“Legend claims Arthur dealt you a mortal blow as well.” Jayne eyed him. Despite the warrior’s build beneath his austere black robes, pain and hardship had dulled the bright edge of his deadly beauty. The raw red scar slanting over his brow had barely missed his eye.
“He did that,” Mordred breathed. “Art thou wondering where I bear the wound? Come to my cabin, fair lady, and I shall show thee.”
A spasm of revulsion twisted her belly—a response that caught her off-guard. If she could pretend to welcome Antoine de Boulaine’s crippled body and feign passion for an aging bureaucrat like Don Alonso, surely she should be able to play the same game for Mordred.
But now it was Calyx whose bed she shared. She wished to be in no other.
Ruthlessly Jayne crushed that preposterous notion. Calyx might make her spirit sing and her body weep with passion. But he was the enemy, no less than this alarming half-Fae prince.
“Ah,” Mordred said softly, those predatory eyes sharp on her struggling features. “Thou art loyal to thy Spanish paramour.”
“I am not—I mean to say, he is not—”
“But is he loyal to thee, Jayne Boleyn? How much dost thou know of thine angelic lover?”
She was fumbling this badly. Somehow she produced a brittle laugh.
“‘Tis not as though we are married, Your Grace. The capitán is welcome to seek his pleasures where he will, and I shall do the same.”
“Brava, my beauty,” he murmured. “Dost thou feel naught for thy guardian angel?”
Somehow he’d twisted the conversation, shifted the blinding beam of his focus to her. She rallied her defenses.
“I am aboard this galleon purely by mischance. I bear no love for Elizabeth Tudor and no loyalty to Morrigan. Your mother has never concerned herself with me.”
The wind was rising, snapping the fine fabric of her shirt, stripping sable curls from her cap to flutter and stream around her face. She smoothed back the loose tendrils.
“England has done naught to earn my loyalty, Your Grace, but that does not mean I thirst for her destruction. She has not been kind to you either, I can see. But Arthur’s time has passed. Would you destroy the Tudor reign from sheer malice?”
“I bear no malice for Elizabeth Tudor.” He frowned. “She is simply in the way. When she is overthrown, Philip means to drag her to Rome to make her submission to the Pope. But I rather presume she shall find a way to thwart him in that, as she has thwarted him all her life.”
“What of your own mother?” she demanded.
Thunder rumbled from the lowering heavens, sodden and pregnant with rain. She strained against the weight. Soon it would pour, despite her best efforts to prevent the clouds from releasing their heavy burden.
“What has Morrigan ever done to you, sir?”
His nostrils flared. “Aside from abandoning me as a babe and lying to me about my parentage? Aside from using a hapless boy without mercy or compunction, demanding every sacrifice to serve her precious Goddess and advance her own ambition? Aside from ensuring my father’s enmity before I was ever born, thanks to the treachery she used to seduce him?”
That sullen pulse drummed against his temple. “She damned me to a thousand years of solitude in a dead kingdom where I was the only creature with a beating heart.”
His eyes burned blue as the heart of a wrathful flame. She barely managed to avert her gaze.
“That is what happened to me when I crossed swords with Arthur. To preserve my wretched life, my mother wrenched the City of Lions from the mortal world to a place beyond time. She banished me to that timeless place, ostensibly to heal—and then she forgot about me.” His face convulsed. “There, as I lay in agony for endless eons, I learned at last to hate her.”
“And then you escaped,” she whispered, heart beating fast against her throat. She recalled the scandalized gossip from the Fae in London’s shadow court. “Morrigan helped you escape, did she not?”
“After a thousand years.” His voice dripped acid. “Maeve faded from the scene and Morrigan took her place and solidified her power over the Summer Lands. Her own plot to overthrow the Tudors was thwarted by my sweet sister Rhiannon. My mother freed me from Lyonesse because she needed me again—to claim the double crown.”
Jayne stared blankly over the heaving sea, where storm-tossed galleons and potbellied hulks struggled against the choppy waters.
Of course, she thought numbly. Morrigan hungered for Arthur’s crown, but she bore no mortal blood of her own. She must rely upon her half-mortal son, Arthur’s heir, to share her rule.
