Heart's Ransom

  * * *

  “So are you going to tell me?” Rafe asked Claudio. It was several hours later, and he had roused again, feeling somewhat less groggy and feeble, but still keeping to his bed to be careful. He sat up, propped against the headboard with pillows, and nursed a bowl of thin, but savory broth that Maria had brought for him. When he had complimented her on the flavor of the soup, her prim façade had softened, her solemn expression growing nearly girlish as she had lowered her eyes.

  “Thank you, Captain,” she’d said. “It was my mother’s recipe.”

  “Tell you what?” Claudio asked. Maria had left them, but Rafe hadn’t missed the way she and the boatswain had paused abreast of one another in the doorway, or the way Maria had smiled when Claudio had offered her something in murmured tones Rafe had been unable to distinguish.

  Rafe glanced up as he blew against a spoonful of the still-steaming broth. “Tell me a long story, Claudio,” he said. “I do believe you owe me a couple―such as what Maria is doing here, and what happened to your face.” He leaned forward, forgetting his own frailties and shifting fully into his physician’s frame of mind. “That eye looks bad,” he murmured.

  “It is fine,” Claudio said, shrugging away when Rafe tried to touch his face. “Leave it now, Rafe, I―”

  “Can you open it?” Rafe asked. He set the soup bowl on a beside table and scooted toward Claudio. “Did you put a cool compress against it? I have some herbs in my box that could help take down that swelling. Let me get up. I will mix you a―”

  “Rafe, it is fine,” Claudio said again, catching Rafe’s hands gently but firmly as he reached for him. “You need to worry after yourself and keep in this bed.”

  Rafe sighed, relenting unwillingly. He rested back against the pillows, and raised his brows expectantly at the older man. “Talk, then,” he said. “If you will not let me tend to you, then you will have to say a lot to distract me. Tell me about Maria.”

  Claudio smiled. “What is there to say? Maria showed me to my room at la hacienda de la Torre when I returned from the docks. We spoke somewhat and later, she brought me supper. We shared common interests and talked about them at some length. And then…” He shrugged. “She is a beautiful woman and I have appetites and needs, just as you do.”

  Rafe’s brows raised again in surprise. When Claudio said nothing further on the matter, he laughed, shaking his head. “Should you not cross yourself or something?” he asked. “I mean, is that not considered a sin?”

  Claudio dropped him a wink. “Not at my age.”

  Rafe laughed until his still-tender midriff protested, making him wince.

  “I saw Diego Gil Barreiro at the docks in La Coruna,” Claudio said, all pretense of lightheartedness gone, his expression growing solemn. “He is the boatswain of La Venganza, under Cristobal’s command. I thought I had seen him when we first arrived, and after we left the smithy, I returned to try and find him again. I did not see him, but I did check with the harbor-master. La Venganza was indeed in port at La Coruna. It had been there for more than a week.”

  Rafe blinked at him, bewildered.

  “I think Cristobal had this planned from the moment of Evarado’s death, when he learned that Evarado left everything to your charge,” Claudio said gently, reaching out and slipping his hand against Rafe’s. “I think he meant for us to go to La Coruna all along.”

  Rafe remembered the day they had discovered the bowsprit of El Verdad had been damaged. If it was my ship, I would put her into port at La Coruna, on the Spanish peninsula, Cristobal had told Rafe. Have her re-rigged, the whole thing replaced.

  Rafe jerked as if he had been slapped. “The bowsprit…” he whispered.

  Claudio nodded grimly. “He must have sabotaged us before we left. He knew it would not cripple us, that we would be able to fix it. But he also knew it would not hold us long, and that we would have to stop and fix it if we hoped to keep ahead of Ransom. I think he sent word to your lady, la Condesa, and told her he would deliver you to her in La Coruna. All she had to do was keep you occupied while he and his crew set sail with Kitty. Then he dispatched La Venganza from Mallorca, probably the same day we left. He meant to leave La Coruna on his own.”

  “Not on his own,” Rafe said quietly. “He is going to sail south to Lisbon and meet Abdul Aziz. He is going to give Kitty to him. That is what Isabel said.” He did not miss the way Claudio flinched in reaction, his eyes widening slightly in surprise, clearly uncomfortable that Rafe recalled this. “I know who Abdul Aziz is. I know he is the one who drew my father into pirating.”

  “Abdul Aziz bin Malik is a very dangerous man,” Claudio said. “Your father used to tell me he was the sort best left at arm’s length, lest he take a notion to bite―that way you would lose no more than a hand. He never trusted the man.”

  There was more; Rafe could tell by the tone of Claudio’s voice. To his dismay and dread, he thought he knew what it was. “But Cristobal trusts him,” he whispered.

  “Cristobal wants to be Abdul Aziz,” Claudio said. “If Lucio Guevarra Silva was your mentor in the ways of healing, Abdul Aziz has been Cristobal’s in those of a pirate. They have only grown tighter since your father’s death. I would not be surprised if this entire voyage has not been of Abdul Aziz’s original devising.”

  Rafe looked down at his lap, pained at the thought of Kitty turned over to such a man. “If he touches Kitty…” he said. He pressed his hand against his brow, torn between anger and dismay as he remembered Isabel’s words, shrieked at him in outrage in the storeroom.

  He will let Abdul Aziz take that espantapájaros―your scarecrow bitch―over and over until she is broken

  He could not bear to think of such things; they tore at his heart like knifepoints. “We will get her back,” he said, his brows furrowing, his hands folding into determined fists.

  “Yes, hijo, we will,” Claudio said gently. “When I came back from the docks, I wanted to find you, tell you right away about what I had learned, but Maria was under Isabel’s directive to keep us apart. It was not until later, after Maria and I had made more…intimate acquaintances of one another, that she told me of this. And by then, it was too late. She left my bed to go and summon you, but while she was gone, more of Cristobal’s crew showed up. They held me down, took to my face with their fists.” He shook his head. “Some of them I have known since they were lads from Santa Ponca.

  “They locked me in the cellar―in the storeroom where I found you, but Maria saw what had happened. She was frightened and hid until the morning. She saw what had happened to you―and to the girl. She came downstairs and unlocked the door, helped me hide in the stables until Cristobal and his fellows were gone. I imagine if she had not, it would have been the both of us choked to death together on Isabel’s poison.”

  Rafe closed his eyes, closing his fingers tightly against Claudio’s. “You saved my life.”

  Claudio smiled, leaning forward and stroking his hand against Rafe’s hair to draw his gaze. “You saved yourself, hijo,” he said gently. “I would not have known to sick up the brandy. I just helped you walk away.”