The woman merely smiled at his befuddlement and assured him Dominique would be grateful to have them on hand. He shrugged and thanked her as the carriage pulled away. Air rushed in from the windows, reminding him his clothes were wet and caked with filth from the swamp. They clung to his body, adding to his general discomfort. Dominique’s clothes were no better, and her skirts weighed more than any clothing had a right to, the saturated material lying like a leaden blanket over his legs as he settled her across his lap.
He leaned her head against his shoulder so she could rest comfortably against him and a few strands of her hair tickled his jaw. The curls had escaped the wrap, the cloth now hanging around her like a scarf, leaving her hair wild and free. The luscious brown bounty poured over his shoulder and forearms like a textured curtain of coffee spirals. He lifted his fingers, ready to give in to temptation and brush a few curls back from her face, but then remembered himself and closed his hand, forcing it back to his side. Do not complicate things any further.
Very soon, they were taken past the city limits by way of a small wooden bridge and emerged on his property. He’d given strict orders that only the house was to be opened, cleaned, and readied for company. The land itself was to be left alone, left to grow as it would, wild and untamed. Un-trespassed on.
Uninvestigated.
Julien studied the trees and bushes, satisfied to see that his orders had apparently been followed. After only a brief resistance, his gaze traveled to the west, ghosting over the center of his property, hidden by the overgrowth of trees. It was only a trick of the mind that convinced him he could see what lay there, see the solid stone nestled in a natural clearing amidst all that greenery. The mausoleum that held the reminders of what happened if he allowed himself to be pulled from his solitary path. What happened when someone tried to force a fate on him that had befallen far too many of his kind. The bodies of the women who had thought he could be tamed.
Slowly, his gaze fell to Dominique, one of the few women who’d tried and survived to tell the tale. In all the dreams he’d had of her, all the fantasies that forced themselves on his imagination, none of them had been entirely accurate. Dominique was not simply a woman—she was a magic wielder. A voodoo priestess—a voodoo queen. To be with her, truly be with her, would seal his fate, subject him to the bonds that were the hallmark of his people. The besotted fools who ran headlong into what was no more than a lifetime of servitude.
That will never be me.
“Master, is everything all right?”
Julien tore his mind away from the gruesome secret in the forest and focused on the servant who had come to meet the carriage. Guillaume’s eyes were brimming with curiosity, though he stood straight at full attention. A curl of blond hair threatened to escape the severe knot at his nape as he craned his head to see all the carriage’s occupants.
“Everything is fine, but the child requires a healer’s attention. Have one sent for immediately and show the boy and his family to a room. They are to be treated as respected guests.”
Guillaume nodded, then gave Dominique’s body a questioning look.
“I will take care of Madame Laveau.” Julien gathered her in his arms, freezing as she stirred. His nerves sizzled and he quickly leapt from the carriage. “Have clean towels and bandages sent to my room.”
He threw the words over his shoulder, trusting the servant to do as he’d instructed. She shifted in his arms again, the small moan of pain falling from her lips urging him to move faster. If she woke here instead of in the relative privacy of his chambers, his guests would get an unfortunate view of the realities of their current relationship.
Dominique’s eyes fluttered open as Julien kicked the door shut behind him, closing them in the privacy of his chambers. Breathing easier now that they were safely away from prying eyes, he carried her to his bed.
“Don’t try to move, Dominique. You’ve been hurt. I’m going to take care of you.”
For a split second, she smiled at him. A real smile that softened her features and lit up her eyes. It took ten years off her, reminded him of the first moment he’d ever laid eyes on her. Before she’d been the voodoo queen of Sanguennay. When she’d been his.
And then reality shattered the illusion. A hiss of pain slid past her lips as he eased her onto the bed, despite his attempts to be as gentle as possible. He stepped back as her brown eyes sharpened, mouth tightening into a hard line.
“Where am I?”
