She instinctively moved closer, offering herself for him to lean on. His grimace told her he’d rather die than admit he needed her support, and she preceded him inside, hoping he’d follow and sit down.
He followed, and she went into the first room she found, on her right. Inside the door, she realized her mistake. His bed was in the corner of the room, rumpled bed clothing strewn on the mattress and dragging on the floor.
Nick staggered past her and sat down on the bed with a groan. Pity stirred in her when she noticed his white, strained face, and she took advantage of his closed eyes to move closer.
“You seemed to be getting better with the medication,” she murmured.
His eyes flew open, and he studied her guardedly. “I was, but I was forced to be on my feet most of the day yesterday. And I didn’t feel like I should be walking around the guests smelling of that medication.”
“Lie back. Let me see.”
The fact that he obeyed her without argument indicated to her how bad the pain must be. He laid with his head toward the foot of the bed, and she quickly retrieved one of the pillows from the floor and placed it beneath his head.
“It looks like you spent a pretty restless night,” she murmured, reaching for the sheet and draping it over his lower body.
“What are you doing?” He grabbed her hand when her fingers neared his belt buckle.
“You’ll need to remove your trousers so I can see the wound,” she said reasonably. “A massage will probably help the pain a great deal.”
“Just get me the liniment over on the bureau and go tell Miz Thibedeau to brew me some of that damned willow bark tea,” he ordered. “I don’t need you massaging anything on me.”
He shifted his leg, his face going stark white as he grabbed his hip and groaned in agony.
“Please, Nick. Let me help.”
“Maybe you better,” he gasped.
Wendi reached for the belt again, ignoring the trembling in her fingers as she undid it. She’d nursed others before--even helped Sybilla tend wounds festered by neglect and putrefication. Her stomach had never curled with dread as deep as she felt seeing Nick in such misery, though.
She tugged at his trousers, and Nick used his other leg to lift his hips and give her room to pull them down. His indrawn hiss of breath accompanied the movement, and she could feel the bellow of pain he repressed. When she saw the scarred flesh on his hip and thigh, bile rose in her stomach, but compassion and concern chased it away.
She’d felt the wound that night on his stallion, but that hadn’t prepared her for the actual sight of it. The muscles bunched and twitched from the nerve damage, and the skin was hardened and rigid with scars. A deep indentation showed where the flesh had healed over after a musketball blew away a large chunk of it. But the destruction was even more widespread than could be accounted for by a small musket ball.
“I got hit with grapeshot,” Nick said, and she sensed he was talking to try to take his mind off the pain. “I’d only read about such stuff in books, and no one could believe the Yankees were using it against us. They had plenty of cannonballs and rifle bullets without resorting to that. But I guess they just wanted to do as much damage as they could in every possible way.”
“Like Sherman did when he marched to Atlanta,” Wendi murmured, standing to go to the dresser and retrieve the witch hazel liniment she’d given him. “I read afterwards that he wanted to show the South what their resistance was doing to their own families. That’s why he destroyed everything in his path, including the fine old mansions that weren’t doing anything to benefit the South’s cause. He wanted the families homeless and needing their men to take care of them. He wanted them to realize what holding out and refusing to surrender was doing to the families they left behind.”
Nick slit his eyes, watching her return to the bed. “I must have read some of the same stories you did.” She caught a measure of respect, and perhaps a tad of surprise, in his tone. “It worked, but it sure was a hell of a loss.”
“You went out to California,” Wendi reminded him. “The South’s downfall didn’t effect you.”
“You’re wrong,” he murmured, then fell silent.
She poured some liniment in her palm and allowed it to warm for a few seconds before she spread it on his hip and thigh. Setting the bottle on the floor, she kneaded the scarred area, firmly and to the point where Nick clenched his fists in response to the pressure of her fingers. To his credit, he didn’t protest the increased pain, and after a few moments, his fists relaxed.
He opened his eyes. “Whatever you’re doing is working,” he admitted grudgingly.
“I told you it would.”
She stood to get a different grip on him, now working her fingers around his thigh, toward the inside.
“Don’t get that damned medication any closer to my co--my privates,” he snarled. “That stuff will burn.”
She blushed violently, not only at his language but at his reminder of the area of his body where she was working. Her tongue fought to utter the comeback flashing through her mind, but she clamped her teeth shut around it. She concentrated on the sturdy thigh, covered with a sprinkling of black hair and muscled and firm despite the damage to it. She leaned forward, remembering that she’d unbuttoned the top of her bodice in the morning heat at the same time she felt her dress gape open.
A bulge she’d been trying to ignore beneath the sheet elongated and jumped far enough to distinctly mound the material. Immediate heat and moisture flooded between her legs, and Wendi straightened, moving back from the bed and licking her dry lips.
“I--I believe that’s about all I can do.”
“That’s not even close to what you could do if you wanted to,” Nick growled in a voice laden with unmistakable want and need. “And you better get the hell out of here before I decide to make you admit it.”
Wendi rushed toward the door, stepping as though she’d run into a barrier when Nick almost silently murmured her name.
“What?” she asked, refusing to turn around.
