Despite the heat, he wore a hooded cloak, his face cast half in shadow. But Bianca could see enough to tell he was quite handsome, or would be if he shaved off his tangled black beard. His sun-darkened face, all gaunt angles, and his brown eyes were almost elegant, in a haunted way. Drawn with taut lines of some deep-seated sorrow. He gazed at her wearily.
For a moment, she wondered if he was a wraith, summoned by her own unhappy memories. A spirit, perhaps flown from the decks of that half-myth the Calypso. But then he gave her a whisper of a smile, and her strange fancies vanished. He was just a man, though certainly a very odd one. Even for Santo Domingo.
“Rum, por favour, señora,” he said, his voice deep and rusty.
Bianca poured out a generous measure of the thick brown liquid into a pottery goblet, sliding it to him over the scarred wood of the counter. “You are new to Santo Domingo, yes?”
“It has been some time since I last visited,” he answered, after he neatly drained the liquor. She poured out more. “This place was owned by Señor Valdez then.”
“It has been a time. I bought it from Valdez more than a year ago, before he went back to Spain.”
“A year ago,” he muttered, as if that was an unfathomable length of time. Perhaps it was. Lives did change in only a moment, after all.
She found herself unaccountably curious about this wraith. People came and went on this island, all of them intent on their own business, most of them running from something. Just like Bianca herself.
“Was your ship damaged in the storm?” she asked. Perhaps he was even a crew member of the Calypso. That would explain why she had never seen him before. A mysterious wraith from a mythical ship.
He nodded shortly, holding out his goblet for yet more rum. “I will not be here for long, señora.”
Here in Santo Domingo? In her tavern? In the mortal world? It was obvious he wasn’t in a talking mood, so she just poured.
“Oh, señora!” Delores cried, hurrying behind the counter to refill her tray. The noise was almost deafening now. “They say the Calypso is in port! And that her captain defeated a vast fleet of pirates and repaired the mainmast in a storm with his own hands…”
When Bianca turned back to the counter, the cloaked man was gone. She saw only a glimpse of his back, as he headed towards a small table in the shadowed corner.
As the night went on, some of the men passed out on the floor and were dragged out by their comrades, only to be replaced by new, thirstier patrons. More men from ships seeking repairs after the storm. But Bianca did not glimpse the wraith-man again, busy as she was pouring the rum and ale and mixing more punch.
Matters seemed to have reached a crescendo of laughter and incoherent, drunken shouts when the door opened once more. Not with a great bang, as with more desperate men in search of liquid oblivion, but slowly. Quietly. Yet still everyone turned to look.
Bianca straightened from wiping spilled ale on the counter, pushing her hair back from her brow. She tensed at the sudden watchful air in the room, the way the great noise fell to a murmur—like the waves of the sea just before a storm hit.
This, then, was surely the trouble that had been coming all night.
She turned to the door. A man stood there, framed in the night-darkness. Not alone—there were six or seven others arrayed behind him. But he was all she could see.
He was tall, probably taller than any other man in the tavern as he had to duck his head through the doorway. Like the strange cloaked man, he had the lean frame of a man who had spent his life balanced on a pitching deck and climbing swaying rigging. His chest and legs were supple beneath his black leather jerkin and hose, a tall pair of worn black leather boots. She glimpsed powerful, bronzed forearms revealed by the turned-back sleeves of his white shirt. A man of action, then, of the sea and all its dangers.
His hair, a long, straight curtain of sun-streaked light brown, fell to his shoulders, bound back from his face with a black silk scarf.
And that face…
She knew it well. Too well. Bianca clutched at the edge of the counter, certain now that she had to be dreaming. For that face, despite the fact that it was a bit older, the skin browned by the tropical sun and the sea’s salt spray, belonged to Balthazar Grattiano.
The one man she had vowed to kill if she ever saw him again.
Chapter Two
Bianca held on to the counter, watching in wary silence as Balthazar and his men made their way through the room. The crowd seemed to part for them, like Moses and the Red Sea; the roar of sound faded to whispers, crackling like summer lightning. She shivered as she watched them take their seats at a suddenly empty table near the window.
For an instant the humid taverna faded, and she was a girl again, standing on the walkway outside her house as she listened with rapt fascination to Balthazar Grattiano talking of ships and navigation, of the wide, wondrous world to be found outside Venice. Talking of glorious freedom.
He had gained his freedom, it seemed, for here he was, in the New World, thousands of miles from his privileged Venetian realm. But she was still locked in her prison. It went with her wherever she turned.
“Is it really him, señora?” she heard Delores say. The awed whisper dragged her back from Venice to the rough wooden floor of her taverna.
“Him, Delores?” Him—the devil?
“The captain of the Calypso! I had heard tell he was here, in Santo Domingo, but I did not believe it.” Delores sighed. “He is certainly most handsome.”
“Whatever he might be, he is a customer,” Bianca said, with a brisk calm she was far from feeling. She thrust a tray into Delores’s trembling hands and proceeded to fill it with goblets of punch. “And hopefully a thirsty one. Go on now.”
She leaned against the counter, watching as the maid sashayed across the room to Balthazar’s table. As she laid out the drinks, Balthazar glanced up at her with a sensual half-smile.
If Bianca had harboured any doubts at all that this was not Balthazar Grattiano, that smile banished them. It was the same charming smile she remembered, alluring, beautiful, carving deep dimples in his cheek that made a woman long to touch them with her fingertip. To kiss them, to feel the rough silk of his sun-bronzed skin under her tongue.
A lovely, sex-laden smile—with a strange, empty sadness behind it.
He was older, yes, just as she was. Hardened by the sea and the harsh sun. Yet still Balthazar Grattiano, the love of every woman in Venice.
And still just as irresistible to women, Bianca thought wryly as she watched Delores giggling. Most of the men who came to the tavern Delores turned away with a saucy word. She was faithful in her way to Alameda. But she seemed in no hurry to leave Balthazar’s side.
Bianca didn’t have much time to worry about Balthazar and his charm, though. A fresh crowd of customers came in, wanting their rum, and she was kept busy again. Slowly, inexorably, the noise level grew once more as a game of dice commenced. The throng closed around Balthazar, blocking him from her view.
From her view, perhaps, but not from her thoughts. She was all too aware of his presence, of the sparkling tension within her. He was near her again, after all this time! The man she had once been so infatuated with; the man whose father killed her mother.
And what was she, Bianca, going to do about it now?
As she rinsed more goblets, she thought of the Calypso, that “legendary” ship said to be able to cross the Atlantic in three weeks. To be impervious to attack and storms. And Balthazar was her captain? How