Heaven in His Arms

by Lisa Ann Verge

  With the pressure of her hand on Genevieve’s shoulder, the servant forced her down into a curtsy. Nanette had made her wear her best dress, a brilliant yellow satin decorated with pale peach ribbons, and the old servant had trussed her up so tightly that her small breasts surged above the edge of the bodice. She felt his gaze upon them, examining, assessing, evaluating.

  She straightened and waited. The muscles in her throat knotted. For a long time, he said nothing. When he finally spoke, his voice sounded as if it emerged from within the echoing halls of an empty tomb.

  “Do you play the harp?”

  She blinked at him. Such an unusual request from the murderer of her mother. Such a strange request from the man who had paid for her music teacher. She tilted her chin. “I play.” Then she added boldly, “Armand taught me.”

  The gray eyes glazed and hardened to steel, then a strange, twisted smile contorted his features. He reached out and wound a lock of her mother’s golden hair around his finger. “I’m saddened to inform you that your music teacher is dead.”

  Her heart stopped. She felt as if someone had just pressed a solid block of ice against the back of her neck. Frigid trickles slid down her spine.

  “One must be careful where one walks these days, with so many ruffians about, especially in Paris. They’d slit a man’s throat for the clothes he wears.” Without looking at her, the baron gestured to the harp with his free hand. “Now play for me, daughter of Jeanette. I paid a pretty sou for that tutor. I want to see if he was worth his price.”

  Nanette pushed her toward the instrument, but her feet were rooted to the floor. The baron leaned upon the dining room table and waited. She smelled Nanette’s sour-milk breath as the servant leaned over her shoulder, pinching the tender flesh of Genevieve’s upper arm. “If you value your life, you will play.”

  Somehow, she found the ability to move. Woodenly, Genevieve walked across the room to the gilded instrument standing in the corner. She sat upon Maman’s red velvet stool and leaned the instrument between her legs. She ran her fingers over the strings. Genevieve remembered Maman’s favorite melody— Armand’s favorite, too. She glanced at the white-sheeted form on the table. For you, Maman.

  Then she filled the room with the music of angels. When she finished, her hands fell to her lap. She had never played so well. It was as if Armand himself plucked at the strings, as if her mother sang the melody in her head. Genevieve looked up to see tears streaming down the baron’s face, but the sight had all the emotional impact of watching raindrops slip down the face of a statue.

  “You have your mother’s touch.” The baron rose. His wide satin skirts whirled around him. His sword clattered against a chair. He approached her and snaked a finger down her cheek. “After your mother is buried, Genevieve, you will take her place in this house.”

  ***

  Genevieve escaped as soon as darkness fell. She raced through the woods in the darkness with a sack of bread and meat she had stolen from the kitchens. She hid in the tree house, praying at the sound of every churchbell that she would not be found. On the second day of her absence, the baron sent the servants to find her. When they failed, he unleashed the hounds.

  But the hounds could not find her. A single night’s rain had washed away her scent. They were confused by the trails of deer that crisscrossed the hills. Once, through the uneven floor of her perch, she watched the baron ride past her, cursing, his face distorted in fury.

  For three months she lived in the hills. She fished in the stream by the tree house with a stick, a pin from her hair, and her corset strings. She baited traps for grouse and rabbits. She gathered strawberries when they ripened, and ate wild greens and roasted chestnuts. When the air grew cool, she snuck into the orchards to pluck apples and raid the villager’s gardens. She was always hungry. She ached for the taste of bread. When the air grew chill, she thought about winter and knew she could not survive much longer in the forest.

  Genevieve snuck down into the village one evening and stole a common broadcloth skirt and a bodice from the laundress’s establishment. She tossed away the silken rags of her clothing and set off, barefoot, for Paris. Surely, she told herself, there would be work for a woman who could read and write and do sums and sew as well as she, and it was better than dying in the woods alone.

  The trip was long and dangerous. She slept in trenches beside the roads. She stole her dinners from the village markets and the orchards that lined the pitted passage. Merchants driving their carts between villages took pity on her and gave her rides through

  The countryside. She traveled ever westward until, a month later, she finally walked through the towering gates of Paris.

