Princess (21 page)

Her gaze fell to the scar on his lips and he thought in sudden panic,
No. Don’t ask me.

She drew breath to speak. He didn’t give her the chance.

“So, what do you want to do today?” he asked smoothly. With a playful growl, he spilled her off him and swept to his feet, his knees shaking slightly as he jumped out of bed and began dressing.

When two or three minutes passed and she still had not answered, he turned around. His forced smile died to find her looking at him. Still in bed, she lay on her side, her head braced on one hand. He cast about for anything to say.

“What would it take to make you trust me?” she asked softly.

He stared at her, heart pounding. At last he shook his head. “I’m sorry. I can’t help it.”

She nodded, searching his eyes with a gentle gaze. “Good enough.” She sat up and held out her arms to him. “Come here. Let me check your stitches before you put on your shirt.”

He finished buttoning his trousers and walked back to her, sitting on the edge of the bed, his shoulder to her. She examined her work. He was tense the whole time, barely hearing her as she told him the stitches looked good and that he was healing nicely.

Sitting behind him, she startled him when she embraced him and snuggled against his cheek. He tensed, bracing himself for a fight, knowing with every atom of his being that any second now she was going to demand again that he spill his guts.

She was just thinking over the words to ease into it. He knew it. He had been through it a hundred times.
How did you
get this scar?
Every damned woman he met wanted to vivisect him.

“Darius,” she murmured.

“Yes?” he said tautly, an armory of defenses at his fingertips.
Damn it, I trusted you.

“Let’s fly kites.”

“What?”
He turned around and stared at her.

“You remember those Chinese kites you gave me one year for Christmas? I still have them!” she said brightly. “I brought them.” She kissed his cheek. “Come on, it’ll be fun.”

She went on chattering happily, but he was no longer listening, staring suspiciously at her. Something very strange was going on.

A short while later, they were traipsing out into fields crowded with butterflies and wildflowers under the wide, blue sky.

Darius wasn’t sure exactly what he had gotten himself into.

The yellow ribbons on Serafina’s wide-brimmed straw bonnet billowed out behind her, getting in his face, tickling, teasing him as he followed her. He hefted their picnic basket in his right hand, a folded blanket under his left arm, with a strange feeling in his brain that he had stepped into a dream-world.

On a secluded hilltop acres away from the main compound, yet within the confines of the villa’s wall, they came to a large, glittering pond in the middle of a green pasture.

“Oh, Darius, it’s lovely!” she exclaimed.

“I found it looking for you yesterday.” Squinting against the sun, he scanned the area for any possible threat, then reminded himself it was broad daylight and he had twenty men posted on the walls.
Relax, for God’s sake,
he told himself, then he gave Serafina a lazy grin. “Let’s go.”

They crossed the field.

The grasses were up to their knees, and wildflowers abounded, little stars of yellow, white, and purple. Insects chirped, and here and there grasshoppers arced across their path. They found a shady spot under a huge elm tree. Darius spread out the blanket, snapping it open with soldierly efficiency. They left the picnic basket behind and went to fly the kites.

The kites were beautiful to see against the azure sky, the swirl of colors from their festooned tails plunging and soaring.

He forgot about everything, for more beautiful still was Serafina’s delight. He indulged her when she clapped her hands for him to make the kite race along the surface of the water like an eagle scanning for fish. Of course, he grew cocky at the game, trying to make it zoom nearer and nearer the water until he finally sank the kite in the pond.

Serafina laughed her head off as he stared at his broken toy in dismay. The kite floated, parti-colored, on the water’s surface like a drowned jester.

He pulled the string and it moved sluggishly toward the reedy shore.

She pointed, laughing to the point of tears. “Go get it, Santiago.”

He growled without menace and rolled up his sleeves. He kicked off his boots and rolled his black trousers up to his shins. She was still giggling as he squared his shoulders and marched, resolute, to the pond.

