Prisoner of Desire Read online

  “You need not vent your spleen on Emile,” Anya said. “He was as reluctant as you could wish. But if he had not brought me, I would have come alone.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Ravel, mon cher,” Simone said, rising and moving to entwine her arm with his, “how fierce you sound. There is no need for such heat. We were only having a comfortable chat.”

  The other woman looked at Anya with a fixed, significant gaze. It was not difficult to understand the silent message. Simone felt the need of her assistance in preventing the challenge that she feared might result from this meeting she had brought about. It was an all-too-real possibility, one terrible to contemplate. Anya put her hand under Emile’s elbow.

  “I think you are right, Emile,” she said, “we had better go. Mademoiselle Michel, it was kind of you to talk to me.”

  “It was my pleasure. Perhaps we will meet again.”

  Anya smiled, at the same time putting pressure on Emile’s arm so that he moved beside her toward the door. “Yes, perhaps so.”

  Ravel let them go. What was the point in trying to keep them? The last thing he wanted was to hear more of Anya’s opinion of him, or to cross swords with Emile Girod. God, but he was weary. His head ached, the penalty of doing too much, too soon, and the places on his back where bits of red-hot coals had burned through his shirt stung under his coat. Shrugging a little to ease them, he moved toward the window that overlooked the courtyard.

  “It was gallant of you to come so quickly,” Simone said, “especially since it’s been some time since you were here.”

  “Your maid seemed to think it urgent.” The words were offhand as he drew aside the drapery, looking out. Below in the courtyard, Anya and Emile emerged from the stair entrance and walked toward the gate where his carriage stood waiting for him.

  “Was it that, or was it the card I sent, her card, that brought you?

  Ravel turned his head. “Do you really want to know?”

  “No,” Simone said the word hoarse, strangled, as she met his hard gaze, “no, I don’t.” Swinging around, she picked up her heavy brocade skirts and walked from the room, slamming the door that led to her boudoir behind her.

  The dying rays of the setting sun painted the sky with the late-winter colors of lavender-blue and gold. The color was reflected onto the sides of the plastered buildings and in the water standing in the gutter in the center of the street. It flickered along the lacquered side of a passing carriage and glowed in the glass of a shopwindow. Anya stared at the radiance around her with a furious scowl.

  Ravel Duralde might or might not be a murderer, but he was certainly a scoundrel. He had made love to her, shut her away for his own pleasure, then when she had escaped and confronted his mistress, come running hotfoot to save the woman from a potentially distressful situation. What had he thought she was going to do to his mistress? Call her foul names? Horsewhip her? She would not so demean herself, and she would like very much to tell him so! Damn men and their touchy tempers and deadly impulses that made it necessary to tiptoe around them, even save them from themselves!

  Not that she seriously thought Ravel would have allowed himself to be put in a position of having to meet Emile. She had seen the look in Ravel’s eyes when he saw the young man, when he had absorbed the resemblance to Jean.

  No matter, he had no business reprimanding her as if she were a convent miss unused to the ways of the world. It was no concern of his what she did, whom she visited, or whom she chose as her escort.

  Emile reached to put his hand on her fingers that clutched his arm. “Slow down, Anya. You’ll wear yourself out, and people are staring.”

  She swung her head to look at him without comprehension; then she realized that she was striding along with her head down as if she had a far destination to make and a short time to reach it. She checked, moderating her pace. “Sorry,” she murmured.

  “I understand that you are upset, but it seems to me it’s out of proportion to what took place back there. I have a feeling there’s more to this than you have told me. Don’t you think I should know what it is, if I may get myself killed because of it?”

  “I suppose so,” she said unhappily.

