The Caged Tiger

Such an innocent question! It brought a lump to Davina’s throat and moisture to her eyes. This was a moment she had faced over and over again in all her worst nightmares, trying to explain to Jamie why his father had rejected them, but she had never, even in the very worst of them, guessed that she would be called upon to do so in Ruy’s presence.

It was the Condesa who came to her rescue, her voice for once almost gentle as she placed her hand on Jamie’s shoulder and smiled down at him.

‘Of course he likes you, pequeño. Is that not so, Ruy?’

‘What man can deny his own flesh and blood?’ Ruy drawled sardonically, and Davina wondered if she was alone in remembering the accusation he had just hurled at her about Jamie’s parentage. She had come to Spain reluctantly, and only for Jamie’s sake, and if anyone had told her that if Ruy had repudiated them that she would insist on remaining she would have denied it most emphatically. It was not in her nature to be mercenary or grasping, wealth and position mattered little in her book when balanced against love and happiness, but something in Ruy’s cold condemnation and lack of feeling for both of them had aroused all her fiercest maternal instincts; and for the sake of her child she was prepared to suffer indignities she would never have tolerated merely for her own gain. Jamie was Ruy’s son, he had every right to be here at the Palacio, but one thing was going to be made quite clear to both Ruy and his family.

‘Jamie is your child, Ruy,’ she told him calmly. ‘Oh, I know why you would prefer not to believe it. I’m surprised you haven’t already had our marriage set aside. Had you done so and married Carmelita, she might have had a son of your own to displace Jamie, and then none of this would have been necessary.’

His harsh laughter jarred, shocking her into immobility. ‘Nothing is quite that easy. Jamie would still have been my heir, whether he is my child or not, simply because he bears my name…’

‘And knowing that Carmelita refused to marry you?’

She didn’t know what prompted her to goad him like that; perhaps it was the nagging ache deep down inside her, a wound which refused to heal; the memory of how she had felt when she first discovered that Ruy did not love her and was merely using her instead to be revenged upon the woman whom he did love.

‘Carmelita had no place in her life for a platonic relationship with a man,’ he told her cruelly, ‘and since I can no longer give her what she desires, she has found it elsewhere.’

‘Carmelita has recently married and gone back to Argentina, with her new husband,’ Sebastian interrupted, and as he said the words, Davina felt the full picture falling into place. Ruy’s mother had always wanted him to marry Carmelita, but now, knowing that her plans must come to nothing, she had decided to fall back on what was left to her… Jamie. Only he would never be allowed to become cold and uncaring like his father, Davina told herself. He would not be brought up to think himself lord of all that he surveyed, to walk roughshod over anything and anyone who stood in his way, to ruthlessly and remorselessly crush underfoot the dreams and hopes of others… as Ruy had crushed hers.

‘It has been a long day, and Jamie is tired,’ she told her mother-in-law. ‘If someone could show us to our rooms…’

‘Motherhood has taught you courage, little white dove,’ Ruy mocked. ‘So cool and brave. I wonder how deep it is, that cool façade…’

‘Just as deep as it needs to be to protect my son,’ Davina told him with a calm she was far from feeling. How long could she endure the sort of mental and verbal torment he was handing out and not crack under it? Hard on the heels of the thought came the comforting knowledge that she was unlikely to see much of him. He was, after all, hardly likely to seek her out…

‘So you intend to stay?’ The hooded eyes watching her were unreadable, but guessing that he had hoped to frighten her into running away, for a second time, Davina lifted her chin proudly to stare back at him. ‘For Jamie’s sake—yes. Personally I wouldn’t touch so much as a peseta of your money, Ruy, but Jamie is your son and…’

‘And you have no objection to touching what will one day be his?’ her husband 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 arrogance-which should have warned her that here was no ordinary mortal. He had been a little amused by her stammered concern that she might not be able to match up to his expectations, that nothing in her life had prepared her for the role of Condesa; wife of a Spanish grandee. It was only when his amusement gave birth to bored impatience that Davina learned fear of her new husband, but this had been swiftly banished by the brief, almost tormenting caress of his lips against hers.

