by Sophia James
‘A witch?’ He echoed the word and smiled. ‘Perhaps that will help you, then. The black arts make cowards of those who believe in them.’
‘Do you believe in them?’
He shook his head. ‘I am a soldier and there is enough sorcery in that.’
Their eyes met and held across the small space; he felt solace in her strength.
‘If I were to simply disappear, would David punish those left at Ceann Gronna because of it?’
How often had he asked himself that very same question and come up without an answer? If he knew for certain the king would be kind, he would have had Isobel out of Edinburgh in a second. But he didn’t.
‘I could not live, you see, if the Dalceann name were to be lost for my freedom. It would be no life to tread on the graves of those I loved.’
‘There is still time to change the king’s mind before he orders a betrothal, and even a day can make a difference in the politics of a court.’
‘You see a way out of this? For us?’
Us. The word rocked him. Lord, how much he wanted an us.
‘There is always a way to get what you want. A trip has been arranged to Dunfermline at the end of the week as an interlude for the royal party. Huntworth will use the outing to attempt to kill me.’
‘How do you know all that?’
‘I’ve led armies across Europe and lived with kings. Every court has its own systems of intelligence and this one is no different.’
‘How will he try it?
‘On the water. He will probably use the summer sea mists to hide in.’
‘Then the king must be told of such treachery before it is allowed to happen.’
He tipped back his head and laughed, the sweet sound of her worry balanced against this one chance of retribution.
‘No, Isobel,’ he said finally as he caught his breath. ‘We must allow Stuart McQuarry all the room in the world to disgrace himself.’
* * *
He was so beautiful, Isobel thought, the stubble on his cheeks catching the brightness of the moon. Mariner had told her today of Marc watching her chamber by night to make certain she was safe. Her protector. Her saviour. She could never remember feeling like this in the company of any other man before and now the fear of losing him to a madman bent on murder made her stomach feel sick.
Stepping forwards she caught his hand and held it tight, the warmth and the strength of him comforting against the truth he had given her—a rare gift in a court filled with lies. She liked the way his fingers tightened against her own.
‘McQuarry must believe there is some truth in what Catriona said to want to kill you.’
Placing his fingers across the swelling warmth of her breast, she watched him, the thin silk of her nightdress the only thing that separated her from nakedness. If she was going to be married off for the convenience of a king, then she would use the time she had left to understand all that she would never forget.
‘Here and now, let there just be us.’
The place between her legs throbbed and her palm fell to his groin, cupping the fullness of him.
‘Ahhh, love,’ he whispered in reply and turned her face into his. ‘We should not, but...’
His lips covered hers, the words between them lost to need, his tongue probing and the world anchored by urgency.
Marc de Courtenay was home in a way Alisdair had never been. It was in his strength and his certainty and the way he strode across life, nothing in his path unshiftable.
Save the suitors.
She shook her head. Not now. She would not think of them now.
‘I want you.’ He spoke as he hauled her towards him, his back against the wall, the words hardly heard. ‘I want you when I wake up in the morning and I need you when I fall into slumber at night.’
He lifted her arms and the pale slip of silk was lost, pooling in shadow on the floor. His eyes ran across everything, the heat in him seen under hooded lids, her breasts jutting in the cool, waiting for his touch.
Only them and only this.
What manner of magic did he use upon her? What force drew them perfectly together, fitting like a new-made glove? Her muscles felt so weak she could barely stand.
I know exactly what to do. I know how to love a man now to the very bottom of my heart.
She almost said it. Almost let the words go to form a new understanding between them, either taken or refused, but she was not brave enough.
Hold him first, her mind said, as she opened her legs to the hand that came forwards, turning into his embrace.
The heat inside, beneath her skin, was the kind that turned into rapture, layered with the knowledge of what had come before and what might follow next. Imprinted. Indescribable.
His touch across the rise of her bottom was gentle as she closed her eyes to simply feel the hard strength of arousal, his breath against her cheek. The smell of a man who did not favour the scents that many of the other men in court plied themselves with.
Only Marc against her body and then inside, drawing her towards ecstasy, thrusting closer and higher, her cries taken into his mouth and lost into their joining.
Her nipples ached as the building waves began to crest, thin pains of perfection calling for bliss.
Her climax came even as she tried to stop it, rolling in to clench every muscle, her breath pulsing tight as she stretched out to feel the fullness.
Taken and consumed. She felt only freedom.
‘Mon Dieu.’ Marc was suddenly still and the control she always saw in his eyes was gone as he looked into her face and emptied his seed inside, no thoughts to break away.
She held him there tightly, wanting the possibility of all he had not given before, and looking directly at him to show him how she felt. She did not let him pull back one tiny bit, as the moon broke through a heavy covering of clouds and came upon them, highlighting his nakedness, dark hair whorling into pattern as a single tear rolled down her cheek. His tongue took it from her before he leaned his forehead against the wall.
‘God, Isobel.’
‘I love you.’