Her voice was hard and painfully detached. The warm tendrils of the past evaporated and Julien firmed his face into a mask of calm confidence and inclined his head.
“You are in my home. You were injured in the swamp and I brought you here to rest.”
The skin around Dominique’s eyes tightened and her breath caught. She glared at him, breathing slowly for several moments as though desperately trying to hold on to her temper.
“Your house. From the swamp. So you brought me through the town, did you? Paraded my unconscious, injured body for all to see? Painted yourself as a knight in shining armor?”
Pain in his palms alerted him to the fact that he was digging his nails into his own hands, his fists clenched so tight they trembled. He’d taken a step in Dominique’s direction and hadn’t even realized it. Slowly, he uncurled his fingers, muscles screaming in protest, pain pricking his skin where blood had swelled to the surface.
“No. I brought you here in a carriage with an injured child and his parents. I told everyone you saved the boy from Parlangua and the loa sent me to you to bring you back. I claimed no credit for the battle.”
“The child…” Dominique frowned. “What child?”
“The child Parlangua intended to consume in order to regain the energy it needed to heal.”
Her eyebrows knitted so tightly the skin between them paled. “I don’t understand.”
“There was a child in the swamp with his parents. Parlangua attacked him and I saved him. Then I told the child’s parents that it had been you that saved the child, that I had merely come after the fact.”
He spoke slowly, and as plainly as he could, but the furrow between her eyebrows remained, her eyes still clouded with confusion. “What is troubling you?”
“Parlangua. I don’t… What really harmed the child?”
“Parlangua harmed the child.” Julien sat on the bed, refusing to acknowledge the way she leaned away from him. “I injured it after it attacked you and it needed to eat to regain the strength to heal.”
“Parlangua didn’t attack me.” Dominique’s eyes sparked with fresh ire, soft brown irises darkening to the shade of logs burning in the center of a great fire. “That was an accident. An accident that happened because you wouldn’t let me go.”
Julien’s mouth opened and closed, words failing him in the face of such blatant naiveté. Perhaps he had been wrong about the young girl hardening into a jaded voodoo queen. At least something of that girl was obviously alive and well.
Perhaps that is not the only part of that girl that survived the years.
He planted a hand on the supple sheets of the bed, now damp from the moisture leeched from Dominique’s skirts.
“Ten years and still so innocent.” He leaned closer, deliberately invading her personal space. “You really believe Parlangua is incapable of harming a child?”
Dominique sank backward but then she mirrored his position, leaning closer to him as she clutched at the sheets to keep her balance. “Parlangua has never harmed me. It has been a friend of my family for generations.”
“You are a priestess,” Julien scoffed. “You come from a powerful family. Of course Parlangua would make an attempt to ally itself with you. The child on the other hand is just a child. Parlangua was injured, it needed food.”
“Parlangua eats deer, birds, fish.”
“Yes, but it found the child first.” He studied her as if he could see past her skin, to the soul beneath. Her reputation had spread far beyond Sanguennay, carried by sailors a
nd merchants across the seven seas. Surely a woman with such a fierce reputation could not truly be this misguided? The stubborn set remained in her jaw, her tone final, unhesitating. Awed, Julien sat back. “What is it like to live in your black and white world? To see no grey, for everyone around you to be good or evil with no betwixt or between?”
“Do not talk to me as though I were a child.” She shoved at him as if she had every intention of climbing off the bed, but she halted, her fingers clinging to his shirt as she choked back a gasp of pain.
“If you do not wish to be treated as a child, then stop acting like one.” Julien firmly grasped her by the shoulders and guided her to roll over and lie on her stomach. “Parlangua can be your friend and still be a creature that will eat a human child if circumstances warrant. There was no malice on the part of Parlangua, no evil. When will you learn that sometimes food is just food, and—”
Chapter Five
“And sex is just sex?” Dominique finished. The pain in her back lessened, her mind distracted from her physical discomfort by the sharp spike of pain in her heart. Pain she had no business feeling at her age, pain that belonged to a younger woman, a foolish woman. A woman who’d given in to a fantasy and had suffered the consequences of that capitulation far after the act itself had ended.
