Bride of Fortune (34 page)

      
As a bride she had known so little of her husband, other than fear of his cruel mockery and shame over the careless way he took her and then deserted her for his mistress. She really had never known Lucero Alvarado at all—until now. And even as she was coming to love him, she feared he might not be Lucero at all, but another man blessed with his beauty, freed of his flaws.

      
“It cannot be,” she whispered as she gazed down on his flushed naked body. Now every inch of him was familiar to her, every long hard muscle, every scar, even the scent of him. It had not been so before when he came to her only in darkness and then only for brief painful couplings before leaving her alone, feeling aching and defiled.

      
But now he was her mate, her love. She ran her hands gently over the crisp abrasion of hair on his chest, then down one long sinewy leg and back up. He was still too hot, too dry. Bending down, she tugged another wet sheet from the bucket where it soaked and smoothed it over his flesh, cooling and wetting him with life-giving water. All the while she worked, she prayed.

Chapter Fourteen

      
Nicholas thought he was drowning, attempting to thrash his way to the top of a pool of foul, stagnant water. Ice-cold water. His teeth chattered and he shook, causing a searing arc of pain to shoot across his shoulder and arm. Then he felt the warmth of another heartbeat, another body. Soft heat enveloped him, small smooth hands soothed him. He could feel her body fitted against his, perfectly familiar as no other woman's had ever been. The fragrance of lavender filled his nostrils as he drifted off into peaceful oblivion at last.

      
Mercedes felt him relax. The chills that had wracked his body were over and he slept naturally for the first time in forty-eight hours. She had spent the second night lying beside him, at times throwing her own body over his to keep him from breaking open his stitches as he struggled against the linen bonds that held him fast to the mattress. When the chills began, she covered him with warm blankets, then stripped off her clothes and pressed her body against his to quiet him. Sometime during the night the fever had broken. She had removed the bindings from his wrists and ankles, and then she had drifted off to sleep herself.

      
Scooting over in the bed, she sat up and studied the man sleeping so peacefully. His swarthy skin was pale from his brush with death but still bronzed against the white bed linens. A beard stubble shadowed his jaw, giving his face a piratical look. Those troubling wolf's eyes were closed, the thick dark lashes swept down onto the high, finely chiseled cheekbones. She reached out and touched his face, letting her fingers feel the raspy scratch of whiskers, trace the elegant contour of his thin hawkish nose, glide over the smooth arch of a heavy black eyebrow. Sleep made him look younger.

      
Her hand moved lower, unconsciously seeking out the steady reassuring drum of his heartbeat as she pressed her palm against the hard slab of chest muscle. When her hand followed the natural pathway of the narrowing arrow of body hair that vanished below the covers at his waist, she withdrew it abruptly with a small gasp of recognition. She wanted him to make love to her, wanted to feel what she had felt lying beneath him on the hard rocky earth! He possessed her very soul now. Here she sat, completely naked in his big bed, gazing down lustfully on his equally naked body, caressing it while he slept!

      
“Don't stop now, beloved. You were just reaching the best part,” his husky voice whispered. He chuckled when she gasped again and seized the edge of the sheet, pulling it up to cover her breasts. His eyes blinked open and he looked at Mercedes. She looked enchanting with her cheeks pinkened in embarrassment, her hair tousled and falling in tangles around her shoulders. Her amber eyes met his, darkening in accusation.

      
“You were supposed to be asleep,” she said crossly, self-consciously running her fingers through her hair. It was a fright. She was a fright! After going without bathing for two days she felt sticky and filthy. A vile film pasted her tongue to the roof of her mouth. And yet he stared up at her with an intensity of desire that robbed her of breath. She could say nothing, do nothing but return the look and tremble.

      
Nicholas sensed her embarrassment. Before she could wriggle from the bed, he seized her wrist. “Please, don't go,” he said. Then a stab of white-hot pain sucked the air from his lungs and he gasped out a surprised oath, looking down at the bandages swathing his right forearm.

      
“The cat sank his teeth in deep. Watch that you don't jostle those drains or you'll really feel some pain,” she scolded, reaching out to check the wrappings holding the small pieces of reed in place.

      
“What the hell have you done? My arm looks like a porcupine's back.”

      
“So far the suppuration isn't excessive and the punctures are draining nicely,” she murmured with obvious pride in her handiwork.

      
He smiled in spite of the pain. In her haste to keep him from moving his injured arm, she had let the sheet drop to her waist again. Two high-pointed breasts stood out to perfection from the angle at which he viewed them. He felt the stirrings of lust begin to override the abominable aching in his shoulder and throbbing in his arm. “You've saved my life, beloved,” he murmured, letting his arm drop onto her thigh where he could feel her trembling.

      
Mercedes felt his eyes on her, willing her to meet his steady gaze. She could not, but rather looked down only to realize the sheet had fallen. When she tried to pull it back up, he held it fast.

      
“Don't hide from me, Mercedes. We've known each other's bodies far too intimately for shyness now.” Even as he spoke the words, he knew they were not true. There was so much left unsaid after her surrender out in the desert. “Everything has changed between us, hasn't it?” he asked.

      
She swallowed the lump in her throat and nodded, uncertain of what to say.
Are you truly the man I married?
she wanted desperately to ask but dared not.

      
“When I saw you afoot and realized you could have been killed...I knew that I couldn't imagine life without you.” He studied her face warily as she continued to look away. Was she afraid of the passion she had finally felt or was it something else—something truly damning?

