The Flesh and the Devil (18 page)

         
'I hate you.'

         
The childish riposte was low and shaking, and for a
fraction of a second Tristin's fingers paused in their work. Then he said as
evenly as ever, 'Well, it makes no matter,' and continued with his task without
looking up.

         
Juana wanted to hide her eyes, but somehow her gaze clung,
fascinated: the servant's livery had sheathed the tawny pelt of a lion. The
moonlight trickled over his shape like droplets of water to darken the copper
hair to purple, gleaming on the smooth turn of a shoulder, on the muscle of a
moving arm, on a jutting, narrow hip and down the long, sinewy length of leg.
When he turned to her his voice was a command.

         
'Juana.'

         
'No.' She shook her head feverishly. 'No, no, no. . . .`
She sounded as idiotic as the Duque himself, she thought incoherently.

         
Tristán's hands gripped her and pulled her to her feet, and
she felt him drag the russet gown from her shoulders, stripping her with as
little compunction as if she had been a doll. When she tried to cover her
nakedness he held her hands, moving so close that she felt the hard heat of his
bare skin against hers as if he shielded her modesty with his own body. A
shudder took her as she felt his hands insistent on her hips, and she looked up
to meet his penetrating green gaze.

         
'There will be time enough to see you,' his voice mocked
her, 'but for now I am content to touch, and hear, and taste —'

         
She jerked her head aside to avoid his mouth as he bent,
but he was curving her back over his arm, urging her down towards the bed with
long hypnotic caresses until she lay on her back on the outspread coverlet of
her hair, and his hands were on either side of her face, imprisoning it for his
kiss.

         
She moaned and tried to thrust him away as she felt him
above her, but it was like pushing sun-warmed rock. She had no strength left;
there was nothing but this monstrous weight upon her, cracking her ribs, hair
chafing her bare breasts as she struggled to be free of him. He was trying to
crush her to death, she thought dazedly. If she did not get free, he would kill
her. . . .

         
She was too inexperienced to demur as he drew her thighs
apart, and it was only at the first exploratory touch that a small,
indescribable sound tore itself from her throat. It was this, she thought, this
insolent authority usurping her treacherous body, that she had hated and feared
from the moment she had set eyes on Felipe Tristán.

         
Now there was hardness against her, forcing a yielding that
made her gasp and cry; then within her, painful and inexorable. She moved
futilely, like a shot bird, and then was tremblingly, pantingly still.

         
'Please—' her voice was ragged and breathless with panic —
'please, I cannot. I
cannot!'

         
She opened tear-wet eyes to find him watching her levelly,
as if his mind and emotions had no part in his merciless ravaging of her body.
Then he said in a voice she barely recognized, 'Can you not?' and moved.

         
Her body convulsed, doubling to meet the pain as if she had
taken a lancethrust. She had no knowledge that the instinctive movement jerked
her into a lover's embrace with
the
 
man she hated, only that the arms that held
her were safe and strong, and rocked her as though to soothe away the pain.

         
But the rocking was not soothing at all. It was fire and
ice
 
and raging torrents rushing through
her, and she clung gasping to his broad shoulders as if she feared to lose her
hold.

         
It was an endless time later that she became aware of where
she was. Her face was buried in Tristán's shoulder and the salt taste of his
skin was on her lips; her arms were locked across his back and he was tracing
her curves with a' detached possessiveness that made her shiver. It was only as
she stirred that she realized the rest, and suddenly she was straining against
his hold, every muscle taut with rejection.

         
He held her without effort, letting her exhaust herself,
then said, 'You have only to save my oath if you wish to be gone. I have sworn
not to loose you until you give consent to marry Bartolomé - will you refuse it
now?'

         
The silence ached, and tears spilled unknowingly down
Juana's cheeks. 'Did His Grace have too much honour to stoop to rape?' she
demanded, and her voice cracked before Tristán's lips came down on hers in a
brief, shattering kiss.

         
'You insult my skill,' he retorted and rolled away from
her.

         
A strange sense of loss assailed her suddenly, and to hide
it she snatched at the bedcovers, drawing them round her while he shrugged
himself into his clothes again with the rapid efficiency of a man who has
finished a task and hurries to be done with the last of it. She had been duped,
she realized; he had taken her cold-bloodedly and without any emotion, even
that of lust, as the strategy in another man's battle which he had been hired
to win. And he had won it. She had no choice now but to marry the drooling
idiot they called a Duque, for no other man would take her after such a dishonour.

         
'You are right.' Her eyes were bleak as she stared into the
darkness. Now I dare not cavil at any husband.'

