The Mercenary Major (18 page)

He swung his left leg over the bench, turning to her and giving her a burning glance that made her forget what she was doing. Her hands reached out to him and clenched on empty air.

“I’ll tie the bandage,” he said. “Thank you, Miss Carr.” He made a quick knot in the cloth over his stomach, stood, and let his shirt fall, covering the bandage.

“Let me . . .” She reached out again with her handkerchief. She could not say
touch you
, though those words came to mind. But she put the corner of the linen cloth to the corner of his mouth, where the cut still bled.

He grabbed her wrist and gently pulled her hand away, drawing a slow breath through his nostrils. “Miss Carr, don’t . . . touch me . . . just now.”

**** 14 ****

J
ack released her wrist and turned his back to her. The ground had shifted under him as it had once on a muddy trail in the Pyrenees, and before he had regained his balance, she had touched him. With complete disregard for the danger in it.

“I beg your pardon,” she said.

Those were the meekest words he’d ever heard from his heiress. His throat tightened. “When you touch me,” he said, “I want to . . . touch you.” Understatement, but he hoped she would not require a full explanation.

“I meant only to tend your wounds.”

He thought of her palm flat against his belly. The cut in his mouth and the fiery stripe across his back pained him less than giving up that touch. He picked up his coat and thrust his arms into the sleeves. He could feel her gaze, but when he faced her, she looked away.

“The trouble is,” he said, buttoning the ruined coat and striving for a conversational tone, “we are unequal in this, too. You would dab your bit of linen against my mouth and stop. I would not.”

She was gathering up her mittens and shawl, and he thought he detected the slightest check in her movements. His pulse leaped in answer, and an earthy, self-castigating Spanish phrase came to mind. He had to get her home to Letty’s, and once he had her safely back in her world, he had to leave her alone. “We’d best go,” he said.

Without looking at him she nodded and moved to stand just inside the door. He restored the lamp and tinderbox to their places and put out the light. Only a few more minutes in this close darkness and the temptation would pass.

He paused at the stable door, turning slightly to tell her they would not step out until he was sure no one had followed them. But she was too near, and his throat closed up on the words. He took a step back. As if she sensed his decision to keep away from her, she said, “We will not do this again, will we?”

“No.” His breathing would not allow any further explanation. He reached for the door.

She asked, “Is it safe to touch you now?”

“Never,” he heard himself say, but her unmittened hand had found and cupped his jaw in the dark, and he turned his mouth into her palm and pressed a kiss to her warm flesh. She gave a little sigh, and it seemed inevitable then that he should grasp her waist, draw her up against him, and kiss her mouth hungrily.

She was making him break all the rules he had set for himself, but the voice in his head spoke, saying,
Live, Jack
, and he let himself go on kissing the girl in his arms, until he was moved to slide his hands below the fringe of her thick shawl to cup her bottom and tilt her body to meet his. She stilled in his arms and broke away from his kiss.

On a ragged breath he said, “
Te quiero
,” allowing himself some release through the Spanish words she could not know.
I want you
.

“I beg your pardon,” she said. “You warned me.”

“A gentleman apologizes,” he answered. “If I were one, I would, but after today, you must see that I’m the Bandit, not a gentleman at all. The only safe course for you is to stay away from me.” Ignoring his protesting flesh, he moved to the door. “Let’s get back to Letty’s.”

With the few coins she had in her pocket they got a hack, and just before they descended, she spoke. “I
will
marry for love.”

Looking up as he handed her down, he said, “Fair enough. I won’t marry for fortune.”

Victoria stared at the dessert table in Lady Nevins’ supper room. Down its length sugar Neptunes rode cockleshells pulled by leaping candy dolphins around islands of bright glazed fruit tarts. The extravagance was staggering.

“How pretty,” said Katie. “Like something out of a myth.”

“Knocks the shine out of Lady Hagwood’s, don’t it?” said Kit Grafton at Victoria’s side. “And more tarts than Alvanley ever serves. A tart for every rake here.”

Sarah Nevins giggled.

Kit lifted one of the surprisingly manly Neptunes from its shell and turned it over in his hand. “What do you admire most, I wonder, Miss Carr?” he asked, fixing on Victoria a gaze apparently intended to give deeper meaning to his question.

