by Sophia James
‘My turn now.’ He reached for the hem of her skirt, frowning as she stopped him.
‘The candles.’
‘You’d like them out?’
When she nodded, he lifted her on to the bed before leaning over to extinguish them.
Darkness. Shadow. The shape of him against moonbeams.
She had expected to be shocked by the sight of a man’s naked body, but wasn’t, his buttocks taut and high and his sex hanging hard as he came in close.
With a will of their own her hands wandered towards him, the smooth stretch of skin pulsating as she reached around, quick and then slow. He jolted away as if he had been burned.
‘Who taught you this?’
The veins in his neck were raised against firelight and the gleam in his eyes measured shock.
‘No one.’
Even his tone did not alarm her. Nay, lying there with her breasts exposed and her fingers exploring his maleness, she felt a kind of exhilaration, as if all the years of her life had been leading up to this one very moment, as if his body was an instrument she had need to practise on, to tune and play with, the melody floating into her with transparent easiness. She could not let him go, her fingers cradling a heavier softness and then exploring further again to the parts behind. When his muscles clenched she smiled.
‘Is this allowed?’
He nodded.
‘And this?’
He groaned, beads of sweat full now on his brow, black hair plastered to his temple.
‘Ahh, Grace,’ he said at length. ‘If its revenge you want, then you are surely killing me.’
‘Revenge?’
Her fingers stilled.
‘This marriage of ours. I had no say in any of it and with Malcolm dead…’ He faltered as she twisted tighter. ‘Deo gratias. Enough.’ His grip clamped across her wrist and he rolled on top in one easy movement, elbows anchoring her to the bed and his eyes close.
‘Now I should know you.’ His fingers pushed beneath her skirt and on instinct she began to fight. Instantly he stopped.
‘It’s a willing woman I want, Grace. If you truly mean for me to cease…’
Caught between desire and fright, she opted for the first and lay still.
Lachlan watched her in the pale light of the moon, watched the fight leave her body and the resolve fill her velvet eyes, watched the way she widened her legs and let him in, ardour making her groan. She was the most responsive woman he had ever known. Already he felt her fingers explore the place where his did, meeting in her wet warm centre as he penetrated further. Up and up and inside, the barrier of her virginity easily felt.
He knew suddenly the power of her maidenhead and the responsibility of being her first. Breathing in, he tried to slow down, tried to bring gentleness across the rush of passion. And couldn’t. Straddling her, he plunged, the thrust of his sex making her move upwards. He was aware of the small run of blood and her cries, high pitched, before his mouth closed down over the sound, his tongue lathing in the same motion as his hips.
This was the ‘little death’ the French spoke of, this blending of beings into oneness, stroke after stroke, higher and higher and letting go, falling into each other, complete.
He could barely catch his breath as he lay there, barely take in the notion of what had just happened, the last tender ripple of pleasure between them. Questioning. Wanting. More.
And amber velvet eyes looking straight into his own. No tears. No regret. No recrimination. The King’s edict and the need of a bairn. Simple logic. There to breed.
He hardened at the very thought, and sitting, brought her on to his lap, her skirt hiding movement and concealing what they both could feel.
‘Again,’ he whispered and her nails raked the skin across his back deep, as if her hurt should also be his in the second taking of her innocence.
Deeper. And the hours of night spread before them into endless possibility.
He’d used her badly. He knew it as he walked from the castle into the freezing waters of the lake. She was a virgin, for God’s sake, and he hadn’t let her rest ’til the birdsong had pierced the dawn. Even then, he had taken her one last time.
God. What the hell was wrong with him? Grace, trussed in the tumbled linen sheets of whiteness, stained in red.
His seed and her blood.
A virgin no longer.
It was done.
Finished.
He laughed as he surfaced from the deep, primal and free. He was alive like he had never felt alive before, replete with sex, and be damned the consequences of any of it.
For once he did not feel the weight of Malcolm or Ruth’s betrayal upon his shoulders.
Bathing, Grace winced at the way her whole body protested against movement, the warm water washing away the stickiness of Lachlan Kerr’s seed and the staleness of sex.
Taken. Used. Her hand rested across the taut skin on her stomach. Surely a child must have been conceived after such a night. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, the small rush of lust fanning the secret places that her husband had touched and known, well, with his manhood and his fingers and his mouth.
Heaven.
She had been there, in the quiet of this night, in the throes of passion, in the whispers as he let her rest and the thrust of power when he did not.
And if she was with child? What then? Would his need be slaked? She shook her head. Nay, he could not just take her for one night. Surely not! The heavy throb of need left its own craving. Lachlan Kerr, his ring on her finger binding her to him, to his smell, his voice, the feel of his skin against hers and the generosity in his careful unleashing of her lust.
Everything felt more…lucid, that was the word, the tense worry of her usual demeanour banished under the finesse of his lovemaking. A flush of heat suffused her body. Lord, when she met her husband again in daylight, would the knowledge of their tryst mark his face?
Or show on hers?
