Don't Bargain with the Devil

by Sabrina Jeffries

  He clasped her face in his hands. “For us, it is real. I love you, Lucy Seton, soon to be Lucy Montalvo.”

  For a moment, she looked as if she did not believe him. Then her eyes lit up, and a melodic laugh escaped her, transforming her already beautiful features, gilding them with a golden glow. “I love you, too, you wicked Spanish devil. I love you so much, mi amor!”

  That earned her a heated kiss that had them both breathless by the time they drew apart.

  “Then show me what you feel,” he whispered. “Make love to me, mi corazón bello.”

  “Make love to you?” A pretty confusion touched her face. “How?”

  “Rise up on your knees, and take me inside you.” He thrust against her to show her what he meant.

  Though she blushed, her eyes smoldered. “I can do that?”

  He chuckled. “Tonight, mi dulzura, you can do whatever you wish.” He lifted his hands, showing her his palms in a classic magician gesture. “No tricks. I am all yours.”

  “Careful,” she teased as she stripped his shirt from him, then ran her hands over his chest. “You may come to regret that offer.”

  “I seriously doubt that.” But the way she was thumbing his flat nipples gave him pause, especially when she bent to tug one with her teeth, sending his blood into full roar.

  She reached down to toy with the crown of his cock. “You were very high-handed with me the last time we made love, you know.”

  “Was I?” He struggled to remember it, his mind too fogged with his need for her to think.

  “You said, ‘My way or not at all.’ ” She ran her fingers over the shaft of his cock, making him shiver. “You said, ‘I will pleasure you until you beg for more, even if it takes me all night.’ ” Still fondling him, she leaned close to whisper, “You said, ‘I will taste and touch every part of you—as often as I wish, as thoroughly as I wish.’ That is what I mean to do to you now, Diego.”

  He groaned. She wanted to punish him for waiting so long to tell her how he felt. And in truth, she deserved that and more. He had been such a fool not to appreciate what she had offered him.

  “Do as you please with me, querida,” he managed. “Only do not take too long.”

  A vixenish delight lit her face. “Well,” she said. “This could be fun.”

  Those words sealed his doom. For what seemed an eternity, she played with him, fondled him, caressed him, until he thought he might die if he could not be inside her.

  Just when he was ready to break his promise and throw her down onto the bed, she lifted herself and came down on his cock with a slow descent that sent him into madness.

  “Dios Santo, Lucy,” he said hoarsely, his hands gripping her shoulders as he thrust up, trying to get her to move. “Please, querida . . .”

  “Are you begging, Diego?” she whispered, undulating over him.

  “Yes,” he growled. “Take me, mi amor. Now. Before I die.”

  She uttered a luxurious laugh. “Even when you beg, you’re high-handed.”

  Then she began to move, so deliciously that he caught her waist and held on for dear life. She was a goddess in motion, seductress and angel in one, the only woman he could ever imagine in his life.

  He kissed her mouth, her breasts, her throat, reveling in the glory that was Lucy. And when the blood finally rose in her cheeks and the heat surged inside him until he feared he might not last another moment, she shattered atop him so beautifully that he could hold back no more. With one last deep thrust, he spilled himself inside her, uttering a cry of purest joy.

  She was his now. His Lucy. For now and forever. And no one, nothing, would ever take her from him again.

  • • •

  Lucy didn’t know what had awakened her. A noise? Diego’s arm across her belly?

  She twisted to look at him, glad that the moon was bright enough to illuminate the room through the open balcony doors. The breeze from the harbor cooled the room only slightly, since Spain in early June was quite a bit warmer than England in early June. His hairy chest glistened with perspiration, his black locks clung damply to his forehead, and he’d thrown off most of the sheet, leaving only a swath across his privates.

  He was beautiful in his slumber, an orgy of golden skin and leonine muscle, like the painting of Endymion asleep that she’d seen at the duke’s house.

  And he was all hers.

