Mistress by Magick

by Laura Navarre

  Something less than a ringing endorsement of Lord Calyx, she thought dryly. Clearly he does not share Philip’s faith in the man.

  Perhaps she could use that in her favor when—

  Don Alonso’s whiskered jaw abraded her bare shoulder, breath hot against her skin. An unpleasant chill rippled down her spine.

  “Ah, querida, your skin is soft and flawless as white damask,” he breathed. “I must confess, the moment I saw you step aboard tonight, I—”

  “Mierda!” The mocking voice rose somewhere behind them, lodging Jayne’s nervous heart squarely in her throat. “Is this a military campaign or a bordello? The Arcángel is a flagship of the holy Armada, señor.”

  For a breath, Jayne allowed herself to sag against the gunwale. A powerful surge of relief rolled through her. Despite her carefully cultivated reputation as an accomplished seductress, she could never discount the possibility that someday she’d miscalculate the strength of a man’s passion—or the flimsy restraint of his honor—and find herself forced to make good on all her implied promises.

  It had happened before, after all. With Dudley.

  But could not her savior, whoever he was, have waited another three minutes to intervene? God’s Eyes! She’d been on the bare edge of teasing out the Armada’s landing site from the befuddled admiral.

  Thus, it was with barely contained annoyance that she felt the don’s hands drop from her waist.

  “Bastardo!” Don Alonso rumbled, spinning away from her. “How dare you intrude upon a private engagement in this insulting manner?”

  “Excellency, can it be you?” The mocking stranger feigned astonishment so broadly it was near theatre. “I beg your pardon, señor! You’re the last man I’d expect to find up a woman’s skirts when there’s trouble in the fleet.”

  Raising her eyes toward Heaven in a bid for patience, Jayne pivoted smoothly. Beyond Don Alonso’s stocky frame, the fighting deck was bathed in shadows, secluded and private between the mizzenmast and the bastion of the fighting tower in the stern. A solitary beam of moonlight shafted through the darkness. It haloed the broad-shouldered figure who stood braced near the ladder, booted legs spread against the rocking deck.

  For a heartbeat, Jayne’s world spun to a halt. He was so tall—a giant of a man, the shocking breadth of shoulders and chest encased in ink-black damask slashed and frogged with silver. The gleaming spear of moonlight glowed on cropped white-blond hair, tousled and hatless. The light carved shadows beneath bold cheekbones and a square jaw. At the base of a sinewed throat, a rich doublet and silk shirt gaped carelessly around the gleaming silver of an antique key, swinging from tarnished links.

  The man would have been striking under any circumstances. But the sight that riveted her, that stopped the breath in her lungs and loosed a fresh flight of butterflies to cartwheel through her quivering belly, was naught visible to the mortal eye.

  With a flicker of her unpredictable Sight, the raging image of a great Figure seemed to tower over him, scaled in armor of blazing gold, a banner of sun-bright hair streaming around a cold, fierce countenance. White fire poured from his eyes as he wielded a flaming sword.

  Beneath the feet of this apparition, the tilting deck turned transparent and insubstantial as mist. An abyss gaped at those colossal feet, filled with writhing coils of serpents with forked tails.

  More than mortal. The words whispered through her stunned brain.

  Whatever he was, the new arrival was not Faerie. No Fae ever born would stand over the gates to Hell.

  Clearly oblivious to the uncanny image, Don Alonso was bristling. “Trouble in the fleet? What the Devil do you mean by that?”

  “Cristo! Have you no eyes?” the newcomer said shortly. “Look to your galleon.”

  Don Alonso peered across the dark expanse of water that separated them from the San Martin’s towering bulk. Amid the stubby silhouettes of the demi-cannons on the gun deck, a shadowy knot of bodies tussled. The distant echo of shouts and curses drifted toward them.

  The admiral gaped at this turmoil.

  “Madre de Dios! What is happening?”

  “Obviously,” the stranger drawled, “it’s a drunken brawl. Apparently, relations between your crew and the soldiers crammed into her hold are as bloody tense aboard your ship as they are on mine.”

  Slower to comprehend than Jayne expected from the fleet’s commander, Don Alonso sputtered.

