by Sophia James
The door held a key in the lock and there was rope in the shelf of a small cabinet. A fine woollen cloth hung on the wall by the bed. All things he could use to escape if he needed to he thought. But not yet. The weakness in him was all consuming and the dizziness took away his balance.
‘You need to get stronger,’ she said and her tone was angry. ‘For my protection has its limits, Marc.’
Marc felt his lips tug up at each end. Not in humour, but in the sheer and utter absurdity of it all. God, when had he ever depended on anyone before and how many thousands had always depended on him? She had the way of his name, too. The fever, he supposed, loosening his tongue in the heat of swelter.
‘They would kill me here? Your people?’
She nodded. ‘For a lot less than you would imagine.’
‘And you? Are you compromised because of it?’
When she did not answer he swore, the night in the forest coming back to him. Lifting his right hand, he motioned to the wound.
‘Your blood and mine?’
‘The spirit of guardianship must be honoured in the proper way. It is written.’
‘A useful knowledge, that.’
‘You speak as if you do not believe it.’
‘Believe?’ Turmoil and battle were all he had known for a long time now. But Isobel smelt of fresh mint and soap and something else he could not as yet name. He closed his eyes so that he might know it better, every sense focusing on the part of his skin where her hair brushed against him, soft as a feather.
Hope!
The word came down with all the force of a heavy-bladed falchion—he who had led armies for the king against the great enemies of France for all the years of his life. Trusting no one. Guarding any careless faith.
It was the sickness, perhaps, that made him vulnerable or the mix of her blood against his own, inviting exposure.
He wondered just what she would do if she knew who he truly was and pressed down the thought.
Just now and just here. A room in a keep above the sea, its buttressed walls holding in a danger that it had long tried to keep without. He closed his eyes to stop her from seeing what he knew lay inside him, fermenting in the deceit, and was glad when she left the room.
* * *
She had seen the look in his eyes and needed to think. Seen the danger and the menace and the hidden knowledge of threat. Not to her though, she thought, as she went down the stairs, the heat of his fever imbued into the very tissue of her skin. She had locked the door and taken the key to keep the others out.
Safety again. For him.
Turning the silver band on her finger, she remembered the man who had put it there. Gentle. Manageable. Alisdair had railed against her father’s strong denial of David’s right in managing his kingdom and had warned him of the pathway fraught with danger that he would tread should he demand authority of the Dalceann tracts.
All his warnings had come to pass, save the one of losing his own life while in the process of trying to change her father’s mind.
She swore beneath her breath. ‘Listen to your heart, Isobel,’ her husband had said time and time again as they had lain in their curtained bed above the storms thrown in from the churning German Sea. ‘King David’s Norman education is changing everything in Scotland and only those who can change with it will survive.’
Slapping one hand against her thigh, she leaned back against a wall. Solid and cool, it steadied her.
Alone.
God in Heaven, why should such aloneness today be any worse than usual?
It was because of this outlander.
It all came down to him. His skin beneath her fingers as she wiped his brow. His breath against her face when she leaned in close, eyes of deep clear green shored up by carefulness.
His body marked by war and battle. She had told no one that!
Neither had she disclosed the silver ring she had found buried deep in the pocket of his gilded surcoat and engraved with the royal mark of King David.
Another day and she would have him gone. She swore it on the soul of Brighid, the Celtic Goddess, the keeper of the sacred hearth and the patroness of women.
* * *
Isobel Dalceann came back to him as the sun fell low against the window and she brought a mash of sorts with bread soaked in milk. He ate it as if it was his very last meal and felt stronger.
‘Thank you.’
Again. It seemed of late he had been indebted to this woman time after time.
Waving away the words, she countered with her own question. ‘Are you one of David’s men?’
She had found the ring, he supposed. He should have tossed it when he had the chance, but the piece held a value to him that was sentimental and he had not wanted to.
‘Once I was,’ he replied.
‘And now?’
‘It has been a while since I was in his company.’
She moved back and he knew he had erred.
‘You knew him, then, personally.’
The furrow on her brow deepened. Thinking. He could almost see her brain turn.
‘My mother was from the House of Valois in Burgundy. David of Scotland gave me the ring when he lived there.’
‘Under the protection of Philip the Sixth?’
So she knew her politics. He nodded.
‘You are a friend of the king’s, then?’ The words fell into the silence of the room, the talk marking him off as...what?
When she breathed out heavily he knew she had not wanted this truth. A simple soldier or sailor would have been so very much easier to deal with. Still, in the face of all her assistance he found it difficult to lie.
‘Many here at Ceann Gronna have already died under the guise of David’s ambitions.’ Her voice was flat and hard.
‘And I can promise you that I should not wish to bring one other person here harm.’
She swore again at that, a ripe curse that was better suited to a man. The lad’s hose were tight against the rise of her bottom and despite his sickness he felt his body react.
‘If I was braver, I would slit your throat as surely as you wanted to slit Ian’s.’
‘What stops you, then?’