She had not meant to say those words, but they came anyway, soft into the room like thieves and taking all free will with them.
The link of flesh joining them swelled and she saw surrender in the muscles of his shoulders as he breathed in both pain and pleasure, finely tuned, and answered her back with his body.
* * *
An hour later he lay spent beside her in the bed, holding her while she slept and liking the small warmth of breath against his arm.
He could not remember another woman whom he had left his seed inside of his own volition and the thought made his grip tighten, for how well he understood the place given to a bastard child born outside of wedlock.
Isobel had said she loved him, in the final rush of pleasure, whispered against his ear as she spun into the realm of sensuality, the nub of her as tight as a drum.
He could not say it back, not yet when the king and his barons all gathered around her with their own plans, for the Dalceann keep or for Isobel it mattered not which. She was a pawn in a game with rules he needed to observe carefully in order to be able to win.
But she was his. He would never let her go.
He felt her breathing change and knew she had awakened.
‘What is the time?’
Looking out of the window, he checked the position of the moon. ‘Near three, I would guess.’ He knew he could not remain much longer.
‘Stay another hour.’
No question was implied as she rose on her elbows without a stitch covering her nakedness and her hair tousled. Marc thought that she had never looked more beautiful than she did at that moment.
His!
He smiled because for the first time in all of his life he had met a woman who did not play games when she looked him straight in the eyes and offered him everything.
Chapter Eighteen
She had told Marc de Courtenay that she loved him and
she had barely seen him since, lost in the whirl of courtly events and David’s insistence on her presence at every one of them.
It had been a mistake to say the words, she knew it had been from the moment she had said them.
I love you.
Lord. Three little words that had him running scared.
She had heard nothing more from Marc about today’s trip on the boats to Dunfermline, though she knew she was to accompany the king and his party. Her own sources had informed her Marc would be travelling over last with his men as company, the information gleaned from a lad she had paid well to ask. Mariner had been more than forthcoming with the tidings, a fact that begged another question altogether. She knew that if the de Courtenay camp had wished for secrecy they would never have said anything, which meant that McQuarry must know of Marcus’s movements as well as she did.
Helen Cunningham was uncertain and edgy, the thought of a sea trip making her head ache.
Isobel had brought with her some of the herbs she had drugged Marc with once, in the forest above the sea coast, and it was easy to offer her chaperon a drink to still her fear.
Ten minutes later when Helen was fast asleep, Isobel sent word to the king that the older woman was not well and that she felt it wise to spend the day with her whilst she recovered from her ailment.
She smiled at the thought of such an easy grace of hours as she changed into the lad’s clothes brought along for the ruse, a hat pulled hard down on her head and a handful of charcoal from the fireplace smeared into her skin. She now looked like a youth who had neither the wherewithal to bathe nor the inclination, and the cold white sea fog added to deception.
Perfect!
Without a backward glance Isobel departed the room and wound her way down to the shore, the ease of turning from a girl into a boy well practised after many years of wearing hose.
Nobody gave a backward glance to the youth who sauntered past the crafts transporting the royal group to the other side of the bay, an interested onlooker whose figure was then lost to the rolling, early morning mists of the Firth.
* * *
Marc should have known better than to expect an outing of the court to go exactly as it had been planned, and he knew he was in trouble the moment Lady Anne of Kinburn, her husband and two other high-born men and women came to plead for a lift across to Dunfermline, having missed their earlier transportation.
With no other conveyances at the wharf he was unable to refuse without inciting the questions that would later follow should Huntworth not go through with his plans. But he sat them in the back of the boat against the pile of ropes and sailcloths stacked in the aft and well away from the oarsmen he had hand chosen for their strength.
The boat was small, but easily manoeuvred, and with ten of his men aboard and all well armed, he did not think it would be difficult to repel any assault.
‘I knew, of course, that we should have come down earlier, but I thought the mist would delay everything.’
Anne of Kinburn’s husband did not look at all happy. ‘If you had taken a few less hours on your hair, Anne, we might have all been on time.’
The bickering continued until they were out into the middle of the Firth, a good half an hour from the other side.
Then, when the sea mists thickened and the waves became choppier, all hell broke loose.
* * *
Isobel could see Marc standing with his soldiers not twelve feet away, his outline blurred even at that distance by a rolling fog. Excitement vied with fear and she pulled her cap down further and repositioned the canvas covering that she hid beneath, the small scar on her palm coming into view as she did so.
Protection. Caught to each other like the sea to the shore, two parts of a whole. Her fist closed about the knife she held and she squinted her eyes to try to make out any craft coming in through the whiteness.
It came out of nowhere, some few moments later, ramming them without any compunction.
Isobel felt the lurch of it, the scrape and then the breaking of timber, splintering under pressure.
Scrambling up from her hiding place under the sailcloth, she came face to face with Anne of Kinburn, her mouth forming a soundless scream and her husband and friends rigid on the seats they had been assigned.
