Bound to Be a Bride (4 page)

He stared at her for a long time, narrowing his dark, penetrating eyes as he assessed her. She felt those near-black eyes boring into her deepest places, but she refused to look away. She had nothing to be ashamed of. She was not the one who had tied someone up and tossed a rough blanket in her face last night.

He reached down to help her. “Stand.”

She had always considered herself a hearty girl, not easily blown over in a strong wind, as the abbess had said. But when that man pulled her so easily into a standing position, she had a feeling of near weightlessness. It threw her off balance and she stumbled on the uneven ground.

Her wrists and ankles were not numb, but they felt awkward and out of use. She lost her footing and, not having her arms to break her fall, she brought her bound wrists up quickly to at least protect her face. At first, Isabella mistook the hard wall of flesh for the rough terrain at her feet.

But he did not let go.

“I think we may have gotten off on the wrong foot,” he whispered, hot and close to her face.

She knew she was supposed to push away from him, but she had spent a cold, hard night down there on the ground and he felt firm and warm and strong.

“Please allow me to introduce myself properly in the absence of a mutual acquaintance to do me the honor.”

He was speaking in the highest courtly language. She was like a marionette in her oft-practiced response, her chin dipping slightly to let him know she had heard, her gaze, though slightly downcast, straining to see him through her thick, long lashes. “I would be very pleased to make your acquaintance, sir.”

She did not want to let go of him. So she did.

“My name is Javier Lerrea.” He had been using his mother’s family name for quite some time, to distance his sisters and parents from his secret revolutionary life.

She had stepped a pace away from him, but he kept her wrists in his hands, his thumb trailing along the even lines of the ropes there.

“It is a pleasure to meet you, Señor Lerrea. My name is…Sol.” She hesitated ever so slightly, but she was sure he caught her out. “Sol… that’s my name,” she added in a hesitant tone that sounded too much like she was introducing herself to herself for the first time.

He raised one eyebrow and was not able to repress the hint of a smile. And what that smile did to his face was beyond anything Isabella could have imagined. He became something beautiful. Her stomach went into a desperate tumble of gripping and rolling. She pulled her tied wrists closer to her chest, as if she could protect herself from the wave of emotion that was rising through her core. The motion only managed to increase her fluttering anxiety, since his strong hands were still gently holding hers.

“Sol, is it?”

She nodded and set her mouth in a firm line to avoid any telltale licking of her lips or biting of her tongue that might alert him to her lie.

“Yes. Soledad… but everyone has always called me Sol.”

“Just Sol. No last name?”

Then she forgot all about strong hands and roiling stomachs and the hard walls of masculine flesh still warm from sleep and she got irritated. She shook his hands off her and stepped another pace back. “Sir, I am certainly not going to reveal my true identity to”—she tossed her chin—“the likes of you.”

His beautiful smile vanished. She was sad to see it go, but someone needed to give this man a lesson or two. Perhaps he suffered from a lack of proper education. She was momentarily distracted thinking she might exercise a bit of pity on the poor man who had to make his way in life traipsing through the forests between Spain and Portugal. Maybe he was a smuggler? Again, Anna would have reveled in those fanciful thoughts far more than Isabella ever would.

He was asking her a question about which direction she was traveling and she had to ask him to repeat it. He moved in closer and said the words a bit slower. Again, like his hands, the movement of his lips was very, very distracting. Why did he insist on standing so close to her and speaking in such a vexing manner?

She answered him with a clipped formality. Of course she was heading to Aveiro, she informed him, sharing her suspicion that he was headed in the same direction.

“Aha!” he cried, his booming voice startling a covey of small birds, as well as his two sleeping friends.

“What have you discovered, sir?” Isabella asked with feigned interest.

“You answered me in Latin, you impostor!” he crowed.

She tried to fight the rush of crimson heat that spread up her chest and neck. “So… why can’t my name be Sol and why can’t I have a passing knowledge of Latin?”

