Prisoner of Desire (6 page)

Anya raised a trembling hand to her mouth. “He isn’t dead? You haven’t killed him?”

“Seeing what he was up to, we mighta hit him a bit hard,” Elijah admitted in a base rumble.

Samson grunted agreement. “It’ll be better for the long ride.”

“But he’s bleeding so.”

“Scalp cuts always bleed. We’ll take his shirt off for bandages. If you’ll hold the door, mam’zelle, we’ll git him inside the carriage before somebody gits curious.”

“Yes,” she said on a sudden shuddering sigh as she looked around with the bemusement fading from her eyes. “Yes.”

With more speed than care, they bundled Ravel Duralde into the landau. Anya climbed in and slammed the door. The vehicle jerked into motion, so that she was thrown across her prisoner as he lay on the seat. In the brief moment she rested upon him, she felt the lean and hard masculinity of his body. Hurriedly, she pushed off of him and knelt at his side. She slipped her hand under his head to test the extent of his wounds, and the warm wet feel of the blood in his hair sent sick remorse flooding through her.

She had been criminally overconfident. She should have known it would be no easy thing to kidnap a man and hold him prisoner. Her plan had been simple. She would distract Ravel for an instant, allowing Samson and Elijah to stun him with a blow from behind. They would bind his hands and feet if need be, put him in the carriage, and the deed would be done.

It had worked. And yet there was little pleasure for Anya in the fact. As they set out for what looked to be a nightmare journey to Beau Refuge, Anya could only castigate herself for her failure to take into consideration the things that could go wrong.

Samson, riding inside with Anya while Elijah sat on top with the driver, helped her strip the cape and frock coat from Ravel. With fingers that had an annoying tendency to tremble, Anya removed his cravat and slipped free the studs of his shirt, then held his inert figure to her in the rocking vehicle while Samson dragged his shirt down his arms. By the time they had torn the garment into bandaging, Ravel’s blood had stained not only the leather seats, but her cloak and the front of her Indian costume. The wounds were bleeding so copiously that she had ordered the carriage stopped within a block or two in order for Elijah to light the carriage lanterns once more, as their bright glow was needed in order to see to dress them. Finally, with Ravel Duralde’s head in her lap to cushion his injuries, they drove on into the night.

He lay so still and lifeless; his weight was so heavily inert upon her thighs. Beneath the bronze of his skin his face was pale. It was a strong face, she discovered, with a broad forehead, thick, dark brows, and high cheekbones that sloped into lean cheeks. His eyes, set deep in their sockets, were thickly lashed. His mouth was firm, with sensual curves, chiseled edges, and small, sickle-shaped smile lines at the corners that served to soften the severity of his features. His chin was square, and smoothly shaven, though with a faint blue-black shadow under the skin. His hair, where it was not covered by the thick bandage, was close-cut to prevent its thick waves from becoming curls, though it still made whorls behind his ears and on the nape of his neck, and fell onto his forehead in a short crisp curl.

What if she had killed him? It did not seem possible that a man so forceful and virile could die so easily, and yet there were few injuries more serious than those to the head. She should not care, still as much as she might despise him, she did not want to be the cause of his death.

Reaching under his cape, which they had wrapped around him, she placed her hand over his heart. It beat with strong regularity against her palm, giving her some reassurance. His skin was warm and supple, covered by a triangular mat of soft hair that was faintly abrasive to her fingertips. Beneath it she could feel the bands of muscle that wrapped his rib cage. Her touch lingered upon them. Involuntarily, she smoothed her palm in a slight, circular motion. The tip of her forefinger touched one of his small, flat paps. She jerked her hand back as if she had been burned, and in the dimness a flush mounted from her toes to her hairline. She felt as guilty as if she had been caught out in some act of promiscuity. It was long moments before she could convince herself that the impulse that had made her stroke him had been a simple desire to soothe that she might feel toward any injured person, longer still before she could relax again.

The carriage jolted and bounced on its springs. Time and again Anya was forced to catch her prisoner close, to reach across his wide shoulders and clasp him in her arms to prevent him from being thrown to the floor. His long legs sprawled across the seat, one of them bent at the knee and banging against the far door, the other stretched between the seats. She was wedged into the corner, hardly able to move. She grew stiff, and her back and arms ached from trying to hold him. All feeling left her thigh on which his head lay.

She looked across at Samson. His head was back and he was snoring none too gently. It was as if she were alone with Ravel Duralde; his life was in her hands. It was not a responsibility she wanted. She had brought it on herself, however, and could not avoid it.

If he died, it would be her fault. She would stand condemned for murder. There would be little she could say to escape prosecution; she would be lucky if she were able to prevent Samson and Elijah from being hanged. To have the deaths of three men on her hands would be a devastating thing. Rather than live with that knowledge the rest of her life, it might be better to pay the ultimate penalty herself.

Suppose someone had seen them. Suppose someone had recognized the carriage, or perhaps had identified Samson and Elijah. The size and strength of the two men made them memorable; she should have thought of that. Even now, the police pursuit might be forming, coming after them. They might be overtaken on the road with Ravel lying lifeless and covered in gore in her lap. The whole story would come out.

Anya had been careless of the opinions of others, even rather wild on occasion, but she had never been involved in anything truly scandalous. If it should happen now, with Ravel Duralde, the furor would be great. This was not something that Madame Rosa could explain away to her friends as being the result of youth or grief. Her stepmother would be devastated, and Celestine too ashamed to show her face. Murray would be a laughingstock if it became known that his future sister-in-law had prevented his opponent from keeping their appointment on the field of honor.

