LAVENDER BLUE (historical romance) (18 page)

Agai
n that damnable low laughter. Suddenly she was swept up high, high against the Frenchman’s chest. Ridiculously, all she could think of at that moment was how far she would fall, with her bound hands unable to break the fall, should he drop her. She could hear the heavy, erratic pounding of his heart against her ear. Sweet Heaven, but this man was excited with passion! Despite his bedding of another woman only moments earlier! She had to give him credit for his prowess. She did give him credit, for she knew all too well the effect his lovemaking had on her. Damn him and double damn him!

Her last vestige of hope expired like a snuffed candle when her body sank into the fluffy mattress. The Frenchman meant to take her. When his hands glided her britches down ov
er her thighs and ankles, all fight went out of her. She forgot to fight him—to fight the feelings he generated. She wanted to forget. For just once she wanted to surrender.

The thud of boots, a belt, the slither of clothes being shed. The bed creaked as h
is great body lowered to pin her small frame to the mattress like a butterfly pinned to a collector’s board. But for that eternal moment in time she would forget that she was a collector’s item, one of the many women the Frenchman took and mounted.

Her arm
s came up. She hooked the leather thong knotted about her wrists behind his neck and drew his face down to hers. With a sigh she felt his lips, firm yet pliant, close over hers. The kiss seemed to last forever, a deep one that left her wanting more. His lips released hers and plundered a trail of soft, hungry kisses across her cheekbone, pausing at a heavily lashed eyelid, then moving to burn the shell of her ear. "
Ma chérie, mon coeur, mon âme
,” he rasped.

Beginning at her fingertips, she vibrated like a plucked violin string at the sensuous way his breath caressed and teased her ear. “
Pourquoi ne peut-il être comme cela tou jours
?”

She neither knew nor cared what he murmured. Her lips parted to the pirate
’s tongue, which conquered her mouth as surely as any sword conquers the unarmed. But she was armed—with the passion she had to give him. And the conqueror went down in defeat before the love-making of the conquered. Wrists bound, her arms moved questioningly over the width of the shoulders, lower along the spine. Her fingertips touched, then gripped, the firmly rounded buttocks, pressing them downward against her arching hips.

“
Morbleu
!’ he groaned.

She ignored the oath, lost as she was in her need for this
desperado who obeyed no law but his own. A self-proclaimed rebel, his kind knew no fear. But his kind would early in life know the hangman’s rope. She would taste of the man—his skin, bone, muscle fiber; she would drink of his essence—while still there was life in him. And in her. For some voice in the recesses of her mind whispered that she possessed the same temperament as the Frenchman. And that she, too, could soon face the gallows.

That knowledge slammed into her with a clarity that startled her, that
left her breathless as a blow to the windpipe. She faced the abyss of death. She walked the precarious ledge that made life all the sweeter.

And so she abandoned herself to lovemaking, matching the Frenchman
’s passion with her own strong, heated desire. He nipped her neck. She shuddered and bit his nipple. The salty taste of a man’s skin. It was an aphrodisiac. She thirsted for more!

“
Kitt,” she murmured in a voice husky with desire.

"
Oui
? ” he whispered against a fleshy, milk-white globe heavy with the need for release.

Arms at either side of his jaw, she tugged downward. She arched her back to make her breast more accessible, and through the pressure of her arms directed his mouth to her turgid nipple. She nurtured him there, glad that she could not be dis
appointed by the sight of his face. He had to possess a strong face, not a handsome one necessarily, but one with the characteristics of the proud lion, the fierce eagle.

She gave up her speculations on the Frenchman
’s appearance as he suckled her breast, giving her an intense feeling of pleasure. “Kitt,” she said again and hurried on before prudish Victorian shame would halt her words. “I want to taste of you.”

She heard the swift intake of his breath. He understood her. A long moment passed. Then he shift
ed his position. She grew giddy with the realization of what she was about.

Now he straddled her, his knees anchored at either side of her ribs. A faint, sensuously musky odor reached her and set off some primeval urge in her.