Humiliation burned Dominique’s face, but she resisted the urge to push it away. Instead, she forced herself to feel it, to wallow in it. She needed this, this reminder of what foolish emotions brought. What happened to a woman who put too much value on a pretty face and physical attraction.
Julien’s hands faltered, the bandages he’d been plucking at sagging briefly in his hands. “Dominique…”
There was a knock at the door, sparing Julien from finishing his sentence. He practically fell off the bed in a mad dash for the door. His servant jumped as he ripped the door open, the basket in his left hand jerked, rattling the bottles of healing ointment until they tumbled to their sides against a nest of clean bandages. The deep bowl he held in his other hand tilted, splashing water onto the floor. Julien accepted the basket and the bowl and quickly kicked the door shut.
A bag lying on the floor by the bed caught her eye—her bag. Without sitting up, she pointed at the bag. “If you don’t mind, I would prefer it if you would use my lotions instead of whatever you have in that basket. I assume one of my assistants packed that bag?”
“Yes.” Julien set the basket on the bed and the bowl on the small mahogany table beside it before retrieving the bag and setting it next to the basket. “How do you know what’s in it?”
“It does not take a seer. If you have that bag, you obviously stopped somewhere in the village that would have had my things, and no one but one of my assistants would have given it to you. Since you had to have made such a stop while…bringing me here, she must have known I was injured.” She shifted, wrinkling her nose at the sensation of soggy clothes against her clammy skin. “And in sore need of clean clothes. She would have packed accordingly.”
“I think there’s a fresh pair of boots as well.”
“Obviously.” Dominique smirked, despite her circumstances. “I told you, a woman packed that bag.”
“More reliable than if I had done it then, eh?”
The comment had likely been intended as a joke. But in typical male fashion, Julien had managed to send Dominique hurtling back into her little pocket of misery. Yes, let’s joke about your reliability. What a heart-warming topic, why would we ever discuss anything else? In that moment, she wanted nothing more than to leave. To get out of this room, this house, and go back to her own sanctuary where she could tend to her wounds in peace.
A slight shift on the bed ended that hope, pain exploding in starbursts along the heat that was the wound in her back. The skin felt raw and smarting. It needed to be cleansed before an infection set in. Dominique gritted her teeth and resigned herself to her fate.
“I’ll need to remove your clothes.”
You miserable sea dog, don’t you dare use that voice with me. Don’t you dare enjoy this—any part of this!
Barely biting back the urge to give voice to the anger threatening to bind her muscles into knots, Dominique rebutted his attempts to help her sit up and levered herself off the bed. Her muscles screamed in protest, skin sizzling as though burning oil dripped down her back. By the time she’d managed to free herself from her clothes and the soggy makeshift bandages, the pain had robbed her of her breath, and sweat soaked her forehead. Her attempt to lie back on the bed ended in a jerky collapse, adding insult to injury.
This time she laid down facing the opposite wall, away from Julien and the pillows soaked in his scent. There was a painting on the wall, and she forced herself to study it, to focus on the art and not the fact that she was lying naked on Julien Marcon’s bed.
It was a portrayal of a ship at sea, white sails billowing out under the blessing of a strong wind, waves kissing the strong hull as it cut through the water. The sunset painted in the background lit the backdrop with glorious oranges, pinks, and yellows, a small tinge of blue-violet lurking above, hinting at the darkness to come. It was a beautiful painting. And a melancholy reminder of an old dream.
In a rare show of consideration, Julien covered her lower body with a sheet, hiding her nudity as best he could. Before she could reflect too much on that compassion, he pressed a wet cloth to her skin. He went to work cleaning her wound and the surrounding skin with uncharacteristic tenderness.
“It’s a beautiful painting.”
