Triumph in Arms Read online

  Read what the critics are saying about Jennifer Blake’s bestselling Masters at Arms series

  “The sexually charged chemistry between the two strong protagonists, danger and an overview of New Orleans and Mexico make this a fantastic and deeply touching love story.”

  —An RT Book Reviews Top Pick!

  “Beguiling, sexy heroes…Well done, Ms. Blake!”

  —The Romance Reader’s Connection

  “Be sure to read this series. No one portrays it better than Jennifer Blake. She has rightly earned the admiration and respect of her readers. They know there is a world of enjoyment waiting within the pages of her books.”

  —A Romance Review

  “The pride and care [Blake] takes in her creations shine through. While books in her new series stand alone, fans of historical romance will enjoy reading the whole series.”

  —Romance Reviews Today

  “Multi-award-winning author Jennifer Blake returns [with the] Masters at Arms series: set in nineteenth-century New Orleans, when honor was still decided with crossed swords and first blood. And a delightful return it is…”

  —Historical Romance Writers

  “Blake evokes the aura of New Orleans to perfection…”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “Blake adds another memorable book to her Maîtres d’Armes series…a fine overview of the art of fencing and duels, she brings together a noble, honorable hero and a heroine bent on revenge in a compassionate, sensual and emotionally intense love story.”

  —RT Book Reviews on Guarded Heart, winner of the Reviewer’s Choice Award for Best American Historical Romance

  “Guarded Heart is a boundlessly exciting and adventuresome tale…surely to be one of the best historical romances I will read this year.”

  —Romance Junkies

  “A brilliant addition to Jennifer Blake’s Maîtres d’Armes books…It is one of the most romantic books I’ve read. Fans of historical romance will not want to miss it.”

  —A Romance Review on Rogue’s Salute

  “Dawn Encounter is one of those books that once put down, you can’t wait to pick back up and read more. There is hot, sexual chemistry between Caid and Lisette that spices up almost every page…I can’t wait to read the sequel!”

  —Romance Reader at Heart

  “With a hero worthy of our dreams and a heroine women can relate to, this new masterpiece is a boon to Blake fans everywhere. Blake’s anticipated return to the historical romance proves to be well worth the wait.”

  —A Romance Review on Challenge to Honor

  Also available from

  JENNIFER BLAKE

  The Masters at Arms

  GALLANT MATCH

  GUARDED HEART

  ROGUE’S SALUTE

  DAWN ENCOUNTER

  CHALLENGE TO HONOR

  Louisiana Gentlemen

  WADE

  CLAY

  ROAN

  LUKE

  KANE

  GARDEN OF SCANDAL

  Watch for Jennifer’s brand-new trilogy set in the sexy and scandalous court of Henry VII

  BY HIS MAJESTY’S GRACE

  Coming in 2011

  Available in paperback from MIRA Books

  JENNIFER BLAKE

  TRIUMPH IN ARMS

  For my readers around the world who appreciate the

  romantic gesture, the passion and promise of love

  unrequited, the mystery of human relationships,

  and the olden days when such things mattered.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  New Orleans, Louisiana

  April 1847

  Christien Lenoir waited with his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets and his back propped against a Doric column of the Théâtre d’Orléans’s arcaded entrance. Tension sang along his nerve endings. The lady should appear at any moment. A single glimpse was all he required; it would decide whether he proceeded or called a halt.

  Around him the crème de la crème of the Vieux Carré streamed from the theater, pouring out into the damp night. Family groups, courting couples trailed by their duennas, widows and gentlemen on the town, they moved in a murmur of animated conversation and hummed snatches of the music just heard in L’elisir d’amore. The flickering gaslights mounted above the arched theater entrance cast a yellow-orange glow over the opera crowd, glinting on jewels, shimmering on silks, satins and velvets, turning white linen a sickly hue. In the street beyond the wide banquette, it reflected with a glasslike sheen from the wet carriages as swearing drivers jockeyed for position, preparing to take up their owners. Rain had passed over during the performance, leaving puddles between the paving stones that rose in glittering wavelets as horses’ hooves and carriage wheels splashed through them.

  Abruptly, Christien straightened. There she was, Madame Reine Marie Cassard Pingre, just emerging into the lamplight’s glow. Her young daughter walked beside her. They came closer, passing where Christien stood, so near he could hear the silken whisper of the lady’s petticoats, catch a delicate wafting of roses and lavender. Face set, looking neither left nor right, she seemed intent on reaching the near corner where the rue d’Orleans crossed rue Royale.

  She was beautiful, he saw, as all things unattainable are beautiful. Following her with narrowed eyes, Christien felt a prickling at the back of his neck not unlike the warning when he faced an adversary of unknown skill, uncalculated power.