Her fingers touched with wonder the tumescent proof of his virility. She wished she could see. She had never really had the courage to look at Armand. Hard. Veined. Pulsating. Around its thickness her fingers failed short of meeting her thumb. Her hand, hampered by the binding, moved to cup the rough-textured sacs that were as heavy with need as her breasts and was rewarded with his grunted, “
Merde
!”

A blind person
’s touch sometimes reveals more than sight would. She smiled, delighted that she had found the courage, at least for the moment, to shed her female inhibitions. But then wearing a blindfold lent false courage. She would never in a million years be able to look the Frenchman in the face should she chance to meet him in a crowded room. Never! Oh, God forbid that the Frenchman frequented the parlors of Brownsville!

A hot flush washed over her, and she groaned with anxiety that such a thing could possibly happen. Her fingers slackened their inspection. Yet the vessel she held begged to be emptied, tickled her lips as his hands cupp
ed her cheeks and guided her. And she drank of this man who quenched her thirst as Armand never had.

CHAPTER TWENTY

T
he sunlight shafted down from the Protestant church’s high stained-glass window. Its beams coalesced the air’s dusty particles into an ethereal halo about Jeanette’s lovely head. No woman, Cristobal thought, could look more angelic—and behave in such a devilish fashion. Too well he remembered their parting scene aboard the
Revenge
nearly six weeks earlier and the vehemence of her hissing epitaphs. Choice Spanish curse words no doubt learned from the
campesinos
.

He could almost swear she enjoyed the act of lovemaking as much as he, that her delight was no performance; yet when the time had come for him to sail, she had coldly left hi
s bed. Averting her bandannaed face as he dressed her, she had spat, “I shall yet see you swinging from a rope!” He thought he knew her well enough; that her anger was directed at herself and her weakness in wanting a man she perceived was using her. Perhaps he was—he knew that he was also weak; that he could not pass up the opportunity to hold her, to bury himself in the woman he had always loved and always would love. He was taking uncalculated risks now, in order to hasten his voyages, in order to return to this one woman.

“
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound—

That saved a wretch like me,

I once was lost, but now I’m found.

Was blind but now I see.”

Jeanette’s voice broke on a last shrill note, and Cristobal shuddered. The damned macaw sang better than his wife. Ah, his fair love was not perfect! Thank God she wasn’t, or he would not have enjoyed her so much over the years. Never had she bored him. Living with her, he was certain, must be like visiting Bedlam. She flicked him a sheepish sideways glance, and he was unable to hold back his grin.

Even at that moment he could see she was trying to stifle a fit of giggles. From the pew
’s far end Brownsville’s matriarch, Elizabeth Crabbe, jutted her gray eagle’s head around and cast a severe frown at the two. Compressing her lips, Jeanette seemed to be trying to concentrate her attention on the minister in the pulpit. Cristobal smiled broadly at Mrs. Crabbe and nodded. The matriarch sniffed and swerved her head forward.

The dreary sermon suffered through, he stood and made way for Jeanette
’s umbrella-like skirts. As she passed near him, he inclined his head and whispered, “At least in the Catholic church, we don’t have to sing.”

She shot him a murderous look. But
he thought he detected a recalcitrant grin lurking in the curve of her lips. Oh, those luscious lips! At the church’s double doors he and Jeanette converged with General Morgan. Henri reported that Morgan was disciplining his soldiers unmercifully for failing to locate Lavender Blue.

The general executed a formal, half-military bow over Jeanette
’s proffered hand. “Mrs. Cavazos—Cristobal,” he said. “Such a pleasure to find citizens attending church who still support the Federal Government.”

Jeanette acknowl
edged the ambiguous tribute with a vapid smile and presented her gloved hand to the special agent, who stood at the general’s side. “Mark,” she said, using an insipid tone that made Cristobal want to shudder again, “you and General Morgan must come to Brownsville’s April Fool’s Ball.”

