Creole Fires (37 page)

“But—”

“It’s upstairs.”

Nicki glanced around. Two black men stood beside the huge front door. Another servant stood just a few feet to her left. There was nowhere to run, no place to go.

“Shall we?” Valcour pressed, his hold tightening on her arm.

Nicki nervously wet her lips.

“They will
assist
you …” he pressed, “if that is what you wish.”

Squaring her shoulders, Nicki lifted her chin. “I don’t need their help—or yours.” When she tried to jerk free, Valcour’s grip increased until she winced.

“A glass of sherry should help ease your nerves.”

Only being some good distance away would ease her nerves, Nicki thought.

At the top of the stairs, Fortier lifted the latch on a heavy wooden door and guided her inside a masculine room that indeed was his study. For a moment she felt relieved. But when he closed the door and slid the bolt, Nicki’s heart started thumping against her ribs.

“I believe you will find the balance of the evening … amusing,” he told her, picking up the stemmed crystal glass of sherry that waited on his desk beside
a snifter of brandy. He handed her the glass and Nicki took a nerve-calming sip.

Valcour took a drink of his brandy, smiling at her above the rim of his glass. He set the snifter aside and surprised her by walking to the bookcase on the far wall and reaching between several leather-covered volumes. With the grinding sound of metal against metal, he pulled a lever and the whole wooden case swung wide. A second room, obviously his bedchamber, was revealed behind the wall.

“Feliciana’s room adjoins mine on the other side. I liked to be near her, so I had my study built up here. Very convenient, wouldn’t you say?”

Heart thundering, Nicki backed against the door, but her eyes were drawn to the room softly lit by the glow of candles. On the far end wall, wearing the same aqua and black lace gown that Nicki had on, a portrait of Feliciana watched them with a soft ruby-lipped smile and gentle, dark-brown eyes.

“Come,” Valcour instructed, extending a fine-boned hand. Nicki didn’t move. Eyes still fixed on the painting, she vaguely noticed the huge, carved four-poster bed against one wall, the thick Aubusson carpets.

“Come,” Valcour repeated, his voice growing impatient and drawing her from her trance.

“No,” she whispered.

“Yes,” Valcour said coldly, striding toward her. He caught her just as she turned to flee.

Weary from another long day of the sugar harvest, Alex sat before the fire in his study, booted feet propped up on his desk, sipping a snifter of brandy.
Warming the amber liquid in his palms, he stared into the flames, thinking about Nicole.

Mon Dieu
, he had missed her. She was all he thought of during the long hours of the day, all he dreamed of at night. Once he had been foolish enough to believe that after she warmed his bed, he would be able to forget her—or at least relegate her to a less important place in his life.

In truth, the opposite had happened—he couldn’t get enough of her no matter how he tried.

Alex took a warming sip of his brandy, feeling the fiery liquid burn a path into his stomach. A memory of Nicki smiling with excitement as they rolled through the streets of the
Vieux Carré
rose up before him. She never grew bored with the people and places around her, seeming to find an endless amount of goodness in anyone she met. He loved the sound of her laughter and found himself wishing he could make her laugh more often.

He would, he vowed. He would make her happy, he was certain he could.

The thought of her naked and responsive, her full breasts heaving against his chest, caused a tightening in his loins. He groaned softly. Only once, in front of the fire in his lodge, when she believed he intended marriage, had she come to him willingly—though what he now took from her, he had no doubt she enjoyed.

Still, the gift of her love, freely given, was something he prized above all else. And one day, he vowed, he would win it.

“Excuse me, Master Alex.” Mrs. Leandre stood in the doorway, a worried look on her aging face. “René Bouteiller is here to see you.”

Alex swung his long, booted legs to the floor. “Bouteiller?” The name conjured a vague note of familiarity.

“Danielle’s fiancé. He looks awfully upset.”

Alex felt a chord of unease. “Send him in.”

Dressed in sweat-stained canvas breeches and a homespun shirt, and clutching his brown floppy-brimmed hat in hand, René Bouteiller stepped into the study.

“I am sorry to bother you, m’sieur. But I have some very bad news.” He was a slender man, just a year or two younger than Alex, with coffee-brown hair and hazel eyes that were already lined at the corners. Obviously distraught, René twisted his hat with hands that trembled, and Alex’s worry began to build.

