Mistress by Magick

by Laura Navarre

  He owed it to her to protect her. All the more so if, as she hinted, she was customarily chaste.

  Abruptly he’d had enough of these games and deceptions. Whoever she was, whatever she was about, he intended to get to the bottom of it right now.

  “I owe you an apology,” he said gruffly. “I should have, ah, practiced more restraint at the crucial moment.” Cristo, he sounded like a bloody idiot. “You deserved better. All the same, I intend to discuss—”

  “No need to apologize,” she broke in smoothly. “There were two of us in this bed, Calyx. I, of all women, ought to have known better. I should have practiced more restraint myself.”

  “Huh.” That was a first in his experience, a woman who took responsibility for protecting herself—or failing to—from the consequences of a seduction he’d planned and pursued with the vigor of a sea battle.

  Grimly he applied his wits to the matter at hand, the interrogation of the English spy in his bed. “About these incidents—”

  “In truth, I fear I was rather distracted by your tragic tale.” Beneath the bedclothes, her sleek arm slid around his waist, distracting him all over again. “At least now I begin to understand your interest in angels.”

  How, precisely, had she managed to turn the tables? They were supposed to be talking about her, damn it.

  She toyed with the silver key at his throat. “Do you ever take this off?”

  “No.” He made another valiant attempt to ignore her silken warmth. “Before you ask, I’ve never seen visions or spoken with angels either.”

  His gaze slid across the blazing images of angels swooping and battling their way across his walls to the mirror he’d acquired when he captured this galleon, its oval plane now obscured by the crimson-and-gold sweep of Jayne’s discarded gown. He wondered why she’d covered it. Had she too fancied strange illusions in its depths?

  Candles flaring into life in a darkened room, a woman with golden eyes and moonlight pouring through her skin, a stern-faced figure with tawny hair and a sword of fire. Even a fallen angel with jet-black wings, raven hair streaming around a face of exquisite beauty that glittered like a diamond.

  Maybe he was going mad after all. Just as his mother had.

  Jayne traced the jagged metal teeth with an idle finger. “‘Tis a curious sort of trinket.”

  “A family keepsake.” He shrugged stiffly. “All through my childhood, my mother treasured it. Always said it was meant for me. When I returned to Zamorra after that fiasco with my father, I found it among her things.”

  “Clearly the two of you were devoted to one another. I find that laudable.” Her brilliant turquoise eyes, brimming with compassion, offered him absolution he didn’t deserve and could never accept.

  “Jayne—”

  “Is this Hebrew, these characters?”

  “Si.” He heaved a sigh. “I can tell you what it says, but I’ve never had a clue what it means. It says ‘the Archangel Michael.’”

  Beneath his hand, a fine film of gooseflesh rose along her slim shoulders. Delicately she cleared her throat. “As in, the key belongs to Michael?”

  “As in, my mother was mad as a loon,” he said roughly. “She claims he gave it to her—Michael, the Angel of War, her celestial companion on the road to insanity. Who knows where it truly came from?”

  She shivered, and he rubbed her back briskly to warm her. Time to drop the accursed subject of Catarina de Zamorra and her madness. Time to get back to the business at hand.

  “Yet, clearly, it is a key,” she pointed out. “What do you fancy it opens?”

  “Nothing.” He bit off the word. “Jayne, take a word of advice from someone who’s stared this mystery in the face for more years than you can imagine. My mother was a sad and lonely woman, grieving the country and kin she left behind. What’s likely is that, during her husband’s lengthy absences, her frailty was preyed upon by some handsome, lying rogue who claimed to be this divine messenger. And he did his work so well she would have done anything for him.”

  His voice had risen until it rang against the walls. Clenching his jaw, he cut off the damning flood of words before the rest slipped out—the way the Conde had cursed him at the end, the inflammatory claim that Calyx was no son of his.

  His noble Castilian heritage was his only thin protection in Philip’s Catholic realm. He’d have to be mad himself to place that weapon in the Comtesse de Boulaine’s wickedly competent hand.

