Lachlan cursed this ridiculous farce.

More than twenty years of selfless service to the King, repaid by the fetter of marriage to a woman who was scared of her own shadow. If it wasn’t so permanent he might have laughed. Indeed, he had seen the puzzled faces of his men as they tried to fathom out the character of his new wife and failed.

She had hit him!

His frightened mouse of a wife had hit him. Hard. And in the shadowed depths of her amber eyes he had recognised what he so often saw in his own.

Secrets.

Sophia James lives in a big old house in Chelsea Bay on Auckland’s North Shore, with her husband, who is an artist, three kids, two cats, a turtle and a guide dog puppy. Life is busy because, as well as teaching adults English at the local Migrant School, she helps her husband take art tours to Italy and France each September. Sophia has a degree in English and History from Auckland University, and she believes her love of writing was formed reading Georgette Heyer, with her twin sister, on the porch of her grandmother’s house, overlooking the sandhills of Raglan.

Previous novels by Sophia James:

FALLEN ANGEL

ASHBLANE’S LADY

HIGH SEAS TO HIGH SOCIETY

MASQUERADING MISTRESS

KNIGHT OF GRACE

Sophia James

www.millsandboon.co.uk

KNIGHT OF GRACE

It is 1360 and Scotland is in chaos. King David has just returned to Edinburgh after eleven years of captivity under the English and the vacuum of power created in his absence brings a crisis. While some landowners want to retain their hard-won sovereignty, others side with the English and the claims of those disinherited under Robert Bruce. Border politics is murky, and David himself makes things more difficult when he thinks to cede his crown to the Duke of Clarence, Edward of England’s son. A few honourable men support the concept of a self-determining Scotland, based on the principles of freedom written in the Declaration of Arbroath.

Laird Lachlan Kerr is one of these men…

…we will never on any conditions be subjected to the Lordship of the English. For we fight not for glory, nor riches, nor honours, but for freedom alone, which no good man gives up except with his life.

Words from the Declaration of Arbroath, April 1320, and affixed with the seals of forty Scottish nobles.

Chapter One

August 1360—Grantley Manor, Clenmell, Durham, England.

Lady Grace Stanton watched the man walking towards her. Tall, dark and beautiful.

She had not expected that.

This beauty worried her more than the danger that cloaked him or the distance he wore like a mantle, and when he finally stood before them and the dust of the horses had settled, she schooled her expression and looked up.

He was disappointed. She could see it in his eyes. Pale shadow blue with suspicion simmering just below the surface. Her heart sank and she felt the aching cold of his distrust. With a feigned smile she took his offered fingers into her own, hating her bitten-down nails and the way the red dryness on her skin looked against the brown smoothness of his.

She had been burdened with this complaint for the whole of her twenty-six years. But today at least the skin beneath her eyes was not crusty raw and weeping.

‘Lady Grace.’ He relinquished contact as soon as he had said her name.

‘Kerr.’ Her uncle was the Earl of Carrick and his tone was anything but welcoming, his furrowed gaze including the twenty or so clansmen who sat on horses behind Kerr. ‘We expected you a week ago.’

‘Ye have the priest, then?’ Kerr cut in, dispensing completely with any pretence to manners.

‘We do. Father O’Brian has come up from—”

‘Then bring him here.’

‘But my niece is not even dressed.’

‘A dress is the least of her worries given the decree of my king.’ His words were flat. Insolent, almost. Teetering on the edge of treason. As Grace looked around at her uncle, the harshness of light made him seem old; a man who had outgrown the demands of battle and wanted now to amble towards his dotage with some semblance of peace. When her glance fell on the weaponry that the Kerrs bristled with, she knew more plainly than ever before the true price of politics. One false move and her family would suffer, for innocent pawns were easily expendable against a background of political frustration.

‘I th-th-think, U-Uncle, that you should ask F-F-Father O’Brian to c-c-come out to us.’ Lord. Her stammer was far worse than it usually was. Grace heard rather than saw the way the men behind Kerr murmured and her pulse quickened so markedly that she wondered if she would fall over from a lack of breath.

No, she would not!

Biting down on her bottom lip, she was very still, centring calm across panic until she felt the alarm recede.

‘You would be married here? Outside? But you had hoped…’

‘Nay, Uncle. Here will be g-good.’

Hopes! She scanned the face of the warrior opposite, fully expecting mirth or at the very least pity, but saw neither.

Just a duty, she suddenly thought. This marriage was a duty, a way of appeasing his monarch and filling the coffers of his own keep.

‘Tainted with a skin condition, but with good child-bearing hips.’ The envoy from Edward the Third of England had uttered exactly those words as she had been summoned for the first time before him. She remembered her uncle’s momentary fury as the decree was laid in his hands, a piece of paper that would change their lives for ever. If he did not comply, Grantley Manor would be at risk. Grantley! The family seat lost if not for the sacrifice of marrying a plain and ageing niece off to a chosen spouse. Even her uncle had limits as to what he was prepared to lose.

The will of kings. A union forged while all grappled with the concept of the self-determination of Scotland.

She could see the outline of impatience in Lachlan Kerr’s eyes, sky blue see-through-you eyes with just a hint of grey. Eyes that said he surely knew the extent of her reputation at court, where the rumours of who she was and wasn’t were touted in the songs of unkind jesters; a figure of fun to give the ladies and lords a moment’s respite against the harsher realities of intrigue. Stephen had told her last summer, after he had returned from London, her cousin reciting the faults, thinking he did her a favour with the warning.

Perhaps he did, Grace mused. A year ago she might have missed the censure and pity so plainly etched on Kerr’s face and imagined it merely as nerves. Today the full shape of an undisguised gall was evident in his frown, in his stance and in the way he stood before them, one hand on his hip and the other on the hilt of a sword.

His brother’s seconds!

This was not his choice, not his want. She pulled the sleeves of her dress down lower, glad when the lace covered even the very tips of her fingers.

A movement from the front door drew everyone’s attention as Judith, Anne and Ginny bustled down the stairs towards them, their fair hair burnished gold by the sun. Individually her young cousins were pretty; together they were much more than that. She felt the interest of the men behind Kerr as a sharpening of awareness, a distinct and utter masculine appreciation. She refrained from seeing if her husband-to-be was watching them in the same way, reasoning that even a slim shadow of doubt was preferable to the knowing of it.

Judith leaned over to her and whispered exactly what it was Grace was thinking. ‘He is far bigger than we had thought.’ Her husky lisp contained both tremor and question.

Nerves, Grace decided and squeezed the hand that threaded through her own, trying to give some sort of reassurance. Anne and Ginny crowded in behind. Waiting. She felt their collected fear like an ache and gestured them back, behind her, where she could stand between any threat of violence, should it come from the Scots.

‘These are m-my cousins.’ She felt she had to say something as an awkward silence hung across the group and was pleased when her uncle tried to ease the tension.

‘The envoy led us to believe that you would be at Grantley before the last Sabbath, Laird Kerr.’

‘I was…detained.’

Detained. The word held an edge of dark despair.

By what? By whom?

A woman, perhaps? The thought slipped into Grace’s mind as she observed him, for he had been married before. She knew, because Judith had overheard the king’s man saying so to his travelling companion, just before he had spoken of the lack of coinage the Kerrs were cursed with, and the desperate need of the Laird to find a woman of means.

Means. Indeed she had that.

With a substantial inheritance and a bloodline that was the very zenith of pure, her dowry would go far to help the ailing finances of any family down on its luck.

Marriage! Would this stranger demand his conjugal rights this very evening in front of his band of men? Lord, even the idea of removing her clothes had the blood rushing to her cheeks.

He would see.

He would know.

He would understand the truth of what before had only been whispered at and if he thought her ugly now… She shook her head. Hard. And feeling the sharp ends of Anne’s nails digging into the flesh of her inner arm, she tried to take charge.

‘W-Would you c-come inside and have a meal?’

Better, she thought. Much better. At least every word was not cursed with a stammer. Raising her glance, she looked straight at the man who would be her husband. In the direct sunlight he had squinted his eyes and the gathering lines to each side of his face were…attractive. No other way to describe them. Much more attractive than his brother had been, and he was deemed a handsome man! Angry at her wayward musings, she spoke again.

‘Father O’B-Brian is still at prayer and could be so for a while. If you could p-p-poss-poss…’

He stopped her simply by laying his hand across her own and she had the distinct impression of help.