  Her breath caught. Diego loved her. She couldn’t believe it. He loved her and meant to marry her, for herself alone and not out of any mere sense of honor. She couldn’t even worry about what that might mean to their future. With him beside her, she was sure she could do anything.

  A noise came from the balcony, startling her.

  “Is someone there?” she whispered.

  “Lucy?” called a familiar voice as the sound of boots landing on iron came to her, followed by a great deal of huffing and puffing. “Is that you, girl?”

  “Papa!” she cried, and sat up straight in bed. Then she realized she was naked.

  Swiftly, she dragged the sheet up around her. Just in time, too, for at that moment Papa appeared in the balcony doorway, still breathing hard.

  “How did you get here so soon?” She fumbled under the sheets for her nightdress, praying it was too dark for him to see. “How did you know where to—”

  “What is it, querida?” Diego mumbled as he roused from sleep.

  Good Lord.

  Papa cursed as his gaze shot to the bed beside her. “Who the hell is that?”

  Diego shot up, glowering in the direction of the balcony. “I must ask you the same question, sir,” he growled.

  Too late, Lucy realized that Diego had never met Papa. “Diego, this is—”

  “You bedded her, you damned whoreson?” her father shouted, stomping further into the room. “You kidnapped my daughter, and then you bedded her?”

  “Papa, it is not what you think!” She found her nightdress at last and dragged it over her head.

  “Hostias,” Diego muttered, as he, too, scrambled under the covers to find his clothes.

  Now presentable enough, she leaped from the bed to prevent her father from launching himself at Diego. “We are going to be married,” she said hastily as she grabbed his arm. “At once. Today. As soon as possible.”

  “Over my dead body!” Papa roared. “Were you his reward for dragging you back to the bloody marqués? Is that the devil’s bargain he made?”

  “No!” she cried. “And who are you to accuse him of anything? You’re the one who helped the sergeant and his lover kidnap me. You’re the one—”

  “Um, Lucy,” Diego began as he slid out of the bed, wearing only his drawers.

  “You can’t tell me you actually believed his lies!” Papa gazed at her with such hurt that it took her aback. Then he whirled on Diego. “And you, sir, trumping up some tale, portraying me as a villain just to further her wretched grandfather’s plans. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

  “I believed it to be true!” Diego protested. “I did not know that Don Carlos was lying to me. He lied to everyone. How was I to know—”

  “You . . . you mean it’s not true?” Lucy broke in. She stared at Diego. “Everything you told me about Papa and the nurse is a lie?”

  Diego sighed. “As it turns out, cariño, Sergeant Crawford really was your father. He married Doña Catalina, your real mother, against your grandfather’s wishes. The story about the nurse was a lie.”

  She stared at Diego, stunned. So she’d been right about Papa’s good character all along. He had merely helped two lovers escape a wicked father who didn’t want them to be together.

  Then something awful occurred to her. “Oh, Lord,” she said, casting Diego an accusing glance. “When you came here tonight, you knew my grandfather was lying! That’s why you sought me out.” Her heart twisted. “All that nonsense about the duke and his key? You came because of your blasted honor. You realized you’d been tricked, and you wanted to fix it! It had nothing to do with me.”<
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  “No!” Diego cried. “I came here for you, mi amor, I swear it. You must believe me.”

  “Believe you?” Papa snarled. “After you lied to her about her own father?” He turned accusing eyes on Lucy. “Though I still can’t believe you thought I could condone anyone stealing a child from her parents.”

  “Why not?” came a new voice from the doorway.

  Lucy wanted to scream in frustration as her grandfather hobbled in, his eyes filled with rage. He’d obviously been drawn by the noise, since neither Papa nor Diego was being particularly quiet. Behind him came Nettie, who looked perplexed by the appearance of two men inside Lucy’s room.

  “You helped that sergeant steal Catalina from me,” Don Carlos spat. “It might as well have been my granddaughter he stole.”

  “Ah, so the villain himself has joined the party, has he?” Papa answered.

