by Beth White
Moving just inside the door, Rafael looked around the small room. It was crowded with a variety of shabby, cast-off furniture, a table covered with half-finished baskets, and fishing equipment leaning in the corners. In his tailored blue coat, open over a fine silver-and-gray floral waistcoat with eye-popping silver buttons, he looked like a peacock holding court in a chicken coop. But he still managed to seem relaxed and curious, absorbing every detail.
He walked over to the baskets and picked one up to examine the lovely, intricate design. “These are beautiful—in fact, my mother would love to own one. There would be a market for them in New Orleans, if you would care to trust me with selling them.”
“Justine is the artist, not me,” she said with a shrug. “I was just helping out by cutting grass for her.” Then she saw her young stepmother, baby Rémy on one hip, walking down the breezeway between the two back rooms. “Here she is—why don’t you ask her?”
“Ask me what?” As usual, Justine’s golden hair was piled in a haphazard knot atop her head and secured with a large tortoise-shell comb, her calico day dress well fitted to her trim figure. Her gaze fell upon Grandpére, who stood near the door, his hat tucked under his arm, a faint smile softening his dark face. Her confidence visibly wobbled. “Monsieur Lanier! Antoine didn’t tell me—”
“He doesn’t know I’m here.” Grandpére glanced at Lyse.
She heaved a sigh. The people she loved were all at such unnecessary odds. Why could they not forgive and reach out?
She supposed it was up to her to bring them together. “Justine, this is Don Rafael, who took me to the soirée at Madame Dussouy’s. He wants to know about your baskets.” She clapped her hands and kissed little Rémy as she took him from Justine. “Come, angel-cake, Grandpére wants to play with you!”
Trusting Rafael to put Justine at ease, she plunked the wiggly, gurgling baby into her startled grandfather’s arms. “Don’t worry,” she told him with a laugh, “he’s been fed and changed, so he should be dry for . . . a while.” Satisfied that the company would sort themselves out, she scooped up the abandoned basket of grass and pattered down the breezeway. With Justine occupied, someone needed to keep an eye on the other three children.
She found them under the porch. Six-year-old Luc-Antoine, self-appointed general, had marshaled his troops in the time-honored tradition of his French Marine forebears. Clutching a bucket, he squatted on his haunches, while five-year-old Geneviève and three-year-old Denis sat on their bottoms digging in the sandy soil with a couple of bent spoons. Three short cane poles lay nearby.
Lyse crouched, hands on knees, to peer in at them. “What are you doing, chéris?”
Luc-Antoine looked around. “Papa said he would take me fishing if I got a bucket of worms.”
“I go fishing too. See?” Denis showed Lyse his spoon, upon which squirmed a large brown earthworm.
“You can’t go,” Geneviève said, rolling her big brown eyes. “You’re too little.”
Denis’s mouth crumpled. “Rémy’s the baby now!”
Lyse hiked her skirt up and crab-walked under the house to hug Denis, wormy spoon and all. “Of course he is. But I think you’ll all have to wait a bit, since we have company now. Where is Papa, anyway?”
Luc-Antoine gave her a Simon-like scowl. “He went to borrow Simon’s boat. He promised.”
“I know, but your grandpére has come to see you, with . . . another gentleman. Maman wants you to come wash your hands and say hello.”
“Will the other gentleman take us fishing?” Geneviève asked.
“Fishing!” Denis echoed.
Lyse sighed. “Not this time.”
“Now’s as good a time as any. I told you I came to fish.” Rafa’s deep, sibilant voice came from behind Lyse.
She looked around and found him peering under the wooden underpinning of the porch. His eyes were alight with laughter.
She frowned at him. “You were supposed to be talking to Justine.”
“A charming young woman, but she was obviously afraid your grandfather might drop the baby on his head, so I took pity and let her go rescue them both.” He dropped into a crouch. “Hello, niños! This is a most peculiar place to drop one’s hook! Might I suggest the fish might be more abundant at the water’s edge?”
“We ain’t fishing under the house,” Luc-Antoine said seriously. “We’re digging worms.”
“Ah. And you are quite expert, I’m sure. Can I see?”