  The mother and child he watched were strikingly similar. Bright hair, light brown touched with gold, curled in fine tendrils around their faces. Though the lady’s tresses crowned the top of her head in an intricate arrangement nestled with pink camellias, the child’s drifted around her in the night wind in fine intimation of how her mother’s might appear if released from its pins. Wide-spaced eyes, delicately molded noses and determined chins marked them both. Their slender forms, encased in the lavender-gray silk of demi-mourning, were made to appear fashionably fragile and elegant by some modiste’s clever fingers. The affection between them was plain to see as the lady glanced down at the child, no more than four or five years old, whose small, glove-encased hand rested in hers.

  Christien’s every sense took on a razor-sharp edge. The streetlamps seemed brighter, the night air fresher, the murmur of the crowd around him like a roar. His heartbeat increased in tempo while a piercing ache of need spread from its heated center.

  It stunned him, that sudden hunger of the heart. As a maître d’armes, one of the infamous fencing masters of New Orleans, his days were devoted to masculine pursuits. Little time was left for feminine company and none at all for respectable females. He had schooled himself to do without such tender influences, seldom allowed them to cross his mind, never permitted them to hold his thoughts or his desires hostage. He was immune, or so he’d felt, to the coup de foudre, that thunderclap of infatuation that made fools of other men.

  He had not taken an attraction to his quarry into account. Nor had he considered how long he
had been alone. It could be a dangerous oversight.

  Mere lust was not the difficulty, though he could not take his eyes from the lady, felt suddenly parched for the taste of her, the feel of her skin against his. Rather, it was a near-desperate urge to stand beside mother and daughter, to walk homeward with them, protect them and, yes, claim them as his own and be claimed by them.

  Christien swallowed on the tightness that invaded his throat. He understood to a nicety who the mother and daughter were, knew their status in the haut ton of French Creole society. That he was unacceptable in the close circle of their acquaintance was a given. Yet the exclusion struck him now as such things had not in some time, making him feel the less for it.

  Madame Pingre had been widowed two seasons ago, so was just beginning to leave off her mourning. The whispers concerning the death of her husband fretted the edges of Christien’s mind, rumors of bloody and convenient murder. Seeing her so close, he felt a flicker of disquiet. She was the kind of woman a man might kill to possess, yet he required her to be innocent; it was the only way the business at hand could succeed. If she was not as expected, he might live to regret his involvement.

  The pair lived in one of the town houses on rue Royale, a pied-à-terre kept for the saison des visites, the annual escape from country life into the city for the social season now winding down with the advance of spring. Not for them the interminable wait to have a carriage brought around, peering down the street for its arrival among the others that clattered up the mud-streaked thoroughfare. They would simply walk home along the wet banquette.

  The lady was certainly headed in that direction. The slight smile that curved her lips had a strained edge to it, Christien thought, and her attention was centered on the child with little left over for those around her. She moved in an aura of isolation and seemed to prefer it that way.

  A male escort should have been with them. No doubt the lady’s father, Monsieur Cassard, was around somewhere but delayed as he spoke to acquaintances. Madame Pingre and her daughter were left unprotected for the moment. Christien’s frown deepened as he saw it.

  Just ahead of her, a dowager in moss-green cut-velvet and cascades of pearls turned and called a greeting. Reine Pingre flushed a little, but paused in her escape. Her expression was polite as she exchanged compliments and listened to a spate of complaint that seemed directed toward the acting ability of the tenor they had just heard. The child, young Marguerite Pingre, stood swinging her mother’s hand as she gazed around her in bored impatience.

  She glanced Christien’s way, her attention snared perhaps by his intent appraisal. She blinked, then returned it in solemn interest. Christien smiled and inclined his head, a consciously gallant gesture.

  Young Marguerite’s mouth turned down. She spun around, putting her back to him. Clutching her mother’s fingers with both hands, she put her forehead against the bunched wrist of her opera-length kid glove. For long seconds, she hid her face there. Then she risked another quick glance over her shoulder.

  It seemed a great victory, one more flattering than any coquette’s show of interest. Christien felt his mouth curve again in wry appreciation.

  The youngster’s gaze slid away somewhere past his right shoulder. Abruptly, she stiffened. Her face drained of color. With a small cry, she jerked free of her mother’s hold. In a flutter of skirts above small, white satin shoes, she darted from the banquette into the street.

  Just down the way, a cabriolet pulled by matched grays rounded the street corner on two wheels. It straightened, racing toward the theater. The child jerked her head toward the sound. She halted on tiptoe, a small, pale statue in the center of the muddy street.

  Madame Pingre swung, searching for her daughter with a startled gaze. Her eyes widened as she caught sight of her in the path of the jangling carriage. Snatching at her skirts, she sprang from the banquette.

