Once Tempted (34 page)

No one more outraged than Eurico, his face mottled with madness, his lips flapping in speechless shock.

Caliopa broke their silence with laughter. So brazenly she mocked their folly, her delirious pitch rising to an unholy refrain, that one of the men crossed himself in fear of her and began backing toward the door.

“There is your treasure, Eurico,” she said pointing at the worthless chest. “There is your legacy. Stones and lead. Just like your heart.”

His grip tightened again, and this time Caliopa knew she would never find release. He brought his lips up to her ear. “I return your treasure to you, you traitorous bitch. Look upon it as your final
legacy.
For what you see will be your gravestones.”

And with that, he plunged her out the window and released her. The courtyard below echoed with screams as her people watched her fall to her death.

She hit the rough stones of the courtyard, her body shattering like that of the fragile white queen. But unlike the hollow chess piece, Caliopa’s soul found only freedom in her flight from Eurico.

And a chance to be with her Álvaro forever.

Olivia wiped at the tears falling down her cheeks. Poor Queen Caliopa. She had sacrificed so much and to no avail. “But the treasure, Paco? What happened to Father Mateo and the treasure? Surely Caliopa had given him enough time to escape Eurico’s evil plans?” she asked.

Paco shook his head. “Eurico offered half the treasure to the man who found it. His henchmen swarmed out of Álvaro’s castle like rats, moving southward as if the devil himself carried them. They found Father Mateo in a monastery in Badajoz. But the holy man no longer had the treasure with him. They beat and tortured him to no avail. He would not give up where he had hidden it. Eventually they left him for dead and returned to their leader empty-handed.”

Olivia wiped at more tears. “But the note, the one the priest sent to Wellington to be decoded. How did that come about? Someone must have discovered the treasure.”

“While they thought Father Mateo was dead when they left him, the nuns who came in to prepare his body for burial were stunned to find Mateo still clinging to life. With his final breath he whispered the secret of
El Rescate del Rey
to the Mother Superior, who’d been summoned to his bedside.”

“And she encoded the secret,” Olivia whispered.

Paco nodded. “Aye. Some say she had the sight, others say she was one of the most brilliant women who ever lived. The Moors were already riding north, so she knew there was no hope of saving Álvaro or Spain. At least not in her lifetime. But she knew that when God willed it, the treasure would be discovered, at a time when her homeland faced its darkest challenge. Its most evil invader.”

Napoleon.

Olivia glanced across the flames at Robert. He was watching her, as he had through most of Paco’s story, and she felt herself growing warm under his gaze.

Something had changed between them. Olivia could feel it with a certainty that left her trembling.

Hopefully they would not share the same fate as Caliopa and Álvaro and allow destiny to tear them apart.

And as the other men started to bunk down, Olivia bade them good night and made her way to the empty chamber she’d chosen for her room.

Halfway there, Robert stole up behind her and caught her hand. She didn’t need to look to know it was him, she would have known his touch anywhere. She closed her eyes and waited for the words she longed to hear from him.

Chapter 16

“O
livia, I—” Robert began to say.

She waited, and when he didn’t speak again, she turned around and faced him. She offered him a smile of encouragement.

It was obviously the urging her proud lover needed.

“I’ve been so wrong about you. When I saw Lando’s ring around your neck that night—I should have known. I should have understood what it meant. But I was determined to think ill of you. To hold you at arm’s length. And now I know why.”

She reached out and took his hand. “How is that?”

“When I heard that gunshot last night. When I realized I had left you in danger, I knew the real reason I’d been denying the truth about you. Very simply, because I love you.”

She folded into his arms, relishing the warmth of his body, the steady, welcoming beat of his heart on her cheek.

“I’ve been as mule-headed about this as that infernal Evaline of yours,” he said.

Olivia laughed. “At least Evaline can be coaxed with carrots.”

