by Sophia James
‘And He answers you?’ Irony so easily heard.
She began to shake her head and then changed her mind. ‘If you listen hard enough, I like to think that He does.’
The bark of his laughter made her uneasy. ‘Such piety and devotion seem ill placed in a woman who responds to the body of a man like yours does.’
Holding her gaze to his, he moved full against her. ‘Does the Lord say yea or nay to the joining of a man and a woman in the shrine of this temple, Grace?’
‘It is d-d-daytime.’
‘And that is your only concern?’ Heat narrowed the line of his eyes, bleached in lust.
‘I was b-burned once, b-by f-flames.’
‘On your thighs?’
She nodded. ‘Th-They are ugly in the light.’
In reply he flipped up the yellow wool of her skirt and when she tried to fight him he brought his elbow across the line of her breast and shook his head, fingers searching out the raised skin, scarred by flame, cool in the air of the cave.
When he looked down a single cry of shame escaped her lips and she was still.
Touching. Bending. The quiet run of his tongue against what she had hidden for ever. She lay her head against the wall and closed her eyes. Feeling. Him. Gentle. Her legs widened and his tongue came to the place between. Yellow wool across his shoulders held him as they were joined in the beat of blood and flesh. There were no questions left. Her groans were louder now, calling his name, begging for this thing just beyond her reach and writhing so that his tongue came in further, tight, the musky scent of her body echoing its need. She went over the top of her desire with a sigh and slumped down so that the cold of the floor was against her bottom and she could see his eyes up close.
Not disgust. Not revulsion. Not pity or sympathy. Only a kind of bafflement.
‘You like this.’ His fingers went to where his mouth had just left.
‘And this.’ Wetness spilled across her fingers as he brought them to the same place his lay and then drew up the hem of his shirt. ‘Your body is calling mine, my nighean, like the shout of a bairn as it is released from the warmth it has nae wish to be torn from.’
One deep thrust and he was in, clamping her knees around his own and turning her so that she leaned back and the length of him drove in further. Her cries made him frenzied and he quickened the pace, one hand masking the sound from her lips and the other pulling at the cloth on her bodice.
And this time when the release came the tightening in her body matched his, clenched together in the terrible rush of un-control. Lost. Against time and truth. Only them. Together.
Chapter Eight
He pushed away and left her on the ground, curled in the hazy world of sleep, her skirt ridden up against the scars of fire, revealing the shapely line of one leg.
‘Damn it,’ he cursed as he strode from the place he had gone to with the intention of telling his wife of the limitations he would like to set on their relationship. He would have her until she fell ripe with the child he required as an heir. That was all.
And instead? He looked back at the entrance to the cave and stopped. If anyone else should find her…
The sun reflected against the trees and he could hear the sweet warbling song of birds, and further off the voices of cottar children playing before supper. All was normal. Just as his life was not. Even now he almost turned back to gather Grace in his arms and take her home. His wife. Her cries as he took her still reverberated in his ears and the subtle smell of flowers still lingered in his nostrils. He could see the red of her hair as it settled against the freckled skin of her throat. Abandoned lust contrasted with her devoutness. His anger had lessened and balanced against what he knew now of her feelings for his brother. The notes had at least told him that.
She had loved him. Every note in that box, signed under the initials of ‘GS’, had expressed the emotion. Briefly he wondered how they were in her custody given they were sent to his brother. He also wondered why she had not kept the notes that Malcolm must have surely given her in return. Still, they convinced him that his wife was not a murderer and the settling howl of rage and dread deadened a little. At least she was not that!
The arrow that whistled past his temple was hard enough to knock him backwards. Scrambling up and drawing out his dagger, he tried to see just where the missile had come from but, with blood running as a river down into his eyes and colouring his world red, he lost a good moment of searching time. Men ran from the castle gate and from the fields and the mill two hundred yards away.
‘What hit ye?’ Con’s voice, sword out.
Lachlan bent to the fletched arrow reverberating in the trunk of oak and pulled it free, the bodkin-like arrow quivering with the movement. Lord, a head like this could punch easily through even the thickest armour. The ache around his eyes worsened and he closed them for a second before answering.
‘Just a graze.’ As he said it he noticed Grace behind the men, face flushed and the yellow gown pulled into place. She did not move towards him, but was looking at the wooden tithe barn across the field from their party, and an expression unlike any he had seen paled her face.
Horror and complicity!
Had she seen who had drawn the bow? Could she know him?
The blood pounding in his temple began to drum even harder and, pushing Con with his well-intentioned ministrations to one side, he regathered his wits.
His mind raced at the distance such a weapon could cover. Three hundred or so yards. The barn was well within that parameter.
Drawing out his falchion, he led his men towards the building and away from his wife.
‘He’s gone,’ Lachlan determined some twenty minutes later, kneeling to footprints in the earth that crossed the strip fields of the villagers and then disappeared into thick woodland. The find had confirmed all his fears as the prints were not those of soft brogans or bared feet but of fine shoes. The conclusions from this discovery were written in the anger on his soldiers’ faces.
