BLUE BAYOU ~ Book I (historical): Fleur de Lis (26 page)

Her hands rubbed against each other. To conceal her agitation, she lightly fingered the stag’s antlers. “We both know that my marriage to François has only brought pain to everyone. It was the wrong thing to do at the time, but it seemed the only solution.”

Nicolas said nothing. The little girl had fallen asleep, and he rose and took her into the next room to lay her on the bed. Natalie browsed about the room, trying to think of a way to phrase what she really meant to say.

“You can’t change past mistakes, Natalie.”

Startled by his voice, she looked behind her. He stood with a shoulder braced against the doorjamb, watching her.

Her fingers deserted the antlers, wandered past the powder horn and bullet pouch suspended from a peg, then traced the tattered binding on a copy of Ovid. She lowered her voice to little more than a whisper. “If I could make something good come out of all the terrible things that have happened . . .”

She whirled on him. Now the words spilled out of her mouth. “I know it sounds insane, Nicolas, but I have this desperate notion that the redemption of
François’s bastard daughter, a slave at that will somehow be my own redemption. By purchasing Quin-Quin from St. Denis and obtaining her manumission, I might somehow be purchasing my own way back to my former life.”

He shoved off the oak door frame and crossed the room in two strides to catch her shoulder
s. He shook her with rough impatience. Her head bobbled, and her mirror necklace bounced against the hollow of her throat. His eyes were slits of anger that burned fear into her. “You’re still thinking of yourself! Going back— leaving François. Damn it, Natalie, you’ve married him! For life!”

“And what if”—her teeth rattled with the shaking— “if I was still legally married to someone else when I married
François?” she blurted out.

The shaking stopped, but his powerful fingers dug into her shoulders. “My God, what kind of woman are you?” he said between clenched teeth.

His contempt knifed through her. “You do what you have to do at the moment! I had to survive—you had to kill your father.”

His breath hissed in. “There’s nothing you wouldn’t stoop to, is there?”

“And you?” she countered. Tears blurred her eyes. She saw only the grim scythe of his mouth. “Are you so virtuous? Do you lie to yourself, Nicolas, denying that you want me? Do you run from yourself and run from the truth? That you love your best friend’s wife?”

“I could want a trading-post whore,” he gritted, “but that doesn’t mean I could love her.”

She slapped him. Sudden silence sizzled the air in the room. Aghast, she stared at the white imprint that gradually mottled his swarthy skin. Her mouth opened to form some sort of apology, but his hands fastened around her upper arms. He jerked her against him, and she whimpered in anticipation of unidentified fear. His mouth silenced her outcry. Like those days of starving in La Salpêtriére, her lips opened hungrily against his. She pressed against his length, seeking his essence, seeking the source of his power, seeking recognition of a mutual need in him.

His tongue invaded her mouth, striking little sparks in the core of her. Her arms wrapped about his neck, and her tongue invited him farther.
Bon Dieu
, she couldn’t help herself. She loved Nicolas Brissac like she had never loved another man. She loved him as a fully enhanced woman, not as the child-woman who had married Philippe.

“God, yes, I want you,” he murmured against her feverish lips. “I want to do all the things to you that a man does to a woman.” His mouth stroked the hollow of her neck. At the touch of his lips on the bare flesh where one breast burgeoned, her entire frame trembled with the yearning that rippled through her. “I’ve loved you .
. . all these years.”

Her head lolled to one side, allowing his lips access to that forbidden part. Instead she felt only the slip of air over her skin as he set her from him.

She looked up into his face for a clue and saw the self-disgust she had glimpsed there several times before. She was sickened by what she had allowed to happen. Before, her love for Nicolas had been her own secret. Now, not only was it exposed, but it had been made to appear cheap.

Her regret at her weakness thundered in her ears, drowning out everything . . . drowning out the creak of the cabin’s door swinging open on its taut leather hinges.

François’s
glazed pupils slid from his friend to his wife. What he saw . . . it could be misconstrued. Nicolas’s big hands clasped Natalie’s shoulders. The dress’s neckline looked askew. François wasn’t certain if it was passion that ignited their expressions or anger.

He braced his weight on his good leg and closed the door behind him. His free hand held a corked bottle, a quarter full. The rich brandy he had consumed to blot out Jasmine’s torture had not helped his equilibrium. The slave woman had loved him, really loved him, which was certainly more than he could say for his dear wife.

“I drove over to talk about old times, Nicolas.” He tried to make out what lay behind the sudden screen that dropped over the half-breed’s eyes. He felt sprouting in his guts an ugly suspicion that had lain dormant in his mind since the day Nicolas returned with the bride he himself had arranged for. “It looks like you’re already busy talking about old times.”

