Prisoner of Desire Read online

“I’m all right, thank you.”

  He swore softly. “You are the most obstinate woman I’ve ever known.”

  “Because I question your word or fail to fall in with your every suggestion? If no woman has ever done that before, then you must have been very spoiled.”

  “I had intended to be the soul of chivalry and let you have the bed to yourself,” he drawled, “but if I have to come and get you, then I refuse to be responsible for the consequences.”

  “You will forgive me if I say that seems like a somewhat frivolous threat under the present circumstances?”

  “Tell me a better time. If you watch and wait for trouble, it’s likely to come. If you ignore it, it may well pass you by.”

  “Being a prisoner isn’t exactly something you can ignore,” she said, her tone cross.

  “No?”

  One moment he was lying relaxed, the next he was on his feet and crossing with long, swift strides the distance that separated them. Before she could do more than throw up a hand to ward him off, he was upon her. He caught her arm, placing it around his neck, then thrust one hand behind her back and the other under her knees. She cried out in surprise, kicking as she was lifted against the hard surface of his chest; then as she met his somber gaze she went as still as if she had been made of marble.

  His arms were like steel chains around her. The beat of his heart jarred through them both, arousing throbbing echoes that Anya felt deep inside. There was an expression in the black depths of his eyes that brought the warmth of a flush to her cheekbones. As the seconds ticked past and she failed to protest or to struggle, the color deepened, becoming fiery. Her only defense was disdain, and she lifted her chin, silently daring him to comment.

  His lashes flickered, lowering like dark shields. He stepped to the bed and placed one knee on the mattress, lowering her to the resilient surface. Lying down beside her with his weight on one elbow, he reached to pull the quilts up over them.

  10

  ANYA’S LEG WAS LYING IN DISTURBING intimacy against that of the man beside her in the bed. She shifted, holding herself stiff as she tried to place a little distance between them. It was impossible. The sag of the bed ropes tipped her slowly back toward him. As she relaxed, her hip and thigh were molded to his once more. She tried again. The result was the same.

  It was difficult to maintain an air of hauteur while being pressed against a man’s side, absorbing his warmth. She had not realized how chilled she had become. The reaction to the heat of his body against her cool flesh, even though her leather skirt, sent a shiver over her.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  She closed her lips tightly on the word. Clasping her hands over her abdomen, she placed her elbow against his ribs to support herself. He turned on his side in an effort to accommodate her. The movement caused her to roll toward him. Hastily she put her hand on his chest to hold herself off. If she was not careful, the treacherous mattress would have her on top of him.

  With a sound of irritation deep in his throat, he took her hand and placed it on his side, slid his arm under her head, then reached to draw her against him so that their bodies braced each other. She was also pressed to him from breast to ankle.

  “There, is that more comfortable?”

  It was, of course, on a purely physical level. Otherwise, it was extremely trying. Through set teeth, she said, “You are insufferable.”

  “Agreed,” he said gravely.

  “It doesn’t seem to trouble you.”

  “No.”

  His apologetic tone was so patently mocking that she retreated into silent dignity. The blood was racing in her veins and she feared he could feel the jarring of her heartbeat. Her chill had vanished, to be replaced by a radiant warmth that came from within. Her breathing quickened, becoming deeper. She was angry, she told herself, that was all. Who wouldn’t be?

  Ravel wanted her. The need of her was like a fever in his blood, and yet something restrained him. It was only in part the resistance he sensed in her. That might have been overcome, if it had not been reinforced by a sense of time running out. There might never be another night like this one, another time when they could be together without hindrance, without an audience. He wanted suddenly to know everything there was to know about her, her thoughts, her feelings, her dearest hopes and wildest dreams. He wanted to hold and understand the essence of her. He just wanted to hold her.

  “What, no more insults?” he asked, his voice wry and yet shaded with something like pain.

  She shrugged, but unconsciously her fingers spread over his side, gently holding in a gesture that might have been a need for support or an impulse to comfort.