Help?

Confused, she looked around. Judith’s eyes were filled with tears and weepy, and Anne and Ginny’s faces were pale. Lord, she prayed her cousins would not burst forth into noisy wailing. Not in front of these men. Not when the safety of Grantley depended on a marriage, signed, sealed and delivered.

Sacrifice. Expediency. Words that had shaped her life for all her years and would now continue doing so. It was written in the blood of men and in the ink of kings.

Irrevocable. Unalterable. Settled.

There could be no going back or refusal. Her life for her family’s lands.

She imagined herself with a sword in hand, beating back any enemy, protecting them with her finesse, winning a battle that no other ever could have…

The thought was so ridiculous she began to smile, but caught back the humour as flinted steeled eyes met her own. And swallowed. Now was not the time for foolish flights of fancy.

‘My uncle has some f-fine Rhenish wine.’

When Kerr inclined his head and gestured to his men, she felt a sigh of relief. Not quite time to leave, then. Still an hour or so before she would be wrenched from here and transplanted to Belridden, his keep a good forty miles to the north.

With a heavy heart she led the men in and, conscious of the fact that the Laird of Kerr walked directly behind her, tried her hardest to minimise her limp.

Following Lady Grace, Lachlan decided that her hair beneath the ugly skullcap was long and red. Not the quiet red of auburn or the burnished red of copper, her hair was a bright gilt shade that showed up in her brows and on the freckles that her cheeks were blemished with. And the skin on both her arms was strangely marred by dryness.

She was not at all the girl he had expected. Nay, woman, he corrected himself, for he knew her to be twenty-six. Long past the more usual time of marriage, long past the silly vacuous age of rising hope. For that at least he was glad. He frowned as he remembered back to the things that were said of Lady Grace Stanton.

Frightened. Temperate. Plain. A dreamer. Aye, and for these things she would do. And do well.

No temptress to dole out her favours to other men when he was away from the Kerr land. No competition to Rebecca, either; with the quick tongue of his mistress silenced, he knew that life at Belridden would be much easier than if he had brought home a beauty.

Lady Grace would suit him admirably. A homely and well-dowered wife. A woman who would not complain. A lady who would have the means to run his castle and the hips to bear his children. It was enough, and, if life had taught him anything, it had been not to expect too much.

The flash of humour as she had tempted him with the wine had been worrying, though! He had seen that look before in the eyes of experienced courtesans. A certain arrogance and self-assurance that came with the innate confidence of beautiful women.

Grace Stanton was hardly beautiful.

And yet she was not ugly either. Not when the sun hit the light velvet of her eyes or shadowed deep dimples on each cheek. Not when her fingers had touched his arm and he had felt something more than mere indifference.

Frowning he glanced over at the younger cousins. Frail, fragile and fearful.

She protected them, supported them, held their shaking fingers in her own and shepherded them inside, like a mother hen might do to her chicks when the rowdy farmyard dog was nigh.

He looked at his men and saw that their interest was firmly placed on his wife-to-be, and on the ring she wore.

He had seen it immediately when first he had taken her hand.

His brother’s ring.

The gold insignia burnished by time.

Ten months since Malcolm had been killed in an accident at Grantley with the explanations of his demise as patently false as the proffered sympathy. No body had ever been found, the ravine he had fallen into deep and craggy and a river at its bottom channelling out to sea. Lach’s brows drew together as he remembered the Earl of Carrick’s oldest son Stephen giving his grandmother and him a version of the death with lying eyes and a shaking voice. Fallen during a ride after giving his troth to Stephen’s cousin? Looking at the lady herself, Lach could not believe her to have inspired a proposal from a brother who had courted and left many of the beauties of both England and Scotland.

Curtailed by politics, however, any revenge was compromised by the unchangeable declaration of meddlesome kings.

A wife of means would be provided to pacify the Kerr clan for the loss of their kin. One brother for another and half of the spoils of the Stanton dowry to fill the empty coffers of Belridden. A quarter would go to Edward; a sop perhaps for Lionel, the Duke of Clarence, in his own bid for the Scottish throne, and the rest to David, a welcome windfall with the merks of the Berwick Treaty largely unpaid. When Lachlan had protested against the offer, it was made clear to him by David that he had no choice. Marry the girl or risk his lands! Put so succinctly, he had packed his things and headed south to get her: his brother’s intended, the Kerr ring still on her finger carved in gold and rubies. Unhidden.

The bile rose in his throat. Had it just been he, he might well have laid his hands around the slim column of her neck and squeezed the truth from her about what had happened to his brother.

But he couldn’t. Not with the fate of his people resting so firmly in her traitorous palms. Not with the threat of winter looming, close and long, and a hundred clan children who would not see the next spring should he take unwise retribution.

He hated the feeling of helpless anger he was suddenly consumed with. Hated the knowing smile on Grace Stanton’s face and the muted sobs of the group of yellow-haired girls. Hated Grantley and its luxury. Hated the problem of poverty he was faced with, and no way short of marriage and a rich wife to solve it.

When the front doors were opened by myriad servants, the opulence of the manor made him stop. The whole of the bottom floor of Belridden would have fitted into this one single salon, wealth screaming from each priceless piece of furniture. He wondered what Grace Stanton would make of the hall at his keep and knew the answer with a sinking heart. She would probably have one peek and burst into tears and take to her bed for a week. Wasn’t that the way of wealthy women?

Her bed. His bed? Their bed? Lord, he had not even had the time to think through the sleeping arrangements before being summoned south on the orders of his king. A niggling worm of doubt turned inside him.

To bed her?

To unpeel the high-necked gown from her body and discover the woman underneath. To enter her with the legality of the king’s missive between them and produce an heir? To see her stomach full swelled with the seed of his loins, ripe, womanly, available.

Even with his brother’s band on her finger, the idea was not repugnant. Not repelling. Nay, the very idea took on a breathless possibility and shimmered between them as they took their seats at the table.

Sensual. Shocking. Raw.

He noticed how she slid her chair as far away from him as she could manage.

‘S-S-Stephen will be here t-t-tomorrow.’

Her stutter made her strangely vulnerable and as their eyes caught close he saw something in them that garnered his pity. Pure and utter effort marked the velvet, and a light sweat beaded her upper lip.

‘We will be gone long before then, aye.’ No point in pretending otherwise. He was annoyed with his sudden want to make things a little easier for her. Annoyed, too, when the softness that had been in her eyes sharpened and she turned away.

A wife to provide a suitable heir. That was all he needed.

That and her sizeable dowry.

And as soon as he could rip Malcolm’s ring from her finger, he would.

Chapter Two

The party from Belridden hardly ate a thing.

They hardly touched the fowl or pork or salmon that appeared in course after course from the generous kitchens of Grantley. Nay, they sat there like a sullen solid wall of plaid and muscle and helped themselves to wine. But that was all.

Did they think the fare poisoned? Or was it food so unlike the nourishment at Belridden that they just could not steel themselves to try it?

A headache that had begun outside blossomed and the zigzagged beads of light that tore through Grace’s vision widened. She would be married under the name of God to a man she would only be able to half-see.

Blinking hard, she caught his glance.

No, his half-glance. One eye, no nose and the glimmer of a neck, and the rest of his body disappearing into jagged nothingness.

Wiping wet hair from her forehead, she no longer cared about the welts of thickened skin hidden beneath her fringe as she counted slowly backwards from one hundred. Sometimes that helped. Today it didn’t.

The arrival of Father O’Brian lifted the silence, his lilting accent welcomed.

‘I had it from the cottagers that the Kerr party were here, Lady Grace, and wondered when you’d be having a need of my services?’

He stopped as he came fully into the room and stared at the strangers opposite. She’d always thought Patrick O’Brian a large man, but compared to Lachlan Kerr he suddenly looked small. Still, to give him his due, the cleric tried to stand his ground as his eyes slid across the numerous swords. ‘I cannot marry you in battle gear, Laird Kerr. In the face of our Lord such a thing would be sacrilege.’

‘Then you cannae marry me at all,’ Kerr returned, no waver in his voice, just a cold, hard certainty. ‘And when ye don’t comply with the demands of your liege, the way forward from here for you might well be an uneasy one.’