She turned back to the general, who was much shorter than either Mark or Cristobal, and smiled sweetly. “
That is—if you’re not too engaged chasing that infamous Lavender Blue.”

Cristobal groaned inwardly. He spoke several languages but could not master the tongue of his wife!
Jen, you little fool! What is it that prompts you to take such needless risks? But then, what is it that goads me to do the same? We are cut from the same cloth, my dearest friend . . . witless, mad humans we are, who enjoy living life to the fullest.

The general
’s steely falcon eyes fastened on the lovely face. Jen’s freckles were misleading, making the woman seem more like a child. But Cristobal knew the man was not one to let appearances deceive him. That was why he had reached the rank of general at such an early age. Word was he had no family but the military. It was mother, father, and, yes, even God to him. He meant to retain his rank until he could no longer sit straight in the saddle. For the military no sacrifice was too great, no duty was too mean.

He smiled, a friendly, benign smile that might have graced the face of the minister. “
Oh, I shall find Lavender Blue sooner or later. Even if it means turning the town inside out for the renegade—even if it means playing King Herod and destroying the innocent in order to locate the guilty. I shall do that, too.”

Jeanette and Cristobal witnessed a demonstration of the general’s grim adherence to his code of duty the following week when a continuous roll of muffled drums drew curious spectators to the quartermaster’s wall, as it was meant to.

Pup tents splotched the grounds now, and the Union Jack waved desultorily in place of the Bonnie Blue. The bugle notes of “
Boots and Saddles” summoned the fort’s detachments to the parade grounds. Into the suddenly silent mass of civilians and soldiers walked the short general. He was faultlessly dressed in the single-breasted dark-blue woolen uniform, its brass epaulettes gleaming in the winter sun, and jack boots that clinked ominously with rowel spurs.

Behind him two soldiers dragged a fighting brown-skinned boy of perhaps nine. The child was dressed in little more than rags. But then, since Brownsville
’s mercantile trade with the outside had been shut down by the Federal Army’s occupation, poverty was more obvious about the city. The women were wearing old gowns made new by beribboned trim. Food was scarce and dear when available. Brownsville’s glorious days as the back door to the Confederacy were ended.

In a thundering voice at odds with the small body, Morgan said, “
For trying to steal government-issued beef from the fort’s commissary, I hereby order ten lashes for the offender.”

A burly sergeant tied the boy, still struggling against his captors, to a h
itching post. With whip in hand the sergeant took his station behind the urchin, whose bare back exposed protruding shoulder blades and a prominent rib cage. Morgan grasped the saber sheathed in the steel scabbard by its brass hilt and raised it high. The blade, deeply curved like a Turkish scimitar, reflected the sun’s angry light. The roll of the drum began again.

“
Scalawags!” spat a woman to the right of Jeanette.

Farther down the quartermaster
’s wall a thin woman, whose bowed head was covered by a black mantilla, wept loudly. "
Que ayudale, Dios
!” she pleaded. “Help my son!”

Jeanette turned to Cristobal. His usual droll countenance was gray. “
Cowards,” she breathed in sibilant hiss.  “Perhaps if more of those despicable cowards fought, that child would not have to steal beef. Maggoty beef at that. Can’t anyone do anything?”

His hand tightened about his ornate walking cane until the knuckles were white. But the voice was light, affected. “
What in the cuckoo’s nest would you have me do? Would you have half the town whipped for a scrapper who most likely has lifted more than one purse? He no doubt deserves the punishment.”
That child could have been myself—a dirty, ragged Mexican-American boy who picked fish bones off Nantes’ wharf when his mother’s job as a scullery maid did not earn the food for the table.

“
Barbarians!” she muttered. “All of you.  I feel like I’m going to be sick, right here in front of everyone.

Cristobal withdrew a handkerchief from his lace cuff and languidly waved it before his nose. “
My dear, please don’t include me in the same category as those uncouth savages.”
Dared he risk one for many?

