“I handed her to them. I arranged it all.” She said it blandly, utterly indifferent to what his reaction would be.

“Where were you sending her?”

“To my father’s men. She does not want this marriage, and when I saw her distress I could not deny her. It was foolhardy, I know, but her pleas touched me, and your behavior when you met with her only made it worse.”

He did not miss that she had turned it around so this was his fault. “So you sent your sister to the mountains to live out her life among bandits in order to save her from me.”

She pursed her lips at the sarcasm in his tone. “I sent her from a marriage she did not want. As to where she would live, I would have arranged something else later. But with you insisting on a quick wedding, I had to get her away at once.”

It vexed him that she assumed he would swallow the swill she was offering. “There is a capricious logic to your tale, Nesta. The only problem is that I do not think you are capricious. You are lying.”

“Why would I bother to do that?”

“Maybe to protect your sister, who sought to run off with her lover. Or maybe to hide the fact that you only want to thwart this marriage in order to spite the King.”

Her attention sharpened on him. Color rose to her cheeks. “You insult me. Better to accept that I am capricious than accuse me of such childishness.”

“A woman used and spurned can be very childish. I do not insult you. I only assume that you are typical, as you assumed about me. If I am wrong, your opposition to this marriage makes little sense. This union will benefit your family’s honor. You should have been explaining that to your sister, to allay her girlish fears, not plotting to help her run away. Aye, to me this looks like the scheme of a smart woman made stupid by wounded pride, whose vision has turned shortsighted because of an old insult.”

She was up on her feet before he finished, glaring at him. The low fire reflected off marvelous sparks of anger in her eyes. They reminded him of other sparks he had seen in them, of passion and desire.

Challenge silently crackled out of her, but as they gazed at each other it changed. The argument and its reason became submerged in the spiritual push and tug of their other battle.

Too much passed between them in that gaze. That she lied and that he suspected why. That each would find the other a formidable foe. That they wanted each other with a fiery desire that kept threatening to consume good sense. It was all there, instantly, harshly, and undeniably.