Patricia Rice (34 page)

A cheer went up around the table as the young men lifted their glasses, and the girl named Gabriella looked even more bewildered. Eavin gave Nicholas a look of disdain and, when the noise settled, lifted her own glass.

"To the French, who have enough charm to make sense an unnecessary trait."

Laughter followed this riposte, and the male guests eagerly drank to this toast, anxious to gain their hostess's favor. Grimly deciding he'd had enough of their admiration, Nicholas put an abrupt end to the odd affray.

"This insensible Frenchman has business to complete with a certain Irish charmer, if she will accompany me to the study," Turning to his mother, he informed her, "I cannot find the time to accompany you to Villeré right now,
maman
, but I will gladly send Michael with you. He has business in New Orleans he can conduct, so it will not be so very far out of his way."

There was that in his voice that could not be protested, and since he rose and peremptorily held out his hand to Eavin, his rudeness effectively dashed all hope of argument.

Unaffected by Nicholas's moods, Eavin stood up and stuck her tongue out at him. Then with a wink, she murmured an aside to the company, "Do you think he's after sending me to my room with bread and water or to be paddling me?"

Since she made it very plain that she preferred the latter with a slight wiggle of her hips and a winning look as she took Nicholas's arm, she left their male guests laughing appreciatively as she sallied out.

"I have half a mind to give that warm little bottom a paddling," Nicholas growled in an undertone as he dragged Eavin into the
petite salle
and shut the door behind them. "Was there some meaning to that performance?"

Eavin disengaged her arm and met his gaze boldly. "I am your mistress; everyone knows it. You have said you do not wish to share me with others. I have just made it plain that I am taken."

"To everyone including my mother!
Mon dieu
, but you are either a clever brat or a wanton woman. I could not applaud your performance for my need to keep from dragging you to my bed right there and then. I think I have unleashed a monster."

"You may very well have," Eavin replied calmly. 'It works both ways, you know. Irish peasant that I am, I cannot look at you without wanting to touch. It is not a very pleasant experience when I am confined by the behavior expected of me. Who is that very young woman your mother is hauling about?"

Nicholas shrugged and reached for her. "Who knows? Perhaps she has dredged up some unknown cousin to harass. I will give her the pleasure of it. Come here and kiss me before I die of starvation."

* * *

With a furious look at the couple standing much too close as they waved farewell from the gallery, Michael ordered the driver to set the horses on the first leg of their journey. Eavin's refusal to leave her immoral position had left him in a quandary. His first urge was to leave rather than condone what she did.
 

His second urge was much more uncomfortable. Knowing his sister was heading straight for a downfall, he wanted to stay and catch her before she hurt herself. It was not the kind of urge he was used to following, but this time it was necessary, for the health of his own soul as well as Eavin's.

Not caring to dwell on Michael's decision to remain in Nicholas's employ even after her refusal to leave with him, Eavin accepted Nicholas's hand and entered the shade of the old house. She knew where he was taking her. She knew the servants were watching and whispering. And she no longer cared.

* * *

After that disastrous party, Nicholas was bombarded with letters from his mother, which he read impatiently and then took great relish in burning over a candle flame, after which he would drag Eavin off to whatever bedroom caught his fancy.

Lying half dressed in his bed after one of these sessions, wishing some miracle would occur to prove the physician wrong about her ability to conceive but facing the fact that it hadn't, Eavin straightened her disarranged chemise and turned to the man beside her.

Nicholas was propped against the headboard, one hand behind his head as he smoked his cheroot. When Eavin touched her hand to his bare chest, he reached down to lift it to his lips and kiss the palm.

"It is not right to despise your mother so much, Nicholas. If not for her, you would not be here. Even I cannot find it in my heart to despise my mother, and she is far from being as proper a lady as yours."

"Your mother is at least honest about what she is. I cannot approve of the situation she created for you, but it is evident that she never pretended to be what she was not. I detest hypocrisy." Nicholas set his cheroot aside and pulled Eavin up against him.

"Don't be ridiculous. This world survives on hypocrisy. Just look at New Orleans. The Creoles pretend that they are still French and that the rest of the United States does not exist. The Americans pretend that they have no wish to enter Creole society. They each look at what the other has and pretend they want no part of it when, in truth, it is just the opposite."

His lips twisted wryly as he wrapped his hand in her hair. "I see another article in the making. I think Daniel Fletcher is half in love with you. I'm not certain that I should allow you to write anymore."

"You can't stop me." Eavin tweaked his chest hairs, then darted a kiss under his arm to put an end to his depredations. "Besides, my reputation has become so scandalous that even the revelation that I write for the newspaper will not bring me lower. This is off the subject. I want to talk about your mother."

"And I don't." Looking down, Nicholas tugged the bodice of her chemise until it revealed the full swell of her breasts. He caressed a tip as a means of ending the subject. "We know our true friends,
ma chérie
. The Howells still accept us. Even Jeremy has come to acknowledge our relationship. When we go into New Orleans, I will introduce you to others who will be happy to make your acquaintance."

When, not if. Eavin sighed as the tingling sensation created by his skilled fingers aroused her. Wriggling closer, she tried to put an end to this distraction. "I cannot stay in your mother's house, Nicholas. You will have to go alone."

"It is my house, Irish, and you will go with me. My mother has no say in the matter."

"She's your
mother
, Nicholas. You owe her respect. That is what I have been trying to tell you."