‘This,’ she answered and leant down into him, her mouth running across his lips. Not gently, either, but with a full carnal want that left him reeling. He felt her bite his bottom lip before her tongue probed, felt the sharp slant of desire and the fierce pull of lust. Felt her fingers on his face and throat and then on his nipples pinching, the rush of hunger acute. When she had finished she moved back, wiping the taste of him away with the top of her uninjured hand.
‘There is not much to hinder the path of a woman taking a man.’ Her eyes went to the stiff hardness that was so very easily seen through the thin linen cloth covering him.
‘Men hold to the premise of self-satisfaction far more than any woman is likely to, you see. A small caress here, a whisper there, the cradling of flesh between clever fingers...’
Hell, she was a witch. He looked away because every single thing she said was true and because the need to come right then and there before her was overriding.
* * *
He had not kissed her back. The knowledge of it ran into her veins and made her step away, his face dim in the shadow. If a man had taken liberties like that with her, she might have killed him, quickly, with the knife she always kept in the leather holder under the sleeve of her kirtle.
But he seemed at home in silence as he waited for her to speak, his palms opened on the bed beside him as if the matter had not compromised him in the very least.
Perhaps it is the mix of our blood that has tainted me, she thought, as he began to speak.
‘How long ago did your husband die?’
‘Two years ago in the coming spring.’
‘Have you lain with another since?’
The question shocked her because she had counted her many months of celibacy every night since the sea storm.
The very thought of it
made her ashamed. A woman who might sacrifice everything for the quick tug of lust. And she knew what obligations kept her here, above the water watching out for her enemies.
She had not forgotten the promise made to her husband the day he had died, the day she had tried to take her father’s arrow from him, embedded in his body.
‘You shall always have my heart, Isobel,’ Alisdair had said, as the blood filled his mouth in bubbles. ‘So could I take yours with me?’
In death he had meant. In the last breaths of thought.
She had laid his hands across her breast above the beat of loss, his fingers long and slender and soft. She could still feel them there sometimes as life had left him, tugging against the ebb of death.
Twenty-one and abandoned to any other hope of passion because those clansmen gathered about her dying husband had all heard his plea and her whispered answer.
‘Yes,’ she had said through the ache of sorrow, every day and every moment she had spent with him imbued in that answer. Until now when another power had turned her, the longing of lust snaking inside deadness. She was glad for the hard measure of this stranger’s cock beneath the cover because at least some part of his body had wanted her in the same way that she had wanted him.
It still stood proud and he made no move to hide it, lying there like an offering he had no mind to give.
‘If I left my seed in you and it took, I cannot think that you would be safe here.’
Reason and logic, she thought savagely as she shook her head, wanting something else entirely. Her husband Alisdair had been the very master of such emotions, and sometimes all she had longed for was wild abandon.
Chapter Five
He was dressed when Isobel went in to her sleeping chamber the next morning, sitting to one side of the bed and watching the door.
In the light of the day her advances of the previous day seemed ill-advised and inappropriate. She also felt tired and scratchy from a night spent in a cot off the solar, reliving her mistake, sleep eluding her as an unwanted excitement crept into possibility.
Lord, Alisdair’s kisses had never stirred such inescapable power, remaining only tepid versions of those from a man who hadn’t even kissed her back. The blood ran into her cheeks like a force and she hated the reaction, a shallow irrational nonsense more suited to the constitution of a vapid courtly maiden. Straightening, she schooled her face back into indifference.
‘You look better today.’
He smiled, the lines around his eyes deepening. ‘Is it recorded anywhere, my lady, that a kiss is the most potent of all medicines?’
His clemency in the face of her breach in manners was welcomed.
‘Andrew came to see you this morning?’
‘Indeed. He felt a further day here might be overextending my welcome.’
‘He is a good man...’ She went to say more, but he held up his hand.
‘A good man who is frightened. Everyone here is. I can feel it when you speak of the Dalceann land and its claimants.’
Her laugh was false, high and shallow. ‘A man newly arrived from Burgundy can hardly wish to be embroiled in our sorry state of affairs.’
This would be the last conversation between them! She did not want him to leave on the promise of something he would come to regret when he arrived in Edinburgh. Another hour and he would be gone. Smiling probably, when he reached the city in the company of his friends and told them about a woman who had kissed him unbidden, a fierce woman with a badly scarred face and wearing simple lad’s clothing.
Yet still she could not abandon him.
Taking his knife from the basket, she handed it over, watching as he placed it in the folds of the velvet surcoat at the end of the bed. Only a small pile of possessions rescued from the sea. ‘I have sharpened and honed it myself. If you would conceal it so that no others see, I would be grateful.’
He stood as she spoke, his tallness surprising her yet again, for it was seldom that men towered above her.
‘God’s blood, Isobel.’ It was the first time he had used her name, the sound of it skewered into prettiness by his accent. She swallowed as he took her hand, running his forefinger across the cut on her palm so very gently.
