"Y-you startled me, senhor." A flush stole into her cheeks, for as always he took her composure and snuffed it as he might a candle flame between his hard fingers. "I didn't hear you come in."
"I think I had better give you something to settle those easily startled nerves of yours." He strolled over to the tantalus on the sideboard and withdrew the glass stopper from one of the decanters. He filled a pair of fluted glasses, and joined her again beneath the portrait of his mother. "This is a very old wine from the cellars of Oporto," he handed her one of the fluted glasses. "Salud, senhorinha."
"Salud. " She took a cautious sip at the wine.
"You will feel it in your heart, not in your head," he said sardonically. "Wine is like life, an acceptance of
the bitter with the sweet, but I am sure you will agree with me that this is a happy wine."
"It is very pleasant, senhor, but I am no authority on wine."
"Who is an authority?" A dark brow quirked above a vivid blue eye. "A wine, like a woman, changes with the atmosphere of a room, or the mood of the moment. As the gods sometimes smile and give a woman charm, so it is with wine."
Morvenna cast him a wary little glance under her lashes and wondered who the woman was to whom he referred. Was it Poppy, with her ready wit and her tawny glamour ? Or did he refer to Raya, the girl he had ransomed with the skilful, flashing blade of a machete?
"Have you no opinion of men ?" he asked. "After all, you are often in the company of young Nuno."
"Do you mean Latin men, senhor?"
"Yes, let us say Latin men," his smile was tinged with something indefinable. "Your opinion should be an interesting one, for I am sure you know that our history has been a stormy and a colourful one, splendid and devilish. As plants are conditioned by the soil in which they grow, so are people conditioned by the lives and actions of their ancestors. They implant in our bloodstream our responses to life."
"Conquistars — and witches ?" she smiled.
"I am sure the flaxen-haired Morvenna of long ago was a sorceress whose magic was not distilled over a cauldron."
"I am sure, senhor, that you are exactly like the man who found this island and took it." Morvenna tilted her chin and met the glinting blue eyes in the wickedly
lean face. "I think that Latin men at heart would like to lock up their wives and keep them secret and veiled."
"Only Latin men ?" he taunted. "Surely all men are possessive of what they love ? Love, after all, is a primitive and powerful emotion."
"I prefer to think it a tender emotion, a compassionate one," she argued, and looked a little askance at the wine glass in her hand. A wine, indeed, that you felt in your heart !
"Of course for some there is more compassion in what they feel than passion." He shrugged, and added impatiently: "I would not call that love. The whole heart must be seared. It should be as a flame, one that goes on burning through storm and calmness; with distance between, and when closeness allows of no distance at all."
"You make love sound very ruthless," she said.
"That you speak with surprise at its ruthlessness, Miss Fayr, is proof that you have never been in love."
It was a statement of fact, not a question. A flick of his eyes and he saw lips that had never been kissed, and skin that had not yet thrilled to a loving touch.
"Women might deny it to themselves, but they like to be mastered," said this man whose wooing would never be like that of other men. "Mastery is not tyranny, senhorinha, and I am sure that one day a man will prove it to you."
He tossed back the remainder of his wine and placed the glass on a table. "What do you think of my house ?" he asked abruptly. "Do you think a woman would be content to live here ?"
"Your mother lived here, senhor. " Morvenna gazed
at him with wide and startled eyes, eyes the colour of the violet jacaranda that spread its plumes behind her fair head.
"My mother was an unusual woman," he gazed up at her portrait with a sombre expression on his face. "She was a Latin, reared to the idea that she should follow where her husband led. I speak of a woman born to other ideas, other cultures. Do you understand ?"
A woman who was not a Latin ! A woman like Poppy, tawny as a tigress, but with an undisputed love of civilization. A need for lovely clothes, bright lights, the admiration of the crowd.
"I couldn't answer for other women, senhor," Morvenna said quietly. "To me this island is like a kingdom of fantasy."
"And this house my Aztec palace, eh ?"
"Perhaps." She met his smile with an uncertain one. "The pelts, the jungle flowers, the dusky timbers — the allegiance of your Indians."
