by Sophia James
She had hit him!
His frightened mouse of a wife had hit him. Hard. And in the shadowed depths of her amber eyes he had recognised what he so often saw in his own.
Secrets.
Taking a breath, he tried to lighten his voice.
‘We still have a few hours of travelling yet as I mean to cross the border north of Carlisle.’
‘We c-c-c-cannot m-m-make y-y-your k-k-k-keep?’ Lord, her stammer was worsening by the moment. He wondered if she would be able to string even two words together by the time they had reached his castle.
‘Nay, it will be safer to camp in the Borders.’
Stressing the word ‘safer’, he saw the calculations of a walked distance clouding her focus.
‘Lord, help me,’ he muttered and wished that he was at home in the arms of his mistress.
But he wasn’t. He was stuck with a woman who stuttered and shook and lied, and was scared of horses.
Lady Grace Stanton. Nay, he amended as he mounted and pulled her up in front of him, Lady Grace Kerr, now.
His wife.
He made mental calculations as to how many hours he would ever truly be required to spend in her company and was heartened to determine that it would be very few. Perhaps he was more like his father than he had thought, and the realisation made him uneasy.
Freezing. She was freezing. Even with a cloak and blanket and three shawls laid across her she could not stop the shaking that had woken her up a good hour ago. And now she needed to relieve herself. Desperately.
It was dark. Black. The forest trees stretched towards an inky sky, and the moon, that had been high when they had finally reached this place, had fallen, a small and weak slice of crescent on the horizon, surrounded by mist.
Ten feet away Lachlan Kerr lay on the dirt without a scrap of blanket or pillow, the dim light from the fire showing the beaded drops of dew threaded through his night-black hair. Even asleep he held his dirk across his thigh, fingers curled around the shaft in habit.
Standing, she began to move across to him, meaning to shake him awake, but his eyes were open at the first whisper of sound and he was up on his haunches in a quick and easy grace.
‘I need to relieve myself.’
He did not budge, question easily seen on his brow.
‘It’s v-very dark,’ she continued and looked towards the trees on the edge of the clearing.
Amazement began to etch out a heavy line on his brow. ‘Ye want me to take you?’
‘Not to w-w-watch, y-y-you understand. Just to k-k-keep watch.’ Damn. Her stutter was back badly and she pressed at the soft skin at the base of her neck to try to ease the tightness.
‘Keep watch against what?’ His laughter was hard.
The ghosts of the dead and the souls of the nearly living, pressed close against the thin veneer of time.
‘I am n-n-not sure.’ Uncertainty leached the movement from her limbs. Should she chance it? Could she walk into the dark, dark forest under a nothing moon and be safe?
Ginny’s screams and then silence. Stephen’s whispers to make it right. Below them a deep chasm and above them a blue, blue sky.
‘Grace?’ Lachlan Kerr’s voice was close and she saw that he had moved up beside her, no longer laughing.
‘Come. I’ll take ye.’ His fingers were warm against her skin, even through the cloth at her elbow, and she was pleased for the support as they walked across the uneven ground towards the river.
When they reached a glade that offered a little privacy, he stopped and disengaged her arm. ‘I will wait here.’
‘You promise. You w-w-won’t go back? You w-w-won’t leave me here…?’
She hoped that he could not see the mounting flush on her skin.
‘If we dinna come back soon, my men will investigate.’ This time something akin to amusement laced his words.
Lord. And she had lost time already with her chatter. Stepping away from him, she crept behind a tree, keeping the shape of the Laird in her vision. When she was finished, she rejoined him and looked up into the sky.
‘Do you e-e-ever wonder if there is anything out th-th-there? Any other place like this one, I mean?’
‘No.’
His reply was short, but it did not deter her.
‘My father once t-told me of the ideas of Aristarchus of Samos. He wrote that the Earth r-revolved around the Sun.’
‘And you believed it?’
‘I do, though I can hear in your t-tone you do not.’
‘The holy scriptures would say that the Earth is the centre of everything.’ He frowned as he looked up. ‘A useful ploy to further their own cause, I should imagine.’
‘Their cause? You sp-speak like a disbeliever?’
‘Once I was not,’ he returned obliquely. ‘Your stammer seems remarkably lessened tonight.’
‘Oh, it only is b-b-bad when I th-th-think about it.’
She tripped on the root of a tree and his hand shot out to balance her body against his.
And for a moment, with the heavens around them and the silence of the very early morning, Grace felt a sense of safety that she had not felt in a long, long time.
Her wedding night. It was not as dreadful as she might have otherwise expected. A husband who had accompanied her into the trees and stayed when she had asked him to. A man who had listened to her explanation of the stars above them with at least a pretended interest and whose arm had steadied her against falling. She tried to still the shivering that had overtaken her and was glad when they reached the clearing.
‘We will be breaking camp in about two hours and as it is a long ride home I would advise ye to get some sleep.’
‘If w-we were to w-walk, how long would it take?’
Laughter was his only response as he settled himself down, fire highlighting his face.
‘Go to sleep, Grace,’ he muttered and closed his eyes.