Her uncle began to splutter, a red sheen covering his cheeks. Grace could see it because she had massaged the tight muscles in the back of her neck for the past two minutes and felt the instantaneous relief to the pain behind her eyes. As if by magic the spots of jagged light disappeared to be replaced by a headache. Dull. Heavy. Constant.

But she could see. See Lachlan Kerr’s anger and the gritted teeth of his twenty men. See the pale faces of her cousins and the nervous demeanour of both the priest and her uncle.

And in that moment Grace knew that, unless she took charge of this farce, everyone in her family would be at risk. More than at risk. Death lurked easy when one disobeyed the commands of the king, and her uncle’s building rage worried her the most.

‘I am certain that G-God’s will would not be slighted.’

Lord, if the Laird of Kerr were to walk out now she doubted the aged priest’s superiors would be easy on him for making such a mistake and the token of this truce to secure a fragile peace would be trampled beneath the weight of error.

Her cousins. Her uncle. Grantley.

In danger.

There was only one thing to do.

‘I w-wish to be m-married, now.’

Judith burst into tears and knocked over her wine, the red blush of it staining the tablecloth, a wider and wider blot along the pristine fold of linen. A sign? A portent? Was history repeated in such a simple action? The weight of uncertainty in Ginny’s eyes deepened and the smooth cold gold of Malcolm Kerr’s ring bound the past with the present.

Fickle and faithless and laughing, the secret of his death lay in the room like a shout, like a screaming echo of unrightness, like a shroud of shame that had brought them all to this pass, this penance.

Father O’Brian trembled against the lintel of the door, his fingers clutching the cross at his neck whilst he uttered a prayer, the dull monotones reflecting the mood as her uncle turned an even deeper shade of red.

Her wedding hour.

Chaos.

Her dress hanging in the corner of her cupboard, shrouded in calico. Unworn.

The flowers she had imagined to fashion into a fragrant bouquet, unpicked.

And a would-be husband that looked at her in the manner of a man who did not care at all.

‘He will take my hand and stare into my eyes and a single tear will run down his handsome cheek as he tells me how much he loves me, adores me, cannot live without me, his finger softly tracing the smile on my face…’

Grace shook her head. How often had she told her cousins this story as she lay beside them in the hours before wakefulness became slumber, dream-time cameos where knights of honour and chivalry and faithfulness rode into Grantley demanding love. Her love, despite the itchy rash and cursed stutter. In these stories she had none of them. Even her hair was a less fiery shade of red.

Dreams?

Reality!

When Kerr dragged her into the space beside him, his hands were neither soft nor careful. When he demanded that the priest give the oath to bind them together, she heard hatred rather than love.

And when he gave her his answer two words kept repeating again and again in her head.

For ever. For ever. For ever.

A warm wash of horror flooded through her as, before God and her family as witnesses, she was married. For ever. Sealed in the eyes of the Lord and the law with an unbreakable and eternal promise.

When it was finished and her husband handed her a large goblet of wine, she drank it without taking breath and then helped herself to another, her more normal sense of optimism submerged under the heavy weight of duty.

Judith held her hand, hard clasped and shaking.

‘If he is anything like his brother, Grace…’

She did not let her finish. ‘He w-won’t be.’

‘You can tell?’

‘I can hope.’

‘We could be at Belridden in two days to get you if you needed to come home.’

‘I am married n-now, Judith. Under what law should I be able to leave my h-husband?’

They looked at each other in silence, the enormity of everything a dark shadow of truth in both their eyes.

‘This should not have been your cross to bear. It should have been mine. I am Ginny’s sister, after all; if anyone had to pay the price for Malcolm Kerr’s death, it should have been me.’

Grace looked at her new husband, their eyes meeting across the crowded room. He was as beautiful as she was plain, the pale blueness of his eyes catching her anew with the contrast of colour against his darkness of hair.

David’s knight. A man who had ruled the fields of battle from France to Scotland for a decade. She had heard the tales from various bards when they had come to Grantley with their songs and their stories. Sword, scabbard, mail and shield: Lachlan Kerr’s weapons of choice as he rode beneath the gold-and-red standard of the lion of Scotland, its border pierced by ten fleurs-de-lis.

And now her husband.

She turned his ring around the third finger on her left hand and the warmth of the metal made her smile.

A sign. Of hope? She wondered about her marriage night, about being close to such a man.

‘If you l-love me, Judith, you will promise to st-stay silent about everything, because if you do not then all of this will have been in vain.’

Judith did not look happy at all. ‘Perhaps if you told him about what he tried to do to Ginny…’

‘And ruin her r-reputation for ever?’

‘This is for ever too, Grace.’

‘I know, but I am twenty-six and Ginny is b-barely sixteen.’

‘She has not spoken since…’ Judith stopped and regrouped. ‘Perhaps she never will.’

‘T-ten months is only a l-little time. With c-care…’

A single tear traced its way down Judith’s cheek. ‘You were always the best and the bravest of us, Grace, and if Lachlan Kerr ever hurts you even a little…’

‘He won’t.’

‘You are certain?’

The pale stare of her husband caught her across the head of her cousin, beckoning her, arrogance written in every line of his face.

Grace tipped up the goblet she held and finished the draught within. This charade was for a reason and their marriage was final. There could be no going back on such a promise even had she wanted to.

‘I am c-certain,’ she returned before limping over to join him.

He barely acknowledged her as she came to stand beside him, his shoulders a good foot above her own even when she straightened. He spoke to his men of his hopes for Scotland and of his want to be again in the land of his birth before another moon waned.

So soon? He would not stay here at Grantley for one night? The shock of such an imminent departure made her breathing uneven and she felt his gaze full upon her.

‘Belridden has favours that Grantley lacks. The mountains around it, for example, are lauded for their bounty when hunting.’

Grace tried to smile, tried to understand that it was a reassurance he gave her. Bounty in hunting? All she could see in her mind’s eye was a far-off, lonely place with trails and tracks used for forage and pursuit.

The easy luxury of Grantley closed in. ‘I have n-no knowledge of h-hunting, Laird K-Kerr,’ she returned and the red-haired man next to him laughed.

Lachlan Kerr did not, however, his eyes bruised with the growing realisation of the enormous gulf that lay between them as he wiped his mouth free of wine on his sleeve before turning.

‘It is time to go.’

Even his men on the other side of the room heard his words, standing almost as one, and the colourful gowns of her cousins seemed caught in a time frame, like an etching, England swallowed up by the muted earthy tones of plaid. Judith’s wail came first as she pushed forwards, her arms encircling Grace, tears running freely down her cheeks.

‘I cannot bear to think of life without you, Grace,’ she cried, ‘the stories you tell us will be so sorely missed.’

Grace noticed the look of interest that flinted across Lachlan Kerr’s face.

‘Stories?’

‘Grace has the most wonderful imagination. She tells us tales at night.’ Bright red coated Judith’s cheeks as she registered the Laird’s attention.

‘I am c-certain that I sh-shall b-be back often.’ Her own reassurance vacillated as incredulity appeared on the face of every Scotsman. The sheer volume of wine she had consumed began to take effect, for she rarely drank very much. The room tilted and the noise in it dimmed as she felt her hand on Judith’s arm without any sense of it really being there. The goodbyes to her other cousins and to her uncle were just as unreal, the farewells far away through the haze of unreality and less difficult than they would have been were she sober.

A kiss and a hug, food pressed into her hands and her cape draped around her and then the party was outside and she was up, on a horse in front of her new husband. A hastily packed chest on a steed behind. Quick steps to another life, the angst of it all banished by too many glasses of fine Rhenish wine.

She wiped her eyes and struggled for control, for normality, but already the whirling tiredness was upon her. Leaning back against the solid warmth was comforting and she did not push away the arm that anchored her firmly into place.

The landscape swam out of focus, soft, troubled. Almost known.

‘Keep still.’ The voice was angry-close and as her eyes flew open wide the world again began to settle.

They were in the foothills of the Three Stone Burn, miles from Grantley.

And heading north.

Away from home. Away from her cousins and her uncle and the people she had known all her life.

She wriggled forwards, her muscles tight from the effort of countering the pressure from the easy canter of his horse.

His horse!

She was on his horse. Hot panic and cold fear.

‘Get me off…let me down… I want to get down…’ When she flung herself away the ground came up, fast, and hit her hard against the shoulder, winding her.

She had not been on a horse since… She shook her head and tried not to remember. Since the moment in the forest outside York when her parents had been ambushed and killed!

