Felice, p.9
Felice, page 9
Marching past him, she stomped off. “I’m away to find something to eat. I’ll return . . . whenever I please.”
She was already out the door when he called out. “You forgot your hat and parasol. And your reticule.”
“Bugger off,” she muttered and headed for home.
Chapter Nine
Midnight had come and gone by the time René reached his town house on Rue Royale. He was so damn tired, it was all he could do to fit the key into the gate’s lock. A twist to the right, and metal screeched against metal in the silence. He winced. This would not do now that new tenants were installed on the ground floor. Stepping into the courtyard, he locked the gate behind him and cursed under his breath at the repeated jarring noise. He’d have Henri oil the lock on the morrow.
Christ, even his bones ached. What he craved was a full night of uninterrupted sleep. He’d risen before dawn these past four days. In a couple of hours, he’d do the same. Three clippers with full cargoes had sailed into port all at once, which meant a hell of a workload lay ahead of him. Unless Bastien returned a day early from upriver, René would be on his own.
Little good Michel was of late. Granted, he could be depended upon to see that the crew from all three ships got their pay by noon—after Felice provided the proper figures, that was. But clearly, the man was not his usual steadfast self. He’d made errors of late. Had René not caught the mistakes, they’d have proven either costly or dangerous. For someone known to be the epitome of calm, Michel’s work discipline had gone adrift under the stress of his wife’s confinement.
Then there was the problem of the missing Endeavor. Had the long-overdue clipper failed to make her way around treacherous Cape Horn? Christ, he hoped not. He’d hired every crew member on board—including the captain. The thought of them lost at sea, along with the few passengers the merchant ship carried, wrenched his gut.
If all that weren’t enough, he had Felice to deal with. She’d barely spoken to him since their encounter three days before. He damn well wasn’t sorry for having confronted her. He’d been right about the banked flames threatening to ignite between them. When he’d leaned over her desk, close enough to catch her scent, her breath hitched, her pupils dilated, and color rose to her cheeks. He knew raw emotion when he saw it. When she slid that lush bottom lip of hers between her teeth, she looked at him as if he was about to devour her, and there was little she could do about it—or wanted to.
Thank God she’d bolted.
He hated to think what might have happened had he followed the command of his randy cock and climbed right over the top of the desk. The last thing he needed was to repeat the mistake he’d made three years ago. Now, more than ever, it was time she agreed to a private conversation. If things continued like this much longer, Michel was sure to take notice. As would everyone else.
A thought niggled at him. Something more than the fire between them was disturbing her. She’d shown up the next day with barely a greeting, then buried her head in those damn ledgers, where she remained until taking her leave. He would consider that later. What he desperately needed now was his bed.
He passed by what had once been the old servants’ quarters and took note of the shuttered windows.
Bien.
Henri and his maman must be settled in for the night. Not only were they safe from Lucien behind the locked front gate, but their new home was a far sight better than the sparse room they’d been living in. And Monique’s days of having to take in laundry were at an end. She worked for René now.
He hadn’t seen her for a few years. She couldn’t be more than thirty, yet she appeared older, with her pinched features, gaunt frame, and lackluster dark hair. She’d been attractive once—pretty even. Given time, perhaps her new situation would revitalize her. Until he’d shown up to move them to his home, he’d had no idea of their plight. Henri had said nothing of their situation when he’d hired on with the company.
Providence could move in remarkable ways, René decided. Because he previously had not employed live-in help, he’d had no use for the old servants’ quarters. Rather than let them sit empty, he’d had the space refurbished, used it to store excess furniture. As luck would have it, his once-a-week cleaning lady had recently returned to Metairie to care for her elderly folks. Thus, René needed to hire someone new when Monique happened along. It only took a day of rearranging furniture and putting a little shine on the roomy, two-bedroom space to make it ready for her and her son.
