by Mary Balogh
Captain Blake, Duarte directed, should move south, toward Almeida. There was no particular hurry in persuading the populace until the fort fell, it seemed, but there might be very little time afterward. And there was no real doubt that Almeida would fall eventually. Perhaps it would hold out for a week or a month, but it would never withstand a determined siege by the French armies,
“She comes with me,” Captain Blake said, jerking his head in Joana’s direction.
Joana lifted her chin as Duarte and all his men looked at her.
“It is I the Frenchmen will be looking for most determinedly,” Captain Blake said. “It is only fitting that I have their hostage with me. Besides”—his swollen eyes narrowed on Joana—“I have a score of my own to settle with her.”
Joana half-smiled at him and made no appeal to her brother.
“Very well.” Duarte shrugged. “Joana goes with you. I suppose she will be as safe with you as with any of us, even though the two of you will be on foot.” The southern route was the steepest. It would be impossible to take horses up the slope.
And so the huts were destroyed and dust kicked over the ashes of the fire—there was no point, the men had decided, in wasting time trying completely to camouflage what had so obviously been a camp—and hasty farewells were made and good-luck greetings exchanged.
Duarte took Joana in his arms and hugged her hard. “You will not let me send you back directly to safety?” he asked her for the last time.
“When life is suddenly so full of meaning?” she asked, her face hidden against his shoulder. “Never, Duarte.”
“Then stay close to him,” he murmured into her ear. “He will protect you, I believe, once you have explained to him, and probably even if you do not.”
“And I shall protect him.” She lifted her face to his and grinned impishly at him. “I shall see you and Carlota and Miguel at Mortagoa, Duarte. Be careful.”
“Yes. And you.” He gazed into her face as if to memorize it, and then kissed her on the lips. “There is no half-relationship in my feelings for you, Joana. You are as dear to me as Maria and Miguel were. As dear as our mother was.”
She smiled and touched his face with one palm before pulling away and turning to face Captain Blake, who was standing a little distance away, stony-faced. She smiled at him.
“Well, Robert,” she said, “shall we go?”
He motioned her to the southern slope, steep and rocky and bare across the stream. The day was still blistering hot despite the advanced hour. Soon they were scrambling upward, using hands as well as feet in places. Their weapons and the food and blankets strapped to their backs were an encumbrance, but a necessary one. They were traveling as lightly as they dared.
He reached a hand across to help her in one particularly difficult place. But she turned her head and smiled at him.
“I can manage, Robert,” she said. “You do not have to play the gentleman.”
“I am no gentleman, as you know,” he told her, his voice and his eyes cold. “What I am playing, Joana, is guard. You will answer to Lord Wellington when I have got you to headquarters, probably with your freedom until the wars are over. You should be thankful that the British do not treat their prisoners out of uniform as your countrymen treat theirs. And in the meantime, you have to answer to me. You will be sorry you did not beg your new lover back there to take you with him.”
“Duarte?” she said with a laugh. “Duarte is my brother.”
“That was not even an intelligent lie, Joana,” he said. “We both know that your father was French and your mother English. Remember? Duarte Ribeiro is Portuguese.”
“My mother was married to his father,” she said, “before she married mine. He is my half-brother.”
He clucked his tongue impatiently and reached across to smack her rather painfully on the bottom. “Move!” he ordered. “We are wasting time. Or rather, you in your usual way are forcing me to waste time. He has a woman who adores him, Joana, and a plump little baby on whom they both dote. Does it not touch your conscience at all that you forced him into being unfaithful today?”
“No!” She ground her teeth together and scrambled upward out of reach of his large hand. “I will not be satisfied until I have enslaved every man I have ever encountered, Robert, and slept with as many as it is possible to sleep with. Let their wives and women beware. And if any man resists me, well, then, he will be sorry, as you were sorry in Salamanca. They hurt you, did they not? I am glad. Very glad. I am only sorry that it did not last longer than five days.”
“Ah,” he said, moving up beside her effortlessly despite her burst of speed, “at last we have stripped away layers and come to the real Joana. I think I prefer her to the one everyone else knows. At least she is honest.”
They climbed the rest of the way to the top in silence, needing every breath to accomplish the steep climb.
Captain Blake paused at the top to look back down into the valley and away to the lower hills to the east. He shaded his eyes and reached out to take Joana’s wrist in his grasp. Then he swore and jerked her down to lie on the ground beside him. He pointed.
“There comes lover-boy,” he said, “together with a whole company of horsemen. Panting with frustration after a whole night without your favors, doubtless. And I was stupid enough to stand against the skyline. Well, Joana, it would be strange indeed if they did not see us. But don’t allow hope to soar. I have no intention of relinquishing either my freedom or my life yet. I have even less intention of relinquishing you.”
“Am I to be flattered?” she asked sweetly.
He wormed his way back from the crest of the hill, drawing her with him, before pulling her to her feet and half-running with his hand still grasping her wrist over the barren, uneven country above the ravine. The horsemen had been miles off and perhaps had not spotted them. But he intended to find a safe hiding place before nightfall.