Consciousness was lost under pressure. Ripping. Screams rent from the very depth of fear. And silence.

‘What the hell is wrong with ye now?’ A deep voice shattered memory, blue eyes narrowing against the last slant of sun as he caught her wrist and pulled her up from the ground. Close.

She slapped him as he relaxed his grip, all the pent-up months of worry behind the movement. And when the edge of Malcolm Kerr’s ring caught at his skin, red spilt down the hard line of his cheek.

He released her immediately and stepped away, the muscles along his jaw rippling as he lifted his hand to the wound.

‘Mother of Mary, are ye a crazy woman? Has David joined me to a cackle-head?’

She made herself be still, placing her fingers across the beating terror in her heart and waited for retribution.

None came.

No true sharp blade into the soft folds of her throat, no well-aimed kick or clenched fist. Nothing except for a silence that was stark against the shrill, quick call of a forest bird nesting for the night.

His men melted back, leaving them alone. Grace could just make out their forms through the leaves of the trees thick in the glade.

‘Do ye have a death wish?’

‘No.’ She whispered the word. Mouthed it. No time to even think of stammering, for the light in his eyes held her transfixed. No empty threat here. No quiet warning.

‘Give me your right hand.’

She hid it behind her back, away from him. What did he want her hand for? To cut it off at the wrist? To break her fingers one by one by one? To slash his initial into the lines of her palm?

‘Give me your hand, Grace.’

She hated the way her chin began to wobble, hated the tears that welled in her eyes and the aching fear in her throat. Hated the way too that her arm came forwards. Towards him.

He took her middle finger, gently, and removed the ring. She felt the roughened skin of his palm and saw the marks of scars under a cloth he wore around his wrist before he let her go.

No, not scars. A brand. A circle dissected by two lines. Indigo. Complex.

‘This ring is a family heirloom. My grandmother holds the other half of a matching pair and I am certain that she would wish it back.’ For a second he held it before depositing it in his sporran. Gone from her.

Memory!

She began to shake, badly, her teeth chattering together even as she tried to stop them, and, without meaning to, she closed her fingers over the place where the ring had been and buried her hand in the copious folds of her gown.

Relief and the release of a duty and a lie! She thanked him silently for the taking of it.

Lachlan caught his breath and cursed this ridiculous farce that the King had burdened him with. More than twenty years of selfless service repaid by the fetter of marriage to a woman who was scared of her own shadow. If it wasn’t so permanent, he might have laughed. Indeed, he had seen the puzzled faces of his men as they tried to fathom out the character of his new wife, and failed. The whispered asides told him that they appreciated her about as little as did the echoes of laughter.

She had hit him!

His frightened mouse of a wife had hit him. Hard. And in the shadowed depths of her amber eyes he had recognised what he so often saw in his own.

Secrets.

Taking a breath, he tried to lighten his voice.

‘We still have a few hours of travelling yet as I mean to cross the border north of Carlisle.’

‘We c-c-c-cannot m-m-make y-y-your k-k-k-keep?’ Lord, her stammer was worsening by the moment. He wondered if she would be able to string even two words together by the time they had reached his castle.

‘Nay, it will be safer to camp in the Borders.’

Stressing the word ‘safer’, he saw the calculations of a walked distance clouding her focus.

‘Lord, help me,’ he muttered and wished that he was at home in the arms of his mistress.

But he wasn’t. He was stuck with a woman who stuttered and shook and lied, and was scared of horses.

Lady Grace Stanton. Nay, he amended as he mounted and pulled her up in front of him, Lady Grace Kerr, now.

His wife.

He made mental calculations as to how many hours he would ever truly be required to spend in her company and was heartened to determine that it would be very few. Perhaps he was more like his father than he had thought, and the realisation made him uneasy.

Freezing. She was freezing. Even with a cloak and blanket and three shawls laid across her she could not stop the shaking that had woken her up a good hour ago. And now she needed to relieve herself. Desperately.

It was dark. Black. The forest trees stretched towards an inky sky, and the moon, that had been high when they had finally reached this place, had fallen, a small and weak slice of crescent on the horizon, surrounded by mist.

Ten feet away Lachlan Kerr lay on the dirt without a scrap of blanket or pillow, the dim light from the fire showing the beaded drops of dew threaded through his night-black hair. Even asleep he held his dirk across his thigh, fingers curled around the shaft in habit.

Standing, she began to move across to him, meaning to shake him awake, but his eyes were open at the first whisper of sound and he was up on his haunches in a quick and easy grace.

‘I need to relieve myself.’

He did not budge, question easily seen on his brow.

‘It’s v-very dark,’ she continued and looked towards the trees on the edge of the clearing.

Amazement began to etch out a heavy line on his brow. ‘Ye want me to take you?’

‘Not to w-w-watch, y-y-you understand. Just to k-k-keep watch.’ Damn. Her stutter was back badly and she pressed at the soft skin at the base of her neck to try to ease the tightness.

‘Keep watch against what?’ His laughter was hard.

The ghosts of the dead and the souls of the nearly living, pressed close against the thin veneer of time.

‘I am n-n-not sure.’ Uncertainty leached the movement from her limbs. Should she chance it? Could she walk into the dark, dark forest under a nothing moon and be safe?

Ginny’s screams and then silence. Stephen’s whispers to make it right. Below them a deep chasm and above them a blue, blue sky.

‘Grace?’ Lachlan Kerr’s voice was close and she saw that he had moved up beside her, no longer laughing.

‘Come. I’ll take ye.’ His fingers were warm against her skin, even through the cloth at her elbow, and she was pleased for the support as they walked across the uneven ground towards the river.

When they reached a glade that offered a little privacy, he stopped and disengaged her arm. ‘I will wait here.’

‘You promise. You w-w-won’t go back? You w-w-won’t leave me here…?’

She hoped that he could not see the mounting flush on her skin.

‘If we dinna come back soon, my men will investigate.’ This time something akin to amusement laced his words.

Lord. And she had lost time already with her chatter. Stepping away from him, she crept behind a tree, keeping the shape of the Laird in her vision. When she was finished, she rejoined him and looked up into the sky.

‘Do you e-e-ever wonder if there is anything out th-th-there? Any other place like this one, I mean?’

‘No.’

His reply was short, but it did not deter her.

‘My father once t-told me of the ideas of Aristarchus of Samos. He wrote that the Earth r-revolved around the Sun.’

‘And you believed it?’

‘I do, though I can hear in your t-tone you do not.’

‘The holy scriptures would say that the Earth is the centre of everything.’ He frowned as he looked up. ‘A useful ploy to further their own cause, I should imagine.’

‘Their cause? You sp-speak like a disbeliever?’

‘Once I was not,’ he returned obliquely. ‘Your stammer seems remarkably lessened tonight.’

‘Oh, it only is b-b-bad when I th-th-think about it.’

She tripped on the root of a tree and his hand shot out to balance her body against his.

And for a moment, with the heavens around them and the silence of the very early morning, Grace felt a sense of safety that she had not felt in a long, long time.

Her wedding night. It was not as dreadful as she might have otherwise expected. A husband who had accompanied her into the trees and stayed when she had asked him to. A man who had listened to her explanation of the stars above them with at least a pretended interest and whose arm had steadied her against falling. She tried to still the shivering that had overtaken her and was glad when they reached the clearing.

‘We will be breaking camp in about two hours and as it is a long ride home I would advise ye to get some sleep.’

‘If w-we were to w-walk, how long would it take?’

Laughter was his only response as he settled himself down, fire highlighting his face.

‘Go to sleep, Grace,’ he muttered and closed his eyes.

She liked the way he said her name, his accent giving the plain shortness of it a hint of the exotic. Snuggling into her blankets, she felt for her wedding ring. It was an emerald set in yellow gold and engraved on the inside with his initials. L.K. She had seen it in the earlier light.

From this small distance his profile was distinct. The most handsome Laird in all of Scotland. She had heard that said of him each time some soul had uttered his name, which was ironic given her own lack of any charm, though she supposed that a sizeable dowry had its way of talking. Her fingers pressed the numbed welts on her thighs and she felt the hollow ache of all that she was.

Ugly. Beneath her clothes as well. She accepted the summation of her appearance now without question, and made it her habit to seldom look into any mirror. Biting down on tears, she hated the aching lump in her throat. She was tired of wishing herself otherwise, tired of the groundless hope of some miraculous cure for the dry skin she was afflicted with, and the stutter. Taking a deep breath, she willed composure and shut her eyes.