"I am their guardian, their patrao, that is all." Still smiling in that faintly sardonic way of his, he bent to a table and picked up a carving in rock crystal — a strange, primitive, heart-shaped carving, agleam in his dark hands. Hands, she had noticed before, with all the ruthless beauty of those to be seen in old paintings of men of the sword.
"What do you think of this ?" he asked.
"I don't know," she came a step closer and studied it. It was oddly anatomical, she thought. "I have always wondered how an expert, or connoisseur, can tell whether a work of art is the real thing or not."
"It has a certain quality, almost identical to that in
certain people," he explained. "A sincerity of purpose, a beauty within — integrity is the best term, perhaps."
She touched a finger to the primitive carving. "Open your hands," he ordered. She did so and he placed the piece within them. "That, Miss Fayr, is the exact weight, size, and shape of the human heart. How does it feel to hold a heart in your hands ?"
She caught her breath. The heart fitted snugly into her palms and was warm from his touch . . . it almost seemed to throb, until she realized that her own quick pulse beat was animating the heart.
"I'm very prosaic," she met his eyes through her lashes and gave a nervous laugh. "I prefer to see a heart as a locket on a chain."
His gaze dwelt on her coral pendant as he took the rock crystal ornament and replaced it on the table. "Were you wearing that," he flicked a finger at the pink coral, "when we found you on the beach ?"
She shook her head. "Nuno gave it to me."
"I see." He gazed down at her consideringly. "I am sure you are unaware that the Indians attach significance to the giving of a gift to a girl. Nuno is not one by birth, but he lived among them during his most formative years and he absorbed quite a few of their beliefs. When a young hunter gives a girl a necklace or bracelet which he has made himself, he is telling her that his designs are serious. Has Nuno seen you wearing his gift, senhorinha?"
She shook her head dumbly.
"Do you wish him to see you wearing it ?"
She shivered at the relentless tone of voice, and half turned away to avoid the blue gaze that cut like diamonds. "I — I only put it on because I thought it
pretty, and Nuno wanted me to have it because all my things were lost—"
"Remove the pendant, Miss Fayr. I will give you something else to wear in its place."
"That isn't necessary." She unfastened the chain with fingers that trembled. "Please don't bother—"
"It is no bother." He strode to the mahogany sideboard and opened one of the cupboards beneath. He took out a box of old dark wood and lifted the lid. Something gleamed in his fingers as he re-joined Morvenna. "You need not be afraid of my motives," he said dryly. "You need not even wear the thing if you don't like it – I shall not force it around your neck."
It was a necklet of silver shells with tiny chains of seed pearls looping each shell together. It couldn't be a family heirloom, she reasoned. He would not leave an ornament of value to him in an old, unlocked box.
"This fastener looks a little awkward, so will you please turn your back to me." She did so, meekly, wondering as the silver shells settled against her skin and she felt his fingers brush her nape whether anyone ever dared to defy him.
"Poppy will wonder where I g
ot the finery from," she said, and the words came out rather breathlessly.
"My dear Miss Fayr," his voice mocked her from way above her head, "one would think that I had adorned you with diamonds instead of an old shell necklace."
"You would have had to force me to wear diamonds," she said, and she put space between them as high heels sounded on the wooden platform of the veranda and the rustle of satin preceded Poppy's entrance into the
room.
She hardly looked a widow in her turquoise sheath.
Apple-green jade hung from her earlobes, and glinted chunkily about her honey throat. Her hair was piled and looped, and shining with renewed vitality. Her smile was seductive as she presented her hand to Roque de Braz Ferro. She almost purred aloud as he brushed his lips across the back of it, where a cone-shaped diamond blazed with fire.
"You are looking in excellent health, Mrs. Tyson," he said.
"Thanks to my excellent doctor," she purred. "Please do call me Poppy, senhor. Being called Mrs. Tyson makes me remember the things I must learn to forget."
"The formalities are discarded," he smiled down at her. "May I offer you an aperitif, Poppy ?"
"I would love a dry white port, with ice and a slice of lime," she said, and while he prepared the drink for her, she stared inquisitively at the silver shells that glinted against Morvenna's throat — a slim, white throat, which the sun seemed reluctant to touch.