“Go on, man, out with it.”

René swallowed so hard his Adam’s apple bobbed. “It is Mademoiselle St. Claire. Fortier has taken her.”

“That’s impossible. She’s nowhere near here.” But even as he denied the words, the slender man’s tortured expression said it was the truth.

“He has taken her to Feliciana.”

Alex felt a moment of rage so great he could scarcely see through the bright red haze. “Wait here.” Striding into the hallway, he headed for the foyer. “Go to the stables,” he told his tall black butler. “Tell Patrick to saddle Napoleon. Tell him to hurry.” Without waiting for a reply, he turned and stalked back into the study.

“How?” Alex asked, opening his bottom drawer and removing a pistol. “How could he have taken her?”

“I am sorry, m’sieur, but I am to blame.” The slender man looked as if he might faint. “I beg you to forgive me.”

“Get on with it,” Alex commanded in a tone that did little to hide his ire.

“M’sieur Fortier has been paying me for bits of news about Belle Chêne. Things I might hear from Danielle. I did not see the harm. I planned to use the extra money for Danielle’s wedding gift. I never dreamed it would come to this.”

“So you’ve been spying on me.”

René dropped to his knees in front of the place where Alex stood. “I beg of you, m’sieur—”

“Tell me the rest,” Alex said coldly.

“Mademoiselle St. Claire was planning to … she had made arrangements for a ship to take her to Charleston and then farther north. I mentioned this to Fortier. His men must have been waiting for her. I didn’t know what he planned; I didn’t know she was even there until I saw her in his carriage this afternoon.”

Alex fixed his hard, dark gaze on the slender young man, who paled even further. “I’ll deal with you when I get back.” Grabbing his jacket, Alex moved to the door. “I warn you, do not think of running. If you’re not here when I return, I’ll find you, and the consequences will be far worse than they are now.”

With that he strode down the wide marble hallway, jerked open the heavy front door, and headed off toward the stables.

“You’re a dead man, Fortier,” he swore beneath his breath. But all he could see was Nicole—running away again, trying so desperately to leave him that
she had fallen into the deadly embrace of another vicious master.

“Finish your sherry,” Fortier warned, forcing the glass Nicki held against her trembling bottom lip. “You need to relax.”

Seated beside him in front of the slow-burning fire in the chamber where he had dragged her, Nicki looked at him beseechingly. “Why? Why are you doing this?”

Above the hearth, Feliciana looked down from her portrait reproachfully, her dark eyes watching them in the eerie, flickering firelight. Nicki forced her mind away from the ominous warning she felt every time she glanced up.

Fortier, too, studied the portrait, but did not answer.

“Women find you attractive,” Nicki went on. “Lisette is in love with you. What do you want with me?”

Valcour set his brandy aside. “She told you that? That she was in love with me?”

“Yes.” Nicki didn’t mention the beating he had given the poor girl, though it took all her will not to.

“Lisette is a fool. How could a woman love a man who has treated her as I have?”

“Love is never easy to understand.”

Fortier scoffed aloud. “Feliciana is the only woman I will ever love.”

Though he spoke with conviction, Nicki sensed an underlying doubt. Maybe Lisette meant more to him than he believed. “You didn’t answer my question. What do you want with me?”

One corner of his hard mouth curved in what might have passed for a smile. “You are his—Alexandre’s—just
as Lisette once was. But you he values even more.” He ran a lean brown finger along her cheek, and Nicki shivered. “For that reason alone I shall have you this night.”

“Lisette wanted you. I do not.”

Valcour merely shrugged his shoulders.

“Does hurting Alex mean so much to you?”

He laughed, a harsh sound that sent a second shiver down her spine. “We have always been rivals, Alex and I …. Did he tell you Feliciana was in love with him?”

Nicki’s head came up. “No.”

“Well, it’s true. That was before she met me, of course.”

“Of course,” she agreed with a hint of sarcasm Valcour didn’t seem to notice. “So you’re doing all this because of Alex.”

A flicker of some dark emotion passed over his face. “Yes.”

“But that isn’t the only reason,” Nicki pressed.

Arching a sleek black brow, he smiled. “Perhaps I look to you for salvation—maybe my very last chance.” His expression less guarded, he stared up at the painting. His eyes grew distant as his mind drifted off in the past. “She tortures me still,” he said softly, “the same as the night I found her with the peddler—naked and curled in his arms.”

