A Bride for Valentin Page 5

  “That is not my concern.”

  “Isn’t it, contessa.”

  His voice had softened but it made the hair on her neck stand up. Then he moved in a languid way but it was deceptive. Entirely so. Instincts which had never been ignited flared to life at the threat before her.

  “No, it is not.”

  The shift of movement brought him forward in the chair. “You know, I may not be a citizen of Spain anymore, but I do know about the happenings in my country. The tides of revolution are rising. Ideas about monarchy and its power are being weighed, tested, and found wanting. On one hand, you have the Carlists fighting to keep things the way they were. On the other hand, you have the Liberals fighting for change. Both factions, fighting for dominance in the arena of politics.

  “And then, there are people like you, my contessa—”

  “I am not your contessa!”

  He paused and with the cessation, seemed to hold her breath within his grasp.

  “You will be,” he promised with a note of finality.

  Her lungs expanded with relief as air flowed back into them. But her trepidation hadn’t eased. After all, hadn’t she married him and gave up the right to her body for his sole use?

  “People like you, my contessa,” he added with a deliberate inflection, “are the ones who represent the bone of the problem. You sit there, perhaps sympathetic for one cause or another but you do nothing to change it.”

  Bitterness dripped from his voice. “You sit there, affronted when you have discovered that I lied about my status to your brother, but I wonder, what would you have done had you known? Probably nothing.”

  “Known what?”

  “That your brother, the honorable, noble Conte Atilio Garcia de Alba abandoned his wife and child.”

  Ysabel froze. “Wife and child?”

  “Si. Or perhaps I should say, wife and children.”

  Her mouth opened and closed like a fish but for the life of her, she couldn’t think of anything to say. Her surprise was so great that her legs were in danger of buckling from under her. She hurried back to her seat.

  “Valentin, please. I can’t—“

  Even her words weren’t coherent.

  He eyed her. “You seem particularly surprised.”

  “My brother has never married anyone.”

  “Anyone of the aristocracy, no. But he did marry and the woman he married was my sister, Jacinda—may God rest her soul.”

  Her mind reeled with the shock of the information. Atilio had married! Why had he never told her anything about this!

  “How old are you, Ysabel?”

  Her name sounded strange the way he said it. But she gulped down the sickening burn at the back of her throat. “I shall be twenty in two weeks.”

  “Is that so? Well, my sister would have been seven and thirty years had she lived, a couple of years older than your brother. Her daughters probably a little younger than you, their would-be-tia.”

  Aunt! She had been an aunt?

  She listened with horrified, rapt attention as the story of Jacinda and Atilio unfolded before her eyes.

  Jacinda and Atilio had met fifteen years ago. How they met, Valentin didn’t know as his sister had never revealed it to him. She’d go to him whenever he was in the vicinity of the village which was quite often at the time. He’d whispered words of love and desire to her, pressing upon her his ardent wish that they express it in a manner which was best between men and women.

  “I know my sister, Ysabel,” Valentin said. He’d risen from his chair and walked over to the small window which overlooked the property of the shack. “She was a very deeply religious woman. She would not give into the passion of the flesh without the benefit of marriage, no matter how great her own desires were.”

  When Atilio realized that she would not capitulate in that manner, he then asked her to marry him. They married in secret and soon after, Valentin remembered that Jacinda had moved away from the village of the youth to a neighboring one.

  “You have to understand that I did not know she had married the conte. Only that one day, without any explanation, she said goodbye to my aunt and then went off in a handsome carriage. My aunt assumed she had become a kept woman by some nobleman.”

  A few months later, a messenger came by the village requesting him to go to his sister right away. When he arrived, she’d been in the middle of premature labor and her body had expelled the baby.

  “The child was fully formed but so very tiny,” he recalled in a soft voice. “It was a girl and Jacinda wept for the loss of her tiny babe.”

  “How did my brother react to the loss of his daughter?” There were tears in her eyes.

  Valentin turned toward her. “He never knew…about the first one.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  What good did Ysabel’s tears do? They could not bring back his beloved sister. Nor the children she had given to a man who’d had no use for them.

  But her tears, they did something to his soul. They were like an ointment, a soothing balm to a burn he never knew he had until the balm cooled the sting of it.

  “What do you mean, he never knew about the first one?”

  “My sister had forbidden me to tell the conte about the miscarriage. He had taken to being away from the home he set up for her in the village for longer and longer periods of time. It was at this time that I learned about the marriage. When she lost the baby, the midwife had told her to wait for at least a year before trying to have another child.

  “When the midwife left, my sister revealed to me that she had no intention of doing what the midwife had advised.”

  He recalled the conversation in his mind, only half relating the tale to Ysabel. He saw Jacinda as he did, weak and pale in the bed of her affliction. Outside the small window, the marker that held her small babe’s grave stood there like a guardian angel. “I must give him an heir, Val,” Jacinda had told him weakly. “His inheritance depends on an heir. I love him too much to deny him anything.”

  “Hermana, please just wait as the midwife suggests. You have the entirety of your lives together to give the man an heir.”

