Pirate Wolf Trilogy (33 page)

Beau bit down
sharply on the fleshy pulp of her lip and moved away from the
gallery door. She kept a wary distance between them, not entirely
believing him to have given up so easily, for it was enormously
apparent he was still as aroused as she.

“I trust your
hand is steady enough not to cut your throat.”

He winced,
having done just that, and glared at her across the room. His
fingers grasped the knife tighter and he turned back to the small
square of polished metal that served as a mirror, smiling grimly as
he concentrated on avoiding major veins.

Beau sat
petulantly in the chair behind her chart table and tapped her
fingers on the wooden top. Her bare feet rustled on the papers that
had been swept to the floor last night, and still keeping a
glowering eye on the pirate wolf, she leaned over and started
gathering them up. There were the original documents in Spanish as
well as Dante’s translations and as she picked them up she
separated them into two piles. Other sheets had nothing but
scribbling and angry black scratches of ink, and there were at
least a dozen pages crumpled into balls and tossed to the floor in
frustration.

“
I hope,”
she said as she stared belligerently at the expansive waste of
precious vellum, “you are not squandering all of my valuable paper
on your scrawlings.”

“When we reach
Plymouth, I will buy you a thousand more sheets. And they are not
scrawlings. They are diligent attempts to untangle the mind of an
ambitious, bloodthirsty, ruthless fanatic who uses religion as a
sword to carve an empire for himself.”

Beau arched a
delicate eyebrow. “Whereas we heretics of the world are more honest
in our greed and ambition?”

“We don’t use
God as an excuse to conquer,” he snapped angrily. “I have seen
whole villages burned, people tortured and mutilated, all in the
name of Catholic purification. These”—he pointed to the scars that
crisscrossed his back—“were not given to me in an effort to make me
convert. After twenty lashes I was willing to pray to anyone who
would listen.”

“So … you are a
heretic in the true sense of the word?”

“You sound
shocked at the notion. Dare I suppose I can have lowered myself any
further in your esteem?”

Beau’s brow
cleared. “It would hardly be a noticeable decline.”

Her sarcasm
earned a caustic glance. “In that case, what shall I offer in my
defense? My mother, rest her soul, was English and a devout
Protestant. Father, may the devil and all his disciples be enjoying
the former comte’s company, made pilgrimages to Rome each year in
order to wash the pope’s feet. My brother owed a great deal of
money to the Jews and married one to clear a debt. My own wife
would have worshipped any idol, so long as it was made out of gold,
but her preference was for pentacles and ram’s horns and kneeling
before altars draped in black.”

“She worshipped
the devil?”

“
Au
contraire
,
mam’selle. She
was
the devil
and took pleasure in sacrificing men’s souls.”

As familiar as
Beau was becoming with his body and his moods, the man himself was
as much of an enigma as ever. He did not like to talk about
himself. He rarely referred to his life in France and never ever
spoke of his former wife without first sharpening his tongue on a
curse. Thus Beau could not help herself, she had to ask. “Why on
earth did you marry her?”

“Why?” Dante
glared at the distorted reflection in the mirror as if it could
provide the answer. “Because it was my duty, as the Comte de
Tourville, to do so. Because she was beautiful. And bewitching. And
because I still had a soul, possibly even a conscience then too.
She made short work of both, however, and I made short work of
her.”

“You divorced
her?”

“I would have
preferred to drown her, like a stray cat, but, aye, at great
expense to my pocket and what was left of my reputation I rid
myself of her.” He glanced speculatively at Beau’s reflection
before he continued. “There were children involved. Two of them: a
boy and a girl. Neither of them was mine, a fact that still keeps
my name prominent on the tongues of Court wags.”

The admission
was made altogether too casually and Beau wondered exactly how
strongly he had braced himself before making it. Because he strove
to give the impression his titles and responsibilities meant
nothing to him at all, it probably should not have come as a shock
to realize that they, like his wife, must have mattered very much
at one time. The ridicule, the jokes at his expense, the general
knowledge he had been cuckolded not once but twice, would have
scarred his pride as deeply as any welts from a lash, and she could
understand why he wore his arrogance like armor. He did not want to
take the chance of being cut again.

“What did you
do to her lovers?” she asked in an equally casual voice.

“The two I knew
about? I shot them, then sent dear Annalise the parts of them she
loved best.”

The tension,
the hard, piercing intensity, in his eyes remained locked on hers
for another moment before he raised the blade and continued
shaving.

Beau released
the breath she had not been aware of holding and wondered if, by
showing her his scars, he was testing her in some way? Deliberately
giving her an opening so he could affirm in his own mind that ail
women were inherently cruel and not to be trusted? A week ago she
would not have disappointed him, responding with gleeful scorn,
using his humiliation as a weapon to slash at his pride like a
blade. But now … all she wanted to do— and it shocked the devil out
of her to admit it—was go to him, put her arms around him, and tell
him it did not matter.

She could not
do that, of course, for she would likely be failing a test of
another kind, the rules of which she had established herself. She
had been the one to insist it could last only until they set the
first foot on English soil. Then he would be free and she would be
free and they would go their own separate ways again, with no
presumptions, no grasping demands, no obligations of any kind.

Beau looked
down at her hands. Odd, how they were shaking.

She gave them
something to do and tidied the papers she had already tidied once.
One of the sheets fell and as she leaned over to pick it up, her
eye scanned the page filled with Dante’s neat, precise script … the
writing of an aristocrat, not a pirate wolf, despite how hard he
tried to disassociate himself from his other life. Her own stylized
script took hours to labor over and had taken years to perfect in
an effort to present the Black Swan as a scholarly cartographer as
opposed to a merchant’s brat in breeches.

