Megan Mulry

by Bound to Be a Bride

  “Javi?” Sebastián asked.

  Javier whipped his head around. “Sorry. Right.” He took another look into the dappled beauty of that midday Spanish forest, until a firm resolve settled hard and sure over his heart. “Right. Let us be off, then.”

  And the three turned their horses in the opposite direction, galloping north for a few minutes, then veering due west, crossing through much of the Duke of Feria’s land and eventually on toward Portugal. Within five days of steady riding, a pace to which they had all become accustomed, with any luck, the three young rebels would be on board the British brig-ship Sappho and sailing out of Aveiro harbor toward the New World.

  ***

  Either they were stupid or arrogant. Probably both, since they were obviously men.

  Isabella had found it almost ridiculously easy to escape her supposedly inescapable fate. She did not think of herself as an overly dramatic female. She had no interest in tense moments, but she had expected at least one or two heart-pounding run-ins or near-misses at the very least. As it turned out, everyone was so preoccupied with the wedding and the arrival of all the great families of Spain that no one took the least notice of the bride’s absence. Much later, she would learn that Sol had kept the door to her chamber closed and informed anyone who tried to get in that the young, virginal, timid bride-to-be simply had to have a few more minutes to prepare herself for the high honor of becoming the wife of the future Conde Javier de la Mina. When it became evident that the conde would never arrive, it was even more fitting that the supposedly distraught maiden would refuse to leave her room ever again.

  But since Isabella was in the forest many miles away at that time, and awash in the brazen certainty of her unaided cleverness, she did not think that anyone else had played any part in her escape. She had made wonderful time. All her parcels were intact. Undressing had proved the most difficult task so far, but even that was rather quickly dispensed with when Isabella thought only of speed rather than propriety and used her knife to cut a clean line right down the front of her priceless wedding gown. She kept her shift and corset and drawers and changed into the peasant dress she had hidden for herself in the tree.

  While still at the castle, and just before the sun had reached its zenith, Isabella had forced herself to appear nervous and agitated (a pretense that was not difficult to maintain). She told Sol in desperate, whispering tones that she needed the older woman to procure something stronger than water from the kitchen in order to calm her rapidly fraying nerves. As soon as Sol had shut the door behind her to do her lady’s bidding, Isabella took the older woman’s serviceable hooded brown cape and wrapped it around her white-brocaded self.

  The commotion in the kitchen had her nervous for a few seconds, until she realized the wedding feast preparations had thrown every member of her father’s household staff into paroxysms of frantic activity. She slipped easily out the back door that led to a sunken kitchen garden, kept her back close to the golden stone of the castle’s exterior, and was into the wooded protection of the surrounding forest within a few minutes of leaving her room. Her horse was exactly where she had left her, chewing on a bit of grass and looking at Isabella with a mildly disapproving stare.

  “Oh, stop that, you beast! I know what I am doing,” Isabella said softly as she patted down the horse’s neck and tightened the buckle of the girth. Over the next mile, she felt like a very lucky child who happened upon treasure after treasure in the trees and shrubs. The first sewn burlap parcel held the very basics: knife, needle, two leather flasks of water, and a practical peasant dress.

  She had contemplated shearing off her hair and sporting a pair of close-fitting buckskins, but she had convinced herself that merely escaping would be enough of an adventure and accomplishment. No need to gild the lily with pretending to be a gentleman. She would never admit that vanity had also reared its ugly head; even she knew that her luxuriant black hair was her very best asset. She rationalized further that she was really treating her mane as a form of savings, a commodity she could sell one day if need be.

  Isabella picked up the trail of the three men, probably poachers, about two hours after beginning her journey. They were obviously heading due west to Portugal, as was she, but they were all still on her father’s land. Now, a few hours later, under the protection of darkness, she tied up her horse a good distance away and walked through the trees, concealing herself as best she could.

  “It just seems unlikely, Javi. The false ruler is right here in Spain. What good will it do for us to go halfway around the world and disrupt a few peasants in Mexico? He won’t even care.”

  The man speaking had the rough features of a peasant, but he spoke like an educated man. A third man had long legs that stretched toward the fire and a bored aristocratic expression. Their leader, the one named Javier, was poking a stick into their small fire with agitated jabs. The coals lit his face like a devil. An arrogant, outrageously handsome devil, Isabella thought with an unfamiliar curl of desire in her belly. She instinctively covered her middle with the palm of her hand, as if to stave off an attack of peptic upset. When he looked up, she must have gasped, because all three men turned simultaneously, pulled all sorts of vicious-looking weapons from all sorts of invisible places, and came running in her direction.

  She caught her breath and turned, running as fast as she ever had. Isabella was a splendid runner; everyone at the convent had told her so. But she was no match for an angry, arrogant, red-eyed Satan of a man. She felt the pull of his grip, hard and merciless, on her nape. He grabbed her like an errant kitten, by the scruff of her neck. From sheer instinct, or maybe stupidity, Isabella began thrashing and kicking and must have made contact with something because the terrible man dropped her unceremoniously back down the few inches he had lifted her off the ground. He moaned like a weak, lame thing. She felt victorious.

