Midnight Confessions

by Candice Proctor

  “I’d like to stop by your house this evening. See how you’re doing,” he said quietly, and heard Hamish snort behind him.

  For a heartbeat, he thought she meant to refuse him. Instead, she sucked in a quick breath that lifted her high breasts and betrayed, for one brief moment, a degree of agitation he’d never have imagined she was suffering. “I’d like that,” she said, and slipped from beneath his grasp.

  It wasn’t until considerably later, after the bloody mess near Congo Square had been cleaned up and a search instituted for the black men who’d survived Zach’s sword, and their little boy accomplice, that Hamish finally consented to sit down and have a beer. Not a ginger beer this time, but a hearty pint of ale from a dockside tavern that sold boiled crabs and crawfish and shrimp by the dozen, and served them on big round enameled tin platters.

  “You must be getting close to learning something about this killer,” said Hamish, wrenching the claws off a crab with swift, practiced strokes. “If you’re his new target.”

  “Then why don’t I feel like I’m getting close?” Zach sat with one hand wrapped around a cold, sweating glass, his fingers swiping restlessly up and down, up and down. “The way I see it, we’re looking for someone who knows how to shoot a crossbow and is intimately familiar with poisons, and the only person we’ve found so far who both fits that description and has anything to do with our victims is supposed to be dead.”

  “Or female,” said Hamish.

  “Jesus.” Zach brought his glass down on the ring-marked wooden table in front of him hard enough to make an audible thump. “She could have strangled me in my sleep, if she’d wanted me dead.”

  “Yeah.” Hamish poked an empty claw shell at him. “But then she’d have needed to get rid of that big body of yours, and that wouldn’t be easy, not with only a black woman and a little boy to help her.”

  Zach stared out the tavern’s grimy window at the street of rutted, half-dried mud slowly beginning to fill with a rollicky waterfront crowd. The sun was still bright and fiercely hot, but there was a golden quality to the light that told of the coming of evening. “I wish we could have found that boy who stole my Colt,” he said, half to himself.

  “He probably couldn’t have told us much,” said Hamish, shoving crabmeat in his mouth.

  “No. But I’m afraid he might know enough to get himself killed.”

  Hamish reached for another crab. “The kid almost got you killed. Why should you care what happens to him?”

  A memory reasserted itself, a memory of wide, frightened green eyes and a skinny, heaving chest. Zach pushed back his chair and stood up. “I care.”

  “Sweet mercy.” Hamish paused with the crab half-cracked in one hand, and stared up at him. “Not again.”

  Picking up his glass, Zach took a long, deep drink of his beer, then set it back down with slow, ominous control. “Don’t push your luck, Captain,” he said, and left.

  Emmanuelle sat on her front gallery, a book lying open in her lap, a palmetto palm waving gently to and fro in one hand. She was alone in the house. Sundays were Rose’s day off, and Dominic had gone to spend the night, once more, with his grandparents on Esplanade. She’d come out here, hoping for a breath of fresh air, but instead of focusing on her book she found her gaze wandering again and again to the street below. He’d said he’d come. She wanted him to come. But she was afraid he wouldn’t.

  She kept remembering the things she’d said to him that night, the night she’d given herself to him with a passionate abandon that would have scared most men. Only, her uninhibited sensuality hadn’t scared Zach Cooper, hadn’t driven him from her. She had driven him away, by the way she’d reacted when he’d told her he loved her.

  For some men, the words came easy. She knew that, knew it all too well. Some men simply loved women, all women, loved the siren call of silken hair sliding over a bare feminine shoulder, loved the soft smoothness of a woman’s flesh beneath their seeking hands. For such men, the words were not so much a lie as an exaggeration, or perhaps a trivialization, a confusion of something that was supposed to be eternal and profound with the fleeting and casual intoxication of a moment. For others, of course, the words simply were a lie, a calculated device to soothe the qualms of the virtuous and timid—a vague, hollow promise that the attraction and devotion would endure beyond the passionate embrace and hot breathless release of driving need.