Luc-Antoine hesitated, then turned to crawl toward Rafa, the bucket clutched under one arm. Denis and Geneviève followed, leaving Lyse to bring up the rear more slowly, careful not to brain herself on the beams under the porch.
When she emerged, she found the three children clustered around Rafa, who squatted with Denis’s fat grub close to his face. Geneviève was giggling, the two boys elbowing one another to get closer.
“I believe,” Rafa said with the gravity of a magistrate, “that this fellow is big enough to catch an alligator at least. Or maybe a whale.”
“There ain’t any whales in Bay Minette,” said Luc-Antoine, the literalist. “The water’s too shallow.”
“Did you ever see a whale?” Geneviève demanded.
Rafa gently laid the worm in Denis’s palm. “As a matter of fact, I have. I once sailed to Venezuela with my father, and there was a big pod of them, spouting like giant fountains, out in the middle of the ocean.”
Lyse felt her mouth going round, right along with the children’s. “I would love to see that one day.”
Rafa’s warm brown eyes met hers, his expression soft and quizzical, oddly more intimate than the kisses they had shared.
“M’sieur.” Geneviève tugged on his sleeve. “Are you gonna take us fishin’ or not?”
“Genny, the gentleman’s name is Don Rafael,” Lyse said, hoping he hadn’t noticed her blush. “Don Rafael, I would like to introduce to you my sister Geneviève and my brothers Luc-Antoine and Denis.”
Rafa shook hands with the boys, then got to his feet to offer a deep, courtly bow to little Geneviève. He grinned when she jumped up and bobbed a curtsey. “I am enchanted, señorita. You are every bit as charming as your big sister.” He glanced at Lyse. “Are you ladies sure you want to . . . ah, bait hooks and handle wet, scaly fish?”
Lyse took a scoffing tone to cover the fact that her heart had melted into a goopy puddle. “Papa taught me to bait my own hook when I was Denis’s size. I’ll show you alligators!”
Half an hour later, cane poles in hand and lines in the water, they sat on the end of the pier with the water lapping under their feet against the pilings. Rafa had removed his beautiful coat and dropped it behind him, drawing Lyse’s gaze to the big shoulder muscles flexing and bunching under his fine linen shirt as he reached to keep little Denis’s pole from tangling in Geneviève’s.
He had come to see her after all. Gone to the trouble of locating her grandfather and somehow instigating this wonderful and wholly unexpected visit. She couldn’t help trying to imagine Grandpére’s conversation with Justine. It was necessary that they be allowed to make their peace, but how terrified poor, bashful Justine must be.
Rafa glanced at Lyse over the heads of the children. “You said your father was gone to borrow Simon’s boat. Does your brother not live here as well?”
“No. Not since . . . last summer.” Lyse rarely shared personal information outside the family, but Rafa knew of the strain between Simon and their father. “They get along better, now that Simon built himself a little houseboat over at Chacaloochee.”
“Ah.”
She could tell he wanted to ask more questions. But she had questions of her own. “I had thought you already back in New Orleans.”
“Lyse.”
She reluctantly looked at him.
He was holding Geneviève’s pole steady, his expression anxious. “I couldn’t go back without seeing you.”
Her pulse sped a little, and she raised her chin. “Now you have met my whole fa
mily. And you have even charmed my grandfather. How did you come to meet him?”
“I went to his office. I wanted to see . . .” He hesitated, glancing down at Geneviève, who regarded him with worshipful brown eyes. He smiled. “Yours is a most interesting family.”
“More than you know. Did you know that my grandmother’s father is the Comte de Leméry?”
He blinked. “The old man looks at least half Indian.”
“He is. His mother was of Koasati origin, though of course his father, Marc-Antoine Lanier, was Canadian. Grandmére Madeleine’s father, Tristan Lanier, was Marc-Antoine’s half-brother through their mother. Tristan’s father, the Comte de Leméry, legitimized him just before his death, though Tristan never returned to France to take up the title. He had already built a life here—and besides, his wife was wanted for the murder of a French dragoon.” She laughed at Rafa’s confused expression. “Sometime I will draw you a diagram of the family tree.”