"I — I wonder where Leird has got to." Morvenna strove not to cover the shells with her hand, and wondered why she should feel guilty about wearing the necklet. She hadn't felt like this about Nuno's piece of coral . . . but Nuno, of course, was not the man whom Poppy admired.
"Raya is joining us for dinner." The senhor handed Poppy her drink. "I expect she asked Mr. Challen to call for her."
"Leird is smitten with her," Poppy said with an indulgent laugh, no longer interested in the "red lion" now she had met more interesting game. "Raya is a very pretty girl. Poor Morvenna," her red lip petalled the rim of her wine glass, "you like Leird such a lot, don't
you, my dear? But that's men all the world over, they always prefer a pretty face to a kind heart."
Morvenna knew she wasn't pretty, so it wasn't that part of Poppy's remark that left her speechless — it was the honeyed implication that she more than liked Leird, who had now lost interest in her because of Raya. It had been Poppy who had flirted with Leird on the yacht, and Poppy knew, cleverly, that Morvenna wouldn't have the cattiness to say so.
"I hope that as a Latin, senhor, you don't think it unfeeling of me not to be wearing widow's weeds ?" Poppy gazed up at him, frank and limpid as an angel in blue. "Gerald wouldn't want me to look drab. He loved bright colours and gaiety, and all I can do for him now is to dress as he loved me to, and not wear my grief on my sleeve. You do understand — Roque ?"
She held out a hand to him and he took it — a pampered little hand, crowned by a diamond that looked too heavy for it, capable of nothing but being crushed in the lean, steely fingers of the senhor.
The blue angel and the prince of darkness, Morvenna thought cynically. Her smile, as Nuno came through the veranda doors into the room, was full of welcome. His handsome young face, his fawn gaberdine suit, his smoothly brushed hair with a gleam of wetness to hold down the waves, were honest as good brown bread, and Morvenna wished belatedly, as his eyes sought her throat, that she wore his boyish gift instead of the chain of silver shells.
He smiled at her, but looked faintly puzzled, as though he couldn't reconcile the radiance of her welcome with her obvious rejection of his gift. "You look nice," he murmured. "There is only one thing about you
that I don't like."
She pretended not to understand him, and when he turned from her to pay his respects to Poppy and the senhor, she found to her dismay that the coral pendant was gone from the elbow table on which she had laid it. The senhor had obviously picked it up and slipped it into his pocket. Nuno's token of admiration for a girl his guardian did not approve of!
He could not approve when he had been so firm about its removal . . . which seemed to suggest that Poppy might have found other occasions in which to insinuate that Morvenna cared for the man whose arms had carried her ashore when the yacht went down.
CHAPTER SIX
ALL through the evening that followed, Morvenna was conscious of the cross-currents of tension that ran beneath the conversation at dinner, and later when they returned to the lamp-lit living-room.
The source was Poppy. She had a talent for making people conscious of each other, and revelled in an atmosphere that held elements of storm.
Tango music came through on the radio, accompanied by some static that did not stop Raya from dancing with Leird. "How well they dance together !" Poppy reclined against the upholstery of her chair, mingling her tigress limbs and her tawny hair with the velvety pelt. "A man always looks so dangerously masculine when he holds a lovely woman in his arms. Don't you agree with me, Morvenna ?"
Morvenna cradled her pineapple drink in her hands, and wondered why Poppy had her claws in her tonight. "When I look at a man I don't look for danger," she said. "I prefer kindness."
"Of course, my pet." Poppy smoked her cigarette with relaxed enjoyment. "It's just as well for a girl to expect only the emotions which she is capable of arousing. I remember Gerald saying that you were the sort of girl a man had to be kind to."
She made kindness sound like an insult, which Morvenna supposed it was to a woman who preferred to be desired.
"Your type reminds me of a certain West Indian plant that curls up when you touch it." Even as Poppy spoke, the quality of her smile changed as Roque de Braz Ferro came striding in through the veranda doors, followed by Nuno. An Indian had come in agitation to say that there was trouble in one of the houses, and the patrao had marched off at once to settle it.
