Awakening His Duchess (23 page)

She didn’t want to see the baby, but Yvette was drawn
inexplicably forward. Baby Marie lay still, her head nearly severed from her
body. Yvette knew she was dead, but she picked her up anyway. Then she
remembered. She had to keep the monsters from slaughtering Etienne. She turned
and he wasn’t there. No, she had been shielding his eyes, hadn’t she?

Where was Etienne?

She fought against the swirling flames and the smoke,
trying to find him. The drums beat, jarring her heart, or it might have just
been the thrum of her blood. Choking fingers of fear closed around her neck.

She searched and searched, growing ever more desperate to
find him, but she kept seeing her boy Piere and little Marie—hacked open like
coconuts. How could such tiny bodies have held so much blood? She kept looking
and looking, but it was as if she had to rediscover her babies again and again
while Etienne eluded her.

Her frantic search leapt to her parents’ home and there,
too, were bodies, her father, her mother curled around her brother, ugly gaping
machete wounds. Where was Etienne? God, she hadn’t seen Henri, either. Icy talons
latched into her spine, shredding her guts. She swirled, and the fire leapt
higher, and the blood threatened to run over her feet like a rising river.

Etienne saw Henri attacked, but now she couldn’t find
them. She had to get Etienne out of there before he saw. She turned and there
he was, but as she tried to move toward him on legs that refused to move, a
machete appeared behind him.

She tried to shout a warning, but her lips were sluggish
too.

Non, she couldn’t watch Etienne be massacred. The machete
lifted higher. The hand holding the machete was white.

She screamed again and again.

“Yvette!” A hand on her shoulder jerked her to a different
time and place.

She clawed away, scrambling, whimpering at the biting
snarling beast of terror intent on devouring her. She hit the headboard.

“Yvette, you’re having a bad dream.”

Her breathing was sharp and the scream hovered in her
throat. There weren’t any drums, no smoke, no blood. A bad dream. A nightmare.

A memory.

Only the dream was more real than when she’d lived it
because now she knew the deaths to be true. That night the limp bodies of her
children hadn’t seemed real. The bodies had seemed like porcelain dolls or wax
models brought in to substitute for her children. She was acting in a tragedy,
only they’d forgotten to inform her she’d be playing a role. Her mind had
conjured odd lies to protect her from the truth. She’d been unable to grasp the
reality of the murders of her babies. She knew what happened, but she couldn’t
believe it.

Her pounding heart cracked, and the pain was a tight gnawing
ball in her chest.

She was all the way against the headboard and she drew her
knees against her chest. She knew of no other way to hold herself together.

Beau sat on the edge of her bed, his dressing gown gaped
revealing the muscular chest she had rubbed camphor on the night before. “You
were screaming.”

She put her forehead on her knees and waited for her shaking
to stop.

“You were having a nightmare?” he asked gently.

She lifted a shoulder. Darkness yawned inside of her. “More
like reliving the past.”

He put his hand on his thigh, palm up. “I suppose my
questions today reminded you of what happened.”

“It is not as if I could ever forget.” The images of her dead
children were seared into her brain with the permanence of a brand.

She fought for the numbness she had learned to wear so she
could function. She pushed against her forehead. There were tricks she used to
rid her mind of the images before they left her so broken she couldn’t move.

At times she went to Etienne, often crawled into bed with
him. Or more lately, because he was getting too old to do that, she forced her
memories of the night she shared with Beau: the look in his eyes, his passion,
the love she felt then, to the forefront of her mind. And he was sitting on her
bed. She couldn’t think about their night on the boat when he was near enough
to give lie to those memories.

His hand moved toward her. “If you want to talk about it,
I’ll listen.”

Surprised by the ring of compassion in his voice, she lifted
her head off her knees and looked at him. His eyelids drooped and his shoulders
slumped. He looked as exhausted as she felt. “Why?”

He looked beside her and then down at the bed as if he still
was unable to tolerate her face. “It occurs to me that you may not have had an
opportunity to talk about what happened to anyone who would understand. I was
there. I know what happened.”

