Bayou Nights (13 page)

“We’ll need carbolic salve and gauze sent to Mr. Drake’s room.” She offered a brittle smile to the young man behind the counter.

“Yes, Miss Lambert. Anything else?”

“Pralines.” Perhaps giving in to one temptation would help her resist the other.

If the concierge thought her requests odd, he was too well-trained to show it. “Of course.”

She followed Drake to the elevator, rode with him to the third floor, and waited while he dug his room key from his pocket.

The hallway was warm, even stuffy, but leaving the close air for his room seemed like folly. Some essential part of her soul swung between a near overwhelming desire to race as far from Drake as was humanly possible and an equally strong need to run into his arms.

She needed him to help her find her father. She couldn’t need him for more. She crossed her arms over her chest, squared her shoulders, and followed him into his room.

Her nose, accustomed to perfume and flowers, wrinkled. Drake’s room smelled of leather and wool and Williams’ soap. Manly smells. Who knew they could swirl through a woman like warm honey? She parted her lips and breathed through her mouth.

Drake slid his good arm free of his ruined coat then slowly peeled the blood-soaked sleeve off his injured limb. His white shirt revealed crimson far more clearly than the dark fabric of his suit.

So very red. Darker where the blood had dried.

Christine gripped the back of a chair. A few inches to the right and the bullet might have found Drake’s heart.

He pulled his tie loose from his collar.

“I’ll take that.” She held out her hands.

He gave her the length of silk. Somehow, the simple action felt intimate, the beginning of a ritual.

Christine turned and hung it on the valet stand, her tongue as knotted as the tie had been.

“I may need some help with the shirt.”

Her faulty heart skipped a beat. “Fine.” Her tongue managed the one word but was incapable of more.

Tap, tap.

Drake reached for his gun. When combined with his bloodied shirt and the harsh planes of his face, the weapon made him look like a highwayman of old. Someone who wrote their own rules. Someone who disappeared at dawn’s first light.

Christine found her voice. “Put the gun away. I asked them to send up a few things.”

She cracked open the door.

A boy stood on the other side. “I have the salve and gauze, Miss Lambert. We sent out for fresh pralines. We’ll bring them up as soon as Jep gets back with them.”

She gave the lad two bits and closed the door.

“Fresh pralines?”

She wasn’t about to explain temptation. “I didn’t finish my lunch.”

For an instant Drake looked as if he might laugh then his gaze landed on the tin of salve. “That’s going to sting.”

“Not as much as getting shot.” Christine went to the bathroom, filled a pitcher with cool water, and grabbed a handful of towels.

She came back to find Drake seated on the edge of his bed gingerly pulling the linen of his shirt away from where it had dried to his skin.

“I’ll do that.” She dipped a towel into the pitcher and wiped gently at the wound.

“Ouch.” He jerked away from her.

Who knew a grown man could be such a big baby? Christine rolled her eyes and gently pulled at the linen. “You’ll have to take it off.”

“My shirt?”

“I can’t very well put salve on top of your shirt.”

The skin around his eyes crinkled. “You get a little tetchy when you’re deprived of lunch.”

She was a little tetchy because she was alone in a hotel room with the most attractive man she’d ever met. “I imagine the pralines will solve that problem.” She hoped they would.

Drake unbuttoned the first button of his shirt. By the third button she knew supplanting one temptation for another was a useless endeavor. Nothing—certainly not pralines, not even ambrosia—could compare with the muscled perfection of Drake’s chest.

Christine’s mouth went dry. She took a step backward and focused her gaze just above his left shoulder. Far better to study the pattern of the wallpaper than Mattias Drake.

He pulled off his shirt.

She focused only on the wound on his arm—to expand her vision, to let her gaze linger on his chest…or his lips, well, no woman could resist temptation like that. Again, she dipped the towel into the pitcher and daubed. Expect this time she was daubing skin. Warm, smooth skin. Drake’s skin.

With his good hand, he touched her cheek.

She jumped then shifted her gaze from his arm to his eyes. His eyes. Their icy depths didn’t look so icy now. Christine swallowed—with difficulty. “I’ll get this cleaned up, then you can apply some salve and I’ll wrap it with gauze.”

His lips twitched—almost as if he sensed how difficult it was for her to see him half-naked. Almost as if he was pleased by her inability to ignore his manly charms.

Damn him.

She refocused on his arm. He’d been right. The bullet had grazed the skin, opening a wound that had bled copiously but wouldn’t cause him permanent injury.

Again, he touched her cheek.

“Stop that,” she snapped.

“Why?”

“It’s distracting.”

