Lady With the Devil's Scar

by Sophia James

  Some part of the whole was missing, she thought, even as he ran his finger across her ear, distracting her. There was a truth that he was not saying beneath everything else that he was.

  ‘Can you promise me something, Isobel, something that might be hard to fathom at this moment?’

  The green in his eyes was close, the lashes that fringed them thick, and for a second she felt a fear that held no boundary.

  She would lose him in Edinburgh to other ladies of pure breeding and good manners, lose him to women without ruined faces or fathers who would dare to question kings.

  ‘Can you promise to trust me in Edinburgh even if you do not understand the reasons for my actions? Protection is a narrow path and if you should wander off it...’ He stopped. ‘I can only help you if you trust me.’

  Such a gentle word, trust, and so easily broken. She had trusted in her father’s guardianship and Alisdair’s libido. She had trusted in her mother’s love and in the innate good sense of law. She had trusted the walls of Ceann Gronna to withstand invasion across as many springs as she might live.

  She saw that he was waiting for an answer.

  ‘Andrew always said that Edinburgh is the place of lies. Is this trust that you would ask of me another of them?’

  His fingers tightened around hers.

  ‘Even a falsehood well executed might be enough to save you.’

  ‘From David?’

  He frowned at that as he gathered her into his arms. ‘There is always more than one powerful man in any court, Isobel. Sometimes it is just a matter of finding him.’

  ‘But you will help me do that?’

  ‘You will help yourself by understanding that kings require very careful handling and that allegiance, fealty and loyalty are only words.’

  ‘You sound seasoned in the art of such expedience.’

  He did not answer as he moved up against her, her back flat against the warmth of a woollen tapestry in red and yellow and strands of the more luxurious purple.

  ‘I want you, Lady Dalceann. I want all of you this time, but not as a pawn or a hostage to demand conditions from a king and not as the leader of the clan, either, who might think to save her men by offering her body in sacrifice.’

  He pushed his groin against her stomach and she felt the rigid need in him. ‘I want you tonight away from the war and the killing, lying with the moon upon your nakedness, spent with fervency.’

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered and the world stood still, the hours of dark between this moment and the morning filled with a promise that was exhilarating.

  Liberty and pleasure—had she ever in her life felt the anticipation of both? And how fleeting would they be now?

  The muscles in his arms rippled as he peeled back his tunic and the chiselled contours of his chest under her fingers were firm.

  Beautiful. She hated the pull of such perfect symmetry, given the lack of it in her own face as she leaned her head down to take the skin of his shoulder between her teeth. He tasted of salt and wood-smoke and safety.

  ‘When I pulled you from the sea I thought you were a god in your braided surcoat,’ she confessed. ‘And I wondered if you could be real.’

  His fingers closed against her cheek, cradling her face. ‘But now you know that I am.’

  His other hand fell lower across the line of her bottom, invoking the same feelings as before, all the thoughts she had lain in bed and dreamed of, sleepless with prescience.

  Her centre quickened, melting in the hope of repetition, his skin drawing her in until no space at all lay between them; the breath she held allowed her the stillness that she needed to simply perceive: his scent in her nostrils, his heartbeat slow and steady under her touch, his growing ardour in the hard outline of manhood beneath flimsy hose.

  This was the heaven she had sought for so long, this silence of feeling with nothing distracting the twin pull of souls in their quest to recognise completion.

  Elation bloomed and brought a flush to her face.

  Was it possible this was more than lust, more than just a momentary union of flesh? Her eyes widened with the question because no words of more had ever fallen between them. All there had been was the

  choler of war.

  She shook her head. She could not care. With a thousand days of battle behind and the chance of something wonderful ahead she took it, opening her thighs to his gentle fingers and arching her neck when he petitioned entry.

  * * *

  Her hair fell in a dark curtain around his arms, the shades in it of flame and sable and midnight as he found the warmth of her, slipping fingers into wetness with ease.

  The sirens of Circe themselves had no purchase on Isobel’s elemental sensuality. She was like fire and water in his arms, writhing with the pressure of him, her hips bucking as she rode his hand, beckoning him in further.

  He swore because he could no longer contain that which he had been trying to. A limited loving. The sweat on his brow and his lip beaded and the sense he had promised himself was lost. He could not deny her.

  She would be his tonight.

  Lifting her, he laid her legs on his thighs, positioning himself so that gravity brought her down upon him hard. He felt her sheath fold in around him, tight and wet, her eyes opening to his as the length drove inwards. Nothing held back as he buried himself to the hilt and then pulled away to do exactly the same again.

  He could not stop, the feel of her slickness egging him on, the movement of her breasts against his chest, nipples tight with the intimacy. He wanted her until he was breathless and all the demons in him were at peace.

  Nothing else existed save for Isobel, her cries hoarse as he drove in again and again, pushing further, relief rising until he reached up and simply seized it, panting with the quittance as he exploded into oblivion, spilling his seed.

  He could not pull back, could not leave the promise, could not understand, either, what had just happened to him as the control he always protected slipped into chaos. His heart in his throat beat without rhythm or pattern as the words of gratitude rose.

