Luck of the Wolf

by Susan Krinard

Sorry? “What do you mean?” she asked, dreading his answer.

  “I mean that you and I…we can never be together.”

  She didn’t believe him. No one could do what they had done and not…

  Her heart burst open, dying a little more with every breath she took. “Tell me why,” she said.

  He lifted his head, turning just enough that she could see the deep lines etched around his mouth. “I don’t want to hurt you, Aria.”

  “I want to know the truth.”

  The breeze caught Cort’s auburn hair and teased it with mischievous fingers just as she had done so brief a time before. “I…care about you, Aria,” he said. “But I can’t be what you want me to be. It isn’t only because of your family and the things they will want for you. There was a woman, a…lady…I thought cared for me. When she left, I knew I could never let that happen again.”

  The part of Aria that could still think, the part that couldn’t feel, remembered the day in San Francisco when she had wondered if Cort had ever been with a woman. She’d even thought it might be Babette, but she’d known for some time that they had never been together.

  “You…you lay down with that woman the way you did with me,” she said.

  But it was more than that, and she knew it. He was talking about something even stronger than joining bodies.

  He was talking about joining hearts.

  “She must have been a very fine lady,” Aria said.

  “Yes.”

  Of course she was. A lady good enough for a gentleman like Cort. Someone who had hurt him so much that he couldn’t care for anyone else the same way.

  He had tried to warn her, and she hadn’t listened. She hadn’t been able to see what seemed so obvious now, the reason why he had always hesitated to touch her, why he always seemed to be one step beyond her reach. It was nobody’s fault but her own.

  And she wouldn’t beg Cort for what he wouldn’t give freely. She no longer had any reason to worry about telling him that she wasn’t Lucienne Renier. The only thing she had to decide now was if she wanted to leave—leave Cort and the silly dreams she’d let herself believe in—or go on with his plan.

  If she didn’t have Cort, she wouldn’t have anyone. She would be completely alone. But if the Reniers believed she was their kin, they would offer her a home among her own kind. She could learn to be what they wanted. Maybe she could even make them love her.

  And she could show Cort that she could be as “fine” a lady as the woman he had loved. She would be so good at it that he would never dream of treating her as he had done all these weeks. He would have to bow and smile and be polite just the way he was with Babette.

  Then he would finally know what he had lost.

  “Aria,” Cort said softly, “it would be best not to mention any of this to Babette or Yuri.”

  Of course not. He wanted to forget this had ever happened.

  “I won’t tell anyone,” she said coldly.

  They returned to camp, stopping to pick up their clothing along the way. Cort was very polite. He made no special attempt to avoid her, and he smiled more than he had for days. They were sad smiles, though, telling her that he felt badly about what he had done. But it was all very formal, and she was just as formal in return. It was the only way to keep her damaged heart beating.

  By the second day after their brief interlude, they no longer saw any sign of human habitation except the occasional small shack or cabin. On the third day, when the road had gone from a track to a set of wheel ruts overgrown with grass and weeds, Aria saw the lodge rising out of the trees. The horses snorted with relief and went a little faster up the final slope.

  The lodge wasn’t quite what Aria had expected. It was built all of wood and stone, like a Carantian mountain cottage, but it was much bigger and taller. As the wagon got closer, she could see that the walls weren’t made of logs but of wooden planks, and the building had been painted a sort of grayish color that almost faded into the background of thick forest and rocky cliffs. The door was strangest of all; it was very fancy, carved and set with a big brass knocker. It seemed to belong in San Francisco instead of the mountains, where there was no one to appreciate just how fancy it was.

  She would learn to appreciate it, along with all the other nice and expensive things her new life would bring.

  She was doing her best to believe those things would be enough when Babette and Yuri emerged from the house. Babette, dressed in a much simpler gown than any Aria had seen her wear before, came toward her with hands outstretched. Yuri trailed after her, scowling as always.

