Page 48

“Hush, my love,” she murmured. “It’s all right. Let it go, let it go.” She drew him down to her breast, stroking his damp hair back from his forehead, and murmured soothing things until the bout of emotion had passed and he lay calm.

And was safe.

“La Cuchilla?”

He nodded.

“What sort of a person would do that to another person?” She could not believe a woman could do such an evil thing.

He didn’t answer. She stroked his hair. “How did ithappen?”

He shook his head. “It was just… something stupid. We were young and stupid.”

“We?”

“Michael and I.”

She waited. And he knew he would have to explain, some of it, at least. All these years he’d kept it locked up inside him, and now…

But if he was going to keep waking her up with the damned dreams…

Trust, she’d said. It didn’t come easy.

“Michael was one of us, Wellington’s Angels, or his Devil Riders, depending on who you talk to. Five of us from school, Gabe, Harry, Rafe, Michael, and me.”

He could hear her soft breathing and the shifting of coals in the dying fire.

“Michael was the only one of us who didn’t make it home.”

She tucked the bedclothes more warmly around them both and waited.

“It was in 1812. Not long after our victory at Salamanca. I’d just turned twenty-one; Michael was twenty-two.

The war was going well, we were young and full of the confidence of youth…

” He sighed. “Such extraordinary confidence. We’d been at war for years, and despite horrendous casualties all around us, none of us—our friends, the five of us who’d been at school and joined the army together—had even been seriously wounded. ”

He lay quietly, recalling that time. Seven years ago, yet it felt in some ways like a hundred years.

And in others, like yesterday. “We half believed ourselves invincible. Life was painted in bold bright colors, no shades of gray for us. It was all a big adventure; we lived for danger.” He shook his head. “Such fools young men can be.”

“Tell me what happened,” she said softly.

“We were riders—glorified messengers, really—taking messages from headquarters, liaising between different sections of the army, delivering information, money, orders—whatever was required.

“This day we’d come—Michael and I—from an important briefing, and we’d been ordered to take messages to—” He broke off.

Even after all this time, the habit of secrecy was strong.

“Suffice it to say Michael was riding to meet a general and I was taking the same information to our Spanish allies in the hills.”

“The guerrilleros .”

“Yes. But just out of camp we were… waylaid. A stupid thing; we should have known better. A… a woman in distress.”

“It was a trap?”

He nodded. “Next thing, Michael and I were in the cellar of a house being… questioned.”

“Tortured,” she whispered.

“He was in the next room. I could hear him… hear what they were doing to him. And he could hear what they were doing to me.” His breathing grew harsher with the memory. “It was… bad.” He’d thought he would die of the pain. “I wanted to die.”

She held him tightly, her lips against his temple.

“But you didn’t give in,” she whispered, “didn’t give up the information.”

Luke closed his eyes. So tempting to let it pass, to let her think he was the hero she wanted him to be.

Trust, she’d said.

So he told her. “I don’t know. I think I did. I don’t remember.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

He made a helpless movement. “We were found, Michael and I, in the cellar of that cottage a week later. Michael had been dead a week by then. I was out of my head with fever. Michael’s body and mine bore identical marks of torture, but he’d had his throat cut and I—I had been left with a blanket, water, and this. ” He gestured to the hideous rose.

“We learned soon afterward that the French had the information.” Bitter shame washed through him as he forced himself to admit, “It seems pretty obvious who talked.” He waited for her response. Isabella was a Spanish patriot, the daughter of a leader of the guerrilleros .

She made no comment, no exclamation of horror or disgust, and gave no false comfort or meaningless sympathy. She just held him tight for a long time, then kissed him.

The breath he didn’t know he’d been holding escaped in a long sigh.

“I’ve never told anyone that. Not my friends, not my family.

” He felt lighter already. “My superiors knew we’d been tortured, of course, and that the French had the information, but there was no way of telling who’d given it—Michael and I weren’t the only ones with the same information—so no action was taken. ” No court-martial, he meant.

“Of course no action was taken,” she said. “They saw you were a hero.”

He turned his head and stared at her. Had she not understood what he’d just told her?

She made an impatient gesture. “It was Michael who talked, of course.”

“You don’t know that,” he croaked.

She shrugged. “I never knew Michael, of course, but I do know you.” She smoothed cool fingers across his furrowed brow and said softly, “Luke, even in your dreams you fight this La Cuchilla. You did not give in, my love, I know it, and if you were not so hard on yourself, you would know it, too. Now come to bed. It’s almost dawn, but I think we both need a little more sleep before we ride on, don’t you?

” And she snuggled down in the bed, pulling him with her.

Luke lay in her arms, feeling empty, drained, and wakeful. So simple. Such an easy absolution. He wanted desperately to accept it, to embrace the notion that it hadn’t been all his fault.

Except he hadn’t told her the whole story. Not quite. Not his deepest shame.

T hey made a late start in the morning and reached Ayerbe as the sun was sinking low. Luke paused on the outskirts of the village. “How tired are you?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I know we’ll be made very comfortable at the Inn With No Fleas, but if you aren’t too tired, we could travel on another hour and call in at the Castillo de Rasal.”

Bella had been looking forward to a hot meal and a bed, but at the prospect of seeing the Marqués de Rasal again, she felt her energy renewed. “Oh yes, do let us go on. I’d love to see the marqués again. He was my father’s dearest friend, and like an uncle to me when I was a child.”

Satisfied, he gave a brisk nod, and they continued on their way.

He’d hardly said a word all day. Bella had been observing him quietly. Physically there was a new ease between them, but whether that came from Luke or herself was another question.

In the darkest hour of his torment he’d turned to her instinctively, seeking her body, her comfort, to help drive out his demons… The dark, desperate violence of his need for her had pierced her heart. And her body still thrilled with it.

And that dreadful tale… He’d never told it to another soul, not even his oldest friends.

He might not love her, but instinctively, he’d trusted her.

Even his offering to stay at a place he did not know, with people he did not know, was a small sign of trust. It was an indirect apology for his refusal to let her visit there last time. The knowledge filled her with quiet warmth.

She glanced across at him, riding toward the deepening lilac sky, his face grave and drawn, like that of a man contemplating his doom.

It wasn’t the air of a man who’d bared his soul.

Instead of exhibiting the lightness and relief she’d always felt from sharing a terrible secret, it was almost as if his shame had increased.

Still, probing now would only make him clam up further.

Bed was the place to talk. After he’d taken her, in that period when it seemed two people could get no closer, when the barriers between them were soft and transparent and the world had shrunk to just one bed, a place of sated bodies, quiet murmurs, and slow, soft touches.

She had not known that place existed.

She understood now why married women talked about when they were girls, even after a month of two of marriage. It had always seemed to her to be an affectation, a way of lording it over their unmarried friends. Now, only a handful of days into her marriage, her real marriage, she knew it was not.

She was not the girl she’d been a few weeks ago. It was not simply being part of someone else—that wasn’t quite right; she was herself and he was a separate being, very separate at times. But she was a different person now, with insights into her own nature—and his—that she’d never dreamed of.

The feeling, when he took her body, of being subject to the deepest animal instincts, of letting go all that was civilized, all that was schooled…

The power of his body as he thrust into her again and again, the strength of her as she took him in, the racking build of pleasure, the deep, sweaty joy in the act.

And the freedom of being able to let go, to scream, to bite and scratch and let out the wildness she’d tried to hide all her life, and he liked it. More than liked it. Gloried in it.

Being married was like coming out of a cocoon, splitting the old carapace, and finding the world was full of rainbow colors. And that you could fly.

She glanced across at her grim-faced husband.

Or not.