No. She must not think such things. Things were bad enough in all truth, but not that bad. She had her prisoner. She was on her way with him to Beau Refuge. She had only to hold him for a little more than twenty-four hours, then everything would be as it was before.

She looked down once more at the still figure in her lap. She had never been this close to a man before, not for this length of time. Her father had loved her dearly, but had never been a demonstrative man. Jean, the perfect gentleman, had seldom touched her for longer than it took to help her down from her mount or carriage. He had sometimes given her swift hugs for the pleasure of it, or to comfort her, but had always released her at once. She never knew if he was afraid he would hurt or frighten her, if it was himself he feared, or if possibly it was the dictates of convention that restrained him.

It was also true that no man had kissed her as had Ravel. Jean’s caresses had been brief, almost reverential, filled with warm and boundless affection but little passion. They had involved only the quick pressure of his mouth on her cheek or lips; never had they gone deeper. She had thought them satisfactory, even exciting, until tonight.

The relationship of one human being to another was curious. She disliked this man, even hated him; she despised everything he stood for, everything he was. Still, because both she and Ravel had been special to Jean, because Ravel had sought her out tonight, and later taken it into his head to chastise her with a kiss; because she had injured him and made him her captive, and because they shared this long midnight ride, there was a peculiar bond between them. It was disturbing to realize it, and she would have repudiated it if she could. Still she could not help wondering if Ravel would feel it when he woke, or, feeling it, if he would acknowledge it.

The wind, steadily rising, rocked the carriage and whipped the branches of the trees overhead. It seeped in through the cracks around the doors and windows, bringing with it a taste of rain. Thunder rumbled far away, a growling, ominous sound. Onward the carriage rolled.

At a point nearly halfway to the plantation, they stopped to rest and water the horses at a low tavern. There was no one on duty except an old black man, who drew water from a well to fill the horse trough, then brought out a glass of sour wine for Anya and mugs of weakly fermented sugarcane juice for the three men with her. To keep the tavern servant from coming too close, Samson served Anya. Even so, she kept Ravel covered with the carriage blanket. When the man went away, she tried to pour a little of the wine down Ravel, but it ran from the corner of his mouth.

Lightning was flashing in white brilliance before they were ready to travel once more. There was no question of putting up for the night, not with their prisoner, though the elderly servant did his best to persuade them. “You going to be soaked,” he told the men on the box, shaking his grizzled head.

They knew it, but there was no help for it. Pleading urgent business, they set out once more. The rain began to fall before they had gone three miles. It began as fat, heavy drops, changing quickly into a torrent that swept toward them in wind-chased sheets. It drummed on the carriage roof and slapped against the windows. It chased in distorting rivulets down the glass, obscuring all vision. It channeled in runnels along the road, splashing as the wheels rolled through it. Behind it came a cold wind to add to the misery. Their pace slowed to a crawl. The coachman, Solon, had traveled that road countless times since he was first set up on a carriage box as a groom, and so followed the winding road by instinct and the faint gleams of the lanterns. Waterlogged, hunched against the chill, enduring, they crept on through the night.

The dawn was watery and overcast. Light rain still pecked relentlessly against the carriage roof, falling with heavier splat-ting sounds as the vehicle passed under the limbs of the evergreen live oaks. Suddenly from the box above, Anya heard a rich and bitter cursing. Samson woke from his second nap of the night. Her eyes wide and her heart beating heavily in her chest, she nodded to him to find out the trouble. He opened the small front glass, calling out, “What’s the matter?”

It was Elijah who answered, his tones thick with disgust. “Back there when we went under that last oak, there was a big ol’ hoot owl going to roost that used us fo’ his privy. Wasn’t a nice thing for him to do!”

Samson roared with laughter. Anya bit her lips, trying not to grin. It was such an anticlimax compared to her fears that she could not prevent the rise of amusement, though she knew it was not funny to the men on the box. There was still the trace of a smile on her lips when, a few yards further on, the carriage turned into the drive of Beau Refuge.

3

BEAU REFUGE WAS BUILT IN THE Creole style, one developed in the warm climate of the West Indies, with its windstorms and driving rains. Two stories high, with an attic lighted by dormers, it had a hipped roof that spread in wide overhanging eaves to cover the galleries on both front and back. The lower floor was constructed of bricks that had been coated with plaster to protect the soft clay from which they were made. Whitewashed cypress was the material of the upper floor. Brick pillars supported the gallery floors, with graceful turned colonnettes, connected by a sturdy railing, reaching from the pillars to the roof. Set back beneath the gnarled and moss-hung branches of live oaks that had been old when the first Frenchman settled in the Mississippi Valley, the house gleamed ghostly pale in the first light of dawn.

Anya directed the carriage first to the main house. Samson got down and rang the bell. When the housekeeper, Denise, who lived in dormer rooms with her son Marcel, came to the door, Anya alighted and went inside. A short time later, she emerged with a ring of keys. Climbing back into the carriage, she directed the driver toward the outbuildings to the rear of the main house.

They rolled past the carriage house and stables, then turned down a snaking roadway that was also lined with live oaks. On either side among the ancient trees were the smokehouse and cooperage and blacksmith shed, the barns and chicken houses, the great plantation bell on its stand before the small church and nearby dispensary, and the slave cabins, where smoke was beginning to rise from the chimneys into the cool and misty morning air. At the end of the road was the cotton gin.