by Sophia James
Was this a trick? She turned to watch him better and the rustle of the blanket brought his eyes back to her own. She saw the glint of green through shadow.
‘Do not move from the bed, Isobel.’
His voice told her that the warning he gave was no idle threat, the hard planes of his cheek dirtied by the toil of battle. He looked tired, older, the lines around his eyes deeper than she remembered them.
He would not sleep on top of her, then, and exact the payment that all vanquishing victors expected of women?
He would not toss her out on to a pallet on the floor, uncomfortably cold with the late spring winds from the north still blowing hard?
The blanket she lay under was a cocoon of warmth and her bed was soft, her pillow allowing her the repose of an easy sleep even given the constraints around her hands. Marc the Betrayer had nothing on him save the dirtied tunic which he had recently disposed of and now dragged over himself as a covering.
Silence coated the room, thick and forced, as outside the voices of soldiers lingering on the upper ramparts floated in an eerie echo.
Neither her men nor her allies! The very thought of the plunder and sacking of her home had her turning to the wall. Andrew was dead. She kept perfectly still as tears trailed down her cheeks to be absorbed by the cotton cover wrapped around the bolster, a wet reminder of all that she had lost and would never have again.
* * *
He knew she cried. He could see it in the shake of her shoulders and the small tremors through the blanket.
So many damned men dead! The last look of the one they named Andrew replayed in his head over and over. A good man. A gentle man. A man who had seen him safe across the countryside into the hands of the ferryman.
If he could have saved him he would have, but had he not countered the threat, then all hope for Isobel would have been lost.
He prayed that her minion might know of his sacrifice from wherever it was his spirit now lingered. In such logic he found absolution.
* * *
‘You came by the sea tunnels, did you not?’
Her question surprised him a good half an hour later, for although sleep had not come to him he thought she had found repose.
‘Indeed.’
‘How is it, then, that you are called in the court of King David the Second?’
‘Marc de Courtenay.’
‘And James? Was that a lie, too?’
‘Nay, it is my second name.’
‘I should never have dragged you in from the sea, Marc James de Courtenay.’ Flat certainty lay in her words. ‘Andrew did beseech me to throw you off the eastern ramparts. He said you were dangerous and that Ceann Gronna would be best rid of you. If I had listened, he might still be alive.’
‘If it was not I who captured you first, it would have been others, and, believe it or not, they most surely would have been less concerned for your welfare than I am.’
Marc thought of Glencoe and Huntworth and the conversation he had endured with them earlier in the evening. They thought the spoils of war should be shared equally and the beauty of Isobel Dalceann did her no favours. Nay, with dark hair to the waist and her gold-rimmed eyes, he imagined her passed around the triumphant commanders like a bone. It was only by laying down the law that she was in here with him, still safe, the authority in his actions silencing argument.
He did not know how long he could keep her safe, for the morrow would bring new questions and the number of his men was not as great as that of the combined forces of the others. He had left none of McQuarry’s men alive in the solar, but the windows may have let in other eyes and what they might have seen could compromise everything.
‘Is there water?’ Her query broke through worry, a note in her voice that sounded defeated and frightened.
Rising, he collected the skin he kept filled.
‘Sit up.’
She did so with difficulty, her sagging cotton
kirtle exposing more of her womanly curves. When she saw where he looked she held his gaze. Her nipples were dark in the half-light, budding atop breasts that were firm and generous. She drank only lightly from the pouch; when she was finished she tipped up her chin.
‘Untie me, Marc. Please.’ The lids of her eyes were hooded, her lips apart as she rounded her shoulders further. ‘Perhaps then we could find a way to enjoy tonight if tomorrow might never arrive for me? There was a time that I thought you liked me, after all...’
The look in her eyes almost fooled him as she arched back, the heat of sex in the space between them.
The promise on her face was beguiling. Take me if you dare to, it said, though another truth also lingered. He could almost feel her fingers on the hilt of his knife plunging it into his chest.
Breaking contact, he stood and moved away from the bed, opening the latticed window so that the cold streamed in upon him.
‘God, you nearly had me believing you.’ He dug his nails into the bare skin of his arms, taking the prick of pain with a satisfaction. ‘And what a mistake that would have been.’
Her expression had changed entirely. Now pure hatred laced her eyes. ‘Traitor.’ Her voice drifted across to him without any hint of uncertainty. ‘I will kill you when I get the chance. I swear I will, Marc the Betrayer.’
He laughed, though he had not meant to, and, looking around, saw the blanket was tightly pulled up around her neck.
The roar of the sea came up from below, tumbling waves of an endless ocean, and the clouds blowing in from the Kingdom of Norway were thick and cold. Tomorrow it would rain, a fact that brought with it another set of problems.
Ensconced inside the castle, an invading army would be restless and the patience of men stretched.
Lady Isobel Dalceann would have to be kept in her chamber until the weather cleared and he would be trapped for great lengths of time in here with her. Even the thought made him tired.
‘Go to sleep,’ he said, lying down again on his pallet, ‘for you will need all the rest you can get to face tomorrow.’