When they stepped inside their new home for the first time, Henri beamed. Monique wept. And René bit his tongue to keep from cursing Lucien out loud. How the hell could the man abandon his family, leave them to fend for themselves? But then, Lucien never did think of anyone but himself.
René moved silently through the courtyard. His sweet-smelling garden, filled with local flowers and exotic plants he’d managed to collect on his travels, edged the entire perimeter of the courtyard. By this time next year, everything should be well-established. He was proud of all he’d accomplished—had every right to be. He’d come a long way from the bayou shanty he’d been born and raised in. Everything he’d ever dreamed of had come to pass—he had a lofty position with a highly respected company, a home in the coveted Vieux Carré, and ever-expanding wealth, thanks to decent wages and wise investments. Yet, as he climbed the stairs to the main living quarters, his footsteps echoed with the odd emptiness hounding him of late.
Spying a light shining through the edges of the curtains on either side of the door, he paused. Had Monique forgotten to turn off a lamp? Gaslighting wasn’t something to be left unattended. He reached for the handle, but the door swung wide and Monique stood before him.
“Bonsoir, monsieur.”
He stepped inside. “What the devil are you doing up so late?”
“I thought it best to remain here for your return,” she said in her Cajun tongue.
“Merci,” he responded in kind. “But I come and go at odd hours. In the future, do not wait up for me unless I send Henri to inform you otherwise. He will also let you know if I intend to return for dinner, which will be a rarity because I take my meals in restaurants. All I require of you is to keep my living quarters in order; otherwise, you may do as you please.”
He noted her hands were clasped in front of her so tightly, her knuckles were white. “What is it?”
“You have a guest waiting for you, monsieur.” She nodded toward the staircase leading to his bedroom.
“A woman?”
“Oui. A pretty woman.”
Liberty.
“Did she give her name?”
“Oui, monsieur. Mrs. Worth.”
Oh, hell.
“She said she was your lady, and that I was to allow her entry, under your orders. Was I wrong in letting her in?”
“Non. You could not have known, but from now on, no one enters without my permission. Is this the reason you waited up for me?”
“Oui, monsieur. I—”
Christ, she was nervous. “When only you and Henri are present, call me René.” Tired and out of sorts as he was, he managed to offer her a smile. “Remember, we are practically cousins.”
She blinked, as if to hold back tears, then dropped her head and settled her gaze on the floor. “I . . . I am so grateful to have a lovely home for my son and me. I do not wish to do anything to cause you disappointment.”
He moved to the Louis XIV side table and reached for a cut-crystal glass on a tray next to a decanter of Armagnac. He poured himself two fingers and turned back to her. Good God, the hemline of her old gown was quivering. “Have no fear, Monique. Your home is here for however long you wish. What we need is a little patience while we get used to each other, non? Forgive me for not taking the time to get to know you in the past, but you were with Lucien, so I had reason to keep my distance.”
“Oui,” she whispered. “I am aware of your dislike for each other. He can be quite charming with the ladies, and I was young when we met. Too young. It wasn’t until we married and Henri came along that my husband showed his true face to me.”
René’s jaw clenched. She was a good woman wed to a good-for-nothing man. “You can relax now. You are safe.”
“I hope so, monsie . . . René.”
Frustrated, he raked his fingers through his hair. Tomorrow, he would have a dressmaker come in with orders to get rid of Monique’s goddamn rags. “Go. Get some sleep.”
“Bonsoir,” she murmured and scurried out the door.
He watched her disappear, then moved back to the Armagnac and poured another two fingers. The last damn thing he needed was Liberty Belle in his bed. He climbed the stairs and strode to the door, opened it, and stepped inside. Liberty lay in the middle of his bed, wearing nothing but a rose in her hair.
“Darling,” she purred. “I thought you’d never get home. I nearly fell asleep waiting for you.”
He drained the glass with a hard swallow and set it atop the rosewood chiffonier beside the door. “I didn’t see your carriage out front.”
