by Sophia James
The fire had started in the mill in the early morning and there were still plumes where hot spots had not been quite doused. But it was neither the loss of food stores nor the ruin of the building that most worried him. Nay, it was the fact that a woman had been seen just before the fire had taken hold. A woman with a hooded dark blue woollen cloak and fine black shoes.
Grace.
Connor tried to explain it to him even as he was dismounting from his horse.
‘Tom the old cottar saw this figure when he was out with his dogs and Bridget the smith’s daughter saw her, too, running for the glade behind the western wall.’
‘Just the figure, not the face? It could have been anyone.’
Connor was silent for a few seconds, as though considering what he would say. ‘Many in the castle believe that it was your wife.’
‘I see. Where is my wife?’
‘In her room. She has not left it since being asked about the fire.’
Passing the reins of his horse to a stable hand, Lach dusted himself down. After a long ride this was the last thing he needed, but he did not want to leave the suppositions festering any longer. As he walked there was a strange silence in the Great Hall, as if the place held its breath, waiting to see what would happen next. Even Rebecca, wiping the tables by the fireplace, kept her distance.
Grace was sitting by the window, the shutters pulled and her hair wild curly red around her shoulders.
For a second he found himself thinking how much more she suited it this length, but then her eyes came up to his, swollen and fearful. The room was very cold.
‘I d-d-did not d-do it.’
When she stood, he saw she now wore only a light bandage on one hand.
‘Do you have a hooded blue cloak?’
‘Y-yes.’
‘Is it still in your possession?’
She nodded and opened a chest beside her, watching as he strode to take the garment out. No smell of flame or smoke. No charcoal or ash or grass stains.
‘If you are blameless, no one will hurt you.’
She shook her head and he heard the word ‘if’ repeated.
‘I th-th-thought they were b-beginning to like m-me.’
He had to smile at her innocence. God, even as a youngster he had not had the same measure of it.
‘I th-thought you would come b-back and see that they l-liked me, your p-people.’
‘And that would be important to you because…?’ He could not quite fathom where she was going with this reasoning, the stain in her cheeks deepening as a maid came in through the opened door.
‘I am so sorry, my Lord, I hadna realised that ye had come home and I thought to help your wife dress for dinner.’
‘You will come down, then?’
‘I d-did not d-do it. Why should I not eat?’
Anger laced the brown of Grace’s eyes and Lach felt a quick rush of passion. It was well past a fortnight since he had lain with her. If he had been sure that she would not fight him, he would have dismissed the servant then and there and taken her to bed. He swallowed back need and turned away, the present he had brought her from Edinburgh still in his pouch.
It was a clip for her hair from the city of Constantinople. He had seen it in the shop window in the narrow closes behind the castle and procured it immediately, an impulsive reckless buy that had cost him far too many coins.
His fingers closed over the smoothness of the shell as he left the room.
That evening a celebration was held for his safe return from Edinburgh and the Great Hall was as full as he had seen it, cottars coming up from the village for the feast and the benches overflowing with curiosity and with downright dislike.
For Grace.
Lachlan knew he should have moved away from his wife, but with the mood of his people so unreadable he found that he just could not.
Tonight she was dressed in a gown that made her look every inch the lady that she was born to be, the red brocade train matching a ruby necklace around her throat, and it was this obvious show of wealth that seemed to be the problem. No woman here could compete with the opulence and no man could understand the need to show off such grandeur, especially with the accusation of being the fire starter so clearly palpable. So she placed herself in a no man’s land between suspicion and overindulgence, the steeple hat she wore rising a good three feet in the air, the wired contraption itself an interloper from the far-off world of courts and kings.
If she had been fairer of face or more tractable, she might have got away with it, but she wasn’t. The skin on her neck was roughened again tonight, and what could be seen of her hair clashed against the lighter colour of the cloth. He swiped his own hair back and schooled growing irritation, for he knew now that gleam in his wife’s eyes. Fright over-laced with bravery and a dollop of challenge.
Rebecca’s laughter was not helping either, or the fact that she had chosen almost the exact same shade of gown as his wife by some canny misfortune. A good number of his men crowded around his mistress, plying her with the ale he had had brought up from the cellars. Grace, on the other hand, refused libation and sat like one who did not welcome any company but her own.
‘If you would like a dance, Con has the way of the steps.’
For the first time that evening she faced him.
‘I d-doubt very much that he w-would wish to dance w-with me.’
The raucous shouts of those who milled around Rebecca filled the room.
‘I give you l-leave to go if you want to join h-her—’
He did not let her finish. ‘Nay, I think you are the one who needs protecting tonight.’
Her eyes flinted and she swallowed. ‘W-was much l-lost in the f-fire?’
‘Flour. Sacks. The wooden water wheel.’
‘My dowry could replace these things.’
‘Sometimes money is not always a solution, and any replacement of what you claim to have no knowledge of in the first place may be construed as guilt.’
‘I did not m-mean…’
‘Whoever started the fire will be caught and punished.’
