“Audra!”
She held up a bottle of wine and two glasses. “How about a late-night drink?” she said. She stumbled inside before he could reply, and he realized she had already been drinking. He closed the door.
Out in the hallway Lena had caught Audra’s movements in the lightning flashes. She had been up inspecting windows because of the storm, saw Audra knock on the door to the room where Lee Jeffreys was staying, watched her go inside. Should she go and put a stop to it? She thought not. She had seen Audra’s naked body after Richard brought her back from their “honeymoon.” The poor girl had been terribly abused, but she had begged Lena and Toosie not to tell her father about what they had seen, and she had refused to go into any detail about how or why it had happened.
Lena had tried to decipher what had gone wrong, and as soon as Lee Jeffreys came upon the scene earlier today, she had her answer. She would never forget the fallen look on Lee’s face when he realized Audra was married.
Poor Audra. If only Joey and Joseph knew what the girl had sacrificed for them, but Joseph’s heart was too frail now to know the truth, and Joey would probably shoot himself. As for herself, Lena felt helpless to do anything about any of it. In spite of her relationship with Joseph, she was still just his Negro lover. It was not her place to tell the man what was going on, nor was it her place to go into Lee Jeffreys’s room and take Miss Audra out of there. Maybe Audra needed to be in there. Maybe she would finally open up to someone; and maybe, by some miracle, Lee Jeffreys would find some way to help the poor girl.
“Lord, help them both,” she muttered.
Lee took the bottle and glasses from Audra’s hands. “You’re already drunk,” he told her. “You don’t need any more of this.”
She puckered her lips in a pout. “Oh, but I do. Did you know that if you drink enough wine, you don’t feel any pain, either emotional or physical?”
The words were spoken mockingly, her smile fake. Lee set the bottle and glasses on the floor near the door, lost her for a moment in the darkness. When the lightning flashed again, he spotted her wandering toward the French doors. He walked over and grasped her arms, turning her.
“I’ve used whiskey enough times this past year to know exactly what you mean,” he told her, “but I decided that wasn’t the answer, and it isn’t the answer for you, either, Audra. What the hell is going on here! You’re eighteen years old, and you’re drinking like a damn sailor!”
They watched each other in another bright flash of light. Lee stood there bare-chested, wearing only a pair of knee-length long johns, and Audra could not get over the fact that in spite of his size and what she had been through, she felt none of the revulsion and fear she felt around Richard. She was actually still stirred by his physique, still felt warm and alive in his presence. She was safe here. As long as she was in Lee Jeffreys’s arms, nothing could hurt her, not even Richard. “Hold me, Lee. Will you just hold me?”
He put a hand to the side of her face. “What is the pain you’re trying to kill, Audra?” He felt her shiver.
“Please just hold me,” she asked again.
With a sigh of resignation, he drew her into his arms, and she collapsed against him, breaking into bitter weeping that tore at his guts. He crushed her close, resting his cheek against the top of her head, stroking her thick mane of auburn hair. “It’s all right, love. Somehow I’ll make it all right.”
He was glad for the storm that raged outside. It helped drown out her wrenching sobs, which he was sure the whole house would hear if it were a normally quiet night. He felt torn with emotion, a need to love and make love to this woman, a need to protect her, combined with the need to kill Richard Potter for whatever he had done to make her this way. The man had broken her spirit, shattered her heart.
Her crying was bordering on hysteria, and he picked her up in his arms and carried her to the bed, laying her on it and climbing in beside her. He pulled the mosquito netting back around it, and he just sat beside her and rubbed her back while she wept into his pillow.
“Just let it all out, Audra.”
She curled up and he lay down beside her, putting an arm around her from behind. She grasped his arm, clinging tightly as though desperately afraid, digging into his skin with her fingernails until it hurt. He decided not to say anything for the moment. He would wait until she was ready to talk, and for several more minutes she just lay there weeping.
