Knight of Grace. Sophia James

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