  “Tell me,” he went on, “does it ever trouble you, having the responsibility for the support of Madame Rosa and her daughter on your shoulders, plus that of the people in the quarters here?”

  His question and the reflection that lay behind it seemed to indicate a truce. It might be safest to abide by it. “Sometimes. At others, I like it.”

  “Do you ever wish there was someone to share it, that there had been a brother to grow up with you, to take some of the load now?”

  “Jean was my brother.”

  She had not meant to say that, it had simply come out. It was true, though. Recognizing that fact, she felt a giving sensation inside her, as if she had let go of some truth that she had been holding.

  It was a moment before Ravel answered; then he said, his voice soft, “He was also mine.”

  The words, the way they were spoken, so hopeless of understanding, accepting of what was past, brought a hard constriction to her throat. It was a moment before she could speak. “He wasn’t perfect, we used to quarrel sometimes, but he cared about people. He would be upset, if he knew—”

  “If he knew what has happened to us, what I have become?”

  “And what I have done to you.”

  His breath was warm against the top of her head. She thought she felt the brush of his lips upon her hair, but that was, of course, unlikely.

  He said, “Is that how you judge your behavior, by whether Jean would approve?”

  “Not exactly, and yet I can’t think of a better measure.”

  There was a silence. Ravel, as if driven, broke it. “Do you ever think of doing something different, something besides shuttle back and forth between here and New Orleans, besides see after this place and follow Madame Rosa and Celestine from one entertainment to another?”

  Her mouth twitched in a brief, humorless smile in the deepening darkness of the room. “I used to think of traveling, of going slowly from one country to another until I had covered the whole of Europe, and then beginning on Asia and Africa.”

  “What holds you back?”

  “Madame Rosa is a prey to sea and carriage sickness.”

  “And being a young woman and unmarried, you cannot go alone.”

  “It isn’t done,” she agreed.

  “There are many things,” he said with amusement threading his tones, “beginning with abducting men and ending with your position at the moment, that are not done by a properly brought-up young woman.”

  She started to speak, then stopped. She raised her head and sniffed. She took a breath, and another, and one deeper than before. “Is that just the fire dying, or do I smell smoke?”

  Ravel pushed himself up on one elbow. Before he could speak, a faint and flickering orange-red glow began to light the room. The smell of smoke, combined with the acrid odor of kerosene, grew stronger. Somewhere a man gave a shout, a hoarse, jubilant sound. When it had died away, they could hear the soft, muted crackling of flames.

  Ravel whipped off the cover and surged to his feet. Anya scrambled after him. By the time they were standing upright, the noise of the blaze had taken on an angry, devouring hum. The reflection of the leaping spires of fire danced on the walls and ceiling. Smoke seeped in around the windows, gathering in the room to form a gray and breath-catching cloud.

  “
It’s the gin; they’re burning the gin,” Anya said in disbelief. The men who had attacked her had set fire to the cotton gin, knowing the two of them were locked inside.

  Ravel made no reply. He slipped his hand into his trouser pocket, bringing out a small object, then lifted his chained leg and set his foot on the bed. Bending, he insert the object in the lock and began to manipulate it.

  The hairpin she had snatched from him so short a time before was not the only one he had found. She should have known he had let it go too easily. She made a sound through her nose that was a cross between thankfulness and disgust.

  He sent her a quick glance. “It’s amazing, the skills that can be learned in prison.”

  “So I see. I trust it also works on the door?”

  There was a quiet click and the leg shackle sprang open. Ravel removed the thick ring and flung it aside. “Of course.”

  “Of course.” She looked at the window where tongues of fire were licking past the glass, trying to get to the dry cypress shingles of the roof. “You might have used it to release us a bit earlier.”

  “I didn’t think it would be necessary,” he told her over his shoulder as he moved with oiled quickness to the door and knelt at the keyhole. “I rather expected to have the privilege of a visit from the boss first.”