She seemed more like a frightened little girl than a woman, and he felt a fury building in his soul at how thin and withered she was. This was not the bratty, proud, feisty Audra he had left in Connecticut. He leaned over and kissed her cheek, gently stroked her hair back from her damp face. The breeze coming in the window had grown cooler, and the storm was abating. “You might as well tell me what’s happened, Audra. There’s no pretending anymore.”
Her body continued to jerk in lingering sobs as her lungs struggled to get back into a normal breathing pattern. Finally she calmed down, and she rolled onto her back. “I don’t know…how to say it. It’s…too ugly.”
Lee sat up and ripped the pillowcase off his pillow and handed it to her. “Blow your nose on it if you have to. Lord knows there are enough servants around here to get the damn bedclothes washed in the morning.”
Audra obeyed, using the pillowcase like a handkerchief, then wiped tears and perspiration from her face. The storm was drifting away, and with it the clouds. Apparently a full moon was behind those clouds, for the room was much lighter now, and with their vision adjusted to the dark, they could see each other’s eyes. Audra just stared at him for several long seconds, as though she were afraid that if she looked away, he would be gone.
“Am I bad, Lee?” she finally asked.
“What?”
“What we did,” she sniffed. “Does it make me a whore?”
Lee already felt the temper he had been trying to train these past few months beginning to get out of control again. “Did Richard tell you that?”
Finally she looked away, turning onto her side. “Worse. Think of the ugliest things you can call a woman, and that’s what he has called me.”
Lee stretched out beside her again, pulling her close, bending his legs into the back of hers. “Why? How in hell did he even know about me?”
She shuddered. “You’re a man. Wouldn’t you know it if the woman you took to bed wasn’t a virgin?”
Lee closed his eyes, wanting to kill. “Jesus,” he whispered.
“I made it worse,” she said, the tears wanting to come again. “That first night…he was so quick. I wasn’t ready, and he didn’t…do anything to make it nice. He was just…just there on top of me before I knew what was happening…and I’d drunk a lot of wine because I was scared. I wanted it to work, Lee. He’d been so good to me before that. I thought…if I could make myself get used to him that way…I’d be all right. Only I drank too much wine. I tried to make it better…by imagining it was you. I didn’t realize it, but I whispered your name…He heard me.”
“My God.” Lee kept a tight hold on her when she shivered.
“When he was through,” she continued, “he hit me…over and over. He called me so many names, and…he made me tell him who it was. I…I had to tell him. That’s why you can’t be here…when he comes back. If he finds you here…it will be all the worse for me. He’ll take me back to Cypress Hollow. When he has me there, he can…do whatever he wants with me. I’m safer here, near Father and Joey.”
Lee kissed her hair, feeling as though he would explode at any moment. He told himself he had to be calm for now, let her talk. “Has he hit you since then?”
She drew her knees even closer to her body. “He…has ways of bringing…pain…without leaving any marks, except in places no one sees but him. That first night…he said that if he’d married a slut…then he’d use me like one. He made me lie on my stomach.” She jerked in another sob. “He told me…if he couldn’t be my first man one way…he would be the first in another way. I passed out fro
m the pain of it…but now it doesn’t hurt so much anymore. I’ve learned not to fight it.”
Lee felt a blackness closing in around him. He suspected it was a good thing Richard Potter was nowhere near Brennan Manor tonight. If he was, he would be a dead man! Rage rumbled through him with such force that for a moment he thought he might vomit. He sat up and breathed deeply for control. “Tell me all of it, Audra.”
Lee had to keep reminding himself that for the moment he could not rant and rave. He could only listen, hold her, comfort her. He sat with his head in his hands as she told him more, the vile things her husband did with her, the fact that he raped young Negro girls right in their own bed.
“Joey doesn’t know what he’s really like,” she said, wiping at her face again with shaking hands. “Neither does Father. Father has a very weak heart now. It would kill him if he knew.”
