Forever, For Love

by Becky Lee Weyrich

  As Pandora eased between the curtains, Ward sat back, staring into the fire. What a pleasant evening it had been. Maybe he would do as he had suggested, pay Pandora court just to see what would happen. He’d known from that first night here in the cottage that he wanted her. Yes, he could finally admit it to himself—he loved her! But maybe Pandora was right. They might discover that marriage wasn’t for either of them. In time he and Pandora would become lovers, growing old together, but never allowing the dull routine of married life to blunt the sharp edge of their passion. He closed his eyes and sighed. They would travel the world together, making love in Paris, Rome, London, Moscow, and in his little shack outside the silver mine in Mexico—even right here in Laffite’s Grove.

  Some sound caught his ear. His eyes flew open. Pandora stood before him, dressed only in his burgundy velvet robe.

  “I want you to make love to me, Ward,” she said matter-of-factly. One hand fluttered up to her hair, held in place by dozens of garnet-studded golden hairpins. “I left it up,” she said hesitantly. “I’ve been told a man enjoys taking it down himself—slowly, letting each pin fall to the floor.”

  When he recovered enough to speak, all Ward could say was “My God, Pandora!”

  “I’ve thought it all out, Ward. It’s what I want.”

  “You can’t just come into a man’s home, shed your clothes, and say, ‘Take me!’ That’s not the way it’s done, Pandora!”

  Although this was exactly what Ward had dreamed of for so long, he was taken aback by her forwardness. He had meant to initiate their lovemaking. It was his responsibility, his right as the man. When he saw her lips begin to tremble and a tear dribble down her cheek, he was on his feet immediately, sorry for his outburst. He drew her into his arms and said, “Don’t cry about it.”

  “You don’t want me,” she whimpered.

  “I never said that. Yes, Pandora, I want you. God, how I want you! I’ve wanted you for as long as I can remember.” He fumbled at the belt of the robe and opened it, slipping his hands inside to touch her breasts. She sighed and leaned her head on his shoulder.

  “Oh, yes, Ward,” she sighed as his touch turned her weak. “Make love to me!”

  He kissed her softly and fleeting glimpses of Laffite and Nicolette together in their great gilded bed passed through Pandora’s mind. Laffite’s hands were stroking Nicolette’s breasts, just as Ward was fondling hers. Suddenly, Ward released her, closed the robe, and moved away.

  “Are you sure, Pan? You won’t wind up hating me?” he asked quietly.

  “No, never!” There was pleading in her tone.

  “You’re very young, Pandora. You’ve had a great shock. It’s natural for you to think now that you will never marry. But in years to come, you’ll change your mind. How will it make you feel, going to your husband knowing that I stole his treasure long ago?”

  Damn his conscience! Why was he trying to talk her out of it? He was a man of appetites and Pandora Sherwood was high on his list of desirable delicacies.

  Pandora felt doubly rejected—first by Jacob and now by Ward. It was almost more than she could bear. She had her life mapped out in her mind. She would soon return to Paris but tonight she longed to feel desired, cherished. Now she realized there was something more to her need. She had thought about the possibility before and found it to her liking. Tonight when Ward had first kissed her, mere possibility had grown to probability. What if Ward Gabriel was indeed her Jean Laffite?

  “Please, Ward,” she whispered urgently, “love me…”

  Slowly, Pandora sank to the sofa beside him. She leaned over, pressing her lips to his, her mouth open, inviting. He drew her into his arms, once more slipping his hands inside the robe even as his tongue slipped into her waiting mouth. Her whole body burned and tingled at his touch. Their kisses grew more passionate. Her breathing came in short, shallow bursts.

  Silence reinged except for the soft crackling of the fire and the dull metallic sound of gold striking wood as Ward slowly, carefully drew the hairpins from Pandora’s thick red-gold tresses, never taking his eyes from hers. She sighed with pleasure as he ran his fingers through her hair. This was so good… so right.

  Then, griping the silken skein, he forced her head back. “Oh, God, Pandora! You can’t imagine how long I’ve wanted to hold you like this!” His eager mouth burned a fiery trail of kisses down her throat.

