With a single gliding stride, he closed the distance between them. Jayne stepped back and bumped against the mizzenmast. Trapped, she stared up at him, a spurt of alarm jolting through her.
What did he mean to do with her?
If only he weren’t so damnably large! Even armed with the slim stiletto concealed in her fan, she would have to be extraordinarily lucky to fend him off physically. His cavernous chest and shoulders filled her sight, encased in onyx damask slashed with silver, like a thunderhead lanced with lightning. The dark seduction of cypress and ambergris, a costly and sophisticated fragrance, floated like incense between them. The frantic drum of her own heartbeat thundered in her ears.
Desperately Jayne grasped for her shattered composure. Even if the man suspected her, what proof could he possibly have? She’d been so careful with her coded missives. Whatever he said, she would deny and prevaricate, grow angry, weep pretty tears. She bore a French title; she’d summon the French ambassador—
“Do you know why I wanted to get rid of Don Alonso?”
This close to him, the low rumble of his voice set off tremors in her belly.
Somehow she managed a breathless laugh. “No doubt one’s commanding officer makes for a tiresome guest.”
“No doubt.” The Scourge of the Spanish Main bared his teeth in a silken smile. “Particularly when he’s doing his damnedest to seduce the lady I’ve decided to seduce myself.”
Chapter Three
Calyx hadn’t meant to make his play for Jayne Boleyn so abruptly. He was a man who enjoyed a rousing chase, both at sea and in bed. He preferred to savor the frisson of rapier-sharp sexual banter, the fleeting thrill of the opening salvo, the slow languor of the stolen kiss, before he overcame the lady’s evasions and she dipped her flag in surrender.
Damn it to Hell, he hadn’t expected to find her in Don Alonso’s arms. The sight of that stiff-necked prig, flushed and panting as he pawed the lady, had fired him with unexpected anger.
The Comtesse de Boulaine was like a fast patache, a scout ship rigged for speed and stealth. The admiral was a lumbering hulk, with bluff bows and a broad beam, a merchant ship that wallowed and sank in heavy seas. Finding the lady in his bed would have been a crime against nature.
His ploy to distract the lustful don had gone off perfectly. Yet the lady herself seemed determined to rebuff him. Her very determination to elude him, while she blatantly encouraged every damn one of his fellow officers, set him afire with curiosity. What the Devil was she about, the naughty minx?
Now he’d declared his intent with no more finesse than a randy sailor on shore leave after six months at sea.
Jayne Boleyn stared up at him, her turquoise eyes widening. Such extraordinary eyes, almond-shaped and lavishly fringed with silken lashes, under black brows as sharp and expressive as strokes from a quill pen. Eyes the color of Mediterranean seas, luminous and drenched in sunlight.
Ciertamente, there was something uncanny about her eyes, and about the señora herself. Her creamy skin was flawless, yet the most scandalous lady aboard blushed like a virgin beneath his gaze. Against the dramatic contrast of jet-black hair coiled smooth beneath her stylish hood, her oval countenance seemed to glow. Her spirited features held the unexpected purity of a Madonna.
But her lush, ripe mouth was fashioned for sin.
Now those perfect lips parted as she gazed up at him, as though dismayed by his interest.
A heartbeat later, that damnable fan swept up between them, hiding her alluring mouth. He’d already noted she used the infernal device as a sort of armor, to toy with men from a safe distance. Over a screen of gold lace and jaunty crimson ribbons, her aquamarine eyes were cool.
“How unfortunate for you, capitán,” she said politely in Spanish, retreating from the intimacy of her native tongue. “I am otherwise committed this evening. And tomorrow, as all men know, you shall be at sea.”
“Which only inspires me to greater effort,” he parried.
Clearly, the lady intended to make him work for it, though by all appearances she hadn’t led Don Alonso such a merry chase. The thought sent a spike of fresh irritation slashing through him. He was hardly a man to demand fidelity in his inamoratas, especially those he hadn’t yet seduced. But he really had not relished finding her in the admiral’s arms.
