by Shirl Henke
“No, his father will not take him. I am forced to live with that brutal man who will kill him. You promised to take him across the water—to where he will be taught white ways. When he grows, tell him his father did not love him. His mother did, but she could not keep him.” With that, Aliyah stroked her son's back and held him tightly for a moment, then, with ä deep shuddering breath, she thrust him into Varana's arms. “She will go with him. She can feed him and care for him.”
Las Casas looked at the wet nurse who held the child. After a moment's debate, he sighed and said, “Come with me. I will take the boy to Castile.”
Aliyah stood on the beach, a small figure in the gleaming moonlight, watching the boat grow smaller as the men rowed it toward a waiting ship. In it sat Varana, holding Navaro. She watched them climb aboard the gently bobbing caravel silhouetted on the silvery horizon. A thin chilling wail of protest from the babe echoed across the water and reached her. Aliyah turned her back and walked into the jungle.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“I have sent Lorenzo and Peralonso with several of my men to inspect the caravels in the bay,” Roldan said with a hint of a smile playing about his lips. He looked at Magdalena to gauge her reaction.
“I am most grateful you have prevented Guzman from threatening me, Don Francisco,” she replied evenly as she took a seat at the table to break her fast.
He flashed a toothy grin. “But you mistrust my own motives in eliminating the competition for your favor?”
She looked at him with clear green eyes. “My favors, as you call them, belong only to my husband, but I am here at your mercy and well know I may be given to anyone you choose.” She had sensed that as much as Roldan loved playing cat and mouse with the scheming Guzman and his ilk, he admired forthrightness.
“I will give you to no one but your husband, my lady,” he said simply, studying her reaction. “Why is it that you doubt he will come for you? Do not deny it. I can sense it.”
“You are most perceptive.” Her face flamed as she considered confessing the nature and circumstances of her marriage to her enigmatic husband. “Let me just say Aaron was forced by the admiral to wed me. He will feel himself well quit of a wife he did not choose, but he may come to kill Lorenzo in revenge.”
“I know of the fate of his family,” Francisco said softly. He reclined on the low couch beside the table, studying the morning sky of blazing gold and brilliant azure through the doorway of the hut. “We knew each other briefly during the siege of Granada, but became better acquainted during the voyage across the Atlantic. Twas my first ocean crossing, his second.” Then he grinned, his mood lightening. “Of course we had little time for talk. The fleet's marshal was a very busy man—between losing his meals over the railing during rough weather and soothing his pounding head, even when the sea was smooth as glass.”
Magdalena's eyes widened in amazement. “Aaron, seasick?” she asked incredulously.
“He hid it from the men fair well with the admiral's connivance, but those who knew him during the war could see how carefully he nursed his aching head. We all did that after a night's carousing with a large jug of wine. The symptoms of both maladies, I am given to understand, are quite the same,” Roldan added innocently.
Magdalena let loose a burble of laughter. Blessed Virgin, alone in this deadly wilderness, her life and her honor hanging by a thread, and she could not but see humor in the suffering of the man who had brought her to this pass! Had her situation unhinged her mind? She saw Roldan eye her curiously, then join her in a hearty roar of laughter.
Magdalena swiped tears of mirth from her eyes and choked out, “Tis passing difficult to imagine my arrogant lord, that fearful white Taino warrior, puking and holding his drumming head aboard ship! I myself found the voyage overall boring but loved the rare occasions when I could go above decks and walk in the salt wind.” Again the laughter seized her. “Small wonder he is so loyal to Don Cristobal for keeping his secret.”
Roldan slapped his knee and they laughed together.
That is how Aaron found them as he stood in the door of the cacique's bohio. “What a pleasantly domestic scene. I nearly break the legs of my horse riding through jungles and across mountains to save my lady wife, only to find her so handsomely amused,” Aaron said with a black scowl. “Pray share the joke with me?”
