Knight of Grace

Sophia James

Литагент HarperCollins EUR

She was his – signed, sealed and delivered! Ordered to marry, his betrothal to homely, timid Lady Grace Stanton was hardly worth the trouble of protest. Yet, despite everything, Laird Lachlan Kerr found there was something about her that was…brave. All his life he had been surrounded by betrayal, and this woman, who believed there was still goodness in him, was special indeed. Grace knew that the safety of her home depended on her betrothal – signed, sealed and delivered!Lachlan’s strength and unexpected care of her were dangerously appealing. She could fall for this man with secrets in his eyes…

Lachlan cursed this ridiculousfarce.

More than twenty years of selfless service to the King, 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.

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.

Sophia James lives in a big old house in Chelsea Bay on Auckland’s North Shore, with her husband, who is an artist, three kids, two cats, a turtle and a guide dog puppy. Life is busy because, as well as teaching adults English at the local Migrant School, she helps her husband take art tours to Italy and France each September. Sophia has a degree in English and History from Auckland University, and she believes her love of writing was formed reading Georgette Heyer, with her twin sister, on the porch of her grandmother’s house, overlooking the sandhills of Raglan.

Previous novels by Sophia James:

FALLEN ANGEL

ASHBLANE’S LADY HIGH SEAS TO HIGH SOCIETY MASQUERADING MISTRESS

KNIGHT OF GRACE

Sophia James

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

KNIGHT OF GRACE

It is 1360 and Scotland is in chaos. King David has just returned to Edinburgh after eleven years of captivity under the English and the vacuum of power created in his absence brings a crisis. While some landowners want to retain their hard-won sovereignty, others side with the English and the claims of those disinherited under Robert Bruce. Border politics is murky, and David himself makes things more difficult when he thinks to cede his crown to the Duke of Clarence, Edward of England’s son. A few honourable men support the concept of a self-determining Scotland, based on the principles of freedom written in the Declaration of Arbroath.

Laird Lachlan Kerr is one of these men…

…we will never on any conditions be subjected to the Lordship of the English. For we fight not for glory, nor riches, nor honours, but for freedom alone, which no good man gives up except with his life.

Words from the Declaration of Arbroath, April 1320, and affixed with the seals of forty Scottish nobles.

Chapter One

August 1360—Grantley Manor, Clenmell, Durham, England.

Lady Grace Stanton watched the man walking towards her. Tall, dark and beautiful.

She had not expected that.

This beauty worried her more than the danger that cloaked him or the distance he wore like a mantle, and when he finally stood before them and the dust of the horses had settled, she schooled her expression and looked up.

He was disappointed. She could see it in his eyes. Pale shadow blue with suspicion simmering just below the surface. Her heart sank and she felt the aching cold of his distrust. With a feigned smile she took his offered fingers into her own, hating her bitten-down nails and the way the red dryness on her skin looked against the brown smoothness of his.

She had been burdened with this complaint for the whole of her twenty-six years. But today at least the skin beneath her eyes was not crusty raw and weeping.

‘Lady Grace.’ He relinquished contact as soon as he had said her name.

‘Kerr.’ Her uncle was the Earl of Ca