If so, her plan had certainly gone awry. Instead of ruling tamely as her pawn, Mordred had set out to overthrow her. Somehow he’d persuaded the Spanish Hagas to follow him. He passed among mortals as one of the omnipotent Church enforcers who were the Inquisition’s backbone. Winning Philip of Spain to his cause had been a stroke of sheer brilliance.
Too bad for Philip that, with the old regime overthrown, Mordred would no longer require him or his Spanish troops. The only head that would wear the crown was Mordred’s.
Before her spread the Prince of Camelot’s life, a tortured landscape shaped by envy, hatred, twisted talent and staggering ambition. She wondered if Morrigan le Fay knew just what she’d wrought in this son she’d conceived for power’s sake, this outcast child she had abandoned and then sought to reclaim.
She wondered if Elizabeth knew what was coming for her.
Body of God, I must escape this floating prison! I must warn her, warn Walsingham, I must. Dear God in Heaven, what of my boy?
Waves of panic battered like storm-surge at her chest. Distracted, she lost her grip on the weather. A smattering of fat raindrops pattered across the deck. A gust of wind drove them against her face, where they clung to her cheeks like tears.
“My dear lady, thou art distressed.” Her deadly companion watched her keenly. “I have a hot brazier and mulled wine in my cabin. ’Tis the least I can do to make amends.”
Jayne edged away. “That is very kind, Your Grace. I do not require—”
“But I do.” With a warrior’s swiftness, he closed in. One blunt-fingered hand clamped around the tender flesh of her upper arm. “I have confided all my secrets to thee, Jayne Elizabeth Boleyn—or most of them. The least thou canst do is to return the favor.”
She twisted against his grip, but she might have been shackled to him for all the good that did. The rain intensified, soaking through her thin shirt, plastering wayward tendrils against her neck.
Anxiously she scanned the decks, vacant now the storm had started in earnest, the tercio clustered below like worried sheep, the crew going wherever sailors went to stay dry. Passionately she wondered where their captain was—the erstwhile captor whose presence she now craved.
No help for it. She was alone in this.
Her alarmed gaze lifted to the scarred figure looming over her. She licked raindrops from her lips and summoned her wits.
“My secrets, as you call them, are of no interest to a man of your importance.”
“Let me be the judge of that.”
Determined to deflect him, she met his gaze head on—a fatal mistake. His eyes were so cold, so deathly cold, relentless and unavoidable as destiny. The vise of his will clamped down on her—and suddenly she could not move. His eyes, she realized, were the portal to his magick. While she stared into them, mesmerized as a rabbit before the weaving asp, she was powerless to resist.
Inexorably he drew her toward the dark companionway.
“Stop this, Your Grace,” she gasped, with the breath he’d left her. “I am a woman of no consequence. My presence here is no more than a wretched mistake—”
A new voice, dry with amusement, sliced through the rain-washed air. “Not a very flattering testimonial to my hospitality, Lady Jayne. I’ll have to exert greater effort.”
Distracted for a crucial instant, Mordred blinked. For a breath, the vise around her limbs weakened. Heart beating wildly, Jayne wrenched her
arm free and spun toward Calyx.
He stood braced above on the quarterdeck, pale shirt plastered to his muscled frame, wet spikes of white-blond hair framing his challenging gaze. One hand lay casually against the saber at his hip—a threat no less effective for its silence.
Jayne gazed up at him—the capitán of the Arcángel, her lover, her captor. A wave of profound relief crashed over her.
Chapter Twelve
Drenched to the skin, Calyx faced squarely into the downpour, but barely felt the cold rain streaming over him. Every iota of his attention was riveted on Jayne.
She was his mistress, damn it to Hell. Yet there she stood, with panic written all over her lovely face, straining against another man’s grip.
Fury simmered in his blood, the cold white rage he’d felt when his father struck his mother, the sickening rage he’d felt as a slave, watching a captive child led sobbing to face the Ottoman lash.
Jayne Boleyn was far from helpless. None knew it better than he. Yet the flash of terror in her turquoise eyes made him want to punch someone in the jaw.