  “No, I must do it soon.”

  Was that when the seed of hatred for the conte rooted in his mind, watching as his sister, who had until then, been heart whole and content with her life become the slave of this man’s wants and desires? Did it begin when, not soon after the miscarriage, he’d come to see her and had happened upon the joyful reunion of her and Atilio?

  He had stood that day in the brush, a few yards away from their property, watching as his sister kissed her husband passionately and with a fierceness that spoke of desperation. Atilio had given her a lusty, male laugh and had lifted her into his arms and carried her over the threshold.

  When she closed the curtains to the home, Valentin had turned away, full of worry as he thought about what the midwife had said. He had said prayers the entire way back to his village that Santos Dios will close up his sister’s womb so she could heal.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t want his sister to have a family of her own or her own life. She had given up everything for him. It would do good for her to have a home and hearth of her own.

  But the conte, from the little he had observed, was a wealthy man. If he had married his sister, why did he keep her in such poor conditions? Granted, the home was much better than the one they grew up in. But, if the man was so wealthy, why was he hiding her in obscurity?

  He took in a shuddering breath. Maybe the hate had been there all along, from the very first moment Jacinda had said she met a man. “Despite the midwife’s warning, my sister became with child again. This time, when I went to see her, I insisted she let the conte know about this birth.”

  “Did my brother seem pleased?”

  Ysabel’s tears had dried away but now her beautiful eyes were red-rimmed. They didn’t detract from her loveliness but now she looked as miserable as he felt.

  “Your brother was more concerned about her
assurances that she’d give birth to a boy. In his defense, he stayed with her when he found out she was with child. He brought in extra help. I remember Jacinda being very happy with her conte.”

  “And then?”

  “She failed, miserably, when she gave birth to a daughter.”

  “Oh, Valentin.”

  “The conte was in a rage. He spouted horrible, nasty things to her. Speaking over and over again how he had elevated her status and made her his wife when he simply could have…forced her…and been done with it.”

  “No!”

  The sharp cry in the room made him look at her. She looked so pallid it was almost death-like.

  “He kept going on and on about how too late it was to get his inheritance, whatever that means. The man had more money than most people. What more could he possibly have?”

  A fearful expression came over Ysabel’s face. “What is it?”

  “Nothing. Please continue. I need to know.” She swallowed, and he watched the movement of her swan-like neck. “All of it.”

  “What more is there to tell, Ysabel? Your brother was so disappointed in the birth of a daughter that he left her there and never saw her again. A day after her daughter was born, my sister bled to death and she died, uttering that wretched man’s name with her dying breath.”

  His eyes drifted shut as waves of remembered pain attacked him. Despite the fact he’d just met Ysabel Garcia de Alba, he’d never told anyone about Jacinda’s death. Diego only knew that she had died in childbirth and Atilio’s abandonment, which no upright Spanish man could ever accept. If a man sired one child or ten, they all belonged to him. It was his duty to care for his family

  “What about the babe?”

  Opening his eyes again, he said, “The baby lived for six months. I had taken her back with me to my aunt’s home. My aunt was too old to take care of young child, so I used my pitiful wages and hired a wet nurse.

  “One day, the wet nurse was caring for the babe. She’d come out of the house and down the stairs when she lost her footing, slipped, and dropped the babe.”

  “Dios El Padre!” Ysabel exclaimed.

  “I find great comfort in the knowledge that the babe was sleep when it happened. She never knew any discomfort.”

  Valentin stopped talking, feeling the agonizing memories threaten his self-control. He had buried the past for such a long time but to relive it, it was like ripping off the scab of a wound.

  One that had never healed.

  He heard movement from behind him but he didn’t look back. But then, a pair of white, delicate hands came and wrapped themselves around his waist. His mouth dropped open.

  The press of her soft body against his back, uncaring of the stench from the water that was now beginning to dry, she held him tight.

  “Lo siento mucho.”

  For a moment, Valentin couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak. The sincerity in her voice, that empathetic acknowledgement of his pain. It soothed some part of him he’d never given voice to. In the same way her tears had soothed the burning inside of him.

  Then, on the cusp of that wonder, his rage swept it away. No, he would not be weak and succumb to this trick. This woman who was the sister of his enemy.

  With a low growl, he gripped both her hands and snatched them away from his body. Whirling around, he grabbed her arms and yanked her close to him. So close, he could see the small smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. See the long spiky lashes and inhale that unique scent of woman.

  “I don’t want your sympathy, Ysabel,” he snarled, furious with himself for noticing the attributes of her womanhood, when he should only be aware of her as the enemy. “Your brother knew what I wanted when I demanded you for my wife. He sold your virgin blood to me just as I knew he would.”

  “What?”

  He tightened his fingers into her flesh. “Si. Your brother, when he heard of my demands after all this time, knew what he was doing. He figured that in exchange for the death of my sister, he would give me his, and I would be free to do whatever I want to you.”

  The revelations of the past hour, or had it been longer, had shaken her to the very core. To stand before this man, held by his powerful grip, while being inundated with the harsh cruelties of her brother’s sins was almost too much to bear.

