Oh, she just couldn’t resist.
“Indeed,” she said firmly. “After an extended and relentless campaign—a veritable Champion of Lust, that man—Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz has finally succeeding in worming his way into my bed.”
She pressed the back of her wrist again her forehead; the gesture was as flamboyantly histrionic as anything Ruy himself might have done. “I fear I was taken completely off-guard. The flatteries, the flowers—certainly the plying with wine—all that I expected. But I had not foreseen that the man would stoop so low as to take a sword in the guts. That duplicitous stratagem succeeded where all others had failed. I fear my reputation is now ruined.”
Sharon was immensely proud of herself. She’d kept a straight face all the way through.
The old cardinal smiled thinly. “Yes, indeed. The man is amazingly stubborn and persistent. He’s driven me to the edge of madness with it, at times.”
But the smile didn’t extend to the eyes. Sharon suddenly realized that Bedmar was a very worried man.
“Signora . . . please.” The Spanish ambassador swallowed. “Ruy and I go back many years together. I would know how he is. Please.”
Sharon found herself swallowing a lump. However the relationship between Bedmar and Sanchez had gotten started, and whatever its formal nature, she understood in that moment something she should have understood simply from knowing Ruy himself. Ruy Sanchez, ruthless as he might be, was no Michel Ducos. And Bedmar was no Seigneur le Comte d’Avaux, who would treat his most trusted agent and bodyguard as a mere lackey.
“My apologies, Your Eminence,” she murmured. Then, stood aside and motioned with her hand. “Please, come in. I’ll take you to him immediately. He’s awake now. Was, at least, when I left him two minutes ago.”
As they moved through the salon leading to the great central staircase, the cardinal gave Sharon a sidelong look. “Did you really put him in your own bed?”
“Yes. It’s a good bed—one of the best in the embassy—and I can easily manage in one of the Stone boys’ rooms. He is absent at the moment.” She decided not to mention that the Stone kids seemed to have all decamped on some hare-brained scheme. Bedmar probably already knew, but . . .
She hurried past the problem. “I’ll be spending most of my time in that room anyway, except when I’m actually sleeping. It’s big and I’m used to it, so . . . it just seemed like the best place to put him.”
She saw no reason to mention the confusing swirl of emotions that had been involved in the decision also. Listen to your woman! she’d screamed at the man, less than two days before, in what could quite literally be called the heat of action.
Had she meant it? She still didn’t know herself. Looking back, she could see that it had been, tactically, exactly the right thing to say to get Ruy out of her line of fire. And that’s still the party line, she told herself firmly.
But . . .
She hadn’t been thinking tactically at all, at the moment she said it. They had just been words, boiling up out of a cauldron of fear and fury. In vino veritas, the old saying went. In wine there is truth. Could the same be said of adrenaline?
She didn’t know; wasn’t even prepared to think about it now. What she did know was that Ruy Sanchez could quite possibly be dead very soon. That bed was, perhaps, the last bed he would ever sleep in. So had come the decision, as of its own volition, just like the words she’d screamed.
If that was to be Ruy Sanchez’s last bed, then it would be hers. Even if it had never been put to its accustomed use between man and woman. He would still die in it.
And, on the plus side, it might help keep the pestiferous man alive. Most doctors and all nurses understood that a cheerful patient—especially a sanguine one—had a better chance of surviving serious illness than one who was morose and gloomy. Finding himself in Sharon’s own bed when he came out of anesthesia had certainly seemed to pick up Sanchez’s spirits.