She sat on the royal dais, watching her husband in a joust, her scarf upon his sleeve as he declared himself her champion, her knight, before thundering towards his opponent. And when it was finished and he had easily won, he knelt before her in an act of homage, the ritual of courtly love causing the faces of the other ladies about them to wish it was their favour he donned, their love that he sought…

In her sleep she smiled.

Lachlan listened as she rearranged her blankets, amazed at the fact that she should need so many layers against a night he felt was almost…warm.

One foot was visible from where he sat, its smallness swamped by a thick woollen stocking. Grace Stanton was nothing like the tales he had heard of her at court. She was unusual, to be sure, but there was something about her that intrigued him. Her imagination, he decided after further thought, as he remembered the softness of her skin when he had steadied her arm to make certain that she did not fall.

She wanted to walk to Belridden and she believed that the stars circled the sun according to an ancient Greek astronomer. He thought of the manuscripts explaining the heavens his father had brought home from Anjou and wondered where they were now. Sold like the rest of the Kerr treasures, he suspected, a further sop to an escalating gambling habit.

Lachlan had barely thought of his father for years and yet here in the space of a day he had thought about him twice. Good times. Before the drink had made Hugh crazy and soft regret had spiralled into sheer and brutal hatred.

Nothing lasted for ever. Not laughter. Not happiness. And certainly not love. The only thing you could count on was the land, and the Kerr land was in sore need of the attention that the Stanton gold would give it.

That was all he expected. Anything else would lead to the disappointment that he was far more familiar with.

He laid his head down against the dirt.

Ever since his return to Scotland it had been a struggle. Government had almost ceased to exist under Robert the High Steward and it had been hard to reassert the authority of his king against the vested interests of landowners made powerful from the long years without covenant. Lord, if David did not step up to rule them, they would rule him, and the murder of the royal mistress was testimony to that.

Lachlan pulled his hair free and shook the length in the night air. Under the Bruce all this might have been so much easier, and for the thousandth time he wished that Robert Keith, the trainer of arms in Normandy, had insisted on a more rigorous tutorship for David.

Everything was uncertain and dangerous with the rebellion of powerful men afoot and yet here he was, dragging a wife home to a land he barely knew. A wife who now lay on her side with her hands clasped beneath her face and the wild redness of her hair a long curtain on the ground beside her.

She was not as plain as he had been told. He wished suddenly that she might open those eyes that were so direct and begin to talk again to him. It had, after all, been a long time since a woman in his company had not reverted to the wiles of flirtation and coquetry, and the change was refreshing. The red stocking she wore on her right foot had also come astray with her disturbed slumber and her ankles were more than shapely.

Lord, he thought to himself, and he turned over to find sleep, trying not to listen to the soft and muffled breathing of his unusual new wife.

Chapter Three

Connor crouched down beside him in the morning before the dawn had properly settled, smouldering anger on his face.

‘Your wife had this with her.’ He dropped a small jewelled box on the dirt beside him; Lachlan knew the casing immediately.

‘How did you find it?’

‘It fell out of a layer of clothes as we transferred the contents from her chest into our saddlebags. Ian’s horse was suffering under the weight of the thing, you see, and we thought to distribute it around.’

‘Does she know ye took it?’

‘She dinna see if that’s what you are asking.’

Lachlan nodded and jammed the thing in his sporran, making certain it was hidden.

Malcolm had been given the heirloom on his thirteenth birthday by their grandfather, and when the precious stones on the lid had winked against the new light of morning, the bare memory of his brother caught Lachlan anew with the way it had all ended.

‘Who else knows?’ He took a quick glance at the form of his still-sleeping wife.

‘Ian saw it. And James. Do ye think Malcolm gave it to her?’

‘Knowing the worth of the thing, I doubt it, but say nothing to anyone else, and seek the silence of Ian and James.’ His words trailed off, something disturbing him in the presence of a treasure Malcolm had held such fondness for.

‘You would protect her?’

‘For now.’

‘If Eleanor finds out she had it…’

‘She won’t.’

‘Your grandmama is a wily woman, Lach, and she has always believed that your brother was murdered. Perhaps it was your wife who killed him?’

Lach shook his head. ‘If Grace Stanton killed Malcolm, it will be me who deals with her. Understand?’

But Connor was not finished. ‘Our king could not expect you to stay married to a murderer.’

‘The king wants these lands strong and with her dowry the lives of all those at Belridden will be safer.’

‘And you? What of your life? What of the nights you lie asleep in your marriage bed with the full bare skin of your throat exposed?’

‘You think she will be there beside me?’

Smothering fury, he looked over at Grace clambering from her pile of blankets. The dress she wore was stained and creased and yet as she stretched into wakefulness the sun behind caught her hair, long and fire red, molten silk unfurling down her back to reach along the rounded lines of her hips. She tempted him and left him feeling unreasonably irritated.

‘Tell the Lady of Kerr that we will be breaking camp in half an hour. Find her someone to ride with.’

‘You won’t be taking her with you?’

‘I won’t.’

‘She can ride with me, then.’

‘Very well.’ Lachlan tossed his plaid over his shoulder and completely ignored his wife’s worried frown.

Turning to the forest, he walked just outside the lines of saplings towards the river, taking a moment to contemplate all that had happened in the last few days.

His life had been turned upside down, yet some things stayed exactly the same, and the betrayal that had dogged his years from boyhood was as repellent in this wife as it had been in the last one.

A gap in the trees allowed him another glimpse of the new Lady of Kerr as she tried to wipe the marks of dust from her costly gown, the fine wool of her skirt drawn tight across the generous outline of her bottom.

Heat rushed into his loins and he felt an odd unbalance as the forest and his men melted away into nothingness. Lord, what was happening? Had she placed some tonic in the wine at Grantley, some potion to mask his reasoning and raise his lust? His mistress was full-blooded and well endowed, the wares on show offered without condition, but he had not felt this…excitement with her.

Not once.

Grace Stanton with her fire-red hair and welt-roughened skin should have run a poor second to Rebecca’s charms and yet…dressed in a high-necked gown with little showing save the top of her hands and the curve of her throat she was…sensual. The thought amazed him.

How?

How did she do that?

How did a woman with so little in the way of obvious endowments manage to be alluring? Had his brother felt it too?

He refused to follow further down that particular track, though he was niggled by the question of whether the Kerrs were to be for ever cursed by the words of Alec Dalbeth.

‘Your keep shall be a ruin and any love that you foster will be as dust in the darkening days of your clan.’

It had been years since his father had banished the priest from their lands, one arm around the mistress that had caused the chasm and the other on a bottle. Clutching. Tight. But the words shouted back into the space between the departing horses and the front portal of Belridden had stuck. Darkness had come in the form of strong drink, and his father, on seeing the sins of his ways too late, had taken the easy path out.

It was Malcolm and he who had found him dangling from the middle beam of the chapel roof, a half-finished tankard smashed beneath his feet, as if he had taken one last sip to see him through the gates of Hell.

He cursed, hating the weakness of a man whom he had once admired, when a noise to one side of the stream slowed his movements. Bending down, he scoured the far-off bank. A group of men were creeping through the undergrowth, metal glinting from the first rays of the sun. The Elliots or the Johnstones, neighbouring clans whom the Kerrs had no reason to trust. From this distance he could not quite make out the muted colours worn.

Three minutes, he guessed, till they rounded the slower part of the river and crossed. Unsheathing his claymore, he backtracked with care. Twenty against forty. The odds were good if it came to a head and he’d be hard pressed to find a better group of soldiers around him.

Would that be enough? He refused to think about it not being so even as he began to run, a branch swiping hard against his face and another slashing his shins.

Grace was standing against the bough of a tree to one side of the camp as he fled through the last saplings and she turned towards him as the others did, eyes bright with fear. He knew she was trying to say something, but could not quite get the words out. Dragging her against him, he placed her in the middle of the circle his men were forming.

‘Shield your head and shut your eyes,’ he shouted at her as he took his own place between Con and Ian, the outlines of the other group now visible between the thinning forest. More than forty. Lach’s grip tightened on his sword and he made himself breathe.

Grace watched Lachlan Kerr’s back and saw the way he brought in breath. Once, twice, three times and then stillness, the echo of a malevolent danger harnessed with a steely control.