He waved his hands—those strong hands from her dreams…
Must
he
flaunt
them
about
like
that, right in my face?
she wondered—and his smile returned. “You may! You may!” He was happy about something or another.

He turned to the other two men. “Sebastián de Montizón and Marco Delgado, please allow me to present… Sol.” He turned back to face her when he said her name, to watch her reaction as he curved his lips around the simple syllable. The other two were still across the small camp, and he leaned in and whispered, “I suspect Sol is your lady-in-waiting.” Then he pulled away quickly, bent to pick up the blanket he had given her last night, and finished with the introductions. The two men now stood a few feet in front of her, looking surprisingly rested and ready for the day despite having woken up a few moments ago from a night spent on the bare ground. “Sol… it is my pleasure to introduce Sebastián de Montizón and Marco Delgado.”

Both men bowed with formal precision, one leg cast in front of them and one hand extended as they bent elegantly forward. The taller one, de Montizón, looked familiar and his name was one from her great-grandmother’s side of the family, though not totally uncommon. Isabella avoided his gaze. The shorter one seemed safer. Unfortunately, the one named Sebastián was not going to be put off that easily. She set her shoulders back as best she could, seeing as the devil had still not seen fit to untie her.

“Señora… or señorita?”

“Señora!” Too loud, she chided herself. “Yes, I am married.”

All three men looked at her pale hand, conspicuously free of any jewelry.

“Oh.” She lifted up the ropy bundle that was now feeling like a permanent nest for her hands. “Oh, well of course I did not think it wise to wear any jewelry while I was escaping through the forest. What if I came upon bandits? Or worse?”

Javier burst out laughing at the prospect. “Yes! What if?” He continued laughing as he began breaking down their camp, dousing the fire, covering the evidence of their stay as best he could. Marco and Sebastián resaddled the horses and packed up the other supplies. Everyone had a job and performed it with the efficiency borne of familiarity.
Who
are
these
odd
men
, Isabella wondered,
who
sleep
on
the
bare
earth
and
awake
rested, like those Apaches I’ve read about who fought those vicious raids against the innocent Spanish settlers in the New World? Men of the earth. Savages.

But Sebastián, Marco, and Javier had obviously been educated in a noble tradition, instructed in classics, history, philosophy. Isabella suspected that at least two of them were noblemen in their own right, raised in a world of luxury and ease similar to the one she would have known if she had gone to meet her original fate yesterday. The vision of Javier sleeping on the forest floor was immediately replaced with the mental image of him sprawled lazily across one of the massive tester beds in an elegant guest room at the castle in Feria. In her mind’s eye, he was half-asleep and naked. He looked up from tying his saddlebag at that very moment and Isabella shook herself briskly and tried to rein in her wild imaginings.

Once the camp was neatly dismantled and all three horses were fed, watered, and ready to move on, Javier took one last look to make sure they had not left so much as a stray button. Finally, his look landed on Isabella. He stared at her in that devilishly invasive way of his.

“So. Sol…”

“Yes.”

He waited her out. She finally burst like a flood. “See here. I can cook, and I promise I shan’t talk too much—I’ve been told men despise that—and I shan’t expect your protection or any other contrivance. I have my own… effects… and am perfectly capable of making my way to Aveiro on my own, but if you happen to be headed that way as well, it would make the time pass more quickly and I’m sure my horse would appreciate the company—”

“Are you asking to travel unchaperoned with three gentlemen not of your acquaintance?”

She hated him in that moment, for sounding so much like her father. She wanted to holler. Then she became resolute. “Fine. If you are going to allow traditional rules of behavior to prevent me from traveling with you, at the very least, will you untie these ropes so I may proceed of my own accord?”

“I never said we were going to travel without you,” Javier said as he approached her. “I was genuinely asking to make sure I had heard correctly.” He nodded to the other men to get on their horses. “Go get her mare saddled and bring her here.”

How did he know she had a mare? He was far too pleased with himself. And now they were alone again. He walked closer to her. Isabella looked toward the forest in the direction Sebastián and Marco had headed, then quickly back at Javier. He was too close again.

