Free Seduced by a Highlander by Paula Quinn Page A

there so badly. He wanted to feel her passion beneath him, hostile and hot atop him, purring with delight while she rode him.His dark purpose? Indeed, it was always his ultimate goal when he saw a desirable lass. Isobel was no different.
    But she was. She hated him for who he was, not for who he was whispered to be. For the first time he wasn’t certain he could change someone’s opinion of him, but he was determined to try.
    “Isobel”—he closed his fingers around her wrist, stopping her when she turned to go—“is wantin’ to convince ye that I’m no’ the savage ye think I am a dark purpose?”
    “It is when I ask myself why ye would want to convince me of anything at all,” she shot back. “We are enemies. Nothing ye say or do will ever change that truth.”
    “Mayhap it will,” he argued, the words spilling from his mouth before he had time to consider them; “mayhap you and I are the ones who can finally bring an end to all the hatred and pain.”
    She eyed him with a quizzical quirk of her brow and one corner of her mouth. “Ye offer yer aid, yet again.”
    “Aye,” he vowed.
    “Ye would have me believe that ye truly care about such a thing?”
    He did care, and for more reasons than he could ever tell her. “Ye
will
believe it if ye give me a chance to prove it to ye.”
    She laughed and tugged her wrist loose. “By becoming lovers?”
    This time, he let her pass him. “By becoming friends.”
    She stopped, and as she turned, Tristan didn’t know what reaction to expect from her. Mentally, he prepared himself for whatever was coming.
    In the golden light filtering through the trees, she stood draped in waves of burnished fire and flushedcheeks. But this living flame had a core carved of ice. “That would require trust, and ye will never gain mine. In fact”—she took a step toward him, her hands fisted at her sides—“I find the idea that ye think ye can offensive. It proves to me that ye have no understanding of what yer kin have taken from mine.” When he opened his mouth to speak, she cut him off. “Ye speak of hatred and pain, but ye did not have to watch yer brother dig a hole big enough to lay yer father in. Yer sister never had to worry over what her siblings would eat from meal to meal, or lie awake at night afraid fer their safety because yer clan abandoned them after they were left with a boy as their Chieftain. How many times do rival clans who know ye have no defense attack yer home and destroy what yer hands have bled over? Yer kin did not take my father’s life alone. They robbed me of mine and of my brothers’, as well. How much more do ye want?”
    His reply was immediate and spoken with a sincerity he had offered to only a few before her. “Fergive me. My intentions are no’ to trivialize the loss ye suffered, but to prove to ye that there’s a MacGregor who thinks another way.”
    She stepped back as he moved toward her, the smolder of her eyes fading into cool disregard. “If ye speak the truth, than ye betray yer clan in a far deeper way than by speaking to me. Why would I want a ‘friend’ who holds no allegiance to his own kin?”
    She didn’t wait for his answer but turned and left him alone and staring after her as she hiked up her skirts and stormed all the way back to the stairs of the upper gallery.
    For the first time in Tristan’s life, words escaped him; right ones, wrong ones, any words at all. How the hellhad he just become the scum on the soles of her shoes? Not that he wasn’t already. He wanted to go after her, to tell her she was wrong about him. He was not betraying his clan. If anyone, he was betraying himself by always trying to deny who he had been born to become.
    He wanted to strip her of this image she had of him slashing away at the helpless, laughing as his victims’ lifeblood soaked the ground. He was not that man. His kin were not those men. He could convince her if he had a few more weeks with her, mayhap a month. It would be