Highland Brides 03 - On Bended Knee by Tanya Anne Crosby Page B

to hell. Leith, perhaps. He was going to have to talk to Leith and be sure they never bought that rotgut again. If he didn’t know better he’d think she was trying to poison him!
    Rolling over on his bed, he flung an arm over the side.
    Christ help him, he was going to die.
    That’s what that secret smile was as she’d fled the woods, leaving him there with her vat of poison.
    She’d known he would drink it and that he’d lie here in misery, waiting to take his final breath.
    She hadn’t managed to kill him the first time, so she’d devised a way to weasel into his head and stay until he’d been driven out by lust and madness to find her. And then she’d poisoned him again. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t forced it down his throat. She’d known he would drink it.
    Just as she must have known he’d come after her.
    He tried to remember… was Broc sickened by her spirits, as well? He didn’t think so, but Cameron surely had been. The poor boy had gone into the woods and they hadn’t seen him again until late in the day.
    Colin groaned in sheer misery. He rolled over once more in the bed and threw an arm over his eyes to shield them from the light.
    “Somebody kill me,” he muttered to himself.
    “Somebody will if Meghan sees you like this,” Leith said from the doorway. “You’re verra lucky she’s in Montgomerie’s bed just now and cannot be bothered anymore with tormenting her brothers.”
    Colin would have laughed at Leith’s pitiful attempt to cheer them both, but he didn’t have the strength. “Go and tell her to come home!” he demanded of his older brother.
    “Aye,” Leith said, “and she would take one sniff of this room and beat you o’er the head with a broom.”
    Colin groaned in misery. “But then she would return with one of her potions and I would be as good as new,” he argued.
    Leith laughed. “Where in damnation did you go anyhow… one minute you were there next to me working on the fence, and the next you were gone.”
    “To speak with Donal the drunk’s daughter,” Colin mumbled.
    Leith lifted a brow. “Aha,” he said, “I understand now!”
    “Nay, ye dinna,” Colin argued, covering his eyes once more.
    Damn, but he was going to die.
    “Anyhow, you’ve a wench here looking for you, says the smithy.”
    Colin peered up at the doorway at his brother.
    Leith lifted a brow. “She wouldn’t happen to be Donal the drunk’s daughter, now would she?”
    “He’s fixing her still,” Colin replied in self-defense… or mayhap it was more in defense of Seana.
    “I see,” Leith said, grinning.
    “Nay, you don’t,” Colin protested once more. “It isn’t what you’re thinkin’ this time.”
    “And you’re not sleeping off a night’s drunk either,” Leith countered, and laughed without pity.
    “Go to bloody hell!” Colin muttered. He tried to rise. “Damn,” he said, and stumbled out of the bed.
    Leith chuckled.
    “I’m going to take the lass to see Meggie today,” Colin explained.
    “Well, you’d better be sobering up or you’ll never get whatever it is you’re after. Meggie will blast your arse!”
    Colin cast him a rankled glance. “What makes you think I want something from her?” he asked Leith, offended by his brother’s assumptions.
    Leith shrugged.
    Did everyone just expect him to want something? Did they never just assume he wished to help?
    He thought about that, and was forced to ask himself… When was the last time he’d done something simply for someone else’s sake, and not his own?
    It was a cold hard question, but one he was still contemplating when he reached the smithy’s.
    “I don’t want you to straighten it out! It must have that verra same kink when you’re done!”
    “Och, lass, it would be easier to make you a whole new piece than to try to fit this one together the way you want me to! I canna do it! If ye want the kink, I’ll give you a new kink!” The smithy lifted up the copper tubing he’d been working