Evil's Niece (2 page)

What did he know about Chapin that he wasn’t telling? Why had he assumed I’d find my marriage intolerable enough to walk away? My parents had passed on. I had nowhere to go.

The pounding of my pulse drowned out these questions, however, and my heart was a frantic bird trying to escape its cage. And yes, my drawers were drenched, clinging to my inner thighs. I had come under Dewel’s spell despite my best intentions, and it was a dangerous place to be.

He tilted his head, gauging my reactions, lowering slowly towards me as though — was this rogue about to kiss me?

But he stopped, near enough for his brandied breath to feather my upper lip. I had never wanted a man so badly in my life, but I was too appalled at my improper thoughts to give in to them.

‘Why have you confided in
me
, Miss Eve?’ Dewel crooned. His voice rang low and seductive, making me quiver to the core. ‘What do you want to happen now?’

Oh, the answers I could give him! The wayward sensations that drove me to close that tiny space between our lips and taste my doom!

But propriety saved me, after a fashion. ‘I want my husband to take me the way he…he nailed that damned niece,’ I replied, impassioned by a cause that might backfire. ‘If I were a better, more desirable wife — if I knew how to flirt and ply my feminine wiles — maybe Chapin would seek his satisfaction at home.’

I swallowed hard, caught up in the maelstrom my courtyard discovery had spawned. Prodded by yearnings as forbidden — and insistent — as the ridge in Dewel Proffit’s pants. ‘And if anyone can teach me how, it’s you.’

His face tightened and his nostrils flared. He pulled me against his hard body, intent on carrying out my desperate demands — or on snaring a witless chicken, like a fox allowed into his half-brother’s hen house.

‘Like Eve with that apple,’ he murmured. He searched my face for signs that I’d back down — or recover my right mind. ‘My God, woman, how could any man resist your charms? Or your challenge?’

What have I been missing?

As Dewel Proffit handed me up into my waiting carriage, his playful swat to my backside made me glare at him, standing there in the door, watching as I sat down and arranged my skirts. But who could remain angry with a handsome man who smiled with such debonair decadence?

‘We’ll meet again soon,’ he promised with a wolf’s grin. ‘I never keep a lady waitin’.’

Thank goodness my driver, Rémy, pulled away — perhaps because Chapin had warned him, too, about Dewel’s nefarious nature. And yet, as the carriage clattered down the brick streets, I wondered if I’d been in the dark because of my husband’s hatred for his half-brother, or because of my own ostrich-like tendencies not to see what was going on right before my eyes.

We passed the tall, imposing facade of the Cotton Exchange, and my doubts assailed me afresh: was my husband in there conducting his business? Or had he slipped off to another secluded niche with his ‘niece’?

Niece, indeed! How long had he been seeing her? She looked ten years younger than he, even though Chapin, at thirty-eight, appeared quite youthful and cut a fine figure in his custom-made clothes. Why did he seek out her company? Lord knows I was available at all hours of the day or night, with precious little to occupy my time.

My head began to spin with the implications. Had I allowed myself to go to seed? Or was my very availability — and social acceptability, as Mrs Proffit — competing with the seductive shine of forbidden fruit? Other ladies referred to their husbands’ boredom in the bedroom, but I never dreamed it was my own man’s affliction. Chapin had never showed much interest in sex, even when we were first married.

God, you tempt me. How could any man resist your charms?

Dewel’s words made me flush all over again as Rémy handed me down from the carriage, at the side entrance to our house — a grand residence on Prytania, in the elite neighbourhood known as the Garden District. The place had belonged to Chapin’s parents, Robert E. Lee and Virgilia Proffit, before we married. Dewel had always been forbidden to come here: this declaration was made by Chapin’s cheated-on mother when she learned of her husband’s illegitimate son, and had been carried into this generation by Chapin himself.

Yet now that I’d had a very personal encounter with the family’s black sheep, I saw things differently. He’d raised questions, about Chapin’s secrets and personality…about the nature of the Proffit family’s relationships. And about me, as a woman worthy of affection. A female who inspired desire.

Because Dewel saw me in a redder light — and he’d persuaded his brother to court me in the first place — the rake had revealed several new layers of meaning surrounding my marriage.

Mrs Frike, housekeeper for Chapin’s parents as well, took my gloves and hat. ‘Will you be dining upstairs tonight, missus?’

‘Yes, thank you, Fanny,’ I replied without thinking.

And then it struck me, how much of my life was so habitual these days — and how much of it didn’t include my husband, because he was seldom home. He’d redecorated the house in sweeping shades of maroon and royal blue to please me when I came here as his bride — had given me the most spacious suite, with French doors to the gallery overlooking the gardens in the back. We entertained lavishly, if seldom; we belonged to all the right social groups and supported the arts. But did he think of me — really
see
me — any more than I thought about him?