  But sometimes, she knew, sometimes men and women said the words and meant them. Sometimes, they actually believed in love, believed it could last, believed that the magic and the joy and the sweet contentment would go on and on, forever.

  Once, Emmanuelle had believed in love and happily-ever-afters. Once, she had loved with a violence and intensity that had overwhelmed her being and subsumed her life and lifted her up in the bright white light of the sublime. No one could have loved more than Emmanuelle had loved. Yet that love had still died. It had bled to death slowly, brutally, hideously, one awful, disillusioning day at a time. And with her love had died, too, her belief in love. Not only her belief in her own ability to love, but her belief that any love ever truly endured for a lifetime. And if even the most intense love didn’t always last, then what was love, really, but an illusion, a delusion? A confusion thrown up by passion and hunger and the human need to believe oneself above the baser promptings of such a thing as primitive lust.

  Her book forgotten, Emmanuelle flicked her fan back and forth, back and forth, her gaze fixed on the end of the street. The heat of the day lingered still, the air heavy and oppressive despite the setting sun that had already thrown the street below into shadow. Surely, she thought, he must have finished at Congo Square by now. She glanced anxiously at the watch she had pinned to her bodice, and knew it again, that shameful, unwanted dread, that worry that for some reason, any reason, he wouldn’t come. And she knew, too, that piercing sweet yearning, that desperate need to see him, to watch his lips quirk up in the smile she loved, to hear the soft murmur of his voice, to hold his hard man’s body close to hers.

  It was both humiliating and frightening, to realize that one didn’t need to believe in love in order to experience its symptoms. One could believe love an illusion, a passing obsession, a kind of mental sickness even, and still suffer from it, anyway.

  He came in the first hush of twilight, when she was in the front parlor lighting a candle, and the air was beginning to sweeten with the scent of night-blooming jasmine and mock orange carried by the river breeze from the high-walled courtyards and secret gardens of the old city. By then, she’d half convinced herself that someone had tried to kill him again and succeeded, a fear that struck her now as both highly fanciful and uncharacteristically, shamefully female.

  She took her time walking down the curving staircase, her hand gripping the polished wooden railing tightly to keep herself from hurrying in answer to the jingle of the bell. She told herself she shouldn’t read too much into his being here, for he would have come in any case to thank her for what she had done. She slid back the bolt with the same studied casualness, although inside, her heart was thumping so loudly, she wondered he didn’t hear it.

  He stood on her doorstep, a tall, darkly uniformed man with gilded spurs on his boots and the long deadly arc of a saber worn close to his side. The glow from the gaslamps on the banquette highlighted the hard planes of his face, but his eyes were in shadow.

  “You’re all right,” she said, before she could stop herself.

  “Did you think I wouldn’t be?” He took off his plumed hat and she saw he was smiling, a wry, teasing kind of smile that melted something inside her. “Without you there to protect me with your bottle of ginger beer?”

  The need to touch him suddenly became overwhelming. She slipped one hand behind his neck, saw the flare of surprise in his eyes before she pressed her face against his chest. His arms closed around her, warm and hard and wonderful, holding her close, and she felt a small shudder rip through her before she could stop it.

 
“Don’t tell me you really were worried?” he said, his breath warm against her cheek as he nuzzled her hair. “A man’s pride is a tender thing, you know, and I think mine’s just been grievously wounded.”

  She laughed softly into his chest, but sobered all too quickly. “I know how easily death can come.”

  He seized her by the shoulders, drawing her back so that he could stare down at her with eyes dark and compelling with a man’s hunger, a man’s need. “And are you telling me you’d care, Madame de Beauvais?”

  She answered him by raising herself up on her tiptoes and kissing him, pushing his lips apart with her tongue. His lips moved with hers, hungry, seeking. His hand clenched in her hair, once, then relaxed, sweeping down her back to cup her bottom and pull her hard up against the cradle of his hips as he braced his legs wide. She was drowning in his kiss, drowning in him, lost to the world around her. She was only dimly aware of the door slamming shut behind him as he kicked out with one booted foot, then staggered slightly as she leaned into him and he took their weight on his bad leg.