“He ought to die, for keeping my letters from you and Joey! He’s partly to blame for this!”
“No!” she insisted, rolling onto her back to face him. “Father wouldn’t do that. Even if he did, it’s still our fault, Lee, nobody else’s. We never should have let it go so far, and after that, we should have found a way to be together. Father thought Richard was the best man for me. He thinks he’s good to me. He can’t ever know, Lee.”
Lee could hardly believe her refusal to accept what her father had done, but he decided that, considering the state she was in, maybe she needed to keep thinking her father was incapable of reading and destroying her letters. It wouldn’t do her any good to learn the man had apparently betrayed her, all to save his precious plantation. Besides that, she was probably right that Joseph Brennan thought he was doing what was best for his daughter. He apparently worshiped the girl. He would never give her over to such torture, not even for Brennan Manor. He surely had no idea the kind of man Richard Potter was behind closed doors.
“The only way to be together would have been for me to come here to live, and I was too damn stubborn and sure it was wrong,” he answered. “The real one to blame is me.”
She touched his arm. “I wanted to blame you, to hate you. But it was just as much my fault as it was yours. We made a mutual decision, Lee, and it’s my doing that I’m already married. There was a problem…with the man in charge of the Negroes. I never liked him. I told Richard that if he’d fire March Fredericks, I would marry him sooner. I didn’t think it would make any difference, and Father was anxious to see us married because of his heart problem. I was afraid he might die before he was able to give me away. And Richard was so kind and attentive. I thought I could be happy.”
She sat up beside him, kissed his cheek. “You have no idea how I felt when I saw you ride up to the house today…the awful feeling of knowing you’d come too late. I wanted to run to you, to ask you to hold me and never let go, but I’m married to Richard now, and that can’t be changed. For all I know, I am already carrying his child. A baby is my only hope of regaining his respect, as the mother of his children.” More tears slipped down her cheeks. “I am hoping that after these last ten days or so apart, he won’t be so angry when he returns; and if we stay here at Brennan Manor, he can’t do the things to me he does at Cypress Hollow. But if he finds you here…”
Lee pulled her close, and she rested her head on his shoulder. “I understand. But I can’t just ride off and forget you, Audra. I can’t just leave you to answer to that bastard’s torture. There must be something I can do.”
“No, no, you mustn’t try to do anything,” she protested, shivering in another sob. “You don’t understand, Lee. He’s one of the most powerful men in Louisiana. If he catches you here, he could do whatever he wants with you and no one would stop him. It’s too dangerous for you here.”
“I don’t give a damn!” He breathed deeply for self-control and gently laid her back down on the bed. He kissed her eyes, stroked her hair away from her face. “We won’t think about it tonight.” He thought how in his arms, the night he took her, she had seemed like a woman; but in Richard Potter’s hands she had surely been nothing more than an abused child. He had tried to show her how beautiful and pleasurable lovemaking could be, but her husband had destroyed her trust.
He pulled her into his arms. “You remember who you are, Audra. Before you were Mrs. Richard Potter, you were Audra Brennan, a proud young woman, the daughter of one of the wealthiest men in Louisiana. You were full of spirit and pride, and you can’t let that man take those things away from you. Don’t you believe for one minute that what we did made you a bad person, or that what that son of a bitch does to you should make you somehow dirty and unworthy of respect. He’s raped you, just as sure as he’s raped those poor young Negro girls, and he’s not going to keep getting away with it!”
“There’s nothing you can do about it, Lee.”
“I’ll think of something. We can’t do anything about the fact that you’re married to him now, but by God, I can do something about how he treats you from now on!”
“Lee, you’ll get yourself killed!”
“Don’t you worry about me. Just because you’re his wife doesn’t give him the right to use you that way.”
She curled up against him, feeling so safe and protected. Outside, the moon disappeared again, and thunder rumbled from a second approaching storm.
