Lady with the Devil's Scar. Sophia James

      ‘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.