She liked the way he said her name, his accent giving the plain shortness of it a hint of the exotic. Snuggling into her blankets, she felt for her wedding ring. It was an emerald set in yellow gold and engraved on the inside with his initials. L.K. She had seen it in the earlier light.
From this small distance his profile was distinct. The most handsome Laird in all of Scotland. She had heard that said of him each time some soul had uttered his name, which was ironic given her own lack of any charm, though she supposed that a sizeable dowry had its way of talking. Her fingers pressed the numbed welts on her thighs and she felt the hollow ache of all that she was.
Ugly. Beneath her clothes as well. She accepted the summation of her appearance now without question, and made it her habit to seldom look into any mirror. Biting down on tears, she hated the aching lump in her throat. She was tired of wishing herself otherwise, tired of the groundless hope of some miraculous cure for the dry skin she was afflicted with, and the stutter. Taking a deep breath, she willed composure and shut her eyes.
She sat on the royal dais, watching her husband in a joust, her scarf upon his sleeve as he declared himself her champion, her knight, before thundering towards his opponent. And when it was finished and he had easily won, he knelt before her in an act of homage, the ritual of courtly love causing the faces of the other ladies about them to wish it was their favour he donned, their love that he sought…
In her sleep she smiled.
Lachlan listened as she rearranged her blankets, amazed at the fact that she should need so many layers against a night he felt was almost…warm.
One foot was visible from where he sat, its smallness swamped by a thick woollen stocking. Grace Stanton was nothing like the tales he had heard of her at court. She was unusual, to be sure, but there was something about her that intrigued him. Her imagination, he decided after further thought, as he remembered the softness of her skin when he had steadied her arm to make certain that she did not fall.
She wanted to walk to Belridden and she believed that the stars circled the sun according to an ancient Greek astr
onomer. He thought of the manuscripts explaining the heavens his father had brought home from Anjou and wondered where they were now. Sold like the rest of the Kerr treasures, he suspected, a further sop to an escalating gambling habit.
Lachlan had barely thought of his father for years and yet here in the space of a day he had thought about him twice. Good times. Before the drink had made Hugh crazy and soft regret had spiralled into sheer and brutal hatred.
Nothing lasted for ever. Not laughter. Not happiness. And certainly not love. The only thing you could count on was the land, and the Kerr land was in sore need of the attention that the Stanton gold would give it.
That was all he expected. Anything else would lead to the disappointment that he was far more familiar with.
He laid his head down against the dirt.
Ever since his return to Scotland it had been a struggle. Government had almost ceased to exist under Robert the High Steward and it had been hard to reassert the authority of his king against the vested interests of landowners made powerful from the long years without covenant. Lord, if David did not step up to rule them, they would rule him, and the murder of the royal mistress was testimony to that.
Lachlan pulled his hair free and shook the length in the night air. Under the Bruce all this might have been so much easier, and for the thousandth time he wished that Robert Keith, the trainer of arms in Normandy, had insisted on a more rigorous tutorship for David.
Everything was uncertain and dangerous with the rebellion of powerful men afoot and yet here he was, dragging a wife home to a land he barely knew. A wife who now lay on her side with her hands clasped beneath her face and the wild redness of her hair a long curtain on the ground beside her.
She was not as plain as he had been told. He wished suddenly that she might open those eyes that were so direct and begin to talk again to him. It had, after all, been a long time since a woman in his company had not reverted to the wiles of flirtation and coquetry, and the change was refreshing. The red stocking she wore on her right foot had also come astray with her disturbed slumber and her ankles were more than shapely.
Lord, he thought to himself, and he turned over to find sleep, trying not to listen to the soft and muffled breathing of his unusual new wife.
Chapter Three
Connor crouched down beside him in the morning before the dawn had properly settled, smouldering anger on his face.
‘Your wife had this with her.’ He dropped a small jewelled box on the dirt beside him; Lachlan knew the casing immediately.
‘How did you find it?’
‘It fell out of a layer of clothes as we transferred the contents from her chest into our saddlebags. Ian’s horse was suffering under the weight of the thing, you see, and we thought to distribute it around.’
‘Does she know ye took it?’
‘She dinna see if that’s what you are asking.’
Lachlan nodded and jammed the thing in his sporran, making certain it was hidden.
Malcolm had been given the heirloom on his thirteenth birthday by their grandfather, and when the precious stones on the lid had winked against the new light of morning, the bare memory of his brother caught Lachlan anew with the way it had all ended.
‘Who else knows?’ He took a quick glance at the form of his still-sleeping wife.
‘Ian saw it. And James. Do ye think Malcolm gave it to her?’
‘Knowing the worth of the thing, I doubt it, but say nothing to anyone else, and seek the silence of Ian and James.’ His words trailed off, something disturbing him in the presence of a treasure Malcolm had held such fondness for.
‘You would protect her?’
‘For now.’
‘If Eleanor finds out she had it…’
‘She won’t.’
‘Your grandmama is a wily woman, Lach, and she has always believed that your brother was murdered. Perhaps it was your wife who killed him?’