  Genevieve had never seen so many people, so much activity. The narrow, twisting streets reeked of the stench of yesterday’s fish or the odor of human sewage. Water raced down the center gutters, and with it ran the guts of slaughtered animals and the refuse of tanneries, blacksmiths, starchmakers, candlemakers, and whatever other trade resided along the route. She searched in vain for her mother’s family, hoping that time would bring forgiveness and compassion, but no one knew of any Lalandes living in the area north of the Louvre. She knew then that she would be alone forever. When she could, she stole her supper from Les Halles, a crowded, bustling marketplace. She slept beneath the bridges of the Seine with beggars and waifs and thieves of all kinds, and every day she sought work, to no avail. One morning she awoke to a magnificent clatter and discovered a glittering procession of gilded carriages driving over the bridge above her head. It was the court, she was told, returning to the Louvre for the season. That day, she found work among the dressmakers of Saint-Denis.

  She shared a dingy, rat-infested room with three other girls. It wasn’t much, but it was the only home she had had since Carrouges. Whenever the court left the Louvre for Vincennes or Saint-Germain or the hunting lodge in Versailles, she would find herself without income and thus threatened with losing the safety of her room. It was not long before one of the other girls taught her how to pick pockets. One of them would attract a victim’s attention by lifting her skirts or tugging on her bodice. While he was distracted, the other, would slice off the heavy pouch that hung beneath his doublet. Then they would both disappear into the labyrinth of the Parisian streets. They lived by stealth and nimble fingers, and as the court spent more and more time in Versailles and less in Paris, they moved to the only place they could afford—an even tinier room near the notorious Cour des Miracles. Here was the center of the Parisian crime underworld. Here, all the cripples and invalids who begged during the day suddenly found their sight, their health, and their lost limbs in the evening.

  Soon, King Louis XIV stopped coming to Paris altogether. The men who infested the narrow, stinking streets around the Cour des Miracles closed in around Genevieve and the girls like wolves. One by one, the girls resorted to prostitution. Genevieve resisted. She cut purses on her own. She took greater and greater risks and had to search markets farther and farther away in order to feed herself. Soon, the other girls tossed her out of their lodging, for she could no longer pay her share and refused to earn it on her back. Her mother had lived that way, and she swore she wouldn’t. Once again, she slept under the bridges of the Seine.

  But she was no longer thirteen years old. Despite the constant hunger, the three years since she’d left Normandy had given her body a woman’s curves. Genevieve never went unnoticed as she wandered through the streets of Paris. The men of the Cour des Miracles kept telling her she could earn a fortune on her back. Her virginity alone, she was told, could be sold for fifty livres. Why not earn some money before it was stolen from her?

  Genevieve began to wonder if she should listen to these toothless men. She began to wonder if she should have stayed in Carrouges and agreed to the baron’s offer. A bed was a bed, after all, and clean linens and a single partner were preferable to bare lice-infested, straw-filled mattresses and the whole disease infested population of Paris.

  Yo
u were born to be a whore, Genevieve. Just like your mother.

  She took the money.

  But as she was being led to the room where the deed would be performed, the lieutenant of police attempted something he had never before dared. He marched into the Cour des Miracles with two hundred armed men and took it back for the people of Paris.

  Genevieve was saved from herself. She was sent to the Salpetriere.

  Chapter 10

  Who are you, Genevieve?

  The question rang in her ears. Andre gripped her shoulders, willing her to answer him. She wanted to tell him. She wanted to scream, I am Genevieve Lalande. She wanted to pour out all of the grief, all of the suffering, all of the desperation that had brought her to this man and to this place in the Canadian wilderness. She wanted to be held and kissed and told that it would never be like that again—that he would give her a home, that he would protect her from the world.

