Paradise & More (Torres Family Saga) (18 page)

      
Magdalena's tangled russet hair obscured her face as she lay draped across the bed, still in her sleeping shift although it was nearly dusk. She had spent the day reading in her room. Unconsciously, her fingers clutched the locket she always wore. “Mayhap we should both take the veil, Miralda. That would ensure your future—if you followed me into a convent and became a nun.”

      
Miralda snorted. “As if your father would dower his most marriageable daughter to the Church!”

      
“He will not wed me for his advantage,” Magdalena gritted out. “Leave me now and attend your chores. I will arise when I will arise.” God and all the Saints, how she despised her own father! For three days after Benjamin and his family died, she had lain immobilized with grief at the city house. Then she had forced herself to ride the short distance across town to the beautiful Torres palace. Her father had stood in the courtyard with agents of the Inquisition and several merchants. They were overseeing the stripping of every furnishing. All the accumulation of centuries of labor by the House of Torres, divided up by greedy men whose evil defied imagining.

      
“Now I languish here, confined to the country house as my punishment...and yet no word of Aaron,” she murmured. What if he were lost at sea? The question had haunted her nightmares for months. Aaron, Benjamin's beloved son, was her only link with sanity, her only reason for surviving in a world devoid of love, reason, compassion. “I must wait for Aaron.”

      
She recalled their bitter parting the previous summer. “He will hate me now,” she thought miserably, but she had sworn an oath to his father, and beyond that, she loved him still.
I will convince him of my feelings—if only he returns to Castile.

      
Magdalena arose and stripped off her shift, then tested the bath water her servant had poured much earlier. Scalding then, it was still warm now. She sank into the tub, all the while turning over ways to leave the valley and return to Seville. Perhaps some word of the Genoese and his fleet would be circulating. Surely by now they must be homeward bound from the Indies. Perhaps they had been summoned to the court now sitting in distant Barcelona.

      
If she could make peace with Bernardo, he might be willing to send her to the queen so that a marriage of political advantage could be arranged. Magdalena had no intention of accepting such a match, but it would be the means to find out where her lover was.

      
Aaron's eyes narrowed as he stood on the gallery looking into the dimly lit room. Bernardo Valdés's shabby old country estate had undergone some significant improvements since he had left Castile last summer. How much of the lavish furnishings had his father's money paid for, he wondered as he watched the whoreson Crossbearer's daughter lave her silky flesh in perfumed water. He had gone first to the city house of Valdés, only to find no one in residence but for a few servants. One informed him that the master and mistress were with the royal court in Barcelona, no doubt to greet the triumphant admiral.

      
He had thought first to race across Castile and Aragon in pursuit of Cristobal's procession. He could gain entry to the royal audience if he were part of the admiral's entourage. Then he might kill Bernardo Valdés.

      
Such an act would have been treacherous repayment for the man who had saved his life in Palos. Colon had given him stern orders about remaining in hiding, even offered him the sanctuary of his own home in Cordoba, where his mistress, Beatriz Harana, lived with Colon's two young sons. He had agreed to hide from the Holy Office until the admiral returned from his audience in Barcelona and thence to return to the Indies when the second voyage was outfitted.

      
Don Cristobal had not, however, wrung from him any promise against revenging himself on the Valdés family here in Seville.

      
“Perhaps Bernardo's beauteous familiar with the mahogany hair can provide me with some answers.” In spite of the hate that burned his very soul, there was yet an. inexplicable desire, a pull this small slip of a girl had on him. He felt the tightening in his loins and cursed himself for seventy kinds of a fool. Yet he could not tear his eyes from her as she lay in the tub, her head resting against the rim.

      
He could see her thick, russet lashes flutter down, covering those cat-green eyes. In profile her face appeared stronger than he remembered it, more angular and aristocratic, less girlish. Then his gaze lowered, following her slim arched neck to the waterline where two impudently upthrust pink nipples barely broke the surface. She held a large gold locket clutched in one hand, nestled between the vale of her breasts. He entered the room silently and knelt behind the tub as she dozed.

