you at least stop speaking?”
He was a fool. A fool to let her words sting his heart. He’d gone from a hero to a villain in a moment. Good then. Let him be what he was born and raised to be.
He stopped his horse and gave her a slight shove. She jumped from his lap. He watched her walk around him and his horse. He did not allow himself to think about things he wanted to say or why he spoke so much around her in the first place.
She didn’t spare him a glance. She mounted her horse and tugged on the reins, loosening them until they were finally free of his.
“Dinna go too far from me,” he warned her as she rode forward.
She turned to him. “What do you care of my safety when you care nothing for my heart?”
She was wrong. He cared about both. “I will find oot the truth before I do anythin’.” There. She should be pleased with that.
“Am I to thank you for acting as my father’s judge even though he was already pronounced innocent?”
“Think of me what ye will, Rose. I always find oot if who I’m killin’ is guilty. I thought I had the truth in this instance, but no one knew of ye.”
“Precisely, Tristan. Why would he hide me in fear of a killer if he were the killer?”
He nodded. She made a valid, logical point. He thought about it as they rode onward. “Yer father must have powerful enemies,” he remarked. “Do ye know who any of them are?”
“Aye, I know them. My father shared many of his concerns with me. Let me see. The Earl of Sussex threatened my father once.” She named a few men, mostly stuffy peers who took offense to everything. No one truly hateful or dangerous.
“Any governors that ye know of who were particularly angry with yer father fer anythin’ over the years. One of them hates yer father enough to hire me.”
She stared at him, chewing her lower lip. He’d frightened her. He was glad. If he was wrong about her father and there was another killer out there, then mayhap her father was correct in locking her away.
But Tristan still thought she deserved to be free. He was going to kick open the gates and spread some light on the matter. The truth would be discovered, and Rose would be safe, one way or another.
“The Governor of Dundrennan blamed my father for his son’s death when the young man was killed on a hunting expedition with my father and his guardsmen. Also, I was told the Governor of Caerlaverock hated the Callanach family because Uncle Richard married a woman he claims to have loved first.”
“Good reasons to want a man dead,” Tristan muttered. They could be one of the men who’d paid him. “How did yer father feel aboot yer mother?”
“He loved her very much and mourned her when she died.”
Tristan couldn’t imagine the pain of loving his wife and someone taking her life. If anyone tried to kill Rose, he would tear them—she wasn’t his wife. She was a lass he’d saved. Still, he’d make a slow end of the bastard. In fact, he was going after whoever burned her house and killed her mother. The threat to her life would end.
“Dinna hate me just yet, Rose.”
“I do not wish to hate you at all,” she told him. “But I will not let you kill my father.”
He looked away. What if the earl was guilty? What would he do then?
Chapter Nine
Rose didn’t know what to do. What kind of wicked soul was she to care for a man who had been sent to kill her father?
Oh, how could it be all over with Tristan before it even began? Dear God, he was going to kill her father. It kept washing over her like ice cold waves on a roiling sea. After trying to talk him out of killing Walters, she knew he was strong-minded. Being there when he killed the governor convinced her that he was merciless.
How was she going to stop him?
They stopped to eat in silence and continued onward for another hour with little conversation.
Who was the man who’d paid to have her father killed? Would this hell ever end? She couldn’t help herself and began to cry. If men didn’t kill, the skin on her legs would be smooth, she would have her mother, poor Jonetta would be alive, and Rose would not have lost her freedom for safety.
“Lass?”
She