Authors: Shirl Henke
Mercedes’ fingers dug into his shoulders, kneading his hard flexing muscles, then pushing the loose satin robe from his chest. His mouth skimmed along her collarbone, then dipped lower to nuzzle the cleft between her breasts, which had grown large and heavy in the latter stages of pregnancy. She pressed her hands into the hair on his chest and let her fingers comb through it, loving the way his heart slammed against her palm.
She purred as his lips moved back up her throat and his tongue stroked around the edges of her ear, then she nuzzled him, snuggling her face against his heaving chest, teasing one flat nipple with her tongue until he groaned out an oath of endearment.
Nicholas slid her gown from her shoulders, murmuring, “It's lovely, but you're lovelier.” Beneath the robe her night rail was a pristine white flowing batiste with a rounded neckline that clung to her full breasts. He slipped the buttons with deft fingers, then freed one pale milky globe, cupping it reverently in his palm. His mouth quickly followed, taking the nipple and drawing on it until she keened out her pleasure.
At once he withdrew the other breast and did the same to it. Mercedes could not have imagined the heightened sensitivity of her breasts during pregnancy. She gasped, then closed her eyes in bliss as he worked his exquisite magic. Her hands pulled at his robe, shoving it off his shoulders until he slipped the belt and shrugged it off. Beneath it he was naked. His body gave off a feral heat that made hers answer in kind as an aching wetness grew between her thighs.
But when he began to pull the voluminous gown up and slip it off of her, she seized his hands, stilling them. “Wait.” Her voice held a husky plea.
Nicholas stopped, looking at her with a question in his eyes, his hands gentling as he whispered, “I never thought...is it all right to love you?” She was so frail and delicate looking, unlike the hardy
soldaderas
he had known. “Might I harm you?”
She shook her head. “No. Angelina explained all about what was happening to my body. I'm fine. Making love can't harm the child.”
“Then what's wrong?”
“It's me...I've grown the past months since we were last together.”
He chuckled appreciatively. “I can see that,” he murmured, cupping her magnificent breasts and letting his thumbs circle the upthrust nipples that begged for his mouth to suckle them.
“But I'm fat. My belly—”
“Holds my child,” he said earnestly as one hand moved lower to cradle the swelling through the bunched-up cloth of her night rail. “I can feel the life inside you—a life I put there. How could it not be beautiful to me? How could you not be beautiful? I want to see you this way, my love, to feel my child kick, to hold you both, to worship you with my body.”
“Then how could I not agree?” she whispered raggedly, letting his seeking hands lift the gown up over her head and toss it fluttering to the floor beside the bed.
“Lie back,” he commanded, pressing her to recline among the pillows on the big bed. Reverently his hands traced the trail which his eyes blazed, from her flushed face down her throat to her breasts. He cupped them and suckled them gently, then raised his head and let his hands move along the curve of her hips and across the swell of her belly, now fully rounded in the last months of her pregnancy.
A fleeting stab of fear touched his mind as he realized how slender she was and how great the burden she carried. Would the birth go all right? But then the baby seemed to provide the answer, kicking against his palm.
Mercedes watched as a broad smile spread across his face and he pressed his ear to her navel, listening. “He's a little hellion already,” she murmured.
His hands massaged the taut skin of her abdomen and he looked up at her and said, “How do you know
he
isn't a
she
?”
“Only time will tell for certain, but I do have an intuition,” she replied, once more closing her eyes as he began to trail kisses around her navel and back up to her breasts.
One of his hands moved lower and found the soft wet heat between her thighs as she reached for his rock-hard staff that was prodding insistently against her hipbone.
Nicholas groaned as she stroked him. She whispered, “Please, my love, now.”
He would not take her from on top, fearing he'd put too much pressure on her belly, but Nicholas Fortune was a man with an infinite sense of invention. Gently he rolled onto his side and positioned her with her legs raised, giving him access to penetrate deep inside the scalding heat of her body.
Mercedes arched up to receive him, wriggling her hips until his cries blended with her own, urging him to move harder and faster.
But he would not be hurried. Sweat beaded his forehead as he held himself under careful restraint, slowly sliding deep within her, then withdrawing in a gliding dance of such mind-robbing pleasure that they both gasped for breath.
Her hands clutched at him, one kneading his chest while the other dug into his hip, pulling him deeper inside her. Then, with a sudden animal ecstasy that took her utterly by surprise, the culmination began, like the shock wave of a great earthquake rippling through her body as she cried out, “Nicholas, Nicholas.”
Even sweeter than the hot gripping contractions of her sheath, the sound of his name on her lips drove him over the edge to join her in the maelstrom of fulfillment. Nicholas Fortune had waited all his life for this moment. For this woman and the promise of their life together. He spilled himself deeply against her already-filled womb, knowing that this was the first but not the last child they would create together.
Slowly, reality reclaimed them. Insects droned softly outside the cheesecloth netting around the big bed. In the distance a coyote bayed at the moon and called to its mate.
One of Nicholas’ prize mares whickered softly from the corrals and Peltre answered her.
“Life is good, so much better than I could ever have imagined before I met you,” he said as he rolled onto his back and pulled her into his embrace.