Magnificent. The thought burst from nowhere as he raised his sword, the strength of his knotted muscles rippling free. Waiting. Wanting. A man tempered in war and killing and fear. She could see the lines where blades had cut against the solid muscle of his forearm when the fabric in his shirt fell back, white against the brownness of his skin, tense, honed. All the forest still as the party from across the river gained the clearing.

‘Who goes there?’ Her husband’s words held no inflection of fear. She felt calmed by his very equanimity.

A big man facing them stepped forwards. ‘Alistair Elliot. And I dinna remember giving ye invite to cross my lands, Kerr.’

‘You had no word from David?’

‘The King?’ Uncertainty shallowed out the other’s voice and the glances of the men behind sharpened.

‘I have it on David’s authority to collect my wife from her home in England.’

Grace knew in the hollow lack of humour the truth that such an admission must have cost him.

A wife who looked like her and English, and a battle that could easily cost the lives of some of his soldiers.

The man opposite shook his head, catching sight of her at the exact same moment that he did so, arrant disbelief in his eyes. The tensing of the muscles in Lachlan Kerr’s jaw was worrying as all around her the men closed ranks, drawing in on the spaces between them, a solid wall of protection for a woman that they could feel no allegiance to, no favour for. The thought stunned her. They would fight and die to keep her safe just because Kerr willed it.

‘Your wife looks as though she may be ailing. Are ye sure it’s the right woman ye have picked?’ The offence was measured and Grace tensed, the heavy mantle of insolence falling between them, a breathing living thing that smote good sense and reason.

Lachlan gestured his men back and the space in the clearing widened. ‘Ye’d be willing to sacrifice your men for the slur you have just offered or are you man enough to stand and fight me alone?’ His glance was pale-blue-cold and for the first time the other man stepped back, hand running to the sword at his side, testing the grip. Waiting.

Time quivered and the whispers of those who began to question snaked over silence.

‘I’d give my word that if you were to fight me and win, every blade we harbour would be yours to keep.’ Lachlan Kerr’s voice held the bland edge of indifference, as if his death was but a trifling consideration and the cache of armoury a greater prize.

‘And I could take your word on it?’

‘My word, or your men’s lives, it worries me not. Or are ye afraid?’

When the newcomer pulled up his sword and slashed suddenly, shiny slick steel missed Lachlan Kerr’s throat by a matter of mere inches and Grace had to rise on tiptoes to see over the shoulder of the man in front, her heart beating so hard that she was certain that the sound of it must be heard.

If Lachlan Kerr was killed, what then?

Would she be taken back to Grantley or would someone else here claim her? She doubted the men from Belridden would want to let go of her money so easily and doubted too the fineness of their morals. Lord, the man who even now circled his adversary, waiting for a chance to strike, was becoming her protector, even given his lack of caring.

The hollow sound of steel against steel rang so loud that she found herself placing her hands across her ears just to dim the noise. Not pretty. Not easy. No dainty practised fight this one, but the raw lunges of two men who would kill each other should the chance present itself. And it nearly did as Lachlan parried, his feet hitting the roots of an elm behind and tipping him off balance, the wicked sharpness of his opponent’s blade making him pay for the mistake in a deep slash down his left arm. The soldiers near her mumbled, and Lachlan bade them back.

‘Nay. Be still. It’s a scratch and my word has been given.’

He did not look at her as he said it, did not in any way include her in the moment. Grace tried to catch his glance to show him that she was at least grateful for his protection, but he allowed her nothing. His very indifference to his fate angered her, made the whole basis of this marriage even bleaker. She wondered how much longer she would have a husband, so careless was he of his life?

With the settling of the fight a different rhythm seemed to come, a closer, finer combat, thrust and counter-thrust, the sweat building on both men’s brows belying the chill in this part of Scotland in early August. Lachlan Kerr moved with a grace seldom seen in a big man, his every movement carefully honed and delivered, nothing left to chance as he came in again and again against his opponent’s weakening thrusts. And then the other man was down on the ground, a sharp swordpoint pinning him motionless and pressing deep. Horror overcame disbelief. Her husband would kill a defenceless man and risk the wrath of God and the eternal promise of an afterlife?

‘No!’ The desperate shout distracted everyone and all eyes came upon her. Without conscious thought she drew herself up to her tallest form and made herself speak. ‘H-H-He h-h-holds no weapon and if you sh-sh-sh-should kill him, God w-w-will punish y-y-your soul.’

Silence met the statement and then the budding of anger. From everyone.

‘Is she a gomeral or just plain saft in the heid?’

The dark-haired man spoke from his position on the ground, the words strangling with such caustic incredulity that pure wrath replaced Grace’s softer anger and she made no effort to harness it. ‘You m-m-might c-c-c-consider the message of m-m-my words r-r-rather than the s-s-stutter in them, sir.’

‘A Dhia, thoir cobhair, she insults me again?’

Lachlan unexpectedly began to smile as he released the throat of his foe, allowing the man to roll over.

‘Get up, Elliott, and be thankful that my wife has not yet worked out the ways of the Scots. She thinks her truth does you a service.’

A quivering waiting filled the air around them, sifting out options as to a way forwards.

‘Then if I hear you have smothered her in the night, Kerr, I will know the reason why.’

He laughed and anger dissipated, and as the group from the river collected their armour and withdrew, Grace was finally allowed from the prison of her tight band of men.

‘They d-d-did not l-l-leave their w-weapons and you w-w-won.’

‘Ye think that? Ye think that I won?’

For a second Grace imagined Lachlan Kerr would raise his hand against her, so forcibly did she feel the fire of his fury.

‘Next time when you think to order me, wife, know that you will be punished. Severely.’

He swiped at the wound on his arm as he pushed past her, the fresh red flow of blood marking the trail of his passage into the trees.

Horrified, she glanced at the ground, not wanting to meet any other censure. Connor was the first to speak.

‘You can ride home with me.’ When he turned away before she could argue, she felt tears prick behind her tired eyes. No one fostered manners here. No one held to the polite tones of normal deportment. She had saved a life and a soul and these men were too arrogant to realise the help she had given them. With her head held high, she leaned against the bough of an oak and contemplated just how far in walking distance it was to the Kerr’s keep of Belridden.

Lachlan could barely stop the roiling anger from bubbling over into a shout of wrath. His wife had shamed him and he knew with a certainty that the news would be travelling around the Marches like wildfire come the evening. The Laird of Kerr brought to task by the plain Englishwoman he had been forced to marry.

Damn it. He had told her to shut her eyes and hide her head and instead…instead she had spoken with her quavery voice, stuttering a truth in the way that only she could have imagined it. His hands tightened around his aching arm and he looked down at the injury, the sides of skin peeling away and leaving the wound wide open.

He should have killed Elliot, for if this cut should fester then he himself would be the man marked for the hereafter.

A wavering sadness counteracted fury. His first wife had been a harlot and this one was a blabbering loudmouth. Dalbeth’s curse weighed on his shoulders, and the banal and aimless void of living stretched long and lonely into a future he could no longer imagine or care about.

He drew in breath and listened to the birds in the trees. Life. His life. This one and only life. He was no longer a religious man, though he hid his lack of belief well, stacked against the certainty of the Kerrs’ bad luck and the vagaries of a more primitive faith. He had lived by the sword for so long now he could barely remember what it had been like before.

Once he had been young, hopeful, running through the forests to the north with his brother, and seeing in the shape of leaves or the colour of the first flowers of spring, a God-given beauty, a plan, a way of living that did not incorporate so much death and loss and despair.

‘If you kill him, God will punish you.’ Grace’s words, give or take the stutter. She was a woman who still believed in the power of a soul and in the very darkness that his should be cast into. He grimaced. She knew nothing of his life and could not understand that it was well past time to worry about his particular salvation or to chart the celestial journey of any humanity that still lingered inside him.

His life! He remembered his fingers around the neck of those who would support David’s enemies when the talking had come to nothing and the splintered and isolated monarchy was again threatened. God, he wiped the hair from his eyes and said a prayer, not believing in the message but comforted by the habit of it.

Nay, the bleating goodness of a woman of principle was not for the likes of him, buried as he was in the netherworld of survival.

