Regency Surrender: Passionate Marriages

‘I...am not...sure.’

‘We can freeze alone tonight or survive together.’ His breath clouded white in the last light of the burning embers. ‘Tomorrow we will hew out a pathway to the west and take our chances in finding a direction to the coast. It is too dangerous to keep climbing.’

He was right. Already the chills of cold made her stiffen and if the earlier rain returned...

Finding her own blanket, she placed it on top of his. Then, removing her boots, she got in, bundling the other two pieces of clothing from her bag on top of the blankets.

Lucien Howard scooped up more oak leaves and these added another buffer to the layers already in place. Alejandra was surprised by how warm she felt when he burrowed in beside her and spooned around her back.

When she breathed in she could smell him, too, a masculine pungent scent interwoven with the herbs she had used on his back.

Juan had smelt of tobacco and bad wine, but she shook away that memory and concentrated on making this new one. He wasn’t asleep, but he was very still. Listening probably to the far-off sounds and the nearer ones. Always careful. She chanced a question.

‘Are you ever surprised by anyone or anything, Capitán?’

‘I try not to be.’ There was humour in his answer.

‘You sleep lightly, then?’

‘Very.’

Her own lips curled into a smile.

* * *

She finally slept. Lucien was tired of lying so still and even the cold did not dissuade him from rising from the warmth of this makeshift bed and stretching his body out in the darkness.

His neck hurt like hell and he crossed to her sack. The salve was in here somewhere, he knew it was. Perhaps if he slathered himself with the cooling camphor he might gain a little rest.

The rosary caught him by surprise as did the small stone statue of the resurrected Jesus. She carried these with her at all times? He’d often seen her fingering something in her pocket as they walked, her lips moving in a soundless entreaty.

A prayer or a confession. Her husband would be in there somewhere, he imagined, as would her father. Spain, too, would hold a place in her Hail Marys. He looked across at her lying in the bed of pine needles and old blankets. She slept curled around herself, her fist snuggled beneath her neck, smaller again in sleep and much less fierce.

Alejandra, daughter of El Vengador. Brave and different, damaged and surviving. One foot poked out from under the coverings, the darned stockings she had worn to bed sagging around a shapely ankle.

She was thin. Too thin. What would happen to her when he left? She’d have to make her own way home through the coastal route as she had said, but even that was dangerous alone. What was it she had said of the Betancourts? They hated her family more even than they hated the French. He should insist she go back from here and press on by himself, but he knew he would not ask it.

He liked her with him, her voice, her smell, her truths. He’d have been dead on the high hills above A Coruña if any one of the others had found him, an Englishman who was nothing but a nuisance given the departed British forces. But she’d bundled him up and brought him home, the same rosary in her bag cradled against his chest and her fingers warm within his own.

She’d stood as a sentry, too, at the hacienda when danger had threatened, his sickness relegating him to a world of weakness.

Jesus, help me, he prayed into the cold and dark March night, and help her, too, he added as the moon came through the banks of clouds and landed upon them, ungainly moths breaking shadows through the light.

Chapter Seven

They saw no one all the next morning as they walked west.

Lucien would have taken her hand if he thought she’d have allowed it, but he did not make the suggestion and she did not ask for any help. Rather they picked their way down, a slow and tedious process, the rain around midday making it worse.

If he had been alone, he would have stopped, simply dug into the hillside and waited for better conditions.

But Alejandra kept on going, a gnarled stick in her hand to aid in balance and a grim look across her face. She stood still often now, to listen and watch, the frown between her eyes deep.

‘Are you expecting someone?’ He asked the question finally because it was so obvious that she was. Tipping his head out of the northerly wind, he tried to gain the full quotient of sound.

‘I hope not. But we are close here to the lands of the Betancourts.’

‘And the fracas yesterday will have set them after us yet again?’

‘That, too.’ This time she smiled and all Lucien could think of was how fragile she looked against the backdrop of craggy mountains and steep pathways. Gone was the girl from the hacienda who had dared and defied him, the gleam of challenge egging him on and dismissing any weaker misgivings he might have felt with his neck and back on fire and a fever raging. This woman could have held each and every dainty beauty in the English court to ransom, with her dimples and her high cheekbones and the velvet green of her eyes. Beautiful she might be, but there was so much more than just that.

Men have loved me, she had said. Many men, she had qualified, and he could well believe in such a truth. Angry at his ruminations, he spoke more harshly than he meant to.

‘Surely they know it was your father who shot your husband?’

‘Well, Capitán, it was not quite that simple,’ she replied and turned away, the flush of skin at her nape telling.

‘It was you?’