  Suddenly, the room vanished. She was once again in Maison Rouge—before Isabel’s coming. She lay wrapped in her husband’s strong arms, feeling his hardness pressed to her naked belly while his hands moved over her back, stroking, fondling, sending waves of desire searing through her. She could stand no more. She must have him!

  “Oh, Jean darling,” Pandora cried, digging her nails into Ward’s muscled arms. “Now, please, take me now!”

  PART TWO

  Chapter Fourteen

  April, 1897

  Naples, Italy

  The view from the window was breathtaking. Naples languished about the gently undulating hills like the many-colored petticoats of some voluptuous peasant maiden as she lay in the arms of her lover. Beyond the staggered houses that dotted the lush green Posilipo area, wavelets danced on the bay like floating diamonds. A plume as white as snow stretched to heaven from the cone of Vesuvius. In the distance, Capri rose from the water, its limestone cliffs in purple shadow, beckoning the rich and the decadent to come and play.

  Bright Mediterranean sunshine spilled in through the open window, pouring over Pandora’s shoulders to shower golden highlights on Franco’s naked body. Staring at him, she had to admit that she had never seen such a flawless male form—broad shoulders, tapered waist, trim hips, and the long, muscled legs of an athlete. In every way, Franco was as sleek and powerful as a stallion. His perfection allowed Pandora to reach new heights that until now had seemed unattainable. Her excitement grew as her hands moved boldly, caressing his strong, earthy maleness with sure strokes. Ah, how good it felt, how magnificent the end result would be!

  Her nose itched, but she dared not pause to scratch it. Franco would rage if they weren’t finished in the allotted time.

  “How much longer?” he demanded, reminding her what an impatient man he was. “I ache all over. Can’t you hurry?”

  Pandora quickened her strokes, dashing sunlight-colored oils across the smooth belly of the figure on her canvas. “It shouldn’t take much longer, Franco.”

  He sighed deeply, tragically, but held his pose.

  Pandora went on with her masterpiece, adding the finishing touches as her mind strayed to other times and other places. Each painting she had done in the past three years seemed a small lifetime in itself. Her existence with Franco had begun a mere five weeks ago. Now once again, she was about to end her work. What would come next? Would she stay on in Naples or move on? She wasn’t sure.

  At least the weather was warmer now. She and Franco had both shivered in her cold studio during the first weeks’ sessions while the late winter rains poured outside and the cold mistral blew down from the snow-covered mountains to the north lashing the coast with a vengeance. A sudden gust of warm wind filled the room with the familiar perfume of oleanders, conjuring up visions of Galveston and the pink, yellow, and white flowers that bloomed so profusely there. A little stab of pain shot through Pandora’s heart. How long had it been since she last saw her home?

  Paris, London, Vienna, Rome, and now Naples. For the past three years—since she fled to France the day after Jacob and Angelica’s wedding, the morning after that dreadful scene with Ward—she had stared at disrobed models in dirty, drafty studios all over Europe. Her bold nudes now hung in galleries, in restaurants, in private villas all over the Continent, and were peddled from stalls on the banks of the Seine.

  The paintings, which she signed “Nicolette,” were now more famous than Bouguereau’s naked nymph at the Hoffman House in New York. The thought of New York brought a fleeting mental glimpse of
Ward Gabriel’s handsome, smiling face. She wondered briefly where he was, what he was doing, if he had married. The ghost of her memory sent shivers of longing coursing through her. How she wished she could reshape their final hour together!

  But the past could not be altered. Her only reality existed in the here and now. She had left Galveston with a mission: she had wanted to be known. Now she was famous all right. At least the recluse named Nicolette was known round the world. Pandora had not been bold enough to put her own name on her paintings. The art world rumors concerning Nicolette were rampant. Many artists and patrons spread tales about her that grew with each telling. It was said that she had an insatiable sexual appetite, that she paid her male models with favors, not cash.

  How ironic that half the men in Europe bragged of having slept with Nicolette, but not a single man had yet made love to Pandora Sherwood. No doubt Ward Gabriel, if he knew, would find that fact amusing.

