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