Serafina helped him carry the kite out of the water, and while Darius went about laying it out on the grass to dry, she returned to their blanket in the shade and unpacked their picnic, her bare feet tucked under her. It was simple fare much the same as what they’d had last night, sliced meats and cheeses, grapes, a marvelous loaf of bread, and wine, but somehow she felt she had never dined so richly.

In a few minutes, Darius joined her, barefoot in the grass, black waistcoat hanging unbuttoned over his loose white shirt.

“Hello, handsome,” she said with a coquettish smile.

He gave her a rueful look. She watched him kneel down on the blanket. He reached into the leather satchel he’d brought and produced his battered copy of his favorite book,
Don
Quixote.

He offered her the book. “Read to me. Any page. Doesn’t matter.”

She took the book from him, shifted off her knees, and sat on the blanket. He lay back propped on his elbows and looked around as though he couldn’t decide how to arrange himself comfortably. She smiled at him when he caught her eye. She patted her lap in invitation.

He arched a brow. “Tempting.”

“The best seat in the house.”

He came toward her on hands and knees and lay down on his back, resting his head on her lap, his long legs sprawled out over the blanket, one knee bent. Settling against her, he let out a tremendous sigh of contentment. “You’re comfortable.”

She smiled to herself and opened the book.

He ate the cheese and grapes while she drank wine and read aloud to him, combing her hand through his damp hair, sifting his forelock through her fingers, absently unfastening the top few buttons of his shirt to caress his chest and play with the medal of the Virgin.

All the while, he twirled one of her tresses around and around his finger, his face nestled against her body. When the slight tug on her hair stopped, she glanced down and found him dozing, eyes closed.

She lowered the book and stared down at him, feeling her whole chest compress with emotion at the beauty of him, trusting her so sweetly, he—the spy, the assassin—who trusted no one. On this magical afternoon, she felt as though she had captured a unicorn. Yes, she thought fancifully, a unicorn stallion with great liquid brown eyes.

The thought that she must soon let him go free again was enough to make her want to cry. She shoved the thoughts violently away. The future did not exist here. There was only him, and now.

Plucking a blade of grass, she tickled his sun-bronzed cheek with it.

“There’s an ant on you,” she whispered.

“Mm, no,” he mumbled, eyes closed. “It’s just you being a nuisance.”

She smiled and threw the grass away, then set the book down, dog-eared. She began stroking his chest and flat belly through his shirt, staring earnestly at his face as she fought with her uncertainties.

His eyes swept open. “What’s the matter, butterfly?”

“Oh, Darius.” Cradling his head in both arms, she leaned down and reverently kissed his brow. She stayed like that for several minutes, holding him, eyes closed. “You are so sweet. I want—I want to keep you all to myself.”

His laugh was as soft as a sigh. “All right.”

“I wish we never had to leave. Darius, why do we never get what we wish?”

He cupped her cheek. “That’s just the way life is. Don’t be sad. You are too pretty ever to be sad.”

“I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“Give me a kiss,” he whispered as he curled his hand around her nape.

She did.

He was right. His kiss made her fears vanish. She sighed as she melted into his embrace and drank the kisses thirstily from his sculpted lips. He gathered her into his arms, pulled her down onto the blanket with him, and made her forget.

For three days, they were constant companions.

As if from a distance, Darius observed the king’s most trusted man courting disaster and didn’t care. He tasted rest it seemed for the first time in his life, a soul-deep sweetness that lingered, an end to the exhaustion of constant watchfulness, and an easing from him of the iron grip that was his decades-old, acute wariness for his own survival.

Serafina cuddled him like he was one of her animals. Though he played it fairly cool, he thrived on every minute of her attention, moved by the sweet joy she took in fussing over him.

Merely hearing her call his name in the house did profound things to him.

He would not have thought it possible, but she became even more beautiful as her happiness blossomed, and it awed him, almost beyond his grasp, to imagine that he, the Gypsy bastard, the nothing, was the cause. He could only watch her like a half-wild animal, marveling at the way she tamed him. Dimly he sensed that somehow this woman was the answer to every need he’d ever suffered, even those which had gone unmet for so many years he’d given up on them.