  ‘Thank you.’ He could barely say them as they fell down upon the bed, curled into each other’s warmth.

  * * *

  She closed her eyes and felt him there inside her still, the last echoes of muscle clenching him close, her body languid with the joy of sex.

  The earth had moved. She remembered only three weeks ago, when the king’s army had streamed on to the lands at Ceann Gronna, worrying that she might never know what it was she now did.

  The imprint of him was stamped into her, the liquid from his body within her own. She wanted to hold and savour it, to know that a small piece of him brought the hope of a child, his child, conceived in a room after war.

  ‘I should withdraw.’ His words. The breath of them tickled the space on the top of her head.

  ‘No.’ She kept him immobile with the pressure of her thighs, bidding him to stay as cold air doused heat.

  ‘If you do much more of that, I cannot be answerable to what might happen next, Isobel.’

  His hand stilled her, lying across her thigh so that the deeply scarred part on his forearm was visible and the pad of her first finger reached out to touch. ‘How did this happen?’

  ‘I was a child without protection,’ he returned and twisted, leaving it no longer in sight.

  ‘There is much I do not know about you.’

  He straightened, so that his clear green gaze fell upon her.

  ‘Yet there is a lot, my love, that you do.’ His smile made her insides coil into warmth. My love? Just a term he had used carelessly or a real endearment?

  The masculine grace of him lying before her was so very enticing. She pushed against him and felt him grow within.

  ‘Yes,’ she said softly as he turned and came above, his elbows taking the weight of his body.

  ‘Yes,’ she repeated as he twisted the heaviness of her hair around his fist and held her captive.

  No little loving. No
half-hearted attempts. He simply watched her face taking the breadth of him, plunging in as far as he could go until she relaxed.

  This was what her body had been made for, this abundance flowing into an ache of need, and when his hand found her nipple and ran across it in the same rhythm as his cock she let go of inhibition and cried out.

  ‘Don’t stop, Marc. Don’t you dare stop.’

  She began to shake as he lifted her hips, the nub that he fondled taking away rational thought and bringing her nails fully along the naked line of his back.

  Her breath could not come as the waves of pleasure that bound her body to his exploded into a primitive need that held no sway to whispered messages of loving.

  She just wanted him, inside her, anchored to desire and appetite. Her stomach swelled, the melting soft inside burgeoning outwards so that she went to pieces with the want, wave after wave clenched into breathlessness.

  Afterwards, he slipped away from her when she let him, but his fingers came into the space he left, lying still, small harbingers of an unfinished loving, opening her thighs.

  Fleshless and spent. If an enemy had broken through the door, she could not have raised even an eyelid. She waited to see what might come next in this lesson of a loving she had only ever dreamed of.

  * * *

  He should leave her now, for she had been tight and small and he knew more would have her bruised upon the morrow. But he could not make his body obey his head, as his cock ached for more, as he leaned over and took her nipple in his mouth, kneading the ample flesh beneath.

  For this moment Isobel Dalceann was his. For this night on the wild coast of the Firth above Elie, the turrets of Ceann Gronna silhouetted against a sea that reached all the way to Europe, she was his conquest, willing and compliant. Jesus, he could not remember a time when he had taken a woman thrice in a row, but the heat in him had resurfaced and his fingers began to move.

  He felt her breath against his skin, felt the way she turned to him, felt her hand reach down to his hardness and guide him in from behind.

  Accepting.

  He had her on her hands and knees within a second, the length of her hair falling to the fur in one long swathe and her breasts swinging heavy under his thrusts. This time he altered the tempo, fast and then slow, the uncertainty of his strokes purposeful, and she begged him to keep going when he withdrew, poised at her entrance.

  God, she was wet, the moistness of her ran down his shaft, glistening, beckoning completion, and when she began to pant he emptied himself into the swollen pinkness and collapsed on top of her pinning her beneath him with no mind for his weight.

  Just breath and sweat and the sweet scent of sex, filling the room around them in the particular way of lovers.

  He wanted to stay here for ever, with her beneath him, the world at bay and a handful of long hours before the dawn.

  Only Isobel.

  Only her.

  * * *

  The muted shadows cast wide across the room as she lay pinned to the bed.

  A teardrop welled in her right eye, pooling until it dropped down her cheek to be soaked up by the bolster beneath. This was what it felt like to be fully used by a man who understood the power of union. No half-measures or excuses. No easy gentleness, either. He had given her everything and taken everything.

  Another tear followed the first one; to think that she might have limited such an act with her own motives of aiding her escape. The world turned on the moments between then and now. Then she did not understand the perfect beauty inherent in the game of mating and now she did.

  He had shown her to herself, her cries unfettered by the pure joy of it all. She had never before felt her body take rein as it did with him, the wrenching bliss releasing all the tensions of so many days of siege. Even now with such a thought the echo of it ached in her bones.

  When he rolled off she turned to face him, unwilling to let the bond between them go. Her fingers rose up to link with his, holding them together.

  ‘My husband was not a man who enjoyed my body.’

  He laughed at that and gripped her fingers tighter. ‘He must have been a eunuch, then, to pass up the chance of loving you well.’

