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He knew she’d been fighting at Torridon since her father died, but he suspected her knights had kept her rather insulated from the real fighting.

That made her falsely confident in her abilities.

That’s what made her fight against him when he first took her from Torridon; she genuinely thought she could take him on.

She was about to learn otherwise.

Therefore, he stood there as Josephine walked around him, challenging him to a fight.

He lowered his helm and his visor, and his sword remained lowered as well.

He waited until she made two circles around him because he knew she was going to get careless and let her guard down when she saw that he wasn’t going to fight her.

But he was about to use the element of surprise.

Quick as a flash, he lashed out his sword, tripping her as she walked around him.

As she yelped and went down on the dirt, he was suddenly standing over her, the tip of his sword to her throat.

He rather hated to toss her to the earth when she was so beautifully dressed, but it couldn’t be helped.

Before he could demand her surrender, however, the lady brought up a foot and kicked him right in the groin.

Literally, right in the balls. As Ridge grunted and stumbled back, she leapt to her feet and threw herself at him, grabbing him around the neck and using her body weight to throw him even further off balance.

Her intent was to cause him to fall to the ground, but Ridge wasn’t so easily defeated.

He managed to keep his balance, grab the woman who was trying so desperately to defeat him, and sling her up over his shoulder.

As she fought viciously against him, he brought a trencher-sized hand down on her buttocks and spanked her soundly. Josephine howled.

“Ridge!” she screamed. “You beast! Put me down!”

Ridge spanked her again. “That is for kicking me in the ballocks,” he told her. “If you ruin my chances of having a son, I will come for you, wherever you are. I will hunt you down and Andrew d’Vant will not be able to protect you.”

He was carrying her back over to the lists where Nicholas was standing, open-mouthed. Ridge motioned to the young man.

“Come along,” he said. “I am taking the lady back to her chambers. She is finished with the training grounds for the day. She should not have been here in the first place.”

Nicholas climbed off the lists, concerned for Josephine. “Ye’re ruining her dress, Ridge,” he pointed out. “The king will be angry.”

“Then she should not have charged me.”

That was the truth and Nicholas didn’t have much to say to that.

What had started off as a lovely morning had turned into a bit of a fiasco.

Across Ridge’s broad shoulder, the more Josephine squirmed, the more Ridge spanked her.

Furious, as she knew she couldn’t fight the man the way he was holding her, she hung over his shoulder and reached down, pulling up the back of his mail coat.

Ridge could feel what she was doing and he spun her around a couple of times, trying to disorient her, but it didn’t work– she had the mail coat hiked up and managed to get her hands on the linen breeches he wore underneath the heavier leather ones he wore as protection.

Once she got a hold of the top of the linen breeches, she pulled as hard as she could and Ridge nearly dropped her.

On top of kicking him in the groin, now she was trying to cut off the blood supply to that area.

She yanked hard, seriously constricting him, and he spanked her so hard that she screamed.

But she didn’t stop pulling. In fact, by the time they reached the entry to the wing where she was housed, she had pulled his breeches up so tightly that the man could barely walk.

“Let go,” he said through clenched teeth.

Josephine refused. “Not unless you put me down!”

“I cannot put you down when you have my breeches pulled halfway up to my shoulders.”

“Then we are at an impasse.”

Nicholas had been watching the entire thing and he wasn’t hard pressed to realize how brutally humorous it was. Josephine was stubborn, but so was Ridge. When two immovable objects met, there was often violence, so Nicholas walked around to the rear of Ridge and tried to look Josephine in the eye.

“Ye really should let him go, Joey,” he said. “’Tis most undignified to see ye like this. If ye could see yerself, ye would know what I mean.”

Josephine looked at him, upside-down. Her lovely hair style was all but unraveled. “He had no right to spank me.”

Nicholas thought that, perhaps, the only way around her was to be firm. “And ye truly had no business trying to sword fight the man,” he said. “I told ye I should not have taken ye to the training grounds and this is how ye repay me? Now, let the man go. I am hungry and want to go inside.”