Mercedes cradled his head against her breast and stroked his curly black hair. “Tell me about Lottie Fortune's boy,” she whispered, kissing the errant lock of hair that fell across his forehead, making him seem like a youth once more. She wanted to know all of the tragedy and the triumph of his childhood in a foreign land, all the things that had formed him into the remarkable man she loved.
“I was born in a bordello in New Orleans. A very high-class establishment, according to Lottie. Her real name wasn't Fortune, it was Benson, before she ran away from her father to the wicked city where she survived as many beautiful women do. She became a rich man's mistress.”
“Anselmo's,” she answered, stroking his cheek softly.
“For a while, until he tired of her—or was summoned home to Gran Sangre to wed Sofia Obregón. I don't know which.”
“Then he never knew about you.” She was not excusing Anselmo's behavior. He would probably not have acknowledged Nicholas even if he had known.
He shrugged. “I'm not certain about that either, only that she lost her patron and was forced to find others to survive. Even selling her body was better than being with Hezekiah,” he said with loathing.
She could feel him shudder at the ugly memory and her heart ached for him.
“I'm glad you told me about Don Bartólome. Now I have one grandfather I can be proud of. Hezekiah Benson was the spawn of Satan. Ironic, that was what he called me when she finally sent me back to live with him on that miserable hardscrabble farm.”
“How could a mother give up her own child?” she said aloud before she realized it.
“At the time I wondered, too, but as I grew older, I think I understood. Her looks were fading from too much alcohol and the sort of life she led. She was on a downward spiral and knew it. I guess she figured a kid wouldn't last long on the streets in the neighborhoods we were inhabiting by that time. Or maybe she just wanted to get rid of me. Hell, I don't know. All I do know is life with Pap was pure hell.”
“Pap?” she echoed.
“My grandpappy Benson was a farmer—or at least that was what he called himself, but he hardly ever tended his crops. That's what he had me for. Couldn't afford slaves so I chopped cotton. And had the skin beaten off my back when I didn't work to suit him. He wanted to be a preacher. Read the Bible every day—especially the parts about ungrateful children and the whore of Babylon.”
“Your mother.”
“My mother. He drove her away, then cursed her for leaving. When he wasn't spouting chapter and verse, he was drinking. Made him even meaner than when he was sober and that was plenty mean, believe me.”
“He punished you for what he thought were Lottie's sins.”
“He punished me for being born,” he replied grimly.
Tears clogged her throat and trickled down her cheeks as she pictured Nicholas as a small boy with black curly hair, looking for all the world like a replica of his haughty Castillian father, a constant reminder to Hezekiah Benson of his daughter's sin.
“I took it for as long as I could, until I got big enough to fight back. By the time I was fourteen, I was as tall as him, but he was bull strong and sneaky mean. We had a few really nasty fistfights. I realized if I stayed, I'd end up just like him—or kill him.”
“So you ran,” she supplied.
“Back to New Orleans. Looking for my mother. Dumb, huh? She was dead and gone by then, so I took a job in one of the bordellos, emptying the slops and doing any other work too filthy for the adults. I filled out quick after that.
“By the time I was sixteen, Pearly made me a bouncer. I'd learned to fight dirty from Pap, so I was a natural. Then I heard about this Frenchman recruiting for the Legion.”
“The French Foreign Legion? So that's how you learned all those languages, traveled to all those exotic places you know about,” she said with dawning understanding.
“Believe me, it isn't as glamorous as they make it out to be,” he replied dryly. “North Africa was hot enough to make the Chihuahua desert seem cool as London and the Crimea was so foul a cesspool, even the New Orleans slums seemed clean beside it. Most of all, I guess it was the war...always the killing, the stench of death. I was so sick of it all, of the rootless wandering, never belonging, just a nameless bastard who would end up some day in a nameless grave like all the others I'd met along the way.”
“But you wanted something better,” she said, curving her cool fingers around his jaw and stroking the faint bristle of whiskers.
“I found something better...better than the land, better than a grand family name, better than anything else on earth. I found you...so unexpectedly.” He met her eyes and saw himself reflected in their warm golden glow.
“I can still remember the first time I saw you, standing in the yard outside the front sala. Your face was in the shadows cast by the portico roof. You looked so tall and harsh and forbidding, carrying enough weapons to stock an arsenal, marked by the war.” She pressed a kiss against the scar on his cheek.
“You thought I was Luce returned.”
“No, I knew you were different, from that first moment when our eyes met. I felt the thrill of that difference even though I didn't understand its cause at first. I desired you and that frightened me.”
“And now that you know all about my sordid history...are you still frightened? Repulsed?” His hand played back and forth across her shoulder, fingers lightly stroking the silky skin.
She pulled his face to hers, framing it between her hands, opening her lips for a deep soul-robbing kiss, as she murmured against his mouth, “What do you think?”
He had his answer as he crushed her in his arms and they tumbled amid the sheets. The specters of war and death were banished along with the shame of past deception. Nicholas Fortune was home at last, for good.
Epilogue
May 1867
“I do not care,
patrón
, it is not fitting for you to be here. It is not the custom,” Angelina said sternly, her big red hands planted firmly on her hips as she blocked his path in the doorway to his bedroom.