“I advise you to save your strength for your sea battles,” she fired back, fan fluttering with telltale pique. “I fear your cause is lost with me.”
“But I love a lost cause.” Calyx grinned.
The more vexed she became, the more he found himself enjoying this battle of wills. Even with the Admiral of the Ocean Sea panting against her neck, Jayne Boleyn had appeared utterly poised and in control. Por Dios, she’d find the Scourge of the Spanish Main a challenge more worthy of her attention!
Above the fan, her turquoise eyes narrowed. Calculation flickered in her gaze.
“Is that why you took the commission to lead this Armada through the English Channel? I have heard the grandees speak of you, capitán, in the drawing rooms of Lisbon. Surely you know your fellow officers will never embrace you.”
Cristo, that was true enough. His jaw tightened.
Artlessly her fan swayed. “They say you once wore a slave’s collar and rowed a corsair’s galley. They say you are a pirate who fights from greed rather than loyalty or faith. They say you sell your services to the highest bidder.”
She paused, voice sinking to a whisper. “They even say you killed your own father. Of course, that particular rumor has never been proven.”
Si, men whispered of his father’s death. But he’d weathered that storm of rumor for years. These days, no man dared say to his face that Rodrigo de Zamorra had died on the point of his son’s Toledo blade.
Not after a pair of bloody duels, in which he’d challenged and killed the two men who tried it.
Unexpected and unwanted, an image surfaced in his mind: his father’s autocratic Castilian features twisted with rage. The Conde de Zamorra, his oh-so-Christian father, had murdered his gentle English wife, killed the mother of his own heir. But the rumors never spoke of that.
Jayne Boleyn was watching him, brows arched, as if waiting for him to advance some reasonable explanation for his notoriety. Beneath her expectant gaze, he consigned his father’s memory to Hell and inclined his head, a fencer acknowledging a hit.
“You disappoint me, condesa,” he murmured.
“Oh?” Cobalt sparks ignited in her stormy eyes. In her temper, she lowered the fan, though she held it poised at the ready. Madre de Dios, she was a beauty, with her pert nose and that stubborn little chin, a flush of temper rising against her elegant cheekbones.
Calyx saw his opening and seized it.
“Having admired your delightfully unorthodox method of boarding my ship, I’ve concluded you’re a woman gloriously untroubled by the dictates of propriety. That crimson garter was a pretty touch.”
Her flush deepened beautifully.
“Don’t imagine I meant it for an invitation, capitán. I might have preferred the chair, if your man at the windlass hadn’t been stinking drunk. He practically dropped the young marquesa and her heirloom emeralds into the sea.”
He threw back his head and laughed. “Didn’t fancy a swim, did you?”
For the first time, her challenging gaze flickered. “I’d sink like a stone. Imagine what a dreadful omen for your Armada that would have been.”
“Personally, I’m amazed you don’t swim like a fish—a woman of your accomplishments, Lady Jayne.”
Si, the name suited her—sharp, smooth and sophisticated as the lady herself. She didn’t strike him as the sort of woman who’d have patience with a name like Ermengarde or Esmeralda or Josephine.
His voice deepened. “If you had fallen in, I’d have dived in after you. You can be certain of that.”
Her lashes fluttered, as though he’d unsettled her.
“Is that part of your duty as the ship’s captain? For all I knew
, you were stinking drunk yourself.”
He laughed again. “I assure you I’m sober as a priest—and dry as ship’s biscuit, now you mention it. Shall I fetch us a glass of Madeira? I’ve an excellent vintage only steps away—in my cabin.”
“Fie, capitán! That hardly sounds proper.” For the first time, the corners of her lush lips curved. “But I won’t mind waiting if you wish to bring me a glass.”
Suddenly she looked far too smug, like his devil of a tomcat when the beast swallowed a fat mouse. He eyed her.
“If I play the gentleman—for once—will I return to find you gone like a sailor’s fantasy?”
That silken fringe of lashes swept over her sea-colored eyes.
“If I strike you as evasive, señor, consider my reticence an attempt to preserve your Catholic virtue. This Armada is a holy crusade, as you have said yourself, and you are one of its leading lights. Surely ’tis your duty to set a virtuous example for your men?”
