Free Prisoner of Desire by Jennifer Blake Page B

accomplished. To her, it was the idle ladies with nothing to do who were less than alive.
    It made her uneasy to think of Ravel Duralde watching her, knowing so much about her. Why should he do that, unless it was out of guilt for the way he had interfered in her life? If he had not killed Jean, she would be a young matron by now, probably with three or four children. Her time would be spent supervising the nursery and her house, planning meals for her husband, seeing to his comfort, occupying his bed. She would have grown rather fuller of figure, no doubt, from childbearing, and perhaps quieter in her manner. The only thing she would know of what was happening in the fields or with the selling of their crops and animals would be what Jean chose to tell her. Her dependence for news and opinions of events would be entirely on him.
    She frowned up at the gathered silk lining of the tester above her bed. Such a quiet round of days might well have been stultifying. But she would have had Jean, of course. They would have talked and laughed and played with their children, and at night they would have slept side by side in their bed.
    She tried, just for a brief and rather shamed moment, to think of what it would have been like to lie in Jean’s arms, to make love. The image would not come. Instead, she saw the lean features and broad chest of Ravel Duralde.
    She flung herself over in the bed, pushing at her pillow. He was out there in the cotton gin. Her prisoner. She had captured the Black Knight, the premier duelist in New Orleans, the man they had called El Tigre when he fought with the phalangists of William Walker in Central America.
    She had caged the tiger. But how could she let him go? How could she?

4
     
    ANYA KNELT ON THE GROUND, reaching into the flower bed to grasp handfuls of the crisp winter grass that threatened to choke the verbena. Nearby, in this back garden of Beau Refuge, a young boy of twelve or thirteen speared at dead leaves as if the rake he was wielding were a lethal weapon. The verbena bed fronted a row of spirea in full bloom, with arching branches of white as fine and full as egret plumes. Beyond the end of the lacy gray-green growth of verbena with its purple flowers was a row of daffodils whose yellow trumpets were just opening. A wind with a moist chill in its breath waved the spirea branches and set the daffodils to dancing on their stems.
    “Joseph,” she called, “watch out for the bulbs.”
    “Yes, mam’zelle,” he said, but continued to mangle the stems of the daffodils as he searched out leaves.
    “The yellow flowers, be careful of them!”
    “Oh, yes, mam’zelle!”
    The housekeeper Denise, coming along the brick path that led from the house, stopped beside Anya with her hands on her ample hips. The wind flapped her apron and the knotted ends, like cat’s ears, of the kerchief tied around her head. “You’ll never make a gardener of that boy.”
    “I don’t know; at least he’s willing.”
    “His mind wanders from what he should be doing.”
    “His is not the only one,” Anya said, a rueful smile on her lips as she nodded her head toward several sprigs of verbena she had managed to pull up with the grass.
    “Humph. It’s a wonder there’s any flowers left in that bed.” The housekeeper lowered her voice. “And if it;s the man in the gin on you’ mind, it’s that one I come to talk to you about.”
    Anya glanced at the yard boy, then rose to her feet, moving nearer. “What is it?”
    “He don’t eat. When I went for the tray with his noon meal just now, he was lyin’ there with his face to the wall. He hadn’t touched his food, and he didn’t answer when I talked to him.”
    A frown appeared between Anya’s eyes. “Do you think he’s worse?”
    “I couldn’t say, but it don’t look good.”
    There was disapproval in the housekeeper’s voice. Massively built, the woman had the high cheekbones and deep-set eyes of the Indian warrior who had been her