“You’re distracting.”

So was he but she wasn’t about to admit it. “Hold still.”

The hand that had touched her cheek dropped and closed on her waist, drawing her closer to him.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to kiss you.”

Her poor heart. It couldn’t take much more of this stuttering then slamming against the walls of her chest. “You most certainly are not.”

“That sounds like a challenge.”

Where was the boy with those pralines? “It’s not meant as one.”

“So you don’t mind if I kiss you?” His finger traced the line of her jaw.

Of course she minded. Sort of. She focused on his arm. “Hold still.”

He pulled her so close his breath kissed her cheek.

“If you can’t hold still, make yourself useful.” She shoved the tin of salve at him. “Open that.”

“Don’t you want me to kiss you?” His eyes twinkled but he took the tin from her ice-cold fingers.

Where was the serious, disapproving man who’d escorted her all over New Orleans?

Perhaps he was addled by blood loss. Perhaps this charm had hidden beneath the surface of his scowl all along and she’d failed to notice.

That was a lie. She’d noticed. How could she not?

He pulled her still closer and she stiffened.

“You act as if you’ve never been kissed.”

Not until his lips touched hers this morning. Christine averted her gaze.

Now he stiffened. “Oh.”

Could he read her so easily? Somehow, around him, fluttering her eyelashes and dipping her words in honey seemed silly. She’d let down her guard and let him see too much. Christine donned the smile she saved for cantankerous octogenarians and allowed her lashes a tiny flutter. “Why, Mr. Drake, I’m sure this is quite inappropriate.” She pulled against his hold.

Rather than let her go, he traced the edge of her smiling lips with the tip of his finger. Who knew the hint of a touch could send shock waves from her lips to her toes? She stood frozen—a spring fawn trapped in a gator hole.

If she was to be a fawn, she’d be a fawn with claws and teeth and maybe even a left hook. Mattias Drake had already seen too much. He wouldn’t see her fear. She opened her eyes and traced the tips of her fingers across his chest.

His sudden indrawn breath and the tensing of his muscles were quite gratifying.

Her finger drifted lower, through the hollow formed by pectorals hewn from warm granite.

He caught her wrist, stopping her fingers’ progress but freeing her to step backward. She stayed where she was.

“Why haven’t you been kissed?”

“I have a ghost as a permanent chaperone.” Why add that until she’d met him, she hadn’t wanted to kiss anyone? That information would just go to his head.

“Your father’s not here.”

“No.”

“So there’s nothing stopping me from kissing you?”

“No.” Her voice was barely a whisper. Where had the fawn with claws disappeared to?

His uninjured arm wrapped around her, pinning her against his magnificent chest. Then, slowly, he kissed her. First a mere brush against her bottom lip, then a teasing nibble at the corner of her mouth, and finally a flick of his tongue against the seam, as if he could taste her.

Perhaps he could. She’d swear on a stack of Bibles that he tasted of mint, clean and fresh and enticing.

Then his lips were pressed against hers. Firm. Perfect. Dizzying.

She melted—there was no other word to describe the softening of her bones—into his chest and sighed, a sound as soft as an evening breeze.

He must have heard her. His hold tightened and his tongue found its way between her lips and took hostage of her ability to even peep.

Her tongue met his. Warm. Velvety. Lush.

Could one drown in a kiss?

Tap, tap.
“Ms. Lambert, it’s Jep. I have your candy.”

Saved by pralines.

Their lips separated. How could the candy possibly be as good as Drake’s kisses? It couldn’t.

“Get rid of them.” Drake’s voice sounded rough, urgent.

Christine crossed to the door and opened it.

A boy thrust a neatly wrapped box of temptation into her hands. “Your pralines, Miss Lambert.”

Her gaze fell to the box, simple, unassuming, hiding untold delights. “Thank you.”

The child scampered off and she closed the door, turned and leaned against it.

“Come here.” Drake’s voice was every bit as tempting as the candy in her hands. More tempting. Certainly more demanding. “If you’ve never been kissed before, I want to do it properly.”

He’d done it properly. Her knees could hardly hold her. She looked at his face. The same harsh planes, the same light eyes, the same shock of hair neither blond nor brown, yet she saw him differently. The man who hid beneath Drake’s cool exterior was warm and charming and maddening. That man was far more dangerous to her than the icy Yankee she’d met only yesterday. She shook her head. “I can’t.”

He stood and the muscles across his abdomen rippled.

The muscles in her abdomen tightened. “I can’t,” she squeaked.

He stalked toward her. “Why not?”

