Heaven in His Arms

by Lisa Ann Verge

  Terror, cold and unadulterated, flooded through her veins. She hadn’t felt so helpless, so frozen with fear, since the day the Baron de Carrouges had touched her and said she would take her place in her mother’s house. Oh, God .. .

  If she seduced Andre, perhaps she wouldn’t have a home, a husband; he might get rid of her nonetheless. Then she would be abandoned and pregnant in a hostile world, forced to do whatever she could to survive. Just like Maman.

  ***

  “By the blessed milk of the Virgin Mary!” Tiny jerked up from his seat in the canoe and glared at Julien. “What are you doing, lying back like a whore on Sunday? We’ve entered the French River, pork-eater!”

  Julien put aside his unlit pipe—a small carved vessel made of red pipestone that he had recently bought from the Nipissing Indians—wordlessly reached over his shoulders, grabbed two handfuls of fringe, and stripped his shirt off his back. Then he stood up and dove smoothly into the oily black waters at the mouth of the French River.

  Genevieve’s bright head emerged from the deerskin blanket she clutched around her shoulders, against the wind. When she saw Julien splashing around in the water, she glared at Tiny, who struggled to light his pipe from a flaring piece of tinder.

  “I trust you aren’t just going to leave him bobbing out there like a piece of dead wood.”

  “Of course not!” Tiny dragged deep on his pipe, then exhaled the blue smoke. “Come, pork-eater! Sing Parmi les voyageurs.”

  Julien, desperately trying to keep his head above the frigid water, began the song with a gurgle:

  Among voyageurs, there are some good men,

  who scarcely eat but often drink,

  with pipes in their mouths and mugs in their hands,

  they say, Friends! Pour me some wine!

  Agitated, Genevieve straightened. “Tiny, the water must be close to freezing!”

  “Hear that, pork-eater?” His blue eyes glittered as he stared at the red-faced boy. “Blossom thinks you’re cold.”

  The boy stopped his singing abruptly. “The water’s as warm as ale, O Mighty One.”

  Tiny’s lips split into a smile, showing his tobacco-yellowed teeth. “More like piss-pot warm!”

  “Tiny.”

  The giant’s grin faded as Genevieve glared at him.

  He waved his pipe expansively. “Arise, boy! You’ve been baptized in the waters of the French River.”

  Andre frowned as he stood in the rear of the canoe. He twisted his paddle so the vessel wouldn’t drift as the men settled back for a pipe break. His little spitfire of a wife had a way with them all. One look from those flashing green eyes and they collapsed like marionettes whose strings had been cut. And damn it, he was no better—because he allowed it, as he’d allowed so many other concessions. Like the rope harness he’d allowed Julien to fashion for her. The skin of her hands had already cracked and bled as she carried her case over the portages, and Andre didn’t want to bother with bandaging them every night—so he told himself. He was a lying bastard.

  The stubborn wench should have stayed on Allumette Island.

  Andre twisted his paddle to heel the boat toward Julien. Blue curls of pipe smoke twisted up into a sheet of cold gray sky. Ten days, and already the warmth and color of the hardwood autumn leaves had settled into a brown mush of carpet on the earth. Gone were the warbles and chirps of the late migrating birds. The gentle forests that once rimmed the hanks of the river gave way to ice-polished sheets of rock rising like ancient castle walls, and feathered crags bearing scraggy, stunted pines. Genevieve was as cold to him as the Arctic wind.

  At the end of one of the innumerable portages on the Mattawa River, Andre had found her curled on a rock, shivering like a wet dog, her hands wrapped in bloody, ripped rags of her dirty petticoat. Did the wench fear nothing? He wanted to strangle her for her stubbornness. Instead, he gave her an extra pair of his leggings to keep her legs warm, and when they reached the windswept waters of Lake Nipissing, the first thing he did was buy her a blanket from the Indian tribe that lived along the shores. Never once had she turned to him in thanks.