  “I thought you didn’t want to do this again,” he said, breathing softly against her ear, nipping at her jawline, laying a trail of kisses that burned like fire down her throat. His breath was coming harsh and fast, as fast as her own, his hands already working at the row of jet buttons that marched in prim correctness down the bodice of her mourning gown.

  “I lied,” she whispered, her hand in his, pulling him with her toward the back of the passage, stopping halfway up the steps to wrap her arms around his neck and drag his head down to her kiss.

  In the end, he took her there, on the winding staircase, her back up against the whitewashed wall, her skirts bunched around her waist, his breath hot and urgent against her neck. But he didn’t say he loved her, and it was only then, when his breathing stilled into silence, that she realized how badly she wanted to hear those words, even if she didn’t believe in them.

  Lukewarm and gently scented with lavender and rose, the bathwater caressed her body, the water and his dark, strong man’s hands, moving in slow, luxurious circles over the bare white flesh of her breasts. She half-sat, half-lay cradled between his spread legs, her shoulders against his chest, so that she had to tilt back her head, the ends of her hair dipping into the water as her mouth sought his kiss, and found it.

  They were in the big copper tub in the tiled bathing room on the second floor of the garçonnière, a bottle of wine and two glasses on a table beside them, a single flickering candle casting a small circle of golden warmth that left the corners of the room in shadow. It was big enough for two, that tub, six feet long and three feet wide and three feet high, although Emmanuelle had never shared it with anyone, until now.

  “Emmanuelle,” he said, his voice rough with an undercurrent of hunger, and she eased herself around so that she was lying along the top of him, her breasts pressed against his chest, his sex hard up against her. She ran her hands over his shoulders and up his neck. She loved the feel of him beneath her spreading palms, warm silken skin, hard powerful muscle. He was dark and he was beautiful and he was young, so young, and she was a fool, surely, to be wishing that any of this could last, to be thinking that she wanted this to last. To be wishing that what he thought he felt for her would last.

  “How old do you think I am?” she asked suddenly, resting her forearms on his chest, her chin propped on her crossed wrists.

  Reaching for his glass, he brought the wine to his lips and sipped it slowly, his gaze steady on her face. “Is it supposed to make a difference?”

  “It should. I’m thirty years old. What are you? Twenty-six? Twenty-seven?”

  He looked neither surprised nor shocked, but only gave her a slow smile. “Twenty-five as of last November.”

  She felt her heart sink, although somehow she managed a light laugh, pushing herself up to rake the fingernails of one hand across the exquisitely defined muscles of his chest. “Alors, un enfant.”

  He caught her wrist in his strong grip and jerked her back down so that she landed hard against him, bare wet flesh smacking against bare wet flesh with a splash that sent bathwater rolling in a crested cascade against the tub’s high copper edge. “That’s me, all right,” he said, a wicked gleam in his eyes, his voice a husky, sensual whisper as he brought his face close to hers. “A real hell-born babe.” She thought he would kiss her then. She wanted him to kiss her. Instead, his gaze locked still with hers, he tilted back his head and drained his wine.

  She arched her spine, putting more space between them, her hand reaching out to grasp her own wineglass. Only she was shaking so badly, she almost sent the dark red liquid sloshing over the edge, and she drank more deeply and more quickly than she should have, the wine warming her belly and steadying her nerves, so that she sounded almost casual when she said, “Have you ever been in love before?”

  She felt his chest lift beneath her as if on a sigh, watched the teasing light die out of his eyes to be replaced by something darker, something cold and fierce and dangerous. “No. Although I came close to it, once.”

  Emmanuelle held herself very still. “What happened?”

  “She died.”

  “How?”

  “She was murdered.”

  Emmanuelle set aside her wine. He wasn’t looking at her anymore. His gaze had fixed on the flickering flame of the candle beside them, and whatever his thoughts, she knew they brought him great pain. “It was at that fort you were telling me about, wasn’t it,” she said softly, suddenly understanding. “Fort McKenna.”