Magdalena's head jerked up when Aaron began to speak, but before she could utter a word, Roldan said, “You are here sooner than I thought possible. That horse must have wings like those of the Greeks to bring you to Xaragua so quickly.”
Aaron looked at Magdalena, clad in a scandalous yet enticing wrap of sheer cotton. “You seem quite unharmed. I thought you abducted and feared you dead.” Against his will, his blood stirred at the sight of her soft curves and shimmering mantle of loose russet hair.
Magdalena stood up, suppressing the urge to run into his arms. Again, he was angry with her. “After all I have been through over you, my lord husband, a few days hard ride should be as nothing. Your old comrade here rescued me from Lorenzo Guzman. You owe Don Francisco your thanks, if you care that I am unharmed—or believe me!”
Aaron had the good grace to flush as he approached her and reached out to place his fingertips gently beneath her proudly uptilted chin. He could feel the pulse in her throat racing. “I care, green-eyed witch, I care very much,” he said quietly as he lost himself in the fathomless depths of those eyes.
“As to what we were laughing about,” Roldan began, ignoring the tender absorption of the man and woman standing before him, “it seems your lady is much the better sailor than you.”
Aaron's head swiveled toward Roldan and his eyes narrowed. “You told her—”
“What the admiral so tactfully kept from her, yes, I did,” Francisco said gleefully. “We were speculating if that might not be why you owe the Genoese such unswerving loyalty,” he added with bushy eyebrows raised.
Aaron felt a chuckle trembling in Magdalena's throat. “I have come to reclaim my wife. I did not think to discuss your accursed feud with the Colons, Francisco—at least not at this moment.”
“Ah, see how he evades the subject?” Roldan said to Magdalena, causing her to loose the laugh that she had been suppressing.
“You indeed must have come to rescue me, not just to revenge yourself against Guzman, else you would not be so upset over petty matters,” she said, sobering as she inspected his sweat-drenched, filthy body. His shirt was bloodied and torn, his hair matted to his head, and his fist clamped tightly over his sword hilt. Never had he looked more beautiful to her, damn him!
“Guzman did you no hurt?” he asked quietly, his fingers stroking a long strand of silky hair away from her cheek. She had been touched by no man but me. Pray God it is yet so!
“He did not use me, though he would have once we arrived here but for Don Francisco,” she replied, staring into his piercing blue eyes, willing him to believe her for once in their mistrustful relationship.
Something tightly coiled, twisting deep in his gut, seemed to unknot with her words. He let out his breath and turned to Roldan. “I owe you a great debt, Francisco.” Then a lazy smile curved his lips. “Perhaps I shall think on a way to repay it one day soon.”
“Peacemaker between the outlaw and the admiral?” Roldan replied, also smiling. “I, too, will think on that matter.”
“I would speak in private with my wife,” Aaron said, ignoring Roldan’s insinuation.
“I have been given quarters nearby. We can go there.” As she led Aaron outside, she wrinkled her nose and added, “You need a bath.”
He followed her across the crowded street to a small caneye guarded by two Taino warriors. Aaron's eyes swept the compound and he tightened his grip on his sword. “Are Guzman and any friends of his about? I would not be caught naked in my bath so they can slit my throat.”
“Roldan has sent him and his lone companion to look at the caravels in the bay. He will return by darkness tonight, not before,” she rep
lied with increasing nervousness as they were left alone in the small cane hut. “When I recognized Lorenzo's voice that night in the garden, I knew he was the one in league with my father, but—”
“But Diego Colon would not believe you,” he replied with a scowl.
“Do you believe me, Aaron? When I tried to tell you earlier, you thought I only made up lies to cover my father's monstrous deeds.”
Aaron took a shaky breath and extended his hands, clasping hers and drawing them to his lips. “I have been a fool, Magdalena. You always spoke the truth, but I was blinded by old prejudices and new hatreds. I could not see who, what you were.” He released her hands and turned to pace the hard-packed earth floor. “I have always desired you—and fought against it. But it was quite useless.”
“I was most determined,” she whispered, afraid yet eager to have him continue.