‘Who would do this and what would they have to gain from killing ye?’
Lachlan shook his head as the same reasoning turned inside his mind. ‘Send retainers into the woods and track where he comes out. That might give us at least some clue. And see if there were others involved.’
The day had darkened, clouds of rain sweeping in from the north and hiding trails, the grey stone walls of his keep wreathed now in mist and shadow. Where was his wife? he wondered. Was this her doing? Was this an easy way to deal with an unwanted husband, the gold coins he had returned to her for her own use enough to set a plan in place? But when could she have done that? She had not been alone since she had come here, save in the cave under the western wall of Belridden.
He said no one would hear me…
He?
Who?
His assailant? Her uncle’s man? The fire at the mill and her brooch in the embers. Pieces of a puzzle beginning to add up, slowly.
Grace at the centre of everything!
He hated the way his mind refused to believe it even as his hand tightened about the silk-lined hilt of his sword.
She was waiting for him in her room, sitting on the chair with her hands in her lap, the brown of her eyes dark against the day, and he had to pull his wrath to order before he spoke.
‘Did you order this?’ His finger touched the wound on his forehead, the blood flow stopped now.
She shook her head.
‘But you ken who did. I saw your face, Grace, and you could not hide the fact that you knew him.’
Again she shook her head.
‘You lie.’
‘I-It was j-just a sh-shadow.’ Her fingers turned a kerchief around and around, twisting the cloth in a singular admission of culpability.
‘Since you have been at Belridden, we have had as many accidents in days as we have had in years.’
He crossed the room and pulled her up, not carefully either. He saw the fright in her eyes and tempered nothing. ‘Who was it, Gra
ce? Who was it you saw?’
‘I did not s-see.’ He squeezed flesh beneath his fingers as a single tear traced its way across her cheek and dropped on to his hand. He let her go as if he had been stung.
‘I dinna believe that you know nothing of it.’
‘Then you do n-not know me.’
He went to reply but stopped, something in the glistening of a righteous anger making him waver.
‘Perhaps you are right and I dinna know you at all.’
Listening to her husband’s retreating footsteps, she stood. She felt numb, sick, confused and, as her hands cradled her face, she tried to make sense of the last few hours.
Malcolm Kerr’s servant. She was sure it had been him. The man who would know that his master had not been interested in her at all, but in her young cousin.
Was she going mad? Was the burden of guilt turning her mind into one that saw the face of her foe in a fleeing shadow? She shook her head. Surely it could not be him. Not here. With the knowledge of Ginny’s indiscretions he would not remain silent for long within the realm of Belridden, where such revelations would be eagerly listened to.
Placing her fingers against her mouth, she pressed hard to stop the forming sobs. She could still feel Lachlan’s hands upon her body.
One hour and her life had been changed from that to this.
Love.
And lies.
‘I love you,’ she whispered.
And she did.
When the door opened a few moments later she thought he might have changed his mind and returned. But it wasn’t her husband. A woman she had not seen before brought in a pitcher of water and bread, a necklace of dried garlic bulbs worn prominently around her neck.
‘For protection against the witchery of a ban-druidh if ye are thinking to harm anything else at Belridden,’ she explained, her rheumy eyes filled with such hatred that Grace was left breathless with the sheer enmity in them.
She did not see Lachlan the next day or the one after that and finally, when she had had enough of her own company, she bid Lizzie to walk with her to the cave chapel in the late afternoon. She hadn’t been down to the Great Hall at all to eat and the only times that she had escaped the confines of her chamber were in the evening when few would see her. Walking today in the sun was wonderful; it had been raining earlier, so there were large puddles on the pathway to the west of the keep. Spreading her arms, she noticed that the ointment she had been religiously using was softening her skin and taking away the dry redness. Even her limp seemed lessened somehow.
They were almost at the mouth of the cave when they heard a strange noise in the bushes. A rustling followed by silence, the green mantle swaying this way and that.
Lizzie jumped back. ‘Dinna touch, my Lady, it could be a boar down from the mountains or a sick beast or a…’
A brown nose poked out, the face of its owner following, the eyes of a very large dog looking up at her in supplication.
‘He is so ugly.’ Lizzie pulled back, but Grace had no thought to merely leave him.
He was frightened and alone, his fur matted with brambles and a long bleeding wound festering on his back leg.
‘He is hurt.’
She bent down, their eyes level now. A wary and alert golden glance stared back.
‘Do you know this dog, Lizzie? Is he from the keep?’
‘In that condition? Nay, he is a stray and should be put down before he harms someone.’
His deep growl made them both jump, but the dog did not move after them. Rather it stopped and waited. Grace got the distinct impression of an animal at the very end of its strength, abandoned and at the mercy of others. There was much in this animal that she felt herself and the want to help it welled.
‘Can you return t-to the castle and get a rope, Lizzie?’
‘Ye mean to keep it?’
‘I mean to h-help it.’
‘Ye willna go nearer? If it bites ye and no one is here…’
‘I won’t touch it, now b-be quick.’