The nightmare had been part memory, part dream. She hadn’t
seen a white man’s hand on a machete. But Beau had been a slave. “Did you...?”

“Participate in the killings? No. My role was different.” He
pulled his hand back and wadded his dressing gown.

She pressed her lips together. He didn’t deny he had played
a part in the revolt. Her breathing quickened as her jaw tightened. “Why did
they kill babies? What did my children ever do to them?”

“They shouldn’t have killed women and children.” He looked
at her and shrugged. “Not that it is any excuse, but desperate men can be
driven to commit appalling acts.”

How could he excuse the murder of innocents? “I know how bad
it was for the slaves, but—”

“Do you?” His voice had tightened. He pressed his lips
together and looked away. He didn’t say it out loud, but she could see he
didn’t think she knew how truly horrid the slaves were treated.

Her sense of injustice faltered. After losing Beau she’d
needed to keep busy so she’d nursed the injured and sick slaves.

Too often she’d treated the torn flesh of one of Henri’s
whipped slaves. Sometimes they didn’t survive their floggings. “I know. I saw.
I nursed the injured and ill ones as well as I could.”

Beau stared at her, his blue eyes narrowed with skepticism
at first, then his head tilted as if accepting that she did know.

He could have pointed out his lungs seizing was because of
his work as a slave, but he didn’t need to. She knew it. Another year or two of
exposure to the cane processing would have certainly killed him. Too many died
off in a few short years and more Africans were brought in to take their place.
“I know they were killed inch by inch every day.”

He nodded slowly. “Yes, they were.”

Still... “That doesn’t justify killing babies who had
nothing to do with how they were treated.”

“The strike was more against the plantation owners and those
they held dear.” Clearly his sympathies were with the slaves, even if he agreed
they had gone too far.

She bit her lip hard enough to taste blood.

“I cannot imagine that it lessens your pain one jot to
understand why everyone was killed,” he said in a flat tone.

“No.” Nothing she could do would change the past. Nothing he
could do would change the past. She’d just never understood why she and Etienne
were spared while her babies were slaughtered.

“We can at least agree that we all would have been better
off here.”

She took a deep breath. It was a small truce for the middle
of the night. “Yes, we would have. We are.”

He reached out and pulled the covers back. “Lie down. I’ll
stay until you fall asleep again.”

His kindness was more unsettling than if he had simply woken
her and told her to quit screaming. But she couldn’t soothe herself back to
sleep with the memories of his love when it was obvious he despised her. “You
need your sleep. You can leave me. I am all right.”

“You don’t look like you’re all right.” He gestured toward
her. “You’re still shaking.”

She was cowering against the headboard. The horror of the
dream poured over her afresh. “I couldn’t find Etienne.”

Beau frowned, then caught her arm and tugged her toward him.
“In the dream or was that what happened?”

She could have resisted, pulled away, but she let Beau pull
her beside him. Her hands continued to shake, but her mind eased as she
remembered what actually happened. “In the dream. The night of the revolt I had
him with me.”

He paused, his hand still around her upper arm. Her heart
beat frantically, partly from the residual terror, partly from not being
certain if he meant to pull her into his arms. “Would you like to go to him,
see he is safe?”

She shook her head. “I know he is all right.”

“Knowing and believing are different.”

She stared at Beau. How could he understand her so well when
she no longer understood him? She had to stop intruding on Etienne and handle
her nightmares on her own. She had been doing better in the last few months.
The nightmares were less frequent, the realization that the murders weren’t
happening now, faster. “No. It is late.”

She held her breath, waiting for him to do more than simply
pull her away from the headboard. But the dream nagged at her. Why was she
dreaming of Etienne falling victim to a white man holding a machete? She
searched her foggy recollection of the dream to understand who held the blade,
but the man’s identity hadn’t been revealed to her. “I tried to keep his eyes
covered, but I know he saw things.”

