The Caged Tiger. PENNY JORDAN
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mocked savagely.
At her side Davina’s hands turned into minute angry fists. That hadn’t been what she had been going to say at all. She had been about to explain to him that Jamie had been ill, that he needed building up, despite his robust appearance, and that for her child’s sake she was willing to endure the torment and insult of knowing herself unwanted in this house.
‘Which rooms…’ she began, ignoring Ruy and turning to his mother, but Ruy forestalled her, his face cruel and malevolent as he too turned towards the older woman, anticipating Davina’s question. ‘Yes, Madre, which rooms have you given my delightful wife and child? The bridal suite, which we occupied before?’ He shook his head and the sneer was clearly visible now. ‘I think not. This wheelchair might be able to perform miracles, as Dr Gonzales tells me, but it still cannot climb stairs.’
Davina wasn’t the only one to gasp. Even the Condesa seemed to go a little paler, her mouth nearly as grim as her son’s as she addressed him.
‘What nonsense is this, Ruy? Jamie and Davina will have a suite of rooms to themselves.’
‘They will share mine,’ Ruy corrected softly. ‘I will not have the servants gossiping about my wife who leaves me and then returns only when I can no longer act the part of her husband. Well?’ he demanded, turning to Davina. ‘Have you nothing to say, no protests to make? Are you not going to tell me that you will return to England rather than suffer the indignity of sharing a room—a bed—with a crippled wreck?’
Davina knew then what he was trying to do—that he was attempting to frighten her into leaving, and how close he had come to succeeding. The mere thought of sharing a room with him, of suffering the intimacies such proximity would bring, had started her stomach churning protestingly. He might not be able to act the part of a husband, as he put it, but he was still a man—the man she had loved, and although her love had died her memories had not.
‘You won’t drive me away, Ruy,’ she told him quietly. ‘No matter what you do, I intend to stay, for Jamie’s sake.’
A servant had to be summoned and instructed to prepare a room for Jamie. Davina could feel the girl watching her as Ruy spoke to her, and although she could not quite catch what was being said, her skin prickled warningly. When she had gone Sebastian and Rosita excused themselves, and as Rosita hurried past her, Davina thought she glimpsed compassionate pity in the other girl’s eyes.
‘My poor timid sister-in-law,’ Ruy mocked, correctly interpreting Rosita’s look. ‘She sincerely pities you, but you have nothing to fear—unless it is the acid tongue of a man who has drunk ambrosia only to find it turning to acid gall on his lips.’
‘Acid burns,’ Davina reminded him coolly. Her heart was thumping with heavy fear, and she longed to retract her statement that she intended to stay. Jamie, who had returned to her side, clutching at her for support, suddenly abandoned her to walk across to Ruy for a second time, eyeing him uncertainly.
‘I have a pushchair too,’ he told Ruy conversationally, while Davina listened with her heart in her mouth. ‘Mummy pushes me in it when I get tired. Who pushes you?’
‘I can push myself,’ Ruy told him curtly, but nevertheless, and much to her surprise, Davina saw him demonstrate to Jamie exactly how he could manoeuvre the chair. Something in her mother-in-law’s stance caught her attention, and as she glanced across at her the other woman looked away, but not before Davina had seen the sheen of tears in her eyes.
How would she feel if that was her child confined to that chair? The sudden clenching fear of her heart gave her the answer, and for the first time she began to feel pity for the older woman. It was a dangerous thing she had done, summoning them here, and one which could alienate her completely from Ruy. She glanced across at him, her breath constricting in her throat as she saw the two dark heads so close together. Ruy had lifted Jamie on to his lap and the little boy was solemnly examining the controls of the chair.
‘He is Ruy’s mirror image,’ the Condesa said quietly. All at once she looked very old, and Davina had to force herself to remember how coldly this woman had received her in this very room when Ruy had brought her here as his new bride. The trouble was that she had not been prepared for the hostility that greeted her. But then she had not been prepared for anything, least of all falling in love with Ruy. It had all happened so quickly—too quickly, she thought soberly. She had fallen in love with Ruy without knowing him. He had married her for… For what? Revenge? For punishment? She shuddered suddenly, reflecting on the harshness of a nature which could enable a man to turn his back on the woman he loved and put another in her place, merely as a means of punishment for some small peccadillo. And yet the first time she met him she had thought him the kindest man on earth—and the most handsome.
It had been in Cordoba. She had gone on holiday with friends—or more properly acquaintances—girls she knew from her work at the large insurance offices in London. Their main interest in Spain lay on its beaches; flirting with the dark-eyed Spanish boys who gave full rein to their ardent natures in the presence of these Northern girls with their cool looks and warm natures, so different from those of the girls of their own country whose chastity was carefully protected until marriage gave their husbands the right to initiate them into the ways of love. Davina had felt differently. She had come to Spain to explore its history—a history which had fascinated her since her early teens, when she had fallen in love with the mystery of a land ruled for centuries by the aristocratic, learned Moors, who had bequeathed to it not only their works of art, but also their colouring and fire.
She had been half way to falling in love with Ruy even before she met him, she acknowledged wryly, for her head had been stuffed with foolish dreams of handsome Moorish warriors astride Arab horses, flowing white robes cloaking lean bronzed limbs, glittering eyes softening only for the women they loved. A sigh trembled past her lips. That was how Ruy had first appeared to her—a heroic figure who seemed to spring suddenly out of nowhere, rescuing her from the gang of teenage boys who had been harassing her as she left the Mosque. His curt words had cut through them like a whiplash, dispersing them to the four winds, and her trembling gratitude at his timely intervention had changed to worshipful adoration when he had insisted on sweeping her off to a small café to drink coffee and tell him what she had been doing in Spain. He, it appeared, was in Cordoba on business. His family owned a hacienda where they bred bulls for the bullfight, and it was in connection with the annual corrida—the running of young untried bulls through the streets—that he was in Cordoba.
Davina had listened fascinated, held in thrall to the magnetism of the man; to the sheer pleasure of hearing him speak, his English perfect and yet still possessing something of the liquid gold of his own language.
She had agreed almost at once when he invited her to accompany him to watch the gypsies dancing the flamenco—not, as she discovered, the polished empty performance put on for the tourists, but the real thing; as different from the other as tepid water to champagne.
They had left before the climax; before the black-browed gypsy claimed his partner in the culmination of a dance so sexually explicit that merely watching it had brought the blood surging to her veins, her expression unknowingly betraying as she watched the dancers, and the man seated opposite her watched her. He had not lived his twenty-nine years without learning something of women, and what he saw in Davina’s face told him, more surely than any words, the extent of her untutored innocence.
Davina hadn’t known it, but it was that knowledge which had sealed her fate—as she later discovered.
When Ruy had proposed to her she had been robbed of words, dizzied and humbled by the sheer gratitude of knowing that the love she had come to feel for him in the short week they had been together was returned. She had had no knowledge when she accepted him that he was merely using her as a tool to torture the woman he really loved—the fiery Spanish beauty who could give him so much more than she herself could offer.
They had been married quietly—a church ceremony in keeping with Ruy’s religion—and that had been the first time she realised that her husband possessed a title—that she had a title. It shouldn’t have surprised her. He had about him an ingrained