If she were his wife, he would have both the envy and the pity of every man he knew.
Mary Kate took a deep breath, one intended to do exactly what it did to the soft hills above her neckline. “I was a little worried about the skirt, but the embroidery hides the wrinkles, don’t you think?” She leaned down to smooth the fabric, and Diego’s mind flew right back to his bunk the previous night. If she were pinned under him in that, he would only have to yank the bodice down a little…
“You look hungry, Diego,” she commented, and there was laughter in her husky voice.
“I forgot something,” he said and ducked back into his cabin. When he emerged, it was with a sheepish look. “I have no idea why I did this. You did not deserve it.” He pulled a hand from behind his back, revealing a pretty glass bottle.
She took it and removed the stopper. Instantly, the scent of roses infused her senses. “You remembered.”
“It seemed a small enough request.”
“And after I’d led you on a merry chase and offended your sensibilities.” She stepped back into her cabin and dabbed herself with the perfume.
“You did not offend me,” he said from his place at the door.
She beckoned to him, and he stepped inside. “Thank you,” she said, carefully slipping the bottle into her trunk.
“You are welcome.”
He turned to go, and she called out to him. “Wait.”
He was resplendent in black velvet trimmed in silver braid. His hair fell smoothly down his back, and the white lace on his wide collar set off his swarthy skin. She drew closer, and the smell of citrus mingled with the scent of roses. He looked much better now, almost as if the thing on deck hadn’t happened at all. She slipped her hand around the back of his neck, expecting him to rebuff her, but he leaned forward, and she pressed her lips to his, lingering long over the firm flesh, then parting her lips to taste him. His hands slipped around her waist, spanning it with his long, lean fingers, and she ran her hands down the front of his soft, warm velvet jacket, pressing her palms to his hard chest.
“You look beautiful tonight,” she whispered when they broke the kiss.
He laughed softly, and the sound sent delicious shivers through her. “I do not think there is a word in any language for the sight of you,” he replied.
She straightened a bit of lace on the elaborate collar that lay over his shoulders. “Diego, if I asked, would you tell me what happened to you today?”
He shook his head and pulled her hands away from his chest, pressing them together and then setting them back in front of her. “It was nothing. The sun was hot, and I had not eaten well at breakfast.”
“Diego Montoya Fernández de Madrid y Delgado Cortés, are you telling me a lie?”
“No. The sun was hot, and I had not eaten well.”
“Half the truth’s no better than none at all. Sometimes ‘tis worse. That’s what Father Brendan always said.”
“How often did he need to say it to you?”
“More than he ought. That’s how I know a lie when I hear one.”
Diego turned and walked back to the door. “You are in for a rare treat tonight. Naval captains eat well.”
“So Galeno told me.”
He frowned. “What else did he tell you?”
Mary Kate rolled her eyes. “About as much as you. He says God talks to you.”
She could have sworn his face paled again, ever so slightly. “He has quite an imagination,” Diego responded before retreating through the door.
“Doesn’t he, though?” she agreed and then followed.
*
Mary Kate couldn’t decide whether it was a blessing or curse, not being able to keep up with the conversation around her. One of the other captains spoke English, but it was very limited and revolved around how impressed she was by the size and weaponry of the galleons and whether or not she liked each course of the elegant dinner they ate. She responded politely, although the squid cooked in its own ink was a bit much. Diego tried to keep pace with the translations, but he would often become so caught up in the conversation that he would forget. Then he would backtrack, but any comments she might have made were no longer timely, for the talk had marched right along without her to some new topic.
“The captain of the Santiago says that he had her refitted in Spain the last time he was there. He thought that perhaps you would like to come and see one of his new guns.”
She pondered that a moment, then smiled impishly. “Well, I’ll grant you now that you’ve yet to let me see your gun, but I’m willing to wager his is no bigger.”
He choked on laughter, nearly spewing red wine over the snowy table linen. This, certainly, led to inquiries about what she had said, and she thoroughly enjoyed watching him trip all over himself trying to come up with a less risqué explanation.
“What did you tell them?” she asked.
“I told them there had been a slight misunderstanding. Behave yourself, María Catalina.”
Well, now, if that wasn’t a challenge, she didn’t know what was. “The thanks I get for having an amusing contribution to the conversation!” She smiled at the other gentlemen and fluttered her lashes in mock consternation. “Yo estoy embarazada,” she explained, delighted by the uproar her pronouncement caused.
His face glowing red, Diego explained that embarazada was very close to the English word “embarrassed.” Avergonzado was, certainly, the Spanish word she was looking for. Truly, he avowed, she was trying to express her discomfiture, not announce that she was pregnant!
“¡Oh, lo siento!” she apologized, once her “mistake” had been made clear. “Yo soy desvergonzado.”
“¡A-vergonzado!” Diego shouted.
“¿Avispado?” she asked, her blue eyes round and innocent. Clever? She shrugged in innocent confusion and took a sip of wine.
Diego vacillated violently between finding her thoroughly entertaining and utterly scandalous. Once or twice he broke a sweat trying to smooth over her outrageous Spanish, but the stunned looks on the proud galleon captains’ superior faces was very nearly worth it.
