Louisiana History Collection - Part 1 by Jennifer Blake Read Free Book Online Page B

dried corn kernels into meal that he had brought Little Quail into the house to serve his needs.
    Elise had lived for five of the seven years she had been in the colony unmolested by a man. In that time, the abhorrence she felt for the physical act of love had grown rather than subsided. That it threatened her now filled her with as much terror as impotent age.
    Reynaud Chavalier was not the same kind of man that Vincent Laffont had been; she recognized that well enough. He was no braggart, no bully. The half-breed was a man of obvious strength, of implacable will, of deep-running desires that he controlled without effort. It would not be so easy to defeat such a man. There would be no bluster in his anger, no wavering in his determination to subdue her. That he was a half-breed mattered not at all, except that it was his Indian heritage that gave him the stoic hardihood that hid his emotions and made him, therefore, doubly dangerous. To use a man’s weakness, one must first find it, and as far as she had been able to tell in her brief acquaintance with Reynaud, he had none. It was these things that frightened her, these that she must add to the illogical terror she felt when she was near him because he was tall, overbearing, and had shown a flicker of interest in her as a woman; because the blood that ran in his veins had a fierce taint; but, most of all, simply because he was a man.

3
     
    B Y THE TIME the early dusk of November deepened into darkness, the small group under the magnolia was thirsty, hungry, and near dagger-drawing with each other from the tight stretch of their overwrought senses. They were no longer speaking. Elise, driven close to madness by the barrage of angry demands and strident pleas for her to rescue them with her cooperation, had withdrawn to sit alone with her back to the tree trunk and her hands clasped between her knees. Madame Doucet, told in a savage undertone to cease her moaning or be strangled, was sitting, staring at nothing, while her hands pulled and patted her dress as if it was a child’s blanket. Exhausted by his terror of the morning, Henri had fallen into a jerking, twitching sleep while St. Amant sat rubbing his injured leg and Pascal strode up and down, ostensibly on watch.
    It did nothing for their state, particularly that of Pascal, to have Reynaud suddenly step up to them from the tree shadows. The merchant started back with an oath. Recovering, he demanded, “Where the hell have you been?”
    Reynaud ignored the question. “We will go now.”
    “I asked you a question,” the merchant said, squaring up to the half-breed with his musket held in front of him.
    Reynaud paused, then looked down at him. When he answered, his voice was deep and deliberate. “Listen and hear me well. I owe you nothing, not duty, not explanations. I care not whether you live or die and know no reason why I should. I will lead you away from my brothers the Natchez for the sake of the blood of my father and for the favors of the woman I have requested. As we go you will do as I say, instantly, without question, because your life may depend on it. If you fail, if you seek to put yourself over me, I will leave you behind because you will have become a danger to all. This I promise. Heed me and you will be safe. This I swear. Come with me now if it is still your will, for this is the last time I will tell you.”
    “You haven’t asked if Madame Laffont agrees to your proposition.”
    “She is still here.”
    Elise met the gray gaze he directed toward her. Caught in its dark intensity, she could not look away. She had the feeling that Reynaud Chavalier knew how near she had come in the past hours to running away. A half-dozen times she had fought the urge to leap to her feet and flee through the woods, to try to make her way to the river’s edge in the frail hope of finding a boat to take her downstream away from the Natchez country. It had not been fear that restrained her so much as the