  “You wanted to see him?” The smoke in the room was growing thicker. Anya lifted the hem of her gown, using it to cover her nose and mouth. There seemed to be more air near the floor and she went to her knees beside Ravel.

  “Call it curiosity. I’d like to know who else wants me dead.”

  “Else?”

  “Besides you.”

  She stared at him with smarting eyes, blinking against the sting of the smoke. “I don’t want that at all!”

  “You must admit it would solve your problem of what to do with me.”

  “You can’t really have thought I had anything to do with the animals who put me in here?”

  “That part could have been their mistake.”

  “It wasn’t,” she said, and ruined the icy effect of the words by choking and coughing in the middle of them.

  Ravel, with his head inclined toward the door in a listening attitude, made no reply. Seconds passed that seemed hours. The old building was burning like tinder soaked in turpentine, going up so fast that fires must have been set at several points. The heat was increasing and the smoke growing black, boiling into the room in a dark and smothering fog. Anya wiped at the tears streaming from her eyes with her skirt. When she looked up again, Ravel had his hand on the door handle, trying it.

  He paused, turning to her. His eyes were red rimmed, narrowed against the smoke, and there were smoke-tears gathering underneath them in the hollows above his cheekbones. “I never dreamed you would be in real danger; it just didn’t seem possible. I’m sorry.”

  Questions crowded Anya’s mind in a confused tumble, but this was no time to sort them out. She only shook her head and rose to her feet, plunging out into the fresh air at his gesture as he threw the door again. Ravel was right behind her. With an arm at her waist, he swept her down the stairs.

  They had gone no more than a half dozen steps when they heard a yell. One of the thugs, bullet-headed and barrel-shaped, came on a run from outside. He stopped in the wagon drive below them and raised a rifle to his shoulder. His face was contorted and his mouth open as he squinted along the barrel.

  Moving with the quick reflexes and easy strength of the great hunting cat, El Tigre, for which he had been named, Ravel vaulted over the railing, springing down upon the other man. The pair went sprawling in the dirt of the wagon drive. There was a grunted curse, the sound of bone crunching under bone. The man with the rifle lay still.

  Ravel crouched over him an instant, waiting, then rose with animal grace. He moved to the open end of the building, angling to one side for the cover of the wall. He looked out, quartering the night that was colored orange with flames, searching it with his eyes. The only thing that moved nearby was the branches of the trees whipped by the hot vortex of the fire, though there was a stirring further down the road.

  Anya joined him. Keeping her voice low, she said, “The others?”

  “It seems they were so sure of us they left only one guard while they went on to other things, like rounding up the slaves.”

  Slave stealing was common, though it was more usual for them to be enticed away one at a time, with promises of freedom, than to be taken at gunpoint. The demand, and the price, was high in Texas, and the border was no great distance away.

  “Do you think they heard the guard call out?”

  “We won’t wait to find out.” Returning to the fallen man, Ravel scooped up the rifle, then caught Anya’s hand and started back down the wagon drive.

  Anya took a few steps. Feeling the hot blast of the fire, seeing the yellow flames, she stopped. “That guard, he’s still alive. We can’t leave him.”

  Ravel gave her a straight glance. He did not bother to remind her that the man would have killed them both. Turning back, he went with swift economy of movement to strip off the guards greasy suspenders and bind his arms behind his back. He made a gag with the handkerchief he took from his own pocket and tied it in place with a piece of the man’s shirt, then grabbed an arm and began to drag the unconscious guard toward the rear entrance to the gin.

  The wind was roaring down the wagon drive, carrying with it billows of smoke filled with fragments of burning ash and soot. The heat was so intense that it parched the skin of their faces and seemed to sear its way into their lungs. Overhead, there were small rivers of fire flowing along the rafters of the unsealed roof. There was a humming, thumping noise in the gin machinery as the upper gears and main drum absorbed the heat. The fire rumbled and crackled and spat. Through the open doorway of the room they had left, they could see that the bed had burst into flames and there was smoke seeping up through the cracks in the floor.