Mordred, the Blade of God, struck him as the perfect candidate.
“Calyx!” Jayne gasped, gazing up at him. Rain streamed into her eyes and mouth. The relief that suffused her voice made his heart clench.
He’d never been a possessive lover. The women in his life came and went too quickly for that. Now he felt murderous as he shot the Blade of God a look that promised mayhem.
He’d never liked the fellow nor any of his ilk—these so-called crusaders who were half priest and half butcher. As he watched the bastard step back, scarred face twisted in a sneer he barely troubled to hide, he liked this Blade of God even less.
With a growl, Calyx sprang over the bulkhead and dropped to the main deck, boots thudding against the rain-drenched boards.
“Best get below, priest,” he said curtly. “This is like to be a bad storm. Half the tercio are already puking up their guts in the hold.”
“That is hardly an incentive,” the man murmured in the antiquated speech he affected. “Thou hast no cause for suspicion. I merely sought to protect thy lady from her own folly, stealing about the deck in this weather.”
Calyx didn’t buy this pretense at reassurance, but his gaze sliced toward Jayne. Stealing about the deck indeed. And another storm to contend with—a blow so bad the entire fleet was wallowing in it. This entire Enterprise had been plagued with rotten weather from the moment she boarded his ship.
Still, he couldn’t prove it. He hardly knew what he’d do with the knowledge if he could.
“Get below or be blown overboard,” he said brusquely. “Makes no difference to me. But I’ll thank you to keep your hands off my mistress.”
Mordred studied him, head tilted, his odd eyes sharp with speculation. Unaccustomed to passengers who didn’t spring to obey his orders, Calyx glared straight back and silently dared the bastard to challenge him.
“As thou wilt,” the Blade of God said at last. “Thou art her guardian angel.”
“That’s the way of it,” he agreed coolly.
Thankfully Jayne had the good sense to say nothing. Mordred inclined his head and melted away, quiet as a panther despite his menacing bulk.
At last the tension eased from her. Gazing at him with cornflower blue eyes fringed by wet black lashes, she licked raindrops from her lush lips. The innocent gesture sent a bolt of heat shooting straight to his groin.
“Thank you for that,” she murmured in her husky voice. “He may be a Church enforcer, but I cannot say I care for the fellow.”
“You’re soaked to the skin,” he said gruffly. “Do you want to catch a fever? Get below.”
For once, she didn’t argue. Indeed, she preceded him to his cabin with an alacrity that told him she’d been unsettled by whatever just happened. He wondered what the Devil he’d missed, but doubted she’d be willing to tell him.
Before his door, she hesitated.
With a muttered oath, he nudged her into the storm-darkened room and closed the door none too gently behind them.
When the weather kicked up, his page had fastened down anything that could break or spill in rough seas. Calyx had designed his own foul weather lantern—a tin-screened lamp bolted to the wall that he lit with his flint striker on the second attempt. A warm amber glow spread through the shadowy cabin.
Stranded in its midst, Jayne stood very still. Here, with the walls muting the roar of the raging sea, the steady drip of water from their sodden garments was audible.
Calyx peeled his sodden shirt over his head and tossed her a dry jerkin. “Care to tell me what you were doing with Señor Mordred?”
Wet lashes dropped over her cautious gaze. “I believe he disapproves of your bringing a mistress upon this holy Enterprise.”
“Too bloody bad.” He unbuckled his sword-belt. “His presence aboard is his choice. He’s the only Blade of God in this Armada. Claimed his place was here on the Arcángel, leading the way.”
In fact, he’d noticed the man eyeing him more than once. Something in the bastard’s pale eyes made Calyx’s scalp crawl. Any sign of interest from a Church enforcer was rarely beneficial. It was one more anomaly on this voyage, and he didn’t like it.
Jayne stood where he’d left her, still dripping, fiddling with her jerkin. The sodden garment hung open, but she made no effort to remove it. Impatiently he strode to her and peeled off the wet leather.