He found what he was looking for a few miles farther on when the gamble of climbing a lone peak paid off and offered a low cave that sloped inward for some distance and would hide them completely from the view of anyone below. He pushed Joana inside none too gently.
“They will not catch up with us tonight,” he said, “or even tomorrow, at a guess. And we will be difficult to track in this country. But we might as well establish a few ground rules from the start. You will not try to attract the attention of any Frenchman, Joana. If you do, I may be forced to slit your throat. And you will not try to escape from me. If you do, I shall use your belt to bind your hands and attach it to my own belt. And I shall have your weapons—now.”
“Don’t be tiresome, Robert,” she said, turning to face him. “Do you not realize that I am on your side? That Lord Wellington sent me after you to make sure that your paper was believed to be a hoax? That I arranged for you to be freed from your parole? That I arranged for Duarte to come to rescue you and to take me hostage? That I am as much a British spy as you are?”
“Your weapons,” he said, standing in the entrance of the cave, his feet planted firmly apart, his expression implacable. “And I might yet have to bind your mouth too, Joana. You must think me more of a fool than I have already proved if you think I will believe any more of your lies. And such outrageous and stupid lies. Your weapons!”
“Very well.” Her voice was quiet, sweet. “If you think I am going to beg and grovel and plead with you, Robert, then you are sadly mistaken. You will believe what you will, and you may go to hell with my blessing into the bargain.” She hitched the musket off her shoulder and dropped it with a clatter to the stone floor of the cave. “But don’t expect me to be a docile prisoner.”
He scarcely saw her hand move, but the next moment her knife was pointed at his stomach, and she was crouched in a defensive stance.
“You want my knife, Robert?” she asked him sweetly. “Then come and get it.”
He was
furiously angry—with her for trying after all she had done to him to make a dupe of him yet again, and with himself for expecting her, against all the evidence of his experience, to act as one would expect a woman to act and lay down her arms meekly.
“By God, Joana,” he hissed at her from between his teeth, “you are asking for trouble.”
She smiled at him that feline smile that he had seen once before. “Are you afraid, Robert?”
The foolish, the idiotic part was that he was afraid. Afraid of hurting her. He should go in, twist her wrist, and allow her to stab herself. That was what he should do. He cursed himself for being unable to do it. And so he circled her in the confines of the cave, feinted one way and then the other—and both times found the knife still trained on the very center of his stomach, and was finally forced to grab for her wrist at the same moment as he reached out with one boot to catch her smartly behind one ankle.
She went down with him on top of her and they wrestled soundlessly except for their labored breathing, while he slowly forced her hand up over her head and to the ground and then cut the circulation from her wrist until her hand opened and the knife fell with a soft clatter to the stones.
“Bastard,” she said to him.
“Slut.”
“Coward and brute.”
“Traitor and siren.”
She snarled up at him.
He snarled back.
And then suddenly and quite unexpectedly she smiled at him, her eyes sparkling, her mouth curving appealingly. “Oh, God, Robert,” she said, “I would rather fight with you any day of the year than make love with another man. I don’t know when I had such fun.”
He looked down at her guardedly. Always when he thought he had her finally figured out she ducked around and came at him from another angle. “You might have killed yourself with your own knife,” he said.
“Never.” She continued to smile and pant. “You would not have allowed it. Do you think I did not know at every moment that you were completely in control of that struggle? But only physically, Robert. Physically you can overpower me. But you can never overpower my will. Never. You will lose if you try. So don’t try laying down rules for me. I never obey rules. When I left school at the age of sixteen, I vowed that never again would I obey a rule I did not like. And sometimes I break rules I do like just because they are there. You are heavy.”
“Am I?” he said. “But you do not have a mattress at your back, Joana, as you usually do when you have a man on top of you.”
“Do you think I would care?” she asked, and her eyes sparked up into his. “If we were making love, Robert, do you think I would care about a stone bed at my back or your weight on top? But we are not making love, are we? And you are heavy.”
He moved off her slowly, not taking his eyes from hers. He reached up, took the knife, and stuck it into his own belt. And he moved the musket over into one corner and stood it there with his rifle.
“We had better eat,” he said, “while we have the dregs of daylight in which to do so. And then I will give you five minutes to go outside to make yourself comfortable. Five minutes. No longer. And I would advise you not to defy me by trying to escape, even if defiance is in your nature. Try to escape this time and you will never be allowed privacy again. Understood?”
She merely smiled at him as she sat up and smoothed her dress over her knees.
“Are you going to have the bedroom on the left or the one on the right tonight?” she asked. “There is so much choice.”
“We occupy the central bedroom,” he said, “together. You do not think I would allow myself to sleep without my arms firmly about you, do you?”
She made a kissing gesture with her mouth. “I am that irresistible?” she said. “I told you you would fall in love with me, Robert.”
He unpacked their food without either replying or looking at her. There had been definite advantages to that prison cell, he thought. Despite the daily beatings, he had had long hours alone with the peace of his own thoughts.