  “Enough of my family history,” he said abruptly and crushed a stab of regret when she flinched. “Let’s talk about yours.”

  “Mine?”

  He slanted a glance at the wary face cushioned against his shoulder, framed by her tumbled hair. He glimpsed her clever brain scrambling for purchase before she smoothed her features into cool amusement.

  She uttered a light laugh and shifted to Spanish. “But my family is not nearly as compelling as yours, capitán. I fear I could never hold your interest.”

  “If you want to hold my interest,” he said silkily, “you have nothing to fear. In fact, I can’t think of anything that would fascinate me more. Tell me, señora, how a Boleyn came to ally herself with the King of Spain against Anne Boleyn’s own daughter.”

  Beneath his arm she was bowstring-taut, quivering with sudden tension. Was that another of her tells—an indication she planned to lie to him?

  “In truth, capitán, there is nothing to tell.”

  “I doubt that, condesa,” he said flatly. “You can tell me or tell your interrogator when your reticence compels me to drag someone else into this. In case you’ve forgotten, there’s a Blade of God on this very ship.”

  An empty threat on his part, but with any luck, she didn’t know it.

  Her pupils widened. Trepidation fluttered in her features. Then her teeth closed over the lush curve of her lower lip, sending a bolt of lust straight through him.

  Even when he knew the unmanageable minx was planning to deceive him, he couldn’t seem to get enough of her.

  “Very well.” She hesitated, no doubt scrambling along the slippery slope between truth and deception. “I was not born a Boleyn. My father was—is—Gifford Carey. He’s a country baron with a comfortable old lodge called Clover Chase where I was raised. My mother died when I was very young, leaving Kin and me—Kinley, my elder brother—in the hands of a grieving father who had not the slightest notion how to tend two grief-sick children.”

  She voiced a little laugh, but it sounded bleak. “The Queen was young then. She’d been passing fond of Bess Carey, my mother, and the Careys are descended from Anne Boleyn’s sister, which makes my father the Queen’s cousin. She adopted my brother, fostered him at court, which was a great honor of course. But it left me alone in the country, mewed up with a kind but absentminded father who was a faded shadow of his former self.”

  “That must have been lonely.” Despite his resolve to remain on guard, to take nothing she said at face value, he felt a pang of sympathy. Their upbringings had been similar, both of them shut up in the country with a grieving parent.

  “Forsooth, it was idyllic, save for the fact that I missed my mother and rarely saw the brother I idolized. The Queen made me her godchild and showered me with small gifts and favors. And I was my father’s pet, if you can imagine that.” A smile teased her lips. “Spoiled rotten.”

  “I can well imagine,” he said dryly.

  Her face grew distant with memory.

  “By the time I was fifteen, I’d fallen in love—or so I thought—with the dashing nobleman who came periodically to Clover Chase to hunt. He was the Queen’s favorite, my brother’s idol. No longer a young man either, but I was very sheltered. Next to my father with his kindly old moon face and spectacles, the fashionable and charming Earl of Leicester was a god.”

  “Lord Robert Dudley?” Recognition spiraled through him. “Elizabeth’s lifelong champion? They say Leicester’s her lover.”

  They also said Leicester had been placed in command of the English
army and the landward defenses, but he had no intention of divulging that to Jayne. No doubt the man cut a dashing figure on horseback, but he was a lackluster commander with little battlefield experience. Now entering his fifth decade and reportedly in failing health, the Queen’s champion was no longer fit for combat.

  When the Admiral of the Ocean Sea had heard who commanded the modest army that was supposed to repel them on land, Don Alonso had laughed.

  “They do say he was her lover,” Jayne said steadily, very still in his arms. “But he was also mine.”

  Calyx was unprepared for the ugly shaft of jealousy that speared through him. He’d always sought his lovers among sophisticated and experienced women, worldly beauties who expected naught save a night’s pleasure and a few pretty trinkets. He’d thought Jayne the same sort. She was a notorious widow and certainly no virgin when she came to his bed. So why the hell should her sexual exploits displease him?

  “He was the first man I ever...” Her swallow was audible in the charged silence. “I was only fifteen, very naïve and very foolish.”