Josephine was reluctant to agree that Nicholas was probably right.

She’d jumped into the training arena where she didn’t belong, and Ridge was right to have removed her.

Reluctantly, she let go of Ridge’s breeches and Ridge immediately set her to her feet.

They eyed each other for a moment, stubbornly, until Josephine broke down.

“I am sorry I kicked you in the groin,” she said. “Are you hurt much?”

Ridge kicked out a leg, trying to pull his linen pants down from where they were bunched up in between his buttocks. “Nay,” he said. “And since you are apologizing, I will say that whoever trained you to fight did a good job of it. You have excellent instincts.”

Josephine fought off a smile at the compliment. Somehow, it didn’t seem appropriate to smile as the man struggled to pull his breeches out of his arse crack.

“You and I have fought each other a few times since we first met,” she said. “You are a worthy opponent.”

Ridge couldn’t help it; he grinned at the fact that she truly thought she was his equal. “I would much rather not fight you, my lady,” he said. “Can we please call a truce? My groin cannot take any more violence.”

Josephine’s smile broke through. “Indeed,” she said. “We have a truce.”

“Did I spank you too hard? If I did, I apologize.”

She shook her head. “With all of the skirts and shifts between your hand and my backside, I hardly felt a thing.”

He laughed softly. “Then we are friends again,” he said. But then, he sobered dramatically as he focused on her. “And as your friend, I would ask a favor.”

She cocked her head curiously. “What is it?”

He sighed faintly, glancing around the area to see who was out and about. The king had many spies at Edinburgh, including him, and he wanted to see if he was being watched. A brief perusal of the area showed it to be relatively safe from prying eyes.

“Stay to your chambers today,” he said, his voice quiet.

“Do not come out again, not today and not any day from this point forward unless you are summoned. I have it on good authority from the spies on the outskirts of Edinburgh that the earl is approaching from his home at Liberton. He should be here within the next hour or two, so I would strongly recommend you return to your chamber and bolt the door. Do not give the man a chance to see you here, out in the open. Do you understand?”

Gone was the humor, the lightheartedness of the day. Gone was the just plain fun of scrapping with Ridge. Now, Josephine gazed back at him in fear.

“God’s Bones,” she breathed. “He has been sighted?”

Ridge nodded. “He has.”

Josephine felt as if she’d been kicked in the gut. She suddenly felt sick. “I do not know why I should feel so shocked by this news,” she muttered. “I knew he was coming. I have been told. Still… the reality of it is somewhat daunting.”

Ridge could feel the familiar pangs of sympathy for the little soldier as well as the familiar pangs of that brotherly protectiveness.

“Go back to your chambers, Josephine,” he said quietly.

“And if I were you, I’d keep the servants out.

Madelaine is a direct line to the king. She is his mistress when the whim strikes him. ”

Josephine looked at him in shock. “She is?”

Ridge nodded. He didn’t say another word, but turned her for the entrance with the silent suggestion she go inside. Josephine didn’t hesitate; she quickly entered the building with Nicholas on her heels.

Ridge stood there a moment, thinking that even if she did lock herself in her chamber, it wouldn’t do much good.

All the king had to do was order her to appear before him, and before her betrothed, and she would have to appear.

Ridge was supposed to practice that morning and then he had a training group he was supposed to work with in the afternoon, new Scottish recruits to the king’s army.

He really had no desire to work with farmers and hunters from the Highlands.

Instead, he thought he might stick close to Lady Josephine’s chambers, just in case she needed him.

There wasn’t much he could do if she did, but still… something told him to stick close.

*

He could see the approaching army from a distance.

Using the apple man disguises, Sully and Andrew had been able to come and go freely between the castle and the inn Ermaline, Esme, and the other whores called home.

It was coming to be their base of operations.

Being that the inn was literally on the road leading up to the castle, it was the best place to watch the comings and goings, and that included the approach of Andrew’s brother.

Since they knew he was due on this day, they’d retreated to the inn and had remained vigilant, watching the road, waiting for what was to come.

And it came soon enough.