      
“Your dreams must be sweet, lady, for you to look at peace. Do you always bathe with your jewels on?” he whispered, pulling cruelly on the mass of curly hair that fell to the floor.

      
“Diego!” She tried to sit up, but he held her fast and muffled her surprised cry. Tears of pain burned her eyes as her slim neck arched over the edge of the tub.

      
He placed his knee on her hair, immobilizing her head. Then one hand slid down her throat and traveled to her breasts. Tweaking one nipple sharply, he whispered, “My name is Aaron, not Diego, witch.”

      
“You must not use a Hebrew name,” she said in a muffled voice. He did not loosen his grip on her head.

      
“Your concern is touching,” he replied, his voice ice cold. He brushed one nipple, then the other, finding them eager to oblige his touch. They pebbled quickly and her heartbeat accelerated. So did his. “Tell me, does a familiar of the Holy Office usually respond so to the contaminating touch of a judaizer?”

      
“I have nothing to do with my father's evil!” she sobbed, hating her weakness yet knowing he would condemn her.

      
“Yes, your father, Don Bernardo, now such an important man at court. When does this evil man you abjure return to Seville?” he asked in a silky voice. His fingers slid to her throat in a palpable threat.

      
“He tells me naught of his plans,” she replied in a pain-clogged voice.

      
“Surely you will be summoned to court? What a match that Satan's spawn can make with you as bait.”

      
“I will not obey him. I am already pledged.” She stiffened at his cold cynical chuckle.

      
“I wager you have pledged yourself many times—as you did with me, and with others too numerous to count since I departed.” Damning her, he left off handling her wet little body. Aaron stood and pulled her up beside him by her hair. The moment he did it, he realized his mistake. She fell against him full length, her arms holding fast to his shoulders while that soft, wet little body pressed to his. Her feet, still in the tub, began to slip and she clutched him tighter.

      
“There have been no others, Aaron.” She buried her head against the rough leather of his jerkin and felt his heart thud furiously. “There is much that I would tell you. My father had another who helped him entrap Benjamin. I do not know his name—”

      
“His name, lady? I know her name. You wheedled your way into my father's affections. You spied within his home. You were my father's betrayer!” His voice choked.

      
Magdalena felt him shudder and held him tightly, shaking her head in denial as acid tears slipped from her eyes.

      
“Did you see the penitential procession led by those hounds of hell who call themselves God's servants? Did you watch the burning in Tablada? My father, my mother, little Ana...Ana...” His voice broke and he shook.

      
“Oh, Aaron, I went to your father the night before he died—in the dungeons of San Pablo. I bribed a guard to let me in—”

      
“No, enough of your lies! You would go only to gloat.” He felt her struggling furiously now as she raised her head to meet his accusing eyes. Her face was tear-streaked and her expression desperate.

      
“I loved your father as much as I despise my own! I would never have hurt Benjamin, never!” Her voice rose in hysteria.

      
Aaron stopped her cries with his mouth, letting all the agony and shock of the past day release itself through the cruelly punishing kiss. He ground his lips over hers, pinning her against him and lifting her from the tub. She was so small and frail, so soft. And she did not resist, but gave in to his rough passion.

      
Magdalena felt his pain, so akin to her own.
Oh, Aaron, we must heal each other!
She tasted her own blood but ignored it as he continued ravishing her mouth. So long, so many endless, lonely months, needing him, wanting him, and now she had him in her embrace.

      
I loved your father as much as I despise my own!
Her impassioned words echoed in his mind. How he longed to believe her as she melted against him, her slim pale arms encircling him, her fingers entwined in his shaggy golden hair. His pain-drugged mind shut down and pure physical instinct overrode all thought. This woman, mistress of deceit, daughter of his worst enemy, had haunted his dreams ever since she had been a bedraggled girl in the marshes. Possessing her once had not appeased the hunger, only fed it so it grew greater.