* * *
She thought of her father and of Alisdair and the days of summer long past when she had not known how to kill a man or play the whore.
Anger at her whole stupid ploy of seduction gave her no peace for sleep. She was useless at the pretence anyway, with the vivid scar on her face and her boy’s clothes. Her arm ached, a dull never-ending throb, worsened by her inability to stretch it out. Her lips were dry.
Marc breathed deeply. She had listened to his breathing even out a good hour ago and he had not moved his position for all of that time. Asleep. The weaponry at his side beckoned to her, the outline of sharpened steel still visible even in the nighttime darkness.
She moved to the edge of the bed and then stopped.
Nothing.
Rolling back the blanket, she slowly sat up, her feet now across the side of the mattress, almost at the floor.
‘One more step and I use the rope.’
The quiet of his words made her jump, more menacing in the calm than they could ever have been in a shout, the cold seeping into her bones with a stealth that annoyed her.
She would abandon her fight for the feel of wool around her shoulders. Her arms hugged her body as she tried to catch on to any remaining heat. The shivers in her legs reached up to her stomach and then into her words.
‘What will h-happen to me? Tomorrow?’
‘Hopefully what has been forthcoming today! The sanctuary of this room and the ability to remain isolated should afford you some respite.’
‘From...?’
‘Your keep has found itself at cross-purposes with the king. I find, in general, that traitors are not given much in the way of a second chance.’
‘Even though I gave you one...’
Anger now replaced an indifferent tone. ‘If you relate anything of such a personal nature to those outside this room, Lady Dalceann, I could not stop them from killing you.’
‘You would want to?’
‘C
old-blooded murder has no place in a system of justice.’
‘What of betrayal?’
‘Is it my actions you speak of or the edicts of the new feudal land laws? In my mind both are linked.’
Too clever, she thought. Answer yes to either and she was damned.
‘You have been in Scotland for only a little while and yet you presume to know the ancient history of Fife?’
She stood as she said it, feet firmly planted on the floor. ‘You come back to Ceann Gronna with your false ideas of valour and faith, a man who would bite the hand of those who helped him? Nay, worse,’ she added, logic and sense dismissed by plain grief and fury, ‘plunge your scabbard down on to the head of a good and kind man under the guise of the backing of the law to enforce such resistance?’
She saw him rise, forming a barrier in front of his sword and knife, his chest naked and his hose pulled low where the lacings had loosened.
Not a man fashioned by lethargy or excess. His beauty was unequivocal and indisputable. Isobel hated the knowledge and the way it lessened her anger and bridled her hate. All she wanted was the fury back.
They were alike, she and Marc, she suddenly thought, alike in their allegiances to ideas no longer tenable. No one could win here; in the struggle for the keep, Ceann Gronna would be lost stone by stone into the hands of a king who had never deserved it.
Hopelessness rushed in on the heels of impotence. Fourteen days of fighting, to come to this impasse, personal and vapid. Andrew and the others should not have died for such a useless rebellion.
Staying still, she breathed out, hard. ‘What would it take to strike a bargain with you?’
‘A bargain for your life?’
She laughed because his question was so very banal. ‘My life is over already. It is the lives of those left at Ceann Gronna that I would plead for.’
‘With what?’
‘Gold. More than you could ever imagine.’
‘Here?’
‘Much more than that in the safe.’
‘There are other cachets?’
She remained mute, watching as the wheels of his mind turned in his eyes. Finally he spoke.
‘Perhaps it might be enough for a king mired in debt.’
‘To save everyone left at Ceann Gronna?’
He nodded.
* * *
Lord, Marc thought. It could work. Gold had its own language, after all, and if what she promised was true...?
‘Where are they? Those of my people still alive from the battle?’
The woman who had plucked him from the sea materialised out of the girl bound in this room, like magic, as she turned her damaged cheek towards him.
‘They are in the dungeons guarded by my men.’
‘Who are the others, then, who have come with you?’
‘Huntworth and Glencoe.’ Her face paled considerably and Marc knew she had made the connections, but he was tired of lying to her.
‘Huntworth? One of the commanders that came before?’
‘Nay, his brother, Archibald McQuarry. You killed the first lord of the title.’
‘Then he has no cause to like me.’
She sat down on the bed. Dried blood the colour of rust stained her torn kirtle.
Nearly dawn. The first callings of birdsong rent the air, above the sound of the waves from the sea. Her hair dropped around her shoulders to the line of her hips, touching the bedsheets in places with its wild and uneven length. Like the silk of night. With her full lips and her tip-tilt nose she reminded him of a painting he had once seen in the royal palace of Philip. Not an angel, but a wanton siren, beckoning men to do things that they had no will for.
He wished he might just undress her and take her, here in this room, politics melded under a kinder promise and all the time in the world to make her understand the danger and the hope and the way a man might protect a woman.
For ever.
He imagined his fingers stroking her belly and falling lower, into the hidden promise of womanhood. He imagined her warmth and her wetness and the way she might call out as he penetrated into the shocking need of lust.
‘Isobel.’ He said her name and she looked up, her glance brimming with an unsaid knowledge.
