Submit To The Warrior. Tatiana March

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      Chapter One

      Scotland, Early 1541

      Fury twisted inside Stefan Navarro as he stared at his king. ‘You are offering me a bride who is married to another man?’

      ‘Lady Morag is married now, but I expect her to be a widow after you finish your siege of Stenholm Castle.’ King James dipped the quill in the inkwell and scrawled his signature on the parchment in front of him. ‘I’ll give you a letter approving your betrothal to her. You can insert the date when you know her husband is dead. Do your duty, and the lands will be yours.’

      ‘If I kill the laird, I get to marry his wife?’

      The king leaned back behind the walnut desk. He called to the knights standing guard outside his private rooms at Holyrood Palace to alert them that his guest was about to leave. Then he turned to Stefan. ‘You want a wife who can bring you lands. Although women are allowed to inherit under the laws of Scotland, most noblemen sire sons, who take precedence. I don’t have an unmarried woman with estates to offer you.’

      ‘And you want Stenholm dead,’ Stefan said bluntly.

      The king gave a grim nod. ‘Last month alone, three messengers rode from Stenholm Castle to King Henry’s court. I believe the laird is plotting against me with the English.’

      Stefan hid his unease at the news. Suspicious of mind, distrustful of the nobles, the king had more than once condemned an innocent man. ‘You could be mistaken.’

      King James folded the parchment and threw it across the desk. ‘I don’t care to find out. I want him dead, but I don’t want his vassals in an uproar if he hangs for treason. He must perish in battle, with the honour due to a laird.’

      The doors swung open, and four sentries stepped out to flank the exit, broadswords clanking at their sides.

      ‘Go,’ the king ordered. ‘Send a message to me as soon as the deed is done.’

      Holding on to his anger, Stefan reached down to collect the letter. He didn’t need to ask if the king meant Stenholm’s death, or his marriage to the widow. The king wasn’t interested in his wedding festivities, only in removing the threat of a traitor.

      Stefan shrugged his shoulders. Best to accept life as it was. The bastard son of a Scottish mother and a Spanish father, he’d grown up with hatred. Blood and guts had carved him a position of power in Scotland. The King’s Arrow. People said King James dispatched him when he wanted to shoot an enemy through the heart, although in truth the name owed its origin to the pair of crossed arrows that decorated his battle standard.

      Stefan didn’t mind that he had been ordered to deliver death. Killing was a way of life for a soldier, and he did it well. Only this time he wished the king had sent someone else to lay siege to Stenholm Castle.

      Slaughtering a woman’s first husband was not a good way to start a marriage.

      * * *

      Lady Morag knelt before the altar at Stenholm Castle. Her lips moved in a soundless Paternoster, her fourteenth since she’d sunk to the polished flagstones without the benefit of a cushion to ease the strain on her knees.

      Something crashed into the castle wall. The chapel windows rattled. Around her, shards of breaking glass rained to the floor. Lady Morag pinched her eyes shut, but a tear escaped to roll down her cheek. Was it the leaded window that depicted Madonna and the child, or the one of Christ with the crown of thorns? She didn’t want to look, couldn’t bear to see the destruction that the month-long siege had brought to the few things she held dear in life.

      ‘God, please,’ she prayed. ‘Let me be the target of a well-aimed arrow. Let the roof cave in and crush me. Let me leave this world of suffering and ascend to heaven.’

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