  He nodded, reaching out to her then, his arm sliding around her neck to draw her close up against him again. She laid her head on his wet shoulder, felt his heart beat hard and strong beneath her. “Her father was the commanding officer at the fort. He wanted her to go to his family back East, find herself some solid, respectably settled pillar of society for a husband. Only Rachel had other ideas.”

  “She loved you,” Emmanuelle said, knowing it, and ashamed of the swift rush of irrational jealousy that surged through her at the realization that some woman had loved him before her.

  “It’s why she died.” His voice had gone oddly flat. He set aside the wineglass, his free hand coming up to stroke the wet tangle of her hair, although he kept his gaze fixed on the far wall. “It was the only thing they had in common, you see, the people that lieutenant killed. They were all close to me, or at least they mattered to me in some way . . . a young corporal from my outfit . . . an old Mexican woman who did my laundry . . . a little girl I was teaching to play chess.” He paused. “The last one was Rachel.”

  Emmanuelle turned her face into his shoulder, one hand creeping up to touch his cheek in mute comfort.

  He took her hand in his, his fingers gripping hers hard. “The lieutenant was simply playing a game with me. I’d humiliated him at chess one night, and he wanted to show me he was smarter than I was—that he could hurt me, hurt those around me, and that I couldn’t catch him, I couldn’t figure it out.”

  “Yet you did catch him.”

  “Eventually. He used to leave these notes, taunting me, asking if I needed another body to help me figure it out.” He paused, and she thought they must haunt him, those notes, those jeering challenges, forever burned into the core of who he was. “And then he’d deliver one.”

  “So he wanted to be caught?”

  “No. He was due to be shipped out to California. If I hadn’t figured it out when I did, he’d have been gone.”

  “What did you do to him?” she asked, her voice hollow, hushed. “Did you kill him?”

  “No. I wanted to. I could have. And for one, terrible moment, I almost did.”

  “I didn’t think you had any trouble killing.”

  He cupped his hand beneath her chin, urging her head back so that she had no choice but to look up and meet his steady gaze. “You’re thinking about this afternoon, aren’t you, and that night on the rue Conti?” He shook his head. “I’m a soldier, Emmanuelle. I learne
d a long time ago that if someone has shown he’s willing to kill you, you don’t let up until you’re damned sure you’ve got him in a position where he can’t do it. I’ve seen too many men ease off too soon, and die for it.”

  “And the lieutenant at Fort McKenna?”

  “If I’d killed him, it would have been cold, calculated murder. I’m not an executioner.”

  She laced her fingers with his and brought their entwined hands up to her lips. She’d always thought of him as a killer, a remorseless bringer of pain and death and destruction. Yet she thought she must somehow have also known this truth about him, that he fought only to protect himself and others, that he maintained always a profound respect for human life. She’d simply shut her eyes and refused to see it.

  “Those men who tried to kill you tonight,” she said softly, “do you think they were sent by the same person who set the Irishman on me?”

  “Hamish thinks so. He thinks I’m getting close to something.”

  “But you don’t?”

  He surprised her with a low laugh. “I think there are about two hundred thousand people out there who hate me, who’d like nothing better than to see me laid out as a cold cadaver on Dr. Austin Sinclair’s embalming slab.”

  The image sent a shudder through her. “Don’t say it,” she whispered before she could stop herself. “Don’t even think it.”

  He wrapped his hands around her arms, hauling her up so that she rose wet and naked and dripping above him. “Why, Madame de Beauvais,” he said, a wicked smile curling his lips. “You surprise me. Are you so sure you don’t love me?”

  “No. It’s just lust,” she said. But she clung to him as if terrified she might lose him. And when he took her lips in a long, lingering kiss, she felt the sting of tears rare and hot in her eyes.

  He made love to her then, slow and sweet, a gentle giving and taking of pleasure. And this time he did say it, those three hushed words whispered hoarsely in her ear. I love you. And God help her, she almost said it back. Almost.