Don’t look at the eyes!
Too late! He slammed his own shut and prepared to die.
Then, feeling stupid, he decided to open them and face the demon that was about to take his life.
The fiend was still resolving. The mouth, turned into an angry sneer, was howling, even as the bright light emanating from it was a bit blinding. Below the head and extremely muscular chest with its bubbling blood from his stab, the hips were resolving to reveal – that was some cock!
Noticing another movement, Tristen saw out of the corner of his eye Tempeste reach out her hand to draw aside the shimmer, just still in sight, like a curtain. Only a tiny bit. Just enough for her hand to extend outward and point at the demon. Her lips were moving.
The devil stopped howling long enough to follow Tristen’s gaze now fully on her. He threw up a hand to ward off something just as a shimmer drew itself around him.
Not wanting to know, not caring, Tristen was on his feet in a flash and darting across the room to fetch his rapier and spinning, he thrust it at the fiend. But it stopped short at the shimmer. He looked down at it. As did the demon. Who laughed, a maniacal laugh. Tristen again prepared to die only to watch the monster’s eyes seize up as it crumpled to the ground.
Turning back to Tempeste, he saw that her hand was just falling back to the bed. The shimmer around her was either completely faded in the mounting sunlight or... Glancing at the monster, Tristen could see that his prison was still visible, faintly. Not certain what that meant, he opted for hope.
He bent to her, picked her up, and silently carried her from the room.
*****
A moon later, Tempeste sat on the steps of Chateau Anjou watching Tristen instruct the Guardsmen at their daily afternoon rapier practice. She was tired. She was always tired. But she was content.
His first words to her upon awakening were, “You stink.” And then he had dumped her into a creek. Brusque though they were, she trusted them, if only because she could see the outright fear in his eyes. That and the fact that there was no creek on the Tower grounds.
They had yet to make love. She would have said that she wasn’t certain they ever would. All she wanted to do was hold him and be held by him. However, lately, she had been awakened in the middle of the night by his raging hard-ons. Time would tell, she smiled.
Having heard the story of his recent adventures as he carried her from the creek in his lap on Destrey’s back – and, in particular, what he had done for Brionde-Anjou, she convinced him to take them to Anjou and not Brionde. That blonde bitch might well have her own husband plus two children, one Tristen’s – Tempeste cared not. Brionde was a convenient distance away from his childhood friend.
Their appointments as chateau Healer and Master of the Guard of Anjou followed shortly after.
In any case, with the much vaunted Master John having killed the Duke, apparently du Guesclin had – wisely, in her estimation – used his office as Lord Constable to negotiate a truce. The Countess of Brionde-Anjou was to marry the two-month old Duke of Normandy and reign until his maturity. The marriage was being held at Chateau Normandy the next moon. Tempeste was privately amused to know that the foremost noble of the land for the next two decades, at least, would be a woman.
For now, all she wanted to do was rest. Even the Tower drew not her attention in the slightest, after she had used her new-found power to work magic at a distance just once more.
Her last spell. She had used it to set all the animals in the stables in the base of the Tower free.
It seemed fitting.
Thank you so much for reading Chateau of Passion. I hope you enjoyed it. Before you close this book, if you’re reading it on a Kindle, you will see a way to rate Chateau of Passion. You can even write a review, no matter what format you’re reading it on! That would be lovely. Moreover it goes a great deal toward establishing indie authors. Then, too, you can share your comments on Facebook (facebook.com/monicabentleyromance).
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With gratitude,
Monica
What's next? Saddle up for Monica Bentley's saga of the Wild West in her next trilogy, the Desert Blooms Series. We begin with Black Petals...
Aksa is tired. Tired of being on the run, tired of seeing her face on WANTED posters, tired of mothering Billy the Kid and his gang.
When will she ever meet a real man, who holds her all night long?
Enjoy the prologue and first chapter!
Black Petals, Prologue and Chapter One
The last shots rang out. It was the end.
She snorted at that thought.