“Perhaps, after all, I should address you as ‘your highness.’” He grinned. “Though I have lately begun to wonder what real difference a connection to aristocracy—or lack of, for that matter—can make in these modern times. I have become acquainted with certain . . . Americans—” he cut a glance her way, as if testing her reaction—“who make a good argument in favor of the concept of every man created equal. My own father has a rather plebian ancestry and gained his rank through courageous action rather than an accident of birth.”
Lyse hesitated. “And yet, Don Rafael, an accident of birth attaches that same rank to you.”
“Yes.” Rafa shrugged. “And we shall see whether I live up to it.”
At that moment, Geneviève shrieked and yanked her pole out of the water. “A fishy! I got a fishy!”
Rafa leaned over to help her unhook the wriggling, flapping fish, heedless of the spotting of his immaculate shirtsleeves and breeches. “What you have here is a pet.” He showed the four-inch fish to Geneviève. “Too big for bait, too little to eat.”
“We can’t have pets,” said the literal Geneviève, her face falling. “Papa says we gots enough mouths to feed already.”
Rafa laughed. “Then I recommend sending this fellow back to his mama so that he may grow big enough for your supper next time.” The fish landed in the bayou with a shallow splash, and Rafa wiped his hand on the leg of his breeches. “Somebody pass me a worm.”
But Lyse shook her head. “It is past time I took the children in to greet their grandpére.” When all three children set up a predictable wail, she firmly began to wrap her line around her pole. “All fine things must come to an end, my little cabbages, even so useful and engrossing an occupation as baptizing the occasional worm.”
Resistance would no doubt have lasted a great deal longer but for Rafa’s loud, awkward, and highly comical attempt to copy Lyse’s efficient movements. By the time he ended with the line wrapped round his legs and its barb hooked in the back of his shirt, the children were giggling and competing to show him the best way to dispose of one’s line, and Lyse had to drop her pole and untangle him.
There might have been, she suspected, another motive behind his feigned ineptitude. He was so tall that he must bend over, resting his hands on his knees, in order for her to reach the hook caught in his collar. She stood with his silky black hair tickling her chin, his aristocratic nose buried in her neck, and his warm breath raising goosebumps along her collarbone. He was real flesh and blood under her hands. There was no moonlight or scent of honeysuckle to blur the lines of social caste, only sunshine and the excited shrieks of the children and the lap of the bayou against the pier. They were, quite simply, a boy and a girl caught in an attraction as inevitable as the tide. She knew it, even before, as she finally worked the hook free and dropped her hands away from his big shoulders, he slowly lifted his head, letting his lips brush along her jawline.
“Thank you, prima,” he whispered, looking into her eyes with a wicked twinkle. “You have saved my fishing expedition from complete disaster.”
“I wonder exactly what you have been fishing for,” she replied breathlessly, trying not to laugh.
“If you don’t know, then I am the saddest excuse for an angler there has ever been.” With a crooked smile he straightened and looked around for the children. His eyes widened. “Uh-oh.”
Lyse followed his gaze, expecting some new prank created by her siblings.
But all three had run back to the end of the pier, where they jumped up and down, waving at a boat drawing closer and closer to the pier. “Papa!” Geneviève shrieked. “Papa! Come see who’s here!”
Rafa knew he should have gone with the morning tide. The ship was laden with goods, its sails repaired, his crew rounded up and put to work, the captain apprised of imminent departure.
But the elderly Señor Lanier’s agreement to make the trip to visit his son’s family had settled the question. He must have one more look into Lyse’s gamine face to assure himself that no one could be so enchanting as he remembered. That she was only a woman, and a very young one at that. Just a drunken fisherman’s daughter, though perhaps brighter and more educated even than his own sister, and possessed of laughter that would charm the stars from the sky.
Oh, yes, and a depth of spirit that drew him like the siren’s song at which he’d stupidly scoffed so many months ago. A way of looking in his eyes and finding the man he wanted to be.
He blinked and saw her father vault onto the pier—miraculously sober and looking as if he might like to haul Rafa into the bay and drown him like an unwanted puppy. Unsmiling, one by one, Antoine Lanier patted his children leaping at his feet, then inexorably put them aside and strode along the pier.