‘As they sh-should be,’ she answered and wound a red-shot silk gauze scarf around her hand. Lachlan remembered doing the same the night he had taken her virginity. The ties he had used had been burgundy, and her skin almost translucent beneath it.
God, was she a witch perhaps, this wife of his, entangling lust with need and to hell with sense or reason? He checked the position of the moon in the sky through an open shutter, and saw it was late. When Rebecca caught his glance from the other side of the room, he looked away and thought nothing of her chagrin. Nay, Grace took all of his concentration.
‘Are ye with child from our time together?’
Her tongue traced a line around her lips, the buds of her nipples stretched taut against the fabric of her dress. The tight lust he felt annoyed him.
‘I th-think it is too soon t-to tell.’
Her tone was self-conscious and, with her curls dancing around her face, she looked much younger than the twenty-six years she professed. ‘The length of your hair suits you, aye.’ His hands stiffened against the line of his thighs as he wondered what the hell had made him say that and when she reached up the freckles on the back of her hand were so different to the blemish-free white skin of his mistress.
Hell. Had his life come down to comparing Grace with every other woman he had ever known intimately and giving compliments when he found the others wanting? Irritation made him unkind.
‘As my wife, one of your duties is to oversee the running of this place. Tomorrow I shall have the housekeeper show you just what is involved.’
‘I sh-should be h-happy to.’
‘If you leave the castle, make certain you take one of my soldiers with you.’
‘So they can s-see that I should not bring h-harm to your keep?’
He laughed and the sound was rusty.
‘I had not thought of it in quite that way.’ This time her eyes met his directly and the candlelight
fired the amber to a different shade of brown. ‘More for protection.’
‘Against w-what?’
Lachlan looked across at her. How easy and safe the living in England must have been for her even to have to ask him such. Here nothing was secure. Neither home nor hearth nor country.
‘This is Scotland, Grace, and you play a dangerous game with all your questions, but if you value your head it would be wiser to keep it down and out of trouble.’
When she nodded gravely, the dimples in her cheeks deeply etched in thought, he felt his physical want for her intensify. God in Heaven, nothing made sense. He looked across the room to Rebecca and was vexed by her childish pout and bad temper. All he wanted was Grace. He could not find it in himself to even be careful.
‘Will you lie with me again tonight?’
The gold in her eyes sparked, a mirror of his own lust. ‘Y-you are my husband. You c-can take me when you will it.’
‘And where,’ he returned fast, all semblance of manners lost under want and need. Her. In her. Entering into the softness of womanhood and seeing her curls jolt with the movement.
She nodded, even to that, though she did not look at him directly.
‘I will meet you in your room, then, after I have spoken with Connor.’
She bowed her head and departed, the sway of her hips distracting him from Con’s words as he watched her go, threading her way through the crowd of people with her head held high and conversing with no one.
Grace took off her fine dress and the tall hat with the veil that tumbled in a light fall of cloth from its peak. But she did not remove her garters holding the stockings and reaching the junction between her thighs, or the ruby necklace gleaming bright from her throat. Lord, how glad she was to be away from the hall below and from the falsetto laugh of Rebecca McInness.
Repairing to her bed, she arranged herself upon it, and when the door opened and Lachlan Kerr entered she did not look away.
‘Merci aux saints,’ he enunciated, dropping the slats behind him and crossing the room in three easy footfalls. Cupping her unclothed buttock with his right hand, he shrugged off his shirt with the left, the hardness of him making her smile until he bundled the length of her hair around his fist.
‘When I cover you this time, my Lady, I intend to have you begging me to stop.’
‘Starting now,’ she answered back, biting into the skin at his wrist and crying out as they came together, the pure and sheer rightness of it freeing.
‘The candles,’ she said raggedly, as he rocked her hips up to his, ‘I w-want them out.’
Wetting his fingers, he extinguished the glare.
They lay together spent, her body draped over his and her hair wildly tangled, rising up and down with the heaviness of his breath.
She was a temptress. Pure and simple. His plain and timid wife was a woman of unequalled sensuality. Bringing his hand up from the sheet, he laid it across her back, carefully so that she would not wake.
Grace. Asleep. He noticed the light fall of her breath and a perfume he could not recognise. Flowers of some sort, he reasoned. It was in her skin and in her hair. And for the first time ever after making love to a woman he did not want to rise and leave, the feel of her curled body within his own right somehow.
He listened to the last shouts from the Great Hall and was glad that he was not down there, glad that he was in this bed with his wife in his arms and the door well sealed against any intrusion.
This wife.
So unlike the last one.
So unlike any other woman he had ever shared a bed with, and, truth be told, there had been many.
His glance wandered to the gartered stockings slung carelessly on to the rush mat, stockings he had removed somewhere after midnight when she begged him not to stop.
How had she come by the injuries on her thighs? His grip tightened. The marks that fire left? Certainty blurred into question.
Feeling the movement of her lashes against his chest, he knew that she had awakened and yet she stayed as silent as he did, enjoying the last moments of togetherness before reality wrenched them apart.