“I’m a pirate, not a saint,” he said bluntly. “And every man jack of this ship knows it.”
He might have signed on for this holy crusade, but he was no angel. Pirate he might be, a licensed thief, ruthless hunter of the high seas, but at least he was no holy hypocrite. He liked to believe he’d retained a few shreds of the honor he’d once prized so highly.
There were nights, during those dark years chained to a rower’s bench in the stinking hole of a corsair’s hold, when that stubborn sense of honor—coupled with pigheaded determination to survive—was all that kept him from slitting his own throat.
Honesty was one of the few virtues he treasured. He had a keen nose for deception, and Lady Jayne Boleyn was up to her pretty neck in mischief.
Beneath his narrowed gaze, that damnable fan swept up again. Seized by sudden impatience with this game of evasion she played so well, he closed the distance between them and captured her slender wrist.
He had a heartbeat to register the feel of her, silken skin sheathing delicate bones and supple strength. Heat sizzled like lightning between them, a raw sexual energy that crackled through him and made his blood smoke. She gasped at the contact, pupils widening as her gaze locked with his.
He’d meant to startle her, to bridge the maddening distance she kept imposing between them. When the color drained from her creamy skin, he realized he’d miscalculated. She’d interpreted the sudden contact as an assault.
Jayne Boleyn was frightened, and her fear was his fault.
He opened his mouth to reassure her, offer a quick apology for startling her. It wasn’t often he misread a woman. But this lady carried herself with such spirit and poise, such sensuality and flair, that he hadn’t recognized her polished veneer for the defensive armor it was.
Sometime in her past, someone had hurt her.
But whatever she’d once been, the woman before him now was anything but helpless.
Something within him shifted, the odd burning vision that sometimes fell over him in the heat of battle. The subtle glow of moonlight behind her alabaster skin seemed to brighten, until she was limned in an aura of silver light, glowing like a ship’s mast when lightning strikes.
A sudden fierce wind lashed his skin. The furled sails snapped and fluttered. The solid Bilbao oak of the mizzenmast groaned. His skin tingled beneath the charge of static.
An ominous mutter of thunder growled through the air.
Frowning, he searched the glittering heavens, clear as a bell with nary a thunderhead in sight. Like any seaman, he was intimately familiar with the vagaries of weather. From time to time, a freak wind blew up from nowhere—in fact, it had been happening all spring. The weather had been devilish strange.
But this sudden, tingling charge in the air, the uncanny light streaming through her skin, was something entirely different.
In the next breath, Jayne Boleyn twisted free of his grip. As he gaped like a landed fish, she spun away and fled into the night.
Beyond the circle of light from the bobbing lantern on the mast, the shadows enveloped her. Senses reeling, he listened as the light patter of her running footsteps receded.
Abruptly, the freak wind subsided. The prickling sense of lightning dissipated. The balmy calm of the May night settled around him.
“Cristo,” he whispered, struggling to make sense of the bizarre encounter.
As a student of astrology and lifelong admirer of the scholar Dr. John Dee, he was a man well acquainted with metaphysical phenomena. But never in his life had he read or heard anything like this phenomenon. Indeed, it had transpired so quickly he found himself doubting the evidence of his own senses.
Now Carlos Alejandro Angelo de Zamorra, capitán of the Arcángel, stood alone on the fighting deck. The delicate fragrance of moonflowers lingered like a ghost on the night air.
Chapter Four
Fool, fool, five kinds of fool! Reckless, careless, undisciplined...
Huddled in the protective darkness near the stern, Jayne covered her face with shaking hands. It had been years since she’d lost control of her tempestuous Faerie magick so disastrously. Why must it happen tonight of all nights, with him of all men—the master of the Arcángel, Lord Calyx?
The man who held the key to the Armada’s success, the man who would lead England’s enemies to her very doorstep. The man Jayne must view as her implacable enemy.
