Lisbon (43 page)

His cool response chilled her a little. She looked away, toward one of the stalls. “Ah, there are some peaches from Alcobaca—you must try one, Tom, they are delicious.”

She, in her apricot gown with her peach-bloom cheeks, looked more delicious to Tom than any peach, but he bit into an Alcobaca peach to please her. “Have you been happy, Charlotte?” he asked softly.

She looked away, not meeting his gaze. “Sometimes.” She pushed away thoughts of her miserable life with Rowan. “But what of you, Tom? Where have you been all this time?”

“In the Bahamas mostly. I slipped back into my father’s trade. It has its ups and downs.”

His fathers trade of piracy
—
oh, he must have hated that.
Her heart went out to him.

“Take me somewhere and tell me about it,” she said steadily.

With alacrity Tom found a nearby inn, and over coffee in a comer of the low-ceilinged common room, Charlotte considered him. Now, on closer inspection, she could see that although his scarlet coat was fashionable, the seam of one cuff was pulling apart, the brave gold braid was a trifle tarnished, and one of the brass buttons was missing. Plainly no woman was looking after him, she thought with a catch in her heart.

She studied him yearningly as she stirred her coffee, drinking him in. Light poured over him through a small-paned window beside her, showing him to be even broader of shoulder than she remembered, deeper of chest. His eyes, though, were just the same, steady, brilliant as emeralds, and as startling against the bronze of his tan as was the sudden flash of his even white teeth when he smiled. The same casual jauntiness she recalled so well still clung to him. But there was a rakish look to him now, 
a cynical worldliness that made him seem older than his years. There was a new scar on his cheek—Charlotte did not need to be told it had been made by a sword or cutlass. She resisted the urge to trace its short length with gentle fingers.

"How did you come by your scar, Tom?”

He shrugged. "I think I told you I was never cut out for the trade, Charlotte. We were cruising Bahamian waters and having indifferent luck when we chanced on a small merchantman foundering off the eastern coast of Cat Island. We got her people and her cargo aboard before she sank, and by nightfall our crew was drunk on stolen rum. One of the passengers we'd rescued was a beautiful girl. ” Charlotte felt a twinge of jealousy go through her. "Despite our captain s promise to ransom her unharmed, around midnight our first mate”—his somber voice recalled the size of that great hulking brute—"decided to take her to his bed. ” His jaw tightened. "By force. I stopped him—with six inches of steel through his heart. But not before he raked me with his knife.”

"What happened to the girl?” wondered Charlotte.

"I was guarding her when a storm came up in the night. As I said, our crew was dead drunk, and we broke up on a reef off Eleuthera. Everybody drowned—it was a miracle that the girl and I got through.” Not quite a miracle—he could remember nearly drowning himself as he plowed through crashing waves dragging her senseless form with him. He could remember sagging down with her, battered and half-dead, upon the wet sand of a strange beach . . . he could remember the gold he found the next morning, washed ashore in a wooden box that had broken open and deposited gleaming coins across the sand. And that was the gold that had brought him to England, and now had brought him here. . . .

But Charlotte was interested only in the girl, alone with Tom in a tropical paradise.

"This girl you saved, was she . . . grateful, Tom?” she asked ironically.

Tom gave her an amused look. "Not very. Mistress Prudence was a spoiled schoolgirl returning to Spanish

Town, Jamaica, where her father was a planter. She blamed me for everything—the storm, the sea, the breakup of both ships.” He began to laugh. “I managed to salvage food from the wreck, and I rigged up a boat of sorts from the debris that washed ashore and sailed us to a port where I could send her back to her father. ” Some of those golden coins had gone to that. . . . “And I realized then that the trade wasn't for me, never had been. So I didn't go back.”

He hadn't cared about the girl after all! Charlotte felt unreasonably heartened.

“Out of the trade you may be.” She smiled. “But with that scar, Tom, you still look like a brigand!”

