by Sophia James
When he still did not move, she decided to tell him all of it. ‘I dreamt of you after you left here, Marc de Courtenay. I wondered in the darkness what it would be like to touch you and have you touch me back. Sometimes in the early hours of another dawn when I did not sleep I imagined just this.’
She saw the moment restraint broke in the bruised greenness of his eyes burning with appetite.
Placing his sword down, he moved forwards and his hand covered hers. The heat of his skin seared away coldness. She was tall but he was taller. For the first time in her whole life she had to raise her chin to look up to a man and when his forefinger ran along the length of the scar on her cheek shock took away her breath.
‘Tell me who hurt you.’
His tone disarmed her. So few had ever mentioned her affliction and none had touched her face where the sword had sliced the flesh in half.
Should she say what she had never told a soul before? Should she let him understand that it was not only politics that had led to the sacking of the keep, but also plain bare greed? Aye, and gold made fools of avaricious men.
‘It was my father. The gold came from a French ship that sank off the rocks a few miles west of the cove at Ceann Gronna and he thought to keep it for himself.’
‘To fight the king?’
‘Nay. To disappear without a trace. When we tried to stop him, he turned on us. If we were dead, no one else would need to know.’
‘What happened then?’
‘Ian broke his neck and threw him into the sea at the mouth of a cave near Kincraig Point. But my father’s arrow had already fatally pierced my husband.’
‘God, Isobel.’
She shook her head, trying hard for indifference. ‘Do not pity me. It is indeed the last thing that I should want from you.’
Unexpectedly he smiled and she felt the warmth of his touch move down to her breast, pushing away her grip so that his fingers might lie against the fullness instead. A warrior’s hand, calloused and heavy. When he flicked his thumb across the sensitive skin she took in a breath and held it, thin pains of need piercing everywhere.
What now?
What came next?
The whole of her world was centred on the touch between them, the glory of sex bringing her forwards.
Not easy. Not soft or gentle. She did not want those things after all that had happened. She wanted elemental and carnal. She wanted to feel so much that there would be no space left for the fear that had engulfed her on the bed in her room as the fingers of her enemies had probed, seeking that which she had not wanted to give.
Her anger broke into a sob, unexpected and raw, hands gripping muscled forearms, nails leaving red crescents in the brown skin.
Hate and fear had such a surprising strength!
‘Take me now, Marc. Make me forget,’ she whispered, the deep longing of lust consuming her, like an opiate to memory.
* * *
Lord, help him. Isobel undressed was the most beautiful woman he had ever had the pleasure to look upon. His cock rose quickly, throbbing with the promise of what was offered.
Only lust.
She had made certain he had the knowledge of it. His engorgement grew tighter, strangling every reason as to why he should not do this, should not take her at her word and stop this thing between them that made nonsense of every promise he had given to himself.
But he could not! The heat of her skin drew him in as his head fell to her nipple and his lips fastened tight around the dusky pink. He heard the sound of blood in his ears and the moan of her need as she stretched back and brought her hands behind his nape to keep him anchored.
Home. On Isobel.
The taste of her centre, the swell of flesh, the musk of sex and abandon, no limits set. He shuddered as she pulled on his hair in the fury of her want, her legs straddling around his own, asking for other things, too, and not kindly.
Raising his head, he saw that her eyes up close were clear and rich with desire.
‘I would never hurt you.’
‘I know,’ she whispered back, her tongue wetting her lips and her mouth opening as they came together hard, the force unstoppable and shocking.
He had spent a lifetime in control with women, always holding back things that he did not care to give despite their pleadings. But here, now, nothing was hidden or masked, no hesitation in any of it as his lips slanted against hers.
Power sliced through, white hot and unbridled, the room falling away into only sensation: her smell, her feel, her touch inside his ear, the promise of her mouth on his. Nothing made sense, balanced in this upper room above soldiers who would like to see his blood run freely across the courtyard flagstones.
He should be wielding his sword close with nothing to distract him. Instead he was brandishing another weapon, the hot stiffness of his manhood between them, the ache of release bound into a thin and unrelenting desperation.
His hands came around her bottom. He felt the long red weals of scratches on her skin.
Take me now, she had said, and he meant to.
Take me hard, she had implied, and his mouth marked her as his.
He lifted her easily, laying her on the bed covered in pelts sewn together. Her skin was white, luminescent against the sable of animal hide, the blue veins across her stomach inciting him into further emotion. When her legs fell open before him the particular scent of union beckoned him closer.
* * *
He looked nothing like Alisdair as he removed his hose and his sex sprung outwards. Her husband had been a small man and thin, his penchant for lovemaking uncertain even at the best of times. She could not even remember a night that he had truly wanted her, preferring instead to suckle at her breast until the skin around her nipple hurt with his insistence.
Sometimes when she could persuade him to enjoy more, he preferred the task completed as soon as possible, turning her so that she could not see him and dousing all the candles in the process.