Rafa thought of the responsibilities that awaited him in New Orleans, he thought of the ship and its precious cargo which must find its destination with all dispatch, and he weighed the present crisis which would determine the happiness of his heart.
He stepped forward and a little in front of Lyse. She must not suffer for his selfishness. “Señor, I bid you welcome.”
Lanier’s response was an inarticulate growl and a quickening of his pace.
Behind Rafa, Lyse gasped, and her hand slipped inside his elbow. “Papa, we have been watching for you! The children—”
Lanier cut her off with a slash of his hand. “Take them inside the house. Tell Justine I am home.”
“But Papa—”
“Step away from my daughter, you infernal Spanish whelp,” Lanier snarled at Rafa. He turned with a scouring look at the children, who stood wide-eyed at the end of the pier. “Get in the house!”
They all ran.
“Papa, I was just taking a hook out of his shirt!” Lyse’s voice was high with strain.
Rafa deliberately turned his back on Lanier and looked down at Lyse. The fear and chagrin in her big eyes made him ill. He had not dishonored her, though the kisses they had shared on the night of the soirée had bordered on . . .
What? Had he treated her with less than the respect with which he would want his own sister to be treated? Though he could claim her invitation, he was no longer a little boy to be swayed by desires of the body. He was a man who should be capable of ruling his emotions. Somehow he must protect her and absorb the consequences of his actions.
He took her hand from his arm and lifted it to his lips. “Go to your grandfather. I will speak to your papa.”
“Rafa, we’ve done nothing wrong. But you don’t understand his hatred of the Spanish. He will kill you.”
Rafa could hear Lanier’s approach, the harsh breath of his rage. “Your grandfather told me. I will talk to him—now go! Hurry!”
With one last anguished look, she snatched her hand from Rafa’s and picked up her skirt to run.
But it was too late. Lanier reached them, grabbing Lyse’s wrist in one hand and Rafa’s in the other. “I told you to leave him!” he shouted, shaking her arm with bruising force. “Don’t you know he’s got no good intentions toward a girl like you?
Are you so loose in morals you’ll give him leave to handle you in whatever way he likes?”
Rafa’s instinct to swing at Lanier was overwhelming, but he couldn’t risk hurting Lyse. She had suddenly gone still, as though she knew struggle would invite more violence. And that realization ignited in him a flare of red rage that threatened to burn every thought to cinders.
He forced himself to relax, to look beneath the insulting words of his adversary. A man’s daughter was his property, and he would not let her go without payment of some kind. Then Rafa must think like a merchant. What would Don Rafael do?
Producing a bewildered smile, he stared at the big fist wrapped around his arm. “My dear sir, there is no need for this, er, energetic method of arresting my attention. I assure you, I am listening.” He brightened. “But then, of course you didn’t know. In your absence, your daughter and I were arranging to hire your ferry to transport me and my luggage out to my ship anchored at Dauphine Island.” He squinted up into Lanier’s fierce dark eyes. “But perhaps you have no need of the enterprise?”
There was an infinitesimal relaxing of the grip upon his wrist. Lanier’s expression became cagey. “I might have. But Lyse cannot speak for me. She is a child.”
Rafa suppressed the urge to challenge the man’s absurd denigration of one to whom he clearly owed his dignity and probably his livelihood as well. “Ah, then it is good that you arrived when you did. I should hate to have taken my business elsewhere.” He laughed, casting another confused look at Lanier’s grasp on his arm. “You can let me go now—I vow I shall not escape.”
For now, Lanier’s anger seemed to have been diverted. With a snarling “pah!” he released both Rafa and Lyse and turned to stalk toward the cottage. “Come into the house, you Spanish dandy, so that we can strike a deal over a tankard of ale.”
Rafa followed, resisting the urge to take Lyse’s hand. Truly it was in the mercy of God that this man maintained any business at all. A more contentious, sodden derelict he had yet to meet.
“Papa.” Lyse hurried to catch up to her father and took his elbow. “Before you go in the house, you should know we have a guest. I was trying to tell you when—”