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activity, its broken cobbles wet and gleaming in the spluttering torchlight, restless horses and weary-looking, pannier-burdened pack ponies . . . everywhere.
    And baggage carts, a good half dozen.
    Sturdy contrivances piled high with household goods. The personal possessions and pride of a well-pursed and landed knight.
    Including, she noted with a jolt, the unmistakable framework of his dismantled bed!
    Suspicion biting deep, she spun around, not at all surprised to find him already upon her. He loomed tall before her, his piercing stare pinning her in place, shattering her composure.
    I should have told you straight away . . .
she thought she heard him say, but the words hung in the crackling air between them, their meaning lost in the sharp patter of the rain, the thudding of her heart.
    And whate’er he’d held back, plague take her,
she
ought not lie.
    Already, she’d told too many.
    But her palms were damping and his tight, wry smile lamed her tongue.
    She flashed a look at the most incriminating of his baggage carts—the one groaning beneath the weight of his massive, ill-winded bed frame.
    He stood motionless, watching the slant of her gaze, a slight twitch beneath his left eye the only visible indication of his own perturbation.
    That, and the faint whitening of the three thread-like scars seaming his cheek.
    Her nerves fraying, Mariota did her best to ignore how her world seemed to spin and contract around her, the whole of it narrowing until little remained save the intensity of his stare and the heat pulsing up and down the back of her neck.
    Ill ease compounded by the two knights hefting parts of the dismantled bed onto their shoulders. Their air of purpose as they strode past her, into the hall, sent an odd giddiness coiling through her belly.
    And with the giddiness came knowledge.
    She turned a sharp look on
him,
the dark-eyed knight watching her so closely. “Good sir, you do not mean to make this your home?”
    “With surety, nay,” he returned, his deep voice devilish. “This holding already
is
my home. See you, I am Sir Kenneth MacKenzie.”
    Mariota blinked at him, her heart sinking. “Sir Kenneth MacKenzie?”
    “Indeed, fair lady.” He sketched her a bow. “The new Keeper of Cuidrach.”
    Chapter Four
    T
he new Keeper of Cuidrach.
    Mariota flinched but kept her chin lifted, her gaze steady on the darkly handsome knight watching her so intently. A sinuous, deep-seeing look that made her tingle and burn, his intense perusal sparking flames she’d thought forever extinguished. Far from it, he stoked feelings that stunned her. Especially when his midnight eyes deepened in hue and he stepped closer. Almost as if he meant to reach for her, pull her skin-to-skin close, nuzzle his face against her neck, then stroke her hair and kiss her, whisper love words in her ear.
    Beguile and woo her, pay court to her heart.
    Win her trust as her body melted against him.
    Instead, he merely reached to adjust her cloak when it caught and flapped in the wind.
    But he’d come so near that his warmth and clean, manly scent engulfed her, the masculine headiness of him teasing her senses and weakening her knees.
    Much to her embarrassment for the heat in his eyes came from irritation, not passion.
    “Your plight is regrettable, lady, but I came here to live quietly,” he said, proving it. “Quietly and . . . alone.”
    Her face flaming, Mariota swallowed, the intensity of him and her own guilt beating through her. Hot waves of mortification that robbed her wits and struck at every vulnerability she possessed.
    “You have nothing to say?” His voice was low and dark, might even have been seductive if not for his skeptically arched brow. “You needn’t fear me—I assure you.”
    “Fear you?” Something inside Mariota twisted. Shame, she was sure, for he unsettled her in ways that could only be called unseemly. And, too, because until very recently, she’d never told a falsehood in her life.
    But rather