“No!” he demanded. “Eyes open.”
She obeyed and stared, fascinated, as he wet his lips with his tongue. A slow, slow exercise in teasing foreplay. Then he waited.
She understood her role in this game. Parting her lips, she mimicked the actions of his tongue, repeating the routine several times till her lips were moist and aching for his kisses.
He sucked in his breath and his swelling erection gave proof that he already wanted her. “You make me tremble,” he murmured.
Tremble? She shook.
He took a forefinger, wet it with his tongue and traced his lips, further moistening them. He waited till she followed suit.
She did, and to her surprise, found it highly stimulating.
Lowering his hand, he used the wet finger to circle one flat male nipple, then another.
“Oh. I’m not sure I like this game.”
“Don’t be afraid.”
Easy for you to say, Mr. Cool-and-Collected. Harriet, who couldn’t believe she was trusting a man so completely, continued to play his game, touching her own breasts while he watched. A thrumming ache swelled the points. Only belatedly did she realize her arms were now free of their invisible bonds, but not her legs.
He continued the motion, over and over. Wetting both forefingers now, then manipulating his own nipples in the ways he wanted her to mirror.
She saw that he wasn’t really cool and collected.
“Please,” she begged.
“Please?” His voice thickened with raw male excitement.
“I…I want you.” she confessed.
“Where?”
She lifted her breasts from the undersides. “Here. I want your mouth on me here.”
“Tell me more.” he ordered hoarsely, reminding her this was aural sex, not the real thing.
“I want you to tongue me softly. At first. Then…oh, Lord…I can’t believe I’m saying this…then nip me with your teeth. Flutter the tip with your tongue. Fast. Then suck.”
He raised a brow. “How?”
“Hard. Nonstop. And deep.” She arched her back off the bed, raising her breasts high, and felt a keening ecstasy, almost as if he actually did as she’d described.
He nodded. “And would you do the same for me?”
“Oh, yes!”
Resuming the game, he trailed the fingertips of one hand down his chest, over his flat abdomen and belly.
She did the same.
He undulated his hips slightly in imitation of the sex act.
She gasped, and realized she’d already been doing the same. Is this me doing these wanton things? Am I really this uninhibited? Yes. With Etienne, I can be anything he wants.
Taking his erection in hand, he challenged her with upraised chin to touch her own wetness.
She balked, then acquiesced when she realized that more than anything she wanted to please this man she loved beyond all reason.
He stroked.
She followed suit.
He moaned.
She whimpered.
“Let go, Harriet.”
“I can’t. Not this way.”
“Do you surrender?”
“I surrendered to you a long time ago, Etienne,” she cried, no longer confused over his identity. “The first time that I said I loved you.”
“Say the words.” he urged in a husky rasp.
“I surrender,” she whispered.
In one fluid motion then, he entered her. And to the rhythm of his pounding strokes, she kept repeating, “I love you, I love you, I love you….”
She wasn’t sure, but she thought…at the end, when he braced himself on rigid arms and threw his head back, crying out his release…she thought she heard him murmur, “God help me, but I love you, too.”
But it was only a dream.
He kissed her awake the next morning.
It wasn’t a dream.
Harriet could tell, even before she opened her eyes, that she’d overslept. The sun coming through the open veranda windows heated the linen sheet covering her bare body from chest to thigh. But, sated and love-sore, she didn’t care if she’d slept the week away.
Etienne was wetting her lips with his tongue, just like last night.
It wasn’t a dream.
She smiled, eyes still closed, savoring the delicious erotic play. Her head lolled half on and half off the bed, her body sprawled across the mattress.
“I surrender.” She sighed against his teasing moist kisses.
And he growled.
He growled.
Harriet cracked open an eyelid and shot upright, barely able to keep herself from falling off the side of the bed.
It was a dream, after all.
The lover licking her mouth was the most pitiful hound she’d ever seen. Yech! The dog was old and fat, its brown mangy fur no longer lustrous and healthy. Its sad eyes, rheumy with too many years of living, gazed at her with a weary resignation, as if it knew she wouldn’t like him. “Go ahead, kick me,” it reproached silently. Worst of all, the mutt wore a garland of flowers looped around its head, which had slipped over one eye.