         
He had bent to pick up his discarded shirt, and for a
moment she thought he had not heard her. Then he straightened and turned to her
without a trace of expression on his carved mask of a face, only his eyes
glittering like pale emeralds. 'I have earned my fee, then' was all he said.
'Come, dress yourself, and I shall have the privilege of escorting Your Grace
to your own bed.'

         
CHAPTER 5

         
Juana woke slowly, unable to understand her unwonted
lethargy or why her limbs should feel so heavy, her mind slack and full of the
mists of sleep. She could hear Michaela‘s voice calling her, and someone was
shaking her shoulder, but it was too much trouble to open her eyes.

         
‗Senorita – senorita, are you ill?‘

         
As Juana stirred to shake off the disturbing hand a burning
inward pain jerked her back to full remembrance, and all at once she knew the
reason for this difference in her body, this drugging, sensuous awareness. She
knew, too, why she had been so reluctant to wake to that knowledge, and her
mind cringed from what she could recall of the previous night. Instinctively
she put up a hand to rub her eyes in a gesture that hid her face from
Michaela‘s scrutiny.

         
‗No, I am well enough,‘ she answered, and the words
sounded ironic in her own ears. ‗What is it? Is anything wrong?‘

        
‗It is the letter, senorita, the one you wrote
yesterday to Senor Miguel. It has gone.‘

         
Juana stiffened abruptly and caught back a gasp as the
movement hurt her.

         
‗But it cannot-‗She broke off, her slender
fingers tensing on the sheet. She thought back to her return last night, just
before dawn broke. Tristán had guided her, swaying and dazed, through ways she
did not know; at the last he had picked her up and carried her, and she had
been too spent to resist; with her head lolling against his broad shoulder she
had lain unresisting in his effortless hold while he bore her back into her own
chamber and lay her down on the bed without a word. As he had crossed the room
again she had heard him say sardonically, ‗I will make you a gift of my
sheets for your wedding night,‘ and then ther had been the suond of bolts
sliding softly back, and the door had closed quietly behind him

         
But before that - her mind groped - before her had spoken
to her, there had been another sound. She could recall it now: a faint,
repeated ripping that might have been the sound of a sealed paper being torn
across and across. She must have left it lying on the desk while she debated
how to send it unimpeded, and he had made sure that it would never be sent. A
bitter smile touched her swollen lips.

         
‗It is no matter now, Michaela – I have changed my
mind. I was awake half last night, and I have decided that I cannot disappoint
my father after all – I shall wed the Duque.‘ She braced herself, expecting a
torrent of questions, and was surprised to see the sudden brightening of
Michaela‘s anxious face.

         
‗Truly, senorita? I think you do wisely! I have said
all along that you will never find nobler husband, or one with a finer house or
greater lands. You will see, you will soon forget to think of Senor Jaime.‘

         
As she had in Felipe Tristán‘s bed, Juana thought with
savage self-disgust. Aloud, she said, ‗I do not wish to speak of Senor
Jaime,‘ but the look in her eyes belied the indifferent tone.

         
Michaela gave her a swift, sly look. ‗As you please,
senorita – yet I wonder what has happened that has altered your mind of such a
sudden.‘

         
‗You are impertinent!‘

         
Juana‘s voice was sharp, but there was a trapped look about
her that had dispelled her first languor and excited Michaela‘s curiosity at
once. She had seen an ugly patch of bruising encircling her mistress‘s wrist as
she raised her hand to her, and there were other signs, too. It looked as
though the Duque had taken the soonest and surest was to make certain of his
unwilling bride, she thought; and it was a relief, in a way, that Juana‘s
desire to go back to the quiet of Zuccaro would no longer be in conflict with
her own, which was to stay amid the excitements of Valenzuela.

         
As she about to speak again, Juana said, ‗No matter
for me - what of you last night? Did the red gown do good service?

         
Michaela met the rather feverish stare of her mistress‘s
dark eyes and then pouted, her fleeting compassion lost in a sense of
grievance. ‗No, senorita. He was not there!‘ Her wrongs flooded back to
her, and her voice warmed into indignation. ‗There was any number that I
could have had in his stead – fat-brained churls, most of them – but I waited
until after midnight in the servants‘

         
solar and he never came! In the end I asked what had become
of him and they laughed at me – said that he hardly ever consorts with them in
general, that it was a rare chance that I had seen him among them. He has the
favor of Senor de Castaneda himself, they told me, and he lives more like a
courtier than servingman.‘