And silence stretched between them, caught in each other’s eyes, the aftermath of violence, the comprehension of death, the joy of still living and the pull of something stronger, more primitive.
The buds of her nipples hardened under his gaze, twin peaks of darkness below linen. The line of her shoulders was stretched firmly back, the bindings tight. Easy to take. He knew she felt what he did when her breathing quickened.
His captive. His right. An hour or so till the day broke properly and a door that was well secured.
One coupling should do it, take the power that she wielded with her feminine wiles and render them impotent, for he seldom returned to a woman a second time.
Her tears stopped him, falling across her cheeks to run unhindered down to the blood-and dirt-stained kirtle. She did nothing to hide them and behind the dark of her gaze he saw a pain that was all of his making.
Swearing soundly, he moved his bedding from the doorway, collected his weapons and left the room.
Chapter Nine
Marc had felt like a youth in the first bud of libido, no sense in any of it and so very much to lose. He drained the ale from the pewter mug before him and then the one after that.
Had Isobel Dalceann done it deliberately? Had she used the spells she was rumoured to be so very good at to make him believe that she was a siren unequalled in her ability to give him the ease he craved? An unfulfilled and empty promise that laughed at him from a distance. His cock throbbed as he moved on the hard wooden bench.
‘Did you tame the arrogant Dalceann witch, de Courtenay?’ Huntworth sat beside him at the table, a heavy night’s drinking showing in his face. ‘Does she know now that her life is worth less than nothing here?’
‘Aye, that she does.’ Marc had to be careful in his answers, for Archibald McQuarry was known for his use of force and violence.
‘Then bring her up to the Great Hall and give us the chance of a game or two. If she dies in the playing, I doubt David would care.’
‘Aye, we could kill her—it would be an easy task and God knows she deserves it. But I have heard talk of riches at Ceann Gronna that we have not as yet found. Perhaps it might be more useful to keep her alive until we do?’
‘What sort of riches?’
‘Gold.’ He brought forth a handful of the jewels taken from her room and laid them on the table, the promise of such largesse a potent persuader of men.
Both Huntworth and Glencoe stood to touch, turning the gold over and over as they felt the weight of the bounty. Marc knew he had them when the lust in their eyes was replaced by the more malleable emotion of greed.
‘She kens where it is from, then?’ McQuarry’s voice held that particular note of avarice.
‘I am certain that she must.’ Marc made much of chewing around the bone of a tasty bit of beef and soaking the juices up with a trencher of bread before he continued. ‘If you would give me a few more days with her...’
‘Done.’ Glencoe spoke for them both. ‘Some bounty for David and some for us though, aye?’
The procession of shapely wenches coming from the kitchen with more food helped his stance, too. One or two of them caught Marc’s glance, offering him more than just the bread and meat. Shaking away their interest, he watched as McQuarry’s hand disappeared under the skirt of the prettiest girl, pulling her on to his lap and kissing her soundly.
He smiled because such encouragement was to be fostered and men riding the loins of willing companions would be less likely to remember the feisty and less amenable Lady Isobel Dalceann.
Even here, a hundred yards from her room, she still pulled at him, her full and sensual lips inviting an ease that promised enthralment.
Breathing out, he understood that the line he walked along narrowed e
ven in the daylight. The gold would buy him some time, but he needed to have Lady Dalceann safely back to Edinburgh if he was to truly protect her.
Huntworth was his biggest problem. If he was to view Isobel properly in the light of day, Marc knew that trouble would ensue, for even in her lad’s clothes and dirtied her beauty was barely tarnished.
He looked around to see where his men were in relation to those of the others. One group sat at the back of the hall, and another to one side. The soldiers of McQuarry were gathered around the long table that stretched from the front and they were unruly. Another worry!
The rain outside slanted into the keep from the sea, no light drizzle but a driving force that could be heard against the high windows on the eastern walls of the hall. It was cold for this time of the year, too, the spring muffled by a late wintry blast. He hoped that the blanket he had left Isobel with would be warm enough and that she would stay quietly in the chamber.
He would leave another group of his men to guard her, and he would strike out into the countryside in an hour or so to find a safe place to go to if there should be a need of it.
* * *
Isobel waited to see if Marc would return; when he did not she sat down on the bed, her arms aching with the effort needed to keep the bindings from pulling at her skin further.
She was amazed that she was not dead yet, or that Marc de Courtenay had not tired of the sexual tension between them and seen to the end of it.
Such desire was not new to her, these looks from men. Even at Ceann Gronna in the past few years she had had to be careful. What was new was her own reaction to it, the pull of hardness on her nipples, her lack of breath as he watched her with eyes the colour of moss in a fast-running mountain stream. Even hating him, Isobel felt her body still drawn to his touch.
He had not hurt her. He had slept on the floor. He had given her water when she had asked and she had heard him instruct his men as he left to let no one in or out.
Protection.
A heady thing in circumstances such as her own.
Placing her head against the heavy wood of her door, she listened. Voices could be heard on the other side. Guards that Marc had stationed there. Safety for now, at least. She breathed out in relief as she crossed to the bed, bringing the covers over her like a tent to keep out the cold.