His wife st
epped forward, leaving him no choice. His hand shot out to encircle her wrist and hold her back. His strong, rich voice rang out across the parade ground. “Ho, there, General!”

The drumroll faltered. In the deafening silence all heads swiveled toward the d
andy leaning nonchalantly against the wall. The man must be deranged!

Cristobal straightened and strolled across the dusty parade ground toward General Morgan. Purple veins throbbed in the general
’s temples, but he obviously curbed his impatience. Cristobal knew the monster of a man had to take into account that the fop and his vapidly pretty wife were his only sources of amusement in that hellhole of a frontier post. “Yes?”

Indolently Cristobal swung his cane up to his shoulder. “
I’d take an oath this is the same urchin who pilfered my gold watch last week, General, and I demand the satisfaction of laying the lash myself.”

In the general
’s calculating eyes Cristobal easily divined his direction of thought – a cold-blooded fish the dandy was, but his type of man. No lily-livered knave to go sick at the sight of blood. “I’m afraid this is a military concern, Cavazos.”

“
But I am a civilian, and that—” he jabbed his cane in the direction of the trembling boy who watched fearfully over one shoulder. His dirty cheeks were streaked with tears. “That smelly wretch of humanity,” Cristobal continued lazily, “no doubt lays claim to being a civilian.”

Plainly, Morgan
’s patience was shredding. He clearly wanted to get on with the whipping. Around the wall the citizens, straining to catch some word of the conversation, were shifting restlessly. If the Morgan was careful, he would to have to quell some rowdy demonstration. “But Brownsville is under military rule, Cavazos,” he said with finality, “and I mean to set an example. The military is supreme here.”

“
But think, General,” Cristobal rattled on blithely, unperturbed by Morgan’s shortness, “what an example it would set for one of their own to administer justice.”

Morgan
’s lids narrowed until they seemed almost closed. “You may have something there,” and Cristobal knew the general calculations were following the direction he had hoped: An example set—with the public opinion trained against the dandy rather than the military. Morgan looked over his shoulder and nodded his head at the sergeant. “Give Cavazos the whip,” he rapped.

The stocky soldier
’s beetle eyes almost bulged their surprise. Then the wide-lipped mouth flattened in resentment at being deprived of the enjoyment of the task at hand. However, he obeyed the order and lumbered over to pass the whip to the elegantly dressed man whose nose wrinkled in distaste at the soldier’s odor of sweat mixed with months of accumulated dirt.

When Cristobal stepped before the hitching post, a gasp of outrage swept through the crowd l
ike wildfire over a dry prairie. The man meant to whip the child himself! “Beast!” murmured one mother with a tot’s curly head pressed against her neck. “Stinking mucker!” cursed the old bootblack who plied his trade a block over from the fort. Jeanette stood paralyzed with shame. Regardless of the vile act Cristobal was about to perpetrate, he was her husband. She would not speak out against him now. But later . . . her hands clenched at her sides until her nails cut half-moons into her palms.

Cristobal pa
ssed his cane to the waiting sergeant and shrugged out of his black frock coat before he took up his stand before the post. The lad’s small rib cage heaved with fright. The whip’s leather lash swept upward. The crowd’s indistinguishable words of anger began to rumble through the still morning air. Cristobal’s pause seemed a calculated insult, and more than one man felt the bile rise blackly in his throat. But none had the courage to step forward.

Morgan thought uneasily that his soldiers still might have to
quell an unruly mob. The lash snapped, cracking loudly on its downward course—and entirely missed the boy. “What the—?” the stocky sergeant cursed, when the lash gouged the dust dangerously close to his boots.

A faint titter arose from the crowd.

“Sorry,” Cristobal said. “Not used to applying such a long whip. Prefer the quirt myself.”

Once again the whip slashed and snaked and sliced through the air. A gasp rose from the crowd when Cristobal, ineptly following through with the swing of his arm, lost his g
rip and stumbled forward. The whip sailed through the air. Its butt struck the sergeant in the stomach. At the man’s surprised grunt, smothered chortles erupted from the civilians and soldiers alike.