She could not even begin to imagine how it would not. And what would he have made of the scars on her thighs? Even in the darkness she knew he would have felt them though he did not ask, did not in any way linger over the disfigurement.
She smiled and stretched, schooling emotion as she donned a clean shift, and greeted the maid who had brought her the water as she again entered the room.
‘Ye are to come down to break the fast, my Lady. The Laird wills it. He has sent me to help ye dress.’
The look in her eyes was kind and Grace saw her visibly relax when she nodded and bade her to stay. Her day gowns were complex and she was used to the ministrations of a maid at Grantley. And today, after last night, she had a need to look her very best.
A tiny frown eclipsed joy as her eyes ran over the red skin at her elbows. She hoped her face might not have broken out into the same rash, but with no mirror she had to trust in touch only and that seemed to suggest that everything was all right.
‘I think the r-r-red gown.’ She motioned to the many dresses hanging from wide hooks on the wall. Grace had seldom worn this particular colour, but today with her confidence growing she decided to.
‘It is verra braw.’
‘Braw?’
‘Beautiful, my Lady,’ the woman returned.
As beautiful as she was not. All the old uncertainties returned with a force.
‘I have changed my mind, I shall wear the blue one.’
This dress was nowhere near as fine, but the maid did as she was bidden, tying the bodice when Grace was in the gown and arranging the pleats across the neckline.
‘Would you allow me to dress your hair too, my Lady? Many say that I have considerable skill in that area and it is such a lovely colour.’
Looking at the servant carefully, Grace tried to determine whether or not she jested, but the honesty so easily seen stamped in her eyes told her otherwise.
‘What is your name?’ she asked.
‘Elizabeth is my real name, though to everybody here I am Lizzie.’
‘I
usually just bind my hair up beneath a wimple, Lizzie…’ She had never bothered much with the styles of the day, preferring instead the easy fashion of the older women.
‘Oh, no, my lady. I could plait it in a certain way. May I…?’ Her hand came out tentatively, threading through the length of redness when Grace inclined her head. ‘Ye have such hair.’ Tis like a curtain of fire.’
Fire. In the trees around her as she hid behind the trunk of an oak, moonlight dimmed by flame and the neck of her mother hanging at a strange angle. Cut.
‘Are ye all right?’ The maid’s hand on her arm was cold. ‘It seemed ye went somewhere for a moment. Somewhere wicked sad.’
Grace took in breath and tried to find normality. This woman was the first person, save for her husband, who had made any attempt at conversation since she had arrived here in Belridden and she did not want to frighten her away.
‘Perhaps, after all, I should like to have my hair dressed,’ she said and sat on the stool by the bed.
Lizzie looked relieved as she brought a brush from her ample pouch. ‘When I have finished, I will bring ye a hand mirror so that ye can see how well ye look.’
When Grace walked into the Great Hall, the conversation of those all around ceased momentarily, the silence worrying her as she stepped up to the top table. The chair beside her husband was empty and she sat, rearranging her generous skirts until she finally gained the courage to look her husband in the eyes.
The detached and careless way he looked back suggested none of the emotion of less than a few hours ago and even when his focus shifted to the way her hair was fashioned she could detect not the slightest glimmer of regard.
He neither stood at her entry nor helped her with the placement of her chair. Nay, he sat there with his pale, pale eyes and watched with an implacable and unmoving stillness.
‘You are late. Do not be so again.’ With that he lifted his knife and began to cut his bread, plying it with thick curd cheese and a handful of cold meat.
The space between their chairs was like a widening chasm.
‘The m-maid did my hair. It t-t-took some time.’
His eyes glanced up. ‘I preferred it as it was.’
‘Unbound?’
‘Yes.’ Short and staccato. A careless indifference.
‘It is ina-a-appropriate for a married woman to wear her h-hair loose.’
‘And appropriate is important to you?’ An undercurrent of anger was so barely hidden that she had no idea how to respond. Was he alluding to her behaviour last night? Wanton. Abandoned. Rash.
‘It i-is, my Lord.’
Turning away, he spoke with the older woman next to him.
‘Grandmère. This is Grace Stanton.’
The smile faded in one singular second. ‘You loved Malcolm, n’est pas? Loved him before…’ The old woman extracted a kerchief from her sleeve, dabbing weeping eyes on the thin scrap of lace. ‘He was…an adventurer who loved chance and danger, you understand. My wild boy,’ she said with a great deal of love and regret. ‘I cannot comprehend what happened….’
Her French accent overrode every syllable, as did her sorrow. And in her misgivings lay a great many questions.
‘He was a good man, no?’
‘I am certain th-that he was.’ Grace knotted her hands together on her lap beneath the table.
‘And you loved him?’
Not trusting the words that could come, she merely nodded.
Lies. Lies. Lies.
‘He gave her the Kerr ring.’ Her husband dug in his sporran and retrieved the treasure before laying it on the table where it sat like a witness to falsity, its sparkling red mocking Grace’s every single truthless utterance.
‘Then he must have been happy…’ The rush of sobs brought forth the old lady’s maid and she was helped from the seat and out of the hall.
