Read Online The Rose Red Bride JK2 by Claire Delacroix - Free Book Online Page B

until his arm locked around her waist. She cried out, but he cast her over his shoulder with dangerous ease.
    “Not yet!” Vivienne struggled against him, but he granted her no chance for escape.
    “I have pledged myself to you, you have surrendered yourself to me and your brother has accepted his price,” he crossed the chamber, untroubled by her protest. “The wager is wrought, for better or for worse, for a year and a day.”
    “I said not yet!”
    “And I said that you had no true choice,” he said, even as he stepped to the sill of the window. “We have wasted too much time this morn already.”
    Vivienne saw the ground far below them and panicked anew. “No!” she cried, fully aware of what he meant to do.
    Undeterred, he seized the rope yet hanging outside the window and swung them both out into the early morning air with a bold confidence Vivienne could not echo.
    Indeed, she buried her face in his tabard, clutched his shoulder, and prayed as her stomach roiled in protest. He planted both feet on the wall with surety.
    “Hold fast, for I need both hands for the rope,” he commanded.
    Vivienne had little choice, for she did not wish to plunge to her death. She seized him, knowing that her fingers dug into him like claws, and did not care. She did not remain silent, though she guessed he would have preferred as much.
    “Help!” she screamed. “Awaken, sentries of Kinfairlie! Be of aid to me!”
    “Be silent!” growled her captor, but Vivienne was no more inclined to heed his words than he had been to heed hers. She screamed with vigor and was delighted when an answering shout carried from Kinfairlie’s bailey.
    A sentry bellowed from his post and an arrow flew past them, embedding itself in the wall.
    Vivienne’s lover cursed, and descended with greater haste.
    “Help me!” Vivienne cried. “I am the laird’s sister Vivienne and his man means to capture me!”
    Her captor halted his descent long enough to swing her around and shove one of his leather gloves into her mouth. “You will waken the entire village,” he said, anger making his eyes snap with sapphire fire.
    Vivienne protested, but her words were muffled by the glove. She did not dare to loosen her clutch upon him to remove it. She was cast over his shoulder once again, no more troublesome apparently than a sack of grain.
    Mercifully, the sentries had already seen her and she had made her circumstance clear.
    Her captor would not get far.
    But, to Vivienne’s surprise, no second arrow followed the first. She dared to look and spied a trio of Kinfairlie’s sentries conferring in the mist of the morning. They did nothing to intervene, though they could not have been forty paces away.
    Indeed, they leaned on their bows to watch.
    What was this?
    Her captor reached the ground, swung her around into his arms. He clamped her knees tightly and her elbows fast against her side, and she saw the annoyance in his expression. He strode through the village with purpose and she noted now that he limped. He still set an impressive pace and her struggling did little to deter him. Still the sentries did nothing to aid her.
    He glanced down and must have noted her surprise, no less guessed the reason for it.
    “You have been bought,” he informed her as he marched toward one of the crumbled walls. “And your fate is sealed by that. Your brother ensured that I could scale the tower unobserved and it is clear that his men have been commanded to not intervene. You need no further sign of his endorsement than that.”
    Vivienne ceased to fight at his words. Indeed, she could think of no other explanation for events. Alexander must have given the sentries directions not to interfere with her capture.
    Her grim captor did not say something else which Vivienne also knew must be true: Alexander would not have made such an arrangement without complete confidence in her future with this man.
    Alexander must have known something to her captor’s credit in