Lady with the Devil's Scar

His arm ached, small prickles of it in his chest and neck, the water she helped him sip tainted with a herb he did not know the name of.

The door held a key in the lock and there was rope in the shelf of a small cabinet. A fine woollen cloth hung on the wall by the bed. All things he could use to escape if he needed to he thought. But not yet. The weakness in him was all consuming and the dizziness took away his balance.

‘You need to get stronger,’ she said and her tone was angry. ‘For my protection has its limits, Marc’

Marc felt his lips tug up at each end. Not in humour, but in the sheer and utter absurdity of it all. God, when had he ever depended on anyone before and how many thousands had always depended on him? She had the way of his name, too. The fever, he supposed, loosening his tongue in the heat of swelter.

‘They would kill me here? Your people?’

She nodded. ‘For a lot less than you would imagine.’

‘And you? Are you compromised because of it?’

When she did not answer he swore, the night in the forest coming back to him. Lifting his right hand, he motioned to the wound.

‘Your blood and mine?’

‘The spirit of guardianship must be honoured in the proper way. It is written.’

‘A useful knowledge, that.’

‘You speak as if you do not believe it.’

‘Believe?’ Turmoil and battle were all he had known for a long time now. But Isobel smelt of fresh mint and soap and something else he could not as yet name. He closed his eyes so that he might know it better, every sense focusing on the part of his skin where her hair brushed against him, soft as a feather.

Hope!

The word came down with all the force of a heavy-bladed falchion—he who had led armies for the king against the great enemies of France for all the years of his life. Trusting no one. Guarding any careless faith.

It was the sickness, perhaps, that made him vulnerable or the mix of her blood against his own, inviting exposure.

He wondered just what she would do if she knew who he truly was and pressed down the thought.

Just now and just here. A room in a keep above the sea, its buttressed walls holding in a danger that it had long tried to keep without. He closed his eyes to stop her from seeing what he knew lay inside him, fermenting in the deceit, and was glad when she left the room.

She had seen the look in his eyes and needed to think. Seen the danger and the menace and the hidden knowledge of threat. Not to her though, she thought, as she went down the stairs, the heat of his fever imbued into the very tissue of her skin. She had locked the door and taken the key to keep the others out.

Safety again. For him.

Turning the silver band on her finger, she remembered the man who had put it there. Gentle. Manageable. Alisdair had railed against her father’s strong denial of David’s right in managing his kingdom and had warned him of the pathway fraught with danger that he would tread should he demand authority of the Dalceann tracts.

All his warnings had come to pass, save the one of losing his own life while in the process of trying to change her father’s mind.

She swore beneath her breath. ‘Listen to your heart, Isobel,’ her husband had said time and time again as they had lain in their curtained bed above the storms thrown in from the churning German Sea. ‘King David’s Norman education is changing everything in Scotland and only those who can change with it will survive.’

Slapping one hand against her thigh, she leaned back against a wall. Solid and cool, it steadied her.

Alone.

God in Heaven, why should such aloneness today be any worse than usual?

It was because of this outlander.

It all came down to him. His skin beneath her fingers as she wiped his brow. His breath against her face when she leaned in close, eyes of deep clear green shored up by carefulness.

His body marked by war and battle. She had told no one that!

Neither had she disclosed the silver ring she had found buried deep in the pocket of his gilded surcoat and engraved with the royal mark of King David.

Another day and she would have him gone. She swore it on the soul of Brighid, the Celtic Goddess, the keeper of the sacred hearth and the patroness of women.

Isobel Dalceann came back to him as the sun fell low against the window and she brought a mash of sorts with bread soaked in milk. He ate it as if it was his very last meal and felt stronger.

‘Thank you.’

Again. It seemed of late he had been indebted to this woman time after time.

Waving away the words, she countered with her own question. ‘Are you one of David’s men?’

She had found the ring, he supposed. He should have tossed it when he had the chance, but the piece held a value to him that was sentimental and he had not wanted to.

‘Once I was,’ he replied.

‘And now?’

‘It has been a while since I was in his company.’

She moved back and he knew he had erred.

‘You knew him, then, personally.’

The furrow on her brow deepened. Thinking. He could almost see her brain turn.

‘My mother was from the House of Valois in Burgundy. David of Scotland gave me the ring when he lived there.’

‘Under the protection of Philip the Sixth?’

So she knew her politics. He nodded.

‘You are a friend of the king’s, then?’ The words fell into the silence of the room, the talk marking him off as … what?

When she breathed out heavily he knew she had not wanted this truth. A simple soldier or sailor would have been so very much easier to deal with. Still, in the face of all her assistance he found it difficult to lie.

‘Many here at Ceann Gronna have already died under the guise of David’s ambitions.’ Her voice was flat and hard.

‘And I can promise you that I should not wish to bring one other person here harm.’

She swore again at that, a ripe curse that was better suited to a man. The lad’s hose were tight against the rise of her bottom and despite his sickness he felt his body react.

‘If I was braver, I would slit your throat as surely as you wanted to slit Ian’s.’

‘What stops you, then?’

‘This,’ she answered and leant down into him, her mouth running across his lips. Not gently, either, but with a full carnal want that left him reeling. He felt her bite his bottom lip before her tongue probed, felt the sharp slant of desire and the fierce pull of lust. Felt her fingers on his face and throat and then on his nipples pinching, the rush of hunger acute. When she had finished she moved back, wiping the taste of him away with the top of her uninjured hand.

‘There is not much to hinder the path of a woman taking a man.’ Her eyes went to the stiff hardness that was so very easily seen through the thin linen cloth covering him.

‘Men hold to the premise of self-satisfaction far more than any woman is likely to, you see. A small caress here, a whisper there, the cradling of flesh between clever fingers …’

Hell, she was a witch. He looked away because every single thing she said was true and because the need to come right then and there before her was overriding.

He had not kissed her back. The knowledge of it ran into her veins and made her step away, his face dim in the shadow. If a man had taken liberties like that with her, she might have killed him, quickly, with the knife she always kept in the leather holder under the sleeve of her kirtle.

But he seemed at home in silence as he waited for her to speak, his palms opened on the bed beside him as if the matter had not compromised him in the very least.

Perhaps it is the mix of our blood that has tainted me, she thought, as he began to speak.

‘How long ago did your husband die?’

‘Two years ago in the coming spring.’

‘Have you lain with another since?’

The question shocked her because she had counted her many months of celibacy every night since the sea storm.

The very thought of it made her ashamed. A woman who might sacrifice everything for the quick tug of lust. And she knew what obligations kept her here, above the water watching out for her enemies.

She had not forgotten the promise made to her husband the day he had died, the day she had tried to take her father’s arrow from him, embedded in his body.

‘You shall always have my heart, Isobel,’ Alisdair had said, as the blood filled his mouth in bubbles. ‘So could I take yours with me?’

In death he had meant. In the last breaths of thought.

She had laid his hands across her breast above the beat of loss, his fingers long and slender and soft. She could still feel them there sometimes as life had left him, tugging against the ebb of death.

Twenty-one and abandoned to any other hope of passion because those clansmen gathered about her dying husband had all heard his plea and her whispered answer.

‘Yes,’ she had said through the ache of sorrow, every day and every moment she had spent with him imbued in that answer. Until now when another power had turned her, the longing of lust snaking inside deadness. She was glad for the hard measure of this stranger’s cock beneath the cover because at least some part of his body had wanted her in the same way that she had wanted him.

It still stood proud and he made no move to hide it, lying there like an offering he had no mind to give.

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