“You tried to win Navaro for me. When I learned that, I began to consider many things on my journey back to Ysabel. You were determined to have me to husband even after I had lost everything. This is a dangerous wilderness for a lady from the royal court.”
She smiled sadly. “This is paradise compared to the dangers for a lady residing with the royal court. I did not wish to repeat my mother's mistakes, Aaron.”
“I know that now...that and so much more.” He looked at her, studying her innocent beauty, the strength and integrity in every fiber of her being. “My father was a far better judge of women than I, but perhaps a poor judge of his own son's worthiness. I found his sealed document among your books. Even in taking your virginity, I accused you of sins of which you were not guilty.”
Her face flamed as she met his eyes. “My pride kept me from showing it to you on our wedding night...only in part because of what you said.”
“I was cruelly unfair and unfeeling, Magdalena,” he said in a stricken voice.
“I had another reason for not showing you the document. The accident that Benjamin witnessed was my fault. I schemed to meet him and was injured because of it…” The whole story of how she plotted to meet Aaron's family came tumbling out, the words like torrents from a bursting dam. Finally, she raised her tear-streaked face to his. “I came to love your father and mother, to wish, to imagine they were my family, rather than Bernardo and Estrella Valdés. But by becoming their friend, I was part of their deaths!”
“No! You tried to save them,” he cried, reaching out and enfolding her in his embrace as she broke down, sobbing. He rocked her gently in his arms, his hand smoothing and caressing her silky hair. “All your life you searched for love, seeing in me and then in my family what you never had from those who owed you their devotion,” he said hoarsely, beginning to understand the loneliness and pain of this proud, spirited woman. His father must have understood it from the first time he met her.
“Bernardo Valdés is probably not even my father. I know not who is—nor in all likelihood does my mother.” She sobbed against his shirt, burying her face against his chest as he held her.
“That matters nothing, Magdalena, for now you are mine—my wife—and I love you with all my heart. Is it too late to ask you to forgive me? I would build a life with you here, raise children, and let all the old hates die...if you are willing?”
She looked up at him through tear-sheened eyes, trembling and realizing that he, too, was trembling…with uncertainty, with fear that she would reject him. “I have waited a lifetime to hear those words. I love you more than life, Aaron Torres, and never will I leave you,” she replied, pulling his head down to seal her vow with a kiss. She wrapped her arms about his neck, raising up on tiptoe as her lips moved from his mouth to his eyes, then down, brushing the raspy whiskers on his unshaven cheeks, lower yet as she licked at the salty skin of his neck.
“I am bloodied and filthy,” he murmured hoarsely into her hair, smelling the tangy citrus fragrance of her clean satiny body.
“I care not,” she said, sliding his torn tunic from his shoulders. Then, seeing the insect bites and abrasions across his chest and arms, she gasped. “You will take a fever if I do not tend these.” She realized how long and hard he had ridden in search of her and felt her throat tighten with love all over again. Oh, the sweetness of this new feeling growing between them!
Aaron looked at the door of the small caneye, outside of which he knew the guards stood.
“Is there not some place near the compound where we can bathe in safety and privacy?” he asked in a heated voice, recalling the time he had made love to her beneath the waterfall.
Magdalena nodded, releasing her embrace only long enough to scoop up several lengths of cloth from the bed and from a peg on the wall a small sack which held her medicines. “Have you any other clothes? These seem to be beyond mending.”
He flashed a boyish grin of deviltry that made her heart stop beating. “I could borrow from Francisco, but he is a bit bigger in girth than I.”
Magdalena chuckled. “His hose would fall from your hips, exposing for all the world what is only mine to see. We will borrow a tunic from him and a pair of hose from his captain who looks to be of a size with you.”
“And you, of course, have such a practiced eye,” he said with a warm, teasing smile.
“Tis all these months living among the Tainos who go naked as their mothers bore them. A woman learns the size of all things very quickly that way,” she replied saucily.