David had no notion of what he destroyed under the auspices of politics. Her life for one: Grace Stanton-Kerr and her bloody stuttered truths. Running his fingers through the length of his hair, he wondered again about the validity of what was whispered by royal enemies who would sacrifice the monarchy. Yet the alternative bore down on him like a heavy harbinger of doom. No king? The mantle of tradition was preferable to the absence of it.

Anarchy!

He had seen it in the eyes of the powerful magnates and the sons of Balliol, and heard it in the words of Edward of England’s detractors and Philip the Sixth’s enemies.

Change for the better? This was a risky hope pinned on rebellion and paid for in the blood of men. Countrymen!

Finding at last what he sought he stripped the sphagnum moss and mulched it between his fingers, spitting on the pink mass to form a paste before smearing it across his wound. The astringent flared and he swore softly, but held the potion in place until the pain ceased altogether. His mother had taught him about the medicines found in the forest.

His mother!

When she had died in childbirth, the light had gone out of Belridden, and had been out ever since.

As he pulled down the sleeve of his jacket, the angry sound of his new spouse’s voice broke across his thoughts.

‘I w-w-w-will not get up on that h-h-horse.’

Con’s reply was surprisingly patient.

‘It is a long way to the keep, my Lady, and it is in my mind that your brogans are hardly up to the task.’

‘B-brogans?’

‘Shoes, my Lady.’

‘F-f-fetch me my h-h-husband.’

Even at this distance Lachlan could hear the aristocratic edge to her command and knew too that Con would be no match at all for her. With resolve he strode forwards, breaking from the shelter of the forest to find a ring of men regarding his wife.

‘She will ride. With me.’

The fight he could see in her eyes came quickly to the surface and Connor moved back, relieved of his need to argue further.

‘I c-c-cannot.’

In answer he simply strode forwards and threw her across his shoulders, her shapely backside brushing the side of his cheek. Her fingers scratched at his back and he was pleased for the thick covering of his plaid and highland shirt. ‘Put me down you…you…blackguard,’ she finally said, the semi-curse a long way from the language that he was much more used to. ‘Put me down this very moment or I shall…’

‘What?’ he countered as he dumped her on his horse, keeping her balanced there with a sheer dint of will as he swung up behind her. His arm hurt like hell from the tussle. ‘What exactly will you do?’

She was silent and he refrained from mentioning how much better her stutter was, though with his thighs pressing on hers and her back warm against his stomach Lachlan was more than aware of his damnably traitorous body rising to attention with each passing second. The scent of her filled his nostrils, the scent of woman and heat, long strands of her hair burnishing his skin with fire-flame red.

Her heart drummed at thrice the pace of his, racing in the slender curve of her throat and as her fingers tightened over his legs she began to shake.

‘Zeus is a fine mount. He obeys my commands unquestionably. You have nothing to fear.’

Sitting on his horse in the clearing with his men busying themselves for departure, Lachlan could feel in the silence every ear upon them.

She did not answer, but he felt her feet fold up as if she would be completely free of any stirrup that hung there and heard the quietly whispered prayers. Over and over again.

Shifting in his seat, he tried to summon back anger, but the zealous ardency of her invocations amused him and her skin, exposed at the nape of her neck, made him catch his breath.

Nothing about this woman added up and her shivers of fright made him wonder. Had she been unnerved somehow by a horse? There was so much about her that he did not know. When she had lifted her skirts yesterday no mark of an accident had been visible, and yet she limped!

Lord! Putting all thought aside, he concentrated on the narrowing path in front of them, loose rocks falling into the nothingness of the gully below as the mounts picked their way through.

‘Y-your horse is v-v-very obedient.’ The whisper was soft.

‘Unlike my wife,’ he returned, regretting it when she stiffened and did not speak again.

They stopped by a river three hours from home to rest the horses. When he slipped from the saddle, he was surprised that she made no effort to follow him, given her preference for walking, although the reason for her reticence was obvious a moment later.

She could barely stand when he helped her down. Placing her hand around his, she clung on, the leg with the limp buckling under the weight of her body.

Turning a brighter shade of red than even her hair, Lachlan was aware of the effort the ride must have cost as she tried to stand unaided, the shaking sending her teeth to chattering.

‘H-how far n-now?’

‘Belridden lies about an hour from here.’ He found himself minimising the distance even though he meant not to. Damn it. Everything about her irritated him and yet here he was halving the journey home in an effort to lessen the worry in her eyes and the weary cadence he could hear in her voice.

He watched her nod and watched too as she hobbled a little way from him, awkwardly placing her weight as she went.

If she fell… He made himself stop and turn away.

God, Grace Stanton had been with them for all of thirty hours, in which she had shamed him in front of an enemy and split his cheek open with his dead brother’s ring. She had a stutter that hurt his ears to listen to, and a fear of life that boded badly for the wilder climes of his own estate, and that was without taking into account her damaged leg and a skin condition that looked at best more than a little itchy.

Yet despite everything Lachlan found himself smiling, for there was something about her that was…brave. A woman who was her own person. A lady of means who believed in the power of God and stood up for his soul with the crystal-clear goodness of one who had never been confronted with the bad.

Pureness was a potent power in the face of suspicion and doubt, he suddenly decided, and a quality that Belridden had long been bereft of.

He imagined taking her to his bed, undressing her, feeling the tightness of her sex around him. He could take her tonight when they arrived at Belridden.

The throb in his loins settled hard against his shirt and he adjusted the fullness as he walked. Would she be virgin or would his brother have known her intimately? He hoped not. He had never had a virgin before, preferring the ease of well-experienced women. Yet he saw suddenly the appeal of such an encounter. Everything to her would be new. And in the unknown he sensed an aphrodisiac that he had not before pondered upon.

Connor interrupted his thoughts as he walked. The sound of his wife’s prayers droned on through the air.

‘Lady Grace is very devout…’

‘She’ll need to be to survive Belridden.’

Irritation rose to a newer level at the continued and fervent incantations and when Grace Stanton finally came up behind him he did not even try to hide his displeasure.

‘I came to a-a-apologise,’ she stated quietly. ‘A-a-and to say that I was j-j-just trying to h-help you.’

‘Help me?’ Her small smile of agreement incensed him further. ‘Help me?’ he added again as he watched her nod, incredulity replacing wrath. Did she have no idea at all as to the consequences of her behaviour? Another darker thought skimmed across the first one. Was she bating him?

His arm throbbed. His keep was still far off and beside him stood a woman who had neither the intellect nor the inclination to understand his anger. When his fingers shot out to lace around her wrist, he could not find it in him to lessen the bleakness of his tone.

‘You are my wife by the edict of David, King of the Scots. Do nothing more to annoy me. Do you understand that?’

He felt certain that the fright in her eyes would allow her to think about the precariousness of her situation and to mould her behaviour into an appropriate response.

‘No, I do not q-q-quite.’

Amazement at her effrontery left him speechless.

‘It is my d-d-duty as your w-wife to p-p-protect you, too.’

His bitter laughter was loud as he removed his hand. ‘You are here to provide Belridden with an heir, nothing else. And protection is my domain. I do not require any such thing from you.’

As she turned away, he saw that her hand no longer threaded through the ornate rosary beads.

Chapter Four

Her husband of two days was looking across at a woman standing to one side of the room. A woman with flaxen hair, her blue eyes meeting his in a complicity that even at this distance was unmistakeable. For just a moment Grace felt a quick thud of envy, but she pressed it down. For her to presume love from a man like the Laird of Kerr was foolish and completely unreasonable.

He had a mistress, a beautiful mistress, and when he walked across and kissed her soundly in front of everyone in the Great Hall, Grace knew exactly her position here.

She was a breeding wife, the provider of money and an heir. Not a lover or a friend, but a woman to beget progeny. Lawful progeny. Boys who would some day take on the mantle of this place and make it stronger. War and fighting and reiving were the life-blood of the Borderland keeps after all, and she swallowed back singular disappointment.

Belridden mirrored the sudden coldness she felt inside, showing no glimmer of any redeeming feature in the draughty and ill-kempt hall. The wind whistled in through wooden shutters and the rough sleeping mattresses littering the floor had not been cleared away. Half-eaten food scraps and mangy dogs lay beneath a high table that had neither linen on it nor tapestries behind it. Impoverished and meagre, Belridden stood like a sentinel on the very last edge of civilisation. The rolling green pastures of Grantley, the manor house with its garderobes and its luxury and an ease of both language and weather seemed so far away in this unfamiliar and uneasy landscape.