What would Jack say?
Victoria thought, and immediately reproached herself for letting the major come to mind. “Lovely,” she murmured.

Sarah Nevins tittered again. “The naked Neptunes were Mother’s idea,” she said. “Though Venus rising on her half-shell might have been more appropriate.” Victoria ignored the girl. Sarah’s mother, it was widely rumored, was enjoying a liaison with an Italian count who had named his yacht in her honor.

Katie came to Lady Nevins’ defense, saying, “Your mother did just right, Miss Nevins, for she has made the sea her theme everywhere tonight.”

Sarah Nevins’ lovely lips curled, and she flashed Kit Grafton a knowing look.

“What do
you
admire most, Lady Katherine, the
mounds
of fruit or the stiff
peaks
of icing?” Kit asked.

Katie’s face blazed a humiliated red, she dropped her gaze, and her fingers clutched her skirts.

“What Katie admires most is . . .” Victoria started to say, then lost her thought as Jack Amberly stepped into their little circle, George Bertram at his side.

“Kindness,” said Jack, finishing Victoria’s thought with a quick glance at her, and gently disengaging one of Katie’s hands from her skirt. “Cousin?” he said. Katie clutched his hand but did not look up. Jack greeted the others coolly, but his gaze did not return to Victoria. She noted that the cut at the corner of his mouth hardly showed.

Apparently, Bertram knew both Kit Grafton and Sarah Nevins. He greeted them warily as if expecting some horrified reaction to his missing arm. At the sound of his voice, Katie lifted her head.

“Captain Bertram, Lady Katherine Faverton,” said Jack.

The blush had hardly subsided in Katie’s cheeks, but in her blue eyes the hurt, confused look had been replaced by one of unfeigned joy. It hit the captain directly and lifted his spirits visibly, like a gust of wind lifting a kite. He smiled idiotically, and turned to Jack. The captain’s eyes said,
Can this be real?
Jack Amberly grinned at Victoria as if they shared the credit for this meeting, and her heart contracted painfully.

“Lady Katherine,” said Bertram, offering his left arm, “would you care to stroll about the ballroom with me?”

Katie nodded.

Jack danced with Miss Nevins, Miss Hagwood, his cousin, both his aunts, and the wives of all of his married friends. He returned to the supper room three times, on the theory that if he did not watch Victoria Carr dance with other men he would not feel such an unreasonable desire to dance with her himself. But she was no less present to his mind in one room than another, and he could not shake a recollection of her touch against his flesh.

At length he resigned himself to endure the view in the ballroom. His heiress was as glittering as the rest of them this night. Her gown was a deep-rose like the sky at dawn on a stormy day. Her shoulders were bare. The thinnest white silk shawl hung low across her back and arms. If he could embrace her tonight, he would trace the lines of her collarbone and kiss the hollows of her throat.

“I told you they were cold, these Englishwomen,” said a low voice at his side. He glanced away from Victoria and found Felicidad at his side.

“Cida, may I have a dance?”

She waved her delicate jet fan and studied him with hard black eyes under kohl-stiffened lashes. “To make your English beauty jealous?” She shrugged. “No.”

“Miss Carr is not my English beauty.”

“Then you should not look at her so that everyone in Lady Nevins’ ballroom can see you want the so beautiful Miss Carr in your bed.”

He laughed grimly. “Sound advice,” he said. “I’ll mend my ballroom behavior and think about sleeping in a soldier’s cold bed.”

“A soldier chooses a warm bed when it is offered, no?”

Jack cocked a brow at her. The black fan stirred the air between them, bringing him the spicy scent of carnations. “You are not offering your bed, Cida. I don’t have your price.”

“Price can be negotiated, Joaquin, and you must go to someone’s bed soon or you will ruin Miss Carr. You cannot take her about London
sin duena
, unchaperoned, like today. It is dangerous. Someone will hear of it.”

Jack stiffened. “How do you know that?” he queried sharply.

“One hears things,” she said. “I could tell you, but not here. You must come to me, Joaquin.”

“Not likely, Cida,” he said. He took her roughly by the arm and propelled her through the crowd and into an alcove behind a stand of ferns.