  Cort came up beside Aria, silent as only he could be, and watched Yuri stride toward them. Cort was smiling with his mouth, but his eyes were empty. “Bonjour, Madame Moreau,” he said with a slight bow. “Good evening, Yuri. I trust you’ve made yourselves comfortable.”

  THE WORDS SOUNDED careless even to his own ears, but Cort felt anything but sanguine. His throat was hard and tight, and his skin was hot as if with fever.

  Not that he hadn’t been feeling those sensations for some time. They had been with him ever since he and Aria had left Sacramento, when he had made the unforgivable mistake of kissing her.

  Disaster.

  “Bonjour, monsieur,” Babette said, smiling warmly. “And Anna. It is so very good to see you.” She took Aria’s hands and led her away, chattering gaily about the house. Cort was hardly aware of Yuri as the Russian joined him.

  “You took your time,” Yuri said, glancing after Aria and Babette. “Did you have trouble?”

  Trouble. Trouble of the kind he certainly couldn’t confess to Yuri.

  He had thought he was in control of himself during the journey from Sacramento, even in the presence of the one temptation he had seemed unable to resist. During the daylight hours of traveling, he had been just disciplined enough to shield himself against her intoxicating scent and the warmth of her body. At night he had maintained his distance, and distracted himself with the thousands of sounds and smells that sang as exquisitely as the voices of angels.

  But it seemed all he’d done was deceive himself from the moment he’d sat down at the card table to win a shivering, half-naked girl. Listening to the voice of the wilderness hadn’t been a solution at all. It brought back too many memories of drifting on a pirogue on Bayou Gris, as much a part of the swamp as the bullfrogs and gators, happily believing that anything was possible for a boy who could dream.

  Still, he might have managed to keep his head if he hadn’t Changed when he’d found Aria gone from the camp. The wolf had taken him completely. Worry and anger had mingled with the relentless savagery of the beast, driving his human self to a state of uncontainable lust.

  Even then, if Aria had rejected him, he might have walked away. But she had wanted him. And where she felt, she acted, so all hope was lost.

  Aria had been everything he could have desired, completely without inhibition and utterly unselfish. It would have been so easy, so very easy, to carry through with the idea he’d had on the train.

  But he’d remembered himself just in time. The deprivation had been agony. He hadn’t just wanted to be inside her, he had wanted to be part of her. In every way.

  Cort heard Babette laugh, and he wondered how much Aria was suffering. He didn’t flatter himself that she wouldn’t get over it. He had hurt her, deeply, but she had a rich life ahead of her. If he’d taken her, all her chances of happiness would be gone.

  He couldn’t give up his need for revenge. But he also couldn’t go through with the idea of taunting the Reniers with Aria’s loss of honor at his hands. Better to have her hate him than love him.

  He laughed under his breath. Did she even know what love between a man and a woman really was? She showed no sign that the kind of ecstatic delirium he had felt with Madeleine had ever been a part of her life. Could anyone forget such emotions?

  Regardless of what she had felt in her hazy past, Aria would soon be too busy to brood over his rejection. And once she was
in New Orleans, she would find more deserving recipients for her affections. She would undoubtedly marry some arrogant aristocrat who would see only what Cort and Yuri and Babette had created.

  Cort growled, and Yuri gave him a sideways glance. “You didn’t answer my question,” he said.

  “We were hardly traveling light,” Cort said. “And you? No further difficulties?”

  Yuri looked off into the forest. “I said there would be none, unless by ‘difficulties’ you include being confined to a filthy railcar, followed by endless days on horseback with an equally filthy guide.” He shrugged. “Well, we are here.”

  Here, and as sharp-eyed as ever. Yuri had never brought up the subject of Cort’s possible attraction to Aria after that first day, but one slip on Cort’s part might remind him of his earlier suspicions. He would be far from happy that his partner had put their scheme at risk after all Cort’s protestations of disinterest in their protégée.