  Christien was already moving, shoving his way through the stunned onlookers. With a single glance for the wild-eyed carriage horses and the cursing driver sawing on their reins, he launched himself after the lady. Reaching with long arms hardened by unrelenting practice with foil and rapier, he caught her around the waist just as she jerked up her daughter. He flung himself toward the far edge, clutching the pair in an iron hold as he plunged, turning in midair.

  The street came up to meet him, slamming into his back in a welter of slime and dirty water. Breath left him in a hard grunt, and the night sky above him spun for an instant. Lying with mother and child locked to his chest and his pulse thudding in his ears, he felt the carriage wheels grind past so close they brushed his hair, and the vibration shuddered through every fiber of his body.

  The clatter of hooves died away as the carriage came to a standstill down the street. Somewhere a young boy whistled in shrill admiration. People were babbling, shouting, applauding. A stray dog barked its excitement. Men ran to halt other wheeled traffic, gathered close with urgent queries to know if the three of them were injured, were alive.

  Christien had only a distant awareness of the commotion. His arms were full, as was his heart, which shuddered against his ribs. A deliciously rounded, most definitely adult female form was pressed against him from chest to ankles on his right side, a warm armful of soft curves under a welter of silk topped by a mass of shining curls that tickled the underside of his chin. On his left, a smaller shape trembled against him, pressing a small, tear-wet face into his neck.

  “Papa,” the child whispered, her lips moving against his skin with the delicate brush of butterfly wings. “Oh, Papa.”

  1

  River’s Edge Plantation

  August 1847

  “Somebody coming, madame, stranger coming down the road!”

  Reine Marie Cassard Pingre put down her pen as the warning was called out from downstairs. She closed the ledger in which she was copying figures from the bills of lading for goods that had been delivered at the plantation steamboat landing that morning. Rising to her feet, she grimaced at the ink staining her fingers. She should hurry and wash her hands before descending to greet the visitor.

  But really, what was the point? The gentleman was doubtless only a crony of her father’s. He would join him where he rested on the lower gallery, which was comfortably shaded by massive live oaks at this hour. With glasses of Madeira in hand, the two of them would discuss the price of cotton and the latest political scandals. She would be free to return to her desk work once the obligatory compliments were out of the way.

  Stretching a little, she moved to her sitting room’s French doors, which stood open to the morning air. Sunlight lay in a broad swath over the canvas that carpeted the gallery floor, reflecting from its white surface with blinding brilliance. Reine shaded her eyes with one hand as she gazed out at the front drive that curved its way down to the river road.

  A horseman cantered toward the house, kicking up puffs of dust that formed a small comet tail behind him. Tall and broad of shoulder, he sat his saddle with the ease of one born to it. A wide-brimmed planter’s hat of summer straw shaded his face, while the folds of a long gray dust coat protected his clothing. He was too far away for his features to be visible, yet something about him seemed familiar.

  Reine felt a small frisson run down her spine. She was not a fanciful female by any means, yet it seemed the sun dimmed as if a cloud passed over it. The heat of the day waned, leaving her chilled and unaccountably disturbed.

  A goose walking on her grave, she told herself with an abrupt shake of her head. That was all. Turning with decision, she crossed to the hallway and made her way down the stairs.

  Alonzo, the white-haired butler who had been a fixture at River’s Edge since before she was born, awaited her at their foot. She asked him to see that refreshments were provided on the lower gallery. As he moved away to do her bidding, she drew a deep breath and walked out the open front door, pausing on the steps of the white-columned portico.

  The visitor had just reached the gate that closed off the pathway
through the front garden. He was definitely not a friend of her father’s, Reine saw; the muscular grace with which he swung from the saddle was that of a man in his prime, one no stranger to physical exertion. He did not lack for assurance, for he tossed his reins to the stable boy who came running and pushed open the gate in the picket fence as if returning home instead of paying a social call. The way he gazed around him, taking in the grass-covered rise of the Mississippi River levee, the front garden behind its fencing, the big white house and waving fields of young cane behind it, was keenly appraising. No master on watch for signs of negligence could have been more thorough.

  Alonzo, his assignment completed, stepped through the front door and came to a halt behind Reine. She was heartily glad of his silent support. The arrival of Chalmette, her brother’s big, rawboned bloodhound that emerged from his cool wallow under the hydrangea shrubs, also improved her feelings. She did not reprove the dog as he raised his ruff with a low growl and planted himself in front of her.

  “Good day, monsieur,” she greeted the visitor in polite tones. “May we be of service?”

  He turned toward her, reaching at the same time to remove his hat. Lowering it to rest against the swinging fullness of his long dust coat, he stood square-shouldered and grim of face before her.

  “You!”

  Shock wrenched that single word from her. The tone of her voice disturbed the hound, for he growled again in deep-throated warning. She put a quieting hand on his head.

  “As you say, Madame Pingre,” the visitor answered with a brief tip of his head. “Christien Lenoir, at your service.”