Free Only With Your Love by Lisa Kleypas

blinking.
    “I look forward to being reimbursed,” he said mockingly.
    Something tightened inside her body, a knot of repulsion and anguish. Her loving husband was dead, and she was the prisoner of this dirty, hairy-faced stranger. He was nothing but a vagabond, a jackal who survived by stealing from others. For a moment her hatred of him outstripped her fear. She hated his rough beard and sullen-looking mouth, his insolence.
    “I think,” she said with every ounce of dignity she possessed, “that your pride would not allow you to force yourself on a woman who did not want you.”
    Easily reading her contempt for him, Griffin sneered. “There are many things I value over my pride, petite. Your body happens to be one of them.”
    As if a swift storm had appeared over an already choppy sea, his mood switched from unpleasant to cruel. When she timidly asked him where she could see to her private needs, he walked her into the woods where the others could not see them, and he mocked her embarrassment. Although he kept his back turned, Celia was mortified to the point of tears. The sound of her quiet sniffling as she rejoined him seemed to annoy him beyond reason.
    “Stop sniveling, you little fool,” he said in exasperation. “God knows why relieving yourself is a matter of such delicacy.”
    He snapped at her again when she didn’t move fast enough to suit him. When the hem of thewrinkled black shirt had ridden up her thighs, he inquired sarcastically if she desired to be raped by every member of the crew, beginning with himself. At his bidding, she seated herself in the pirogue, staying as far away from him as possible. After exchanging a few parting words with Aug, Griffin clapped him on the back and boarded the vessel.
    Employing oars and long poles, the new crew guided the pirogue along the sluggish bayou. In spite of their earlier insolence, the men quickly became accustomed to Celia’s presence, and they made no overtures to her. She found her attention captured by the exotic scenery: dense foliage and clusters of amethyst irises, muddy water filled with turtles, thick-whiskered muskrat feeding on cattail roots. The insects seemed to plague her more than they did the others, and she slapped at the flies and mosquitoes irritably. By the end of the day, she decided she had never felt so grimy and uncomfortable.
    Night brought coolness with it, and Celia began to blink sleepily, wondering if the journey would ever come to an end. The pirogue passed through the last humid stretch of the bayou and through its head, into a wide, cool lake. The light of a full moon glittered over the dark water.
    Griffin was faced with a decision as the vessel surged across the rippled surface of the lake. If he pressed on through the night, he would have Celia at the Vallerand plantation in a matter of hours. They could cross the lake, travel by horseback to the Mississippi River, find someone to ferry them across, and make a short trip through the Bayou St. John. Legare was probably at their heels already. It would be best to deliver Celia tothe Vallerands quickly, and then disappear into the night.
    He looked at Celia. She sat a few feet away from him, huddled in a ball of misery, resting her head and arms in her lap. The disheveled cloud of hair obscured her face. Her neck was streaked with sweat and dirt. The black shirt was pulled closely over her body, but he knew that underneath it were bony knees and hips as slim as a boy’s. Wryly he wondered how she could have inspired such lust earlier.
    She sat up and looked straight ahead, clasping her hands in her lap like a prim little girl. Griffin was puzzled by the sight of her. She couldn’t possibly be the same creature who wrapped herself around him like a second skin when he kissed her. Had he imagined the warm silken mouth, the seductive undulation of her body against his…Had he been so exhilarated by a mixture of bloodlust and danger that he had felt a response she hadn’t