Harriet knew in that moment…before an ecstatic Saralee rushed in after her dog and handed her the note…that Etienne was gone. How could he abandon her? And why today? He was supposed to stay another two days. She’d thought she had time to convince him to take her along.
In fact, there were two notes. Saralee first showed off her own letter.
Princess:
I heard you’ve always wanted a puppy. I looked and looked, but this is the best I could do on such short notice. Let me introduce you to your newest royal subject. Lancelot.
Love,
Papa
The signature had first read Etienne, but he’d crossed it out and written Papa. Despite her anger, Harriet felt a rush of thanks for Etienne’s sensitivity.
“Isn’t he beautiful?” Saralee asked Harriet as she knelt on the floor to hug her new dog.
“Huh? Oh, yeah.” The animal, who tolerated Saralee’s fierce embrace with a “Woe is me” roll of the eyes, looked as if it might have cardiac arrest if forced to walk from here to the door. And, Lord, Harriet hoped it was housetrained. Blossom was going to have a fit over this gift of Etienne’s.
While Saralee picked up the heavy dog with a grunt and carried it out, cooing the whole time, Harriet opened her own letter. A pile of paper money fell out…probably the bundle she’d gotten from the bank for the gold bar. Setting it aside, she began to read.
Harriet:
Cain and I will be leaving at dawn. We have to be in Houston by the end of the month. Don’t be angry. Well, I know you will be angry anyhow. But this was the only way.
Blossom knows what to do for Abel. The head driver has instructions for the harvest.
You can use the money to get back to New Orleans and for the train fare to your home. The mail boat will be by in two weeks. Go then, not before. Provided you want to leave, that is.
If you are still at Bayou Noir when I return, we will talk.
Etienne
What? He expected her to stay here, risk giving up her career and security in the future? All based on those nebulous words, We will talk. The jerk! Harriet didn’t realize till she put fingertips to her face that she was weeping.
No words of love. He hadn’t even asked her to wait. Just a vague hint of something more if she was still here on his return. No promises whatsoever. The rat!
With a flash of comprehension, Harriet saw the correlation between her predicament and that of Ginny Brandon in Sweet Savage Love. Steve Morgan had loved her to pieces, too, in a wild night of loving. Then he’d left. And poor Ginny had waited and waited for Steve to come back to her. Pathetic, that was what Ginny had been. Handicapped by her love for a hardheaded, hard-hearted rogue.
Even worse, this was all taking on the characteristics of codependency. Like Harriet’s mother.
He hadn’t even bothered to tell her good-bye. Harriet put her head down and cried her eyes ou
t, then braced herself. As usual, she had only herself to rely upon. She’d been foolish, letting her defenses down, but she’d always believed in learning from her mistakes. She would look on this as a painful learning experience.
Never fall in love.
Never trust a man.
Watch your back and guard your heart.
That was when Harriet got her second shock of the day. Standing, Harriet peered down and saw that her nightgown had been torn down the front from neckline to hem. Of course, the flimsy fabric could have ripped with her thrashing during the heated night. But she knew better. Harriet’s heart leaped joyously.
It wasn’t a dream.
Etienne had come to say to good-bye to her, after all. In his own sweet, savage way.
“Get that dawg out of mah kitchen,” Blossom stormed a week later. “1 declare, I’m gonna whup that boy next time I see him. That Remy Lejune down the bayou been tryin’ to unload this no-good cur for years. Never did see such a sorry animal in all my born days. Got fleas and dawg bizness ever’where.”
“Lance doesn’t have fleas. Me and Mam’zelle Harriet gave him a bath. And he only did his bizness once and that’s cause you scared ’im with your cane,” Saralee asserted from the table where she was eating dinner tonight with Blossom, Ellen and Abel, who’d made his way over from his sickbed for the first time.