Lachlan Kerr watched her for a moment, his fingers striking the table before him in a restless beat. ‘You know, for the life of me I cannae see my brother and you—’ He stopped and reached out for the ring, turning it as he took breath. ‘Malcolm was my grandmother’s favourite. And my father’s. So he was spoiled, I suppose. He got his way in things more often then he should have. If he did anything to hurt you…’
‘He did not.’ Strident, definitive, the tear-stained face of Ginny and the furious anger of Stephen lending her voice an edge that she could never have feigned.
‘Then I am glad of it.’ Replacing the ring, he sliced himself another crust of bread and reached out for the salt and mustard. The knife he used was engraved with his initials in the horn of the bone. L.M.K. She wondered what the M stood for.
Malcolm? Like his brother? Perhaps it was a family name. How close had they been, for there was only thirteen months between them? She remembered Stephen telling her that after they had prayed together in the chapel at Grantley on the evening that Malcolm Kerr had fallen. Were they seeking absolution? She had certainly not felt it in all of the three hundred or so days since.
Yet Lachlan Kerr had not come with the others sent from Belridden to understand just where it was that the accident had happened, nor had he replied to the message her uncle had sent explaining his demise.
Why had he stayed so distant? she wondered, the thought interrupted as he spoke.
‘Today the castle will be prepared for a celebration of our nuptials.’
‘B-But n-no one looks pleased about me being here.’
‘A good meal and fine wine will alleviate things, and when I repair the cottars’ roofs with your gold, they will be happier still.’
Just the dowry, then! All the hopes from last night’s loving were dashed, though, catching his eyes, she was shocked as a white-hot bolt of awareness flooded between them. Unexpected. He turned away as if he had been burned and the look on his face was hardly happy.
‘You still pine for my dead brother and I have lost the ability to believe in anything at all. Do not imagine this union of ours is something that it is not.’
Grace felt her body choke at his honesty and she made herself look down, unable to remain aloof from the pain of his rejection and wanting to hide her easily read expression.
And beneath her skirt the places that his body had awoken beat with a growing rhythm.
Take me.
Again.
Pulsating with the hopeless echo of longing.
She leaned over slightly as she picked up her knife and the feel of his arm against hers heightened everything. When he pulled back, she resisted leaning further. The smell of lye soap and male was heady and when she looked across at his wrists, the same thin lines that she had noticed before fascinated her. She knew little of Lachlan Kerr’s history, little of his first wife or his subsequent liaisons.
All she truly knew of her husband was the way that her body responded to his touch…Stop it, she chastised herself, the quiet edge of reason protecting her from his distance.
When the woman, Rebecca, walked into the hall, she saw how her husband gestured to the empty seat beside him and saw also how he smiled in welcome, his hand against the other woman’s arm, the long blonde curtain of her hair falling, unbound, thick, silky. Like hers was not.
She suddenly regretted the fussy style of her own hair and, looking around the room, observed the way those on the benches watched her, with a great deal of caution and an even greater deal of dislike. She was a plain interloper with the stigma of a Kerr death attached to her name, and now the second wife to a man who plied his mistress with favours whilst she sat there looking on. Rebecca McInness’s fingers wandered between Lachlan’s legs. Lewd and patently visible, the material of her bodice had fallen almost to the line of her nipples. He made no move to stop her brazenness, either, but took another glass of ale.
Unsteadily she stood. ‘I f-f-find after all that I am n-n-not hungry.’ Pointedly she placed her clean napkin down.
Her husband, however, was not letting her go so easily. ‘I have given you no leave to retire.’
&nbs
p; ‘H-Have you not?’ The catch in her voice negated the whole effect of haughtiness and the smile on the face of his mistress undermined it yet again.
The hall had quietened at this unexpected exchange. Still she could not find it in herself to retreat, but stood there, caught between anger and embarrassment and distress.
‘Sit down.’
She shook her head, but did not move and was debating what to do when a scream sounded from the kitchen and a child erupted from a doorway, the edge of his tunic well on fire.
Two steps and she had him in her arms, the generous cloth of her skirt wrapped around the flames and the jug of ale on the table dousing everything.
Fire. Flames. The child’s shocked brown eyes, his mother’s running steps and pain. In her hands and up her arms and in the tight recess of memory.
Pain. Like before.
Her legs buckled beneath her and she staggered towards the only man who had ever been vaguely kind to her outside her own kin. Lachlan Kerr’s frown was deep as he caught her before she fell.
Hot. She was too hot.
‘Water.’ Had she said it? She tried again.
‘Be still, Grace.’ His voice through layers of grey and then hands on her brow. Cool. Steady. Liquid dripped into her mouth. Sweet.
There was darkness behind him, and the candlelight held the two of them trapped in a ring of flame.
Flame. ‘The child…?’
‘Was burned a lot less severely than you were.’ Impatient. Worried.
The room was one that she did not recognise and she hated the tears that fell across her cheeks. When she raised up her hands to stop them, the heavy bandages surprised her.