I ascended the spiral staircase, aware now of things that were missing…things I’d not questioned until Dewel Proffit’s blazing blue eyes forced me to. I passed Chapin’s chambers and for the first time in weeks I actually looked inside. His cherry furnishings and collection of Impressionist prints remained the same as when I’d come here, because this suite had belonged to his beloved mother. Yet I saw his rooms differently now.

Would I find anything besides his fashionable clothing, if I threw open his armoire? Would his secretary drawers reveal his secrets? Letters to that young lady, perhaps?

Anger engulfed me, a betrayal that cut to the bone. How
dare
that man cheat on me? I was the wife who’d accommodated his every desire — and now realised he’d expressed so few of them. How had I provoked his infidelity? And why did I know that, if challenged, Chapin would point out
my
shortcomings rather than his own?

I suddenly wanted to explore his sanctum, to rip his room apart in search of evidence. But I didn’t dare. Far safer to continue to my own suite, where the pastel pinks and sunny yellows soothed my soul; where a brazen male like Dewel Proffit would feel totally out of place.

Or would he? Just knowing my husband rarely graced these rooms might be motive enough for Dewel to slip up the gallery’s outside stairs without anyone being the wiser. But these were foolish thoughts! Chapin’s illegitimate half-brother knew not to come here —

All the more reason for him to defy family rules. To rub his brother’s nose in it!

I stepped into my elegant bedroom and leaned against the door, as though I could shut out my illicit feelings about the man I’d met today. He was every socially unacceptable thing Chapin was not: gossiped about; nonchalantly libidinous. An entrepreneur known for shady dealings with bankers and brokers — and their wives.

Yet it had been Chapin in that courtyard, sneaking around with a young lover. And it had been Dewel assuring me that my own inadequacies were not to blame — indeed, that I had no feminine shortcomings, as far as he could see. He’d raised my spirits with his attentions, with his audacious suggestion that I, too, needed a niece.

I laughed out loud. A younger ‘nephew’ — now
that
might set a lonely wife’s pulse to pounding. But it would remain a fantasy I’d never live out.

Why not, Mrs Proffit? They say taking a lover brings the bloom back to the lily, and adds a new dimension to one’s days: a juicy, delicious secret to savour in moments alone.

Yet it was not a younger man that came to mind as I felt myself growing wet between the legs. Again I saw Dewel’s dark face, with that roguish grin and those defiant blue eyes…the raven hair that beckoned my fingers to run through it. And again I felt his weight pressing me against the iron gate, refusing to back down, or to allow me that opportunity. Dewel was a man who took what he wanted and played by his own rules.

And he smelled good too, like brandy and fine tobacco — and the musk of a male predator sniffing out a mate. My husband preferred expensive French colognes to the earthier scents I associated with his half-brother.

I swallowed hard; felt the vein in my neck fluttering with my unspeakable ideas. Dewel was forbidden fruit, plain and simple. That was his only allure — the fact that I’d been told not to associate with him, much less believe anything he said.

But my heart heard things differently, now that my eyes had seen a new truth. Although
everything
of importance had now come into question, I had to live as though nothing had changed.

Or did I?

*  *  *

The next morning found me writhing beneath Dewel’s dark body, arching to receive the erection I’d wanted since the moment I’d felt its presence. I no longer questioned how he had beguiled me: he was giving me the attention I craved but didn’t know how to coax from a husband who slept in his own bed, kept his own counsel, and had placed me on a pedestal too high to climb down from.

Was I not a woman who inspired sexual desire? Lord knows I
wanted
Chapin’s affection. Yet seven years of disappointment disappeared at the touch of Dewel’s bare skin.

‘I’m gonna bury my cock deep inside you, sugah,’ he breathed against my ear. ‘Then I’m gonna pump you nice and slow this time, so I can feel your pussy purrin’…I’m so long and so hot, I’m gonna have you clawin’ at me for release and then yowlin’ like a she-cat when you come. And you
will
come, sweet Eve. Again, and again.’

I moaned at his implicit promise, for never had a man spoken so openly of what he intended to do to me. This was a different sort of arrogance, this cocksureness, for it spurred me into taking what I’d wanted for so long. My husband’s occasional fumblings in the dark had fallen short of even my sheltered, virginal expectations. And now I knew why.

‘Take me,’ I begged, opening my legs like a shameless hussy when my dusky lover positioned himself above me. ‘Bury it deep and rub me hard, high up against the bone, where you drove me so insane before. I want you to —’

‘
Begging your pardon, missus, but you’d best wake up. Someone’s here to see you.
’

‘— pump me until we both convulse with…dammit, Dewel, was that someone talking to me? Can’t they see we’re —’

‘
I tried to tell her you were asleep, but she strutted up here like a house afire and I
—’

I awoke so suddenly I sprang upright in my bed, to find a total stranger fixing me with a minxlike gaze. Her hand was on my breast! And then I saw I was totally naked — and exposed! — because I’d kicked the blankets all over the bed. Poor Fanny, the grey-haired housekeeper, hovered behind this unexpected guest, wringing her hands as though I might fire her on the spot. I yanked the sheet over myself and backed the stranger away with my glare before anything else unseemly took place.