  Of course, Atilio would do as he had done. No wonder he was so insistent on marrying her off to Valentin. It was a way to assuage whatever guilt, if he had any, and to get rid of her.

  So, no matter how much she didn’t want to believe it, it was true. Atilio had sold her virgin blood to Valentin.

  “And what will you do to me?” she asked in a small voice.

  “I’ll take you, whenever and however I want,” he told her in no uncertain terms. “Until I get you with child. And then, I’ll—”

  “You’ll abandon me, here, won’t you? Just like Jacinda was abandoned by my brother.” It wasn’t a question; just a statement of fact. Of intent.

  Of acceptance.

  “Si. I’ll leave you here just as he did.”

  The pain in his voice—she couldn’t ignore it. Now that she knew the full extent of her brother’s treachery, she understood why Valentin had asked for her hand.

  Ysabel gazed up into the furious eyes of her husband. “Valentin. I will give myself to you freely.”

  His hands dropped from hers as if she’d burned him. “What?”

  “I will give myself to you freely,” she repeated. Though her arm throbbed from the strength of his grip, she didn’t mention anything about it. “My father taught us, both my brother and I, that the house of Garcia de Alba was an honorable house. Each generation of the family must conduct itself in a manner pleasing to Dios El Padre. We are responsible for our behaviors and the consequence of our behaviors.”

  She moved away from the intense stare of Valentin although she still felt the heat of his gaze along her back. “Each member of the family is responsible to the other. Though my brother did this action, he will not take responsibility for it. So, it falls on me to make amends. And I will.”

  Folding her arms, she went on. “When I spoke to Madre Superiora about this, she told me to not be afraid to take you as my husband. That maybe, good things will come from this marriage. Now I know, it won’t. It can’t.

  “So, I will give myself to you tonight and any other night you see fit. I wish I had known your sister and my nieces. But that was not meant to be. This house, I will accept as my own. I will serve my brother’s penance for you. I told my brother and I will tell you. My father would rather be stained by the truth than glittering with lies. I’d rather do what is right and have no reward, than to be rewarded for what is wrong.

  “I will await you this evening.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Ysabel’s words scorched Valentin’s brain for the rest of the day. She went cleaning the house, ignoring him for the most part. There was plenty of work for him to do around the house to make it livable. They avoided each other for the most part. Or maybe he avoided her. He couldn’t be sure.

  Her words, as he worked on the house, continued to reverberate through his head. She was going to pay for her brother’s sins. Was that really what he wanted for her? Until she said it, he thought that’s what he wanted. Defile the conte’s sister. But now, it was different.

  Ysabel knew what her brother did was heinous. Family with the Spanish culture was very important. To abandon one’s family was to abandon one’s identity. Giving herself to him, knowing that he had every intention of using her to only leave her…it made no sense.

  Other thought started to crowd into his mind. Such as, why would a woman as noble and beautiful as Ysabel not have married yet? Why did she wish to become a nun? What was it that her brother had said that made her capitulate to this match?

  Now he understood some of Diego’s anger at him. This woman was honorable in the same way that Jacinda—may God rest her soul—had been. Though she had been born into wealth and Jacinda had not,
they still exhibited that same self-sacrificing quality of which he’d yet to understand.

  Jacinda had given her life up for Valentin. Ysabel was giving her life up for Atilio.

  But Valentin would swear that Jacinda’s sacrifice had been out of love. He never doubted his sister’s love for him at any point in his life. Why would Ysabel do something like that?

  The answer came to him as he chopped his last log for the fire. Because, it was the right thing to do. Someone had to accept responsibility for what had happened to Jacinda. The conte may acknowledge, it but accepting it? He would never do that.

  Night came on swift wings, muting the blinding brilliance of day. The wind, cooler and refreshing blew against his heated face as he stacked the rest of the wood inside the shed not too far from where the shack was. Then, moping his brow, he set one foot in front of the other back to the house.

  He shut the door. Sounds of meal preparation were evident along with the fragrant food. She’d made a hearty soup of vegetables and shredded chicken. Simple fare but delicious as they sat across from each other at the table. The flatbread was warm and soft. Dipping the bread into the soup added a different texture he enjoyed.

  “Valentin?”

  He looked up from this bowl. “Yes?”

  “Do you wish for us to share a bedroom?”

  He nearly choked on the spoonful of soup he’d taken but he quickly suppressed it. “What do you mean?”

  “Are we to share a bedroom? I am used to having my own bedchambers, but I am not sure if that is what you wish.”

  Valentin thought back to when his sister lived in the house that the conte had bought her. It was a small house with only one room. He was certain she and conte shared their bedroom.

  “We’ll share.”

  “All right.” She continued to eat the soup while he had lost all appetite.

  For, despite the fact he wished to go to his marriage bed without a care or concern about her, he couldn’t. The woman before him was beautiful. No man would be able to hold himself apart from her unless they were made out of stone. Valentin was made out of flesh and blood, easily malleable by the attraction of a beautiful woman.