‘Yes.’ One word barked against silence, echoing back in a series of sounds. ‘But when he came back from the brink of death it was Papa who made certain he should not survive it.’

‘Repayment for his acts of brutality as a husband?’

‘You understand too much, Capitán. No wonder Moore named you as his spy.’

He ignored that and delved into the other unsaid. ‘But someone else knew that it was you who had fired the first shot?’

‘In a land at war there are ears and eyes everywhere. On that day it was a cousin of Juan’s, a priest, who gave word of my violence. No one was inclined to disbelieve a man of God, you understand, even if what he said was questionable. I was younger and small against the hulk of my husband and he was well lauded for his prowess with both gun and knife.’

‘A lucky shot, then?’

She turned at that to look at him straight and her glance was not soft at all. ‘He was practised, but I am better. The shot went exactly where I had intended it.’

‘Good for you.’

A second’s puzzlement was replaced by an emotion that he could only describe as relief. The rosary was out, too, he saw it in her hands, the beads slipping through her fingers in a counted liturgy.

‘You have killed people before, too, Capitán?’

‘Many times.’

‘Did it ever become easier?’

‘No.’ Such a truth came with surprising honesty and one he had not thought of much before.

‘“And he that killeth any man shall surely be put to death.” Leviticus, Chapter Twenty-Four, Verse Seventeen.’ Her voice shook.

‘You know the Bible by heart?’

‘Just the parts in it that pertain to me.’

‘You truly think that God in his wisdom would punish you for fighting back?’

‘He was my husband. We were married in the Lord’s house.’

‘He was a brute and any God worth his salt would not say otherwise.’

She crossed herself at the blasphemy as he went on.

‘Looking too far back can be as dangerous as looking too far forward in life. In my experience it is best to understand this moment, this hour, this day and live it.’

‘It’s what got you through, then? Such a belief?’

‘I’m a soldier. If I made it my mantra not to kill the enemy, I would have been dead long before we left the safety of Mondego Bay, near Lisboa. No, what gets me through is knowing who I am and what I stand for.’

‘England?’

He laughed. ‘Much more than that, I hope.’

He looked across at the land spread out before him, its valleys and its peaks, its beauty and its danger. ‘Democracy and the chance of freedom might be a closer guess. Spain is in your blood as England is in mine, yet who can say what draws us to fight to the death for them? Is it the soil or the air or the colours of home?’ Picking up a clump of leaves, he let them run through his fingers, where they caught the rising wind and spun unstopped across the edge of the pathway into nothingness.

‘We are like these pine needles, small in the scheme of things, but together...’ His hand now lay against the trunk of the giant tree on the side of the track, its roots binding what little was left of the soil into a steady platform.

* * *

‘Together there is strength?’ Alejandra understood him exactly. This war was not about Juan or her father or her. It was about democracy and choice and other things worth the blood that spilled into death to defend such freedoms. And was not personal liberty the base stone of it all? Papa had never taken the time to understand this, the residual guilt of her mother’s murder overriding everything and allowing only the bitterness to survive.

The waste of it made her stumble, but a strong hand reached out.

‘Careful. We are high up and the edge is close.’

She wound her fingers through his and kept them there, wishing she might move every part of her body against his to feel the honour within him. Could life be like this, she thought, could one person be simply lost in the goodness of the other for ever, not knowing where one began and the other ended?

This was a kind of music and the sort that took your breath and held it there around your heart with an ache of heaviness and disbelief. Hope lay in the knowledge of a man who had not given up his integrity despite every hardship.

Such foolish longings made her frown. Her clothes were dirty and the knife that she carried in the sleeve of her jacket was sharp. This was who she was. A woman honed by war and loss and lessened by marriage and regret; a woman whose truths had long since been shaved away by the difficulty of living from one day to the next.

He could only be disappointed in her, should he understand the parts that made her whole. Carefully she pulled away.

‘We should go on.’ Her voice was rough and she did not wait for him as she followed the path down the steep incline above the mist of cloud.

* * *

She barely spoke to him as they laid out their blankets that night under the stars and the warmer winds of the lower country. She hadn’t looked at him all afternoon, either, as the mountain pastures had turned to coastal fields and the narrow tracks had widened into proper pathways.

They had met with a sailor who was a cousin of Adan’s and he had promised to take Lucien across to England on the morrow. He’d also offered them a room for the night, but Alejandra had refused it, leading them back into the hills behind the beach where the cover of vegetation was thicker.

‘Is Luis Alvarez trustworthy?’ Lucien had seen the gold she had pulled from her pocket for the payment and it was substantial, but he had also seen the pain on the old man’s face when Alejandra had told him of Adan’s death.