His answer was flippant. “Call me, rather, an opportunist.''

No . . . Charlotte had married one of those. And now she was wiser about men. This dangerous-looking fellow across from her wasn't that. She cocked her head at him. “Perhaps a rake,” she suggested humorously.

Tom laughed. A laugh that had lost its bitter tinge, gone suddenly young and carefree. Just as his heart had rebounded with joy on seeing her again.

She leaned toward him, serious again. “But I do not understand how you escaped, Tom. I
saw
Russ kick you over the edge of the crag as you lay unconscious on the rim.”

He watched her face go white as he told her how he had lain on a ledge some twenty feet below the rim, how he had shouted himself hoarse, how he had weakened, how he had despaired of ever escaping the trap into which he had fallen.

“Oh, Tom!” Charlotte's voice came in a soft sorrowful rush. “You are telling me I left you to your death!”

“Not you,” he said quickly, his big hand closing warmly over hers. “For you didn't know.” She looked so shaken that he was afraid she might faint.

As the truth of what had happened that night on Kenlock Crag surged over Charlotte, the depths of the trap into which she herself had fallen appalled her. Rowan had lied to her, maneuvered her every step of the way. “Arranger” that he was, he had arranged that she would fall willingly 
into his arms. In that moment she hated herself for being such a blind fool, a pawn of his masterly game—and a wave of impotent fury at Rowan for his callous deception engulfed her.

But to Tom, even as he worried over the effect all of this was having on Charlotte, this was a moment of triumph. It had wounded him deeply that she would so soon forget, but now he knew why she had so quickly wed. They had deceived her into thinking him dead! His lady had not forgotten him after all. The thought floated by on bright wings. It was easy now to tell her about the days when he had not cared what happened to him, about the long nights at sea without her. Listening, swept up by him, by his nearness, by the love she had always borne him, Charlotte tried to force herself to remember that she had another life now which did not include Tom—and found she could not.
Tom
was her very life.

She moistened her lips, tried to control the emotions that surged through her.

“What brings you to Portugal, Tom?”

He looked deep into her eyes and told her the truth. “I came seeking a lady,” he said. “A lady who had left England, it seemed, even as I arrived.”

Charlotte stared at him.
That
was why Rowan had taken her to Portugal so suddenly! Oh, he might very well be on a mission—who ever knew with Rowan? But he had brought her along to Lisbon so she would not meet Tom!
That
was the news old Conway had brought him back at Aldershot Grange that had changed his mind!

And that accounted too for Rowan’s strange moods, for the callous violence of his lovemaking—he was jealous!
Of Tom!

Pain must have racked her face at that moment, for Tom leaned forward. “What’s the matter, Charlotte?”

“Nothing. ” She made a slight gesture as if to brush away cobwebs. “I am honored, Tom, that you came seeking me.”
But it is too late
,
too late.

“And found you, more desirable than ever. Rowan Keynes is a lucky man, Charlotte. You would fill a man’s life.”

 “Not Rowan’s,” she said bitterly, stirring her coffee.

“Oh?” He looked up alertly. “You are not happy, then?” She thought of last night's hurtful lovemaking, of this mornings insults. “No, I am not happy,” she admitted huskily.

His big hand still covered hers, warm and protective. “I have never stopped loving you, Charlotte, not for a moment. And the day came that I had to see you again, to know how you were, to make sure you were all right. On that day I sailed for England.”

“Oh, Tom.” Her voice was choked.

“I know you have another life now.” He spoke gravely. “And I would not take it from you. But if there is ever aught that I can do . . . ”

Oh, there is, there is. You could take me in your arms, you could make my heart whole again!

“I cannot ask you to the house,” she said. “Rowan would hear about it and he is wildly jealous of me. Scarcely can I speak to a man that he does not rush me away somewhere. I am sure that the reason he brought me to Portugal is that he heard that you were back in England.

“Then I am endangering you—something I would not do.”