  He was a damn fool for expecting it. She was the ice princess now, haughty and distant, as cold to the touch as marble, and just as stiff whenever he carried her to or from the canoe. But he knew the fire that burned inside; it tormented him every night when he slept under the canoes with his men, heard her mumbling in her sleep beneath the tarpaulin, and imagined her, rosy-cheeked, beneath him, her lashes casting shadows on her cheeks, her lips parted and her head thrown back …

  “Steady,” Tiny warned, the canoe rocking as Julien clutched the lashed gunwale. “Steady!”

  Andre dragged his attention back to the situation at hand, twisting his wide paddle deep as Simeon and Gaspard grabbed the boy beneath the armpits and heaved him over. The wench will be the death of all of us, he thought, cursing his distraction. He set himself to straightening the boat as the boy lay shivering, naked but for breechcloth and leggings, as the men laughed and taunted Julien for looking like a plucked chicken in the morning sunshine.

  The boat swayed. She was staring at Julien, at the lean muscles of his back, muscles that had finally emerged beneath his young flesh, muscles that now bulged hard and knotted, after hundreds of miles of paddling and portaging. Andre didn’t like that look; he didn’t like the way she assessed each of his men as a potential husband in the past ten days.

  “Take your place, pork-eater.” Andre dug his paddle deep into the water and felt the first pull of the upcoming rapids. “We’ve got five miles of rapids to run.”

  The men knocked their pipes on the sides of the canoe. The embers sizzled as they hit the water. Shaking, Julien took his place and retrieved his paddle. Genevieve shrugged off her deerskin blanket—the one Aehad given her—and tossed it across the boy’s wet back.

  Andre barked for the men to get to work and concentrated on the slice of the canoe through the water. He navigated the vessel down the deep, elongated bay, around shoals and fingers of smooth granite rock. He dug his paddle deeper, too deep, and The Duke glanced back in surprise as the canoe bucked. Andre scowled and he shifted his paddle, then set his mind on the task to come. The French River was the first west-flowing river they had encountered during the journey, and soon they’d be riding down B brutal sweep of raging white water. He’d have to keep his mind on the watery road ahead and not on the quagmire of a relationship he had with his wife if he intended to keep his men, his wife, and all his merchandise dry and whole.

  The men knelt and lifted their paddles out of the water as they passed through a narrow channel and rounded an island bristling with pines. The water rippled and eddied as the current clutched the belly Of the canoe. Ahead, a narrow staircase of rocks fanned across the river. Andre bobbed from the knees as the canoe bucked beneath him, scanning the river for haystack waves that concealed no harm and ragged crests of foam that hid boulders and, beyond, dangerous eddies and holes.

  They shot down in the rapids—Little Pine Rapids—and it was like sliding down a sheet of ice. Grit-(ing his teeth, Andre watched for standing waves and souse holes, barking out orders to the men to keep in the narrow thread of water that wound through the danger, that would bring them most swiftly down the river, twisting and turning his paddle like a rudder. A black strip of soaked stone marked the low water level on either side of the shore, and rocks Andre had never before seen on this route now crested above the froth. Faintly, he heard the excited cries of the men in the canoes following as they, too, entered the white water and felt the rush of power beneath their feet. But soon even that noise was drowned out by the thunder and roar of the water as it tumbled over its bed of stones. His men, all well trained but for Julien, knew how to drag their paddles against the current, or paddle with it, or veer the bow or stern to one side or another, or raise their paddles as they faced an oncoming wave; they knew how to react instantaneously to his commands, and Andre felt the rush of exhilaration as they tumbled down the water as
smoothly and easily as if they had raced like the wind across a choppy lake.

  The rapids followed in succession: Big Pine Rapids, Double Rapids, the treacherous Ladder, Little and Big Parisian Rapids, the Devil’s Chute, and Crooked Rapids, five miles of unceasing white water, five miles of the cold wind biting his skin above his beard, filtering like ice through his hair, feeling the canoe below him as if he were an extension of the vessel, as if he were riding a horse bareback across the hills of Provence as he had done with his brothers as a child. The men whooped and laughed as the vessel careened through narrow chutes, as it slid down slick tongues of current, as spray as clear and sparkling as diamonds rose and splattered over them. Andre’s heart pounded in his chest, hard and loud, and when the rapids finally spit them out on a long stretch of calm water, he, Wapishka, and The Duke, smiling and triumphant, rent the silent, scraggy woods with piercing Indian shrieks.