“I know you did the best you could for him. You are a good
mother.”

A sob bubbled in her throat. “A good mother doesn’t leave
her babies behind to be slaughtered.”

“Yvette, don’t think about it. You were one woman. Saving Etienne
was a miracle in itself.” His hand flattened on her arm and he gave a couple of
rubs before he urged her down to the bed.

She turned away and curled into a ball. “I didn’t really
save him. I tried to get him to go back, but he wouldn’t obey. If I had
anything to do with it, it was only because I was a poor mother.”

“I don’t believe that,” said Beau.

Had she ever understood him, or had she simply been caught
up in her own fantasy of falling in love and experiencing passion before she
married Henri and settled into her role as a plantation owner’s wife? Not that
she’d ever embraced the role as well as Henri would have liked. Yet Beau didn’t
want her as a wife.

On her wedding night with Beau she had felt closer to him
than any other person alive, but she no longer knew if it was real or illusion
as so many things in Saint-Domingue seemed.

But he wasn’t that boy who had seduced her with exquisite
patience any longer. Nor was she a virginal young girl. Heat stole over her
cheeks. He’d made it clear he wasn’t planning on marital relations, but he
hadn’t moved from the edge of her bed. Nor had he reached out to touch her
other than to move her. When they touched it was at her instigation, not
because he wanted her. And she had no idea what he wanted beyond a relationship
with his son.

She didn’t know who he was. She twisted to look over her
shoulder at him. He seemed careworn after his discussion with his father and
anguished that a rift had sprung up with Etienne. He was nothing like the
light-hearted boy who’d pursued her in Saint-Domingue.

She wanted to extend their time together. And perhaps his
offer to listen was a hope for the return favor. Did he need to sort out what
he and his father discussed? “How went your talk with your father?”

In spite of the foolishness of it, her mind was working to
supplant the images in her head with the memories of the night on his boat. To
use the memory of him for comfort when he sat so near her played havoc with her
sanity.

His eyes narrowed a bit before he shrugged. “Well enough.”

She watched him carefully while gripping the sheets,
determined not to reach for him. “I know you did not always get along.”

The corner of his mouth tilted up as if he was aware of her
struggle. “No, but I vowed if I made it out of the grave I would do whatever it
took to make him proud.”

The duke wanted more grandsons. Had that come up in their
talk? Heat rose in her cheeks and she stared up at the canopy. She didn’t want
to be a brood mare because he was willing to please his father. She didn’t want
more children at all. It was better to not risk the possibility of having than
losing another child. The very idea of it would break her. And she didn’t want
some businesslike rutting to spoil or supplant her fond memories of their
wedding night.

Yet the idea of his hands upon her, his body against hers,
his lips touching hers swirled in her head, and she couldn’t quite banish it.
Her body was quickening with a need she hadn’t felt in a long time. But Beau
didn’t want her. She turned to face the far wall. “I don’t know what is real
anymore.”

“Yvette, I’ve had plenty of nightmares too. I understand it
takes time to calm from them.” He put his hand on her shoulder.

She jerked as if he’d touched her with a hot poker. A
current of raw power rolled through her. No, she couldn’t be feeling desire,
not like this.

His hand stilled. “You are still jumpy.”

She hummed a sound of agreement, glad the darkness hid her
odd response or he had misinterpreted it. Or perhaps it was the dream, too, the
way it had set her on edge as if she needed a physical release to rid herself
of the tightly coiled fear.

He shifted on the bed and the covers lifted. Then he slid in
behind her, placing his arm over hers. His hand cupped around the back of hers.
“Go back to sleep. I’ll keep you safe.”

His voice was rough with drowsiness and his body felt
relaxed where it touched hers. His chest was against her spine, but their hips
were separate, and he hadn’t removed his dressing gown. There was a warm
comfort to his embrace, and it mirrored the way she would often curl around
Etienne in the early days after the revolt and massacre. Yet her body absorbed
his proffered warmth and comfort adding an undercurrent of excitement to the
asexual hold.