The Pelican Bride Read Online Free PDF

as a threat, and he’d settled with little fanfare on a five-mile square just outside the transient Mobile clan’s winter quarters.
    “Do you not live at Fort Louis? Why?”
    He shrugged. “It’s a long tale. In short, I prefer to provide for my own livelihood without interference from the Crown.”
    “Yet you fly the French flag. You are a strange man, Monsieur Lanier.”
    He chuckled. “Which is perhaps the truest reason for my solitude.” He glanced at the younger girl, who had fallen into a fitful sleep against Mademoiselle Geneviève’s shoulder. “Please let me know if your sister requires anything for her comfort. I shall send someone back with food.”
    He executed a curt bow and headed for his quarters. A woman would never understand his aversion to walls.

    Geneviève stared at the sliver of salted fish in her hand and braced herself to put it in her mouth. Somehow she had expected the food to improve once they left the sea behind. Fish for breakfast. Fish for the noon meal. Fish for dinner. Manna indeed.
    She leaned against the outer cabin wall, settled Aimée’s head more comfortably in her lap, and nibbled at the dubious meal. The memory of fragrant aromas from Papa’s bakery wafted across her palate, somehow covering the pungent mess in her mouth. Yeast, that inimitable substance of her childhood, had left an indelible impression that no amount of bad food could erase. Perhaps the jar of leaven she’d managed to secrete beneath her Bible had survived the journey.
    The hope sustained her better than a hundred fine meals. If she could find a way to bake her pastries, she and Aimée would do well.
    Swallowing misgivings, she peeked around the corner of the cabin, where Tristan Lanier stood with feet braced wide against the rocking lunge of the boat. When he turned suddenly and caught her staring, she ducked back out of sight, heart pounding. He didn’t want a wife, she reminded herself. There was nothing to fear.

    F ORT L OUIS DE LA L OUISIANE
    What I need is a wife , Julien Dufresne thought as he shepherded the last of the Pélican girls through the stockade gate and ordered it closed and locked. The spindly-legged cadet on guard, with a longing glance at the girls’ well-padded backsides, saluted and moved to obey.
    Julien drew his kerchief from the inside pocket of his jacket and mopped his face, cursing the heat, cursing the mud caked on the expensive Russia leather boots he’d had shipped from Paris last fall, and cursing the mosquitoes that found their way through threelayers of clothing into his smallclothes. Most of all he cursed his nonexistent birthright—which was the reason he found himself in this godforsaken outpost, instead of comfortably ensconced in one of his father’s salons.
    He cheered himself by imagining the raw streets as they must one day appear. Bricked and lined with shops they would be, with clusters of brightly dressed women fluttering in doorways and carriages pulled by fine horses trundling under sunny skies. One of those carriages would be his, and one of the women would be carrying his child—a son born of legitimate union, blessed in the cathedral which he would endow.
    One of the girls he had just safely delivered would be privileged to become his bride. Maintaining a legacy of education, refinement, and landed privilege required the finest of bloodlines, and he must begin as he meant to go on.
    Several of the women had proved to be young and quite beautiful, which was frankly astonishing; one had to wonder what would motivate a gently bred female to voluntarily cross the ocean to this unsettled bog. Lack of virtue would be unacceptable in the wife of the son of the Comte de Leméry—regardless on which side of the blanket he had been conceived.
    One of those women would discover that she had made a most fortuitous decision in emigrating to the New World.
    “Which canary did you swallow, Dufresne?”
    Startled, he turned to find brick mason Jean Alexandre, a