‘Papa says that those who make money from a war hold no scruples, but I doubt he will push you overboard in the middle of the Channel. You are too big, for one, but as Adan’s kin he also owes the dead some sort of retribution.’

‘That is comforting.’

She laughed and he thought he should like to hear her do it more, her throaty humour catching. Tomorrow he would be gone, away from Spain, away from these nights of talk and quiet closeness.

‘Being happy suits you, Alejandra Fernandez y Santo Domingo.’ Lucien would have liked to add that her name suited her, too, with its soft syllables and music. Her left wrist with the sleeve of the jacket pulled back was dainty, a silver band he had not noticed before encircling the thinness.

‘There has been little cause for joy here, Capitán. You said you survived as a soldier by living in the moment and not thinking about tomorrow or yesterday?’ She waited as he nodded, the question hanging there.

‘There is a certain lure to that. For a woman, you understand.’

‘Lure?’ Were the connotations of the word in Spanish different from what they were in English?

‘Addiction. Compulsion even. The art of throwing caution to the wind and taking what you desire because the consequences are distant.’

Her dark eyes held his without any sense of embarrassment; a woman who was well aware of her worth and her attraction to the opposite sex.

Lucien felt the stirring in his groin, rushing past the sickness and the lethargy into a fully formed hard ache of want.

Was she saying what he thought she was, here on their last night together? Was she asking him to bed her?

‘I will be gone in the morning.’ He tried for logic.

‘Which is a great part of your attraction. I am practical, Capitán, and a realist. We only know each other in small ways, but...it would be enough for me. It isn’t commitment I am after and I certainly do not expect promises.’

‘What is it you do want, then?’

She breathed out and her eyes in the moonlight were sultry.

‘I want to survive, Capitán. You said you did this best by not thinking about the past or the future. I want the same. Just this moment. Only now.’

His words, his way of getting through, but she had turned the message in on itself and this was the result.

He should have stood and shaken his head, should have told her that the decisions made in the present did affect the future and in a way that was sometimes impossibly difficult. If he had been a better man, he might have turned and walked into the undergrowth, away from temptation. But it had been almost a year since he had slept with a woman and the need in him was great.

‘You are not promised to another in England? I should not wish to harm that.’ Her question came quietly and he shook his head. ‘Then let me give you this gift of a memory, for my sake as well as your own.’

Her fingers went to the buttons on her shirt and she simply undid them, one by one, parting the cloth. Then she leant forward and took his hand, placing his palm across the generous swell of her breast beneath the chemise. The heat there simply claimed him.

She smelt of flowers and sweetness, and the silk of her undergarment against his hand was soft. Her hair had fallen, too, over her shoulder, unlinked purposefully from the leather tie she more normally fastened it with, the dark of it binding them into the shadows of night.

Her nipple was hard peaked, risen into feeling, and the white column of her throat was limber and exposed, a holy cross in gold hanging on the thin chain. He could just take her, like this, Alejandra Fernandez y Santo Domingo with all her beauty and her demons, offering herself to him without demand of more.

‘Hell.’ His curse had her smiling as she brought the blanket around them, a cocoon against the winter cold.

Her hands were on his neck and his chest, feeling her way. He hated how his breath shook and how the certainty that was always with him was breached with the feel of closeness.

She filled him up with hope and heat, and even the ache of his wounds were lessened by her touch. For so very long he had been sore and sick and lonely and yet here, for this moment above the sea and in the company of a woman he liked, he felt...complete.

Such recognition astonished him as his thumb nudged across her nipple on its own accord in a rhythm that was ancient. He felt her stiffen, felt her fingers tighten on his arms, the nails sharp points to his skin.

‘You are beautiful, Alejandra.’ His member pushed against the thick fabric of his trousers.

Lifting up, he steadied her against the trunk of a pine, the blanket behind them a shield against the roughness of bark and a buffer of warmth. There was no time now, no dragging moments, no hesitation or waiting. Undoing the fastening of her trousers, he had them down around her knees before she could take a further breath and then his fingers were inside her, sheathed in warmth and wetness, the muscles there holding him in, asking for more.

‘Lucien?’ Her voice. Whispered. ‘What is happening? What is this that you are doing to me?’

‘Love as we make it, sweetheart. Open wider.’ When she did as he asked he found the hard bud of her centre and pressed in close.

Her shaking was quiet at first, a small rumble and tightening, and then growing. He held her there in the night air and the moonlight and brought her to the place where the music played, languid and true, a rolling sensation of both muscle and flesh.

She was not quiet as she called his name, or gentle as she held his hand there hard inside, wanting all that he would give her, the last edge of reason gone in the final flush of orgasm.

