“Give me the gun,” he growled. “His life is mine.”
His words seemed to snap Farah out of whatever threatened to pull her under. “No.” She scowled at him. “He attacked me.”
“Farah, you’re not a killer,” Dorian soothed, a desperate tenderness glimmering from his onyx eye. “Now give me the gun.”
“I’ve—reconsidered my position on that.” She looked at Warrington’s twitching leg, could hear the breath gurgle through his throat, and she felt woozy all over again.
In a flurry of swift and magical movements, Dorian took her gun, shoved her behind him, and shot Warrington squarely between the eyes like he was a dog that needed to be put down.
Farah took her hands from her ears and pushed at his broad back, fighting elation at his presence that rose through her fear, shock, and anger. “You needn’t have done that,” she charged. “He wouldn’t have survived my shot.”
Her husband turned on her, his eyes devouring every inch of her barely clad body as he tucked the gun in his belt. “He should have died slowly,” he said. “But he is still a stain on my soul, not yours.”
They stared at each other for a dark, tremulous moment.
“Dorian.” She breathed his name, and the sound of her voice seemed to unleash a torrent of raw, brutal emotion from within him.
She was at once trapped between the chilly stones and six feet of burning, aroused male. On a primitive groan, he took her lips in a fierce, possessive kiss. His gloved hands were everywhere, almost clinically, as though checking for injury, then he crushed her to him in an embrace that threatened to squeeze the breath from her.
“Fairy,” he groaned against her lips, and Farah thought she detected the brogue of their childhood. He seized her mouth. Possessed it. Drove his tongue into her with deep, drugging thrusts.
Farah wanted to leave this place. To escape the smell and the death and the fear. But she felt her husband’s ribs expanding with heaving, painful breaths against her chest, and detected bone-deep tremors running through his solid frame, and so she stood passively in his arms, submitting to his scorching kisses.
He said her name almost incoherently between rough drags of his hard lips and bristly chin. “Fairy. My Fairy.”
She tried to answer him, to soothe him, but each time she took a breath, he claimed her lips again. His own breaths began to slow to a less alarming rate, rattling out of his broad chest in deep, ragged pants.
Farah wasn’t aware that they weren’t alone until some rather loud throat clearing echoed off the castle walls. “Blackwell…” She recognized Kenwick, one of her handymen, who addressed her husband. “What do you think we should do with this?” He kicked at Warrington’s limp body with the toe of his boot.
Dorian lifted his head, his eyes clearing of their clouded frenzy. Inspecting her again, he seemed to only just notice the thin translucence of her nightgown.
“Get rid of it, Kenwick,” he said darkly, taking off his cape and settling it around Farah’s shoulders.
Farah lifted an eyebrow as the enveloping warmth instantly sank through her gown and into her skin. She shivered, not from the cold, but a deep, intense relief. “Kenwick? You know my handyman?”
He didn’t even have the decency to look sheepish, and Farah narrowed her eyes at him. “Just how many of my staff are in your employ?”
Dorian didn’t answer. Instead, a strong arm swept beneath her knees and lifted her until she was cradled to his thick chest.
“I’m perfectly capable of walking,” she informed him, wriggling in his grasp.
“Hold still,” he ordered, climbing the stairway.
She did as he said, only because she didn’t want to survive all this only to die from a fall down the stairs. Now wasn’t the time. She had a few choice things to say to her husband.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“Murdoch!” Farah cried, as they stepped through her shattered wardrobe. She struggled to be let down, but Dorian held her in a vise grip.
A pile of rumpled dresses lay strewn about the floor like bright casualties of a horrific battle. Her room was torn apart, as though tossed by a frenzied thief searching for treasure.
“He’s being seen to,” Dorian said.
“He could die.” She thrashed about in his arms. “I must go to him!”
Her husband subdued her resistance with embarrassing ease, his jaw set in a hard line. Shards of timber crunched beneath his boots as he carried her into the hallway where a standing Murdoch was being supported by Frank and Tallow. Gemma held a cloth to his side, and Farah was overjoyed to see that the blood hadn’t soaked through yet.
“Doona ye worry about me, lass,” Murdoch admonished. “I’ve enough flesh around my middle. The bullet just took a bit of it, ’tis all.”
Relief doused her with alarming force, renewing her struggles with vigor. He still looked alarmingly pale, and sweat glistened on his brow. “Murdoch! You need a doctor.”
“Bah!” He motioned with his head to be led toward his rooms at the far end of the hall. “Nothing some whisky and a few stitches willna fix. It was more the shock of the shot than the bullet itself that took me down, I’m ashamed to say. I’m getting too old for this sort of thing.”
Desperate to see for herself, she pushed against her husband’s unyielding chest. “Blast it, Dorian. Put me down!”
“No.” His strong arms held her impossibly tighter, but he glowered at Murdoch. “You will be seen by a doctor and that’s final.”