Two British soldiers ran toward Rick with fixed bayonets. He fired, hitting one. The other continued to advance, stabbing his bayonet into the side of Rick’s right leg. Rick pistol-whipped the man, and he fell to the ground.
“Shit!” Rick flicked the reins, wheeled his horse around, and raced back to the general.
Jackson’s eyes gleamed as he roared, “We whipped ’em back!”
General Coffee appeared out of the fog. “We had ’em on the run until they brought reinforcements. They have a lot more men now, coming through the swamp.”
The general’s stallion sidestepped, snorted, and he patted his withers to calm the beast. “They’re fierce.”
“So are we,” General Coffee said as his horse danced and almost collided with Duke. “We bloodied their noses tonight, sir.”
Jackson looked toward the battlefield. “That we did. We stood face-to-face with ’em. Showed ’em we’re not afraid to go on the offense. Now let’s see to a good defense.”
Rick and Penny left the battlefield and rode with Jackson to the de la Ronde plantation. Rick swayed, barely staying upright on his horse.
“We’ll stay here a while to make sure enemy reinforcements don’t try to extend their counterattack,” Jackson said.
“General,” Rick said, gritting his teeth against the pain. “I’m going over to Macartés’ to get my wounds cleaned up. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
The general eyed Rick’s wounds in the torchlight. “There’re doctors here. Go see one of them.”
“I don’t want to take them away from the seriously wounded, sir. Sophia can fix me up.” Rick wasn’t about to let an early nineteenth-century surgeon get anywhere near his wounds.
“You need to be fit to ride with me the next time we take on those bastards,” Jackson said. “Go rest. Report to me in the morning.”
Rick would have saluted if he’d been able to lift his arm.
Penny peered at him a moment, shook her head, and took hold of his reins. “Stay in your saddle, Marine. I’ll get you some help.” Penny was dazed-looking, covered with dirt and blood, but she was more together than he was.
“You have blood on you. Are you hurt?” he managed to ask.
“Not mine.” She led his horse to the Macartés’ mansion while he slumped over, light-headed, blood seeping through his clothes.
“Pete! Remy!” Penny called as she and Rick rode up to the mansion.
The balcony door was thrown open, and Pete and Sophia appeared at the railing. “Remy’s with the wounded.”
“Rick’s cut bad. Help me get him up there,” Penny said.
Pete and Sophia ran down the stairs, and together with Penny’s help, got Rick out of the saddle.
“Do you need help?” Tommy called from the balcony.
“Find Remy,” Sophia yelled. “Tell him Rick’s hurt.”
“Fuck!” Pete said. “Look at all this blood. You sure he’s not shot?”
“Not…shot,” Rick mumbled.
“Let’s get him upstairs.”
They carried Rick up to the parlor and placed him on a long table. “Jesus, I’ve never seen so much blood. He’s got to have another wound.” Pete lightly shook Rick’s shoulder. “You sure you’re not shot?”
“Bayonets. Just sew ’em up, willya?”
“Get his jacket and shirt off so we can see,” Pete ordered. “I’ll cut off part of his trousers.”
Every move felt like a thousand irons burning Rick’s skin. It took all his reserve energy to lift his back even an inch off the table. If the enemy came through the door right now, he wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing to defend himself or his friends.
Remy arrived, putting on a clean apron. “What do we have?” He pulled a stethoscope out of his pocket and listened to Rick’s heart and lungs.
“Two long, deep gashes,” Penny said. “I was afraid he’d picked up a bullet, too.”
“Are you injured?” Remy asked, not taking his eyes off her.
“Minor cut near my knee. You can feel my legs up later,” Penny grinned.
“I look forward to it,” Remy returned her grin. Then to Tommy, he said, “Will you bring me a pot of hot water from the kitchen?”
“Do you want clean towels, too?” Tommy asked.
“A couple,” Remy said as Tommy rushed off.
“I thought you two were covering each other’s backs. You did a lousy job, Penny.” Pete gave his words time to settle in and sink to the bone before he added, “How’d Rick get this bad?”