Bearing her knife, she pushed past them, most of the damage to the boat done at the front where Marc and his men stood, swords drawn, a tight circle of deadly intent.
‘Stay down,’ she shouted at Anne and her group, ‘and move to the very back.’
The small party did exactly as they were told, the sobs of the two women present loud and very frightened.
McQuarry’s men came in a swarm, leaping on to the boat with the sure footedness of sailors well used to the sway of the sea. Isobel took the first man out even as he came towards her, using the motion of the waves to unbalance him.
Marc shouted and she looked up, another coming from the side. Without haste she jabbed at his thigh, watching as he, too, fell backwards into the water, losing purchase.
The whole front of the boat was now full of fighting men, the noise of blades meeting loud in the morning stillness.
She could see Marc fighting his way back to her, his strokes as sure as the ones she had seen at Ceann Gronna. He left only death in his wake.
When he reached her side he grabbed her by the arm, placing her behind him so that any other threat was lessened, his eyes the greenest she had ever seen them.
‘How the hell did you get here?’
She did not have time to answer as another craft came through the mist at full speed towards them, Stuart McQuarry at the helm shouting out instructions. Marc’s arm around her chest held her to him as the jolt ripped through the boat, his grip knocked away by the broken remains of a flying oar which gouged deep into his flesh.
* * *
He had been hit, the blood from his forearm dripping down on to Isobel, the cap she had worn flown off in the jolt, so that the heavy plait of her hair draped across him.
He could not believe she was here, in danger with the bastard Huntworth upon them and revenge in his eyes. Anne of Kinburn was screaming now as she turned over and over in the air to plop into the sea like a great jellyfish, her skirts filling, yellow against the slate grey of ocean.
Mariner was down, too—hit by the collision, Marc hoped, and not pierced by a blade. Further off in the water two of the others in the Kinburn party floundered, the ocean pulling them under with ease.
He had not expected the second ship, had not been ready for it; he, who usually looked for every contingency at the head of armies, had failed to do so here.
Why?
Because his whole focus had shifted to Isobel when he had seen her in danger. He did not want to let her go still, with the unfolding horror all around him. He wanted to keep her here behind him and safe, her warmth soft against everything brutal. If she died, he would, too. It was that simple. Isobel Dalceann with her spirit and bravery had taken his heart and made it her own.
God! The thought floored him as surely as the battle, the beat of blood in his temples pounding hard.
‘I love you, too.’ Said as he turned her head around to his lips and kissed her fast and quick, his sword arm raised against any other intrusion.
He saw her eyes widen in surprise even as the dimples in her cheeks rounded, the blood from his arm reddening her tunic and noise all about them.
One moment of love snatched against a cauldron of hate in the midst of battle. He smiled because with all that had gone before it was appropriate somehow, this centre of calm within a vortex of chaos.
And then she was gone, across the side of the boat into the water and swimming hard for the shrieking Anne of Kinburn.
* * *
He loved her. He had kissed her in front of everyone and had meant what he said. Joy rang in all the parts of Isobel’s body. She saw him now with his sword flashing, an expert against novices; how very easy he made it all look.
‘Please kee
p him safe,’ she prayed in a whisper, for if she was to lose him when he had proclaimed his feelings... No, she would not think of that.
She reached Anne and hauled her up, holding her face above the water.
‘Keep still and I will take you back to the boat,’ she ordered, pulling with an easy side-crawl towards it. Anne to her credit listened, and it was only a moment or so until she was back against the railing of wood.
‘Stay beneath the rim. It will be safer. Just hold on while I get the others.’
‘My h-h-husband?’ Her teeth chattered alarmingly, the wimpled hat she wore filled with water and dragging behind. With a quick flick of her knife Isobel cut the ties and then she was off again, the white of the mist hiding the others further away, but their cries alerting her to their positions.
* * *
Marc could not see Isobel anywhere and the dread of her absence was building. Huntworth was less than a few feet away, his men depleted by the skirmish, the second boat sitting against the ocean at an angle that suggested it was taking on water and fast. Eight of the enemy left against their six. Easy odds. Stepping forwards he met Stuart McQuarry head on.
‘This is for my brother, de Courtenay, for his blood on your hands at Ceann Gronna.’
Marc laughed and the sound was not humorous. ‘Oh, he was a dead man long before that, hose around his knees in shame, an easy conquest with his pretensions and his greed—a familial characteristic, perhaps?’
The other snarled. ‘You come to Scotland with your patronage from the French king and inveigle your way into the heart of the court, an impostor and a bastard.’ His sword swung sharp and Marc parried. He did not wish to kill him yet for there were things he needed to know.
‘Some here say my father was a Scottish earl. Your own, perhaps?’
He smiled as rage reddened the face of the one opposite.
‘Lady Catriona has been loose of tongue, no doubt, with her dubious truths and her filtered reality.’ Stuart McQuarry stopped to catch breath as he brought his blade down hard, the snap of it chilling.