  She got no further. Her attention was caught by an abrupt movement ahead of them. The neighborhood they were in was not the best, being an area where gambling dens and drinking houses had filtered in among the more respectable establishments. What she had seen was the sudden swing as a man, who had been standing staring at her from where he lounged outside the doorway of a barrelhouse, ducked back inside. He had been big and burly and dressed in nondescript and wrinkled clothing, no different from the half dozen others who were hanging around that door. She might have passed him by without a glance if he had not moved. Instead, she registered his flight from the corner of her eye, saw the fringe of rust red hair under his bowler hat, and knew him immediately.

  “That man,” she said on a gasp, stopping so suddenly her hoop and petticoats swung against Emile’s legs, “that was the leader of the gang who tried to kill Ravel!”

  “What?” he exclaimed. “Where?”

  “In there,” she cried.

  Without waiting for more, Anya picked up her skirts and ran toward where the man had disappeared. She pushed through the knot of men around the door, ignoring their muttered comments, not stopping to see if Emile was behind her. She stepped inside the dim, low-ceilinged room. The sickly sour smell of spilled beer, wet and foul sawdust, and uncleaned spittoons struck her like a blow in the face. The walls were lined with beer barrels stacked one on the other. Long tables, the tops scarred with knife carvings and ringed with the imprints of beer glasses, and with benches on either side for seating, sat in a solid rank in the center. Across the back was a bar made of rough planking laid on barrels, with glasses stacked in precarious pyramids behind it. To the right of the bar was a sagging door, just closing. Anya scanned the room, but none of the score or more men at the tables was the one she wanted. She started toward the rear door.

  “Anya, wait!” Emile called.

  She paid no attention. Pulling open the door, she stepped through the narrow opening. Her skirts dragged on the rough frame and she felt the cloth tear, but she had no time to be concerned. She was in a dirty and noisome court, the corners of which were used as a privy judging by the smell. She could hear running footfalls, however, and catching the upper hoop of her cage crinoline, she lifted her skirts high and plunged after the man. Rounding a shed at the back of the court, she came upon a gateless portal in the high wall that gave onto another street.

  Emile was calling her. Lifting her voice as she stepped through onto the side street, she shouted, “This way!”

  The street was empty. It was a back avenue, for it was unpaved and the banquettes were still made of wood. The rows of dilapidated houses that fronted it sat silent, with only here and there the glow of a lamp in a room. Nothing moved. Then from somewhere on the right came the squawk of a disturbed cat. The animal came streaking from an alley with its eyes wild, its fur standing in a ruff down its back, and its tail twice normal size. There was a growled curse, followed by the heavy thud of running steps. Anya, her skirts billowing over her hoop and the hem flying, sprinted in the direction of the sound.

  A block. Two. Around a corner to the left. Anya’s bonnet flew back, held only by its ribbons as it bounced against her back. She could hear footfalls behind her, though Emile had stopped wasting his breath trying to stop her.

  Ahead of her was the raucous whine of music from a fiddle and a barrel organ and voices raised in laughter. She could see lights that were brighter now that the last of the sunset was fading and twilight closing in. It was toward the cross street from which they came that her quarry was heading; it must be. Breathless from the press of her stays that constricted her lungs, Anya forced herself to run those last yards.

  She came abruptly into the light. Slowing her pace, she glanced around with her senses suddenly alert. There was somethi
ng odd in her surroundings. She had taken little notice of the streets she was traversing and in any case few of them had posted names; still she did not like this place.

  Her attention was diverted by the sight of the leader of the thugs, the man they called Red. He was shouldering his way through a crowd of men standing around the door of a house where a woman stood on the balcony. He looked back at her once, then slid inside. With the fire of determination in her eyes, Anya started after him.

  “No you don’t!”

  The voice came from just behind her. Her arm was caught in an iron grasp and she was pulled around to face Ravel. She stared at him in surprise for an instant before she jerked at her arm, pushing at his chest with her free hand. “Let me go!”

  “You need a keeper!” he said through set teeth. “What in the name of hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “He went in that house over there, the leader of the gang who was at Beau Refuge. Let go of me, or I’ll lose him!”