  Her small voice quivered. A fierce protective instinct swelled in his chest.

  “The man must be a cad,” he said roughly, “to use an innocent girl so badly. I take it he seduced you?”

  “Why, to the contrary.” Her tone turned brittle. “I seduced him. At least, that was what he told the Queen when the tale came spilling out.”

  A murderous rage made him ball his fists. “And she believed him? Against the word of her own godchild?”

  “She has been in love with him for thirty years, Calyx. The fact that she chose never to marry does naught to lessen it.” Her weary sigh teased his skin. “Besides, the tale Lord Robert told was not entirely false.”

  “So you did seduce him?” Calyx struggled to make sense of it, the conflicting impulses to protect her and shake out her secrets until her teeth rattled in her head.

  Clearly sensing his agitation, she shifted away.

  “He turned up one day at Clover Chase to hunt, as he did from time to time. Unusually, for him, he’d sent ahead no notice. Consequently, my father was away, and I’d given most of the servants a holiday to visit the village fair. So it fell to me to play lady of the manor and entertain Lord Robert alone.”

  She uttered a delicate snort. “In truth, I was thrilled by the prospect. I fancied myself in love with him. He’d just ended his long-standing affair with Lady Douglass Sheffield. My father had let slip that Lord Robert was seeking a bride. I foolishly imagined the Earl of Leicester might be willing to settle for the daughter of a country baron languishing in genteel poverty.”

  “That would be you?” He rubbed her back to settle her.

  “Indeed! I fancied he’d come to Clover Chase to beg for my hand. But it quickly became clear he had not come for wooing. He turned up without even a groom to serve him, disheveled, agitated, with no baggage—not even a change of linen. Of course, this was wildly unlike Leicester.

  “In a frenzy of excitement, which I did my best to conceal, I loaned him some of Kinley’s clothing and sent him off to bathe. I thought the servants would shortly return, but a fierce thunderstorm blew up—the worst they’d seen in the district in ten years. Neither the servants nor my father could press through it. Old Cook and I were left to our own devices to throw together some sort of supper. And I was left to serve it and entertain Lord Robert as best I might.”

  Her lips twisted in a bitter smile. “This was my chance to enchant him, or so I thought. I did my best to be charming and witty, but Leicester barely responded, too caught up in his own troubles to heed my desperate efforts. I could barely comprehend his ravings at the time. But in retrospect, I think he’d actually been fool enough to propose to the Queen—his lifelong love. She rejected him, of course, as she rejected all her suitors.

  “Hoping to cheer him, I opened a bottle of my father’s best claret.” A sad smile ghosted across her lips. “He was so miserable he drank nearly all of it. Sick with hope and nerves, I drank more than a little myself, although normally my father barely allowed me to touch it.”

  Seeing well enough where this was heading, Calyx grimaced. “So Dudley was drunk and miserable, and you were drunk and desperate. That was ripe to go ill.”

  “Indeed,” she sighed. “In the end, I was so desperate to comfort him—and of course, to demonstrate my own sympathetic, wifely qualities—I very nearly threw myself into his arms. When he kissed me, I thrilled to my fingertips. In truth, I was such an innocent I never expected matters to progress farther.

  “But there I was, too cup-shot to manage a coherent sentence, swooning with delight over his kisses. He even muttered that he loved me, though I believe now he meant the words for Elizabeth. When he grew more ardent, I demurred, but either he did not notice or he did not care.” Her mouth tightened. “But I must accept my share of blame. I ought to have done more to fend him off.”

  “I beg to differ,” Calyx muttered. “You were a child dependent on his honor and protection. The man was a knave of the worst sort.”

  Caught up in her own tale, she barely seemed to notice.

  “In the end, he had me on the floor of my father’s hall, with my skirts around my ears.” She sighed. “I was his revenge against the Queen who’d spurned him, but who was still very much in love with him. He passed out afterward, and I covered him with a cloak and went staggering off to bed—torn and aching, disillusioned by the realities of the conjugal act, but still delirious with rapture. Now, I was certain, he must marry me! What a little fool I was.”