He looked about to rise from the table and depart from her life again—
oh, not yet, not yet!

“Rowan has left the city, ” she heard herself say. “He will be gone a week or longer.”

She saw his eyes kindle and his hand on hers tightened. “Then we might . . . see something of each other?” Charlotte looked at Tom. The world fled away. . . . “Hire a coach,” she said. Her voice was almost harsh. “We will stop by the house and I will tell Wend . . . Oh, I do not know wbat I will tell her, but something. We will go south, Tom, across the Tagus toward Setubal. It is a land of sand dunes and orange groves and little villages crowned by ancient castles. ”
A land for lovers .    .

His eyes were alight and his hand held hers in a grip that almost hurt. “It is more than I hoped for,” he said hoarsely.

And more than 1 should dare. . . .
But there was a madness in her today, a restless longing that would not be 
brooked. Tom s return was a dream come true, a wonderful impossible dream. A wondrous flower-stitching in the plain weave of her days. She knew herself to be hopelessly entangled in Rowan’s web, held fast by her children, who must have a settled home and grow up decently. But that lurking knowledge was submerged in the joy of having found Tom again. She knew it could not last, she knew that Tom would go away once more, out of her life, this time forever. But oh, what fate would be so unkind as to deny them these few precious hours together, hours that must last through a lonely lifetime without him?

Tom hired a coach and they went directly to the house in the Portas del Sol. Charlotte ran in, looking radiant. As she was throwing some night things and a change of clothes into a bag, Wend came in.

“You are leaving him?” Wend asked sharply.

“No,” said Charlotte.
Although God knows 1 would like to!
“I have run across some old friends, the Milroyds. They have invited me to stay with them for a while.” And in response to Wend's puzzled look, “I will be gone only a couple of days, Wend.”

Wend's puzzled look followed her as she left, running downstairs to get into the coach with Tom.

“Was everything all right?” He was concerned.

“Yes.”
I
 
have covered my tracks, Tom. 1 am about to do what I thought never to do—break my marriage vows.

It was very silent in the coach. Too moved to speak, Tom took her in his arms.

The world fled away, and Charlotte was seventeen again and deep in love. . . .

At the Tagus River they dismissed their coach as too cumbersome. They crossed the Tagus by ferryboat, hired a cart, and meandered unencumbered into the unspoiled countryside. When they found a fishwife cooking
salmonetes 
or red mullet over a little earthenware pot, keeping the charcoal aglow by wafting a straw fan, they stopped to watch, then bought some from her, along with brown bread and a wineskin of
vinho verde.
And lunched upon the fine sand of an empty beach, watching little distant fishing boats bob up and down on the horizon. They spoke 
of the time Charlotte had surprised Tom by the waterfall— and laughed, and remembered. . . .

After lunch their cart plunged into the pine woods and they turned olf the road and found a lonely spot where the pine needles were thick underfoot and low branches swept gracefully down overhead like a curtain.

Tom reached down and piled the pine needles thickly. “Will you sit, my lady?” he asked.

Charlotte smiled and sank down with her apricot skirts billowing about her. “Why couldn’t life have been kinder to us, Tom?” she murmured.

“It is being kind to us now,” he said huskily, and took off his coat.

“Oh, Tom ...” She held out her arms in yearning and he went into them, cradling her head in his hand as he bore her gently backward onto the natural bed he had made. The air was fragrant with the scent of pine.

He stroked her hair with a gentleness she had not known for a long time—for Rowan was seldom gentle. He kissed her cheeks, her eyes, her lips, as if he could not believe his luck.

“Charlotte, Charlotte, how I have missed you. ...” His voice was timbred, soft.

Charlotte closed her eyes. She had missed him too. Ah, how she had missed him! She felt his hand, moving delicately among the hooks at the front of her bodice, release her breasts, and gave a little gasp as his left hand cupped her right breast and he bent down to nuzzle its rosy crest with his lips.