‘You are like a caged bird here at Ceann Gronna, beautiful of feather but clipped of wing. Come with me to Edinburgh and plead the cause of the Dalceann keep in my company.’
Her heart raced. ‘Nae, it is not possible.’
She thought of David’s anger at the Dalceann intransigence and the men he had sent to marry her when he perceived the vacuum of power to be dangerous to the defence of his own realm after Alisdair had died. The barons and magnates who had strode into Fife later, on the command of their king, only coveted Ceann Gronna Castle as they sought a loveless and compromised betrothal with its chieftain.
‘I would ask of you a favour, though. There is a blindfold in the basket. Would you wear it without argument when Andrew and his men come for you?’
‘To keep the secrets of this place intact?’
She could only nod her head as he asked and hope that it was not his death warrant she was signing and that Andrew would hold to his promise of a safe passage.
‘If I say yes, could I petition something from you, too?’ His words were soft as their eyes met and she could not look away.
‘Could you kiss me again?’
She turned, thinking he was making fun of her, a joke against the morning bathed in harsh light, the disfigurement on her face so very easily seen. But he caught her, gentle in his strength, the white of his tunic against the darkness of skin. Closer with warmth, as his mouth came to hers, no hesitation in it.
He kissed like a warrior would, taking what he needed without discourse to the properness of society, her timid answer pushed away into sheer and blazing want. It ran in white-hot shards to her stomach and her loins like an old knowledge. Alisdair had been a gentle man and her childhood sweetheart, his ardour limited by reason, logic and a certain reserve. Marc kissed her with a hint of the nobleman ransacked by the sheer power of a fighting knight, his mouth slanting down to her throat and the skin below that, and then turning his tongue to her breast.
She could not push away, or call a halt. All she wanted was more, her head tilted, eyes glassed with surrender, the feel of his muscle beneath her fingers, honed by time and battle.
Digging in her nails, she felt him flinch, but she wanted to mark him before he left, wanted him to remember that he had kissed her with her full desire, layered under all the reasons of why she should not have.
As he finished he held her face against his chest, the beat of his heart wildly quick, her hope rising with such lack of control.
She wanted to say, stay for ever, in her arms, in this keep, in this one room and well away from the communion of others. She wanted to tell him that under the scars and the boy’s clothes a woman lay who had long been bereft of the ministrations of a virile male. She wanted to cry as she had when she was a young maid, weeping at the very unfairness of her life, lost in politics and greed and war, rent from this to that by the pretensions of parents who held no care for her welfare.
But to say all that disregarded her history as a Dalceann and her love for Andrew and Ian and Angus and the many other men and women who had stood with her against the wrath of both her father and a long-absent monarch.
So in the end she said nothing because it was easier to do so and because it would lead him safely away from Ceann Gronna and the siege in the coming spring.
Another summer and it would be over.
David had lost patience with a little force and was amassing a bigger one. She had heard rumours from passing bards who criss-crossed the provinces of Fife, Strathearn and Menteith, singing for their supper.
She thought then that she did not even know her green-eyed stranger’s proper name, a man tossed into her life by an angry sea and then tossed out of it again by the shifting will of monarchs.
But her time had run out, for Andrew w
as coming up the stairs. She knew his step against the stone, his men behind him. Breaking away, she stood on the other side of the room as they entered.
‘Morag is looking for you in the kitchen, Isobel. I said I would send ye down when I saw you.’
She knew what he was doing, giving her an excuse to leave the room before Marc was blindfolded and taken. She saw the rope in Andrew’s hands and the knife at his belt, sharp enough to cut into a man’s throat like butter. Swallowing, she shook her head and stayed still.
‘We can do this gentle or you can make it hard,’ Andrew said, turning to the one he had come for. ‘But ye will be on that ferry for Edinburgh come the morrow, I swear it either way.’
‘As long as I am still alive,’ Marc returned. ‘Does Ian accompany us?’
‘No. It’s difficult enough to traverse the countryside without watching for revenge.’
‘Thank you.’
Marc shrugged on his surcoat, the red velvet looking a little perished under the laundering it had suffered from an over-enthusiastic washing maid, the braid on one shoulder drooping. The knife was nowhere at all to be seen and Isobel was astonished by Marc’s sleight of hand for she knew it must be there. A small comfort that, if his wrists were to be tied.
Taking the blindfold from her basket, she held it out, watching as he took it and placed it against his eyes before Andrew checked it.
He would not see her again!
The thought came to Isobel in a piercing ache, but she stayed still as they led him from the room, his hand held against Andrew’s arm for direction. He did not look back or hesitate.
At the first-floor landing window she waited as they came through the door on the ground floor, more men with them now, their voices reaching her from the distance.
He fell even as she turned to leave, the foot of one of the Dalceann soldiers coming between his legs. With bound hands he could not cushion his fall, his head cracking against the coping stones on the side of the pathway.
As he was roughly gathered back upright Isobel swore, for even at this distance she saw the blindfold had been lifted and that the secrets of Ceann Gronna, so carefully kept, had been compromised.