“Your hands,” he commanded.

She held out her wrists for him to free her and she gasped when she realized the motion pushed her breasts together and nearly out of her still-untied rag of a dress. Only one day had passed and already she missed the protective confinement of fine silk and cool, pressed linen against her skin.

He began to untie the fine compilation of ropes, and within seconds had the whole length loose and sliding from her body. It turned out it was one single piece of narrow rope, and it slipped from behind Isabella’s neck and back with an exhilarating swishing sound. “How did you—?”

Javier shrugged and Isabella had that pang of dreamy longing again. He looked boyish and… delicious.

“I grew up around horses,” he said. “I loved learning about knots and bridles and netting and that sort of thing.”

She could tell he was embarrassed for some reason, though she could not see why. Horsemanship and the attendant skills required to master it had been an honored component of every aristocrat’s education for centuries. Perhaps one of his parents had belittled his interest. She wanted to encourage him. She reached out and touched his upper arm. He was wearing a white shirt, open at the neck, and a deep, midnight blue riding jacket of the softest silk. She had not realized how elegantly dressed he was until that moment. What with being held hostage and all, her mind had been elsewhere.

He flinched at her touch.

She pulled her hand away quickly. “I’m sorry… I only meant to…”

He stared at her lips when she spoke.

It made her even more flustered. She continued too quickly. “Oh, please excuse me. I think I must be a bit rattled by my actions of yesterday after all. I cannot quite recall the rules of polite society when all I see are pine trees in every direction and I wake up with my cheek against a bed of pine needles and a pillow of coiled rope. Please forgive my impertinence for touching you just then.”

He tightened his lips, as if her apology annoyed him. “Very well.” He looked down at her ankles. “May I?”

He gestured to indicate he wanted to undo the rope at her ankles as well.

“Yes. Please. If you would.”

He lowered himself slowly to his knees and she felt his eyes on every inch of her body as he went down… her neck, her breasts, her stomach, her… sex, her thighs. Then, thankfully, he was sitting back on his heels and quickly removing the second rope that had held her legs together. He looked up at her then, resting there at her feet like an adoring angel, rubbing a piece of the rope slowly between his thumb and the other fingers of his hand. It was not an absentminded rubbing either. He was practically caressing the length of rope. “It’s still warm,” he said in a throaty whisper, “from your skin.”

Isabella’s mouth went dry as sand. Her breasts felt heavy and tight. Her palms were itchy. “Are you putting a spell on me?” she whispered and then looked quickly over her shoulder for a possible witch or sorcerer, as if Javier might very well be capable of such a thing. When she returned her fevered gaze to his, she held her breath. “My body feels very strange when I am around you.” The words sounded matter-of-fact when she had formed them in her mind, but they sounded terribly forward and inappropriate when they left the safety of her mouth.

Her right hand flew up to cover her mouth, then her other flew up to cover her eyes. Since her hands were once again free to assume a useful purpose, concealing her abject embarrassment was as good a job as any.

She heard his movements as he rose and walked away from her. When she had regained enough courage to show her face, she took her hands slowly away. Javier had mounted his horse and was in the process of resituating the two slender lengths of rope in neat circles on either side of his saddle. He patted them with something akin to affection, then turned to see Isabella had been watching him.

They stared at one another like that until, from the east, they heard the laughter of the other two men and the accompanying noises of their horses.

Before the other two were upon them, Javier gestured toward Isabella’s dress. “You might want to… straighten yourself.” He glanced away quickly before she had the chance to look down and see that her corset was guilty of an utter dereliction of duty.

She whipped quickly around to face one of the omnipresent pine trees and tried to stuff her ample chest back into its confines as best she could. Why was she so flushed and sensitive and swollen everywhere? She stomped her foot to get ahold of herself, yanked the corset up with a final, ruthless tug, then tied the string at her neck with a solid double knot that would not come undone without a concentrated effort.