He smiled, his gift to her new philosophy of living for the now and one that would make it easier come the morning. He wished it could have been different. He wished he could simply follow where his hand had been. But there was danger in such abandonment, the least of which was an unwanted pregnancy.

As she slid down the trunk of the tree to sit at the base of it, her knees wide open, he thought she had never looked more beautiful or more content. The smell of her sex was there, too, and he breathed in and savoured it.

‘That has never happened before. To me.’ Her words, quiet and tearful. Her eyes were full of unshed moisture as he moved his forefinger and the clench of her muscles echoed in answer.

‘This?’

‘Yes. It was exactly right.’

She was asleep before he had the blanket about them, her head cushioned against his chest. Uncoupling his hand, he sat there and tried to work out what the hell had just changed inside.

Usually sex to him was a quick thing associated with relief and little else and he left afterwards with a small but definite guilt.

But here tonight, when he had not even found his own completion, the tight want in his being was unquenched.

He prayed that this might never stop, this now, here in Spain with Alejandra in his arms. Above them in the gap of cloud a shooting star spun across the sky and he wished upon it with a fervour that shook him.

‘Lord, help us.’

It was as much as he could do in this arena of war with a boat waiting to take him home on the morrow and a back full of wounds that were worsening.

Left in his company, she would be compromised and tomorrow when she woke he knew there would be difficulties. In the harsh light of dawn reality would send each of them their different ways and back into lives promised elsewhere. It was how life worked.

Lucien thought of his friends at home and his family and the ancient crumbling estate of Ross that would need a careful guidance if it were not to fail completely.

He could not stay in Spain. He could not live here. But his arms tightened about Alejandra and he breathed her in.

* * *

She came awake so abruptly she jolted and felt him there beside her, lying in the warmth of their blanket fast asleep.

In the early spread of dawn his hair looked lighter again. It was as if more of the darkness had been rubbed away, leaving large swathes of the pale that were caught now in the new morning.

She swallowed back the heaviness in her throat and stayed perfectly still. In sleep Lucien Howard looked vulnerable, younger, the lines of his face relaxed into smoothness. The heavier shadow of a day-old beard sat around his jaw, a play of red upon fair bristles.

She had never lain with a man like him. Juan had been dark and hairy and thick. This English captain was all honed muscle and lithe beauty, reminding her of the statues she had seen once years ago when her mother and father had taken her to Madrid, the marble burnished smooth by time and touch.

She had been astonished at the way he had made her feel last night—still felt, she amended, as the memory lifted her stomach to a tight ache and she moved against him. She wanted again to feel like that, tossed into passion and ecstasy and living in the blinding moment of joy.

He stirred and turned towards her, his hands coming around her in protection, and her fingers found the buttons of his trousers and slipped inside. His flesh was warm and smooth and for a moment she wondered if what she did was right, this plundering, without his consent. Still, as her hands fastened about him the flesh grew, filling the space with promise.

No small measly man, either. No quiet polite erection. Already her hips were moving and her legs opened at the same time as his eyes.

Pale and watchful, the very opposite of his vibrant quickened appendage. The surprise came next, creeping in with a heavy frown.

‘You are sure?’

In answer she simply drew him over her and tilted her hips and the largeness of Lucien filled her completely, stretched to the edge of flesh, pinning her there as he waited.

‘Love me, Alejandra,’ he said and drove in further.

‘I do,’ she replied, and it was only much later when he was gone from her that she understood exactly what such a truth meant.

He was not gentle or tentative or hesitant. He was pure raw man with the red roar of sex in his blood and a given compliance to take her. She had never felt more of a woman, more beautiful, more cherished, more connected, more completely full.

The way he made love was unlike anything. He used his hands and his mouth and his body wholeheartedly and joyously, as if in the very act he sacrificed his reserve in real life, nothing held back, nothing hidden.

And this time he came with her to the golden place far above, the place where their hearts were melded into one, cleaved by breath and flesh, joined in the sole pursuit of rapture and escape and fantasy. Delivered into euphoria. Like a dream.

The shaking started as quietly as it had done before, at first in the very pit of her stomach and then radiating out, clenching and tight, her breath simply stopping as it spread so that her back arched and she took what he offered with the spirit that it was given, with honesty and pleasure and something else that was more unnameable.

And then the tautness dissolved into lethargy and the tears came running down her cheeks in the comprehension of all that had just occurred and never might again.

She could not ask him to stay, there was no place safe here for him, and she knew she would not fit into the polite and structured world of an English earl.

This small now was all the time they would have together, close and real, yet transitory. She found his hand. She liked the way he linked their fingers.

‘I will come back for you. Wait for me.’ His words whispered into the light, the promise within both gratifying and impossible.

‘I will.’

She did not think that either of them truly believed it.

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