18
SHE had dozed and woken again. But she knew that she must sleep. She was unaccustomed to the life of Joana Ribeiro, and the first few days would be tiring, she knew. More so than usual—there was not usually quite so much traveling as there was likely to be in the coming days. And the traveling would be filled with tension, for they would be journeying not only to various places but also from the pursuit of Colonel Leroux and his company.
Colonel Leroux, she thought. He must come. He must find their tracks and follow. And she must be ready for him when he came. It struck her suddenly how suicidal her plan was and how dangerous for Robert. She might as well have killed the colonel in Salamanca, where only her own life would have been forfeit as a result. But for some reason she had wanted him on her own territory. She wanted him in the country where Miguel and Maria had died.
But she would need her weapons. They were in the back corner of the cave with his sword, though his rifle, she knew, was at his back, within his reach. She could reach none of them, imprisoned as she was. One of his arms was beneath her head and curled about her shoulder, a comfortable-enough pillow but really only a chain of captivity. The other was firmly about her waist. One of his legs was thrown over hers. He would awaken, he had told her earlier when she had protested, if she moved so much as a muscle during the night.
It was hard trying to sleep on a stone floor without moving a muscle.
There was no way she could get to her gun or her knife without waking him. And even if she could, she would never get away without being caught by him again. She thought with some indignation of her belt binding her wrists and attached to his belt, and knew without a shadow of doubt that that would be her fate if she tried to get away. She would never get to her gun again if that happened.
No, she would have to have patience and await her chance. It would come. She had never wanted anything that she had not got. And he could be made to fall in love with her. Despite everything, she could have him wrapped about her little finger within days if she tried. She clamped her teeth hard together when she recalled the scorn with which he had greeted her attempt at explaining the truth to him. Not that she had tried very hard. It went against her pride to beg and plead. If he chose not to believe her, then so be it.
But she could still make him fall in love with her if she so chose. They were kindred spirits, she and Robert Blake. They sparked desire off each other, and yet neither would ever fawn on the other. She knew she could never make him her slave, and she exulted in the knowledge, difficult as it made her task. If she ever called him bastard again, then he would call her slut again. He would give insult for insult. He was not a gentleman and did not know that one did not insult a lady no matter what. She was glad he was not a gentleman.
She lifted one hand to rest against his chest, and his boast proved to be no boast at all, but the simple truth. He had been fast asleep just a moment before. Now he was looking down at her. She knew it even though she did not tip her head back to look.
“It is impossible to lie still for a whole night without moving a muscle, Robert,” she said with a sigh. “Especially when you have me in such close embrace. But of course, it is not an embrace, is it? It is captivity.” She tipped her head back and looked up at him. There was moonlight coming into the cave. Even so, she could sense him more than see him.
“It is captivity,” he said. “Do you want to turn onto your other side?”
“No,” she said. “I am quite comfortable as I am. One has but to have a powerful imagination. A feather mattress. A pile of soft blankets. Feather pillows. Mmm. Can you not feel them?”
He caught her wrist in a tight grasp as her hand slid downward from his chest to his waist.
“Cut it out, Joana,” he said. “Go to sleep.”
“You would have me believe that you are made of stone like this floor?” she said. “I know differ
ently, Robert. Do you not desire me even just one little bit?”
“You will be sorry,” he said, “if you continue this. I warn you, Joana, that you will not be able to control the situation if you continue to play the tease. And I will not even try to do so. It is a while since I had a woman and I am hungry.”
She could hear her heart beating. She could see it pulsing behind her closed eyes. Luis had bedded her six times in all—she had counted—each more horrid and nauseating than the one before, until she had told him that if that was what marriage was all about, she would rather do without it, thank you very much. He had not even been offended. Relieved was more the word. She had discovered why later.
And Robert talked of hunger!
But she had never deliberately pressed flirtation beyond the point at which she could control it. And even with Robert on those two occasions there had been no great danger. But this time she knew he spoke the truth. They were alone together—very alone in the middle of the night and very close to each other because he thought there was the necessity of guarding her from flight. And perhaps he was right too.
She felt him relax. He thought she had gone back to sleep. But how could she sleep now that her blood had been aroused? More to the point, how could she back off when he had issued such a challenge? It was not in her nature to resist a challenge, much as she feared picking it up.
“Is it food you need, then?” she asked, her voice low. “I am hungry too, Robert. Do you have food? Shall we share it?”
He swore, a word she had not heard in the English language before, though she had heard its Portuguese equivalent among Duarte’s men.
She thought he was going to unleash his anger on her in words. She braced herself for the tirade, prepared herself to give as good as she got. Instead he pulled her against him with such force that she felt the breath slam from her body, and found her mouth with his, forcing it wide with his own, plunging his tongue inside so that she was sure she must choke.
And she knew the terror of helplessness, of having unleashed a passion that she could in no way control and that would violate her and perhaps hurt her before it was sated. But terror could be fought, she thought while she still could, and a fight could be fought even if it was to be inevitably lost. She had fought such a fight for her knife. Now she would fight for her very self.