She swallowed. “Must I have a reason? Isn’t
no
sufficient?” Drake would never force himself on her. That she knew with the same assurance she knew the sun rose in the east, summer was hot, and the river ran north to south.

His hand closed around her upper arm. “Why not?”

Because far more than her virtue was at stake. She couldn’t afford to lose herself in his kiss. “Please”—her gaze fell to where his hand circled her arm—“let me go.”

He released her. “I never figured you for a coward.”

There was a weakness that ran through the women in her family. A fatal flaw that made both her grandmother and mother put their hearts in the hands of men who valued their own pleasures more than love. Her heart would remain where it belonged, beating regularly in her chest. To surrender it to a Yankee with candy sweet kisses was a folly she refused to indulge. If that made her a coward, so be it.

She lifted her chin.

He laid a finger against her lips. “Don’t say it.”

She shifted her head so his finger lay against her cheek instead of her swollen lips. “Say what?”

He leaned toward her, his breath against her ear nearly as intimate as his kiss. “You’ve thought of all the reasons you shouldn’t come to my arms and you’re going to tell me no. I see it in your eyes. Don’t say it.”

There was just the one reason: she was terrified to the tip of her toes. “No.”

Her pocket pulsed. A buzz of electricity that startled her. Her hand slipped inside her skirt and found the coin. It pulsed its wishes. Not in words. Not even in images. She just knew what it wanted.

“Why not?”

She now had two reasons. Christine withdrew the bit of silver. “The coin. It wants us to go to out to the bayou and it wants us to go now.”

Chapter Eleven

Somehow Christine had transported them from the hotel to a carriage to the dubious comforts of a pirogue in less than an hour. Now they floated beneath cypress hung with Spanish moss. Drake felt unseen eyes watching them from the lily-choked verdure, perhaps from behind the worn shutters of the tiny shack that seemed precariously balanced on stilts, perhaps from the canopy of green, perhaps from the water itself.

It made sense that a swamp would be hot—a wet heat that invaded the lungs and sent rivulets of sweat down Drake’s back. The smell was a surprise. Decay, rot, and the growth of countless plants assaulted his nose with each breath.

If Christine was uncomfortable with the heat or the smell or the whine of insects small and large, she didn’t show it. She sat in front of him in the small boat, her back somehow straighter than a straight line.

He wanted her in a way that defied logic. Not that logic had so much as tiptoed across his mind at the hotel. The melting expression in her eyes, the taste of her kisses, and the touch of her fingers on his naked skin had chased rational thought clear to the Mason-Dixon Line, leaving him and his visceral needs poised on the edge of a cliff, willing to risk obliteration on the jagged rocks below. The blasted bellboy with the blasted candy had saved him. Saved them both. Drake should be grateful for the arrival of the pralines.

He wasn’t.

His body, ready as it was to meld with hers, objected. So too did his heart. That muscle had managed the impossible; it had seen Christine clearly. Seen past the woman who flirted and flitted and drawled. Seen the brave woman she kept hidden away like a dirty secret. It had even seen her fear.

Promises had rushed to his lips.
You can depend on me. I’ll never hurt you. I’ll treasure you forever.

Drake wiped a bead of sweat from his temple and scowled at her back. He had no room in his life for promises he couldn’t keep. Good thing he’d kept his lips firmly sealed.

“Veer left,” Christine told the man wielding the pole that propelled them through the water.

“Ain’t nothin’ good that way.”

It wasn’t as if going right would lead them to Nirvana. “Do as the lady says.”

The man, who smelled almost as rank as the swamp, mumbled something about funerals.

“Just do it.” Drake smacked at a mosquito.

Behind him, something splashed into the water. Drake turned but saw nothing except tree trunks, fallen leaves, looming branches, and venomous green. A bird called—squawked—and the sound echoed across the water, mixing with the songs of crickets and frogs. The world had turned primordial and he did not belong.

“Left again, Mr. Thibault.”

The man looked over his shoulder and scowled. “You know where you’re headed?”

Christine’s head bobbed. “I do.”

Thibault looked up at the canopy of green that hid the sky. “You ain’t got much time. I don’t aim to be out here with night comin’ on.”

“We’ll only be a minute or two.”

“Humph. See as you are. I ain’t waitin’.”

Thibault would abandon them to a night in the swamp? Drake’s jaw tightened and his gut flipped.

“There! Up ahead. Left again.” Christine pointed to a bit of land with a few trees.

That was their destination? Drake breathed a sigh of relief. It didn’t look so bad.

“You don’t want to go there, Miss Lambert.” Thibault stopped them in the water. “That there is home to Zeus.”