      
“What did I say when I was feverish?” he asked abruptly. Her head turned in surprise and her eyes locked with his. He watched her nervously moisten her lips with the tip of her tongue before replying. God, had he revealed his identity—that he was not Lucero Alvarado!

      
“Mostly it didn't make sense. You spoke of the war...and you called my name,” she replied, evading the implication of his question, and the fact that he had spoken in two foreign languages with which Lucero had scarcely a nodding acquaintance four years earlier.

      
Neither of them said anything for a moment, but he did not relinquish his hold on the sheet covering her thigh. Then his hand began to move softly back and forth, caressing her.

      
“You're lovely, Mercedes.”

      
“I'm wretched-looking, unbathed, haggard and thoroughly disheveled,” she responded, unnerved by his scrutiny. What was going on behind those mesmerizing eyes? Did he suspect that he had said something incriminating while delirious?

      
“You're the very best wife any husband could ever wish for,” he said quietly.

      
Wife. Husband.
The words sealed a pact between them. His hand slowly loosened, then fell away from her as he drifted off to sleep once more.

      
They would never again speak of his feverish ravings.

* * * *

      
Nicholas mended quickly after the fever broke. He awakened that afternoon, voraciously hungry and, much to Angelina's delight, polished off a bowl of lamb stew. Rosario bounded in as soon as the tray had been cleared away.

      
“Papa! They said you were getting well. I was awfully worried. Are you feeling better now?”

      
He patted a space beside him on the bed and she climbed up amid the pillows surrounding him and gave him a hug. “I'm feeling much better. How is Bufón?”

      
“Angelina says he will live even though he might run with a limp. You saved his life, Papa,” she said with pure adoration in her round dark eyes.

      
“I'm glad. He saved your stepmother's life, you know.”

      
She nodded gravely, “I don't ever want her to die—or you either.” She burrowed against his chest and held onto him tightly.

      
A surge of empathetic warmth filled him. She had been alone and frightened, deserted by her mother in death, then taken away to an alien place by strangers. He understood what it meant to be a child afraid and alone, only he had never had anyone to worry about him, anyone who loved him...until now.

      
Stroking her shiny black curls, he said softly, “We'll never leave you, Rosario, I promise.”

      
That is how Mercedes found them when she brought his medicine.

      
During the next few days as his strength increased, a new tension grew between Nicholas and Mercedes, subtly different than the intense sexual antagonism of earlier when he had teased and stalked and she had held herself rigidly aloof. He knew he had revealed something during his delirium. Yet she had chosen to ignore it. He had always considered that it was only a matter of time until Luce's wife would realize that she was sleeping with an impostor, but he had hoped it would be after she was expecting his child, when she would be powerless to speak out. But that was before he met her...and fell in love with her.

      
A foolish thing to do, certainly nothing he had ever planned to do, falling in love with his brother's wife. But he knew sure as the summer rains came that he would never give her up as long as he drew breath. Perhaps even though she did intuit his charade, she returned his feelings. But the scars Luce had inflicted on her were deep. She guarded her heart and had feared to yield her body until the savagely fulfilling sexual encounter they had shared last week. Perhaps her own response had frightened her almost as much as the thought that she had freely given to him what she had never given to Luce.

      
Before he had been patient, playing a waiting game, taunting her, teasing her untried body, arrogantly assured that one day she would surrender. They had moved past that point now. She had slept in her bed the past week, insisting he needed to rest without risk of her brushing his injured shoulder and arm. At first he was too weak to protest, but now he had mended well enough.

      
Determined, he threw off the covers and swung his legs over the side of the mattress. Until now Baltazar had been helping him walk. Today he would go outside under his own power. He stood up, grateful when the room did not tilt as it had the first time he tried to stand up the day before yesterday. Gingerly he made his way across the floor, holding onto furniture until he reached the window facing on the courtyard.

      
He called out to Lazaro, who was working at the well, to draw him a warm bath, then sat down on a chair to begin unfastening the bandages over his wounds. As he worked, Nicholas was flooded with memories of two days earlier when Mercedes had taken the curious little reeds out of the draining punctures. He had flexed the injured arm, making a fist even though the exertion caused him to wince in pain.

      
They had been sitting side by side on the narrow wooden bench in the courtyard. “Are you certain it doesn't hurt that much?” she had asked dubiously. The flesh around the drains looked slightly pink but that was from healing, not suppuration. “There aren't any streaks of red.”

      
“I'm relieved to hear it,” he said dryly, “since I've no wish to have you sawing off my arm.”

      
Her head shot up, a look of horror in her eyes. “You've actually seen that on the battlefield?”

      
His expression was flat as he choked back the memories. “I've held men down while it was done to them. Sometimes I think it would’ve been a greater mercy to put a bullet in their brains than to maim them for life.”

      
“You'd hate that—not being perfect, wouldn't you?” she asked hesitantly.

      
Amusement replaced the opaque look in his eyes. “Father Salvador would scarcely concur that I'm perfect, but I do thank you for the compliment.” With pure pleasure he watched her blush.

      
“I scarcely meant...oh, you know well enough what I meant,” she said, flustered, then returned to her work.

      
“Ouch! Watch what you're doing,” he groused as she fumbled removing the last drain.

      
“Serves you right for making me nervous,” she replied.