Penny whirled on him, hands on her hips. “Do I look like the kind of girl who intentionally lets my bro get injured?” She flicked her blue hair off her sweaty neck. “It was pea soup out there—worst battle conditions I’ve ever seen. At one point, I thought it was as bad as it could get, but five minutes later, it surpassed that, and five seconds later, surpassed it again. You couldn’t see shit! Rick and I were probably ten to fifteen feet apart and couldn’t see each other. Nothing stopped Jackson. The man’s fearless. The battle was intense. All my senses were cocked.”
Remy used an auto-injector to give Rick an intramuscular dose of morphine. “That should ease the pain. And you two are just as fearless. Doan sell yourselves short. We’ve all been in battles and know how shit happens. Jackson would be lost if you put him in any of the situations we’ve been in.”
Sophia stepped to the side of the table and took Rick’s hand. “How are you doing, Marine?”
Rick tried for a smile but failed, tried to wink, too, but couldn’t pull that off either. “Kept losing Penny and the general,” he mumbled. “Couldn’t see through the gun smoke. Bayonets held in disembodied hands came out of the fog and attacked me.”
Remy’s eyebrows arched. “If we were home, you’d get a transfusion. Just so you know, if your blood pressure drops any lower, we’re going home ASAP.”
Rick’s teeth chattered. He tried clenching his jaw, then said in a low voice, hardly above a whisper. “Tell me good news.”
“You’ll survive. The bad news is, you’ll hurt like hell. The good news is, the cuts didn’t go into the muscle. You got lucky. I’m going to debride the wounds and sew you up.”
“What about infection?” Penny asked.
“We all started a course of antibiotics before we left, but those two bayonets that stabbed Rick were dirty as shit. That’s why I’ve got to clean the wounds out good.”
“You know how to do this?” Pete asked.
“Yep. Charlotte’s a good teacher.” Remy glanced around. “When Tommy comes back, get him out of here. He woan understand what I’m doing.”
“I need to be at headquarters,” Rick said.
“You’ll be in pain and should keep your arm and leg elevated. But I know the wounds woan stop you from doing what you think you should do,” Remy said.
“Wouldn’t stop Jackson. Won’t stop me.”
“We’ll see about that, hotshot,” Penny said.
“I can go anywhere. I got a bad-tempered horse. He even bit my damn foot.”
As his muscles absorbed the narcotic and the drug spread into his bloodstream, the searing pain that had sucked Rick into a black hole slowly released him. He could sense his late mother drifting on the edges of his consciousness, felt her lay a soothing hand on his lacerated skin.
He squinted at Sophia. “Rosary…pocket.”
She searched through his jacket pockets until she found the rosary, tucked it in his hand, and wrapped his fingers around it. And the first peaceful moment he’d experienced since waking up that morning at the Villére Plantation swept over him.
But his overactive gut whispered to his heart a truth with a double meaning, “It won’t last until all of them are dead.”
40
New Orleans (1814)—Pete
Pete watched Remy stitch up Rick’s wounds and was relieved when Penny volunteered to stay the night at the Macarté Plantation to watch over the patient. That freed Pete up to take Sophia back to the city. Penny must have sens
ed the tension between him and Sophia because she pretty much booted them out the door. And Penny Lafitte could have done it, too. Man, she was one badass babe.
Pete and Sophia rode the six miles in silence with steam rolling off Pete’s shoulders and anger churning in his stomach. Sophia had a lot of explaining to do, but he was so pissed right now he didn’t want to talk about what she’d done behind his back.
Not yet anyway, but he would. And it could get ugly.
Four years of marital almost-bliss was about to come to a screeching halt. He hadn’t been this angry since Sophia’s parents annulled their marriage.
When they reached Marguerite’s courtyard, he announced, “I’ll put the horses up. You go on in and get a bath.”