  “But this is impossible! I left orders for a Mass at Compline. Por Dios, they are supposed to be praying.”

  Jayne divided her frustration between the chaos aboard the San Martin and the striking figure who’d interrupted her intelligence foray. The bitter taste of disappointment filled her mouth. Unless she was exceptionally lucky, and Don Alonso more a fool than she credited him, her ploy to discover the Armada’s landing site had gone down in flames—quite literally.

  From the San Martin arose the faint tinkle of breaking glass. Against the combustible wood danced a tongue of crimson fire.

  She swallowed a groan of frustration. Truly, she had been so close!

  “Looks like it’s getting out of hand,” the newcomer observed. One corner of his wide mouth quirked in a grin. “Better have someone row you across, Admiral, before they burn her to the waterline.”

  “Quite so.” With a jerky bow, her quarry hurried toward the ladder.

  Jayne found herself utterly alone with this maddening interloper. Annoyance crackled through her. Whoever the Devil he was, need the man look so infernally amused to have thwarted her?

  Now he was taking her measure with a pirate’s boldness. Trust her to recognize masculine appreciation when she saw it.

  As his gaze slid slowly over her, from her jaunty slippers to the counterfeit ruby flaming against her tight-laced breasts, his deliberate gaze lingered like a physical caress.

  The knowledge of what he saw seared through her. This intruder, whoever he was, had just found her in another man’s arms. No doubt he thought her an expensive whore, like the others brought aboard for this fiesta. Was he wondering if she would prove as amenable to his advances as she’d been to Don Alonso’s?

  Slow heat spread through her, a tide of warmth flooding her face and bringing a surge of color to her cheeks. Beneath her whalebone bodice, her nipples tingled.

  His brows were bold slashes, darker than his pale hair. They drew together in a frown as he took her measure.

  As little as Jayne told herself she fancied the masculine possession in that slow assessment, she liked the gleam of intellect even less. God save her from a thinking man. Most of them, in her experience, thought with the brain between their legs.

  The silence between them grew uncomfortable. As Jayne cast about for some blithe excuse to take her leave, the stranger lounged against the mizzenmast.

  “Should I beg your pardon, comtesse,” he said in a torrent of husky French, “for depriving you of the admiral’s company? Somehow I’m not convinced you minded.”

  Minded? Of course I minded, she wanted to snap, still unaccountably flustered. The fact that he’d addressed her in what he clearly thought her native tongue meant he knew who she was, or at least who she pretended to be.

  The low rumble of his voice issuing from that powerful chest unsettled her. Though his French was excellent, the flavor of Castile turned his L’s and R’s to liquid.

  Deftly Jayne unfurled her fan to hide the rising heat in her cheeks. Over its gold lace rim, she widened her eyes in mock reproach.

  “Au contraire, monsieur.” Effortlessly she shifted to the same tongue. “Even a blind man could see I was enjoying the admiral’s company. As I have now been deprived of it, however, I must return to the officers.”

  “I can’t see why,” he said flatly, settling against his perch—effectively blocking her escape. “Unless you’re stimulated by the bone-dry details of military strategy, that lot will bore you to tears in five minutes.”

  Military strategy is exactly what I wish to hear, if I am ever allowed.
Jayne gave her fan an irritated snap, but kept her tone cool and unruffled.

  “Do you claim to be better company, monsieur?”

  “Most assuredly.” His voice deepened, and her heart fluttered queerly. “I’m the captain of this ship. Who better to show you its secrets?”

  A small shock of excitement jolted through her. Body of God, she was standing in the presence of the infamous Lord Calyx himself! If any man was better placed than the admiral to know the landing site, it would be the fleet’s own navigator, Carlos Alejandro Angelo de Zamorra. Capitán of the Arcángel, the man Philip himself had lauded.

  Perhaps luck had not abandoned her after all.

  “Monsieur le capitaine?” She sank into a pretty curtsey, the crimson cone of her skirts spreading against the floorboards. “Your King speaks well of you, Lord Calyx.”

  “I’m told he speaks well of you, Lady Jayne. You’re said to be one of his intimates.”