She absorbed every particle of his attention. He saw a man who was like a child for her, soaking up her laughter and her smiles, her artless caresses, and he wrapped her love around him like a blanket on a cold winter’s night. He fed upon her innocent kisses that turned so frequently to feverish desire, and yet the sense that theirs was a chaste and sacred bond never left him.

They ignored the future and neither dared speak aloud what he knew both of them foolishly daydreamed—that it was forever. That this ancient villa with its fading yellow paint was their house.

That he was her husband.

That she was his wife.

He knew it was absurd. He didn’t care. He knew it would hurt terribly later. Didn’t care. They were playing like children at a reality that could never be, but for now it was easy to forget that a war-torn world existed beyond the estate’s protective wall.

He didn’t get any work done, aside from penning some correspondence to his estate manager in Spain. He wrote the man his instructions from their bed, using the smooth curve of Serafina’s naked back for a desk. For days, he didn’t practice or train, didn’t even want to look at the elegant rifle he would soon bring to Milan.

Caught up in learning for the first time how to live, he didn’t want to think about death.

His whole existence turned upon her kiss. His dignity, he decided, was a small price to pay for the joy he had found. She was the delight of his life. In the mornings, they languished and played in bed together well past breakfast. In the afternoons, they watched clouds, painted outdoors with watercolors, collected botanical specimens from the woods and fields. They waded in the little lake, they had picnics, and somehow, in spite of unbearable temptation and frustration, they refrained from making love.

On the fourth night, as they lay in bed, their bodies entwined, they stared for innumerable moments into each other’s eyes, doing nothing but caressing and touching.

But soon he felt her skin heating with the blush of arousal, his innocent seductress. She slipped her arms around his neck and gave him a hungry kiss. His muscles trembled with his awareness of how unbearably easy it would be to slip inside her, take what was his, and quench the endless ache.

This he vowed he would not do. He vowed it with the last shred of honor he had left. He would not leave her ruined and possibly with child when he went off to die. It was bad enough that she would mourn him.

She whispered his name, running her hand down his stomach. He shivered.

Slowly, he lay back on the cool sheets, pulling her atop him. He tasted her mouth deeply while his hands roamed up and down her back, caressed her arms, kneaded her backside, her silken thighs enfolding his hips. When she moaned softly with desire, he rolled her onto her back again, on the edge of desperation.

The curtains billowed over the open window, carrying to them the fragrances of the night. They petted and played, spending themselves lavishly, recklessly, while the precious moments continued ticking away, sand steadily draining from the hourglass.

Something’s wrong.

Darius awoke suddenly in the middle of the night, with crisp, instant alertness.

The room was dark. Beside him, Serafina slumbered peacefully. He held very still, listening.

All he heard was the stridulating song of insects and Serafina’s restful breathing, but his heart was pounding and the hairs on his nape stood on end.

He sat up, swung his legs over the side of the bed, and reached silently for his breeches and a shirt, then pulled on his boots. He walked quietly to the door and listened, hearing nothing.

With a dark glance back at Serafina, he opened the door and went out. Moving soundlessly down the hall, he descended the wooden stairs, avoiding the steps that creaked. On the first floor, he rounded the newel post and glanced into the first room he passed, the dining room. Here, as in every room on the first floor, he had stationed a man at the window.

“All clear, private?”

“Yes, sir. All’s quiet,” said the soldier.

“What’s the hour?”

“Three, sir.”

Darius gave a firm nod. “Hold your post.”

He checked in with the others without incident, but the instinctual sense of warning did not diminish. His sixth sense, honed so early in life, had saved his neck too many times for him ever to ignore its sometimes illogical proddings. Still uneasy, he went into the small, spartan room he had abandoned days ago, and opened the armoire, where he took out a black leather case which housed his usual arsenal of weapons.

Lifting his ebony-handled dagger from its velvet bed, he felt better the instant his favorite weapon was in his hand. He tucked a pistol into the waistband of his breeches for good measure.