  ‘I think he felt it was shameful to take pleasure in the marriage bed.’ She had never told anyone that. She waited for his answer.

  ‘Was he a good husband in other ways?’

  ‘Yes.’ A simple word and all the guilt dropped away. ‘He was my friend.’

  ‘Then you were lucky.’

  The call of a guard on the western tower kept them quiet, listening for the answering shout. It came a few seconds later, a keep bedded down for the evening, all gates shut.

  ‘What will happen to Ceann Gronna?’

  ‘It will be passed on to one of the barons loyal to David for a sum that will help the royal coffers, I suspect.’

  ‘No longer Dalceann, then?’

  ‘Few families last for ever in their domains, Isobel. Be thankful the keep was not razed and the people here are still alive.’

  ‘I am.’ She rose up on her elbows and looked straight at him. ‘I have you to thank for that, Marc.’

  He shook his head. ‘When you arrive in Edinburgh you may not thank me for much at all.’

  ‘My father’s stance was not your responsibility.’

  ‘Maybe not. But your welfare is.’

  ‘Because I am your captive?’

  He laughed again. ‘Much more than that, aye.’

  His other hand threaded behind her neck and he brought her head down to his, finding her lips with only the lightest of pressure.

  ‘Just this now,’ he whispered as she went to speak, his tongue coming in against her own, tasting the essence. When she relaxed into his will he turned her beneath him and everything wonderful began all over again.

  Chapter Thirteen

  They had been travelling for three days and Isobel had barely seen Marc in all that time.

  The king’s men surrounded her, their livery different from that of the other soldiers, and the cart she travelled in was comfortable.

  Margaret, one of the Ceann Gronna maids, had been brought on the journey as her companion, and she sat on the seat opposite, eyes wide open as she looked upon the scene through the gaps of leather draping the conveyance.

  Hiding her from everyone? Isobel had not failed to notice the stares of men whose eyes raked the scar on her cheek as she was brought down into the Great Hall at Ceann Gronna.

  Marc had been there with a group of soldiers by the fireplace and for the first time she saw him properly within the company of others. She swallowed back the difference. He watched her like a stranger might, eyes of flinted steel, any memory of the night past faded into nothingness.

  The king’s men with her crossed over to his side and she was surprised to see the deference they afforded him as she waited. He did not look in her direction once as he spoke of the plans for the ride towards Edinburgh.

  He had insisted she wear her grey kirtle and blue bliaud from yesterday and the unfamiliarity of the long skirt against her legs annoyed her from the moment she had descended from her room.

  She should have donned her hose and tunic, should have bound her plait tightly and laid a cap above it. Instead she had let the maid dress her hair, because Marc had asked it of her, and worn her unbecoming circular hat with the cloth tied beneath her chin.

  Everything felt foreign. Even the hall of Ceann Gronna was different with the standards of the Dalceann clan removed and the furniture repositioned. She did not see one face she knew save for a young lad hovering around the door leading from the kitchens, worry in his expression, seeing her, no doubt, as a woman on the way to her death. Death after a night of full and unmitigated paradise. Even the thought made the muscles inside her clench in need, wanting it all to begin again in a rush of excitement.

  Such craving brought blood to her cheeks, though catching the indifferent glance of Marc de Courtenay on her, she looked away.


  She had made her bed and now must lie in it. The very thought unnerved her as he gestured her forwards.

  ‘You shall ride in the cart with your maid, Lady Dalceann, and the soldiers of David will be set to guard you. We will make camp in the late afternoon and resume our journey tomorrow at first light, for the king is eager for your presence in Edinburgh.’

  Not trusting speech, she merely nodded—eager to behead me and use me as an example for what happens to a dissenter.

  She saw the truth in all of their eyes. If she had had her knife, she might have drawn it and ended it here, but Marc had taken it from her last night after he had left her bed, the warmth of his seed still within her, no precautions taken.

  Used well and truly. She did not even recognise the woman she had become.

  ‘Take her out.’ Marc’s command, no compassion in it.

  She felt the arm of a soldier beneath her elbow shepherding her, and when his fingers touched the side of her breast he did not pull back.

  A prisoner and a renegade. The rights of such women were diminished under the letter of the law. Lady Isobel Dalceann, the last of a clan that had no mind to follow ordinance and statute.

  * * *

  Lord above, if she looked anything other than what she did, all of this would have been so much easier, Marc thought, restraining the urge to run a blade through the back of the man whose hands touched places that overstepped all boundaries.

  With her pouting lips, dark eyes and hair, Isobel Dalceann seemed like a princess brought in from Anjou, the lines of her face so very fine and angled. He wished she had been plainer and not so generously curved and that the sensuality evident in her gold-tinged eyes was not unequivocally lascivious.

  ‘It was never stated in any of the songs that Isobel Dalceann was such a great beauty.’ Glencoe beside him said the words he could see all the others thinking.

  ‘Save for the scar,’ Mariner on his left added, ‘though perhaps it only adds to her mystery. She will walk into the court of Edinburgh like a queen and the king will be mesmerised, just mark my words, for have you ever seen another like her?’