  Lucy instinctively went to Papa’s side, but he didn’t seem to notice her, his attention narrowed on the marqués. “Tom didn’t steal Catalina, you ass, and you know it,” he bit out. “You pushed her out by setting up that fool marriage to Álvaro. Catalina despised yer choice of a husband. She tried to do what you wanted, but once she found herself carrying my child, she told me she’d rather die than be his wife! You were the one who drove her out of here, damn you!”

  A sudden silence fell across the room. Don Carlos hunched over his cane, his eyes stark with shock and grief, and Diego looked stunned.

  But Lucy barely noticed. My child. Her mother had been carrying Papa’s child? Not the sergeant’s?

  Suddenly everything fell into place. That was how Papa had known to come to this house. How he had known where to get in. That explained why an unmarried soldier with nothing but a deathbed promise to prompt him would have chosen to take on a little girl! Oh God oh God oh God, she was going to be sick!

  “You’re my father?” she said in an anguished voice. “My real father?”

  “What?” Papa turned to her, his face blanching as he realized what he’d just revealed. “Lass! Oh, God, lass, I didn’t mean for you to learn of it this way.”

  He reached for her, but she slapped his hand away, her world shifting so entirely on its axis that she didn’t know which way was up.

  “Apparently, you didn’t mean for me to learn of it at all,” she choked out. “You meant for me to live my whole life feeling like an orphan, like a woman without any family, like a stranger in my own country.”

  “Lass, no,” he said hoarsely. “I did it for you! Because I loved you. Because I loved your mother.”

  “Not enough to marry her,” she spat.

  “You have to understand,” he said, his eyes dark with remorse as words tumbled out of him. “I never meant for any of it to happen. I fell in love with Catalina the moment I first saw her at a ball in Gibraltar. I pursued her relentlessly and asked her to marry me. She gave herself to me the night I proposed, but afterward she got scared and refused to marry me, saying she couldn’t go against her family.” He shot the marqués a foul look. “She said her father would be publicly humiliated by the broken betrothal.”

  He threaded his fingers through his hair. “But when she realized she was carrying you, she couldn’t endure her situation any longer. She escaped to the garrison in Gibraltar, meaning to marry me. Only I had caught the fever that swept Gibraltar in 1803. They told her I was going to die. I was unconscious.”

  His voice hardened as he glared at Don Carlos. “There was no time to waste. Sure that her father would drag her back to marry her forcibly to that bloody Álvaro, she turned to Tom, my best friend, for help. He’d been half in love with her himself, so he offered her marriage to provide a father for her child and protect her from the marqués. That way, she wouldn’t have to marry a man who might abuse her once he discovered she was bearing another man’s bastard.”

  Tears rolled down his cheeks. “The curse of my life is that I recovered a week later. By then, they were married, and there was naught to be done. I’d lost her, and I couldn’t do a damned thing about it.”

  “Except adopt your daughter.” Her heart broke for him. And for herself. “Your own daughter, whom you lied to all your life! Why didn’t you tell me? After they died—”

  “And brand you as a bastard for the rest of your life, the unmarried colonel’s illegitimate brat? For all intents and purposes, you had legitimate parents. I thought it best to leave it that way. I made you my daughter in every way acceptable to society.”

  “But not to me!” she cried. “You could have told me privately. Don’t you remember how many times I asked about them, and you would tell me nothing? I wanted a mother so badly, and you wouldn’t even tell me about her.”

  The stricken look on his face tore at her, but she fought to ignore it. “Oh, lass, I was afraid if I told you, you’d go looking for the marqués. And when he wrote the regiment last year to ask about you, and they warned me, I—”

  “Oh, God!” she cried. “That was why they put him off! How could you?”

  “Lass, dearest lass—”

  “No. Don’t.” She backed away from him. “I don’t even know you anymore.”

  “He kept your family from you,” the marqués cut in, edging closer. “You see, dear girl, he doesn’t care about you.”

  She turned on him with a vengeance. “And you do? You didn’t even come looking for me until after your son died and you had no more chance of an heir.” How could she have been so blind?

