The Sometime Bride Read Free Page B

one seemed to be caught in the flow of the world around her, teetering on the brink between the child on the balcony and the dignified daughter of the house. He wouldn’t mind being around when she fell into womanhood. That alone might be worth his long hazardous journey from England to Portugal by way of France and Spain.
    Blas gifted her with the slow, easy, infinitely enigmatic smile which had been intriguing women since he was little older than she. He was offering a truce. But not without having the last word. It was, after all, necessary to his twenty-one-year-old self-esteem. “The French could be here any time now, young Catherine, and knowing anything at all about Thomas Audley and his business could mean your death. We must all learn to be more cautious.”
    With the tip of his fingers he touched her chin, running his thumb lightly over her lips. “Keep that lovely mouth shut, child. And your ears away from knotholes. It would be a shame to lose so much beauty while still in bud.”
    Reduced to speechless idiocy by sensations far beyond her realm of experience, Catarina darted around him and ran for the door, leaving Blas with a very thoughtful look on his angular bronzed face.
    In the course of the next five days not even the youngest stable boy was left unaware that the little senhorita was enamored with the young Spaniard who spent so much time talking to Senhor Tomás. It was understood, naturalamente , that he was not truly Spanish, for the Senhor would never hire one of the enemy to work at the Casa. So he must be one of the fine English gentlemen who would save them from the Corsican monster.
    A proper match for their young mistress, all agreed. At fourteen she was of an age to be married. It was not good to leave such succulent fruit too long on the vine. Sin hovered over the Casa Audley. Such temptation was too much for a man to bear. And the English cavalheiro did not appear to be a saint. To be sure, he had not greased the wheels of his cart—had they not all heard the squeal as he approached? But the devil was strong in this one, and possibly the screaming of the wheels had not been enough to frighten the demons away. Heads shook from the kitchen to the stables. Senhor Tomás would have to have a care with this one.
    Catarina, blissfully oblivious to the avid interest of her father’s staff, had managed to contrive a half dozen accidental meetings with her hero. She had even been allowed to participate in the choosing of a proper name for her father’s new protégé. Yet for all her effort, her conversations with Blas had been cool and stilted, his manner faintly condescending. A stranger might have taken him for a candidate for holy orders. For Thomas Audley had indeed taken a care, revealing with a notable lack of subtlety his daughter’s precise age and her exalted position in the household. A position which placed her far above an anonymous spy, no matter how bright and talented he might be. As a result, Catarina’s temperament had deteriorated from besotted to hurt to vast indignation. As her anger increased, Blas—who was far from accustomed to being warned off—grew colder. It might be said his attempt to please Thomas Audley had resulted in a fit of the sullens.
    None of which, fortunately, were apparent the night he made his debut in the gaming rooms.
    Catarina was waiting for him, tucked up in her favorite hidey-hole. Red velvet draperies enclosed a minstrel’s gallery which overlooked the largest of the Casa’s gaming rooms. An affectation from another age, the gallery had been included for sentiment’s sake when the house was rebuilt, as was most of Lisbon, after the disastrous earthquake of 1755.
    By the time Caterina was ten, her surreptitious use of the minstrel’s gallery had become an open secret. If Thomas Audley had been a more conventional father, that might have been the end of it. But he was heard to say that anything his Cat might learn from her perch in the small