Lach shook his head. ‘If Grace Stanton killed Malcolm, it will be me who deals with her. Understand?’
But Connor was not finished. ‘Our king could not expect you to stay married to a murderer.’
‘The king wants these lands strong and with her dowry the lives of all those at Belridden will be safer.’
‘And you? What of your life? What of the nights you lie asleep in your marriage bed with the full bare skin of your throat exposed?’
‘You think she will be there beside me?’
Smothering fury, he looked over at Grace clambering from her pile of blankets. The dress she wore was stained and creased and yet as she stretched into wakefulness the sun behind caught her hair, long and fire red, molten silk unfurling down her back to reach along the rounded lines of her hips. She tempted him and left him feeling unreasonably irritated.
‘Tell the Lady of Kerr that we will be breaking camp in half an hour. Find her someone to ride with.’
‘You won’t be taking her with you?’
‘I won’t.’
‘She can ride with me, then.’
‘Very well.’ Lachlan tossed his plaid over his shoulder and completely ignored his wife’s worried frown.
Turning to the forest, he walked just outside the lines of saplings towards the river, taking a moment to contemplate all that had happened in the last few days.
His life had been turned upside down, yet some things stayed exactly the same, and the betrayal that had dogged his years from boyhood was as repellent in this wife as it had been in the last one.
A gap in the trees allowed him another glimpse of the new Lady of Kerr as she tried to wipe the marks of dust from her costly gown, the fine wool of her skirt drawn tight across the generous outline of her bottom.
Heat rushed into his loins and he felt an odd unbalance as the forest and his men melted away into nothingness. Lord, what was happening? Had she placed some tonic in the wine at Grantley, some potion to mask his reasoning and raise his lust? His mistress was full-blooded and well endowed, the wares on show offered without condition, but he had not felt this…excitement with her.
Not once.
Grace Stanton with her fire-red hair and welt-roughened skin should have run a poor second to Rebecca’s charms and yet…dressed in a high-necked gown with little showing save the top of her hands and the curve of her throat she was…sensual. The thought amazed him.
How?
How did she do that?
How did a woman with so little in the way of obvious endowments manage to be alluring? Had his brother felt it too?
He refused to follow further down that particular track, though he was niggled by the question of whether the Kerrs were to be for ever cursed by the words of Alec Dalbeth.
‘Your keep shall be a ruin and any love that you foster will be as dust in the darkening days of your clan.’
It had been years since his father had banished the priest from their lands, one arm around the mistress that had caused the chasm and the other on a bottle. Clutching. Tight. But the words shouted back into the space between the departing horses and the front portal of Belridden had stuck. Darkness had come in the form of strong drink, and his father, on seeing the sins of his ways too late, had taken the easy path out.
It was Malcolm and he who had found him dangling from the middle beam of the chapel roof, a half-finished tankard smashed beneath his feet, as if he had taken one last sip to see him through the gates of Hell.
He cursed, hating the weakness of a man whom he had once admired, when a noise to one side of the stream slowed his movements. Bending down, he scoured the far-off bank. A group of men were creeping through the undergrowth, metal glinting from the first rays of the sun. The Elliots or the Johnstones, neighbouring clans whom the Kerrs had no reason to trust. From this distance he could not quite make out the muted colours worn.
Three minutes, he guessed, till they rounded the slower part of the river and crossed. Unsheathing his claymore, he backtracked with care. Twenty against forty. The odds were good if it came to a hea
d and he’d be hard pressed to find a better group of soldiers around him.
Would that be enough? He refused to think about it not being so even as he began to run, a branch swiping hard against his face and another slashing his shins.
Grace was standing against the bough of a tree to one side of the camp as he fled through the last saplings and she turned towards him as the others did, eyes bright with fear. He knew she was trying to say something, but could not quite get the words out. Dragging her against him, he placed her in the middle of the circle his men were forming.
‘Shield your head and shut your eyes,’ he shouted at her as he took his own place between Con and Ian, the outlines of the other group now visible between the thinning forest. More than forty. Lach’s grip tightened on his sword and he made himself breathe.
Grace watched Lachlan Kerr’s back and saw the way he brought in breath. Once, twice, three times and then stillness, the echo of a malevolent danger harnessed with a steely control.
Magnificent. The thought burst from nowhere as he raised his sword, the strength of his knotted muscles rippling free. Waiting. Wanting. A man tempered in war and killing and fear. She could see the lines where blades had cut against the solid muscle of his forearm when the fabric in his shirt fell back, white against the brownness of his skin, tense, honed. All the forest still as the party from across the river gained the clearing.
‘Who goes there?’ Her husband’s words held no inflection of fear. She felt calmed by his very equanimity.
A big man facing them stepped forwards. ‘Alistair Elliot. And I dinna remember giving ye invite to cross my lands, Kerr.’
‘You had no word from David?’
‘The King?’ Uncertainty shallowed out the other’s voice and the glances of the men behind sharpened.
‘I have it on David’s authority to collect my wife from her home in England.’