Warrior Untamed by Melissa Mayhue Page A

any moment he would pull her closer as he had done once before, wrapping his hand in her hair to bring her mouth against his to once again—
    “Your oats appear to be burning.”
    “What?” She jerked upright and stumbled backward, only to have her hand caught by his before she fell.
    “Your oats. They are burning.”
    “My oats,” she repeated, at last realizing he spoke of the meal she was preparing. “Damn and double damn!” she hissed, hurrying to pull the little pot off the fire.
    Her oats weren’t the only thing that was burning, and the wide grin on his face assured her that he knew it as well as she did.
    Damn and double damn indeed.

T hirteen
    W HAT ABOUT HERE ? Does this place meet with yer approval?” Brie struggled to keep the irritation out of her voice but failed to reach that goal.
    “Defensible enough,” Halldor murmured, lifting his head to scan the small glen. “Water for the animals. Shelter back under those rocks. Aye, it will do.”
    It had damned well better do. He’d rejected the last two spots she’d chosen, and now she’d be lucky to finish setting up their camp before they had no light left at all.
    Their second full day on the trail had gone by without incident and Brie wanted to keep it that way. No arguments tonight, she reminded herself. No making a fool of herself like last night, when she’d allowed her imagination to get the best of her.
    She managed to hold her tongue as she dismounted and offered a shoulder to assist Halldor off his horse. When his feet hit the ground, he leaned on her more heavily than she’d expected. More heavily than he had the last time they’d stopped.
    “How do you fare?” she asked as she helped him to sit under the overhang of rock, protected at last from the unrelenting drizzle of rain.
    He leaned his head back against the stone wall supporting him, eyes shut, and grunted his noncommittal response. It had been a long day of hard riding, and every mile of it showed in his weary demeanor. Dark smudges stained the skin under his eyes in a way she was sure they hadn’t just an hour or two earlier.
    Brie hurried through the tasks at hand, expecting at any moment that he’d insist on helping.
    He didn’t. A glance to where he sat confirmed that he hadn’t moved a single muscle.
    That, more than anything, heightened her concern for his condition. A hand to his forehead told her all she needed to know. The fever was back with a vengeance.
    “Editha promised three days before the Magic overtook you again, and it’s only been two. Something’s gone wrong.”
    “Three at most,” Halldor muttered, his eyes still closed. “Promised nothing.”
    Maybe there hadn’t been an explicit promise, but Brie counted on the Tinkler’s word. Three days, the woman had said. What else had she said? Something about redressing the wound.
    “I need some light.”
    Brie scrambled to gather whatever she could findthat was dry enough. She piled the tinder together and gently coaxed a small flame.
    “No fire,” Halldor reminded her. “We agreed. It’s not safe here.”
    “A small fire,” she countered. “And though you might have made that assumption, I agreed to nothing.”
    Not that it mattered to her now. She needed to have a look at his wound, and that wasn’t something she could do in the dark.
    “Can’t draw attention. Not safe for you this close to Tordenet.”
    “It’s not safe for either of us this close to the castle,” she responded, kneeling at his side to pull away the heavy fur and expose his arm. “But here we are and here we must make the best of it. By the Seven!”
    The bandage had slipped down off the wound, lodging around his bicep. A foul black ooze trailed down his arm, bubbling out of the wound. Brie had never seen its like, not even in the most neglected of battle injuries.
    “Well. Here’s our problem.”
    The first thing Editha had asked for when she’d seen the wound was water. Brie grabbed the small pot from her