“Thank you,” he said.
The simple acknowledgement did what his carnal comments couldn’t. She turned to face him again, losing herself in his eyes for a year-long moment. She glanced at his mouth, finding his lips pursed in a pout. Full and tempting, they called to her as though he’d spoken again.
What would happen if she actually walked back to that bed? Touched his lips with her fingertip? Bent down and kissed him?
Colin’s lovemaking had been tender and sweet. She had a feeling Nick’s would be violent and wild, filled with all the contradictions in his soul. Gentle yet fierce. Confused yet determined. Frantic yet all consuming.
Nick’s lovemaking could fulfill her as a woman in a way Colin’s never had, basically because Nick was more of a match for her than the more passive Colin had been.
She couldn’t imagine Nick agreeing to marry a woman just to dispel the loneliness facing him from a life without a partner. When he married--a pang of hurt went through her at the thought of him with another woman--it would be forever. It would be a total commitment to the two of them as the whole they would then be.
She finally realized how long she’d been standing there, caught in the flowing vibrations stretching between the two of them. Nick’s hooded eyes and slightly parted lips spoke of his responsiveness and acknowledgement of the sensations, too. His naked leg lay outside the sheet, his body more tempting partially clad than if it had been totally nude.
“You need to get the hell out here.” Nick’s voice almost begged her, spurring her more than if he’d ordered her, as was his usual bent.
“You’re welcome,” she said belatedly, then turned and made it through the doorway, not stopping this time until she exited the garconniere.
The world was still turning. The sun still shown. Birds still sang and flowers still bloomed, their dew-soaked heads nodding in the misty morning light. So why did she feel as though she’d left part of her appreciation
for life inside the bachelor quarters? Why did she feel as though she’d never get it back totally until after she joined her body with the man inside, where the other part of her, lost now, waited for her to find it?
She got a grip on her emotions and walked toward the kitchen house. She needed to concentrate on trying to contact her mother before Nick ordered her off Belle Chene. Now that the funeral was over, he’d have more time to realize her presence was an intrusion here.
Chapter 13
God, she was beautiful. Nick wanted her with a desperation he’d never felt even in his teens, when it seemed like all he could think of was how soon he’d be able to sweet-talk his way beneath some girl’s skirt for the first time. Find out if the culmination of this hot, tempting wanting was all it was touted up to be. If burying that throbbing part of him inside a woman could possibly feel as good when he came as it already did those other, unexpected times in the dark night.
He stared down at his bare leg, imagining a smooth, feminine thigh wrapped around it. Wendi’s thigh. Her skin was the pearl-pink of a redhead, unmarred by the freckles those with hair darker than her strawberry blond usually sported. It gleamed with that pearlescent glow, beckoning a man’s fingers to its warmth and silkiness. Her blue eyes danced with merriment when she teased him, sparkled with desire when she was as tempted as him.
And make no doubt, he mused, she wanted him, too. But did the same thing keep her from lying beneath him as kept him from kissing her senseless and eating those beautiful breasts until she opened for him to plunge into? Did the thought of who they both were--he the son of her mother’s lover, she the daughter of his father’s--keep her from surrendering to what he was sure would be a mind-blowing passion?
Or did she succeed in holding him at arm’s length because she thought he might have killed her mother? Was she able to resist the pull because she shuddered at the thought of making love with her mother’s killer?
Damn it all, those people are dead now. Wendi and I are very much alive.
Nick drew in a sharp breath. What part of his subconscious had opened and allowed that thought to see the light of day? Had he been standing, he might have fallen to his knees, the emotional impact was so strong. Turning over, he buried his face in the pillow, his mother’s shocked voice ringing audibly in his ears.
Why hadn’t he let his mother know he was there for her that night? That he would stand by her and face the consequences of their reputation being maligned, a direct result of both his and his father’s actions?
No one, not even the servants, knew he’d slipped back to the St. Charles Street mansion the night his mother killed herself. Word of Sabine’s death and whisperings of her being his father’s mistress had proceeded him, since Nick had taken a piroque and gone into the swamps for the night, not returning until the next day. And he didn’t go to her when he overheard her soliloquy in her dark bedroom. He was too ashamed of his own part in the outcome.
Why have they done this to me? he remembered her saying in a voice breaking with agony, while he stood in the hallway, unable to force himself to face her. My punishment is too harsh. I can’t go on any longer.
Had he known her words meant she was preparing for suicide, would he have found the courage to comfort her? Remind her how much he and Pierre loved her? Remind her he needed her, especially now that his heart had hardened against his father?
Nick shook his head and sat up on the side of the bed. He’d gone over and over that night in his mind. Then over it some more. He couldn’t change what had happened--what he had done and what he had failed to do.
He needed to concentrate on Belle Chene now. After his interview with Julian the day he arrived, he still wasn’t sure his cousin was the right one to take over management of the plantation. Something didn’t sit right, much as he wanted to get the hell out of here. Hell, not only get the hell out of the city, but the entire state of Louisiana. Get back to California, where his demons faded into near oblivion--dim enough to be locked into the box in his mind and ignored.