When the maid had gone and the silence again resettled, Grace sat, tucking her skirts between her legs and leaving the material so that she could rise quickly and run if the need arose.
But the animal sat still, very still, neither looking away, nor tending to its wounds, and the dull buzz of flies around the blood was all that could be heard on the air. Even the wind seemed lessened.
‘You look like you need some love,’ she said finally and his ears pricked against the sound. There was a considerable notch out of one of them and the other did not quite stand straight. ‘I could help you if you w-would let me?’ Her fingers reached out and he did not pull away. Encouraged, she lent further forwards and when her fingers touched his fur, he only turned his head slightly.
He didn’t have the softness of a pet, but the pelt of a dog who had been through some hard times. She smiled as he butted his nose against the heel of her hand before stiffening, the hackles of his fur rising proud along the skeletal ridge of his spine.
Startled, Grace scrambled up. Lachlan stood there, and the growl of the animal echoed threateningly.
Suddenly she knew just exactly who this dog reminded her of.
‘I instructed you not to leave the castle without a guard.’
‘I could n-not find one of your s-soldiers and Lizzie was w-with me.’
The frown on his forehead deepened, but he did not pursue the argument, instead looking down at the dog.
‘I f-found him in the bushes. He’s w-wounded.’
‘A leg-hold trap by the looks.’ Putting out his hand, he moved forwards. ‘Animals who are wounded can be unpredictable.’ Grace saw how he shielded her with his body. As unpredictable as he was!
She watched as he slipped the rope around the dog’s neck, the line of his fingers checking for other injuries.
‘He’s some sort of a bloodhound and probably a hunter. Not a pure breed though, for you can see that in the shape of his ears.’
‘You know about d-dogs,’ she queried, ‘yet you do n-not have any yourself?’
‘I travel a lot.’ The animal licked his face as he knelt.
Travelled, but never settled. She saw how the mark of the arrow on his forehead had faded into a light red line, making him look even more menacing and reckless than he usually did.
‘Could his wounds be m-mended?’
‘Probably, but that’s not the question, is it, Grace?’
‘It’s not?’ She always felt like this with Lachlan Kerr. Out of kilter and on guard.
‘Nay. More is the question as to why you should want me to?’
‘I d-don’t understand.’
‘When David first mentioned your name as a wife, I thought of my brother and his penchant for the type of women I had no interest in, and I wondered. But then you came and you were different.’
‘Not as p-pretty?’
He shook his head and her heart sank. ‘Not that. Different as in…honest, direct, truthful.’
Now she knew where he was heading.
‘And I thought to myself, Lachlan, you have been years and years in the company of those who would say one thing and do another, for politics you understand, and after the Bruce there were many enemies.’
‘Of David?’
‘And Scotland! But now I am not so certain that you are that much different at all.’ His finger traced the mark of the arrow. ‘Who was it, Grace? Who did this to me?’
Lachlan or Ginny? Did she risk answering and hope to find in him a man who would be sworn to silence? How long would it be after all before Kenneth MacIndoe spilled the truth?
Before she could answer he began to speak again.
‘My guess is that it was someone who you know behind the tithe barn in the shadows and then I would ask why is it that you will not say it?’
Her rising blush made him continue.
‘Are you a murderer, Grace? Is that what you would hide?’
‘No.’
‘Then do you shelter o
ne? Your cousin Stephen, perhaps, or your uncle? They were as scared of me as you are, aye.’
The paleness of his eyes seemed to bore right through her, though when she said nothing he began to pull the dog towards him, softly at first, and then with more pressure. She was surprised when the dog acquiesced, sidling up to his legs in the way of one who was a favoured pet. ‘Dogs represent a home, you see. A settled home where people stay and stay. We dinna have that with these lies between us, so I am wondering, if you should give your heart to such a one, where it would take you?’
Her heart!
She looked up sharply, confused by the dreadful certainty that perhaps it was not the dog he spoke of after all. But he gave nothing away, this lord of lands that were threatened by everyone and she saw how he must have looked in the court of London where he had gone to negotiate the release of a monarch whom Edward had no interest in letting go.
Persuasion, diplomacy and intellect. Nay, it was not just in war and battle that Lachlan Kerr excelled.
And yet in the asking of his question she had detected something that she had not imagined to find there. Longing for a home.
‘How did your parents die?’ Perhaps if she knew something of his family.
‘Badly.’ He looked away as Lizzie came down the track towards them with two youths.
‘It took me a time to find them, Laird,’ she puffed, and Grace saw that they were armed.
‘You w-would not kill him?’
Icy pale eyes bored into her before he turned and led the small group out of the woods.
She decided to call the black dog Dexter, after her grandfather, for he deserved a name that was strong, as strong as he was to have withstood the wildness of this part of the country and the marks of the trap still evident in the fur on his leg.
Another secret blossomed within her.
It was past thirty days since she had last had her menses, her breasts full and aching, and the very thought of it made her feel…whole.
A mother.
Her.
She had given up hoping that it would ever be so after her sixteenth birthday when no man had so much as looked at her, and so the wonder of it now made everything possible.