How well had she loved his brother? How much did she know of his death? Was there any credence in the circulating rumours that laid the blame for Malcolm’s disappearance squarely at her feet?
These were questions that he needed to ask. But not now. Not when the rush of sex came upon him again and he turned, liking the way her body wrapped about his before she accepted him in.
Chapter Seven
Grace walked along the castle path early the next afternoon. Today a haze fell across the land, gentling it and giving it a wild sort of beauty that England lacked, the stone of Belridden taking on almost a pinkish hue. The tall starkness of it looked less ugly, a keep designed for defence, and in this world far from civilisation, safety had its own particular allure.
Safety. Her fists balled by her side as she remembered last night, remembered the passion between them, raw and undisciplined, all resistance gone in a sheer and overwhelming response. Even now she could still feel her excitement of it, the wonder and the intensity, and the protection.
Tears came to her eyes, welling up and threatening to fall. She would always be safe here, cocooned in the title of wife, with the nights of many years lining up before her. Would he come again tonight? Her lips turned up at the thought, for the bud of a woman’s power was forming and she could see her husband atop a palfrey and riding towards her from the woodland behind the water meadow. This horse was smaller than the one he had come to England on and the bridle was coloured in the reds and greens of the Kerr clan, a chevron in the same shades embossed on his saddle. Not only a Laird but a knight and he had brought his badge with him from the court of Philip.
The mill was a burnt-out shell, its waterwheel hanging in charred lines across the river, and he was not looking pleased. Her elation was dampened further when a retainer joined him, suspicion in his eyes as they met her own.
‘We’ll need to rebuild before winter, Laird. The wheel and roof are completely lost and much of the corn in from the fields gone with it.’
‘Bring men to clear away the beams and cut new timber from the forest. Then promise bread from the castle kitchens and the free use of the woods for game in return for worked hours.’
Grace listened with a growing regard for her husband’s logic and good sense as he outlined plans to get the mill running again. Finally he seemed satisfied with what they would do and, farewelling his soldier, he dismounted. It was cold and she wished that she had worn her cloak, but with all the conjecture about a woman in blue she did not dare be seen out in it. She was amazed at how little her husband had on in this weather, his highland shirt open at the collar and his legs bare. In the light of a new day all that had happened in the darkness between them seemed unreal, the brittle sharpness of his glance deflating any shared confidences and reducing her to worry.
‘I can s-see that people think I d-did this.’
‘Well, there hasn’a ever been a fire before at Belridden that’s done this amount of damage and you the only stranger here. You must know how it looks from the way of others.’
‘A-and if it happens a-again—?’
He broke in. ‘Are you saying that it might?’
She shook her head. ‘No. But if someone else p-pretends it?’
Anger crossed his brow. ‘Then they will be caught.’ He was quiet for a moment before he continued. ‘If it is you for some reason, Grace, then it would be best to tell me of it now.’
‘It was not m-me.’ She willed back the pain as she walked beside him, bleakness and desolation replacing hope as they made towards the keep. She could not think he should believe that of her. Perhaps he was more like his brother than she knew.
Her mind went back to the night Malcolm Kerr had arrived in Grantley from London with her cousin. He had taken one look at her and laughed.
‘Ye brought me up from court for this woman, Stephen?’ He was careful hi
s voice did not carry around the room and that her uncle had no notion of his rudeness. ‘I could have married any number of plain heiresses in London and certainly none with the same shade of hair.’ His sneer was ripe, and, had there been a cart willing to make the trip back to town that evening, all that had happened next might have been avoided.
For Ginny had walked into the hall with her hair newly washed and a fresh gown of sapphire blue, exactly the same shade as her eyes. Grace had seen the interest on the face of her would-be suitor and something in her had turned. Something frightening.
She shook her head. Lachlan Kerr was nothing like his brother, but today he was distant and distracted, the careful lover of the night replaced in daylight by a man with plenty on his mind. Her glance took in his fingers laced through the bridle reins, fingers that had caressed her body with magic. She smiled at her nonsensical thoughts, glad that he had no way of reading her mind, though his next observation worried her.
‘You are quiet this morning?’
What did that mean? Was he comparing her demeanour today with that of last night? Her humour completely disappeared. Of course he was not thinking such a thing. Why, he had barely noticed her, save to ask if she had knowledge of the fire, and he was certainly keeping a good space between them.
‘It m-must be a lot of r-responsibility to be Laird,’ she chanced, scratching at a spot at her wrist.
‘Does the burn still trouble you?’ he asked and unexpectedly reached out to take her arm, bringing the hand up into a better line of vision.
She tried to snatch it away. ‘Nay, it is gone. How l-long have you b-been the Laird?’ She asked the question more out of the hope of distraction.
‘Since Malcolm died.’
Ten months. So it was not long. She was pleased when he let her fingers go.
‘M-my uncle often said it t-took a brave man to go into b-battle and a b-braver one to stay and w-work the land.’
He laughed, the sound ringing in the air, and a sound that she thought he had not much practice in.
‘Perhaps he was right. Malcolm was certainly away from Belridden for as many months as he could manage. Did you meet him first in London?’