  Then she saw the gleam of pure hatred in his eyes. “You. Will. Never. Do. That. Again.” He ground out each syllable as if it cost him dearly. “Get me my rope. The narrow one.” He barked the order with easy authority and the taller of the two lackeys quickly obeyed. The devilish Javier tied her up very quickly and very effectively as the shorter man held her in place. When they were finished, the devil shoved her over to their campsite.

  “Sit,” he commanded, then turned away to speak quietly to his friends. Isabella lowered herself awkwardly to the ground, until she was able to tuck her legs beneath her and sit rather demurely against a tree. She tried to hear what the three men were going to do with her as she made a few attempts to tug at the thin, soft rope that held her wrists. Unfortunately, the way she had been tied was far more complicated than she had first assumed. If she tugged in one direction, it tightened around her shoulders. If she pulled at her shoulders, it tightened around her neck. If she sat perfectly still, however, she felt entirely unencumbered, as if there were no rope at all.

  Javier had restrained her so quickly that she had initially assumed he must have been careless. Quite the opposite. Three rows of narrow rope twisted around her wrists and slipped into an invisible knot that continued in one infinite loop around her shoulders and neck, crossing in an X behind her back, then circling back where it met the other wrist.

  Isabella was disoriented, but eventually her head cleared enough to listen to the voices of these strange men. They were not speaking like lackeys… or poachers. They were speaking like… like… her father.

  “Who are you and why are you following us?” The devil had turned and was squatting in front of her. His shoulders were too broad, his wagging finger too close to her face. He spoke in that accusatory way, as if she were a prisoner of war, which, for all she knew, she was. Everyone knew the French and English had allied themselves with all manner of Spanish riffraff in their ongoing skirmishes around her father’s lands.

  She turned her head away, trying to ignore him. She might have tilted her chin up in the tiniest way, but it wa
s only how she was raised. She had not intended to appear arrogant.

  “Are you trying to rekindle my anger? Answer me, you whore!”

  Now, that was quite enough. Her head snapped around. “I am not a whore. That much I can assure you.”

  She noticed that the other two men, standing a few feet behind him, had to turn away rather than let their arrogant leader see their incipient laughter. Perhaps she was the first person in history to speak plainly to the proud Javier.

  “Did you hear that, gentlemen?” Satan barked like a traveling carnival hawker. “She can assure me that she is not a whore… but how will we ever know?”

  The taller one turned around quickly. He no longer showed any sign of mirth. “Javi. Stop this at once. Look at her. She’s pathetic.”

  Now, that was not right either. “I most certainly am not!” Isabella railed. “I am perfectly capable of surviving in the forest, or at sea, or anywhere I happen to find myself in need of… surviving.”

  The three men stared at her—bound—and after a comical beat of openmouthed gaping, burst into peals of uproarious laughter. Satan found it particularly amusing. He stood up quickly (apparently any damage Isabella thought she had landed with her kick to his manhood was very short-lived), and he slapped the palms of his hands against his (rather muscular and right at her eye level) thighs. “Let us leave this snarling little beast to all of her independent accomplishments, shall we?”

  This time, the shorter lackey lost his sense of humor. “Of course, you are joking, Javi. We cannot leave her here. I’m sure you don’t need me to enumerate the reasons.”

  The devil turned to stare at the fire.

  Isabella stretched her legs slightly to put her feet closer to the warmth. Maybe being their prisoner for the night would not be all bad, seeing as how they had already built a fire and it felt particularly soothing against the bottoms of her soft boots just then.

  He kicked her feet out of his way. “Go build your own fire if you want to warm yourself.”

  The taller one glared at his master.

  Good, thought Isabella, at least one of them was born a gentleman. Not that she put any stock in that sort of thing. Terribly ancien régime and all that to even think that way. Revolution was afoot. She believed in letting people express themselves. She knew her father had earned everything that he had. Maybe not with the sweat of his own brow, come to think of it, but all those peasants and farmers and helpless tenants needed a leader like her father to… to… manage everything. Did they not?

  Isabella made a mental note to craft (at some later date) a solution to the philosophical snares that bogged her down when she tried to iron out the rights and responsibilities of landowners versus the needs of their human dependents.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  Isabella’s eyes flew open. She had the terrible habit of closing her eyes and mumbling slightly when she was lost in thought. The nuns had tried for years to punish it out of her, but they had never been able to rid her of it completely.

  “What?!” She was nearly sure these men were not going to kill her after all and her voice was probably starting to ring with its typical impatient confidence.

  The devil waved his hand in front of his face. “The eyes closed and the mumbling thing you were just doing? You don’t have visions or any of that nonsense, do you?”

  She shook her head slowly, still uncertain about what he was asking. “No…“ At least, she did not think she did. How would you know, she wondered, unless someone told you after the fact?