Did it matter anymore? A log fell in the fire behind her, kicking up a blaze of sparks. Another shot rang out.
Okay, she thought, not the last one.
Brought to earth at last. Like those coons Daddy done hunt at night as a boy outside Shreveport, the land she had never seen and never would.
She had had a good run. She had to reckon. She had outlasted the Kid, that was damn sure.
Her eyes automatically scanned the edges for tell-tale signs of the extra knob here, an extra bulge there on the surrounding boulders. Only idiots feared being set up as a silhouette with a fire behind them when fighting alone at night.
The bad’uns? They knew where you were. You, however, needed light to see if ––
She spotted one just now, at the edge of the clearing, that large boulder to the northwest. An elbow? Lowering a rifle? She raised Sammy’s, feeling the happy slick of black gunpowder on her hands as she cradled the barrel’s forearm in her left palm and...
His kisses distracted her. His sweet, sweet kisses. The way that he held her, so gently in those lovin’ strong arms of his, that trail-stained bandana of his getting in the way of her fingers as she struggled to unbutton his blouse.
Oh, his kisses. She would miss them.
She fired.
CHAPTER ONE
Blam! Blam!
Pause.
Blam!
Aksa swore and rolled over. Why did Daddy ever give Sammy that rifle?
She pulled her pillow over her head, trying to squelch the noise.
It had been for his birthday. Sammy was getting onto marrying age. Already two or three girls, daughters all of buffalo soldiers, were looking him over. She had seen ‘em. Mama talked about it all the time, to Daddy’s grunt.
Daddy had gotten the gun cheap from Massa Thurman at the Fort – a Winchester ‘73 repeating rifle, chambered at .44-40 (whatever that meant), fifteen slugs lovingly tucked, one after another, into the right-handed side of the magazine...
Blam!
Sweet Angel! She had heard all about it often enough. She couldn’t get him to shut up about it.
...slab-sided for easier use slipping out of a rifle scabbard tucked in behind the knee while riding, barely a kick at all for smooth right-handed lever action, pumping that used bullet out of the top, moving that right hand down in a half circle then back up as you loaded the next bullet into place...
Blam!
Oh, she remembered, suddenly. .44 was the size of the barrel for the bullet. 40 was the number of grains of gunpowder, just like salt, used to fire it in the thingie over the trigger.
Blam!
Sweet Angel, forget about how many grains! She hunkered down under her blanket. Brother or not, she was going to kill him herself!
...swabbing out the inside of the barrel afterward with a with a push rod stored in the butt plate, cleaning all the action with soapy lye water, toweling it dry then smearing all the moving parts with boar fat, including the inside of the barrel...
Blam!
Blah, blah, blah! On and on for weeks now. God, she wanted to just throttle the boy!
His incessant monologue. Where he got his bullets, what the clerk at the Fort dry goods trading post had said about how they needed to be stored in a cool and dry place, like under his bed. How Daddy had got it so cheap (that is, use
d, she grumbled) because Massa Thurman had gotten fed up with the barrel length, it being too long to pull all the way out of the rifle scabbard when charging Apaches on his horse – whenever he got up on a horse, anyway – so had ordered a shorter carbine-length barrel, straight from Winchester Repeating Arms Company in New Haven, Connecticut.
As if Sammy even knew where that was!
Nevertheless, it hadn’t stopped him.
Day in, day out, seven times a week and three times on Sunday always a going on and on and on. Heavens!
His target practice, slaughtering unsuspecting tin cans that used to hold peaches from back East was her existence ever since. She rolled over, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes.
All she ever got for her birthday was sewing tools. Darning tools. Cleaning mops, sponges. Cooking tools. It was important. She knew. Someday, one of those buffalo soldiers from the 9th over in that Arizona Territory would come a-calling. And, she had best have her ducks in a row, Mama always said. Men have been the same ever since good ol’ Abraham had had his Isaac. One day, you could never tell when, they just up and decided that it was time to get themselves a wife. At that point, they expected that a house would magically appear, with everything working inside it, along with that wife. Because, boy oh boy, does she hear about it when it doesn’t!
