The Iron Rose

by Marsha Canham

  “Then why is he here?” Gabriel asked.

  “Mainly because we needed the English crew to help bring the galleon home and it would have looked peculiar to go out of our way just to disembark a duke and his manservant.”

  “I would have solved the problem in a more practical way,” Jonas muttered.

  Simon Dante held up his hand to end the discussion. “There is no harm in hearing what he has to say. But not tonight. Tonight we celebrate the victory of our Rosa de Hierro. Come. A feast awaits us on the dining table and I want nothing to spoil our mood.”

  It was hours before Juliet could excuse herself and climb her weary way up to her bedchamber. She had eaten far too much and drank far too much, and after Jonas had shaken off his displeasure at the presence of the king’s man under their roof, they had sung too much. All the people she loved dearest in the world were in that room, and looking at Jonas with his flame red beard and raucous laugh, she could even feel the spirit of her grandfather beside her.

  As tired as she was, she ordered a hot bath and soaked away the salty rime that made her hair feel like wire and her skin like parchment. When the last vapors of steam had expired, she toweled herself dry and donned a shapeless shirt for sleeping. She had learned from experience that while her brothers may have appeared to collapse into drunken stupors, they were not averse to creeping into her room an hour later and playing a prank that would prove costly if they found her. The last time she had outfoxed them, they had thrown her naked into a vat of indigo dye, and the stains had taken weeks to fade away.

  As a precaution, she bundled a roll of pillows under the blankets of her bed and arranged it to look like a sleeping body. She doused the lamp and crept to the opposite wing of the house, careful to light no candles or leave any clues behind. With luck the Hell Twins would search her room and assume she had gone back to the Iron Rose.

  The furniture in the room she had chosen was covered in white sheets, the windows latched shut. Needing air, she raised the sashes and opened the french doors, then went out onto the wide balcony to wait for the room to cool. Most of the lanterns on the lower tier had been doused and apart from the glow that came from several windows closer to the front of the house, the rest were dark. There was nothing as extravagant as the sixty-five bedrooms Harrowgate Hall had to boast, but there were half a dozen chambers on the upper floor that were furnished for phantom guests who never came.

  The shrill humming from the cicadas was constant, a sound that took a day or two for Juliet to adapt to after several weeks at sea. The breeze rustling through the palms was similar to the rush of waves beneath the keel, and helped ease the transition. Far below was the lighted circle of the harbor with its cluster of ships riding at anchor. They looked almost insignificant from such a height, like toys in a pond.

  She was not exactly sure when she realized she was not alone on the balcony, or how she knew the identity of the dark silhouette leaning back against the wall. The tingle in her breasts, perhaps, or the feathery shiver that ran down her spine.

  “This is not a good night for you to be creeping about in the dark, your grace.”

  “I merely came out of my room, which is there,” he said, turning slightly to indicate a set of open doors, “for a breath of fresh air. Furthermore, with all the shouting and singing going on below, sleep was proving to be somewhat elusive.”

  Juliet smoothed back a lock of hair that had blown across her face. “We are not accustomed to catering to the needs of houseguests.”

  “Or prisoners?”

  “As it happens, we do have a sturdy hut on the beach with bars in the windows and a bolt on the door. If you would prefer those accommodations—?”

  “Mea culpa.” He held his hand over his breast. “It was a poor riposte. All things considered, you have been more than generous.”

  “Benedicamus Domino.” She issued the blessing with a mock bow.

  “Ex hoc nunc et usque in seculum,” he murmured. “You know the Catholic liturgy?”

  “I make it a point to know my enemy’s weaknesses and strengths,” she replied in Castilian. “I know their faults,” she added in French, “I know their foibles”—in Dutch—“and I know how to play one against the other,” she concluded in Latin.

  “All that,” he mused, “and you can sail a ship through riptides, shoot a pea off the masthead—which Johnny Boy was only too proud to inform me—and wield a sword like the devil’s own angel.”