He had never once looked at her as Marc did now, with greed and admiration in his eyes and the afternoon light strong across the room. When he wet his finger with spit and drew it across her nipple she felt the sharp slip of a desire that was fathomless.
His thighs were heavily muscled and sprinkled with dark hair. Reaching out, she touched him, feeling the planes of strength until he swore and guided her fingers to his shaft of red. His own hands surrounded hers, holding her there in a quiet pressure, smooth stretched skin expanding in her hand.
Not all taking, then, but giving. She liked the vulnerability of him and the easy knowledge of how very much he desired her drawn into the heavy throb of flesh.
Shifting forwards she guided the tip of him into her mouth and heard him swear. His hands fell slack and she took him deeper, laving her tongue and closing her eyes so that she might just simply feel, him in her, at her mercy, centred in touch.
So very easy to make a man her own, the shattered breath as his chest rose quick to match her rhythm and he threw back his head and groaned.
She had never done this before, never brought a man to coitus with her mouth, though in her bed at night after Alisdair had finished his quick ministrations she had dreamed of it. Tasting.
He pulled away even as she thought he might come, might leave the white milk of his surrender inside her, to savour and remember when he was gone.
‘God.’ His voice was rough. ‘God,’ repeated again as he ran one hand through his hair, the hint of distrust shadowing both eyes into the very darkest of green.
Uncertainty.
She could not care that she saw things she did not wish to in his face. Nothing was important save a release from that which kept her stiff and tense, the ache in her body focused now around the muscles between her legs. She wanted him there, wanted him to wipe away the terror of before, the impotence and the weakness. She needed her power back, strong and certain, giving what she wanted and to whom she wanted to, melding the mastery of sex into an authority of her will.
> ‘Please.’ She meant not to say it even as she did, tipping her head back and raising her hips. Her fingers dug into the mattress like talons.
If he leaves now I shall hate him!
But he did not go, the quiet whisper of words comforting when he bent to the contour of her waist and then her hips. His right hand bundled the length of her hair and bound it in a fist, tethering them together.
She could not pull away. This was exactly what she craved: mastery and skill. No hurt in it but no pity, either, just the feel of a male against her and his intentions plainly given.
‘The battle for Ceann Gronna went as God willed it, Isobel, but perhaps in the spoils afterwards other things can be salvaged, aye?’
‘Things like this.’ She hardly recognised her voice, hoarse with longing, and she writhed as his fingers fell into the folds between her legs, skirting inwards.
‘Marc?’ His name as a question in the midst of all that had been and her thighs open so that he might find the path that the others had not quite discovered and wipe away the terror.
‘Look at me,’ he said suddenly, ‘and tell me that this is what you want from me.’
His eyes showed the whites, like a stag in full roar, she thought. Such greed made him magnificent, a warrior and a knight who would be hers on the turn of one tiny word.
‘Yes.’
Her whole body shook as she moaned it, the pain of waiting more than she could bear.
Neither anger nor hate. Not hurt or desperate loathing, but a cleansing. She closed her eyes as one finger found its way inside, stretching her, while another rested on a nub that made her buck up with the very perfectness of it.
Lord, what was he doing? How did he know of this? His rhythm heightened and it took her body, up and up into a realm where nothing was left save the quest for what he promised, this magician warrior, inside her as she exploded into warm languid waves of feeling.
Pulsating and shaking, he took all her will as he played the sweet final shades of music, the clenching in her abdomen repeated in her very toes.
Then stillness and a bitter sweet echo of pain.
Tears fell from her eyes, but she neither wiped them away nor opened them. She did not want to see him yet or wish for the world to intrude on the perfect.
This was her secret and one she had never before discovered about herself. Such a gift. It was barely comprehensible.
She felt him move, of course, off the bed and towards the door. Away from her. She watched him under hooded lids trying to understand his feelings, but his face was set as he pulled on his hose and repositioned his armoury.
She had not pleased him. She had not taken him inside her and let him ride until he was replete and the demons that hounded a man were quiet. Alisdair had told her of it once, when she had asked him of his proclivity for her breasts rather than the womanhood between her legs. Demons took those who used the sin of lust as a balm, he had explained, and impure thoughts were not to be encouraged.
Her hand ran across the swell of her stomach and then down to the wetness between her legs.
She had never felt such a thing before. Lord, was she like those loose women of the night? Had Marc thought her such and would leave because of it? Even now not five minutes after the last wave of pleasure she craved him again, weaving the magic of his fingers on the hardened bud of her femininity.
The bang of the door had her turning into the soft pillow to block out the empty room.
* * *
His anger spiralled into cold wrath as he stalked along the corridor to the outside ramparts.
He needed air and chill to douse the fierce want that had consumed him, that had broken through his normal control and left him coveting things that would never come to pass.
A family.
A wife that he could grow old with.
A home that was not sacked by battle and a monarch who might reward him with quiet retirement into peace.
