Insolent: The Moray Druids #1 (Highland Historical) by Kerrigan Byrne Read Free Book Online Page A

softly, lifting her good hand to his cheek and ignoring the slickness she knew to be blood. “There will be much more blood to shed before this is over, I fear. But for now, I think it’s best that we run.”
    And so he ran.
    Morgana had a sense of trees bending past them, of black and blue hills giving way to flat swathes of dark pastures. The Berserker’s legs devoured distances with a speed that exhilarated and terrified her. It felt like they were flying. Morgana could sense the care he took not to jostle her, and as dawn turned the sky behind them a brilliant pink, her lids drooped despite herself. She knew she should ask him to stop. That she should see to her wound, but the bleeding wasn’t much. She could just rest for a few moments while she and her warrior flew away from their enemies. And those few moments became oblivion.
    Frigid water startled Morgana from slumber, and she awoke submerged to the neck in a still pond. Her dark Berserker still cradled her against him as a sky flushed with fire by the setting sun backlit his ebony hair and obsidian eyes. Hadn’t it been dawn when they’d left Yorkshire? Had she slept all this time?
    Morgana gasped as her shoulder throbbed with intense pain, and the beast made a harsh noise as he gestured toward it.
    “I need you to snap off the shaft here,” she pointed with her good hand to the wood between her shoulder and the feathers. “Then I’ll need you to pull it through as swiftly as you can.”
    The Berserker nodded, though his features conveyed reluctance.
    “I’ll be alright,” she assured him.
    He released her, allowing her to stand in the chest-high water, and held her gaze as he reached for the weapon, a dark wrath swirling in his fathomless eyes.
    And then the arrow was gone. She’d barely seen him move, barely even registered the sharp burn as he broke the protruding arrow and yanked it from her body.
    Unable to withstand the excruciating pain, Morgana sank to her neck in the pond and closed her eyes, whispering the self-same spell she’d used to knit his wounds the evening before. The sensation of her flesh, connective tissue, and veins knitting together wasn’t pleasant in the least, but it was a relief, and after a few gasping moments, her shoulder was as good as new.
    Gaining her bearings, she tried to ascertain their whereabouts. The Yorkshire hills no longer rose against the sky in dark green and black ribbons of sloping movement. Flat, wide squares of land dotted with tree-lined brooks and stone walls or wooden fences partitioned fields recently harvested. To the west, a dark forest bracketed the small loch in which they now stood. He’d had to have taken her fifty or so miles by her estimation. And that should afford them a luxuriant head start should King Harold send anyone after them.
    “Thank you, warrior,” she sighed and stood, slicking her water-soaked hair away from her face.
    He regarded her with a bestial astonishment, cocking his head to the side like an enormous Cerberus. Without warning, he seized upon her blood-soiled dress and ripped the bodice open to the navel causing her breasts to spill out.
    “Do you mind?” she huffed, swatting at him ineffectually as he used those soulless eyes and strong hands to examine her newly mended shoulder with the thoroughness of an alchemist. “I told you it was healed, now unhand me if you please!”
    He looked like he was about to, when the gentle bob of her breasts above the water arrested his unnatural attention.
    Morgana fought a blush as his grip on her shoulders intensified and his features tightened with naked hunger. Those lush lips parted on a hushed, yearning moan. His eyes lifted hers, ensnaring her within the voids of black she’d thought were empty, but instead held a bottomless well of unfulfilled desire as his head lowered and his lips inched toward her in infinitesimal degrees.
    If she’d read dominance, expectation, or superiority in his emotional signature, she would