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She raised her chin, her brows furrowed. “Who told you?”
“I have informants.”
“What if I had said yes to him? You wouldn’t be so smug.”
“Impossible.”
“I should have said yes, just to teach you a lesson.”
He laughed, little wrinkles formed near his eyes. “You taught me a lesson when you said, ‘Don’t come back.’ A very harsh lesson, wife. So why did you say no?”
“How do you do that? Turn the question around? You were supposed to be telling me secrets, not the other way around.” She brushed at the hairs whipping around her face, tucking them behind her ear only to have them return with the next gust of wind.
“Was Chadwick’s proposal supposed to be a secret?”
“No.”
“Well, he was boasting to everyone at White’s. He made it sound as if you’d said yes. I got drunk that night because I worried that it truly was the end for us. And that’s my secret.”
Her shoulders slumped. Maybe it was relief, or maybe it was that she held Roman to such a high standard. He was mortal, after all.
“You believed him?” She soothed her hand up his arm, enjoying the hard feel of him.
“Drink and emotion are a terrible brew.”
“I never said yes. How could I? I’d only known him for two weeks. In the end, Mother had to send him away. He became rather a nuisance, standing at our door twice a day with posies and poetry books. However, he had a nice gig and the prettiest brown thoroughbreds,” she admitted.
“Some thoroughbreds are prettier than others.”
She laughed a little, though she was more than curious about how he knew such things. “When you were in London, why didn’t you visit me and Mother?”
“A bit of selfishness. And self-preservation.”
“I might have fallen to pieces if you had arrived without an announcement, but I would have been more than pleased to see you,” she said.
His words had an odd way of warming her. Another gust blew across the ship, and Shelene grabbed her bonnet.
“Let me take you inside,” he said.
“No, stay with me. We no longer have to spend another moment apart and that makes me extraordinarily happy.”
* * * * *
Nantes, lying upon the banks of the River Loire, was only a short, overnight journey from Brest, depending upon the tides, but the port was extremely busy, a remnant of its slave-trading days along with its proximity to Paris. Ships launched daily to ports around the globe, especially along the oft-used routes to the Caribbean and its rich resources of sugar, rum, coffee and tobacco.
Nine days of marriage and travel had almost killed Roman. Maybe his idea of celibacy was a bad one. Knowing his young, nubile wife was prancing about the cabin next door in her shift had left him wide-eyed from lack of sleep and hard from lack of companionship.
The only good from all this was that he had finally gotten her to say yes. He would not get her with child on this voyage. He would do all he could to keep her safe and protected. He still debated whether to reveal the secret that affected her most of all. That of her uncle’s treachery. Roman had no doubt that Belgrano’s activities would eventually come back to haunt them all if he wasn’t stopped.
Las Colinas was a handsome prize, easily forfeited given the nature of certain treasonous crimes. Roman had made some reasonable guesses as to why that hadn’t happened. And most of that had to do with English support during the Napoleonic Wars, along with Commodore Hightower’s wife owning the estate. The king was more interested in keeping the English happy than taking one estate among the thousands in Spain.
Belgrano wasn’t one to forget though, and the grudge against Roman was unforgivable, while Roman wasn’t the sort to let a man of Belgrano’s low caliber continue to wreak havoc.
Roman rapped on her cabin door, identical to his, with a low beam across the portal, on which he’d already knocked his head twice.
“Roman?” she said from inside.
“Yes. The dory is here to take us ashore.” They would travel on another ship via the Middle Passage, down the coast of Africa, then catch the trade winds to the Caribbean, where a final leg would deposit them in Buenos Aires. “Are you ready? Joaquin is here to remove your trunks.”