Prior to their marriage he had made no attempt to seduce her, and in her innocence she had mistaken this lack of desire for her as respect. She had often wondered, since her return to England, if she had not gone to him that first night after their arrival at the Palacio, had not let him see that she wanted him… and if he had not been in such a blazing rage of anger against his mother, whether he would not have made love to her; whether in fact it had been his intention to have their marriage annulled when Carmelita had been suitably brought to heel. But above all else Ruy was a man of honour. Once he had in actual fact made her his wife there was no going back—for either of them. Until she had conceived his son, and learned exactly why he had married her. With that knowledge how could she have remained? She might have suspected that all was not well between them, but until she was brought face to face with the truth she had been able to delude herself. When that was no longer possible she had escaped to London, taking Jamie with her, and leaving her mother-in-law to convey to her son the good news that he was now free…

Free… Her eyes were drawn irresistibly to the man in the wheelchair and for a brief moment pity overwhelmed her bitterness. Ruy would never be free again. Ruy, whose superb, physical, male body had taught her the full meaning of womanhood, never to make love, ride, swim or dance again.

‘Look at her!’ His words cut through her thoughts. ‘She cries. For what, my lovely wife? For having to share my bed and being perhaps tormented by all that we once knew together, or have other men, other lovers, obliterated the memory of the pleasure I taught you?’

‘Ruy!’

His mouth twisted bitterly at the warning tone in his mother’s voice. ‘What is it, Madre?’ he demanded savagely. ‘Am I to be denied the pleasure of speaking about love as well as that of experiencing it, or does it offend you that a man in my condition should have such thoughts? You who brought me the news that the woman I loved had left me…’

So the Condesa had been the one to tell Ruy that Carmelita was leaving him… Davina repressed a small shudder. She couldn’t understand how the other girl could have done it. Had she been in her shoes, she thought with a fierce stab of pain, had she been the recipient of Ruy’s love, nothing would have kept her from his side. He might be physically restricted, but he was still the same man; still very much a man! Her wayward thoughts shocked her, widening her eyes as purple as the hearts of pansies with mingled pain and disbelief. She was over Ruy. She had put the past behind her. All the love she had now was focused on Jamie. As though to reinforce the thought she reached out for the child, and her hair brushed Ruy’s chin as she did so.

His withdrawal was immediate and unfeigned, and as she lifted Jamie from his lap, Davina was dismayed to discover that she was trembling. What was; it about this man that had the power to affect her like this even now—so much so that his rejection of her was like the stabbing of a thousand knives?

Grateful that Jamie gave her an excuse to look away from the contempt she felt sure must be in his eyes, she busied herself with the little boy, listening to his informative chatter.

A manservant appeared, silent-footed and grave-faced, and positioned himself behind Ruy’s chair.

‘This is Rodriguez, my manservant,’ he told Davina sardonically. ‘The third member of our new ménage à trois. You will have to grow accustomed to him, since he performs for me all those tasks I can no longer perform for myself. Unless of course you wish to take them over for yourself… as a penance perhaps… and a fitting one. You took pleasure from my body when it was physically perfect, Davina, so perhaps it is only just that you should endure its deformity now.’

‘Ruy!’

Davina thought her mother-in-law’s protest was on account of the indelicacy of her son’s conversation, but she ought to have known better, Davina decided, when she continued angrily, ‘The doctor has told you, the paralysis need not be permanent. Much can be done…’

‘To make me walk like an animal, used to moving on all fours—yes, I know.’ Ruy dismissed the notion impatiently, disgust curling the corners of his mouth. ‘Thank you, Madre, but no. You have interfered enough in my life as it is.’ His glance embraced both Davina and the child held in her arms. ‘Rodriguez, you will take me to my room. Davina.’