  And Babette’s feminine instincts would not be easily deceived. She had never suggested that there might be anything personal between Cort and Aria, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t considered it.

  “I appreciate all you have done, mon ami,” Cort said.

  Yuri coughed and avoided his gaze. “The girl is ready to begin?

  “She has been looking forward to it.”

  “Fortunate that she and Babette have become so fond of each other.”

  “Aria hungers for friendship and affection. Babette has given her both.”

  Babette and Aria came to join them, sparing Cort further conversation. Aria was smiling a little too brightly, her arm locked around the older woman’s waist.

  “You must be hungry,” Babette said. “The kitchen here is quite adequate, and I will have something prepared within the hour. In the meantime—” she gave Aria’s shoulder a squeeze “—we will heat water for Anna’s bath.” Her nose wrinkled. “And also for you, monsieur, when she is finished.”

  Cort bowed. “As you wish, madame. Far be it for me to offend your delicate sensibilities.”

  He regretted his boorishness immediately, but Babette seemed unaffected. She gazed at him for several moments, glanced at Aria and then gave a brief, almost imperceptible shake of her head. She and Aria led the way into the lodge. Aria glanced over her shoulder once, but there was no expression in her eyes.

  The lodge was as rustic inside as it was without, but it was the sort of rusticity favored by wealthy men who preferred their brushes with the wild to be doled out in careful measures like sugar for coffee. The furniture was all handmade by fine artisans, and the carpets, plain as they appeared, were far too expensive to be trampled by dirty boots. Large paintings of stags and hunting scenes decorated the walls, along with a number of mounted heads.

  The kitchen was well stocked with canned and preserved foodstuffs, as Babette had indicated, and the range was equipped with a large hot-water tank. There was no tap, of course, but a large pump had been fitted in the sink, drawing from a nearby spring. In addition to the kitchen, there were a study, a large living area and six bedchambers upstairs.

  In short, it was ideally suited for their purpose. And for keeping two people apart.

  While Cort and Yuri unloaded the wagon and saw to the horses, Babette assembled a cassoulet out of canned and preserved foods, while heating water for Aria’s bath.

  Afterward they sat down at the substantial kitchen table and ate in near silence. Cort was uncomfortably aware that Babette’s gaze frequently moved from his face to Aria’s, as if she were attempting to solve a particularly challenging puzzle. Aria hardly looked up from her plate. Later, while she and Babette cleared the table, Cort and Yuri carried buckets of hot water to the tub upstairs.

  It was all too easy to imagine Aria in the water, head tipped back as the steam caressed her breasts and dampened the blond curls around her face. But it wasn’t only her physical beauty Cort imagined. He pictured her expression the way it must have looked when he’d told her about Madeleine.

  Aria had believed the lie that he’d been heartbroken over his lost amour and could never love again. He had learned to hate Madeleine long ago, but the second part was the truth.

  Wasn’t it?

  The thought was so unexpected that he nearly tripped on his way downstairs with the empty bucket. Babette was starting up the steps as he caught himself. She stared at him in astonishment.

  “What is it, monsieur?” she asked. “Are you ill?”

  “Non, madame. I am perfectly well.”

  “You should rest.”

  Behave as if everything is normal, he told himself. “Surely you’re fatigued, as well, Madame Martin.”

  “Perhaps a little.” She smiled. “You must call me Babette. We will be working together closely for the next few weeks.”

  “I doubt I will be much involved, Babette, as I have no experience in training girls to be ladies.”

  Her smile faltered a little as she stood aside to let him pass. He focused on the floor in front of him and didn’t look at her again.

  That night he left his shoes at the doorstep and went walking in the woods. The loam and pine duff were thick and pungent under his bare feet, and the air smelled heavily of resin.

  The mountains were different from the bayous of Louisiana. Very different. Yet a few days ago he had felt just like the rough, naive boy he had been, running with his kin through the swamps and bald cypress woods, hunting deer and howling one to the other across the water.