"It was over a woman." He brushed a black strand of hair back from a frowning forehead. "These things have to be settled at once, otherwise all the relatives get involved and we end up with a family feud on our hands."
"How has it been settled, Roque ?" Poppy was leaning forward, intensely interested.
"A wedding has been arranged," he said laconically. "It will take place at the weekend."
"What have you done ?" Poppy's voice was silken. Raya and Leird had paused in their dancing to listen. Morvenna leaned back in the shadows and watched the fair faces and the dark ones, and felt curiously left out of the love tangles and dramas.
"I merely provided the livestock which a poor boy could not pay a greedy father for his daughter." The senhor gave a lazy laugh. "Bartered brides are common on our island, senhora. Are you shocked ?"
"It's savage, primitive," Poppy breathed. "What will happen at the marriage ceremony ?"
"The girl's dowry of pigs will be paid to her father, then she and the boy will go into the jungle together. The village will celebrate with a feast of roast pig, palm wine and dancing."
"I must see it all." Poppy's eyes were glittering. "Will that be possible, Roque ?"
"Of course," he gave her a brief bow that indulged
her whim. "A wedding is a public affair among the
Indians, and certainly an interesting spectacle for
visitors to our island. Mr. Challen and Miss Fayr will also find it intriguing."
"I hope, Morvenna, that you won't find it too primitive," Poppy said with mischievous relish. "Do the Indians wear masks and feathers ?"
"All the trimmings, Mrs. Tyson." It was Nuno who answered, and his face was tautly drawn with distaste as he looked at her. "It is little different from a so-called civilized wedding, except that the boy and girl are often far more in love. The villagers build them a thatched house while they are alone in the jungle, and stock it with fruit and fish and flowers for their return."
"Will they do that for you, Nuno, when you marry ?" Poppy flicked cigarette ash into one of the jaguar-paw ashtrays. From where Morvenna sat she could see the long, ruthless line
of Poppy's profile and her upswept, darkened eyelashes. She knew with fellow sympathy that Nuno, who was so at home in the menacing jungle, was no match for a woman who cared for no one outside her own skin, but who was clever enough to make it seem a sophisticated virtue. Combat with her would leave him as defenceless as it left Morvenna.
"That radio makes more noise than music." The crisp voice cut across the room like a whiplash. "Please to turn it off, Raya. We will ask Miss Fayr to play for us — Nuno, will you be good enough to fetch the guitar which hangs on the wall of my study."
Morvenna had not known that the senhor possessed a guitar, and she felt a tingling in her fingers to hold one again. She glanced up as the radio was switched off and
silence fell over the room for a moment. "You will play for us, honey ?" Leird stretched his spare, rangy form in a chair, and his smile slid away from her and followed Raya. The smile died to a small frown as the girl struck a match across the seal of the senhor's ring and carried the flame to the cheroot he had just placed between his lips.
"Thank you, little one." He gave the girl a smile of lazy affection. Then he glanced at Leird. "You would like a drink, senhor, after being put through the convolutions of the tango ?"
"That would be nice. Raya knows what I like." "And the ladies ?" The blue eyes dwelt on Poppy, then on Morvenna.
"I'd like a brandy with a dash of crème de menthe," Poppy drawled. "A barbaric mixture, but I love a dash of fire and ice."
The hidden meaning in Poppy's remark was not lost on Morvenna, or on the senhor, she was sure of that. As cheroot smoke curled up about his eyes, she glimpsed the amusement in them. "And you, senhorinha," he said to her, "will you try this combination of fire and ice, or do you prefer something more temperate ?"
"I still have my pineapple, thank you." She sounded like a prosaic schoolgirl, and was unsurprised when he quirked that left eyebrow of his and flicked a glance from her Indian-slippered feet, set demurely side by side, to her slim hands cradling her long glass of juice.
"Morvenna likes her drinks sweet, and her men kind." Poppy's side glance was maliciously amused. "She would sooner be chaste than chased, wouldn't you, pet ?"
Beloved castaway Page 6