“Perhaps you should have tried that.” He shook his head. “I made judgments about you, rash ones, ones born out of my anguish over Lando’s death—over what I so willingly accepted as your intimacy and apparent duplicity with Bradstone. If only I’d believed what my gut was telling me instead of listening to all my old hatreds.”

She couldn’t help herself; she shivered. “We’ve both held onto longheld suspicions and foolish dreams.” She glanced up at him, looking into those eyes and seeing now the true depth of his feelings, his belief in her.

The knight errant, the Hobbe of her imaginings could never equal the man before her. Now she knew, understood, that all their foibles, all their shared misunderstandings had been their true enemy, and now together they’d found a way to vanquish this once insurmountable foe.

“I would never have been able to keep my vow to your brother,” she said, “if it hadn’t been for you.” She squeezed his hand. “I’m so glad I waited for my hero. Someone of noble and honorable spirit to restore the treasure to its rightful intent.”

Robert didn’t know if he fit that description. He’d hardly been honorable to her—taking her virginity, kidnapping her, bullying her into helping him. Yet one question remained. “But you did translate it—you gave Bradstone the location, for he set out for Portugal on the first ship leaving London that night.”

Olivia smiled. “I may have translated it for him, but I didn’t give him the right location.”

At this Robert chuckled. “You sent him on a wild-goose chase.”

“In many ways I sent him to his death.” She looked up at him.

Robert heard the self-incrimination in her voice. This was what he loved most about Olivia—her deep-seated sense of honor, of noble integrity. Despite the fact that Bradstone had used her so ill, even murdered her father, she still bore in her heart a sense of guilt over what she believed was her hand in the man’s death. The haunting light of her self-inflicted blame still glowed strong in her eyes, even after seven years.

If anyone should wish Bradstone dead, it was Olivia, and here she was looking at
him,
of all people, for absolution.

For if it had been him there that night in Chambley’s library, he wouldn’t have given a second thought about sending his cousin to his just reward, exacting the pound of flesh owed for Lando’s death.

And yet as he found himself unable to look away from her troubled expression, he knew it was time to put the past behind them. It was the time for them to start a new life together, unhindered by their respective ghosts of culpability, recrimination, and most importantly, hatred.

“I killed him,” she was saying, “as if I had pulled the trigger myself.”

“You did no such thing. Bradstone’s greed is what destroyed him,” Robert told her.

“If only I could forget that night,” she whispered. “You know I can still hear it?”

“Hear what?”

“The gun.”

Robert didn’t need to ask which gun. He kissed the top of her head and wondered just what she had seen that night.

Olivia snuggled tighter into his arms. “You know why I kissed you when you were so ill?”

“No, why?”

She turned her face toward the light of the portal. “I thought you were going to die. I didn’t want to have another man die in my arms.” He felt the chill race through her bones, her grief almost palpable.

“Like Lando?” His own grief, so familiar, so filled with remorse and a need for revenge, took a painful turn as he saw Orlando’s death through her eyes for the first time.

She nodded.

“I never even learned his name,” she said. “The papers just called him a French spy, but he wasn’t. He was Spanish—I knew it that night, though Bradstone tried to tell me differently. But mostly, your brother didn’t deserve what fate held in store for him. He was too young.”

Too young.
Her words ate at him. Orlando had been too young for the mission. But then he’d always been the most serious of the Danvers brothers and had always seemed older than his actual age.

“That night on the ship, you were dreaming of him, of that night, weren’t you?” Robert asked.

Olivia shivered. “Yes. His face has haunted me for years. I hear the shot and see that look of surprise, of anguish, and of failure. You can’t imagine it.”

Robert could. He’d seen that image himself in more nightmares than he cared to count.

It seemed he and Olivia Sutton had more in common than either of them ever realized.

And yet he needed to know more.

Robert steeled himself and asked the one question that had consumed him for seven years. “Did he suffer?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so. When he died, he seemed almost at peace.” Tears welled in her eyes, glistening as they rolled onto her cheeks. Robert brushed at them, catching and releasing them, fervently wishing they’d carry away the last of his own hatred, his own pain.