      
He swept her into his arms, tossed her wet body onto the bed, then began to discard his jerkin, tunic, boots and hose with rough, desperate movements. She crouched in the middle of the bed covers, seeming to wait for him. When he stood before her, as naked as she, Magdalena reached out her hands and touched his sun-bronzed body in awe.

      
“You have been fair baked by the Indies' sun,” she whispered. Running cunning little fingers through the sun-bleached hair of his chest, she asked, “Twas the Indies you found, was it not?”

      
“Wherever, the sun burned me well enough,” he murmured as his lips swooped down and plundered her mouth. He could taste her blood and knew he had hurt her. He should want to hurt her more, yet for some inexplicable reason he did not.

      
Magdalena felt him soften his hungry, desperate caresses until they spoke more of love, less of punishment. Like him, she was filled with grief and loneliness. And now she knew the dark desire he had introduced her to when first he lay with her. Then she had felt unsatisfied, bereft when he was satiated. This time she intuited it would not end that way. Instinctively, she arched against him, luxuriating in the feel of his springy chest hair abrading her breasts and the insistent pressure of his male member against her belly.

      
Aaron cupped her buttocks and raised her against him. She continued to kiss him feverishly, as hungry as he. His tongue rimmed her lips, then darted inside when she gasped with pleasure. Slowly, as he let his lips and tongue brush, stroke, and caress her lovely little face, he knelt on the bed and lowered her until they lay side by side, arms and legs entwined. His mouth suckled one small breast, then the other as she writhed against him, lost in soft, panting moans, clutching him tightly.

      
His hand traveled down the silky curve of her hip and dipped to the furry mound between her thighs. “Open for me, Magdalena,” he commanded hoarsely. She complied instantly. When his fingers slid over her swollen, wet nether lips she cried out and bucked with each stroke of his hand.

      
Her fiery need ignited his and he reached for one little hand and pulled it down between them. When he closed it around his aching shaft, a cry tore from his lips as she stroked him in rhythm with his caresses of her. The heat was as intense as the steel forges of Toledo. He rolled her atop him and let her impale herself on his aching sex. As he raised and lowered her slim hips, her hair fell like a burnished curtain about his face and chest. Aaron slid his hands up to her tiny waist, then reached out and grabbed great handfuls of the silky mantle and pulled her down for a molten kiss.

      
Magdalena felt the rhythm and the heat building together. Now she knew the sensations, instinctively felt what she hungered for. Gliding on an arc of pure, golden bliss, she rode him over the crest as surge after surge of ecstatic contractions convulsed her quivering flesh. She felt Aaron's hands twist and tangle in her hair as he arched into her with one final plunge, swelling and spilling his seed in a long shuddering release.

      
Aaron felt her soft, tight sheath rippling in satiation about him and it carried him over the edge. He joined her in a spiraling world of color and light where there was, for a few brief moments, neither death nor hate, only the fiery perfection of two bodies replete in harmony.

      
Reality quickly intruded. Aaron felt the scratching of her locket against his chest. Raising his upper body and rolling her away, he leaned on one elbow and examined the gaudy piece of jewelry. “I repeat my earlier question, lady, do you always bathe with your jewelry?”

      
Magdalena, still awash in all the wondrous new sensations he had awakened in her, could not think clearly. Should she risk all and give him Benjamin's ring? If she did, would he listen to her explanation of how she came to possess it? Or would he think it a prize stolen when her father and the Holy Office appropriated the riches of the House of Torres? As her mind raced, she thought to distract him. Reaching out to stroke his dark bronzed chest, she said, “Truly the sun must be awesome in the Indies to burn you through your clothing.”

      
“For all the wonders we found, the sun is yet the sun and it only colors a man's skin where he bares it.” His eyes dropped to his groin and hers followed. She gasped and he chuckled mirthlessly. “There are some areas of my body I did not wish to burn.”