Harriet had prepared and was serving dinner tonight, after much protest from Blossom. She wasn’t much of a cook, but she could whip up a mean Spanish omelette filled with onions, green peppers, mushrooms, and oozing melted cheese. On the side was a dandelion salad with bacon-and-vinegar dressing, and Saralee’s beaten biscuits. A feast fit for the best gourmet connoisseur. Not that anyone noticed. Everyone was still talking about the ongoing implications of Etienne and Cain’s abrupt departure.
“How you gonna straighten out that boy now he’s gone?” Blossom demanded of Harriet, as if it were all her fault. As if she hadn’t asked the same question a zillion times.
“I tried, but he tricked me.”
“Hah!” Blossom exclaimed, giving her a thorough study. “Mebbe you was too busy thinkin’ of yer own pleasures the night he skedaddled off, ’stead of our plan.”
Here we go again! Harried blushed.
That caught Abel’s interest. “I’ve been reading your book,” he started.
And Harriet put her face in her hands. She just knew what was coming.
“What book is that?” Ellen asked politely.
“Mam’zelle Harriet is a book-writer,” Blossom explained proudly, to Harriet’s surprise. Then Blossom spoiled the effect by adding, “But she ain’t learned how to pull in a man with her book-learnin’. Leastways, not yet.”
Harriet peeked at Abel, who was grinning with wicked anticipation. Luckily, all of this passed over Saralee, who was engrossed in surreptitiously feeding Lance bits of omelette.
“Harriet’s book is Female Fantasies Never Die,” Abel told Ellen with a straight face. “You should read it sometime.”
When understanding dawned, Ellen sputtered at Abel, “Oh, you are a sinful man! You and your brother always were the teasin’est scoundrels in the bayou. Fornication and devilry…that’s all you ever thought about as boys.”
And as men. Some things never change.
“Do you know what the dumb man said when asked to spell Mississippi?” Harriet asked sweetly as she passed beverages to the others at the table.
Ellen shook her head as if she didn’t understand what was going on around her. Blossom clucked her disapproval. Abel smirked, waiting for the punch line. And Saralee, in her own little world, was trying to get Lance to eat dandelion.
“The man asked, ‘The state or the river?’” Harriet whooped.
Since no one laughed, Harriet blundered on, checking first to make sure Saralee wasn’t listening. “Okay, this woman came home from a visit to the doctor and boasted to her husband, ‘The doctor says I have the breasts of an eighteen-year-old.’
“The dumb husband responded, ‘What did he say about your thirty-year-old ass?’
“The woman paused and replied, ‘I don’t believe we discussed you. dear.’”
Blossom and Abel laughed. Ellen said, “Really, Harriet, do you think that is appropriate talk for a lady? And, besides, I don’t understand the humor.”
“Harriet is saying that all men are dumb,” Abel explained.
“Oh, well, of course,” Ellen agreed, as if that was a given.
Blossom narrowed her eyes at Harriet. “You knows all this man woman stuff but you couldn’t keep Etienne here. Tsk-tsk!”
“And I needed to talk to Etienne.” Ellen sighed. “Now I don’t know what to do with the school.”
“Dint yer trip to Houma help?” Blossom asked, patting Ellen on the arm. Caught up in the frenzy of roullaison, the sugar harvest season, not to mention Abel’s injuries, followed by Etienne and Cain’s hasty departure, no one had really had a chance to sit down and talk at length about anything.
“No,” Ellen said, then explained to Harriet and Abel. “I taught in Mam’zelle Baptiste’s school in California for five years after I graduated from Messiah Normal School in Ohio. But I came back here when Blossom wrote and told me about all the families returning to the plantation with no school.”
“How many children are in your school now?” Harriet asked, sitting down on the bench next to Abel. She slapped his hand away distractedly when he tickled her thigh playfully.
“Twenty-five…sometimes thirty,” Ellen said, picking at her salad. “There are just no supplies.”
Harriet frowned. “Who’s been funding the school?”
“At first, M’sieur and Mam’zelle Baptiste set us up. Then, after the war, the Freedman’s Bureau supplied some money. But half of the grants coming from Washington never made it to the schools once they filtered through every corrupt politician from the highest to the lowest level, North and South.”