  An eyebrow took a brief quirk upward. “I suppose you think a woman should be nothing more than an adornment for a man’s arm?”

  “Good God in heaven, no. I am in consummate awe of any female who can discuss more than fashion and the state of the weather.”

  She humphed and muttered disdainfully in Portuguese, “As long as they are soft and plump and lay beneath you like submissive starfish.”

  “A soft body can be a comfort at times,” he agreed quietly.

  His Portuguese was not quite as effortless as Juliet’s, but the fact that he understood what she said succeeded in unnerving her again.

  “Do you enter into every conversation with the intent to annoy?”

  “Not every one,” he admitted.

  “Just those with me.”

  He smiled crookedly. “You cannot deny that you throw down your own share of gauntlets, Juliet.”

  “Which you pick up and fling back at every opportunity … Varian.”

  His smile turned into a soft laugh. “I take my points where I may, for you do not allow too many openings. Your tongue is as sharp as your sword and I confess your proficiency with both weapons intrigues me. I believe I can say with complete and absolute honesty that I have never met a woman quite like you before. One who provokes the most violent urges to throttle one minute, and the next …”

  She arched her eyebrow again. “Yes? And the next … ?”

  Varian clamped his teeth and cursed inwardly. He had seen the trap and fallen into it anyway. Even worse, his eyes had lost the battle to remain fixed above her chin and were making a recklessly slow and dangerous journey down the length of her throat to where the collar of her oversized shirt hung loosely open.

  He had not been able to sleep. Delivered to his room by the two stout bulwarks, he had been given stern orders he was to remain inside. Beacom was nowhere in sight, locked away in another room, he supposed. With not much else to occupy his time, Varian had taken advantage of the hot bath and hearty meal provided, but the instant he had stretched out on the feather mattress, the queasy feeling he had experienced on the jetty had returned. The room was on solid foundations but he was still moving, rolling with imaginary waves, and to avoid spewing his fine meal into his lap, he’d paced a while. He’d sat with his head in his hands and pondered his situation. He’d listened to the muted sounds of singing and revelry from somewhere below, and in the end, he had flung the french doors open and stepped out onto the veranda, fully anticipating another brace of guards posted there to turn him back.

  What he found was a wide, deserted sweep of balcony. There were no barriers between the rooms, no guards to bar his way as he walked the full length of the one wing, then rounded the corner and strolled across the front of the house. He counted off more than a hundred paces before reaching the end. There he met an ivy-covered lattice wall that barred intrusion along the western wing of the house and he assumed that those were the family’s private quarters, including the rooms that would be occupied by Juliet Dante.

  He had remained a while to admire the truly spectacular view of the harbor but when the effects of the hot bath began to wear off and his various wounds began to ache, the thought of a little nausea became a small price to pay for a soft bed and clean sheets. He had retraced his steps, only to find he was no longer alone on the veranda. Someone else was standing in the shadows at the far end. Someone dressed in a thigh-length cambric shirt with her long dark hair left unbound in the night breezes.

  “And the next … ?” she said again, jolting his
attention back up to her face.

  Varian’s hands curled into fists by his sides. He had come perilously close last night to doing something that defied all logic; he could not afford to make the same mistake again.

  “The next,” he said offhandedly, “is of course an urge to turn you over my knee and paddle you until your face turns blue.”

  Juliet’s eyebrow remained arched. She studied his face for a full minute in silence before the smile trembling at the corners of her mouth broke free of her efforts to restrain it. A tilt of her head released a deep, resonating laugh, which lasted so long and was so completely uninhibited, the joy of it caused Varian’s rigid expression to falter and collapse.

  “Well, it is true,” he said. “And you must know you have that effect on people else you would not have perfected it over the years. Look at poor Beacom. You need only glance in his direction and he is reduced to a quivering puddle.”

  “Beacom is a quivering puddle. I am surprised you tolerate his company.”