  It was the regularity of the thumping sound in the machinery that drew Anya’s attention. At first she could see nothing in the smoke-filled inferno that the gin had become. Then she saw a movement at the back of the platform running down the side. She stopped.

  There were two people lying bound and gagged there, one of them kicking at the upright beams that held the machinery. It was Marcel and Denise.

  Ravel and Anya were beside them in an instant. Ravel tore the gag out of Marcel’s mouth, while Anya did the same for Denise. The manservant croaked out, “My pocket — knife.”

  Flaming bits of wood were raining down all around them by the time the ropes were cut and enough circulation restored that Marcel and Denise could stumble out of the gin. It was as well that the rear entrance of the long building was deserted. They made no attempt at concealment, but threw themselves headlong into the night, not stopping until they had reached the deep shadows under a live oak tree. They let the guard fall to the ground and bent over, drawing deep breaths to the depths of their lungs of the blessedly cool and untainted night air.

  When he was able, Marcel told them what had taken place. The man they called the boss had come in his carriage. He had not stepped down, but called the leader of the men out to him. His orders given, he had turned around and driven away back toward New Orleans. The men had immediately tied up Marcel and Denise, then gone to round up the slaves in the quarters, making ready to haul them away while the hours of dark still lasted. The men had carried the two house servants out to the gin; they were the ones most likely to be able to identify them, they said, so they would burn with their mistress and her prisoner. The gin had been fired and a single man left on watch while the others loaded the slaves in the wagons and ransacked the house.

  The thought of the people she had worked with and cared for so long, the older ones, the children and babies, being hauled away like so many head of cattle made Anya feel ill. Almost to herself, she said, “We have to stop them!”

  Ravel turned his gaze toward her and slowly she lifted her lashes to mee
t it. He wondered if she realized the plea that lay deep in her eyes. He gave a hard nod. “We will need other weapons.”

  “Everything is at the main house under lock and key — unless they have already been taken.” The hunting rifles and handguns that had belonged to her father were prized goods, easy to sell in New Orleans. The muskets and silver-chased fowling pieces, relics scorned by the crooks who infested Gallatin Street, might have been left behind.

  “Cane knives?”

  “Yes. They are in the tool shed, but it’s locked.”

  “Let’s see,” Ravel said, his teeth gleaming white in the tight grin that lighted his smoke-grayed face.

  A short time later, Ravel and Marcel had armed themselves with the cane knives, the long, wide-bladed, and lethally sharp knives used for cutting cane and also for clearing underbrush. Denise had taken a hoe for protection until she could get her hands on a butcher knife from the kitchen. Anya had seized on a short-handled sledgehammer since she had always hated the vicious-looking cane knives. With the greatest stealth, they circled wide around the slave quarters, coming up on the rear of the big house. Denise left them there, moving with the silence of her Indian ancestors to the separate kitchen building. She returned just as quietly a few moments later, carrying a knife with a blade that had been sharpened so many times it was as thin as a stiletto.

  Standing concealed among the fig and pomegranate trees in the back garden, they watched the shadows of the men against the lamplight as they crossed from room to room in front of the upstairs French doors. There appeared to be only two of them. That meant two were still down at the quarters. A harnessed wagon belonging to Beau Refuge stood on the drive at the end of the walk leading from the back gallery of the house. In it were several bulky sacks. The sight of them, with their implication of leisurely picking and choosing among her possessions while she herself was supposedly roasting in the gin fire, made Anya’s blood beat high in her veins. Her grip on the hammer she held tightened.

  For long moments there was no sign of movement from the upper floor. The men must have carried their depredations toward the front of the house, where the salon and Madame Rosa’s bedchamber were located. His voice low, Ravel said, “Now.”