The irony was that she hadn’t even needed magickal protection. As she stared into the amber depths of those Spanish eyes, part of her had known he meant her no harm. Calyx de Zamorra was no Robert Dudley, drunk and despairing in the wake of his Queen’s rejection, that fateful night in her father’s hall.
As for Jayne, she was no longer a sheltered innocent of fifteen, oblivious to her own magick until the loss of her maidenhood shattered that barrier as well. She was an experienced agent on a critical mission. If she couldn’t beguile his secrets from the canny Lord Calyx, she need only apply her wiles to a less guarded subject.
Instead, she’d treated the man to a magickal display he’d be hard-pressed to attribute to nature.
Leaning against a cannon’s smooth barrel, she struggled to steady her ragged breath. This night had been an abysmal failure by any reckoning. The only prudent course now was to slip away to her rented rooms in the city and compose the coded report of her failure.
The bitter knowledge of that failure seeped through her. Her unreliable magick had given out, the Armada was sailing, and she’d failed utterly to determine where its commanders intended to land. She’d learned nothing and achieved nothing she could use to bargain for her son.
She was tidying her hair and skirts, grimly steeling herself to face down the disapproving murmurs of upper-crust Lisbon, when the soft tread of bootheels thudded against the deck. Skin prickling, she crouched beside the cannon. A whiff of distinctive fragrance—cypress and ambergris laced with New World tobacco—cued her to tingling alarm.
Heart thudding, she held her breath as a giant figure, glittering in jet and silver, stalked silently past. In the darkness, the gleam of pale hair shone like a halo as the ship’s captain vanished into the companionway. Her straining ears detected the soft grate of a key turning. Swiftly Calyx de Zamorra emerged with a bottle dangling in his grip—no doubt the fine Madeira he’d mentioned.
Wildly she wondered if he still hoped to seduce her with it.
As she crouched in the darkness, he swept past her, headed for the main deck where the gay melody of a volta piped. She watched him go, heart kicking against her breast, as a new plan took shape.
It was a risk, no doubt, but her very presence aboard this ship was dangerous. There was another place she could look, after all, for the information that would save England and free her boy.
When she was certain the captain would not double back, she crept from hiding and slipped into the narrow companionway. She whispered a grateful prayer that the Arcángel was a captured English galleon, smaller and sleeker than the lumbering Spanish vessels with their monstrous fighting towers. Enclo
sed with his latest orders, Walsingham had sent her the builder’s plans for this ship.
Though she found the captain’s cabin without difficulty, he had locked the door when he left. She pressed her ear to the panel, senses straining, wondering suddenly if he kept a mistress. Lord Calyx had a reputation among the ladies of Lisbon that was either notorious or legendary, depending upon one’s perspective.
“Body of God!” she whispered, swallowing a bubble of hysterical laughter. He would hardly have tried to seduce her if he’d left another woman waiting in his bed.
Swiftly she unfurled her fan and shook the lock pick from its hollow handle. Working by touch in the stygian darkness, she inserted the pick into the keyhole and probed. The captain employed a standard pin-tumbler lock that should present no difficulty, save for that fact that her hands were shaking. Twice she stopped, cursing softly, to wipe damp palms on her skirts.
“God have mercy!” she muttered as she worked. This lock was proving as devilish difficult to manage as its master—
When the pins sprang up and the lock snicked open, a triumphant smile curled her lips. And just in time. A disorderly chorus of drunken voices singing a sailor’s ditty floated into the passageway and the floorboards groaned.
Catching her lower lip between her teeth, Jayne pocketed her pick and darted inside, easing the door closed behind her. Ear pressed to the varnished wood, she listened as the revelers staggered past. At last, she released her breath and turned to survey the cabin, dimly lit by a golden swath of lantern light streaming through the porthole.
A thrill of surprised delight tingled through her.
She hadn’t expected much, God knew, from a pirate’s lair. Now she gazed in astonishment around the snug cabin with its low beams, crowded with colorful, glittering curiosities from every corner of the globe. Surrounding her on the sloping walls, winged angels with flaming swords swooped and stalked and wrestled with straining mortals. Painted masks grinned between colorful tapestries and oil paintings teeming with Biblical themes.
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