Free Awakening His Duchess by Katy Madison Page A

way he carried himself and a tiny hitch to his gait.
    He used to have such a smooth loose-limbed walk. She might
miss that. In Port-au-Prince she’d loved to stare after him when he walked away
from her. But she always knew it was with reluctance he left her. Now it was as
if he couldn’t wait to put distance between them.
    Gathering her skirts in her fists, she trotted after him.
“Beau, your brother was killed by a horse. Your papa says it is dangerous. I
don’t wish Etienne to be put at risk.”
    “All Englishmen ride,” said Beau, not stopping.
    She grabbed his arm. The heat of his skin seared her and
fire seemed to shoot through veins rusty with disuse. Mon Dieu, was she
still so enamored of him she could not control her urges? And she didn’t,
couldn’t, want him.
    He swirled around and yanked away from her. “Don’t touch
me.”
    She pulled her hand back, startled by the churning deep
inside her. What was wrong with her? She didn’t want another child, didn’t want
to have relations with a man who didn’t love her, didn’t want to be a wife
again. Her life was all about what was best for Etienne. That was all that
mattered.
    He reached out and put his hand against a table.
    “You cannot make Etienne do such a dangerous thing.” She
tried to sound reasonable as he glared at her. Men lived their entire lives in
Saint-Domingue and never rode on the back of a horse. There were too few of
them to be turned into pleasure animals. Besides the animals here in England
were massive and far more dangerous. “This riding horses. There is no need.”
    “There is every need.” Beau leaned his hip against the side
table and folded his arms across his chest. “With a name like Etienne he will
already be picked upon and if he sits a horse like a sack of rocks as Mazi
does, he will have a hard time at school.”
    School? “He has no need for school,” she blurted. Did
he mean to rip her son away from her by any means possible? “He will have the
best tutors here.”
    Beau’s head tilted and his eyes narrowed. His beautiful
eyes—no matter how much his body had changed she would have known his eyes
anywhere. God, why hadn’t she asked more questions about the white slave? Her
husband would have made certain he was freed—unless he already knew it was
Beau. She put a hand to her head. Had Henri known? She tried to remember if it
had been him or her father who had most often said, just an albino.
    “School is for more than education,” Beau said tightly. “He
will attend in a few years.”
    In a few years she might be able to convince him that school
was not necessary, but the horse riding... “I do not want him riding horses.”
    “It’s not your decision anymore.” Beau pushed away from the
table and turned. “Mazi is waiting.”
    She touched the warm wood where his hip had been resting as
if she needed proof he was real, not an apparition conjured to torment her or
to take her son from her. Without her willing it, she caught at his shoulder.
“Please, he is the only family I have left. I cannot lose him. I cannot. I
would have nothing left.”
    Beau flinched. Then he pushed her shoulder back and held his
arm stiff, holding her away.
    It was the wrong thing to have said.
    “Do you think I would deliberately harm my son?” His jaw
thrust forward. “I shan’t have him jumping stiles or racing, just sitting on a
damn plodding horse.”
    “I do not know what you will do. I barely know you.” What
she thought she had known was all turned on its head. In the last few years
she’d been betrayed again and again. Slaves who’d cared for her since infancy,
who’d fed her, washed her face, sung to her, men and women she’d known her
entire life had turned and butchered her family like they meant no more to them
than the chickens for supper.
    Then Beau’s resurrection meant that she’d been lied to about
him. He hadn’t died in front of her as she thought all these years. He hadn’t
been buried. Her