Regency Surrender: Passionate Marriages. Sophia James

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      ‘War...has its...losers.’

      ‘And its cowards,’ she tossed back. ‘Better to have not come here at all if after the smallest of fights you turn tail and leave.’

      He felt the anger and pushed it down. His back ached and his vision blurred and the cold that had hounded the British force through the passes of a Cantabrian winter still hovered close.

      Cowards. The word seared into vehemence. So many soldiers lost in the retreat. So much bravery discovered as they had turned their backs against the sea and fought off the might of France. All he could remember was death, blood and courage.

      ‘You need to sit down.’ These new words were softer, more generous, and in one of the few times since she had found him on the fields above A Coruña, she touched him. A hand cupped beneath his elbow and another across his back. A chain lay around her neck, dipping into the collar of her unbuttoned shirt. He wondered what lay on the end of it; the thought swept away as she angled the garden chair beneath him and helped him to sit.

      His breath shook as much as his hands did when he lifted them up across his knees.

      ‘Thank...you.’ And he meant it. If she had not been behind him seeing to his balance, he knew he would have fallen and the wooden seat felt good and steady and safe. Shutting his eyes against the glare of the morning, he allowed his mind to run across his body, accepting the injury, embracing the pain. The witch doctors in Jamaica had shown him this trick once when he had taken a sickness there. He had used such mesmerising faithfully ever since.

      * * *

      The Englishman had gone from here somehow, his body still and his heartbeat slowing to a fraction of what it had been only a moment before. Even his skin cooled.

      Uneasiness crept in. She could not understand who he was, what he was. A soldier. A fighter. A spy. A man who spoke both the high and low dialects of Spain as well as any native and one who knew at every turn and at every moment exactly what was happening about him. Alejandra could see this in his stance as well as in his eyes now opened, the blue today paler than it had ever looked; alert and all-knowing.

      She had never seen another like him. Even worn down to exhaustion she caught the quick glance he chanced behind to where a line of her father’s men were coming in from the south. Gauging danger, measuring response.

      ‘Where will I be sent...on from?’ His gaze narrowed.

      It was seldom she told anyone of plans that did not include the next hour, for it gave the asker too much room to wriggle free of any constraints. With him she was honest.

      ‘Not from here. It is too dangerous in A Coruña now. You will leave from the west.’

      ‘From one of the small ports in the Rias Altas, then?’

      So Captain Lucien Howard knew his geography, but not his local politics.

      ‘No, that area harbours too many enemies of my father. It shall not be there.’ She turned and looked up at the sky, frowning. ‘There is a storm coming in with the wind from the ocean.’

      The clouds had amassed and darkened across the horizon, a thick band of leaden grey just above the waterline.

      My father needs to find out who you are first before he lets you go. He needs to understand your people and your character and the danger you might pose to us should you not be the man you say you are. And if you are not...

      These thoughts she kept to herself.

      ‘I am not your enemy, Alejandra.’ He seldom called her by her given name, but she liked it. Soft. Almost whispered. Her heart beat a little faster, surprising her, annoying her, and she looked away, making much of watching those who had come in from Betanzos. Tomeu was amongst them, shading his face and peering at them, the bandage on his wrist white in the light even at this distance.

      ‘But neither are you my friend, Ingles, for all your sacrifice and devotion to the cause of Spain.’

      He laughed, the edges of his eyes creasing, and she took in breath. What was it about him that made her more normal indifference shatter? She even imagined she might have blushed.

      ‘I am here, señorita, because of a mistake.’

      Now, this was new. A piece of personal information that he offered without asking.

      ‘A mistake?’

      ‘I spent too long in the Hercules Tower looking for the British transports. They had not arrived and the French were circling.’

      ‘So they found you there?’

      ‘Hardly.’ This time there was nothing but cold ice in his glance. ‘They had taken one of my men and I thought to save him.’

      ‘And did you?’

      ‘No.’

      The wind could be heard above their silence. Strengthening and changing direction. Soon the sun would be gone and it would rain. The beating pulse in a vein of his throat below his left ear was the only sign of great emotion and greater fury. So very easy to miss.

      ‘He was a spy, like you?’

      He nodded. ‘There are weaknesses that are found out only under great duress. Jealousy. Greed. Fear. For Guy the weakness was cowardice, but he ran in the wrong direction.’

      ‘So you left him there? As a punishment?’

      ‘No. I tried to bring him safely through the lines of the French. I failed.’

      For some men, Alejandra thought, the rigours of war brought forward cowardice. For others it highlighted a sheer and bloody-minded bravery. She imagined what it must have cost Captain Lucien Howard in pain to try to rescue his friend. She doubted anyone or anything could push him into doing that he did not wish to, but still, most men held a limit of what was sacred and worth dying for and a well-aimed hurt usually brought results.

      Her father was the master of it.

      But this Englishman’s strength, even in the lines of his wasted and marked body, was obvious. Unbreakable and stalwart. She imagined, given the choice, that he would choose death over dishonour and pain across betrayal.

      She wondered if she could manage the same.

      The blood from his torn hands stained his white shirt and the sweat from his exertions had darkened the linen.

      But he was beautiful with his pale eyes and his gold hair, longer now after weeks of sickness and fallen from the leather tie he more normally sported. She wanted to run her fingers through the length of it just to see it against the dark of her own skin.

      Contrasts.

      Inside and out.

      Lucien. The name suited him with its silky vowels. Almost the name of one of the three archangels in the Bible, the covering angel, the fallen one. Alejandra shook her head and cleared her thoughts.

      ‘I will send Constanza to you again tonight with her herbs. She has a great prowess in the healing arts.’

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