  “He came with the title, unfortunately, and I have not had the heart to send him out to pasture. He has no other family, no other interests; I have even caught him polishing boots at four in the morning when he is displeased with the job the bootboy has done.”

  “You have a bootboy?”

  The question was asked with the same sarcasm she had slathered on the query of sixty-five bedrooms at Harrowgate Hall.

  “It is a very old castle,” he explained with a sigh. “It is also an extremely old title, and whether I like it or not, it comes with a great many responsibilities and obligations, not the least of which is to ensure the employment of the hundred or so villagers who have relied on the family for generations. It is not unlike the community you appear to have fostered here,” he added, nodding in the direction of the bay. “If not for your family, where would they be? What would they be doing now?”

  “Whoring and drinking somewhere else, I expect. It would be of little concern to us or to me.”

  The midnight eyes returned to scrutinize her face. “Now, that you do not do well, Captain,” he said quietly. “You declare indifference, yet you care a great deal what happens to those close to you. Johnny Boy, for instance. If you worried so little about the people around you, you would not have noted a pinprick of blood on his leg in the heat of all that was going on today. Nor would you have asked Lieutenant Beck how he burned his face, or gone below each day to check on the men who were injured in the battle with the Santo Domingo.”

  “ ’Twould be a foolish captain who did not see to the welfare of her crew.”

  “And a foolish lord who allowed his retainers to starve over a harsh winter. However, as you have taken great pains to remind me at every opportunity, I have no friends here. My title bears no weight, my position carries no influence, no authority. Having been in your company for less than three days, I can see how I might have made a comical figure with all my arrogance and pretensions, yet I ask only for the chance to prove otherwise. Moreover, I would ask that you be tolerant of similar errors I have made in judging you.”

  The offer and the way it was delivered with his hands spread in supplication sent her head tipping to one side, as curious now as she was wary.

  He had a buttered tongue, that much was a certainty. She suspected there was a good deal more to Varian St. Clare than met the eye, and not all of it was the formidable physical strength he camouflaged beneath the velvet and feathers.

  To that end, she let her gaze rove down the pillar of his neck and across the impressive breadth of his shoulders. He wore only a shirt and breeches, no doublet, no starched collar. The shirt, in fact, was open midway down his chest, revealing the wealth of smooth hairs that formed a natural, dark breastplate.

  “I think I have already been quite tolerant,” she murmured. “Especially after last night.”

  “Last night was a mistake. My behavior was … totally inexcusable. I suppose I could blame it on the rum, yet no … not even that in good conscience, for I should have better control over my actions. I do have better control, by God, and the fact that there was moonlight, and starlight, and you were half clad …”

  His voice trailed away as he realized the same conditions existed before him now. The moonlight was in her hair, sparkling off the dampened curls. She no longer smelled like saltwater and canvas, and the collar of her shirt had slipped to one side, exposing the smooth roundness of a shoulder to the starlight.

  “At any rate,” he continued, “it should not have caused me to lose all sense of propriety.”

  “Are you saying you have better control over your urges tonight? If so, I am glad to hear it, for I am in no mood to fight you.”

  Her voice was so soft it sent an unexpected spray of gooseflesh rippling up his arms. The infernal shirt had slipped lower and likely would have come right off her breast if the nipple had not tightened and snagged the silky fabric.

  “I have no wish to fight with you either,” he said.

  “Well then,” she mused, “what shall we do instead?”

  If there was still a moment when he might have reclaimed his senses enough to beg her pardon for the interruption and walk away … it was lost when she took a step from the rail, rose up on the tips of her toes, and pressed her mouth over his. Her lips were soft and the kiss was fleeting, but when it ended, he felt as though he had been struck by a bolt of lightning. The first bolt was followed by another as she slid a hand up and circled it round his neck, dragging his mouth down into another longer, bolder caress.