  “You were fifteen.” Clearly Leicester wasn’t at his best that night. His drunken advances had done nothing to waken her sexually. “I take it he soon shattered your girlish fancies?”

  “The next morning he was appalled and apologetic, swearing to tell no one of my shame, of course,” she said dryly. “As though I’d held him down and raped him myself. Still he said naught of marriage. I thought he was waiting to approach my father, who turned up while Leicester and I were struggling through an awkward breakfast.”

  “Let me guess. Your ardent suitor said not a word to your father of his love for you. Likely acted as though nothing unusual had occurred.” He grimaced. “I may not place much stock in religion, but even a pirate like me knows this much. God abhors a rapist. Your father should have called him out and run him through.”

  “My father was immersed to his ears in Kin’s latest scrape at court. He noticed nothing, and you may be certain Lord Robert did not linger. He recalled some urgent business and went galloping off, with barely a word of farewell. Although it crushed me at the time, I think now he was ashamed. He simply could not bear to look upon me.”

  Her voice skipped lightly over the words, like a barefoot child running nimbly through a sea of broken glass. But those shards of betrayal, disillusionment and abandonment must have cut her to the bone. He tightened his arms around her and sleeked one hand over her glossy mane.

  Cristo! What manner of bumbling idiot was Gifford Carey, never to see or sense his daughter’s devastation? As for Leicester...

  “He should be ashamed,” he said roughly. “How the man looks in the mirror without flinching is a mystery to me.”

  Jayne lifted her head from his shoulder and surveyed him, blue eyes grave and level. Her slim brows drew together in a frown.

  “You are a most unusual man,” she said. “Surely your own pirates behave as badly? Soldiers and seamen are known for rape and pillage, are they not?”

  “Not on this ship,” he growled. “Any man who rapes a woman or child is keelhauled. If they survive the experience—which many of them do—I put them ashore wherever we happen to land. Some of them wind up having to defend themselves from the wronged woman’s outraged family. I find a certain justice in that.”

  Head tilted, she studied him, a smile playing about her lips. “So you’re a man of honor after all? You manage to conceal the fact quite well.”

  “Even thieves have a sort of h
onor, some of us.” He shifted. “If I didn’t take justice into my hands, my primero would. Diego has no more tolerance than I for a bully who brutalizes helpless women and children.”

  He rolled onto his side and drilled her with a warning look. “Don’t let that lull you into false security. Half the men on this ship don’t report to me, but to that galley rat Nicanor. Even among my men, every crew has its share of monsters. The ones on the Arcángel simply haven’t been caught yet.”

  “I see.” Long lashes swept over her somber gaze. “I suppose you intend to tell me you’ve locked me into this cabin for my own protection?”

  “In part,” he admitted. “Until I know what mischief you intend to make aboard this ship, here you’ll stay.”

  Her slender frame bristled, but he sensed her fighting to contain her pique. Rolling onto her back, she gazed at the rafters.

  “I could wish someone like you had been at the Queen’s court that summer, when the truth came boiling out. I vow, there was a rare scandal! I had just joined the court as a Maid of Honor—an envied position—and Dudley was still her precious favorite.”

  “Did he let the truth slip?” Sudden suspicion gripped his gut like a fist. “Dios! Were you—?”

  “Nay, nothing like that,” she said hastily, burrowing beneath the furs as though she had something to hide. “But I was wretched, watching from the sidelines while my so-called love danced attendance night and day on Elizabeth. The entire court was rife with rumor that he sought a wife with royal blood—and I the Queen’s cousin—but he ignored me utterly. In the end, I was a fool again. Lacking any girlish confidante, I confided our liaison to my cousin Lettice Devereux, the widowed Countess of Essex.”

  Bitter scorn tightened her features. “In my naivete, I failed to realize the royal bride he was secretly wooing was Lettice. She feigned sympathy for my dilemma, held me as I wept, coaxed forth every detail from my faltering lips, sent me sniffling to bed with a hot posset—then went straight to the Queen with her story.”