Without doubt, the woman they had captured was behaving very differently from the creature of his dreams.
Then Andrea felt something more: The Sofia he held had a more prominent belly than the tight drumhead on which he was used to beat out his love tattoo.
By Jesu and Maria, she was pregnant.
Was it his child? His head was too overwhelmed to figure very clearly, but he thought it might be. No wonder she was behaving so strangely. Andrea had heard that pregnant women were subject to strange fancies and often didn’t know their own minds. He would have to think for the two—the three—of them.
Between them, Andrea and the bravo wrestled Sofia a couple of paces. Young Barbarigo was trying to be as careful as he could, but he did have to use some force. The woman herself set her feet firmly into the men’s shins more often than she let them touch the ground.
“Here. Let’s gag her with the veil,” the bravo suggested when they stopped to recoup and regain a grasp on their burden. “That’ll give me another hand.”
Andrea nodded dumbly.
The fight Sofia put up against the removal of her veil wounded Andrea in plenty of places, but the jab to his heart hurt worst of all. In spite of—or perhaps because of—his admiration, the bravo was ready to smack her into submission. Andrea stayed the man’s hand, though having to fight on two fronts at once was wearing.
Of course she has been among the Turks so long she has taken on this extra layer of any woman’s natural modesty. Andrea excused her opposition and promised himself as well as Sofia that there was no harm intended.
“Do you think I would hurt you, my love, or—or our child?” he pleaded.
Your child? You think this is your child when I could have a prince?
Andrea seemed to read these words in the glare of eyes over the bravo’s hand, so he didn’t think in that direction any more.
He did, however, keep up the struggle towards the .sedan. His actions were, after all, in her best interest, no matter whose child it was. And he promised himself he could love any child Sofia bore.
Still he could not escape the impression that the wish to remain disguised motivated her as much or more than modesty. Like a thief in the nit, like the two men having a time of it with Ghazanfer who’d both taken the precaution of muffling their faces, Sofia seemed to be masking illegality from witnesses more than beauts fi-om lechers.
But Andrea could waste no more time considering it. Ghazanfer was gaining the upper hand at his end of the alley. A lucky kick by one of the bravos had managed to knock the monster ‘s dagger out of reach and into the deep shadows. That was all that kept the eunuch from giving better than he took, even in that two-to-one match.
“I was beginning to wonder, captain—” The bravo on the other side of Sofia’s contentious form clenched his teeth and panted his exertion. “—whether any woman could be worth this much trouble. For what you paid us, you could have found yourself several dozen obliging whores. But now I see. I’ve got to hand it to vou. She’s worth it.”
Andrea didn’t appreciate the fellow’s sentiments, nor the roving of his defective eve, but the young lover had no choice. No way could he have kept the force he struggled with in his arms on his own.
The bravo swords, oddly enough, seemed to have a calming effect on the maelstrom .Andrea held to him in a parody of the passion he’d hoped for.
Then, into the halt a breath the bravo gave her while he worked the veil into a manageable gag, Sofia compressed these words. “No gag. I won’t scream.”
Andrea had the unease’ feeling she spoke to his accomplice as much as to him, but he pretended otherwise and signed the man to hold off. The bravo shrugged and complied, but kept the gag poised a mere heartbeat awav from where he wanted it to be.
“Why did you do it? Barbarigo, why?” At least she was speaking Italian now, although he didn’t like the formal name with which she distanced herself, “After the .Arsenal—I thought you were my friend.”
“Your friend? Cora mia, I love you. I do this because I love you. I do everything because I love you and can bear no one else to have you.”
There was a snort of impatience in her voice. “I mean, why did you have to kill Khalil?”
“Khalil?” Andrea didn’t like the caress she gave the name. Worse, the bravo heard it, too, through the language barrier, and raised a teasel brow over the mad lurch of his eye.
“Him.” Sofia pointed to the ground behind them.
“The janissary?”
“Yes, the Chief Soup-Maker.”
“He has nothing to do with this.”
Andrea didn’t like the recollection nagging at the back of his mind that until very recently, the Sultan’s private army had been sworn to celibacy, living together like monks. Andrea had always found this a very unnatural—and dangerous—mode of existence for men of the sword. Such a life could not help but be dangerous for any women in the janissaries’ neighborhood.
Sofia insisted, “Khalil has everything to do with this.”
“An unfortunate accident. He got in the way. But not one that need detain us. Please, Sofia, don’t let it keep us a moment longer.”
“Excuse me, captain,” the bravo said.
Andrea waved impatiently against the interruption of Turkish into a flow of Italian that, for some reason he couldn’t quite fathom, was taking all his concentration to follow.
The bravo persisted. “Perhaps it will hasten things along if I mention that that red-booted fellow there made my job easy. He exposed his heart, as nice as can be, by raising his arms for an embrace.”
“Infidel,” Sofia hissed. “Murderer.”
The bravo grinned maniacally. “Seemed the best thing to do, under the circumstances. To run him through.”
Andrea felt as if his heart, too, had been punctured. But no,