  “And just what were you going to do if you caught him? He fastened his hand on her other arm, giving her a shake.

  “He can tell us who the boss is!”

  “How were you going to persuade him to do that? Beg him prettily?”

  “What kind of idiot do you think I am? I mean to find out where he’s hiding and bring the police back to drag him out!”

  Her arms were growing numb from his grip. The unbreakable strength of his hold filled with her such frustration that she felt like screaming. There was a strong urge, near uncontrollable, growing in her to kick him like the tomboy hoyden she had once been, or else to claw for his eyes.

  “The police,” he said, his tone edged with acid sarcasm, “don’t come here except in the broad light of day and in force. Look around you. This is Gallatin Street.”

  She ceased struggling. Her eyes were dark blue with doubt as she stared up at him. Slowly she turned her head.

  Up and down the street around her was one barrelhouse and barroom after another, with their filthy sawdust spilling out the doors. The men moving in and out of them, weaving along, were sailors and stevedores and steamboatmen and men with the look of backcountry trappers and farmers. They were a rough lot, dirty, unshaven, reeling drunk. Among them she saw a thin and feral-looking creature who carried a set of leather thongs at his waist, the dreaded strangling cords that were known to deal quick death to any greenhorn stupid enough to wander into the area. The women who traipsed the wooden banquettes were little better. Hard faced, dressed in ill-fitting and tawdry finery from which their bodies spilled in wanton display, there could be only one name for them. Even the woman on the balcony where the leader of the thugs had vanished was posturing and posing, now lifting her too-short skirt as high as her hipbone to give the crowd below a quick view, now bending to hold the railing and shake her shoulders so that her full and pendulous breasts spilled out of the low neck of her sleazy gown and had to be stuffed back in again. There could be little doubt that the door below her led into a bordello.

  Anya moistened her lips. Keeping her voice firm with an effort, she said, “You could go in and bring the man out.”

  “And leave you here alone? You would be flat on your back with your skirts above your head and a line forming before I was out of sight.”

  She flashed him a fiery glance. “You need not sound so pleased at the prospect! Emile could stay with me. Where is he?”

  “I sent him back to bring my carriage.”

  “Your carriage? When I want to go home, I can walk!” She was in truth exhausted by her long day and the night that had gone before it, an exhaustion she had not acknowledged or even felt until that moment. The last thing she would do, however, was admit it.

  “I can’t.” His voice was hard, final.

  “You mean,” she said slowly, “that you are just going to leave? You are going to let the leader of those men get away? Why did you come, then? What are you doing here?”

  “I followed you, what else? There is something we need to discuss.”

  Her words thick with fury and yet as cold as if coated with hoarfrost, she said, “I fail to see what it can be.”

  “Do you now?”

  He released one arm then to hail Emile, who was hanging out the window of an approaching carriage as he watched for them. Anya could have broken the grasp Ravel retained in that moment of inattention, but what was the point? She stood still, hearing the echo of his words, hard and undisturbed, in her mind. What could he want of her? It was an unsettling question, but not nearly so threatening as the others that crowded in upon her. Surely Ravel’s concern for her safety was exaggerated. That being so, why had he shown so little interest in running the leader of the thugs to earth? Why had he allowed the man to escape?

  The inside of Ravel’s carriage, a fairly new equipage, smelled of fine leather and the shellac glaze of the side walls, with just a hint of tobacco. It bumped and swayed on its springs over the rutted street. The pace the coachman set was brisk, as if he was not anxious to linger on the most notorious street in the city. After a short time, they reached a paved thoroughfare, and the going was smoother.

  Ravel threw a glance at Anya. She sat upright with her bonnet that she had removed in her lap. The stony set of her features gave him a tight feeling in his chest. He wished he knew what was going on in that agile brain of hers, and at the same time was afraid he knew too well. She was maddening, and also unbelievably desirable with her hair escaping from its pins, her cheeks pink with anger and exertion, and the soft, rounded contours of her breasts straining against the bodice of her gown with every deep breath. If it weren’t for Girod sitting across from them he might very well chance her rage, press her down upon the leather seat, and kiss her until she was too starved for air to resist him.