He backed her up against the wall and blocked any escape. For a minute he wondered if she had bribed someone in Letty’s house to spy on him, but dismissed the idea. Letty’s servants were loyal to a fault. “This is as close as I come to you, Cida. Now tell me what you heard, from whom.”

She held the black fan spread against her lips and looked over it coquettishly. Her other hand reached for him and brushed the front of his pantaloons, and he took a step back.

“It is what you like, Joaquin. The English girl, she will not touch you so. Remember the bed in the house on
Calle Media
.”

He studied her, looking for the girl he had shared that bed with. It had been the last summer of his youth, with Spain in revolt everywhere against Napoleon’s imposition of his brother Joseph as king. Men joined
juntas
by the thousands, but Jack had stayed at his first honest job: an apprenticeship with a printer he had begged for and won because he could read and write better than the man himself. His meager wages had gone to rent them two rooms on a sloping street in a respectable district where their windows looked out toward the distant Guadarrama Mountains. That summer he believed he could persuade Cida to marry him. They would never steal again. Daily he brought flowers or bread and wine, and once he cajoled a guitarist to play beneath their bedroom window. But within weeks she told him she would no longer play poor man’s wife with him. Return to stealing, she said. He refused. Two days later she poured a stream of coins on their table, her earnings from one day as a whore. He left.

When the thieves of his district formed a
junta
of their own, he joined. The bandit, Sobrino, told him they would not be fools like most Spaniards, dying in hopeless battles against superior odds. They would choose their fights, save their country from the French, and emerge rich. Other news came from Portugal. Lieutenant General Arthur Wellesley had landed with a British army, and Jack saw that for the first time since his parents’ death he had a way out of the streets of Madrid.

He came back to the present and shook his head at the woman before him. What he saw was the diamond choker around her graceful neck, a fitting emblem of the greed that had parted them.

“Cida, I left your bed when you put a price on it. Besides, I doubt Lonville is so complacent.” Her gaze shifted from his, and suddenly he knew where she had heard about his outing with Victoria. The words of their attackers came back:
Cove didn’t pay us enow . . . A guinea apiece
. “You heard one of Lonville’s lackeys reporting to him, didn’t you?” Lonville had danced with Victoria earlier. Jack thought of the parrot-voiced man waving the sword in Victoria’s face and wanted to shake Cida.

“You see,” she said smugly. “You need me, Joaquin. I can help you or hurt you.” She shrugged the eloquent little shrug that said she was indifferent either way and set her fan into lazy motion.

What she could do, he realized, looking into those sharp black eyes, was hurt Victoria. “I am not going to offer for Miss Carr,” he told her.

“She will not have you, will she? She is no different from me then. She has no wish to be a poor wife either. You are a fool, Joaquin.”

“Maybe,” he said. He stepped within reach of Cida’s restless fingers and caught her by the wrist, stilling the fan. “But Cida, I think you have things backward. The gentleman pays for the privilege of sharing the lady’s bed. The lady does not pay him, not even in information.” He backed away.

“Jack, there you are,” said Reg, coming up at that moment. “Seen the
condesa
?”

“She’s right here,” Jack answered, moving aside and bowing to Felicidad.

Victoria was about to dance her first waltz when she saw Jack Amberly emerge from an alcove across the room, behind him the beautiful
condesa
. She experienced a sort of momentary blindness until her partner, Richard Kindel, said, “Miss Carr, are you all right?”

She turned to him and offered her gayest smile. “Of course.” The musicians struck the opening notes, and Lieutenant Kindel took her in his arms. In September the prospect of this first waltz had been the height of the fantasy she had woven about her new life in London. Permission to waltz signaled her acceptance among the
ton
. This was where she belonged.

Richard Kindel whirled her about the room with obvious skill and ease.

“I feel privileged,” he told her, “to be waltzing with the most beautiful lady at the most brilliant ball of the Little Season.”

And Victoria could think only of fish. Whether it was Lady Nevins’ aquatic theme or some errant memory of the pond at Faverton Hall, the dancers seemed like that other species of fat gold creatures, gliding past one another aimlessly in a shallow pool, each aware only of his own glittering magnificence. Victoria had thought the world of the ton embodied what she desired in life, that it would stir her mind and spirit, but tonight its pleasures seemed vain and incomplete.