  “Oh!” He snapped his fingers. “I know!”

  Her heart sank. He probably knew her father and would be depositing her back on his doorstep by dawn tomorrow.

  “You are running away!”

  She nodded enthusiastically. She felt like she was shopping for ribbons at her favorite little shop in the small town outside of Burgos. But, instead of ribbons, this man could offer up frilly little stories and she could pick and choose whichever one she liked. “Yes!”

  “And,” he continued, “your… husband will soon be chasing after us with a shotgun…”

  She stopped nodding and slowly moved her head from right to left.

  “No, he won’t come after us?” the devil asked. “Or, no, you don’t have a husband?”

  “No, he won’t come after us.” She felt a slight pang of guilt about the man who thought he was marrying her that day. Would he come after her? She figured her father would send out a search party, but she had not given much thought to her jilted groom. He was probably hideously ugly and deformed. Francisco de la Mina was his name. From a long line of Francisco de la Minas. They were probably all inbred and cruel. The de la Mina men probably had perfumed, manicured hands and too much powder on their faces and padding in their jackets. I need not feel sorry for someone horrible like that, she assured herself.

  Francisco de la Mina certainly would not be as… intense… as this strong man invading her space. The thought made her smile.

  She looked up again and realized all three men were staring at her, the devil Javier striking the most accusatory pose, arms crossed arrogantly in front of his chest.

  “What?!” she cried. “I don’t—” She didn’t what? She halted to collect herself. Why had she not spent more time concocting the story of who she was and why she was traversing the Spanish countryside unaccompanied?

  He began tapping his foot, the infernal beast.

  “I don’t believe my husband will pursue me.”

  “And why, may I ask, is that?”

  “Because… because…” Her hesitation made her sound like a liar even to her own ears.

  His toe tapped on.

  “Could you untie my wrists please?” She held up her forearms and tried her best wide-eyed gaze. “Please, my lord?”

  He turned away from her and scowled. He spoke to an empty area a few feet in front of him, as if he were talking to someone on the other side of the fire. “No. You will be fine with them. I am quite adept at tying knots.”

  The taller man seemed to find that funny.

  “Close your mouth, Sebi,” the devil chided the snickering one, then turned back to face her. “You aren’t going anywhere. And I am not happy about it. Where is your horse?”

  Isabella tossed her head in the general direction of where she had tied up her horse. Nothing more. The last thing she wanted was a trio of rascals going through her personal belongings.

  “Fine,” the devil added carelessly. “If you don’t care enough about your horse to make sure she’s comfortable for the night, you shall be similarly ignored. Your basic needs shall also wait until morning. Sleep well.” With that, he threw a coarse gray blanket toward her and then proceeded to watch in smug fascination as she tried to pull it over herself with her hands tied at the wrists and her legs tied at the ankles. It was not elegant.

  ***

  Javier watched her closely from the cover of encircling darkness beyond the firelight. He had probably been overly harsh with her, but how was he to know she was an innocent? He kept up the charade of his initial fury, but he was not sure how to proceed the following day. There was no way he could turn back; the Duke of Feria probably had an armed group of men ready to begin their pursuit the next morning, if they were not already on their trail. Perhaps Javier should race to Aveiro with only one of his friends, and impose upon the other the task of returning her to the nearest village.

  Or castle.

  He was not fooled by the rough weave of the peasant dress she had thrown over her otherwise entirely aristocratic self. Her cheeks were as smooth and rosy as any he had seen in the ballroom at El Escorial, the royal palace outside of Madrid. Her eyes were direct. Disconcertingly so. Confident. Fiery. Everything about her exuded a banked heat, as if she had been waiting her whole life to fan the flames of… what? Her independence? Her intellect? And tha
t haughty lift of her chin when he had insulted her purity was sheer aristocratic indignation.

  She might be many things, he thought ruefully, but she would never be good at cards. Her face revealed every thought that sped—quite rapidly, from his brief observation—across her mind. Javier watched as she breathed the steady pace of exhausted sleep, almost still. She was a beauty. Her beauty did not move him, or so he told himself. But it was a fact with which they would have to contend at some point. She would stand out quite glaringly where they were going, if in fact he felt required to take her along for his own protection.

  He froze in the darkness, momentarily lost in the brief moan that escaped her dreaming lips. Red, moist, slightly opened lips. He wondered what she dreamt of when she had that blissful expression on her face, her eyebrows slightly raised in what looked, to his experienced eye, quite like eager sexual anticipation.

  What in Christ was he thinking? She was a burden, a liability he needed to discard as quickly as possible to ensure the safe transfer of himself and his two closest friends to Mexico. He had to get rid of her as soon as first dawn broke across the small area where they had made camp.

  Javier was about to settle into his own rest when the witch commenced a low chorus of little hums of pleasure, made even more provocative by the sleep that wove through her and the way her expression was lit by the dim glow of the waning fire.

  Suddenly, Javier heard, or felt, the rustle of Sebastián a few feet away.