“Pete—”
He sliced the air with his hand. “I don’t want to hear it, Sophia Frances. I’ve been on the road for four days. I got beat up, nearly killed, and I returned to find my wife working on General Jackson’s staff in the middle of a goddamn battle. If you want the truth, I’m more disappointed and hurt now than I was when you chose Thomas Jefferson over me. And goddamn it, I was messed up for months over that.”
She clutched her crossbody bag to her chest. Damn journal. Damn pencils. He wanted to grab the bag and throw her drawings out into the street for wagon wheels and horses to destroy.
“It’s not like that. I was never in danger,” she said.
“Enough! I don’t have the patience right now to listen to you. I’m so pissed, I’m shaking. Go get your bath. Go to bed. We’ll deal with it tomorrow.”
“Pete—”
“I’m not listening to you! Go away!” If he yelled any louder, he’d wake up all of New Orleans—and goddamn it, right now he didn’t give a shit.
She sniffled as she trudged across the courtyard toward the back door of Marguerite’s townhouse. And he had no sympathy for her.
Liar.
Okay, it tore him up, but he couldn’t give in to her. She promised before they left the future that she wouldn’t do anything to put herself in harm’s way. And goddamn it, she’d done just the opposite. He wanted to shake some sense into her—not physically, but he had to do something to get her attention.
She entered the townhouse, and he watched as the oil lamps came on downstairs, following her trek through the house as the lamps came on upstairs in the bathroom and their bedroom.
What he said about shaking was the damn truth. She’d ripped his guts out.
They had lived in a wonderland ever since she came back to him five years ago. He knew she had a restless spirit, so he made sure she traveled to new and exotic locations at least every few months to satisfy her hunger for inspiration. And it was the only time she relaxed enough that they could make love without pressure to conceive, which had become a daily chore for them.
Lukas had kept her busy enough that she didn’t miss her adventures, but when she didn’t get pregnant again, that restless spirit returned, and it was even more insatiable. It was as if she was driven to paint more original and challenging paintings to make up for the babies she couldn’t conceive.
They both wanted a house full of kids and had designed their new home near Florence with six bedrooms for the babies they planned to have. What a joke. They’d never fill them, especially if she continued to do stupid shit that could get her killed.
Maybe the next IVF cycle would work. And if not, the next one. They had to remain positive, but she was in a slump. When he found sketches she’d drawn of empty wombs, he cried and even had a talk with their priest, who advised him to talk to Sophia. But she refused to discuss it.
Living in denial wasn’t helping either of them.
He took a bunch of deep breaths. “Shit. Why is this happening to us?”
He unsaddled the horses, hung up the tack, and brushed them before putting both in empty stalls with hay and water. None of it cooled his temper, even though Elliott told him years ago that horses enjoyed being brushed in areas they couldn’t reach. So Pete made sure he always attended to chests, bellies, and the backs of their legs. These horses were tired and wanted to eat and sleep, but Pete was stalling and kept brushing, and the Elliott-directed task kept him away from Sophia.
When he finally went inside, there was no light shining beneath their closed bedroom door.
He stripped in the bathroom and inspected his purple bruises, shivering. If Penny hadn’t recognized him, he’d be dead now. He had close calls in Afghanistan, but his worst ones until now had occurred on the streets of New York City. He was just damn lucky he wasn’t chewed up by a fucking gator.
Folded on the washstand were a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt that Marguerite made for him, along with a large pot of hot water on the small corner stove. Sophia had left the clothes and water.
But even though she was always thoughtful and kind, he could still be pissed at her. Wait a minute. She wasn’t always thoughtful and kind. If she was, they wouldn’t be struggling with the worst blowup of their relationship.
He stepped into Marguerite’s imported porcelain tub and washed off several layers of dirt and grime. She didn’t have running water in the tub, but she did have a drain that probably went straight to the street. He didn’t ask and didn’t want to know.
He picked up the razor but dropped it. He didn’t plan to kiss his bride goodnight, so his four days of scruff could stay right where it was—on his bruised face.
After drying off, he pulled on the sweatpants and T-shirt and turned off the oil lamp.
A short knock preceded the door opening. “We need to talk, Pete. We agreed we’d never go to sleep angry. And we’ve kept to that.”