  He missed them, his cousins and nieces and nephews. Even his father, who had cursed him when he’d left the bayous for good.

  And his mother, who had died of grief.

  Clenching his jaw, Cort fought the urge to Change and outrun the memories. He sat at the base of a mammoth pine, an old patriarch that had never seen a saw or a meadow of broken stumps, and laid his head back against the rough bark. He half expected Aria to come looking for him, breathless and defiant, Changing from wolf to nymph in an instant.

  But if she had ventured outside, she didn’t wander in his direction. After a few minutes he headed back, in no better state than when he had left. He had come within a quarter mile of the lodge when he heard raised voices.

  Yuri and Babette. He continued a few steps and stopped. Curiosity was not enough to put him into the middle of a lovers’ quarrel when he was raw with guilt and self-disgust.

  Turning on his heel, he returned to the forest.

  “I KNOW YOU, YURI. You will not go through with it.”

  Babette stood with one hip resting against the massive oak dining table, her dressing gown pulled tight around her waist and her hair down about her shoulders. She had not been able to sleep; the masquerade she and Yuri had been performing since Cort and Anna’s arrival had exhausted her, and she was in no mood to indulge the man she loved.

  Yuri sat in one of the rustic chairs, his arms folded across his chest. “We have no choice,” he said, his expression as glum as she had ever seen it. “If we fail to cooperate, Brecht—”

  “Brecht!” she said with a laugh.

  “—di Reinardus will not let us escape a second time. You have no idea how ruthless he is.”

  “But he is only one man! You said yourself that his former allies—”

  Yuri cut the air with his hand. “He still has those who obey him, and he is the most dangerous man I have ever known. I have no wish to die, and I will not allow you to get yourself killed. The girl won’t suffer. We will deliver a woman worthy of being a queen, and that is what she will become.”

  “As the bride of a traitor and regicide!”

  “Why should you care what happened in a distant country twenty years ago?”

  Babette leaned over the table, hands pressed flat to the polished wood. “It is not a distant country that concerns me. I tell you, Yuri…nothing is worth betraying her like this. Or betraying your dearest friend.”

  “I cannot afford such friendship now,” Yuri muttered.

  “Are you certain you
can afford mine?”

  His brown eyes, so full of the feeling he refused to express, gazed mournfully into hers. He was little better than a villain himself, but always, always, she became weak and foolish in his presence. Even though he was weak and foolish himself in so many ways.

  Babette could feel herself beginning to lose control. That would never do. She could still hardly believe what Yuri had told her after he had taken her out of the warehouse. It was a fairy tale of epic proportions. An infant girl born into royalty in a distant land, the child of murdered parents, swept away from those who might exploit her and brought to the thriving new nation called America to be raised by the distantly related Reniers, very few of whom knew her true background or name. The most absurd thing Babette had ever heard.

  Or it might have been, had she herself not risen from a naive, ill-educated peasant girl to become the most celebrated whore in New Orleans. And regardless of her rank, Anna—Lucienne, Alese, or whatever name they called her—needed her now. A clear head was the only thing that would give Babette the slightest chance.

  “There must be another way,” she said. “You said yourself that the duke was exiled from his own country and has no current allies in Carantia. He will have to depose yet another king in order to claim the throne.”

  “You seem to forget, my dear, that the king in question is a weakling who lacks the support of the Carantian people.”

  “And di Reinardus will have such support? That I very much doubt. You said that the loup-garou nobility in Carantia, including the duke, prefer to oppress the human majority, which will hardly endear him to his subjects. And ambition blinds him. He will make a mistake.” Babette bent closer to Yuri. “We must tell Cort everything.”

  “Out of the question.”

  His expression was unyielding. He had made up his mind. Perhaps if he had not been so bent on protecting her…

  “You convinced di Reinardus that Anna needs further refining before she becomes his bride. That is the only reason he let us go. Perhaps if I were to leave now, you might not find it so simple a matter to achieve what he demands.”