“I owe him my life,” she whispered. “He saved me from Bradstone. That bullet was intended for me. Once your cousin had his translation, he was ready to consign me to my fate. But Orlando stopped him and died in the process.”

Heroic to the end,
Robert realized. How like his brother to think he could prevent Bradstone’s evil plans all on his own.

Only the devil had been able to give Bradstone his due by sending him to the depths of the Atlantic.

“Robert, you have to believe me, I had nothing to do with his death. If I could have died—”

“Shh,” he whispered into her ear. “That is in the past.”

“Do you believe me?”

Did he? For the last month, he had turned his anger on Olivia. And now she was asking for his forgiveness.

“Yes, with all my heart.” He tipped his head down and sealed his words with a kiss.

Olivia welcomed his lips, his words, as if she had been set free. Now, with the air cleared between them, she knew they would find the same passionate joy that they had found on the
Sybaris.

Only this time it would last a lifetime.

His mouth covered hers, his tongue teasing open her lips. She opened to him, a soft moan slipping from her as his tongue dipped and caressed her own, stroking it, as she knew he would fill her and stroke other parts of her.

He backed her up against the wall, the cool stone a dizzying contrast to the heat of his body. The sturdy, solid presence behind her kept her knees from buckling as he deepened his kiss, his fingers tracing a slow, lazy line over the exposed tops of her breasts.

Another reason she could add to her list of things she liked about this dress.

That and the delicate fabric left her feeling all but naked up against him. A feeling she relished and couldn’t wait to experience again.

His hand plucked at the tie that held the bodice gathered in front, and once he’d freed it, his fingers dipped lower, exploring the shape of her breast, curling around her flesh and moving ever closer to the nipple that was already taut and aching for his touch.

When at last his thumb plucked at the fevered flesh, she pulled her mouth from his and let out a long, hot sigh.

It felt so good to be touched by him.

He took that as an invitation to move south, his mouth starting first at her ear, his teeth nipping at her lobe. “What do you want?” he whispered, while his fingers continued to roll lazy circles over her tight nipple. “What would you have me do next?”

Her thighs tensed, that place between her legs growing wet with possibilities. She wanted him to touch her, she wanted him to kiss her, she wanted him to fill her with his manhood and stroke her to that place that left her breathless and wanting it all over again.

She wanted it all, and she wanted it to last the night.

“Take me in your mouth,” she whispered, her back arching, her breasts rising like an offering.

His arm around her waist tightened, pulling her close, while his head dipped down to take her as she had requested.

When his warm, hungry mouth closed over her breast, she gasped for air, her mouth gaping and struggling to find the air that suddenly seemed to have left the room. The rough, nubby flesh of his tongue washed over her nipple, and she found only joy in his touch. Over and over, his mouth suckled at her, while his tongue lapped and teased her.

All the while, his hand was making much the same motions on her other breast, so that both came alive with longing, while at the apex of her thighs there seemed to be breathless little whispers, uncoiling with passion, clamoring for more, begging for his touch.

She caught his hand and guided it there. “Touch me, please.”

He tugged at her dress, drawing it up from the hem until it bunched around her hips, leaving that heated place open and exposed to the cool night air.

At first his fingers toyed with her, teasing little brushes that barely answered the anguish growing there.

“Is that what you want?” he asked.

She couldn’t speak, she only shook her head, arching her hips toward him.

His mouth slanted in a wicked grin. “I think I know what will help.”

With that he knelt before her, his breath coming in hot intimate waves against her. And then his fingers were there, opening her up to him, to his lips.

She nearly buckled in shock when his tongue began edging her open. Olivia clung to his shoulders for support, her back pressed against the wall.

Over and over his tongue dipped and delved deeper into her, until it found the very source of her pleasure. Slowly he began the same dance he’d started on her nipples, the rough pad of his tongue rolling over her flesh. Her world spun out of control as her body rose up to meet him. She was standing on her tiptoes and felt as if she were being lifted even higher.