He looked at her and sputtered a fake laugh. “Until now. I can’t talk about how disappointed and hurt I am. Go to bed.” He squeezed past her in the doorway and strode toward the sitting room for a shot of whisky. Maybe that would unclench his asshole. And maybe not.
She followed him through the corridor, her bare feet pattering on the floorboards. “It’s not like that, Pete. I took precautions. I asked General Jackson to assign Tommy to me, so I’d always have a soldier for protection. Everyone on the General’s staff knows who I am, and they all watched out for me like I’m their little sister. I was never in danger. That’s why I stayed behind at the Macartés’. I knew it was too dangerous to go out.”
He spun on his heel. “The thing that upsets me so much was that you had this all planned out without considering what I wanted. You,” he pointed at her, “promised you wouldn’t leave Marguerite’s side. But within just hours of my departure, that’s exactly what you did.”
“That’s not completely true.”
A spasm ripped through him “Completely? Shit, Sophia. Are we arguing semantics?”
Her impatience with him was on full display as she gritted her teeth and bunched her hands into fists, but she remained calm. He’d give her that.
“Marguerite went with me the first day, but she left when General Jackson asked me to stay and sketch pictures of his staff meeting. Before she left, she arranged with Tommy Malone to walk me home. It was my idea to dress as a private to give me another layer of security. I was always with Marguerite, Tommy, or the general. What I was doing was important.”
“To who? You? The world? History? What about being important to me!”
“To whom.”
“What?”
“Whom not who.”
“Shit! What…ever.” He poured a whisky from the decanter sitting on a table between the fireplace and window. The fire needed more fuel, needed to be stoked, but hell, he was stoked enough to blast the room with plenty of hot air.
He turned around to face her again. “What about the rest of us? You want to go on other adventures, but I’ll tell you right now, I’ll never be able to trust you again.”
She gave him an arch look before continuing. “Knowing how important it is to me to visit other eras, and you’ll never agree? That’s not fair.”
He took a big gulp and didn’t give the bu
rn time to settle before he swallowed hard, shocked that she was throwing what was “fair” at him. “Are you fucking serious? It’s not fair? Shit. Give me a break.”
“I’m quite serious. You travel all over the world for your job. I want to travel all over the world too, but to different centuries. I need that.”
He pointed with his glass, his hand shaking. “I’m calling bullshit on that one. If you can’t have it, what are you going to do? Get your brooch? Go back to living in your studio apartment. What about Lukas? Are you going to give him to me and walk out of our lives?”
Tears streaked down her face. “No, that’s not what I want, and you know it. You’re not fighting fair.”
“Fighting fair? Now we’re back to what you think is fair again. God. Sometimes, Sophia, I don’t know where in the world your head is. You nearly died in Paris, and you think this is some goddamn grand adventure. I almost died out there in the swamps.”
Pete hammered the wall with his fist. “I just want to keep my wife safe, but you won’t let me. I’d rather live without you than show up one day and find you dead. It killed me to leave you in New York City. I thought I’d never recover. But that pain was a walk in the park compared to what it would be like if I had to bury you. Or if you just disappeared and I had to spend the rest of my life wondering if you were dead or in prison or—”
He stood in front of the window and sipped from the crystal glass, wanting to throw it through the window to get her attention.
“What can I say? W-what can I do to put us back together?” she asked, taking little hitching breaths.
“Nothing, goddamn it!” He pressed his forehead against the cool window glass. “I don’t know why we thought we could put a relationship back together after twenty years.”
“We have put it back together. We have a son we adore, a great life, interesting work, wonderful friends, a business, and a large family. We can’t throw that all away. What can I do? What promises can I make?”
“Why bother? You won’t keep them.”
“That’s not fair either. If you had stayed in the city, you would have been out scouting for Jackson while I stayed at headquarters. You wouldn’t have had a problem, knowing I was with Tommy. I took every precaution while you were out trying to get killed! You and Rick shouldn’t have split up. That was dumb.”
The Topaz Brooch Page 46