Julien didn’t pause in his ministrations, rinsing the cloth in the bowl and continuing to work the mud and dried blood from her back. “I bought that from an old man in Meropis. He was half blind, but he painted the most breath-taking landscapes.” His voice held a smile. “Perhaps a blind man remembers the true beauty of nature better than we see it ourselves, eh?”
“Perhaps.”
Warm water trickled over her back. There was something soothing, almost hypnotic about his strokes, the way he coaxed the grime from her skin rather than scrubbing at it. Her body grew heavy, a pleasant haze falling over her mind until she drifted in that wonderful place between waking and sleep.
The burning scent of rum filled the air. A second later, a wretched sting lanced her back, seeming to drive through the wound clean out her chest. She hissed and arched her back, coming back to herself with a start.
“I’m sorry.” Julien took the rum-soaked cloth from her back. “I thought you were asleep. I’d hoped to finish this part before you woke up.”
“Who could sleep through that?” She winced, holding perfectly still, trying not to agitate the injury further. Something tickled at the back of her mind and she realized she no longer felt the itch of dried mud on the back of her legs. Trying not to draw attention to herself, she slid her hand to touch her leg beneath the blanket. The back of her body had been wiped clean.
“As I said, I thought you were sleeping.”
Her hand closed into a fist. “So you thought you’d have a look.”
The rum-soaked cloth pressed to her wound again, not so gentle this time. “I didn’t flip you over to clean the other side, if that makes you feel any better.”
Dominique breathed through the pain as the slosh of liquid against the sides of a glass bottle warned of a fresh trickle of alcohol. The air stuttered in her lungs as searing heat licked at her back.
“The wounds are not deep,” Julien noted. “Mostly superficial. Parlangua must have tried to stop.”
An image of Parlangua lunging for Julien, black claws sliding through his flesh like a fish diving into the sea, reared its ugly head and Dominique squeezed her eyes shut as if she could block out the memory. Her heartbeat pounded like a drum in her ears, reminding her of the adrenaline that had burned through her veins as she’d watched blood pour down Julien’s arms.
“Why are you telling people we are to be engaged?” She half-shouted the words, in too much of a hurry to distract herself from her own thou
ghts.
Julien set the bottle of rum down on the table beside the bed, the glass thudding against the wood. Dominique forced her eyes back to the painting, trying to distract herself as she waited for his coarse hands to apply the healing ointment.
Glass clinked together. “There are a few bottles in this bag. Which is the healing ointment?”
“Is there a green bottle marked with a serpent curled around a staff?”
“Yes.”
“That’s the one.”
The scent of lady’s mantle perfumed the air, pushing back the scent of swamp water. Contrary to the rough texture she’d expected, Julien’s fingers felt soft under the slick, oily film of the healing ointment. Body heat burned her through the skin-warmed substance and she gritted her teeth against the tactile memories. Memories of his hands on her skin under very different circumstances.
“I meant to speak with you about the engagement.”
Julien’s voice startled her, a blessed distraction from her current thoughts.
“Did you?”
The sarcasm tasted good on her lips, eased her spirits with its familiarity and stabbed like a sharpened pitchfork against the gooey memories trying to envelop her. Julien chuckled, and the sound only fed her annoyance, helped chase back the unwanted emotions of the past.
“Hear me out. I think if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll agree it would be a beneficial arrangement for both of us.”
What little part of Dominique’s inner youth still existed shed a tear at his choice of words. Arrangement. Beneficial. How…logical.
“You’ve done very well for yourself here, Dominique. I’ve been in town for less than a day, and already I’ve heard about the great voodoo queen who commands the respect of every man, woman, and child in a fifty mile radius—and farther. If my men’s reports of the tavern owners are to be trusted, I believe you have also carried on your parents’ liquor trade?”
Blue Voodoo: A Romantic Retelling of Bluebeard (The Hidden Kingdom Series Book 2) Page 5