  Ward Gabriel! How often she thought of him. How long it seemed since she’d seen him last.

  “Carissima,” Franco crooned softly, casting a leering grin her way. “What can you be thinking of? Your nipples have puckered. No gutter thoughts, per favore. Keep your mind on your work or we’ll never be done.”

  Ignoring Franco’s annoying interruption, Pandora went right on thinking what she pleased but a flush of embarrassment warmed her face. Without moving, she glanced down at her thin smock. Her thoughts of Ward had indeed aroused her.

  The last time she’d seen him… it seemed long, long ago. Her final night in Galveston—the night of the wedding—the night Ward had rejected her desperate plea that he make her a woman. After that disgraceful scene at his cottage, she’d had no choice but to run away. She could not have faced him again.

  She still smarted with shame whenever she thought about that night. She still blamed herself for his turning back at the last moment. It embarrassed her now to remember how innocent she’d been at the time. What an enormous amount of naive courage it had taken to throw herself at him that way.

  She could still imagine his kisses and the way she’d felt as his hands played over her breasts. Heat rose in her body at the very thought. Oh, how she had wanted Ward to make love to her that night; he had wanted her, too. She was as sure of it this minute as she had been then. On the very brink of taking her, her vision had begun. She’d sighed Jean Laffite’s name and Ward had quickly drawn away, raging at her about her fantasies. She must have been out of her head that night. Why had she tried to make Ward fit her image of Jean Laffite? Even if she still thought he might be the one, Ward believed none of her talk of reincarnation.

  To this day she could still see the scowl of anger on his face. “You don’t want me to love you!” he’d accused. “You want your precious pirate ghost! Well, I won’t play your games, Pandora. If ever you decide that I’m the man you desire, I’m more than willing. Just let me know!” He’d flung the robe at her then. “Get dressed. It’s time I took you home.”

  She’d been stunned, shamed, furious at the time. Their ride back to Broadway had been in strained silence. He’d seen her to the door, wished her a cool good-night, and driven away. No kiss, no touch, no word of comfort.

  She’d spent the rest of that night sobbing and packing. The next morning, she’d caught the first boat leaving Galveston, headed for New Orleans. She had literally run away from home, leaving only a note behind, addressed to her aunt and uncle.

  Her week’s stay in the Crescent City while she waited for a ship to take her to France had been most enlightening. She’d spent her time searching through old record books, gleaning facts about the Vernet family. Nicolette’s birth was recorded in the church archives, the same day as the great fire that leveled most of the city in 1794. Ironic, she thought that she and Nicolette had both come into life during times of great danger—birthed in fire and flood.

  She also located Nicolette’s marriage certificate—but not to Jean Laffite—to a man named Diego Bermudez. Oddly enough, however, there was no record of his death in the book. Could that mean that Nicolette and Jean Laffite were never legally married, but lived together as lovers?

  She’d even found the old Vernet home in Toulouse Street. She thought it resembled a beautiful Creole woman who had fallen on hard times. Its cream-colored sand brick facade had gone dingy with age and want of paint. The delicate wrought iron balconies, used now by some poor family to hang out their wash, were rusting badly.

  She’d knocked at the front entrance, curious to see if the interior would spark any memories. A fat Irish woman with a squalling infant in her arms answered the door. Pandora had a difficult time explaining why she wanted to come in and look around. Finally, she’d lied, telling the befuddled tenant that she was considering buying the property, but needed to see it first.

  Moving from one cluttered, dirty room to the next, she’d tried to imagine its former grandeur. In one of the bedrooms upstairs, she’d experienced a warmth that was certainly lacking in the rest of the unheated house. “Nicolette’s room,” she’d said to herself. She’d closed her eyes and concentrated, finally conjuring up a vision of a great tester bed with filmy mosquito netting and heavy brocade curtains, a rosewood dresser on which lay a silver toilette set, and for a fleeting instant she’d seen a young, ebony-haired beauty, standing by the window, weeping.

  Pandora had caught her breath and reached out, whispering Nicolette’s name. Her hand had passed through the fading image, and when she looked about again, she saw only a pile of papers, peeling plaster walls, a sagging cot, and a mouse scurrying through a hole in the baseboard.