The irony was
not lost on her as she glanced absently down the page. He had
translated harvest predictions, lists of oats, grains, legumes,
even poultry and fowl that would be delivered to Spanish ports in
the coming months. A meaningless jumble of words, especially when
her mind was otherwise occupied.

Yet something
caught her eye.

She wasn’t
really looking for anything, or even aware she was absorbing the
words off the page. She was too aware of Simon Dante’s broad back
turned toward her, shutting her out.

But the
word
olive
was
intrusive enough to break through the thickest fog of
distraction.

“Why in
heaven’s name would they want to ship olives to Spain?” she
muttered to herself. “The country is full of them now. Did you
translate this correctly?” she asked in a louder voice. “It reads:
The ship of olives will arrive in port no later than All Saints’
Day.’”

He shot her the
kind of glance that would have withered most men had they
questioned his accuracy after so many frustrating hours of
searching through an unending maze. “There are shipments of olives,
peacocks, even rosaries, anticipated with great glee. Make what you
will of it.”

“Peacocks?” She
leaned back in the chair and rubbed a hand across the nape of her
neck. Jonas and Spit both claimed their napes prickled and their
ballocks shriveled when something of great import was about to
happen. At that particular moment Beau’s neck felt raw enough to
scratch and her nipples had peaked so hard, they felt like hillocks
of ice.

“Simon—?”

The edge of the
blade was poised just below his left ear where the flesh protecting
the jugular was the thinnest. It was the first time she had called
him anything other than Dante, Captain, or bastard, and he did not
feel compelled to move or breathe until he determined the
reason.

“Have you found
something?”

“I don’t know.
Where are the paintings of the harbors?”

She followed
the flicker of his eyes to the divided bin that held her charts.
The Spanish parchments stood out from the others, and by the time
she retrieved them, Dante was beside her, helping to roll them flat
on the table.

Her eyes
scanned the first one and did not see what she wanted. The second
offered nothing better, but the third brought a triumphant gust of
air rushing past her lips.

“There,” she
said, stabbing a finger downward.

Dante leaned
closer. The sun was not yet full in bloom and besides the shadows
he had to contend with, there was the open, gaping edges of Beau’s
shirt. “What am I looking at?”

“Don’t you know
what ship this is?”

His face
was level with hers as he questioned her sudden smile. A great many
Spanish galleons were identifiable by their size, silhouettes, and
gun batteries, especially to someone who had been plundering the
Main for ten years. The galleasses were all distinguishable by the
rows of oars that protruded from both sides, the
thousand-ton
ratas
,
Portuguese carracks, and—because it was in their best interest to
know—the six- to nine-hundred-ton treasure ships like the
San Pedro
were as familiar to English sea
hawks as their own vessels.

The ships in
all three paintings, which Dante had studied as diligently as he
had studied the written documents, were nondescript and identical,
with no immediately visible differences aside from the artist’s
attempt to give the harbor depth and dimensions; the ships in the
foreground were larger, those anchored closer to shore were
proportionately smaller. None showed more than a few token black
gunports.

Beau
looked smug. “It’s the
Sancta Maria Encoronada”

His eyebrows
drew together in an undivided black slash. “How the devil do you
know that?”

“Firstly—and as
you’ve already remarked—because I have the patience to use a
single-haired brush when I want special details; secondly, because
I mark my charts with a black swan. It makes me tend to notice
little things like trademarks and … peacock feathers.”

Dante followed
the tip of her finger to the minute detailing painted across the
stem gallery of one of the galleons in the forefront. It was a tiny
fan of peacock feathers, so muted and so skillfully worked into the
bold rendering of the ship itself, it would be discernible only to
another artist’s eye—or to someone who knew what to look for. Even
though he could see it now, so clearly it brought a curse to his
lips, Dante was still dubious; but Beau had already turned her
attention to the markings on one of the other sterns.

Her
finger stabbed again. “Wheat sheaves: The
Santa Catalina.
And there … the
Nuestra señora del Rosario”
She looked up. “Rosaries, for
pity’s sake.”

“Olives?” Dante
asked, scarcely daring to look.

Beau had
to search the other two paintings before she found the small,
delicate leaves that formed part of the cresting on the immense,
fifty-gun
Napolitana
, the
flagship of King Philip’s navy.

“
I am
only guessing, but I would say your harvest predictions are a
detailed accounting of what ships will be ready in what ports by a
particular date,” Beau said. “And if that’s true”—she let the top
two paintings roll themselves up again and stared at the third, the
harbor Dante had previously identified—“if that’s true … my God …
there are at least forty, fifty ships in Cadiz alone, including
half a dozen
ratas”

Dante nodded
grimly. “Any one of them capable of leading an invasion fleet.”

“Then the
rumors about an armada…?”

“
They
were never rumors, mon
enfant
,
they were truths the Queen chose not to believe.”

“Surely she
will have to believe them now?”

“Indeed she
will, and she will have to strike now, strike hard and fast, while
the Spaniards are gathered together like suckling pigs around a
sow.” He looked down at the painting and his eyes clouded with some
terrible irony she did not understand. “Cadiz, by Christ. I knew
it!”

His gaze
flicked past her shoulder and sought the solid gold galleon resting
on the corner of the table. “If I but had my
Virago
, and a dozen ships …
half
a dozen ships … I would gladly finish what we
started in Vera Cruz. It would my greatest pleasure to make the
spider king squirm and sweat out the price of his own
treachery.”

Beau ran her
hands up his arms, inviting him to drop down onto one knee before
her. “I have no doubt you would, Captain Dante. You seem to have a
knack for making people squirm and sweat … and take the greatest
pleasure doing it.”

“Do I, now?”
His eyes narrowed and he smoothed his palms along her inner thighs,
pushing the hem of his shirt up as he did so.