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