The silk shirt clung to her breasts, the tight peaks of her rose-colored nipples plainly visible. The sight sent a bolt of lust arcing straight to his cock. Every thought of interrogation evaporated from his brain.
“Take that off,” he growled. “You’re all over gooseflesh.”
Her gaze was riveted on the slick plane of his naked chest. Slowly her eyes lifted to his face, pupils wide in the gentian blue.
“I appreciate your protection while I am aboard this galleon,” she said softly. “But my public role as your mistress is a necessary ruse. Perhaps in private it would behoove us to shed the pretense.”
A shaft of annoyance sliced through the fog of lust clouding his thoughts. No matter how unwilling a passenger she might be, she was his mistress now, damn it—and gave every indication of enjoying the experience.
“Whatever your intentions may be, Jayne—and rest assured I’ll get to the bottom of them—this is no pretense.”
His hands circled her narrow waist and slid upward. The heat of her breasts seared his palms beneath the drenched fabric. She gasped, nipples pebbling against his hands, giving the lie to her pretense.
She swallowed hard, the long column of her throat rippling. “‘Tis true my body may respond to yours. I have begun to think I may have been...overdue for a lover.”
“I suppose any lover would have done?”
Feeling savage, he caressed her full breasts, thumbs teasing her nipples with sensual purpose.
“Calyx!” she whispered, lids drooping over the sensual shimmer of her gaze. “Whatever may have occurred between us, this—liaison—is not by choice, at least on my part.”
“Oh, isn’t it?” He tweaked her nipples.
Her eyes fluttered closed, a soft moan slipping from her lips.
“Dear God in Heaven, can you not see?” she whispered. “I am begging you, Calyx. You must put ashore and let me off this ship!”
Her sheer determination to convince him only heightened his suspicions—and hardened his resolve to keep her. He couldn’t explain why he was so dead set against freeing her. Clearly he’d have to put her off somewhere before the first shots were fired, or risk her life along with theirs.
But not yet, damn it! We’re a good sennight or more from battle. Seven more nights with Jayne in my bed.
“You say you’re my captive, do you?” He loomed over her, inhaling the scent of moonflowers in her damp hair. “A slave to my will?”
“Mmmm...” In the dim light of the storm lantern, her creamy skin flushed.
“When it comes t
o captivity, I have vast experience,” he murmured. “If you want me to free you, Jayne, you’ll have to persuade me.”
“How—how would I do that?”
A spark of deviltry made him grin. “Imagine you’re a harem girl and I’m an Ottoman sultan. How would you beg your lord and master?”
“My lord and master?” Her lids snapped open, eyes throwing sparks of cobalt temper. “Is that what you want?”
Anticipation simmered in his blood as he rumbled an affirmative and plucked the cap from her damp curls. One deft tug from him, and her midnight tresses tumbled down around her shoulders.
“And if I...please you...do you swear to set me free?”
“Please me well enough and I swear to consider it.”
Deftly he hooked her wet shirt in his hands and tore it open, baring her slim milk-white curves. Swiftly, before she could think to protest, he tugged her hands behind her and bound them with the torn garment.
Belatedly grasping his intent, she hissed in protest, but he swallowed her words in a swift hot kiss that left them both panting. Even with angry flags of color flying in her cheeks and her eyes nearly black with wrath, her silken tongue dueled with his and her supple frame arched against him.
“Now you’re a proper captive,” he breathed, testing the strength of her bonds. “Show me how you please your master.”
Another woman would dither or prevaricate, wasting both their time with ladylike protest. But not his Jayne. With her signature boldness, her gaze never leaving his, she leaned forward to trail her tongue in a line of fire along his naked chest. He sucked in his breath as her wicked tongue swirled around his nipple.
Calyx thanked his lucky stars for the moment of divine inspiration that had launched their little game.
Gracefully she slid to her knees. Her warm breath fluttered against his belly, raising tremors along his rain-chilled skin.
“Is this the sort of thing you were hoping for?” she whispered.
“It’s a bloody good start.” Mindful of her bonds, he tossed his codpiece aside and unlaced his breeches. The sight of her upturned face, mouth parted and eyes smoking with arousal, kicked his heart against his ribs.
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