“Bold wench,” he said as he again crushed her to him in a swift, fierce kiss. “Let us gather those clothes and be off to bathe lest I lose all sense of decorum.”
Within a few moments they were outside the compound. Magdalena led Aaron to a secluded place upstream from where the women of the village bathed their children and washed food utensils and cookpots. The shallow, swift-running stream was not nearly so luxuriant as the pools near Guacanagari's village, but it served them well enough.
Magdalena watched Aaron rip off his tunic, hose, and boots after carefully placing his sword and dagger close by the stream's edge. Even injured and filthy, he was splendid. He paused with one foot on the bank and reached out his hand, palm up, unashamed of his nakedness as any Taino warrior. “I have made you stink with my sweat, love. Come.”
Her trance broken, Magdalena quickly unfastened her cloth wrapper and let it float silently to the mossy bank. Beneath it she, too, was naked. The skin of her body was still pale and untouched by the sun that had turned her face and arms golden, while virtually all of him was bronzed, but for his member now standing so proudly erect. She approached him boldly, stopping only to pull a cluster of fruit soap from the bank. Rubbing it into a thick lather, she placed one of her small hands in his and let the other clasp his rigid staff. As her slippery little fingers curled about it and slid up and down, she was rewarded by his sharp intake of breath.
“Little witch, you always fill my thoughts. I cannot live without you,” he murmured as she melted against him, her busy hands at work soaping and caressing all over his body.
“Kneel so I may wash you quickly,” she said as she pulled him down into the rushing current. The cool water felt incredible as it rippled over his sensitized skin. They rolled in the shallow stream until he lay on the soft mossy bottom and Magdalena reclined atop him with her hair floating down her back with the current. “You will drown ere I can bathe you this way,” she whispered as his head nearly submerged beneath the surface.
“I will risk such a sweet death,” he replied, pulling her down for an underwater kiss. Their feverish mouths moved, opening, brushing, tongues dueling. The rush of water lent a sensuous urgency to the kiss until he sat up, gasping for air. Magdalena, too, coughed and gulped breath into her lungs.
Aaron held her securely against his thighs with her legs scissoring his hips. “That was a most unusual way to go about a kiss, but I think it will last longer if we stay above water,” he said, pulling her into his embrace once again.
“And be sweeter without the water robbing me of your taste,” she whispered, opening her mouth to
his kiss.
He rimmed her lips with his tongue, then plunged in to explore. She returned the caress, splaying her fingers in his thick wet hair and pulling his head close to hers. He reached up and cupped a breast in each hand, letting the water slick his fingertips as they teased the pebbly nipples. She arched against the tantalizing torture, wriggling her buttocks against his straining staff until he seized her around the waist, raising her up and then lowering her to envelope him.
Magdalena let out all her breath as the exquisite sensations raced through her body. Throwing her head back, she closed her eyes and began to move with his hands on her hips, raising and lowering her in a slow, languorous rhythm. “The water, oh...it...ooh,” she moaned.
His soft, breathy laughter rippled over her like the water. “Oh, yes, the water is very...very...good.” He punctuated each word with a slow, deep thrust.
Aaron could feel her nails digging into his shoulders as she clung to him, moving with him to the rhythm of the rippling stream. As they ascended to that higher plane of sweetest union, she opened her eyes and met his. Piercing blue and luminous green mirrored their souls' love as he quickened his strokes. He was as hot as the water was cool, now ablaze with the splendor of his love for this small, russet-haired woman in his arms. Magdalena, too, felt the fiery beauty of the moment and drew him deeper into her, holding him fast, wanting the moment to last forever. Yet this intensity could not last, lest it consume them. Together they spun out of control into a whirlpool of heat. He poured life into her body as the currents eddied softly around them, enveloping them, cooling the shuddering ecstasy of their release.
Magdalena's head fell on his shoulder and she collapsed against his chest, holding him tightly. His hands moved up her back, softly stroking her wet mane of hair as he murmured love words in her ear. How long she had waited to hear them!