  Heaving and exhilarated, he glanced down at Genevieve, expecting to find her clutching the canoe as if her life depended upon it, expecting to find her shocked and quivering from fear. There, woman, is a man’s risky pleasure.

  But she swiped water from her face and laughed with all the rest.

  “By the head of Saint John!” Water gleamed in Tiny’s beard as he twisted at the sound of her laughter. “We ought to give you a paddle, Blossom, and see how you ride the waves!”

  “It’s like…” Water dripped from the bright length of her braid as she twisted it. “It’s like tumbling down the side of a hill!”

  Andre suddenly thought of her as a little girl, rolling down the side of a slope, giggling, her skirts rising above her knees.

  “Julien had my knees clattering with all his talk.” She nudged him playfully. “He told me it was like dropping off the edge of a cliff.”

  The boy shrugged, shamefaced. “I’ve never run the rapids before, either.”

  “Reason enough for another baptism,” Simeon suggested, his teeth visible beneath his black beard.

  “Why bother?” Wapishka gestured to the boy’s soaking shirt. “He’s already been baptized by the river herself.”

  “There are more rapids, aren’t there?” Genevieve asked. “Somewhere downstream?”

  “There are more,” Andre snapped, “but we won’t run them.”

  “Why not? It’s so much faster than portaging.”

  She tilted her head and looked up at him, and for a moment she was his Taouistaouisse again, bright-cheeked, excited, all the haughtiness melted away. The rapids had done this, the rush and tumble of the water, the buck and roll of the canoe in the fresh open air; the danger and excitement of it stripped away all pretense and revealed the pith of a man— or a woman. Andre’s hands tightened on his paddle. What kind of creature are you, woman? What does it take to make you scream?

  “It’s dangerous, that’s why,” he argued. “The water level is too low. We could tear a hole in the bottom of the canoe and lose everything.”

  Her gaze skittered away, as if she suddenly remembered to whom she was talking. She shrugged beneath her deerskin blanket, which Julien had long returned to her in favor of his shirt. “If it can’t be run, then it can’t be run, but it’s just so much more fun to rush down with the current than plod along the shore.”

  He thought of the falls ahead that gushed into the river, leaving a sliver of turbulent water for the canoes to pass by; he thought of the jerky drop just beyond, and the breath-stealing rush of froth and mist before the ribs of the canoe connected again to the water. A wicked grin twitched his lips.

  “I didn’t say it couldn’t be run, Taouistaouisse.”

  Tiny, Wapishka, and The Duke glanced over their shoulders in astonishment. Genevieve tilted her head, a sparkle of excitement lighting her green eyes.

  “We’ll walk the shore and take a look at the run.” He twisted his paddle and steered the canoe toward the shore. “Then we’ll do it.”

  ***

  Andre’s footsteps crunched on the bare stones as he and The Duke picked their way along the edge of the steep cliff that formed one bank of the river. Nothing obstructed the view down the edge of the precipice into the deep ravine that held the swirling white water of the rapids, for here, as along the shore of most of this river, scarcely any dirt covered the bones of the earth. Only stunted jack pines and scrubby, dry vegetation flourished atop the hill, their gnarled roots digging deep into fissures of rock.

  The water flowed low in the ravine. In places, only the tips of rocks thrust from the river, easy to see from above but nearly impossible to see from the rim of a canoe. Still, as Andre scanned the length of the rapids, he knew they could be run if the canoe was empty of merchandise and only two skilled men manned the vessel. With Genevieve as a passenger, of course. Break, woman. It was a damned cruel thing to do, but he’d reached the limits of his control. Soon, they’d pass the farthest western point he’d ever traveled. Ahead lay territory charted by only a few Frenchmen, and beyond that, by none but the Indians. Now he was fully in his world, his savage world, where life was short and hard and a man didn’t fight against his pleasure.

  Break, woman. For there can be no such thing as a Frenchwoman with the courage and grit of an Indian squaw. Now she’d get a taste of what it was like to live in his world, always riding the edge of control, swept along by the forces of nature, in a place where only those quick of wit and courage could survive.