Natalie ignored his sarcastic innuendo. “I saw the execution today,
François.” She moved to put distance between herself and Nicolas. In the candle’s faint light, her hair sparkled like
louis d'ors
. God, but she was beautiful! “I saw Jasmine lashed on the whipping horse.”

François
glanced at Nicolas for a hint as to what was on Natalie’s mind, but his partner had turned his back to kneel at the hearth and stir the embers. François knew that Natalie had been aware of his affaires all this time. He had wanted her to hurt like he hurt for her. If she had made a scene, cried or begged or gotten angry, she would have been in a class with other women. That he could deal with. Maybe, just maybe, he could have made her . . . Hell, he was getting maudlin.

He said bluntly, “Jasmine died about half an hour ago.” Natalie bowed her head for a brief second, then looked him directly in the eye. “I brought
her child here—your child, François.”

Anger stirred his liquor-steep
ed blood. “You are never to meddle in my business!”

“Don’t you mean meddle in your affaires?”

His gaze went from her to Nicolas, who had risen to stand beside Natalie. François wasn’t certain if it was a protective gesture or not, but the mere action riled him. “We’re going home.”

“Your daughter goes with us,” she said defiantly.

Frustration knotted in him. “Why?”

“Because,” she said in an empty voice, “the child may be the only hope left to bond us.”

The preposterous statement staggered him. His mistress’s child, a slave child, bonding them. He almost laughed, but the laughter turned to a sneer. “Do you think a child will bring me to perform my husbandly duties—which you could not inspire?”

Natalie blanched.

Nicolas said, “The child is asleep. Leave her for the night.”

Damn Nicolas and his logic and wisdom and—damned complacency with the world! As for his own self, his life was spinning dangerously out of control. He shrugged and limped to the door. “Are you coming?” He tossed the question carelessly over his shoulder to Natalie.

The ride back into Natchitoches was tensely silent, with only the rumble of the caleche’s great wooden wheels and the chorus of bullfrogs to rile thoughts that were already highly agitated. Initially, Natalie’s interference had infuriated him, but once more the insidious serpent of suspicion slithered through him. Had Nicolas and Natalie been carrying on their own affair the entire time? His mind flashed back over the years, sorting out images of them. Those interchanging glances he had intercepted—had they held nuances he had missed?

He pitched the empty bottle out into the night, immediately wishing he had another. The brandy might blot out the image of their bodies entwined, an image that tortured him, spinning through his brain in tempo with the carriage’s wheels over and over. By the time they reached Natchitoches, the settlement’s lights had been snuffed—and his su
spicions had magnified. An instant’s cold sobriety flashed through the darkness. Had he been cuckolded? There was only one way to find out.

As if sensing his suddenly resolved purpose, his wife seemed to flee up the stairs to the galle
ry and down the hall to her bedroom. Her pale blue dimity skirts swished like the tail of a Thoroughbred in heat. Promising. He trailed after her. His wooden leg thudded on each stair, declaring his intent. When he opened the door, she spun around to face him. Her arms were lifted to remove the combs in her hair. The position provocatively thrust her breasts taut against the blue-striped organdy bodice. Something in his face must have given him away. Slowly, her arms lowered to cross protectively before her.

“What do you want?”

He unbuttoned his vest. “To consummate our marriage, Natalie.”

The cornered look of the animals that Nicolas trapped edged into the silver center of her green eyes. She had no excuse. She was his wife. With a boundless sense of satisfaction, he felt himself harden, thrusting against his breeches as her breasts did her
bodice.

“Why now,
François?”

His smiled wryly, even as his fingers worked at his cravat. “The obvious. Because I was unable to before.”

“With me, yes,” she countered, her voice huskier than usual. “But not with every other female in the Louisiana territory.”

He started toward her, discarding his shirt on the settee. He reached out and fingered one of her wispy side curls. “All that has changed.”

She turned her head away. “I’ve changed. I’m not the same woman you married. Whatever love I might have had for you, you destroyed with your whoring.”

He brushed her gardenia-white cheek with the back of his fingers. Her sharply indrawn breath pleased him enormously, even excited him. “I’m not asking for your love or affection.” His hand dipped down between her b
reasts and located one taut nipple. “I want
foutre
, my dear.”

Her head swiveled around at the obscene word. “No!”

“You’re my wife, remember?” With that, he ripped the bodice down the front, and her breasts spilled out over the camisole. Her hands fought him, and she tried to shove him off balance, but he was larger and forced her backward to the bed. His free hand opened his breeches. Never, with even the most practiced whores, had he felt the excitement bursting in his groin as he did now.

Natalie tried to scramble across the bed, but he caught one hose-encased calf and dragged her back. She kicked out at him, and her fingers arched out to claw his face. He dodged and then leveled himself atop her. His hands thrust her skirts over her hips. “Not like this!” she begged.