‘It’s all right, Fanny,’ I rasped, although nothing was further from the truth. Dewel and I were still humping in my head — or at least the remnants of that fantasy made me wonder if he was somehow responsible for this intrusion. ‘I’ll handle it from here. Please fix my breakfast now — and enough for our guest as well.’

With a puzzled nod, the housekeeper departed, leaving me alone with a young woman the likes of whom I’d never seen. Her midnight hair was gathered atop her head in wild disarray, with only a white ruffle of a maid’s cap to suggest her occupation. Her charcoal dress fell halfway down firm, slender thighs and her side-buttoned boots came to her calves. She wore a pristine white pinafore, yet when she leaned towards me again I detected the bobbing of her loose breasts beneath it — a movement I found unnervingly alluring.

‘Who on earth are
you
?’ I demanded, grasping my sheet up around my armpits. ‘If you’ve come looking for a position —’

‘Oh, the position you were in looked just fine,’ she purred, winking suggestively. ‘Legs spread so pretty —
ooh-la-la!
with that wreath of red curls around a —’

‘I beg your pardon!’ I’d never laid eyes on this will-o’-the-wisp of a French maid, yet she was describing me in intimate detail as though she’d been here when —

Oh, my God, I’d not only been dreaming of Dewel, but acting it out as well. Perhaps even talking aloud, so she and Fanny could hear what I’d been demanding him to do. By the look on her face, she’d been ready to join right in.

‘No need for pardon, madame. Monique Picabou understands a woman’s dreams — her needs. And I’m here to service you.’

Blood rushed to my face, and I couldn’t find words to cover my embarrassment any more than my nightgown, crumpled on the floor, could hide my nakedness. ‘I — I don’t understand. I never sent for —’

‘Ah,
oui
. You haven’t read Monsieur Proffit’s note, because I have it right here.’

She fished a slip of paper from beneath her dress, her grin waxing wicked as she touched herself. ‘It says he’s sending me here on loan from his own household, because you need a niece. Your wish is Dewel’s command — and here I am, madame, just the woman to teach you about seducing that man you married.’

I buried my face against my bent legs. Dewel would be laughing like a hyena, certain this impertinent girl with the lilting voice would catch me unawares — and probably flying high on a fantasy about
him
. How could I have fallen prey to such an egocentric bastard?

Therein lay the key, the fallacy that had led me to this moment of exposing myself not only to my housekeeper, but also to a wild young wanton whose ideas went beyond my comprehension. I was in charge here: the wife of a prominent New Orleans gentleman, ensconced in my fine home on Prytania. No one could make me do anything as outrageous as this wayward female was suggesting.

With that in mind, I composed myself. Not easy, because when I looked up, determined to send her away, Monique was rifling through my closet. She’d thrown open the louvred doors to assess my dresses — feeling the fabrics and checking the cut of the bodices, shaking her disheveled head before flicking each one aside.

Mustering all my tact, and trying to ignore the shimmy of her backside beneath that indecent uniform, I addressed her firmly. ‘Contrary to Mr Proffit’s high opinion of his abilities, what woman in her right mind would ask such a scandalous man for help with her marriage? He’s a known —’

‘Right mind? Left mind?’ she replied, playfully tapping each side of her head as she grinned at me. ‘Both brains fly out the window when Dewel focuses those baby blues on you,
oui
? You might as well play along, Auntie Eve. But he always wins, you know.’

I nipped back a retort. This outrageous young lady would remain loyal to her employer, so I needed another approach. Something to sidetrack her from this talk about my private affairs.

‘Who did you say you were again?’

‘Monique Picabou, madame. At your service!’

Peekaboo, indeed! She looked far too eager to render services I couldn’t even imagine. And since she’d come from Dewel’s house, I could guess what sort of servicing went on between those two. I was naive, but not blind.

‘So you’re French?’ I ventured, hoping again for a safer avenue of conversation.

‘
Non, non, non
, madame — Cajun,’ she replied with snapping brown eyes. ‘My family lives in the bayou behind Monsieur Proffit’s cane plantation. I suggest we start by getting you new clothes, Auntie Eve. No wonder your Chapin’s chasing after a hot young pussy!’

My face must have fallen again at this reference to my personal dilemma, for then Miss Picabou scurried to my bedside, her eyes wide with apology. Even so, I sensed she — like her employer — knew more about my husband’s private life than she would ever let on.