  His sinful voice as he underscored the word, deep and soft as velvet, made her breath quicken. But the sound of her name on his lips sent prickles of alarm rippling through her. He knew exactly who she was. Somehow she must have drawn his attention. Or had someone warned him?

  How much does he know?

  As her thoughts seethed, she floated gracefully upright and plied her fan. “My husband was the King’s intimate, and I merely his grieving widow. I have nothing like your notoriety, monsieur.”

  She paused. “The English call you the Scourge of the Spanish Main, oui? They say the Queen’s tame pirate, Sir Francis Drake, would do anything to capture you.”

  Beneath lowered lashes, she glanced up coyly to gauge the effect of this strategic flattery. He was still studying her with that furrow between his dark brows, as though he sensed something about her that was off, something that puzzled him. The scrutiny behind those intelligent eyes made her itch with nerves.

  Now, as though he’d reached some decision, he uncrossed his booted legs and shifted to the full measure of his impressive height.

  “El Draque is welcome to try.” Lord Calyx dismissed his formidable rival with a shrug and switched deftly to English—another tongue he spoke with barely an accent. “Tell me, Lady Boleyn, doesn’t it trouble your English blood to pour your fortune into this Armada? It spells the doom of your royal cousin.”

  A pulse leaped at the base of her throat. To hide it, Jayne fluttered her fan. While her English blood was certainly no secret, it was not broadly known among the Spanish, to whom she generally passed for French. The capitán of the Arcángel must have taken more than a passing interest in her.

  Had her disguise been penetrated? Had the Spanish learned she was spying for England?

  “It seems you know all my secrets,” she said with forced lightness. God grant he does not. “In that case, you will know there is no love lost between Elizabeth Tudor and myself. When last I dwelled on English soil, I fear I offended my royal cousin. Like any Tudor, she is not known for her forgiving nature. When I married the Comte de Boulaine, my loyalties became his.”

  “Your husband lies cold in his grave. Who holds your loyalties now?” Inch by slow inch, his dark gaze slid over her.

  Her chest tightened, making it hard to breath. To deflect him from this dangerous ground, she shifted to the offensive.

  “Once committed, I am constant as rain. You of all men, captain, must understand how a foreign marriage alters a woman’s loyalties. I am told your own mother was English before she married a Spanish grandee.” She paused. “Surely her loyalty, once given, did not waver?”

  A sudden stillness gripped his powerful frame. Though she’d meant the remark to be anodyne, a sop to quiet his suspicions, she had the sudden sense of having seized a tiger from the fabled Orient by the tail.

  “Indeed,” he said with ominous softness. “My mother’s loyalty was unwavering. What better incentive to secure a woman’s allegiance than the love of a doting husband? Surely you can attest to that.”

  Now it was Jayne’s turn to stiffen. No woman living would have called Antoine de Boulaine a doting husband. For most of their marriage, arranged through the ruthless application of threats and bribery by the enraged Queen, he’d been a querulous, gout-ridden invalid, rarely capable of exercising his prerogatives as a husband.

  Her memory of their infrequent conjugal encounters was sufficient to make her tremble with suppressed loathing.

  He’d thought her brazen, and how not, when she came to her marriage with another man’s child in her belly? She’d renounced the Protestant faith of her girlhood and converted to Catholicism at Antoine’s insistence. Yet he’d always questioned the sincerity of her conversion. Toward the end, after she started spying for Walsingham, her husband had called her an outright heretic. She’d been fortunate indeed he succumbed to his long illness when he did.

  Yet she would have been more fortunate had he passed a little sooner, before he’d altered his will and left her destitute.

  Even that, she’d turned that to her benefit, her apparent sacrifice winning her entrée to Philip’s inner circle. His palace at El Escorial had opened its doors to her—which had led her here.

  The capitán of the Arcángel was still watching her, eyes narrowed on the agitated flutter of her fan. The fiery figure with his flaming sword had vanished, but Jayne’s instincts clamored for her to be wary. Whatever he was, this was no lust-blind bumbler, easily beguiled to spill the invasion strategy to a woman he knew was English.