Her performance was also a welcome distraction from the questions that had been burning inside of him ever since the timely but disturbing reappearance of Magdalena.
Chapter Ten
“Don’t be cross with me, Diego,” Mary Kate coaxed outside her cabin door. They had concluded their visit on board the galleon, and though Diego had seemed as amused as she by some of her “blunders,” now he had become very formal and distant.
“I am not cross,” he insisted, “but the hour is late, and a captain’s day begins early.” Besides, she was the least of his worries. The mood on board had shifted slightly in their absence, and again, more than a few of his crew seemed uneasy in his presence.
“‘Twas only those other captains were so stiff and arrogant seeming, and I couldn’t understand a word of the conversation. I only meant to have a bit of fun, never to truly shame you in front of your peers.”
“I was not ashamed. I was the envy of every one of them tonight.”
“Will you not come inside, then, and give them greater cause for envy?” She said it lightly, though they both knew he had only to say yes.
He smiled and sighed. “Alas, as I said, the hour is late. I would not be able to give the task the proper devotion of time and energy.”
“Well, ‘tis sure you wouldn’t be worth much in the morning when I’d finished with you.”
Diego bowed and turned away, but she laid a hand on his arm to stop him. “You won’t sleep well with trouble on your mind, either. If I promise to be on my best behavior, might you come in and talk a while? You can ask my sister, there’s none keep a confidence so well as I.”
Oh God, to unburden his soul! To find a true ally on board his ship, besides Galeno, who was too young to be encumbered with his captain’s confusion. “You must already think me mad,” he said, painfully aware of how he must have looked, raving into thin air on deck. �
�I would not confirm your suspicions by telling you anything more.”
Mary Kate pondered that a moment. “Well, if you’re mad, your madness saved all of our lives today. Now, there’s Paddy O’Shea back home. He swears the owner of the village pub is really Oliver Cromwell in disguise. Tried to attack him once with an ax. The only reason Paddy was still alive when I left was that his brother-in-law vowed to keep him locked up tight in the cellar. I’ll take your kind of madness first.” Too late, she saw his face tighten, and the flicker of worry that dulled his eyes. “I’m only teasing, now! I don’t think you’re mad.”
“If my fate were in your hands, María Catalina, I think that I could tell you all without fear.”
“That you could, Diego, that you could. There’s naught you could tell me that would change my good opinion of you.”
He laughed tightly, as though the sound were difficult to squeeze through his constricted throat. “I was not aware that you had a good opinion of me.”
Mary Kate smiled, trying to follow his lead and lighten the mood again. “Oh, well, you’re a stiff-necked lout who’s overly concerned with rules and appearances, and you have more self-control than is healthy for a red-blooded man, but on the whole, I think you’re a fine human being.”
Heaven help him, he wanted her. He wanted to pull the pins from her hair and the gown from her body and bury himself in her, burn away all the fear and the doubts in the inferno he knew could blaze between them. The scent of roses warmed by the pale flesh he had been trying valiantly not to stare at all night had been driving him to distraction. She would taste like wine, feel like silk, moan like the most seductive melody…
“Now there’s the look in your eyes I like to see,” she said with a husky laugh. “Come in, Diego. I’ll take your mind from your worries, and you’ll sleep all the better for it.” To her surprise, she meant it. The man seemed to have the weight of the world on his shoulders, etching lines in his face. She wanted to comfort him, soothe his cares. She didn’t want him just as the means to an end anymore.
“And when the passion is spent? My troubles will still be waiting.”
“And so will I. When I’m done with your lips for kissing, I’ll be more than willing to listen to them spill your troubles. ‘Tis my whole body I’m offering, ears included.”
He caressed her jaw with the back of his fingers, and the innocent contact stole the breath from both of them. “That is a very charming offer, but I need to be alone. I have much to think about.”
She reached up and caught his hand in hers. “‘Tis a standing invitation.”
He drew his hand away, pulling hers with it, and kissed her fingers. “Sí. I think that you have made that very plain. Buenas noches, María Catalina.” Before he opened his door across the hall, he stopped. “What kind of Spanish lessons has Galeno been giving you?”
She laughed out loud, and the sound made something inside of him become calmer, more confident.
“Sometimes I stumble upon something interesting to learn, other times I just ask him for certain words, but always within the most innocent of contexts. He’s a trusting lad, that one.”
The sense of calm evaporated. The only man on Magdalena who trusted him completely was a naïve boy. “Sí,” he agreed with a nod, “so he is.”
*
He spent the better part of the night on his knees, and what he did not spend there, he spent pacing his cabin like it was a prison cell. More times than he could count, Diego stood in front of his door and thought about crossing the passage to the cabin that his first mate had given up to Mary Kate. What if he told her? An Irish Catholic from Ulster who had spent her whole life surrounded by Protestants would not be nearly so inclined to see him condemned for heresy as another Spaniard might.
But even his own brother had not believed his visions were really holy. How could he tell a woman he had known for such a short time? And what if she used it against him? She had already proven to him that she would stop at nothing to get back to Ireland. He prayed to everyone he could think of—everyone except María Magdalena. As much as he needed to talk to her, he just was not certain he could trust her. If only someone else would come to him. The Blessed Virgin, perhaps, but how would he know that she was who she claimed to be?