"I owe her nothing." Grimly, Nicholas jerked Eavin onto his lap where he could meet her eyes. "I will tell you this only once, so listen carefully. That ever so proper lady you admire, this granddaughter of a marquis, wife in the noble house of Saint-Just, is not only a whore, but one so weak-willed as to watch her own son beaten nearly half to death without raising a hand to stop it. I owe her nothing. She is lucky to have a roof over her head."

His words didn't shock Eavin as much as the bitterness with which he said them. A furious Nicholas she understood. He had reacted to Francine's death with fury, but never bitterness. The pain of this old hurt must have entered deep and festered for years. This, then, was what he had once warned her of.
 

Eavin curled into his shoulder and ran her hand up and down his chest, exploring each ridge and curve. "How is she a whore?" she asked, knowing this was not the subject that was painful but not daring to touch the other.

"My father bought her. Every time he whipped one of us, he would buy some bauble to appease her. I had barely regained consciousness one time when he appeared with a young quadroon and offered her to my mother as the maid she had been asking for. It didn't matter to her when he turned around and made the girl his mistress a few weeks later. The night we fled Santa Domingue because his
petite amie
warned us of the uprising, they had to carry me on board the ship. I'd broken my leg when he chased me down the stairs with his cane. When we arrived in New Orleans, he bought my mother the largest house he could find, and she forgave him again."

"I thought there was no money." Again, Eavin questioned around the more painful topic. The thought of the proud boy Nicholas must have been chased through the house by a madman with a cane twisted
her
insides. She didn't want to think what it must be doing to him.
 

Nicholas seldom talked about his boyhood. There were certain people who knew of it, but even with them he didn't discuss details. Those memories were buried deep inside, where he didn't have to acknowledge their existence. But with Eavin, it seemed necessary to have them out, to discard them, and in so doing, make her understand what he was.
 

"There was money in Santa Domingue. It would have been difficult to lose money with the plantation. But when we left, we left almost everything behind. We lived off the valuables we were able to carry and credit. My father was very good at persuading people to give him credit."

"I can imagine," Eavin responded wryly. Nicholas must have inherited his charm from his father. He certainly hadn't got it from his mother. But that wasn't the boil that needed lancing. "Then your mother had nothing of her own here: no family, no wealth, not even friends?"

"She was not the only one. Hundreds fled the rebellion. Do not make excuses for her. Had he killed me, she would have slept in his bed that night."

"As I sleep in yours, even knowing what it makes of me." Eavin propped her elbows on his chest and met Nicholas's eyes. "You are not a woman, Nicholas. You will never understand what it means to be a woman. This is a man's world. We are given very few choices in it. We can marry without love and the world calls us respectable. Or we can love and live in sin and be closed out from the friends and family we crave. We can pray our husbands die so we can live quietly and respectably on our own.
 

"Very few are wealthy and lucky enough to have the funds to live without a man's support. Your mother made her choice when she married your father. If he was anything like you, at one time she probably loved him very much. It must have been torture for her to be torn between the man she once loved and the child of her body. But to keep a roof over your head and food in your stomach, she suffered that torture. It would have done you no good if she had interfered and been beaten, too. There was literally no other choice that she could make."

Nicholas caught Eavin's wrists and turned her on her back, covering her with his body. Amber eyes darkened to almost black as he glared down at her. "Is that the choice you would have made?"

"Would you have me choose between you and Jeannette?" she asked.

Anguish welled in his eyes, and then he buried his lips against her throat and his body into the haven of hers, and there were no more words between them.

Chapter 29

"Nicholas, I believe we have a visitor."

It was the first of September, but heat still clung to the skin and depressed even the oaks into drooping. Eavin stood on the gallery, fanning herself and pretending there was a breeze off the river in hopes that the thought would cool her. Sinful woman that she was, she wore her bodice unbuttoned at the throat, but a trickle of perspiration still gathered at the hollow there. She didn't even turn toward the man appearing in the doorway. She knew he was there by the way the air moved around him.

Nicholas came to stand beside her and growled angrily at the sight of the rogue boldly walking up the river road. His greasy hair and earring revealed his occupation even if his identity weren't already known.

"I've warned them not to come around here. Claiborne is about to hang every one of them. He'd love an excuse to plant militia on my levee."

"They don't seem to cause anybody harm. Lafitte is your friend, isn't he?"

"Don't fool yourself,
ma petite
. Lafitte can kill at the drop of a hat, just like his men. That's why they live by themselves on Barataria, in a place where the law doesn't touch them. Lafitte was a gentleman once and knows how to live among more civilized people. His merry band of men are no such creatures. Stay out of sight while I see what this one wants."

Eavin sent one of the young boys working in the storeroom to fetch cooled wine for their visitor while Nicholas greeted him. She had no objection to staying out of the pirate's way, but she wished she could hear what he had to say. Nicholas still wasn't remarkably informative about his business.

But his business wasn't hers, and she had no right to intrude. It was not a concept she would have grasped readily when first she came here, but she was understanding Nicholas's need for privacy a little more every day. Her confidence in their relationship grew a little with each discovery.

She knew she loved him. She didn't think he loved her as he had Francine, but he needed her, and that was enough for now. She lived minute by minute. The future of the entire country was uncertain right now. Why should she worry about so insignificant a problem as her own?

So she set Jeannette down in the
petite salle
and sat down to edit the paper she had been working on. The toddler wore the lacy linen gown Eavin had sewn for her birthday and played with the cotton-stuffed doll Nicholas had given her. Her hair was thicker now, but she was still tiny, appearing little more than an elf or leprechaun perched in the middle of the rug. Eavin smiled with love as the child pulled the doll's hair and crowed with laughter. Nicholas had given her far more than she could ever give him. It would be time enough to consider the future when it came.