Like dinner come late or come out burned!
She didn’t really mind. But, time to time, she couldn’t help but wonder what it was like to be the boy in the family. With the real name. With the real gifts. Not that she wanted a rifle. Much less a repeating rifle. Daddy’s bolt action single shot was good enough for the little hunting they ever did. What was there out in the New Mexico Territory to hunt anyway? Deer? She snickered at that thought. If you ever saw one! No, life in the desert limited one to the occasional quail or pheasant. And she could bring them down easily enough as it was.
When Daddy wasn’t looking.
She was learning. It was one thing to go hunting with Daddy when her teats were as flat as a board. Once they showed up, and Mama already said that she would have the same melon-sized ones she and Gramma had – whatever that meant, since Aksa had only seen a melon once, a cantaloupe someone had said, being served to an officer’s wife at the Fort. Once her melons showed up, her hunting days were over and she was stuck inside learning how to darn socks.
Which, she had to admit, was handy. It did make the wool, the cotton last longer. She was always after Sammy, poking his big toes out of his socks. She didn’t know how he could stand it, his bare toes squishing around in hot, sweaty leather, all day long. She couldn’t. She had simple round-toe lace-up brogans, like they all did. When she bothered to wear them. Thick, flat, heavy, meant for work.
Massa Thurman had beautiful boots. Riding ones. Pointed-toe ones, for sliding your boot back into the stirrup if it slipped out at a full gallop. His were tooled leather, too, with embroidery from the ankle on up. Soft, supple, light to the touch, not clod heavy. She should know. She had always cleaned them whenever they used to visit him at the Fort.
Back before her melons had showed up.
He was a captain in the Fighting Sixth. When he had got detached to Fort Stanton before the War of Northern Aggression, he had brought his slaves Jupiter and Flo and their baby Samuel with him. All the way out from tree and river heavy Louisiana. Catfish country. Shrimps country. Coon country. Three foods she had never tasted but had heard about from Daddy and Mama often enough. Boar was different. They had them there, and they had them here. She had even killed one, once. Here in the Chihuahuan Desert of the New Mexico Territory. She had gone hunting with Sammy and he had plugged one with Daddy’s single shot out among the greasewood. But the boar, instead of dying, got ornery and charged them with his tan and white overgrown tusks glistening with blood and drool. Sammy had panicked and turned to run. Panicked herself, she had grabbed the rifle out of his hand, thrust in the next shell – she always carried them for Sammy in her hand – and fired at it just before it got to her. Blew its head off, right at her feet. Her melons were just coming in at that time, and they both knew without saying that they were in trouble, so they had fibbed and said Sammy had killed it. Daddy had been so proud. He had ridden over to the Fort the next day and invited Massa and his friends out for a barbeque.
Mama had made her wrap her melons in cloth to squash them down to her chest. That was her memory of the barbeque. Sammy getting all the praise for her kill. She having to sweat all day cooking it, then hide around the corners during the feast with her boobs hurting. Sweet Angel sure had a sense of humor!
She could never be mad at Sammy for very long, though. She knew that. He was her older brother. They were all they had. Besides, he had seen the stately cedar trees of Shreveport. Or at least he pretended to remember them. Some days, when the sun was so hot on the hills bare of anything but boulders large and small, so hot that one’s nose twitched with the dust of the desert broom, so hot that even the shade was barely a relief, so hot that water was a fancy, a dream, something you carried with you or went without – on those days, he would gather her in his arms in the shade of a boulder among the scrub, pull her in close and tell her about the big white house with pillars on the front at Royal Cedars, the plantation Massa Thurman had grown up in. And the slave quarters behind it. With the music and the dancing in the evenings, after all the field work was done, either putting the cotton in the ground or bringing in the bolls for separating later in the year. Or, if you were lucky, working the food crops since there was more shade nearby. Or, if you were even luckier, working in the barn taking care of Massa Thurman’s horses.