  She scanned his face, the fine, straight nose, the dark brows, the dark, scruffy growth that covered his cheeks and chin and could now be called a beard. The dusky predawn light cast pale blue shadows on his skin and gilded the streaks in his shaggy, sun-washed hair. He was strong. Stubborn. Determined, capable. Secretive, evasive, half-wild. Handsome… . He was more than she had ever expected to have in a husband; he was more than she had ever dared hope. How well she had played her part! His eyes were full of confusion, of wonder, of desire. He thought he had married the finest daughter of the petite noblesse, impoverished but well-bred, orphaned but protected by the Crown. Now he had caught her with a rabbit, a rabbit whose neck she had twisted with her bare hands, yet he still didn’t suspect the truth. From his expression, she knew he was bemused and amazed that a woman of her kind “adapted” so well to the wilderness.

  Genevieve should be relieved that he had not guessed the truth; she should be praying thanks to God. Instead, she ached to cast aside this disguise and tell him everything. She wanted him to want her, not Marie Duplessis.

  But Genevieve was the daughter of a murdered courtesan. She was a thief, a pickpocket, a poacher. A liar. A bastard. A whore.

  Yes, a whore in all but deed—for she’d taken the money, she’d sold her soul for a bite of bread. The remnants of the honor-price still jingled in her case. That day, she’d realized that she’d been destined for this fate all her life: What’s in the marrow will always come out in the bone.

  She turned her face away. She was a fool—a sentimental fool. Those years in Paris should have sucked her dry of sentiment, not left her with this tiny pocket of hope. If Andre knew the truth, all that wonder would disappear from his face. She couldn’t bear the disgust, and more, she wouldn’t suffer the consequences: an annulment in the spring, the frantic search for another husband, the threat of being sent back to Paris. She was acting like a besotted young girl to consider risking everything she’d worked for just to be comforted in this man’s strong arms.

  “Look at me, Genevieve.”

  His voice was ragged. She met his tawny eyes and a frisson of something glorious quivered up her spine. She thought, This is how Maman must have felt when she looked at Hamlin. This is why she was so willing to throw away all modesty, all care, for the love of Armand. Perhaps a woman would do anything—risk anything—for the chance to be loved.

  No. She gasped as he raked his hands through her hair and dragged her against his body, solid, full demanding. She couldn’t tell, him the truth. Fifty years from now, she wanted to wake up next to this man and still find him staring at her … just like this, just like this, just like this… .

  There was only one way to keep him. There was no place for sentimentality in her world—there hadn’t been, not since the day her mother was murdered. She had come to Quebec to start a new life. She had left Genevieve Lalande behind—forever. Whatever the cost, he must never know the truth.

  She gripped a handful of deerskin fringe and softened against him. “Everyone has secrets, Andre.”

  “Tell me yours.” He squeezed her body, as if he could force the truth from it. “Tell me which is the real Genevieve: the one who swears like a drunken seaman, or the one who stitches the men’s shirts like a girl out of the convent?”

  “Neither—or both.” Too close. Too close to the truth. “They never could make a lady out of me at the Salpetriere.”

  “A lady doesn’t belong here in Quebec.” He buried his fingers in her loose plait. “You should have stayed safe from swine like me in Paris.”

  Genevieve fluttered her eyes closed against the truth. “Make me your wife, Andre.”

  “Damn you.” His fingers tightened in her hair. “Damn you.”

  “Andre …”

  “Be quiet and let me kiss you.” He kissed her. Ah, the kissing. She’d never get enough of this, never in a hundred years. The sweet, hard merging of lips and bodies and souls into one— so pure, so powerful, overwhelming her senses so she could not think. This was lovemaking. This was the meaning of the feelings that had surged within her from the moment they’d met. When the kiss ended, Genevieve clung to him as if the earth had fallen away beneath her feet.

  She pressed her cheek against the warm curve of his neck. Her heart pounding hard in her chest, she wrapped her arms around his wide shoulders and waited for her body to stop trembling. Her toes skimmed the forest floor.

  His breath, fast and hot, warmed her hair just behind her ear. “It’s useless, isn’t it?” “What is?”