The more he thought about it, the more it seemed to him the key lay just across the hall. He wanted Mary Kate. Perhaps she was not what he had always assumed he wanted in a wife, but he had to admit that a woman who could fight and outrun pirates as well as he was more exciting than a shrinking violet. When his mind had been plagued by doubts, she had made him laugh. He had behaved like a raving madman in her presence, and still she offered him her friendship. She was beautiful, and the most delicious combination of lusty and innocent. Yes, he wanted her, and she had been promised to him.
That, it seemed to him, was the answer. Legally she belonged to another, but not in her heart, and it was not as though she had taken any vows. One thing was clear: she would never leave Diego for her betrothed of her own free will. She would not break his heart as Faith Cooper had. Maybe she did not love him—he did not love her either—but they had friendship and attraction. How much farther along the path could love lie? Had he not told Faith that very thing? If he took Mary Kate to wife, then he would prove Magdalena right, and hence resolve the question of Magdalena’s authenticity.
It was all so simple! How had he missed it? He had been so wrapped up in the fact that María Catalina was betrothed, and not Spanish, and not at all what he had expected. He would be breaking the rules, true. His country was obligated to return her to hers, but which country was that, England or Ireland? Surely somewhere in all the confusion, there was room for a humble Spanish sea captain.
Dawn had just begun to lighten the sky when he finally wrenched his door open and stalked across the passageway. At exactly the same moment, her door flew open, and they faced each other in stunned surprise.
Mary Kate spoke first. She was dressed as though she had just risen from her bed, but she shook her head and said, “Neither of us has slept a wink, I’ll wager. ‘Twas a poor waste of a night. Don’t just stand there. Come in. I promise not to ravish you.”
Diego glanced around him. “Your reputation,” he muttered, belatedly aware that there were men about who would see him enter her cabin.
“Damn my reputation! If you don’t get yourself in here and talk to me, I’ll march right up to the galley in my shift and ask for breakfast for two. That should be the end of any worries for my reputation!”
He was going to marry her. What did it matter? He stepped inside.
“Well?” she demanded, closing the door behind him.
He had seen her like this once before, or rather, he had seen the spit and image of her—the thin, white shift, her dark hair tumbling over her shoulder. This was right. This was absolutely right. This was why Magdalena had appeared to him so.
He tangled his hands in Mary Kate’s tousled hair and wordlessly answered her demand, and she melted against him, responding in kind. Yes! Diego thought. So right, so perfect, like their bodies had been made for each other from the very beginning.
She yanked the tail of his shirt from his breeches and ran her hands underneath, over his chest, around his ribs and down his back. His fingers tugged on the ribbon of her shift, and he pulled it past her shoulders, baring her breasts, then cupping one, not quite gently. Her flesh was full and firm, her nipple taut in the palm of his hand. She stepped backward, pulling him with her, until they fell onto the bed and he had to take his hands from her body to brace his fall on top of her.
Looking down into eyes clouded by passion, upon lips parted and swollen, he took those lips again before he blazed a white-hot trail of kisses downward. He could feel her pulse fluttering in her throat, taste the faint flavor of rosewater on her breasts. With his teeth, he gently captured the tight crest at the summit of each one in turn and coaxed tiny sounds of desire and frustration from her.
“Marry me, María
Catalina,” he whispered against her, even has his hand found the hem of her shift and began tugging it upward.
She groaned deep in her throat. “This is no time for honor, Diego Montoya. Touch me!” She lifted her hips so he could pull the offending garment up more easily and so he could readily obey her command.
He stopped and waited, still looking down at her.
“Damn you!” She hiked her own hem up and rubbed the inside of her bare thigh against the soft warmth of the velvet breeches he was still wearing from the night before.
He kissed her again, running his hand up the satin skin of her leg until he cradled one soft, bare cheek and pressed her hips against him. Her gasp of pleasure was nearly his undoing.
“Say that you will marry me.”
She sucked in her breath. “Jaysus, man, I’ve lost me wits! Make love to me and then we’ll talk!” She tried to pull his head back down, but when he wouldn’t yield, she lifted hers to his.
He kissed her again, let her drive him mad as she ground her hips against his, her heat penetrating the velvet that separated them.
She broke away and began to fumble with the fastenings at his waist. “I may be a virgin, but even I know you cannot do this with your breeches on!”
He lowered himself to one elbow and covered her hand in his. “Stop. Not yet. Tell me you will marry me.”
She giggled, and her breath tickled his lips. “Don’t we have this backwards? Aren’t I supposed to be leading you on and then holding out for the church and the gold ring?”
He pinned her gaze with his, and his voice was choked and intense. “Tell me you knew me the moment that you saw me. Tell me you saw me before we ever met.”
Mary Kate’s muddled brained snapped back from the brink. The burning in his gaze wasn’t lust. It was something else. Something desperate and deeper than she could fathom. “Diego,” she whispered softly.
Paula Reed - [Caribbean] Page 11
