The Knight Read online

  Randolph wouldn’t be the only kinsman vying for Bruce’s favor.

  James’s rivalry with Sir Thomas Randolph, Bruce’s nephew who’d been rising in the king’s estimation since James had captured him from the English and brought him back into the Scottish fold, had intensified of late. They were always trying to best each other on the battlefield or whatever mission the king gave them. The king encouraged it because it helped him in his efforts to retake his kingdom. Aye, Randolph was a thorn in James’s backside. He should have left the blighter with the English.

  James couldn’t marry Joanna. He was the Lord of Douglas—dispossessed or nay—and she was his vassal’s daughter, for Christ’s sake! Marriage was a political alliance. A tool. One of the best means he had of advancing his family. It had nothing to do with his personal feelings. Hell, that’s why men had lemans. A wife was a duty; Joanna would be his happiness and his heart. How could she not understand that?

  He raked his fingers through his hair, not knowing what to do, what to say. He gazed down at her face, and his chest burned, as if each breath of air he drew into his lungs was heavy with acrid smoke. He didn’t want to hurt her. Christ, hurting her was the last thing he wanted to do. He loved her.

  He cupped her cheek in his hand. Her skin felt like ice. Usually, she would nuzzle into his touch, but she stood perfectly frozen, staring up at him as if seeing him for the first time. As if he’d just betrayed her in the worst possible way and destroyed her faith in him.

  A chill ran through him. His heart raced. If he didn’t know better, he’d say he was in a panic. “Jesus, Jo, don’t look at me like that. I can’t marry you—even if I wanted to.”

  She flinched as if he’d struck her. “Even if you wanted to?”

  He swore. “That isn’t what I meant. Of course I want to.” He did, he realized. But personal desires had nothing to do with marriage. “But I am not a peasant, bound only by the dictates of my heart. I have a duty to my family as lord. I must marry to restore the wealth and prestige of Douglas. Surely you can see that?”

  “But we made love. I gave you my innocence.”

  James cringed inwardly. Her words shattered the wall of glass he’d built around his guilt. What the hell could he say? It was wrong? He’d been helpless to resist? There were no words he could muster in his defense. “You wanted to give yourself to me. I thought you understood what that would mean.”

  It took her a moment to figure out what he meant, but when she did, the look of horror in her eyes cut him to the quick. “A leman. God in heaven, you never meant to marry me.” It was a statement, not an accusation, but it still felt like one. She folded her hands over her stomach as if he’d just kicked her. “How could I have been so foolish? I thought…” Her voice choked. “Oh God, I thought you loved me.”

  The tears shimmering in her eyes as she looked up at him ate like acid in his chest. He reached for her again, but she jerked away.

  “I do love you,” he insisted. “This has nothing to do with how we feel for each other.”

  His words fell on deaf ears. She shook her head in disbelief, her eyes never leaving his face. “Thom was right about you. I didn’t want to believe it. I defended you.”

  James stiffened at the mention of his old friend and boyhood companion. Their friendship had come to an abrupt end a handful of years ago when James realized Thom’s feelings for James’s sister, Beth. The blacksmith’s son reached too high. But it was more than that. It was the scorn and disapproval in the other man’s eyes that rang loud and clear every time their path’s crossed. Thom didn’t make it a secret that he didn’t approve of the way James was making a name for himself. But James didn’t give a shite about his old friend’s approval. Thom knew nothing about the duties and responsibilities of a lord.

  James’s fists clenched at his side. “MacGowan has been trying to turn you away from me for years. What the hell did he say?”

  “That you would never marry me. That your ambition would not permit it. That it didn’t matter what happened between us or whether—”

  He grabbed her arm, not letting her finish. “Christ, you told him?”

  Why did the knowledge that MacGowan had learned what they’d done make it feel infinitely worse? James could almost hear his old friend’s condemnation. His fingers bit into his palms as his muscles flexed and fists clenched even tighter. What the hell did a blacksmith’s son know about honor?

  More than you. He pushed the voice away. He’d never meant for this to happen, damn it. He thought she’d understood.

  She lifted her chin; she alone had always been immune to his temper. “He guessed. But why should you care? You intended to make me your whore, or did you not think people would realize what it meant when you built me a ‘palace’ and surrounded me with bastards? Our babe will be a bastard.”

  He pulled her toward him angrily. “Don’t talk like that. Don’t make it sound ugly.”

  “It is not me who makes it sound ugly, James, it is ugly. Whore. Fornicator. Adulterer. Bastard. What else do you call it when you take one woman to wife and set up another as your concubine?”

  “I call it trying to make the best of a complicated situation. I call it doing what is necessary so that we can be together. What the hell would you have me do?”

  Her eyes held his for a long time. He thought she was beginning to understand until she said, “I would have you be the honorable man I thought you were for my whole life. I’d have you understand that what you have offered me, what you planned for us, is more impossible than marriage. I would have you love me enough not to even ask the question.”

  His mouth thinned. “It isn’t that easy, and you know it. I have a responsibility and duty, damn it.”

  “Is it duty that drives you or ambition? Have you not achieved enough? You are one of King Robert’s greatest knights, and he will reward you as such. Is it Douglas that seeks more or is it James?”

  His eyes narrowed. He wasn’t used to her talking to him like this. She sounded like MacGowan. “They are one and the same.”

  “Are they?” Guileless blue eyes peered into his with far too much understanding. “Nothing will bring him back, James. Nothing will change what was done to him.”

  A hot ball of emotion burned in his chest and throat at the mention of his father. “Don’t you think I know that? But I made him a promise. I swore I would do anything to see the Lords of Douglas restored to greatness. And that is bloody well what I intend to do. Don’t try to stop me, Jo.”

  Joanna’s heart was breaking. The man she thought she knew didn’t exist. She’d given her love to an illusion, a myth, a legend that he was sure to become.

  Here was the “Black Douglas” the English whispered about, the ruthless, uncompromising warrior who had led a campaign of destruction and terror in the English-held Borders. She’d seen hints of this man over the years but had never thought that ruthlessness would be directed toward her.

  How many times had she made excuses for him? Told herself the James she knew was different from the one on the battlefield? She knew the dragons of his past that James fought. Understood the toll his father’s cruel death in an English prison, stripped of everything and left to starve and perish from his wounds, had taken on him. She’d been there the day the then eighteen-year-old James had returned from the English court after being publicly humiliated by King Edward.

  At the urging of William Lamberton, the bishop of St. Andrews, James had petitioned Edward for the return of his lands and offered his allegiance. But upon learning his identity as the “son of the Douglas traitor,” Edward had lapsed into one of his famous Angevin tempers, spewing a vicious public diatribe against the upstart Douglases, who were no more than peasants in lords’ robes. Telling James he wasn’t fit to wipe his arse or clean his garderobe. The “Lord of the Garderobe” he’d dubbed him. James had been forced to flee for his life. It had been a stinging blow to his then youthful pride.

  She understood the dark shadows of vengeance t