  She learned a great deal about the Vernet family in New Orleans. Nicolette’s mother had died in a madhouse. Soon after his wife’s death, Claude Vernet married his sister-in-law, Gabrielle, just as she had told Dr. Pinel. As for Jean Laffite, he had sailed away from New Orleans shortly after the great battle against the British, never to return again. Everyone she spoke with agreed that he had headed for Mexico, but had landed on Galveston Island by mistake. Some said he died in the Yucatan of a fever in 1826. No one seemed certain. One elderly woman told her that Laffite had been seen in Alton, Illinois, as late as 1854.

  Gooseflesh prickled her arms when she met an old man who said he’d actually known Jean Laffite.

  “Knew his brothers Dominique and Pierre, too, and their uncle Rene Beluche,” he told her.

  The thought that this man’s life had overlapped both of hers was somehow staggering. She’d stared into his weathered face, wanting to ask a million questions, but not knowing where to begin.

  “You really knew him?”

  His egg-bald, sun-bronzed head tilted to a jaunty angle. “Not so’s I could call him friend. Me and him we fit the British Dragon together. I was just a lad, a beardless drummer boy. One day I stood so close to him I coulda reached out and touched that scarlet sash that held his sword.” The old man’s voice took on a wistful tone then as he gazed off into the distance, remembering. “Tall he was and straight as a swamp cypress. With green eyes that could pierce you through. There was pure devilment in his smile. He could even laugh while them Brits was trying to make us all into buzzard bait. I tell you, lady, now there was a man! The women loved him; the men feared him. His band of bloody roughnecks would’ve stormed the gates of hell if Laffite told them he wanted old Lucifer taken captive.”

  “What about his wife?”

  “Wife?” The old man squinted up at her with eyes as sharp as a hawk’s and a face to match. “Don’t know that he had no wife. I heared tell he had himself a right pretty woman, though.”

  “They weren’t married?” Pandora had trouble containing her shock.

  “Hell, no! If we’re talking about the same woman—the one that run off to Galveston with him. She still had her a husband. Spanish Creole the man was, and something of a bounder as I recollect.”

  “Was his name Bermudez?”

  “Yeah.” He stabbed at her with his pipe and nodded.
“Yeah, that was it. That was one big scandal in this town, I can tell you. Jean Laffite won that woman in a poker game from her husband. Imagine, a man putting his own wife in the pot.” He chuckled then and winked at Pandora. “Hell, I reckon it ain’t such a crazy thought after all. Many’s the time I’d of liked to got rid of my Mabel that easy, rest her soul.”

  “What happened to Bermudez?”

  The old man stared down at his gnarled hands, sorting out the past in his mind. “Don’t rightly recall, ma’am. He was a no-good, though. Only married that pretty little gal for her papa’s money. Treated her real mean, he did. Even tried to kill her once, so they say. As I recollect, Bermudez just up and disappeared.” Suddenly, his eyes lit up. “No, wait, a old whore name of Josepha told me he died of the yellow fever on her flatboat. She claimed Laffite hisself deep-sixed the body. Since there wasn’t no corpse or no death certificate, the church never recognized him as dead. To their way of thinking, his wife was married to him to the day she died. Poor woman, reckon she had good cause to run off with Laffite.”

  Pandora now realized that the broomstick marriage was all, except their love, that had united Jean Laffite and Nicolette. She could not have been his legal wife, could never have hoped to be. All the more reason, she thought, for their souls to seek each other in a new existence, since, by church law, Nicolette had never been allowed to marry the man she truly loved. If Pandora had ever doubted before that Nicolette had come back through her, all misgivings vanished during her stay in New Orleans.

  From there, she had traveled on to Paris, arriving in rainy, dreary March. Dr. Pinel had agreed to resume their sessions, even though he still scoffed at her belief in reincarnation. With his help, she’d relived much more of Nicolette’s life, especially her younger years, including her brief but dreadful marriage to Diego Bermudez—gambler, womanizer, liar, cheat, and sadist. That Nicolette survived the man’s cruelties was a miracle.