“I sent my driver away.”
He noted her clothing scattered about the room. Gathering it up, he laid the pile at her feet. “Get dressed. I’ll see you home.”
A flare of anger lit her eyes. With an upward tilt of her chin, she recovered and gave him a seductive half smile. “It’s much too late to leave now, so I may as well spend the night. And why is it you’ve never invited me into this lovely room before? Why do you never spend an entire night with me?”
Because I have never cared enough to allow any woman into my private space. He raked a hand through his hair. Damn it, he wasn’t about to give her an answer.
She bent her head and gave him a faux pout. “Don’t you miss me, darling? It seems all you do is work, which leaves me quite bored.”
He turned his back on her and moved to the window. Shoving his hands in his pockets, he stared down at the empty street below. “How can you be bored when you’ve been busy showing Ainsworth the town?”
She laughed, a soft, velvet sound deep in her throat. “Why, I do believe you might be jealous. And here I didn’t think you were the sort.”
Christ, that was the last thing he was. He never questioned the amount of time Ainsworth spent with her, but if what he suspected was taking place, why the man’s nightly visits to a whorehouse? “Liberty—”
“I am not sleeping with Ainsworth, if that’s what you think.”
He could always tell when she fibbed. Which occurred whenever she wished to hide her flamboyant ways. Tonight, she spoke the truth. He wasn’t about to question what took place between her and Ainsworth. What he needed to do was figure out the kindest way to ease himself out of a relationship that had gone flat before Ainsworth arrived on the scene. The woman had a temper.
“He takes photographs of me. That is all,” she said. “He’s absolutely obsessed with this newfangled equipment and tinkers with it for hours.”
Her words got René’s attention. He kept his back to her. “What kind of photographs?”
She laughed again—soft and throaty. “Why don’t you ask him to show them to you?”
Like hell he would. As soon as he found the time, he’d call on Madame Olympée, try to find out what her regular customer was up to during his nightly visits. After the first time René and Bastien had spied the man entering the brothel, René sent a telegraph to their Boston office. He figured it was the fastest way to get a message aboard the next ship to England. At the moment, Ainsworth was being investigated both here and on the other side of the Atlantic. Sooner or later, René would have answers to a few of his questions.
He drew in a slow breath, carefully choosing his words. “You are a lovely woman with many fine attributes. Why you would choose to be with a man like me—”
“Darling, don’t tell me you think you’ve fallen out of love with me. I won’t have it.”
He closed his eyes against the frustration about to burst inside him. He didn’t love her, had never led her to believe he might one day. “There’s that word again.”
“Come to bed. Let me show you a new meaning to it.”
Whatever reserves he had left drained out of him. He could no longer put up with her manipulations. “Madame, things are over between us.”
A hush fell over the room. He didn’t know which was worse, the silence or one of her fits of temper.
“You are weary, darling. Come to bed. You’ll feel differently in the morning,” she said, but the sultriness in her voice had given way to a familiar edge that appeared whenever things didn’t go her way.
“Mon Dieu, Liberty. Leave things be.”
“It’s her, isn’t it?”
He knew of whom she spoke, but he damn well wasn’t about to acknowledge it. “Get dressed. I’ll see you home.”
“I saw how you couldn’t keep your eyes off her that evening at Le Blanc House.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, but I do. We women are like finely tuned instruments. Our instincts tell us when an odd chord has been struck, when something is out of tune, or when just the right note has sounded to draw two people together.”
He kept his focus on the darkened street below, knew to hold his tongue despite her goading.
“You can’t have her, you know. Even if she weren’t engaged to a man of noble blood and will spend her life in faraway England, she’d never have you. Oh, she’ll toy with you. But you’re a Thibodeaux from the bayou—a bastard son of a voodoo witch and an arrogant French aristocrat who thinks nothing of openly keeping mistresses.”