“Zeus?” asked Drake.

“The father of all alligators,” explained Thibault. He grinned, displaying a few missing teeth. “I ain’t never seen a gator so big…or so mean.”

So that’s why Christine had insisted on bringing a rifle with enough bore to drop an elephant. Of course she wanted to invade a giant prehistoric beast’s home at the behest of a bit of silver.

“Are you sure about this, Christine?” Drake asked.

She deigned to look over her shoulder at him. Her brow arched, her lips thinned, her head tilted. No other reply was needed.

Thibault maneuvered them closer.

The grass in one spot was beaten down as if the monster regularly slid from land to water on its belly.

“I say we touch ground as far from there as possible.”

Now both Christine and Thibault looked over their shoulders at him. Drake stared back. Sometimes the obvious needed to be stated.

Thibault poled them to the other side of the tiny island where a gentle slope allowed Christine to climb out of the boat and barely wet her boots. “We’ll be back in a few minutes, Mr. Thibault.”

Drake climbed out of the boat after her. He even took a few steps then glanced back at Thibault.

The man was sucking on his remaining teeth, his gaze locked on the sway of Christine’s backside as she pushed her way through the marsh grass.

Drake’s hands fisted. Knocking out the rest of Thibault’s teeth might relieve some of the tension tightening his shoulders and neck.

“Are you coming?” she called.

Drake could hardly let her brave the island alone. He leveled a narrowed gaze at Thibault. “You’ll be here when we get back?”

“She only paid me half. I get the rest when you get back.”

Christine Lambert was nobody’s fool. She didn’t trust anyone.

“Drake, are you coming?” Her voice sounded somehow sweeter in the humid air.

He hurried after her.

“Watch out for snakes.”

Snakes? Drake paused, momentarily frozen by the thought of serpents slithering through the tall grass. “What kind of snakes?”

Behind him, he heard Thibault chuckling at the Yankee who was afraid of snakes.

Christine didn’t seem to notice that fear had rendered his limbs useless. “My grandmother once told me there are more than forty different kinds of snakes in Louisiana. We only have to worry about the poisonous ones.”

Did she want him to stay rooted where he was? “How many kinds of poisonous snakes?”

She tramped on through the brush. “Seven.”

“Seven?” Drake croaked. He cleared his throat. “Seven?”

“Round here, we only need to worry about cottonmouths. Maybe…maybe a rattlesnake.”

“Oh.”

A growl rumbled across the small island.

“What’s that?”

She turned and looked at him, the arch of her brow almost amused. “Zeus. Are you coming?”

Drake drew a deep, dank breath into his lungs and followed her.

“There.” Christine pointed to a misshapen tree, its trunk split into a deep vee, its branches weighted with Spanish moss. On its bark clung a hairy spider the size of Drake’s palm.

With the back of her hand, she flicked the enormous arachnid into the brush.

Another growl, this one louder, vibrated through the brush.

“It’s in the vee.”

“Do you want me to…?” He’d rather hold his hand in flames than stick it into the tree’s hidden depths, but he’d be damned to hell before he let Christine take such a risk. He stepped forward.

“Wait.” She thrust the tip of the rifle into the depths of the cleft, hesitated, then said, “Stand back.”

She lifted the tip of the gun from the tree. An enormous black snake hung from the rifle. An enormous, black, hissing snake. The inside of its mouth was as white as cotton.

The growl that reached Drake’s ears didn’t rumble. It rent the late afternoon, silencing bullfrogs and crickets and birds. He tore his gaze away from the snake and turned.

A nightmare come to life lurked in the grass. Impossibly big, armored, with jaws long as Drake’s arm, the thing growling at them didn’t belong in the same century as a typewriter or a gramophone. It belonged in the distant past.

“Oh, dear.”

Oh, dear? She held a deadly snake not two feet from her body, a prehistoric predator was snapping its jaws within spitting distance, and her response was
oh, dear
? Drake pulled out his gun.

“If you shoot him with that you’ll just make him mad.”

“What do you suggest?” Sarcasm lengthened his vowels.

“Duck.” She whipped the gun through the air, sending the angry snake into the alligator’s open jaws. The beast snapped its teeth together and bits of snake fell from either side of its mouth. She leveled the rifle, aiming at the top of Zeus’s head. “Get the coin out of the tree.”

Another coin? They already had a coin and it had caused them nothing but trouble.

“Hurry.”

Drake put the thought of a second snake or a nest of enormous spiders clean out of his mind and thrust his hand into the depths of the vee. His fingers found a coin. One. He pulled it free. “Got it.”