  Nay, she must find some other mark to question. The dashing captain of the San Juan de Portugal, Juan Martinez de Recalde, had seemed more than enchanted.

  Gracefully she furled her fan and shifted to Spanish. “I must not be so selfish, capitán, and deprive your guests of their host. Thus I take my leave and bid you good hunting.”

  She uttered the words with a rueful smile, though it nearly choked her to wish him luck in attacking her homeland. As she glided toward the ladder in a rustle of brocade and silk, he shifted lazily to block her path.

  “Not so fast.” His low murmur sent tremors skidding across her nerves. Heart bumping against her ribs, she chanced an upward glance.

  “I have a confession to make, condesa.”

  God’s Eyes, must the man be so tall? He was a veritable Goliath. The top of her head did not reach his shoulder. When she tipped her head back to meet his gaze, the breath clogged in her throat.

  He glided from deep shadow into a silver shaft of moonlight that made his strange, white-blond hair glow like a halo. Who was he, truly? She’d never seen a Spaniard with such hair.

  But his eyes were all Spain—the warm golden-brown of the cacao Philip’s explorers brought back from the New World. She’d tasted the bitter brew, well sweetened with honey and vanilla, at El Escorial. The floating euphoria caused by the bracing beverage had nearly set her drunk.

  The sensation she experienced now, gazing into the dark warmth of those mocha-brown eyes, was quite similar. She felt like one of the planets he was said to study, whirling through the star-bright heavens.

  “A confession, you say?” Flustered, she summoned a cool smile. “Behave yourself, señor. If you fear for your soul, you have an army of priests to hear your indiscretions.”

  “I don’t have a soul. Haven’t you heard, condesa?” The corner of his mouth curled up with black humor that sent her pulse skittering. “Guardian angels watch over me.”

  Jayne wondered if he too had glimpsed that winged Fury with his fiery sword. In fact, she found herself wondering a great many things about the mysterious captain of the Arcángel. His mouth, for instance, was pure seduction. The kind of mouth a woman daydreamed about—wicked, mocking and brooding by turns.

  Casting about for any distraction from that unsettling train of thought, she studied the ornate talisman nestled at the hollow of his throat. It was indeed a key, suspended on heavy links of hammered silver, stamped with Hebrew sigils. An odd choice of ornament. She’d never seen anything like it.

  “Aren’t
you curious to hear my confession, Lady Jayne?”

  The sound of his name on her lips left her breathless, but she lifted her chin and held his gaze. Her words rang crisp with annoyance.

  “If you must tell me your sins before you permit me to rejoin the company, by all means proceed.”

  “Aren’t you wondering about that convenient brawl on the San Martin? The disturbance that so dismayed our good admiral, whose men were supposed to be at Mass?” His dark eyes gleamed. “I’m afraid I caused it.”

  “You?” Her head tilted. “I am certain you are quite capable of provoking hostility when you set your mind to it, Lord Calyx. But it would have been quite a feat to inflame those men from this distance.”

  “We’ve been bottled up in port all spring, with nothing but supply problems and these interminable Masses to bedevil us. This entire Armada is spoiling for a fight, and that overcrowded flagship is the worst of the lot. I simply sent a man over with orders to stir the pot.”

  “Do you dislike your commanding officer so profoundly?” This fact, too, she filed away. “That must be a dreadful nuisance.”

  “Don Alonso should never have been given command of this Armada,” he said bluntly. “His military credentials derive entirely from campaigns on land. He knows naught of sailing. At the first sign of high seas, he goes green at the gills. What’s worse, he’s timid and unimaginative, utterly lacking in initiative.”

  Privately Jayne agreed with him, based on what she’d seen and heard. She’d reported as much to Walsingham. Still, the fact that the admiral’s own officers harbored such grave doubts was new intelligence.

  “I do not refute you,” she murmured. Who knew what else he might divulge if she seemed receptive? “Nonetheless, the turmoil is already fading. What did you hope to accomplish with your prank?”

  “In part, to clear the air before we sail. The San Martin’s a powder keg rigged to blow.” He paused. “But I won’t deny the prospect of thwarting the don’s romantic conquest held a certain appeal.”