  That would be the only way he was likely to have her after today. Unless his gamble paid off. Luck, however, as he knew well, was no lady. She was a teasing trollop attracted only to those who scorned her, a bitch who laughed and turned away from those who yearned for her most.

  The carriage drew up before the townhouse. Sitting forward, reaching for the handle to open the door, Emile said to Anya, “I’ll see you inside.”

  “Stay where you are,” Ravel said, his voice firm with authority. “My coachman will take you wherever you want to go. I’ll see to Anya, since I need to speak to Madame Hamilton.”

  Anya sent him a quick, curious stare, aware of a sense of portent in his words.

  “Now see here,” Emile protested. “It is my responsibility to see Anya — Mademoiselle Anya — safely inside. She is in my care.”

  “Your care?”

  Ravel’s question held such biting irony that Anya saw Jean’s brother flinch. She put out her hand to lightly touch the wrist of the younger man. “It’s most gallant of you, but unnecessary. I will be perfectly fine.”

  “If you are sure,” he said, the stiffness of offended pride in his tone.

  “I’m very sure.”

  Ravel waited for no more, but pushed open the door and stepped down, handing Anya out. At his order, the carriage pulled away. He thought of offering Anya his arm, but the likelihood of her taking it seemed slim. She started under the port cochère of the townhouse and he moved easily to walk at her side.

  “Do you actually have business with Madame Rosa?” Anya inquired in a sharp undertone as they mounted the stairs to the upper rooms.

  “Yes, I do.”

  What it could be, she could not imagine, nor could she summon the will to care. She was tired, so very tired. Still there were certain duties that must be observed. There was a light burning in the salon, and rather than stalking away to her own room, leaving Ravel to be tended to by the servants, she felt obligated to see if her stepmother was able to see him.

  Madame Rosa sat reading a novel, with her half-spectacles that she sometimes used perched on her nose and a paper knife with which to slit the pages in her hand. She looked up as they entered, then removed her feet from the footstool
on which they rested, sitting up straight.

  “I was beginning to be worried,” she began, then stopped as she caught sight of Anya’s disheveled state. Her features stiffened. Laying her book and paper knife carefully aside, she took off her spectacles and got slowly to her feet. “Where is Emile?”

  Ravel stepped forward. “I am afraid I persuaded him to allow me to escort Anya inside instead. I hope you will forgive my presumption, and my intrusion, Madame Hamilton.”

  “Yes, certainly, M’sieur Duralde,” Madame Rosa answered.

  The older woman’s manner had little warmth and less cordiality, but she was sufficiently in command of herself to be polite. There was also in her shrewd gaze a measuring quality. Ravel drew a deep breath and took his pride in his hands.

  “I realize what I have to say may come as a surprise — then again it may not. Either way, I trust you will consider it well and remember recent obligations. I have come to request from you, madame, formally and with all due respect, the hand of your stepdaughter Anya in marriage.”

  13

  “NO!”

  The answer came not from Madame Rosa, but from Anya. She had not meant to speak, would have thought herself incapable of it for the pain welling up inside her. That single word, resonant with anger and revulsion, seemed to vibrate in the air as she stared at Ravel with her teeth clenched and her head high.

  “Why?” His voice was dangerously soft though his narrowed lashes hid the expression in his dark eyes.

  She opened her mouth to annihilate him, to say that she had no intention of falling in so easily with his need for vengeance. Something about him as he stood with his hands on his hips in the center of the small, elegant room stopped her. It was not easy to make her stiff lips pronounce the formal reply, still she managed it. “We should not suit.”

  “Anya,” Madame Rosa said, a shade of anxiety in her tone as she looked from one to the other, “do not be hasty. Sit down and let us discuss the matter.”