The Rogue’s Stolen Bride

Chapter Eleven: The Dagger

Jace

I looked at the small furious woman standing in front of me with her carpet bag and her blazing eyes and her absolute certainty that she was going anywhere I was going whether I liked it or not.

There was no time to argue.

“Keep up,” I said, and walked into the trees.

She kept up.

Behind me I could hear the muffled protests of the restrained guards, Cutter and Pike moving efficiently through their tasks, and Bram making the particular sounds of a man trying to recover his dignity after being felled by a piece of luggage. Ahead of me the forest closed in, dark and dense and mercifully quiet.

Kaida, for her part, was giving the performance of her life.

She kicked. She screamed. She pounded her fists against my back with considerable enthusiasm and at one point landed a blow on my backside that was genuinely impressive for someone of her size. I tightened my grip and kept walking and said nothing, because I had the distinct and inexplicable feeling that every bit of this was entirely intentional.

The road disappeared behind us. The sounds of the guards faded. The forest pressed close on all sides, nothing but birdsong and the soft give of leaf litter beneath my boots.

She went still.

Not gradually — all at once, like a candle being snuffed. The kicking stopped. The fists unclenched. The screaming cut off so abruptly that the sudden silence seemed to ring in the air between the trees.

“You can put me down now,” she said. Calm and matter of fact, as though she were commenting on the weather.

I kept walking.

Just a few more steps. Just — a moment longer than was strictly necessary, for no reason I was prepared to examine too closely.

Then I set her down.

She landed lightly on her feet and straightened up and smoothed the front of her dress with both hands, composing herself with a speed and efficiency that suggested she was accustomed to recovering her dignity from difficult situations. Then she looked up at me.

This close, in the green filtered light of the forest, she was even more unsettling than she had been at the carriage door. Those dark eyes were direct and clear and considerably more composed than any girl who had just been thrown over a stranger’s shoulder had any right to be.

Before she could speak, a small immovable presence inserted itself between us.

The maid. Chin up, carpet bag clutched in both hands, eyes narrowed at me like I was something she had found on the bottom of her shoe.

“Step back,” she said.

I stepped back. It seemed the wisest course of action.

The girl — Kaida, I reminded myself, her name was Kaida — touched the maid’s arm briefly, and something passed between them in that touch that I couldn’t read. Then she looked back at me, and to my considerable surprise, she said, “Thank you.”

Not what I was expecting.

“I know that wasn’t—” she paused, choosing her words carefully, “—conventional. But you came. And I’m grateful.”

I looked at her for a moment. She meant it. There was no performance in it, no calculation. Just simple, genuine gratitude, delivered with a quiet dignity that sat oddly with the green dress and the amethyst pendant and the image I’d been constructing in my head of a pampered Alpha’s daughter who would spend the next twelve days making my life difficult.

I was going to have to revise that image considerably.

“Jace Blackwood,” I said, because it seemed like the thing to say.

“I know,” she said. “I’m Kaida Hawkins.” She extended her hand.

It was the smallest hand I had ever seen.

I took it. And there it was — that same jolt, like a bowstring being drawn suddenly taut, the tension moving up my arm and into my chest before I could do anything sensible about it. She felt it too, I could tell by the slight widening of her eyes, quickly controlled.

I released her hand.

Something unknotted quietly in my chest. Whatever had been wrong with me back at the Blue Pony, whatever aberration had taken hold of my senses in that tavern, it hadn’t followed me into the forest. I was attracted to a woman. Straightforwardly, uncomplicatedly attracted to a woman. Everything was fine.

“The horses are this way,” I said.

The horses were where I had left them, tethered deeper in the forest where the trees grew thick enough to muffle sound. Four horses for six people — I did the arithmetic quickly and didn’t like the answer. I had planned for one unexpected passenger at most. The maid was an entirely unbudgeted complication.

Kaida looked at the horses. She looked at our party of six. “Not enough horses,” she said.

“Not enough horses,” I confirmed. I looked at the maid. “I don’t know your name.”

“Maggie,” Kaida said. “She’s my companion. She goes where I go.”

Maggie lifted her chin at me in a way that suggested this was not up for debate and never had been.

“Right,” I said. “Then Maggie rides with Cutter. You ride with me.”

Beside her, Maggie’s eyes went very wide. She opened her mouth.

“Maggie,” Kaida said, in a quieter tone.

Maggie closed her mouth. Then opened it again. “I am not,” she said, with great dignity, “riding with him.” She pointed at Bram, who was still rubbing the side of his head.

“Cutter,” I said. “She rides with you.”

Cutter, to his credit, simply nodded. He was a man of very few words, which was one of the things I appreciated most about him.

Maggie looked Cutter over with the expression of a woman conducting a rapid and not entirely favorable assessment. Cutter looked back at her with absolute impassivity.

“Fine,” she said.

I turned to Kaida. She was looking at her skirt with the focused expression of someone working through a practical problem. The green wool was full and long and entirely unsuited to riding astride.

“I need your dagger,” she said.

I looked at her. “My dagger.”

“Just for a moment.”

I should have hesitated. Any sensible man would have hesitated before handing a weapon to a woman he had just kidnapped. Instead I found myself drawing it from my belt and holding it out to her, handle first, without entirely meaning to.

She took it, shook out her skirt, and without a moment’s hesitation drew the blade in one clean stroke up the seam to mid thigh. Then the other side. Then, with the calm focus of a woman who had committed to a course of action and intended to see it through, she worked the blade around the entire hemline, cutting away the excess fabric in one long strip that fell to the forest floor in a coil of fine green wool.

She handed the dagger back to me and looked up.

“There,” she said.

Cutter made a sound that might have been a cough.

Bram stared.

“Oh,” Maggie said softly, from somewhere behind me. Her voice had lost all its steel. “That beautiful dress.”

I slid the dagger back into my belt and said nothing, because there was nothing useful to say. I was going to have to reassess my assumptions about the Alpha’s daughter.

“Shall we go?” she said.