Free Iron Lace by Lorena Dureau Page A

properly that the
young girl finally acquiesced. Reluctantly she allowed Mlle. Baudier to
lead her back upstairs.
    As for Vidal, he poured himself another glass of wine and
sat back down in the parlor to wait for his imaginative little ward to
repair her toilette, while he continued making occasional comments to
help soothe poor Grandmother Chausson's ruffled nerves.
    But between the sips of wine and those soothing phrases,
Miguel was anything but calm himself. He knew it wasn't the liqueur
warming his blood and swelling the desire in him at that moment as he
savored the memory of how the soft white silk of Monique's loosely
hanging gown had marked all the more the firm roundness of those high
young breasts and the tantalizing outline of those softly curved thighs
and buttocks in motion. Try as he would, he couldn't stop wondering how
it might feel to have those magnificent young breasts pulsating in his
hands and those softly undulating hips stirring passionately beneath
him.
Qué barbaridad
! It was becoming increasingly
difficult to continue thinking of Monique Chausson as nothing more than
a capricious child. Her actions might be immature at times, but his
impetuous little ward had certainly looked every inch a woman as she
had come down those stairs that night, and he could no longer deny that
he wanted her with every fiber of his being.

Chapter Ten

    Miguel
Vidal slumped back in the box that the Baron de Carondelet
had so graciously permitted him to use for the evening in the Salle de
Com é die. He had resigned himself to a dull couple of hours. There was
only one actor in the cast from the Cap-Français, and the leading lady,
a rather attractive quadroon whom Monique recognized as a milliner
around town, wasn't too bad in her part, but the rest of the performers
were rank amateurs.
    Fortunately, however, from the way his young wards' eyes
were glowing in their flushed faces, it was evident they were quite
fascinated by everything they saw and were in no mood to criticize
anything. After all, thought Vidal, it shouldn't take much to please
them. The year-old theater they were attending was not simply the only
one in New Orleans, it was also the city's first.
    It was hard for him to realize sometimes just how
sheltered and unsophisticated the girls' lives had been until now.
Despite their lack of discipline in certain things, they had really
lived so little. He had to keep reminding himself that only a few
blocks away lay vast stretches of untamed wilderness and that little
Monique and Celeste were seeing a theatrical performance for the first
time in their lives that night.
    He looked at the two girls sitting there beside him in the
box, so prim and proper now in their voluminous skirts and black lace
mantillas perched atop mountains of carefully piled curls, and decided
that the radiant look on their faces made the boredom of the evening
worthwhile.
    He almost chuckled aloud as he recalled once more the way
Monique had looked when she had made her entrance earlier that evening
in her makeshift chemise, wanting so desperately to be "classic", as
she had phrased it. What an adorable little doll she was, with her huge
gray eyes and pale spun-gold hair! Part of her charm was that she
didn't seem to realize how truly beautiful she was, or how
devastatingly provocative just the sight of her could be. His desire
for her was a constant knot embedded in his loins. He knew it shouldn't
be that way, but what good did it do to deny its existence, when that
knot continued to grow with each passing day? Neither her contempt for
him nor his common sense could melt it.
    He looked at her doll-like profile as she sat there caught
up in the spectacle. She seemed completely enthralled by the
performance, the earlier skirmish completely forgotten now. There were
so many things she didn't know… a whole world of concepts
and sensations yet to be explored. How he wished he could be the one to
take that little hand and lead her through