  “Fighting you.” Hungrily, he kissed the line of her jaw. “I’m damned tired of trying to swim upstream against the rapids.”

  She arched her neck, giving him access to the tender skin of her throat, but he wanted something else. He kissed her again, nudging her lips apart, tracing the line of her teeth, seeking the warm, honeyed recesses of her mouth. Genevieve surrendered herself to him, tilting her head at his urging, opening her lips wider, welcoming his tongue and his hands in places where she had never wanted any man to touch her. His caresses were magic, pure and heady, swirling a fog in her head until all she could think about was lying with this man under the open sky and giving him anything—anything—he demanded.

  Andre lifted her off her feet. She felt the gentle prick of nettles against her back as he lay her down on the damp forest floor, on top of her makeshift net. His body fell atop hers, heavy and large. She softened beneath him, for the feel of his muscled limbs, of his long, strong form covering her like the warmest blanket, was the sweetest sensation she had ever known. He released her lips to kiss her temple, to breathe warm, moist air into her inner ear, and then to bury his face in her hair.

  He tugged anxiously on the ties of her bodice. Genevieve tried to assist him, but her arms were like leaden weights and her fingers were clumsy and uncertain. She had always wanted him like this, since the first day she had seen him in Montreal. There was no sense to it. She had only known him for a few weeks, yet he filled her every thought, he haunted her every dream. He had become as necessary to her as food and water and air. Then realization struck her, as clear as a bright winter morning.

  Genevieve blinked open her eyes and stared sightlessly at the latticework of boughs above her head, at the few soggy amber leaves still clinging to the black branches. Of course. She should have guessed sooner; there was no other reason for these feelings. Her heart trembled in sudden fear.

  She was afraid to love. To love was to hurt and to die a little.

  The thought scattered away as quickly as it came, as he pushed her bodice apart, lowered his head, and engulfed one sensitive, aching nipple in his hot mouth. She squeezed her eyes shut. Oh, to think that for fifty livres she’d been willing to give this away… .

  The past was gone … gone. He continued, relentlessly lathing the peak of her breast, drawing it deep into his mouth, holding her still beneath him, coaxing another and yet another moan from her until she was arching against him, weaving her hands in his silky hair, kissing his head, smelling the scent of damp river water in the long tresses. It no longer matt
ered that the earth was cold and damp against her back, that heavy drops of rain pattered around them, falling from the trees. All that mattered was the touch and taste and smell and sight and sound of him, poised over her body, hungry and wild.

  Genevieve squeezed her eyes shut as he released one breast to taste the other, and the cool air chilled her nipple to hardness. She was no longer the master of her own body, for it writhed and arched beneath him, communicating in a language she had only begun to understand. She didn’t care. She helped him rearrange the cloth of her skirts, which were twisted and tangled beneath her legs. She welcomed the feel of his callused fingers on her calf, encouraging his touch as his hand rose past where the threadbare stocking was gartered above her knee, to scrape the bare flesh of her inner thigh. She felt so vulnerable, so dependent, so tiny against his bulk, all her senses following the trail of his fingers with trembling anticipation. A wonderful, alien sensation throbbed through her limbs, growing stronger as his hand slid between her legs. He nudged her thighs apart, then he touched her, masterfully, and her entire body jerked in response to the waves of pleasure reverberating through her form.

  Unconsciously, she closed her legs tightly.

  “Let me touch you, Taouistaouisse.” His voice was soft but urgent. “Let me feel you against my hand.”

  Andre gazed down upon her, his tawny eyes bright, his breath coming fast between his lips. She opened herself to him again. He pressed a knee against her thigh and stroked her. She arched as the sensation shot through her anew.

  “Genevieve …”

  She couldn’t seem to catch her breath. His kisses stole it from her mouth, his tongue tracing her lips as his fingers conjured powerful magic in her body. She wrapped her arms around his neck to hold on to him, for he was the only thing that wasn’t whirling madly about her. His stroking continued, endlessly, creating a bubble in her abdomen that grew tighter and thinner and tauter, threatening to burst.