  “We must watch those ridges.” The Duke squatted and pointed down the ravine toward a ragged line of stone that thrust out into the center of the river, the shells knotted in his hair clanking as his slick black ponytail slipped off his shoulder. “We must remember to bear away from them when we reach I his curve.”

  They discussed the run all along the route to the camp. All his canoes had landed and the merchandise lay scattered about the rocky shore like so much flotsam. The men had already eaten their gritty breakfast of sagamite flavored with blackberries, and a haze of blue smoke hung in the air from the pipes and the cooking fire. The cook clanged his copper pot clean near the shore.

  Andre saw Genevieve perched upon a boulder while Wapishka regaled her with a story that, by the amount of hand waving, was exaggerated utterly out of proportion. Andre’s loins tightened at the sight of her, her breasts straining against her bodice, her legs crossed at the ankle and swinging back and forth, her lips parting in a laugh.

  She looked at him suddenly.

  “Come.” He bowed and swept out an imaginary hat, then gestured to The Duke, who waded out to the empty canoe. “Our carriage will be departing soon.”

  “I thought we weren’t running the rapids.” She leapt gracefully off the boulder and jutted her chin toward the water, where The Duke ran his hands over the sides of the birch bark vessel. “The canoe is empty.”

  “It’s just you and me, woman.” He grinned as her eyes widened. “And The Duke. We’ll be doing the run with an empty canoe. It’s the only way to be sure we don’t damage the boat.”

  “What use is that?” She shrugged herself into her blanket. “The men will still have to portage all the kegs over that rock.”

  “I’m not running the rapids to save time, Genevieve. I’m running them for you.”

  She blinked at him, then her chest inflated and that steely, defiant look lit her eyes. “If that’s the case, I’d rather not.”

  “You were all-fire eager to run the rapids an hour ago.”

  “I thought it was the quickest way down.”

  “It is the quickest way down.” “But that’s useless if it’s only me, you, and The Duke who are going to benefit from it. I’m perfectly capable of climbing the portage by myself.”

  “I thought,” he growled, frustration curling his hands into fists, “you would enjoy the ride.”

  “I would.” Her dark lashes rose as she met his gaze evenly. “But I’m not willing to pay the price for your kindness.”

  He clutched her arm as she tried to turn away. “Frightened, Genevieve?”

  “
Suspicious.” She tugged her skirts clear to her knees, so he could see the leggings strapped around her leg. “These leggings, the blanket, and now a ride down the rapids. What are you trying to do, Andre?”

  “I don’t need a woman freezing to death or collapsing on the trail.”

  “It would save you a lot of bother. No woman to slow you down on the voyage.” She leaned toward him, arms akimbo. “No annulment proceedings in the spring …”

  “Quiet.” He lowered his voice when he realized some of the men had turned to stare. “If I’d wanted you dead, I’d have done it by now.”

  Genevieve set her jaw and glared at him, and he saw all of his treachery in her eyes. “I might have spent too much of my life in charity houses like the Salpetriere,” she retorted, “but I know one thing: No man gives a woman gifts unless he wants something back from her.”

  It was on the tip of his tongue to say I don’t want anything from you, but he stopped himself, for it was a blatant lie. He did want something—he wanted her. He had had enough of this cold, angry Genevieve. He wanted back the woman who laughed, he wanted back the woman who tried to seduce him at every turn, and he wanted her without commitment, without entanglements, without complications.

  But most of all, he wanted to kiss her pouting lips, then caress her until she was senseless with desire, until she begged him to take her, until she melted like a block of snow in the sunshine. His breechcloth tightened at the thought. He wanted to pull her in his arms, press his loins against her, smother her parted lips with kisses, feel her sex with his fingers, and make her throb for him, as she had that day on Calumet Island. He knew he couldn’t. He had no right—and that was what was tormenting him, this last shred of honor he’d not yet shed. She had to initiate any lovemaking between them—and she’d damned well better do it soon, before he forgot himself.

  Then he remembered how she’d looked, only moments ago, when they had run the five miles of rapids. The exhilaration and the power of the white water had affected her as it had always affected him: It made her forget, for a brief moment, that he was the enemy. She had been eager and open. Passionate. They had shared a moment.