He was Sir Marc de Courtenay, the first commander of kings who dealt in the realm of the fine gains of war. He was a bastard in two courts and a man who knew enough secrets about them both to destroy nations.
He had no hope for what he dreamed of, no earthly prospect of armistice and serenity, no knowledge of home or hearth or family. All these things had long been taken from him—at birth when his mother had failed to survive her confinement and then later when he had been sent down as an apprentice to a man who thought nothing of beating a child until his skin bled with it.
War and battle had given him back his place, at the front of soldiers who would do whatever it was he asked of them even in the moments of utter rampage. Charge and attack was a death very often only thinly disguised by his orders.
His right hand sat on its own accord across the hilt of his sword at the ready. Another habit.
His fingers remembered the soft folds inside Isobel and the wetness that had spilt across his fingers when she had found her final oblivion. He brought the hand to his nostrils, capturing what essence was still left there, tasting it again in the quiet cold stone of the corridor.
He could have stayed, but her orgasm had brought him shame and discomfort. Did she cry out for another loss, less brutish than McQuarry’s attempts at subduing her, but every bit as effective?
He remembered her silence and her vulnerability, and all the other things that Isobel Dalceann had never been before Ceann Gronna had fallen.
Defeated. Taken. Subdued. Vanquished.
The tears on her right cheek had magnified the place where even her own father had tried to kill her.
He should not have plucked the centre of lust from her with such little abandon. He should have tucked her into bed with her fright and left her there to rise in the morning without a great temptation to hate him for the exposed uncertainty that she had let him see.
A hot-blooded woman was Isobel Dalceann, with her generous breasts and tight quim and legs finer and longer than any woman he had found oblivion with.
Faceless women, now that he had seen her. He shook his head. There it was again, this spell that lingered in her ability to make a man mad with want. He leaned back against the wall and toyed with the idea of just going back and taking, for his own sake now, no kindness in it save the hope that she would be gone from his mind come the morrow.
Aye, the unbalance of sex seduced him with possibility. She could be beneath him in less than a full minute, writhing wet as he emptied himself of a tension that brought the blood into his temples. She even wanted it, for God’s sake. Sweat beaded his upper lip and made him dizzy with avidity. His manhood, still stiff in his hose, showed no signs of abating and he was sick of the effort it took to stay where he was and not turn back.
Isobel. Under him. Her eyes golden with lust and acquiescence. Her breasts tipped hard and thrusting as he escorted her with his erection to the same place his hands had just managed to.
So very easily! But he could not destroy any more of her.
His breath quickened and, striding towards the Great Hall, he resolved to drink his fill of the fine whisky brought up in kegs from the Ceann Gronna cellars.
Chapter Eleven
She wore a kirtle of blue and a bliaud of grey, the colour of sadness, when he went to her room the next morning, and around her waist she had fashioned prayer beads. Her hair was hidden under a barbet and veil, whilst on her feet she favoured soft boots of leather.
Like a novice almost, or a virtuous young maid in the first blush of youth with the mantle of religion firmly draped around her. In spite of everything Marc smiled because no one else in his entire life had managed to confound him as Isobel Dalceann did.
He saw piety in her stance and in the way she bowed her head, a frown on her forehead and her teeth worrying her swollen bottom lip.
All the small gestures were exactly right; he could not have faulted such a performance even as he wondered where it was she had secreted the knife he had given her.
‘Breakfast will be sent up. I thought it
prudent to keep you out of sight for this morning at least.’
She stood before the window, a few small wisps of dark hair escaping around the edges of the fabric tied beneath her chin. The dawn burnished everything, lending the room a repose that had not been there the afternoon before.
‘Thank you.’
She did not raise her eyes to meet his, but kept them downcast.
Disquiet began to fill him.
‘I hope you slept well.’
The only sign of anything being amiss was the tightening of her fingers on the cloth of her bliaud.
‘Very well.’
His own ire rose at such an answer. He had spent most of the night trying to drink himself into a stupor and failing.
But looking at her more closely, Marc saw that the circles beneath her eyes were dark and the bruise on her cheek where she’d been hit by the bastard
McQuarry had turned purple.
He also saw that the silver ring she wore on her marriage finger was missing. Little details, but important. Women seldom did things on a whim, he had come to understand in his life of knowing many, and although other men laughed at the capriciousness of the feminine sex he himself had never found that to be true.
Nay, women only did things after much reasoning and debate.
‘The castle is safe for you now, Lady Dalceann. No one shall dare place a hand upon your person.’
That brought her glance up. She was angry. He could see it in the shifts of muscle on her face and in the puckering of her scar. The brown in her eyes was almost black.
‘What will happen to me, then?’ There was a cadence in her voice that he had not heard there before—beyond caring, if he could have named it.
‘You will be taken to Edinburgh to stand before the king.’
‘I see.’ She did not even flinch at the words. ‘And my men?’