A practical man, when the country had split into North and South the year after they had all arrived at the Fort, rather than resign his commission and return to Louisiana, he had decided to stay. All he needed to do was keep wearing the blue uniform. Besides, he got promoted to captain. He managed to sit out the entire war there and was proud of it. When the North had won – or, as he liked to put it, “the South got bored killing Yankees” – obeying orders, he had freed Daddy and Mamma and Samuel and little Aksa.
Following the lead of the great landowners like Lucien Maxwell who held about a million and a half acres, or so everybody said, Massa had invested all of his pay in cheap land. He put his former slaves to work on fifty acres, with the understanding that Jupiter got to own two and a half of those acres every year that he brought in the crops: hay, wheat, pinto beans, chili peppers and more hay. Now, thirteen years later, Daddy was the proud owner of over thirty acres of land. Desert land, tis true. Which made irrigating the prime concern of every farmer. The ancient practice of acequias made it all possible. Legend said the method came all the way from the deserts of Arabia (wherever that was), arriving in the New World with the conquistadores – with its annually elected watermaster overseeing the shared use of the Acequias de Margarita, the mother ditch of Lincoln County, and its tributary ditches. Without these ancient canals crisscrossing the county, draining from the Rios Bonito, Hondo and Ruidoso in land south of the Fort, draining from the great Pecos River in the eastern part of the Territory, farming was simply impossible. Thus, anyone who messed with another’s water rights was begging for an early visit to Boot Hill, that place every small town had where just about every cowboy in it died with his boots on instead of peacefully in bed like a Christian.
Speaking of water rights, she suddenly remembered that they had to shut off the sluice to the Rio Hondo later this afternoon. The watermaster would be by to check it, sure enough, and put a lock on it. And she still had more adobe bricks to make before then. Groaning, she got out of bed, running a hand through her bedraggled locks, then snatched up a gingham bandana to tie them back out of her eyes. She ignored her shoes. Her soles were tough enough.
On her way through their tiny kitchen, she bussed Mama on the cheek, while snatching up a piece of jerky from the table and stuffing it into her mouth to let her spit work it soft.
Mama was standing over a pot, scraping up streak
s of lanolin floating on the surface of the water from some wool she had boiled last night. She stored it in mason jars for them both to use on their skin, especially their hands, to keep it from cracking. Aksa grabbed up a bit of the wax and rubbed it between her fingers, then into the dry spots along the edges and tops of her palms from yesterday’s brick-making.
Mama was wearing her bright orange silk scarf – brought all the way from back East – over her hair. Wrapping her hair after Aksa stretched it for her was the only thing she ever used her silk scarf for. Cotton or canvas seemed to soak up too much water from her hair overnight, she always complained. Even their new recipe of Bessie’s milk mixed with honey just got sucked right out. It was simply too dry here in the Territory. Aksa had a scarf, too, a light blue one gotten used from a trooper’s wife at the Fort, traded for lanolin. Not that she ever used it to straighten her hair, except maybe at Christmas. Thicker, kinkier than Mama’s soft and wavy hair, Aska was happier just pushing it out of the way. A bandana was fine.
Murmuring a “Morning, honey” in her sweet tones that always made Aksa feel warm and happy, Mama was also nodding at the pile of cow chips stacked in the corner. They were almost gone, used in the stove for fuel – since firewood was unthinkably expensive.
Stifling a grumble at the thought that Sammy had eyes only for his Almost New ‘73 Winchester Repeating Rifle from New Haven with its Fifteen Slug Magazine, she opted instead for shaking her head and made time in her mind to fetch Mama some more from the pasture. In the meantime, since Mama had another pot of wool on the boil, she grabbed up a handful of chips and, opening the latch on the stove door with a rag, she threw them into the flames. The furnace heat that blew out in her face made her gasp, her eyes stinging.
“Thanks, sweetie. The bricks...”
Dusting off her hands, she gave Mama a quick squeeze. “Right now, Mama.” She grabbed up the enamel water pitcher on her way out.
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