  More facts fell into place. “You had to have known my mother lived with the garrison; we were here for four years. She was just there across the border.”

  “You probably even knew the name of her damned husband when you sent me on my wild-goose chase in England,” Diego snapped.

  “No!” Don Carlos cried. “I knew she married a soldier but not his name.”

  When Diego snorted, Papa turned on him. “You have some nerve to question him, when you’re the one who believed his nonsense and did his bidding. Or did you believe it? You’re a famous magician, a master of lies. How do we know you didn’t realize it from the first, that you didn’t act out of greed?”

  That was like throwing pitch on a fire. Diego drew himself up with offended dignity. “I will have you know, sir, that I acted on the purest of motives.”

  “To gain your property,” her grandfather put in with a sneer.

  Her father cursed. “You only acted to get yerself an heir, you bloody, selfish—”

  “Enough!” Lucy shouted. “Enough, all of you! The whole lot of you have been lying and scheming and manipulating my life!” Suddenly, she couldn’t bear to look at them. “Out! Get out! For once in your misbegotten lives, leave me be!”

  They stared at her, shocked, then broke into a chorus of protests.

  She ran onto the balcony, where Papa had used a grappling hook to attach a rope and climb up, and turned to glare at them. “If all of you don’t leave, I will climb down the same way my father did, and none of you will ever see me again!”

  She simply couldn’t take any more! She had to think, had to figure out who she was, what this meant. She had to be alone.

  “Lucy, mi amor—” Diego began.

  “You, too, curse you! Nettie, get them out of here, and lock the doors. Or I swear . . .” She threw one leg over the balcony rail.

  “All right, all right, lass, we’re going!” her father cried as he backed toward the door. Between him and Diego, they muscled her grandfather from the room. Nettie followed, shooing them along.

  Once the room was emptied, Lucy pulled the rope up and went back into the bedroom, closing and latching the balcony doors behind her.

  Her eyes caught sight of the bed where she and Diego had made love. The bed where the man she’d considered a saint for adopting her had conceived her with the woman he’d loved but never told her about.

  It was all too much.

  Dropping to the floor, she wept.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Dear “Cousin,�
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  You know perfectly well why I put “cousin” in quotes. In the past few years, I have sought out every one of my late husband’s relations. None has your knowledge of society or your financial capabilities. It is long past time that you admit you are not my cousin, by marriage or otherwise. As for being wounded by my accusations, you wound me far more by continuing to protect your precious privacy while I am fighting for my very future!

  Your “relation,”

  Charlotte

  T wo hours after Lucy had evicted the men in her life from her room, she stood in the tiny parlor, staring up at her mother’s portrait.

  So much of what she’d learned about her life in the past two months now took on an entirely different meaning: Papa’s changes in regiment, the legal adoption, the fact that he’d kept her at his side until the end of the war, so he could remain close by in Great Britain while he packed her off to a costly school in London. Had he been worrying even then that her grandfather might whisk her away?

  Not that it mattered. What mattered was he’d lied to her all these years. How could he? Surely he’d seen how desperately she wanted to know about her family. She understood his keeping it from everyone else—even with legitimate parents she’d had trouble fitting in. But to keep it from her . . .

  How could she ever forgive him, even if he had only done it to prevent her from falling into Grandfather’s hands?

  Her grandfather. God rot him, too. She’d fallen for his crocodile tears, been swept up in the long conversations she’d had with him about her mother. She’d been fool enough to believe that her dear abuelo was truly glad to have her here, to like her for herself. And after he’d said it was her choice whether to marry the duke, she’d acquitted him of bringing her to Spain just so she could bear his heir.

  Hah! His behavior toward her had all been a lie, too. He’d known from the beginning that his daughter had run off with a soldier. He hadn’t just discovered it a year ago, as he’d claimed. No, he’d sent Diego after her because his son had died and he needed his precious heir. In that respect, he was exactly the same manipulative, scheming scoundrel who’d ruined her mother’s life