A tendril of ice moved over Nicki’s heart.

“She was lying there weeping, looking at me with her soft brown eyes and begging me, over and over, not to hurt him. I had always wanted to please her, always done anything she asked …. That night I did the same, and the cowardly dog slipped away and never looked back.”

“But I thought nothing happened. Surely there would have been gossip among the servants.”

Valcour closed his eyes against a wave of remembered pain. “Those few slaves who knew the truth have long since been sold.”

“What did you do to her?” Nicki fought an image of Lisette’s battered face and bruised body.

“I wanted to forgive her. I tried to …. That next night, I went to her. Even then I desired her as I had no other woman. At first she pretended passion, but I wasn’t fooled. It was the peddler she wanted, the peddler she desired above the master of Terre Sauvage.”

“Dear God.”

“I don’t remember hitting her, only her begging me to stop. But I remember taking her—never have I known such triumph, such ecstasy.” His fingers tightened on the stem of the glass. “At the very moment I lost her forever—I glimpsed both heaven and hell.”

Valcour turned to face her, the tears that shimmered in his hard black eyes matched those in Nicki’s own.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “so sorry.” He had loved her so much he had destroyed her. Now he was destroying himself.

Nicki watched his face in the eerie glow of the lamp. As quickly as the emotion had come, it was gone, replaced by a look so cold he seemed a different man. “We’ve talked enough.” Setting his brandy aside, he drew her to her feet.

“Please let me go,” she said softly. “You don’t really want to hurt me.”

“No. I hope this time things will be different.”

“And if they aren’t?”

“That, my dear, is exactly what I mean to find out.” Whatever regret she had glimpsed in him was gone. There would be no reprieve.

With a quick flick of her wrist, Nicki tossed the last of her sherry into his face and bolted for the door. Cursing, Fortier stumbled after her. Nicki’s trembling fingers worked the lock, slid the bolt back, then his arm closed around her, dragging her back inside.

“I shall have you, little flower,” he said against her ear as he carried her scratching and clawing back into his chamber. In seconds he had her pinned against him, her wrists bound in front of her, then her hands secured above her head, tied firmly to the bedpost. She stood beside the massive bed, fighting to hold back tears.

“Why?” she repeated. “At least tell me why.”

Fortier grabbed the front of her aqua silk gown and the thin chemise that was all she wore beneath. With a vicious twist, he ripped them away. “Because you’re nothing like her. Because you are fair and she was dark, because your hair is fiery and hers was the color of midnight. Because even wearing her gown you are not her.”

He laced his hands through her shiny copper hair and painfully jerked her head back. “Tonight I mean to cleanse myself of these hellish demons that torment me—once and for all!”

With that he kissed her, his cruel mouth punishing, bruising her tender lips until she tasted her own blood. As his tongue thrust savagely between her teeth, one hand slid inside her bodice, his long brown fingers clutching the soft flesh of her breast until she cried out in pain.

Trembling all over, Nicki fought to break free, but
his hard body pinned her against the bedpost. “You do this,” she warned, “and I swear to you, I’ll kill you.”

Valcour laughed. “You may try, little flower. In fact, I shall be disappointed in you if you do not. But in the end, I will break you—or you will set me free.”

He pulled open her bodice, affording himself a better view of her breasts, white and smooth in the firelight. “I promise you, I will go slowly. Give you all the time you need. Tonight you will learn the pleasure there can be in pain.”

“Dear God.” Nicki felt the bile rise up in her throat. Twisting toward him, she jerked her knee up hard, catching him unaware, and eliciting a yelp of pain. Considering the frothy barrier of her petticoats, the blow did far more damage than she had expected.

As he doubled over and fought for breath, Nicki struggled with her bonds, trying in vain to loosen them.

“Bitch!” he accused, regaining his strength, his black eyes glittering with rage. “You’re nothing like she was. You’re a thief, the scum of the earth. Not fit to wear her clothes. Not fit to walk in Feliciana’s footsteps!”

“That’s where you are wrong, Fortier,” came a menacing, deep voice from the doorway. “She’s a lady. My lady. And you have made the fatal mistake of trying to do her harm.”