“And?” Harriet prodded.
“When the Freedman’s Bureau closed, church organizations began to help. I’ve been getting my money through the Blessed Waters Free Church of Louisiana. But they’re poor, too. I went to Houma this week, to plead for at least two hundred dollars to buy books, paper, pencils, desks….” She exhaled wearily. “We need everything. The preacher told me they are rock-bottom dry and that I have to go to the church headquarters in Houston if I want to get more help.”
“Houston!” Harriet, Blossom and Abel all said at once.
Coincidence? Harriet wondered. Or fate?
Ellen nodded. “I was hoping Etienne would be willing to help. I just can’t continue to ask his father to pay. When I saw that he’d returned unexpectedly, I thought that maybe God had answered my prayers. But now it looks as if I’ll have to close down the school, or make my way to Houston.”
“Hmmm,” Harriet said aloud.
“Now, Harriet,” Abel warned.
A loud commotion outside interrupted their discussion, followed by a shrill female voice inquiring of someone in the backyard, “Where’s Abel?”
Uh-oh!
Dressed in a formfitting, dark traveling costume, Simone made a grand entrance into the kitchen. Abel, his face awash with astonishment and pleasure, stood abruptly, then groaned at the anguish caused by that simple movement.
“Oh, chérie, I came as soon as Etienne and Cain told me of your injuries. I have brought a bateau to take you back to New Orleans with me. Already I have hired the best physicians to care for you there. Non, do not worry about the trip. You can lie on the flat bottom. We will put a mattress there. It is all arranged.” The whole time Simone blurted out her greeting, she held Abel’s face between her hands and kept kissing his cheeks and neck. Tears streamed down her face.
“Is she what I think she is?” Blossom whispered in an aside to Harriet.
“Yes,” Harriet said.
But even Blossom could see the love these two shared and she clamped her mouth shut, although she couldn’t help adding, “Is the
boy plum crazy? Hankerin’ after a white woman? Them Swamp Angels will skin ’im alive, or cut off his pecker.”
In the end, after everyone settled down, Simone ate some dinner and sent a meal out for the black man who’d accompanied her. Then she told them all the news. Etienne and Cain had arrived days ago, checked to make sure that the caskets were still in the warehouse, transferred the gold to a piano and musical instrument cases, and planned to board the steamboat Southern Star in a few days for Galveston, Texas.
“A piano?” Harriet asked.
“Music cases?” Abel asked.
Simone grimaced. “They’ve joined a minstrel show.”
Abel hooted with laughter. “Blackface? Oh, I would love to see Etienne singin’ a coon song.”
“But there is another reason why I rushed to your side,” Simone told Abel, biting her bottom lip indecisively.
“What?” he demanded. “Tell me, Simone.”
“Pope’s scurrilous gang knows Etienne is the agent hired by Grant. One of Charity’s customers told her several days ago. But I couldn’t get word to Etienne.”
“Oh, hell!” Abel exclaimed and put a hand to his lower back, bracing himself against the pain that must be throbbing there since his afternoon dose of laudanum was wearing off.
“They don’t know that the gold was hidden in New Orleans, or where it is now, but they’ve discovered that Etienne’s assignation point is somewhere in eastern Texas,” Simone continued. “Pope has dozens of hired guns covering the region from Beaumont to Corpus Christi. Zut alors, what a mean, lawless bunch!” She sighed deeply. “Etienne and Cain are heading for a trap.”
Harriet took a deep breath. “I’m going.”
“Harriet, you don’t know your way to the privy, let alone all the way to Texas,” Abel chided her softly.
“Well, I know the way,” Ellen declared, fingertips pressed to her lips in pensive concentration. “Harriet and I will both go. We can travel by pirogue to Morgan City with one of the field hands. That’s one of the stops for the steamboat Etienne and Cain are taking from New Orleans. I know some back ways that will save time. That way, Harriet can warn them and I can meet with the church officials in Houston.” She beamed at everyone.