She shook her head, seeing in that moment how appealing her dowry must have been to a laird struggling with day-to-day expenses. Nothing here looked as if it had been attended to for decades. Even the occupants inside the keep looked ragged, their simple tunics and shifts dotted with repairs. She saw in their covert glances just exactly what they thought of her. Nobody smiled. Nobody welcomed her. Nobody hid the knowledge of her place here or sheltered her from the fondling of the Laird and his mistress, the woman’s arms now full along the rise of Lachlan Kerr’s buttocks.

She had been fooling herself on the journey north that this alliance could be anything more than a simple union of need—his need of legitimate heirs and her need of a husband. Any sort of husband given her advanced years. Even the brother of a man she had loathed.

Taking in a breath, she swallowed back panic. Lachlan Kerr’s ring on her finger denoted ownership in a circle of promise and submission and any ill-timed rebellion now could ruin things completely. In children she might find great happiness, and surely in the sharing and shaping of young lives some common ground could be formed.

His hand at her elbow surprised her.

‘If you follow me, I’ll show ye where you’re to sleep.’ The woman he had fondled watched from the other side of the room, warning in her eyes as their glances met. With dignity Grace smiled, hoping to give the impression of an airy unconcern even as she hid her shaking fingers in the generous train of her woollen dress.

Lachlan Kerr signalled his men to pick up her possessions and turned towards a door she had not noticed before. Lifting her skirts to avoid the hem being stained further, Grace was surprised by the breadth of a tower and by the warmth of a cosy solar off a hallway. A fire burned in a large grate, a coiled rush mat on the ground before it. To one end was a raised cubby with a mattress spread on wooden slats and covered in an intricate green-and-red cloth. A footstool, a table and a sturdy oaken chair completed the furniture.

When the men placed her things on the floor and departed, Lachlan Kerr closed the door behind them.

Alone. A silence widening with possibility. When he reached out and laid his hand across the swell of her bosom, the clench of her teeth worried the soft flesh on the inside of her mouth.

Blood. She tasted it and swallowed, keeping still as his fingers wandered down to the curve of her hips and the line of her bottom. Through the fine cloth of her gown her skin burned and her heartbeat, already quickened, doubled its pace yet again.

When he laughed and moved back, she felt the blaze of embarrassment more forcibly than she ever had before.

‘I will take ye tonight after supper. A woman will be sent to see to your needs.’

His voice was deep and she saw in his eyes the unmistakable flare of sex, and the sharp rush of prescience almost made her faint.

Beat, beat, beat.

Blood in her throat and in her stomach and in a place between her legs where there had only ever been stillness.

I will take you tonight. A duty. An insignificant thing. After supper.

‘I th-th-th-think th-th-that w-w-we sh-should w-w-wait.’

‘Wait for what?’ he returned with impatience even as he opened up the portal to leave.

For love. For softness. For the blossoming of feeling and hope and promise. She shook her head as the words rushed around in her mind and watched the easy way he left her, his thoughts on other obligations that waited outside.

Standing perfectly still she reached one hand across her breast just as he had, the quick thrill of ardour returning, bold with thoughts of something she did not comprehend. Imagining. Skin against skin. Her eyes flew open and all the pleasurable feeling exited in one single rush. Her hand went to her damaged leg, the knots of red-welted scars overlaid with pearl. She was a flawed wife.

Peg-leg. Ugly. Red-head. She scratched at the creases of skin at her elbows as she contemplated options. The children at Grantley had been told to be kind as she was growing up, though many a boy had not heeded the special advice given about how to handle the withdrawn and newly orphaned thirteen-year-old Grace. Their taunts still pierced her equanimity sometimes, a reminder of reality when her mind took her on other journeys of wishful thinking.

Would she be able to stay in her clothes for this ‘taking’? Could the expanse of skin between her ankle and her knee be enough for a man like Lachlan Kerr to dwell on before he laid his seed on her stomach? Grace frowned and wondered where this seed would go next. Without a mother, and as the oldest of the female cousins, she had had no one to ask about the proprieties of marriage and its expectations. Of course she knew children were a product of this thing that a married couple did after marriage, but the mechanics of a swollen belly as a result of ‘the act’ eluded her. She had tried to ask Stephen of it once, but he had not answered, avoiding her company until he left again for London. So she had desisted from further questions, reasoning that, as an ageing and plain woman, she might never need to know the answer anyway.

Until today. Until the hours that led to supper, suspense vied with dread in a very even measure.

Lachlan cut into his rondel dagger with the flat side of a water stone, angling the blade so that the full bite of it was in contact, and rubbing till a burr began to form. Testing the sharpness to see if the edge grabbed, he cursed as the honed blade slid into the soft base of his right thumb.

He swore roundly, before placing down both stone and blade and wiping blood against the linen of his long shirt. He felt keyed up, nervous almost, the fear he had seen in his wife’s eyes somehow…important.

Could this be her first time? At twenty-six! Lord, the whole idea unnerved him. He had been less than half her age when the fifteen-year-old daughter of a French knight had asked him into the deserted tack room of her father’s stables and showed him exactly what it was he had been missing. When their illicit affair had been discovered, he’d been hauled off to the battlefield of Vironfosse in Vervins with Philip the Sixth, his back tanned with the sharp end of a whip and the sure-fire knowledge that he would never bed an unmarried girl again. And he hadn’t.

He frowned. He would bed Grace Stanton and hope that issue would be forthcoming quickly.

The ghosts of the past quietened under his plans and, digging into his sporran, he found his brother’s ring and turned the rubies into the light. Remembering.

Ruth. His first wife! He had taken this very ring from her finger as she had been buried in the consecrated ground beside the chapel because he had not uttered a word.

Not one.

And the secrets that simmered beneath the liturgy of honour and esteem and integrity spoken at her burial had remained untold because of the baby, her skin marked close with blue veins. The bastard progeny of his brother and stillborn, as if God in all his omnipotence had smote her breathless.

Hannah. He had called her that after his mother, because she had needed at least a name. Grinding his teeth together, he stood. Time should have leached some of the pain but it had not, and when Malcolm had been killed his violently uttered oaths had brought him Grace Stanton.

God, what irony was there in that, he asked himself and went to stand at the window, pulling back a sheath of leather and staring out. The sun was low, falling behind the Cheviots on its journey west. Night time. Almost. The thought of his new wife readying herself for him was surprisingly arousing. Erotic, even. He had instructed his housekeeper to make certain that she bathed, a custom he had adopted daily since his first sojourn into Acquitaine. He hoped that she would not be adorned with too heavy a nightdress. He hoped that her hair would be down. But most of all he hoped that she would not share the trait of Ruth, her sullen inertness at the whole process of lovemaking a decided inhibitor to any enjoyment.

The sun fell now into the darkening dusk, turning the surrounding countryside into hidden shadow. Taking breath, he released it carefully. He felt suddenly like a young boy, the pull of lust strong in his blood.

How would he take Grace? Quick and hard or slow and soft? Up to him. Completely. The flesh between his legs swelled as an unwanted power, all the old betrayals surfacing. He did not want a wife to worry about. He did not want a spouse to watch over to determine if her conscience was clear or not. He did not want the fetter of trust laced again around him, its tethers pulling tighter and tighter with the passing of time.

If she hated him, all this would be so much easier. He would have her as a wife in name only, to ripen with his children and hold her own counsel. Already he could see how those in his castle had turned against her and he had made no move to make it different. Nay, Grace Stanton with her fire-red hair and her stutter would bear his children and ensure his lineage. That was all.

‘Sheas,’ he muttered into the silence. At thirty-three he was too damn old for all this nonsense. Too old to try to mend what was broken, and lust was such a fleeting companion.

Chapter Five

Grace sat on the chair beside her bed and waited. She had dismissed the woman sent to help her dress a good half an hour earlier. The offered bath had been a wonderful surprise and she felt cleaner than she had in days, despite redressing in her sturdy day gown.

When would Lachlan Kerr come demanding her wifely obligations? She guessed it to be some time after the hour of ten and wished that she had the bravery to blow out the row of candles on the table and bar the door, the slats on this side well hewn and heavy. But if she did that it would only be delaying everything until the morrow and she suddenly wanted what it was that would happen now done, so that she could wake in the morning with at least some knowledge of what she faced…for the rest of her life.

Footfalls outside had her tensing, and, tilting her head, she listened to the sound of voices.

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