  When it ended, he studied the hard sparkle in her eyes and felt more than just the tiny hairs across his nape begin to stand on end.

  “May I ask why you did that?”

  “Why did you kiss me last night? And if you say again it was a horrible mistake and you’ll regret it to the end of your days … be warned that your days will end here and now, and in a most unpleasant fashion.”

  His jaw slackened a moment, then clamped tightly shut again. “I expect the answer you are looking for is that I kissed you because I wanted to.”

  “And why did you stop?”

  “Really, Captain, I—”

  Juliet laughed softly and stood back. “Does your hand still pain you?”

  “I … I beg your pardon?”

  “Your hand. Let me see it.”

  He drew a wary breath and slid both hands out of sight, clasping them behind his back. “The burns are much improved, thank you. The thumb is still bruised, but I can use it without screaming.”

  Juliet smiled and reached out, grasping his wrists and drawing them forward. She had remarked once before that his hands were big and capable, too strong to have spent idle hours sitting at card tables or playing at dice. The fingers were long and tapered, blunt at the tips with enough callouses to suggest he did not always remember to shield them in kid gloves. They were the hands of a swordsman, with wrists like iron. Angling them into the light now, she could see the redness from the rope burn was almost gone on the one palm and if one had not been there to hear the thumb pop from the socket, the faint swelling would hardly tell the tale.

  She brought the injured hand forward and placed it over her breast. She heard him take another sharp bite of air, heard it catch in his throat, but he did not jerk away. Not a finger twitched, not a hair bristled, and any other time she might have laughed out loud to see the shocked rigor on his face.

  Any other time she might not have been feeling so damned unsettled and at odds. She was back in the bosom of her family. Her ships were safe in the harbor and she was being lauded as a hero. Her belly was full of good food, her skin tingled from a hot soak and a lusty scrub … and yet she had not been able to eat, drink, or wash away this feeling of restlessness. A bug had landed on her arm earlier and she had nearly stabbed herself, for pity’s sake. Now, just the sensation of having his hand on her breast was setting every square inch of her flesh on fire, warming her to the demon that was already coursing through her blood.

 
; At the same time she became disturbingly aware of the heady scent of his skin, the broad expanse of his chest only inches away. The beating of his heart was tangible against her fingertips, and lured by the open shirt, she coaxed the linen slowly aside and rested her hand on his warm skin. He was all muscle, hard and sculpted, and when her fingertips started roving, she felt a shiver race through his flesh.

  “You managed to avoid answering my question,” she murmured.

  “I … scarcely remember what you asked.” His voice was hoarse, forcing an indifference that broadened her smile and sent her hand searching farther afield. The hairs tickled her palm and she combed her fingertips through the springing curls until she found his nipple. A slow, speculative circle traced around the sensitive flesh had it stiffening into a hard little peak.

  “I asked if you had better control over your urges tonight.”

  The question set the blood pounding through his temples, stinging through his veins even as her hands moved lower, sliding farther beneath his shirt to explore the bands of muscle that quickened across his ribs and belly. Appalled by his utter inability to deter her, he watched as she leaned forward and touched his chest with the tip of her tongue, then followed the same path her fingers had taken to his breast. When her mouth closed over his nipple, she sampled it like one might taste an offering of some exotic delicacy. Her teeth gently caught the skin, pulling the dark disk inside the heat of her mouth where she continued to torment it with her tongue.

  His body turned to iron. His hands came up and gripped her arms, but still he did not push her away. There were tremors in his fingers, tremors in his throat as each breath came harsher than the one before.

  Intrigued, Juliet took more of him into her mouth. At the same time, she started to gently ease the tails of his shirt free of his breeches. When the cambric hung over his hips in loose folds, she searched for the fastenings at his waist, releasing one button, then the next. She did not wait for the cloth to part completely before she slid her hands beneath and what she found there caused her own breath to falter in her throat, for he filled her two hands and still strained upward for more.