The Caged Tiger. PENNY JORDAN

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СКАЧАТЬ anything? No, it will do no good to plead for compassion for my wife, Sebastian,’ he added cruelly. ‘Or is it guilt that brings you to this room, little brother? After all, had you provided Madre with her grandson, there would be no need for Davina to be here, would there?’

      A small sound must have betrayed Davina’s presence, for both men turned at the same time.

      ‘Ah, there you are,’ Ruy drawled in a false parody of tenderness. ‘Just in time to help me change for dinner.’

      ‘I don’t want any dinner,’ Davina began, but her protest was overruled by Sebastian’s angry protest.

      ‘You cannot do this!’ he told Ruy. ‘You cannot mean to subject your wife to such indignity… Have you no compassion, Ruy? How is Jamie?’ he asked Davina, turning to her. ‘Has he settled down all right?’

      ‘Better than I expected,’ Davina told him. There was guilt and embarrassment in his eyes, and she thought she knew now why he had been so offhand with her at the airport. It was obvious that his mother had told him to say nothing of Ruy’s condition, to her, and now he felt guilty about the way his brother was treating her.

      ‘Rosita had better be careful,’ Ruy commented sardonically when Sebastian had gone. ‘My little brother’s concern for you is most touching. I trust you have something better than that to wear for dinner,’ he added, giving her slender figure a disparaging glance: ‘You will not have forgotten that we observe the formalities here at the Palacio.’

      She hadn’t. Since Jamie’s birth and her flight to England there hadn’t been any money for luxuries like evening dresses, but she still had the clothes Ruy had insisted on buying for her after their marriage—when he had realised that he was irrevocably tied to her, and had tried to make the best of their mesalliance. Her mouth twisted a little bitterly and for the first time she realised that she had been handed a weapon which she could use to gain reparation in full for all the hurt Ruy had caused her, if she chose to use it. She was to take the place of his manservant, or so he had commanded, and if she chose, she could make the performance of those small intimate tasks which would be required of her as humiliatingly agonising for Ruy as he had once made her life for her!

      ‘You will go and prepare yourself for dinner,’ Ruy commanded her curtly, frowning when she made no attempt to move.

      ‘Don’t you want me to help you first?’

      Something in the soft tone of her voice must have made him suspicious, because he frowned darkly, manoeuvring his chair past her. ‘Not tonight,’ he said abruptly. ‘I am hungry, and I don’t propose to wait all evening for you to perform the tasks Rodriguez can perform in half the time.’ He glanced at his watch, pushing back the cuff of his shirt, and Davina felt her stomach constrict painfully at the sight of his lean, sinewy wrist, and the dark hairs curling against the gold mesh of his watch-strap. All too vividly she could remember how that hand had so arrogantly caressed her yielding flesh, had turned her from girl to woman and taught her pleasure…

       CHAPTER THREE

      SHE had endured many formal dinners during her days at the Palacio, but none which had tautened her muscles to breaking point as this one was doing, Davina reflected, as the long meal seemed to drag on interminably.

      On the table her glass of sherry still stood barely touched. It was Silvadores sherry, matured in their own bodega near Cadiz; the very best fino, dry and clean to the palate. The first time she had tasted it Davina had found it too dry, but habit had accustomed her taste-buds; all those long, lazy afternoons whose end had been signalled by the serving of sherry and tapas on the patio. She clamped down on the thought. On too many thoughts.

      ‘You are not hungry?’

      It was Rosita who whispered the words understandingly, but Ruy who answered them for her, even though they were separated by the length of the polished table, gleaming with silver and crystal. The Silvadores had no need to parade their wealth ostentatiously, and Davina knew that the fine china plates and silver cutlery they were using were nothing compared with the exquisite Sèvres and Meissen china locked away with the gold plate which was a legacy from the Conde who had sailed to the Americas. The family’s wealth derived from many sources—from the sherry business, from land they owned all over Spain, from the young bulls raised on the estancia; from business ventures involving the development of exclusive holiday resorts—but it was here in this ancient Moorish castle that they had set their deepest roots. And Ruy was the sole ruler of this empire. How had his accident occurred? By what means had he been robbed of his independence? Davina glanced down the length of the table. Seeing him seated no one could guess that the powerful muscles moving smoothly beneath his dinner jacket were all that remained of his old physical perfection.

      As the meal dragged on images as sharp and crystal clear as the day they were formed imposed themselves relentlessly on her mind; Ruy swimming in the pool; Ruy riding at the estancia, tending the young bulls destined for the arena; Ruy dancing… making love… She shuddered deeply and wrenched her thoughts back to the present, trying to tell herself that it was divine justice that Ruy, who had cruelly and callously used her to get back at the woman he really loved, should now be deserted by that woman. Why had Carmelita done it? Davina wondered. She had been a bride of a matter of weeks when the sultry Spanish woman had sought her out at this very house, reinforcing what Davina had already heard from her mother-in-law—that Ruy loved her; that there had been an understanding between them for many years; that they were on the point of announcing their betrothal when they had quarrelled, and Ruy in a fit of pique because she, Carmelita, did not choose to run to his bidding like the milk and water English miss he had married had chosen a bride as different from the seductive Spaniard with her night-dark hair and carmine lips as it would have been possible to find. She would get him back, Carmelita had told her. A milksop like her could never hold a man like Ruy, whose lovemaking demanded from his partner a deep-seated understanding of the complexities that went into the making of a man whose blood combined the fiery fanaticism of early Christianity with thousands of years of Moorish appreciation of the sensual arts—a woman such as Carmelita herself.

      And yet now Carmelita had abandoned him. Because he was no longer the man he had once been; no longer capable of outriding the wind, of making love until dawn tinted the sky, or because her pride would not allow any child she bore him to come second to the son his English wife had given him? Under the polite mask of Spanish courtesy lay deep wells of passion that were a legacy of their Moorish ancestors, as Davina already knew. Who could say what had prompted Carmelita to desert Ruy and make her life with another?

      At last the meal drew to a close, but instead of feeling relieved Davina felt her nerves tighten still further, the implacable determination in Ruy’s eyes like the fiendish threat of a torturer ready to turn the screws that final notch which separated excruciating pain from oblivion by the mere hair’s breadth.

      All through the meal she had answered her mother-in-law’s questions about Jamie’s upbringing as politely as she could. Once she might have been intimidated by this woman whose ancestors had numbered kings and queens among their intimates, but where Jamie was concerned she would allow nothing to stand in the way of what she considered right for her child, and this she had been making coolly and firmly clear to Ruy’s mother throughout the meal.

      By the time she realised she was carrying Jamie she had been too numbed by pain to care, for by then she had known exactly why Ruy had married her, and why too he spent so many hours away from the Palacio—away from her bed. The baby she had been carrying had been incidental to her pain, but after his birth she had been overwhelmed by such love for Jamie that that pain had started to recede, if only minutely. As she СКАЧАТЬ