Free Tainted Lilies by Becky Lee Weyrich

only image which came clearly to mind was Jean Laffite’s face—the sun-bronzed cast of his skin framed in combers of darkness, which broke about his shoulders, his bold brows shadowing the green-gold glitter of his sometimes-melancholy eyes. She didn’t have to visualize his strong, sensuous mouth. The feel of his kisses still lingered on her lips.
    Nothing else matters, she thought to herself. I’m my own person. The choice is mine.
    She knew her parents would be disappointed by her decision and that hurt her. But not as much as the thought of life without Jean Laffite hurt. She couldn’t imagine spending the rest of her life away from the man she loved.
    “There comes a time,” she’d told her aunt shortly after the incident on the beach that afternoon, “when a woman must choose between being selfish or resigning herself to living out an empty life to please others. I’ve made my choice, selfish as it may seem to some people.”
    Jean Laffite, aided by Xavier, dressed slowly, meticulously. He savored the feel of fresh linen against his scrubbed skin. Rubbing a hand over his close-shaven face, he nodded his approval to his servant. He stepped into his perfectly cut trousers, then pulled on new boots, which shone like polished mahogany.
    All for her, he thought to himself. For my Nikki!
    Xavier, sensing the Boss’s pensive mood, remained silent as he carefully wound the sash of crimson satin about Laffite’s trim waist. Tonight his master wore the colors of the American flag—white shirt and blue britches, set off by the bright red cummerbund—to honor Louisiana’s first anniversary as a state.
    Jean Laffite, a man whom no country claimed, longed to find a home for his fierce patriotism as much as a place for his intense affections. France, the land of his forebears, had been denied him when his parents transplanted to Spain before his birth. Spain, which had killed his Jewish grandfather and had driven the rest of the clan into exile in Santo Domingue, or Haiti, where the Laffite brothers had been born, stirred only his hatred now.
    He knew the islands of the Antilles well. He had been schooled on Martinique, taken his military training on Saint Christopher, sailed with Beluche and his brothers under letters of marque out of Guadeloupe. His first bride hailed from Saint Croix. But those homelands were lost now, too. In 1804, when the slaves of Haiti rose up to drive the French off the island, Laffite and his family escaped with ten thousand other refugees to make a new home in Louisiana. Now they lived in the United States, and Laffite longed to make himself a valued citizen, not a man outlawed and hunted by its government.
    His need for respect, for belonging, and his need for the love of Nicolette Vernet twisted and twined about each other in his mind and in his heart, making each an intergral part of his whole desire.
    Laffite told himself that with a woman he loved and cherished at his side, he would naturally become more respectable in others’ eyes and be more easily accepted by his countrymen.
    It was all well and good to be the Boss of several hundred pirates, privateers, freebooters, and buccaneers expelled from the four corners of the world. But he longed for more. He enjoyed his status of “gentleman smuggler” in New Orleans—the camaraderie of the Crescent City’s leading businessmen when they met at Maspero’s Exchange and the shy but admiring looks offered him by their wives and lovely daughters at the opera—but it pained him that he was never invited into their close-knit society. There were a few wealthy rebels who entertained him in their homes on occasion, but the true crème de la crème of New Orleans eyed him with the same disdain and suspicion they had for the Americains—those settlers from other states who had invaded from the northeast, traveling down the Mississippi to begin new lives in the old city.
    Nicolette, if she would have him, could change all that.
    “You going