“Once a man marries,” she said, “the woman and everything she owns belongs to him, to do with as he wants. You know that it’s true, Lee. You’re a lawyer yourself. With a southern man who has as much wealth and power as Richard, it is even more true. There is nothing you can do, and nothing I can do but find a way to make life bearable. Please, please leave before he finds you here.”
Lee did not reply immediately. His head ached from desperate thoughts of how he could help her, and every muscle in his body ached to kill Richard Potter. Perhaps, for reasons other than he had planned, God had meant for him to find that song and feel compelled to come here. The least he could do now was help Audra out of this mess, if that was possible.
“I’ll leave, all right. I’ll leave Brennan Manor, but I’m not leaving Baton Rouge until I figure out how to help you. It’s partly my fault you’re caught in this, and I’m not going to let it continue.”
She touched his face. “Lee, please let it be.”
“I can’t, Audra.” Their eyes held as he took her hand and kissed it. “You just try to get some sleep.”
“I should go back to my room.”
“No. You’ll stay right here in my arms so you aren’t alone. You’re safe here, from the storm, from Richard Potter and from your own nightmares. I’m not letting go of you, at least not tonight.”
The thunder came closer, and she could not deny how good it felt to be safe and loved. Wrong as it was, she could not bring herself to leave his arms. “I’m a married woman now,” she reminded him.
“You’re a piece of property, apparently worth hardly more to your husband than one of his slaves. Married or not, you’re staying right here. You know the house servants won’t say anything if you order them not to, and as far as I know, none of them even knows you’re here.”
“Lena and Toosie will find out,” she said, weariness beginning to overtake her. “They know everything that goes on in this house.”
“Neither one of them would betray you. Don’t forget you have full command of everyone in this house. If you tell them to keep quiet, they will. You remember who you are, Audra. Don’t let that bastard destroy your spirit and pride. He can steal your body and your material possessions, but he can’t steal what is inside of you, the love, the heart, the spirit that is the Audra I fell in love with.”
Audra felt herself drifting into a much-needed sleep, her body utterly exhausted from her fit of tears. “You really…never stopped loving me?” she asked, slurring the words.
He kissed her hair. “I really never stopped loving you.”
Moments later she was asleep in his arms. Rain began to pour again, but at least the room was cooler now, and Lee pulle
d a blanket over them. He fell into a fitful sleep of his own, unable to rest soundly for the vision of horrors that kept stabbing at him, imagining Richard Potter abusing her in such hideous ways.
Hours passed, and both of them lost track of time. Audra stirred awake in the wee hours before sunrise, and her movement woke him. He felt her kissing at his neck, stroking his chest. “I want to remember how good it can be,” she whispered. “Show me, Lee.”
He felt a fire beginning to creep through his veins. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I do,” she whimpered. “I want to remember how gentle and beautiful you made it for me. No one else ever needs to know.”
It was raining softly now, the raindrops pecking at the wide leaves of a rubber plant just outside the window. It was a warm, sweet moment, and it was a moment he could not resist capturing. If he could do nothing else for her, he could take away the ugliness she had known and replace it with gentle love. He met her mouth, wondering what it was about this woman that made him lose all reason. He was a man of education, a man who always thought logically, and until he had met Audra Brennan, he had been a man in full control of his faculties.
All that control was gone the moment he tasted her sweet lips once more. The thought of Richard Potter abusing her tore at his guts, bringing on a fierce need to possess her himself, to reclaim her, to remind her of the beauty of the act. She returned his kiss with sweet passion, but he felt her stiffen when he moved a hand under her gown to touch her bare leg.
“This is me, Audra,” he said softly, kissing her eyes, her neck, her lips again. He gently rubbed his hand over her slender thigh, over her belly, noticing how her hip bones protruded from her loss of weight. “Look at me,” he gently commanded.
She opened her eyes, and in the very dim light of early dawn she could see the sincerity and love there.
“I would never hurt you.”
Tender Betrayal Page 20
