Creole Fires Read Online Free PDF Page B

dark eyes and Spanish features would win, though at Lorna’s horrified expression, she prayed he would not. The way he had looked at her had made her skin crawl, but he’d seemed so confident of his purchase, so determined, she’d finally given in to an urge to show him her disdain. Then the other man in the crowd had materialized out of nowhere—saving her from some dreadful fate she could only imagine, or immersing her in something worse.
    She had tried to see his face beneath the stylish gray narrow-brimmed high hat he wore, but everything happened so quickly that he was gone before she got the chance. All she had noticed was his height, which was several inches taller than the men around him, and that his shoulders were broad.
    He appeared to be a large man—and big meant powerful. Nicki shuddered. Powerful enough to hold her immobile against her fiercest struggles. Powerful enough to do the ugly things the watchmen had done to Lorna and the other women prisoners.
    Nicki closed her eyes, fighting down her fears. She had always been so fearless, so confident. Now it seemed, at the most inopportune time, she would remember the beatings she had received from Armand Laurent for her defiance, the suppers she’d missed because of her arrogant nature and too-haughty ways. It had taken some doing, but she’d finally learned to suffer in silence, to keep her bitter retorts to herself. Her reward had been imprisonment for a crime she didn’t commit.
    Outside her cell, Nicole heard the watchmen’s weighty footfalls, their ribald laughter as they headeddown the hall.
Wherever I go has got to be better than this
, she told herself firmly. But as the heavy iron door swung wide and she was led away, she wasn’t really so sure.

3

    Nervously wringing her hands, Nicole St. Claire stood beside the gleaming black barouche that waited on Royale Street in front of a sign reading: Thomas P. Demming, Attorney-at-Law.
    A gray-haired watchman stood on one side of her while an equally graying black man, dressed in fashionable red and gold livery, stood on the other.
    The guard pulled a timepiece from his pocket and flipped open the lid. “We’re a few minutes early.”
    “He be here,” the old Negro said. “He be here right on time.”
    And he was.
    Nicole had just glanced toward the corner when the tall broad-shouldered man she had glimpsed at the auction came around it, striding in their direction. Nicki blinked, blinked again, then swayed against the carriage wheel, gripping the spokes for support.
It couldn’t be!
    But it was. Alexandre du Villier. She would know that handsome face anywhere. During her hard days of indenture, as she had huddled on her narrow cot trying to get warm, or scrubbed the hard woodenfloors, or washed a mountain of dirty laundry, she’d thought about him, wondered what had happened to him. Wondered if, back in her other lifetime, he might have come to call on her as she had once wished.
    She glanced up at him as he drew near, accepting the papers the guard handed over but perusing them only briefly. When he looked down at her, her heart began to pound.
Would he recognize her too?
Dear God, she prayed he wouldn’t.
    She couldn’t bear to face him in her filthy rags and matted hair. But then maybe that was why he’d bought her. He had remembered her and was here to rescue her again. Her heart increased its pounding, and the rags that bound her breasts felt so tight she couldn’t breathe.
    He was handing the guard a draft now, just as he had promised, while the driver returned to his seat at the front of the carriage. Nicki fought a moment of panic as a pair of hard brown eyes locked on her face, and his big hand lifted her chin. He assessed her a moment, his dark look traveling over her bruised and dirt-smudged face, then down the front of her soiled brown wool dress, where the bodice hung loose and to all appearances, empty.
    A glimmer of something moved across his face, and she wondered if it might