“It’s the only way.”

He knew that now. His hands anchored her hips to the mattress. He used the space between her thrashing thighs as a channel to guide his thrusting organ up into her. At his entry, she arched off the bed with a strangulated gasp. Otherwise, there had been no obstruction, no maidenhead to pierce. Only her surprise and outrage. With that knowledge, his own rage mounted. He plunged into her time after time, and then came too quickly. With a muffled groan, he fell across her.

“You’ve had what you came for,” she hissed, pushing ineffectually at him. “Now get out!”

He raised up off her, his arms enclosing her at either side. Her unbound hair, meshed over the tap
estried cover, framed her dead-white face. A great sadness welled in his soul. “No, I found out what I wanted to know.”

He shoved away from her an
d rebuttoned his breeches. Something in his expression must have warned her. She struggled from the bed. Pushing mindlessly at her skirts, she followed him to the door. “Where are you going?” she asked in consternation.

He retrieved his sword and started down the stairs. Whatever
sadness he had initially felt was rapidly being diluted by his anger. He had been betrayed. He ignored Natalie’s anxious questions and stalked from the house. He might have been unfaithful to Natalie, but he had never tried to dupe her or to skulk around behind her back. Yet she and Nicolas had done just that. Nicolas, his partner, his best friend.

He would kill the bastard.

Nicolas, his partner, his best friend.

The catchphrases chased each other round and round in his rage-smoked mind as the caleche’s gray picked its way through the deep night. The fresh bottle of rum
François gulped from periodically only intensified his seething hatred. Shakespeare was wrong, he fumed. There was no fury like a man cuckolded.

He should have known that that half-breed’s sixth sense would have alerted him to a trespasser’s approach.
François, silhouetted by the moonlight, descended from the caleche and stalked toward the cabin door. Nicolas waited just inside in the shadows. Just like the half-breed had always done—waited in the shadows, waited to take his place in Natalie’s bed!

François
stepped into the darkened room and drew his sword. He could just barely make out Nicolas’s eyes. “I’ve come to kill you,
mon ami
.”

Nicolas’s voice held the calm and patience of a priest. “You want to tell me why first?”

“
Merde
! Do you and Natalie take me for an absolute idiot?”

In the silence, he wasn’t certain what Nicolas was doing. He heard movement, that was all. He didn’t trust the son of a whore.

“You’re wrong.” Nicolas’s voice came from a different part of the room.

François
spun toward it. He squinted, trying to focus on the differentiating shades of black.

“Nothing has happened between Natalie and me,
François.”

“Liar!” He moved toward the shadowy figure. “I’ve known all along.”

The figure evaporated, and François swung around. He cursed the wooden leg that gave his position away while Nicolas moved silently, stealthily. If he couldn’t conceal himself, then he would distract Nicolas, his enemy.

“Don’t you think I’ve seen the way you two look at each other, touch each other?” His sword scythed the air. It made no contact,
but he heard Nicolas, dodging from its path, bump against something.

“I tell you,
François, you’re wrong.” This time Nicolas’s deep voice came from François’s right.

François’s
sharp blade cleaved the darkness. Nothing. “Am I wrong about the bloodless sheet tonight?” He swung with both arms.
Whoosh. Whoosh
. Emptiness. The damned half-breed had the advantage in that he saw better in the dark.

“You’re wrong about everything. Go home. We’ll talk about this tomorrow when you’re sober.”

“Oh, but you’re wily,
mon ami
." Where the hell was the bastard? Keep him talking. “While I was away, did you hang your bloodied sheet out for all to witness the defloration? You assume too much,
mon ami
. The privileges of the proxy over that of the husband, eh?”

“The proxy marriage was your idea,
François, when you hurt your leg.”

“Perhaps I didn’t have to lose my leg.” Even as he said it, the suspicion became certain knowledge. Nicolas and Natalie had conspired against him from the first. Take his manhood, and what was left?

“You know that’s asinine, François! You would have died if we hadn’t amputated.”

François’s
smile was lethal. He stabbed at the traitorous voice. The sharp blade sheared an unobstructed arc. “Goddamn you to hell, Nicolas!” he cried.

He hacked again and again at the unseen enemy and found each time only a void. Sweat and tears mingled in his eyes. “Damn you, Nicolas,” he said, weeping, “can’t you fight like a gentleman instead of a
sauvage
?”

Suddenly, Nicolas’s arm locked about his throat.
François’s free hand clawed at the constriction. “Bastard!” he wheezed.

“Drop the sword,
François.”

He
felt the vital air seeping from pores. He had to strike now! Wrenching his wrist, he raised the sword and drove backward and downward with it.