“
Cavazos!” Morgan barked. The dandy was making a fool of himself, not to mention a complete mockery of the military.

Cristobal hefted his ungainly frame upright. “
I shall do better next time, Morgan,” he muttered, meticulously brushing the dust from his trousers.

Impatience mingled with chagrin to ruddy the gen
eral’s complexion. “You are bungling the whipping, Cavazos!”

Unperturbed, Cristobal wiped the dust from his hands. “
My methods of punishment are more subtle, General. I vow I could worm the whereabouts of my watch from that urchin if you would give me half an hour alone with him.”

“
Just take the little heathen and leave!” Morgan nodded curtly at the bugler and rapped out, “Dismissed!” to his troops.

Cristobal took his coat from the bristling sergeant and grinned drolly. “
Sorry to strike you, old man.” Before the sergeant could muster a retort, Cristobal added to the general, “And, Morgan, I shall let you know if my watch turns up.”

“
Blithering idiot!” Morgan muttered and stalked away.

The bugler
’s notes were drowned out by the crowd’s boos and laughter as Cristobal grabbed the boy’s ear and pulled him along with him. The boy kicked and flailed, finally breaking loose to dash for freedom through the press of people.

Cristobal shrugged his broad shoulders and ambled off toward the black-iron gate, carelessly sw
inging his cane. The men and women made way for him, all the while hooting at the buffoon that he had made of himself. Jeanette stood her ground, but he saw burning in her eyes a contempt no longer tempered by her friendship for him. The freckles across her nose leapt out from the deathly pallor of her skin. She said not a word when he took her elbow.

They walked a block toward the center of town in tense silence before he raised a hand to hail a hack. “
I had no idea the exertion of applying the lash could be so wearing,” he said, handing her up inside the carriage. “While you finish your shopping, I think I shall lift a draught of refreshment.”

“
Oh, by all means do!” she retorted and jerked her hand from his grasp.

“
Now, Jen, you’re not going to be one of those wives who nag about a little drink?”

She drew a shuddering breath. “
Madame Dureaux’s Millinery,” she told the driver.

Cristobal watched the hack roll away before he turned his footsteps toward the Matamoros ferry. During the
twenty-mile stagecoach ride from Matamoros to Bagdad he contained the misery that pricked at his soul. He stretched out his long legs diagonally to avoid the bony knees of the drummer across from him, and closed his eyes. But the contemptuous curl of Jeanette’s lips haunted him, and his eyes snapped open, unseeing of the mesquite-studded hills and sandy marshland that rolled past the coach’s window.

La Fonda del Olvido was packed with sailors of every nationality waiting out the afternoon
’s rough sea. The room was hot with the press of bodies and reeked of stale beer,
pulque
, and
aguardiente
. Cristobal’s eyes searched the smoke-congested room to find Solis in a far corner with three more of the
Revenge's
sailors. Cristobal could not face such camaraderie at that moment. Solis looked up and lifted a swarthy hand in greeting.

Cristobal shouldered his way to the table. “
A boy was almost whipped for theft at the fort,” he said tersely. “I want you to find his mother and see that the family is well cared for.”

So
lis nodded, but his finely arched brows rose in curiosity that his captain would concern himself for one boy in particular.

Cristobal offered no explanation but left them to weave a path to the long bar. “
Brandy,” he grunted when the white-aproned bartender approached.

He took the mug and headed for the stairs and the room he kept.

But the mug remained on the bureau, the brandy untouched. On the bed’s edge Cristobal sat with his head buried in his hands. Was the need for deception worth the anguish of what he had lost? A friendship that overrode the bounds of sexuality. Never could she despise him more. But that was not completely true; her loathing would be as sharp as a machete—and as deadly, should she ever discern his masquerade.

Sometime during the even
ing Rubia entered. Her pale hands lowered to cradle the weeping man against her stomach. Desolate, his arms went around her hips. “Hush, Kitt, love,” she consoled him. “Everything will be all right.”