Susan Wiggs - The Calhoun Chronicles Bundle - The Charm School

He got up and bathed in the cool water from the basin at the washstand, using a spicy scented soap, then cleaning his teeth with a tooth powder that tasted like anise. He thought of the long, laughing conversations they shared. The bickering and bantering. The quiet moments reading books. The satisfaction of taking a sounding on shipboard and finding that their figures agreed. That was the Isadora he wanted back. He had to return to the place they were before he had stepped over the line, to the friendship, the camaraderie, the respect.

But even as he thought it, he knew he would keep pushing her. He liked seeing her unbend, liked making her laugh, and hell, he liked seeing her get mad.

He was through pretending he was a gentleman. She knew better than that, anyway. She knew damned well that he was a groping mass of male desire. No more pretending, then. No more standing aside while she dreamed of Chad Easterbrook.

Ryan was moving in for a good time.

Isadora’s nightmare began when she awoke. It started with a maid barely more than four feet tall. Scolding like a jungle parrot, she blustered into the room and started ordering Isadora around in a musical Brazilian patois.

“My name is Angelica. You can have your coffee and churro while I do your hair. And for the riding today, you may not wear that strange norteamericano gown. I have brought something much, much better….”

“What riding?” Isadora managed to ask. “I don’t know how to ride.”

“That is no matter. The burro knows what to do. All you have to do is sit. A monkey can sit.”

“I am certainly not going to ride a jackass. Truly, I cannot—” Isadora almost choked on her fried bread. “What in heaven’s name is that?”

Angelica laughed, her face jolly and appealing despite the sad state of her teeth. “It is your costume for riding.”

“I won’t do it. I won’t put that on.”

“Senhora Peabody, you are not going to insult your hostess by refusing, are you?”

“I’m afraid I shall have to.”

“I’m afraid I cannot let you.”

The argument went on, but the diminutive servant proved the stronger, and by eight o’clock Isadora stood in the courtyard, dubiously eyeing a sleepy looking burro. She felt utterly ridiculous—Angelica had made her put on a strange, wide-legged split skirt that barely covered her shins. “Like the gauchos wear,” the maid had declared, buttoning the back of a loose white blouse.

She felt completely naked. Yet without her corset and longcloth petticoats, she detected a comfort and ease that was alien to her. Well, she thought. If Rose insisted on riding a mule for a bit this morning, she could oblige.

But it wasn’t Rose who came out to greet her in the courtyard.

It was Ryan.

After all their days together on shipboard, Isadora told herself, she should be used to his startling handsomeness, but she wasn’t. Freshly dressed in fitted dark breeches and a blousy white shirt, he looked more outrageously attractive than ever.

She couldn’t help herself. She kept thinking of last night. It changed everything. Last night he had kissed her—too intimately to be dismissed as a friendly gesture, too lightly to be construed as true passion.

His regrets had come almost instantly, she recalled. He’d hastened to return to the house, and the rest of the evening he’d studiously avoided her while regaling his aunt with tales of his adventures at sea.

Isadora had somehow managed to endure the evening by sitting stiffly, her back rigid, nodding when spoken to and pleading fatigue far earlier than she should have, then disappearing into her chamber. She would have been able to get through today if she didn’t have to see Ryan. The longer she spent away from him, the more she could convince herself that their embrace had been a figment of her imagination.

But now she had to look him in the eye by the dazzling light of day. All the feelings he had stirred in her—the warmth, the yearning, the frustration, the ecstasy—had barely cooled and in fact heated anew when he came near.

She angled the flat brim of her straw hat over her eyes. “Was this your idea?”

“Good morning to you, too,” he said cheerfully.

Clearly, the night before hadn’t affected him at all. He was back to being the friendly, unconventional Ryan she’d known from the start.

“I don’t ride, you know,” she said.

“Before you boarded the Swan, you didn’t sail, either,” he replied.

“But there was a point to sailing. I have no idea what the point of riding an ass is.”

“Ah, you’ll see.” He grinned and went over to one of the burros. “Do you know how to mount it?”

She felt a blush splotching her neck and cheeks. “How difficult can it be?”

“I’ll hold its head and you get on.” He reached for the bridle. The animal bit at him, large yellow teeth snapping loudly. Ryan pulled his hand out of harm’s way. “This must be a female.”

“You are so amusing.”

He managed to hold the beast and she surprised herself by swinging easily into the saddle. The animal was small and short-legged, so that helped, and once settled astride, she understood completely why she had been made to wear the gaucho pants.

After they were both mounted, she looked across the courtyard at Ryan and burst out laughing.

“What?”

“Your noble steed,” she said. “What a picture you make. I should call you Don Quixote.”

“You are so amusing,” he said, mimicking her tone. “Come, Sancho. Our quest begins.”

“Our quest for what?”

“You’ll see.” He patted his saddlebag, then kicked his heels into the burro’s flanks. The little animal trotted forward, and Isadora’s mount followed.

She enjoyed the ride too much. She loved seeing the countryside from the back of a plodding burro. Everything passed with delicious slowness. They rode two abreast on the gravelly mountain pathways, winding downward toward the city. The hot, dry sun felt good. The hat brim shaded her face, but she could feel the brush of heat on her bare arms and the backs of her hands.

She and Ryan spoke little as they descended the steep road to the heart of Rio. Isadora kept thinking of the way Ryan had touched her, holding her as if she were something fragile and fine, something he didn’t want to hurt yet couldn’t let go.

Then she remembered that this was Ryan Calhoun. He had probably learned the seductive manner of embracing a woman from his countless lovers, and he’d honed it to a fine art. He had, in fact, come from the arms of another woman as if it didn’t matter whose embrace he shared. She was making a fanciful moment out to be too big an affair. They were together in a scented garden, coaxing an exotic animal out into the light, and the moment had been no more than that.

That’s all it was. That’s all it could ever be. That’s all she dared to want it to be.

“You’re living inside your head, Isadora,” Ryan called to her.

“What do you mean by that?”

He swept one arm out to encompass the view of the harbor, the sparkling waters and the distant mountains. “I’ve brought you to paradise and you’re scowling. What are you thinking about that makes you scowl?”

She felt the rash of a new blush. “Nothing. This is a different mode of travel for me, and I’m not used to it.”

“Well, try enjoying the scenery, and the travel won’t bother you so much.”

He was right, she discovered. Rio was endlessly fascinating, from the Fountain of the Laundresses with its chattering servants and energetic water boys stationed at the spigots to the fashionable rua do Ouvidor, where mysterious, bejeweled donas went about in curtained litters.

They visited the ship and watched the discharging of the cargo. Ryan’s next task was to check the inventory against that of the consignee, then come to a reckoning of a price.