Locked away for the most part, anyway. Every once in a while--just often enough to remind him they hadn’t died off completely--one or two of them managed to force a gap in the lid of the box. Managed to sneak a claw out and dig it into his belly. Into his heart.
He washed in the common room used by all the young men who had occupied the garconniere over the years, dressed himself and headed for the house. His leg bothered him more with the lack of pain than it did when the ache would distract him from his responsibilities.
No, he admitted honestly. It wasn’t the lack of pain bothering and distracting him. It was the reason for it. The slender fingers that had massaged the pain away. The woman those fingers belonged to.
The way she ignored his rude demands for her to leave him alone and tended him anyway. The caring he felt in her touch. For that matter, she seemed to want to take care of anyone in need. Hadn’t she shown that trait with her clients that day?
He stopped on the back veranda, stunned. Could he possibly be overcoming his aversion to her being Sabine Chastain’s daughter? Be beginning to care for the total woman she was, rather than just wanting to get beneath her skirts? Get to know her in other ways instead of scheming to plunge his hardness into that delectable body and eliminate this want for her?
Hell, he needed to get out of here fast. Get back to California, a continent away from this hell.
“Julian!” he bellowed as he strode down the hallway. “Someone tell Julian to get his ass into the study so I can talk to him!”
Miz Thibedeau stepped out of the front parlor into his path. “You don’t have to bellow like a bull this early in the day, Monsieur! And you know there’s no servants left in the house since the funeral.”
“Why aren’t you out in the kitchen house fixing breakfast?” he demanded.
Her eyes narrowed, and his stomach tightened in warning. Damn it, his belly seemed to have a mind of its own whenever Miz Thibedeau got that look in her eyes, like he better treat her right or his belly would go empty. Blackmail, that’s what it was. Absolute blackmail.
Nevertheless, he softened his voice.
“I mean--look, I just got up on the wrong side of the bed a while ago. And I’m hungry for one of your delicious breakfasts. By the way, have you seen Julian this morning?”
“No, I haven’t. And Wendi already asked me to make you a cup of willow bark tea. It’s steeping on the counter in the kitchen house. I’ll bring it to you in the study.”
“Thank you. Is there anyone else around who might go find Julian for me?”
The front door opened, and both of them looked up. Julian came in, wiping his face with a handkerchief, his clothing rumpled as though he’d slept in it.
“Whew,” he said. “It’s already steaming out there.”
Miz Thibedeau hurried down the hallway without greeting Julian, and Nick felt a twinge of annoyance. Miz Thibedeau wasn’t normally that rude. Julian probably deserved it, though. He’d already noticed his cousin didn’t deign to greet the servants, and should they have the audacity to speak to him for no important reason, he disregarded them.
Nine years younger than himself, Julian hadn’t been one of Nick’s playmates when he visited Belle Chene. He didn’t remember Julian’s mother, either, vaguely recalling that she’d died in childbirth.
“You look like you’ve been up all night,” Nick said.
Julian gave him a wicked grin. “Part of me was,” he said with a wink. “But I got some sleep--enough to function on today.”
“Let’s go into the study.”
Julian followed him, and Nick took the seat behind the desk, catching Julian’s frown of irritation when he did so. Julian evidently thought the manager’s chair should be his now, given his father’s death, but Nick wasn’t ready to fully relinquish control of Belle Chene to his cousin just yet.
“Is the woman you spent the night with someone who means something?” he asked as Julian settled into one of the chairs i
n front of the desk. “Or just a passing stand?”
“We’re betrothed,” Julian said, a satisfied smirk on his face as he leaned back. “Unofficially, for now. We would have announced it, had my father not died. And I still don’t intend to wait an entire year to make her my wife, despite what the mourning period dictates. Rest assured, however, the wedding won’t interfere with my duties regarding Belle Chene. In fact, she’ll be perfect for Belle Chene’s mistress, and the plantation does need one.”
“I have to agree with you there. Who is she?”
Julian hesitated for a moment, then shrugged. “Felicite Debeau,” he said. “There’s no stain on her lineage, cousin.”
Nick whistled under his breath. No stain, for sure. In fact, he wondered how the hell Julian had pulled that off. The Debeaus were one of the original families of the parish, and he recalled that Felicite had been their only daughter. At least, when he’d left New Orleans.
“Quite a catch. For a Bardou,” Nick murmured.
Julian bristled. “I suppose you’ll dig into everything until you figure out how the hell I managed to get her to agree to marry me,” he growled. “So I might as well tell you that her family isn’t as rich as it used to be. Even being gone as long as you have been, you’ve still got contacts enough to find that out. And her only brother died in the war, so there’s no male hair to inherit their plantation, Candlemas.”
“In other words,” Nick said, “she wouldn’t have looked at you before her family fell on dire straits, given the scandal of the Bardou family.”
“True,” Julian said without remorse. “But have no doubt about it, Nick. I intend to have Felicite for my wife. And Candlemas borders Belle Chene, so that will give me my own plantation, yet allow me to keep supervising Belle Chene.”
“Then I suppose that gives you another reason to take your responsibilities at Belle Chene seriously. Good points in your favor.”
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