Christine glanced over her shoulder and smiled at him.

That smile…men had launched wars over smiles like hers. He smiled back.

Zeus hissed.

“Let’s get back to the boat.” She backed away from Zeus.

The alligator growled but didn’t follow.

Drake backed with her.

“He’s impressive, isn’t he?” she asked.

“Impressive?” Not the word he would have chosen. They put several more feet between themselves and Zeus.

The beast watched them, apparently content with the bit of snake he’d devoured and not interested in pursuing a woman with a four bore rifle pointed at its head.

“Do you want me to hold that?” The gun was too heavy for anyone to aim for long.

She nodded. “He’s just protecting his home. Don’t kill him.”

“Not unless he comes after us.” He took the gun, thrust Christine behind him, and together they retreated farther from the prehistoric monster whose life somehow mattered to Christine.

The grasses closed around them and Zeus was lost from sight. The deep croak of bullfrogs and the crickets’ songs replaced his growls. They’d done it. They’d found an island in the middle of a swamp, then found a coin, and now they were going to escape with their lives. Drake allowed himself a small smile then he heard it—the hammer of a gun and Christine’s sudden, shocked intake of breath.

“Lower that gun, Yankee.”

Drake allowed the gun’s muzzle to rest on the ground before he turned.

Thibault had the muzzle of a .22 pressed under Christine’s jaw. His free hand circled her upper arm.

“What did you find out there?” he asked.

“Nothing. We found nothing.” Christine’s voice was clipped, its usual honey replaced by vinegar.

Thibault drew the muzzle along the line of her jaw. “It ain’t nice to lie.”

“Does it look like we’re hauling a treasure chest back to your boat?”

“That’s too bad. All the way out here for nothin’.”

Nothing but a cursed coin. “Let her go.”

“Why would I want to do that, Yankee?” Thibault pulled Christine toward the boat. “I reckon this lady and I are goin’ to be friends. Real close friends.”

“Who sent you?”

For a brief second Thibault looked confused. “Sent me? Ain’t nobody sent me.”

Drake believed him. The man was an opportunist who’d grabbed the chance to possess Christine. He’d probably take her to some God-forsaken cabin in the swamp and rape her until he grew tired of her.

“Just take us back to the city.” Christine twisted in Thibault’s grasp. “I’ll double your fee.”

The bastard pulled a lock of Christine’s hair free of its chignon, smelled it, then grinned. “There’s some things in this world that are worth more than money.”

For an instant the swamp’s green was bathed in a red haze and the crickets and frogs and creepy-crawly things’ songs were drowned out by the roar in Drake’s ears. Drake wanted nothing more than to rush Thibault, knock him down, then drag him to the water’s edge and hold him under until his lungs filled with fetid water. Christine would not approve of that plan. She didn’t kill things. Hell, he’d bet the damned coin in his pocket that she’d tossed the snake into the alligator’s mouth by accident.

Drake drew a slow, heavy breath. The flora returned to its usual shade. The fauna resumed its singing. She had a plan. She always had a plan.

If Christine had a plan, she’d better implement it soon. If she didn’t, the least she could do was stomp on the bastard’s instep. He dragged her closer to the water. Didn’t she realize Drake couldn’t help her once Thibault got her on his boat? Couldn’t she resist a little more?

“Mr. Thibault, people knew we were coming. They’ll look for us.”

Thibault laughed, a creaky sort of guffaw. “People go missing in the swamp all the time.”

Christine glanced at the boat, then the water. Her eyes widened and she shifted her gaze to Drake. Her meaning was clear.
Wait.
Thibault pulled her again. Hardly any land remained and when she stopped resisting, Thibault stepped into the water. Not a shallow step either. Water rose mid-thigh. His hold on Christine’s arm slid to her wrist but his gun remained pointed at her head

“If you think for one minute I’m going to ruin my skirts by getting in that water you’re plumb crazy.” The honey had returned to her voice with a vengeance. Then she offered Thibault a shaky smile.

The man looked as confused as Drake felt. What was she up to?

“Walk toward the boat.” Thibault took a step toward the pirogue and sank to his upper thighs.

Drake raised the muzzle of the rifle out of the grass.

“That gun might stop a gator in its tracks but the aim ain’t the best. You’re just as likely to hit her as me.” Thibault’s eyes were narrowed and mean.

Christine shifted her gaze from the water to Drake. “Don’t.”

Thibault took another step and Christine stumbled. Drake had a clear shot. He aimed and Thibault screamed.

The scream echoed off the canopy, sending birds careening into the air and ice down Drake’s spine.