A rustle of silk and petticoats told him she’d climbed off the bed and was donning her clothing. “He’s approached me, you know. Your father, I mean. Seems he is in the market for yet another mistress. This time, one to share with his illegitimate son. Might you help me on with my corset?”
Hearing the subtle changes in her voice, he wasn’t about to touch her. She was a woman growing angrier by the moment. “Hooks are in the front. Always have been. I’ll tend to the fastening of your gown if need be, but you got out of your clothing on your own, so I suspect you were clever enough to think of what to wear before you ever stepped out your door.”
“You are being a cad, René.”
“Non. I am being honest.”
He felt her anger explode. Like a vibration running through the room and right up his spine. He heard her telltale scramble toward the fireplace.
Merde!
He ducked sideways.
The vase shattered against the wooden window casing. Barely missed the glass. He would like to throttle her. Instead, he kept his voice low, his words precise in their delivery. “Well done, Liberty. You just destroyed an irreplaceable Chinese urn. An ancient one at that.”
“You coldhearted Cajun bastard. I’ll not have you toss me away like yesterday’s newspaper.”
He glanced at his bed. Ah, hell, he’d see her home, then return to the office and catch a nap on the cot. “Unless you wish to assist me in preparing the carriage, finish dressing. You can meet me in the courtyard. But do so quietly, I’ve people asleep downstairs.”
“Oh, yes, that woman who let me in. She’s far too pretty to be a maid. Where’d you find her?”
When he failed to respond, she eyed the matching vase atop the fireplace mantel.
“Do not touch it, Liberty. I’m warning you.” The one she’d destroyed had been his first legitimately acquired work of art, which was why the pair sat on the mantel in his bedroom—a reminder from whence he’d come, and where he might go in life. That vase can never be duplicated, goddamn it.
She reached out and ran a finger down its delicate side. “It amazes me how a Cajun bastard growing up in a bayou hovel could know how to choose anything of value, let alone pull everything together in a room befitting an aristocrat.”
An angry response leaped to his throat. He swallowed the words, kept them to himself. That’s because I was raised to steal anything I could get my hands on. I soon learned to spot the difference between cheap goods and quality. I grew to respect an object—not for its monetary value but for what it represented in the heart of its creator. But I’ll be damned if I will give you the satisfaction of knowing my thieving ways made me want a better life, and that it would take years to figure out how to go about changing my circumstances in a town that always rejected me.
“On second thought,” he said in a casual monotone, “I won’t leave you alone in my home, lest I return to a pile of rubbish.” He moved to the linen-covered Bergère chair beside the fireplace. He sat, propped his elbows on the armrests, and steepled his fingers beneath his chin. As relaxed as he hoped he appeared, he was poised to react. A few slow intakes of breath and he was in control of his faculties. No longer would her words have the power to rile him.
She continued dressing without looking his way. “A self-taught aficionado of the finer things in life—is that what you are? Or perhaps your taste comes from your aristocratic French father. I doubt your Cajun voodoo mother would know the difference between a porcelain vase and a chamber pot.”
He laughed. “Aren’t you just chock full of sophistication?”
Chapter Ten
Shock gave way to denial. Denial gave way to hurt. And some time during the night, hurt gave way to anger—an anger so fierce, Felice could barely see straight. “Curse your black heart, Mr. Abbott,” she muttered as she tramped through town in the predawn darkness. “Curse any good thing I ever thought you stood for.”
“Beg your pardon, mam’selle?” Henri said, as he scurried alongside her.
“Pay me no heed, Henri. I awoke in a foul mood.”
Except for the occasional vendor getting an early start, and a lamplighter making his rounds to extinguish the gaslights, the streets were empty. She and Henri reached the front door of the office, only to find a pitch-black interior. To their right, three majestic clippers, their cargo yet to be unloaded, floated low in the water. Lanterns lighting the fore and aft decks cast eerie patterns across the surface of the water. An amber glow shone from the portholes of all three ships.
