Alex stopped her with a roar of fury. “Of course you didn’t! God, do you actually think I would believe otherwise? For pity’s sake, you could have been dancing around like Salome with her veils—or without her veils—and it wouldn’t have mattered. You told him to stop. Whether you were drunk, let him kiss you, or anything else, the moment you wanted it to end it should have. That’s what any man with honor or a damned conscience would do.”

Joan was stunned. She knew that; she just hadn’t known whether he would see it the same way. “I’m not making excuses for him.”

“Good,” he growled angrily. But she knew it wasn’t at her but at the situation. Alex was a fixer. A rescuer by nature. It would be hard for him to hear this and know there was nothing he could do to change it or make it better. But he was making it better. Just by his reaction, he was making it better.

“I don’t want to hide from my mistakes.”

Alex’s jaw tightened. “The way I see it, the only mistake you made was being fifteen. Hell, Joan, we all make mistakes when we are young. That doesn’t mean we deserve to be punished for them with what that bastard did to you.”

“Not everyone would agree with you. Some people would say I got exactly what I deserved for going off with him alone and allowing him to kiss me.”

“Then some people are bloody idiots.”

She smiled. She couldn’t believe it. She’d told him what had happened, and she was actually smiling. She wouldn’t have thought it possible.

He opened his arms. “Come here, sweetheart.”

An instant later she was in his embrace again, and he was holding her. Comforting her. Hugging her. It was exactly what she needed. Not questions. Not judgment. Not an explosion of male anger. Just calm understanding and acceptance.

Well, maybe not complete calm—he was a man after all. A man who fought with his sword for a living. She knew that inwardly he was seething with rage.

Which is why his next words surprised her.

“I wish I hadn’t killed him.”

She drew back. “Why not?”

His expression turned so dark and menacing he almost reminded her of Lachlan.

“So that I could make him pay for what he did to you. Slowly and painfully.”

He sounded like Lachlan, too. For all his noble knight persona, sometimes it wasn’t hard to imagine Alex in a blackened nasal helm, black leather, and a dark plaid slipping in and out of the mist like a phantom with the rest of the Highland Guard.

She loved both sides of him. The fierce, deadly warrior and the noble knight. But it was his nobility that had renewed her faith in honorable men. His reaction to what had happened tonight only reinforced it.