LAVENDER BLUE (historical romance)

by Parris Afton Bonds

  Trinidad reached a gnarled hand up to Jeanette’s sun-bonnet and removed a cotton tuft that clung to the grosgrain band. “Ay de mi— you do not want Cristobal to see thees.”

  “I doubt if he would notice,” she said waspishly. Her husband was still in town, his longest absence yet. The nights he spent at Columbia he seemed more intent on the working on his articles in his bedroom than on the titillating conversations she was accustomed to enjoying with him.

  Three weeks had passed since that night he had kissed her, and the memory of that kiss still lingered to pique her feminine vanity. Did her independent nature lessen her feminine appeal? And there was something else about that disturbing kiss that she could not put her finger on.

  The puzzle still nagged her like a toothache when she slipped out of the house just after midnight dressed in her boy’s disguise. She always drove the lead wagon, if for no other reason than to keep out of the dust. The wagons bumped over rough cactus-peppered hills and through tangled chaparral on dry arroyos. The first night out the northerner that Trinidad’s bones had expected hit, and Jeanette hunched around the warmth of the campfire with the rest of the campesinos, drinking steaming coffee out of tin cans.

  These were the times when she was the happiest. The freedom in the open spaces—the unlimited reach of the star-spangled sky over her bedroll—the cry of a lobo wolf or shriek of screech owl to break the frosty night’s silence. Other feelings, too, completed her happiness—the camaraderie of the men, the excitement of challenging a dangerous enemy, the fulfillment of doing something worthwhile.

  More than once she chuckled to herself at her latest escapade. Another note for General Morgan from Lavender Blue. The day after she pulled out with the wagon train Trinidad was to leave the note in the offering box of the convent’s chapel in Brownsville:

  Five hundred bales of cotton escaped your hands;

  bound for blockade runners across the Rio Grande.

  And below it a drawing of the lavender-blue flower. That should cause the general to froth at the mouth for a couple of days.

  Oh, to see Morgan recalled, disgraced, and discredited, as Grant had recalled Burnside!

  Rather than pay duty on the Rio Grande City ferry, she worked alongside Xavier and Andres to rope the cotton bales across the muddy river. From the other side Lorenzo, Felix, and the one-armed Pedro worked the ropes. Afterward the campesinos floated the wagons over. That night she lay a long time in the semi-trance of her physical exhaustion. Despite the fringed leather gloves, her hands were raw from tugging at the rope, and the muscles of her back and forearms ached. At last the croaking bullfrogs in the cozy river mudbank lulled her to sleep. She slept deeply, secure in the knowledge that one of the faithful campesinos always stood guard against possible bandit attack.

  Monotonous days followed; days of leading the wagon train of cotton up one side of the river and back down the other, days of going long distances without water because sometimes it was impossible to get down to the river.

  The laborious journey at least served to dissipate her preoccupation with her husband. Yet the nearer the wagons rumbled to Matamoros and Bagdad, the greater grew her apprehension. Soon she would have to deal again with the Frenchman. But it would be the last time, she swore. Once she paid the Frenchman his degrading price for the war supplies consigned at the Matamoros warehouse, she meant to seek out another avenue for her cotton; one she had just learned of earlier that week at a military tea given by the lonely Federal officers at Fort Brown.

  A great many of Brownsville’s citizens had shunned the invitation. But others came because the large Federal forces stationed there expended a considerable amount of money every payday on Brownsville merchandise (especially the saloons’ mind-bending beverages). Naturally the shop- and saloonkeepers wished to continue to receive the military’s patronage. Cristobal had escorted Jeanette and was his usual droll self. Between her charm, his repartee, and a spiked punch, they managed to entrance the guests and soldiers, who were far from home and bored with the rigors of garrison duty. In fact, at the end of a song performed by the military’s glee club she sweetly persuaded the aide-de-camp to talk more freely of his duties. He was an intense man with gray eyes that never left her face, which made her uncomfortably aware of the direction of his thoughts.

  “Despite our occupation of the lower course of the Rio Grande,” the soldier had said, “the only effect has been to change the point of entry to upper Rio Grande crossings; enough supplies are still getting through to supply the whole Rebel army.”

  That she knew, but it was the rest that he divulged which gave her an idea. “From the contraband caravans our spies have spotted coming and going out of Monterrey, it appears that Mexican city may be the new distribution point for Confederate war supplies.” He took another swig from the punch cup before adding, “And the hell of it is, Jeanette—pardon me—Mrs. Cavazos, is that our hands are tied by the Monroe Doctrine.”

  “Politics!” Jeanette simpered. “You’ll just have to explain it all to me, suh.”

  The aide-de-camp was quite pleased to demonstrate his knowledge and explained, “The Federal Government is pledged to support Juarez against French intervention into our Western Hemisphere. So—you can understand, Jeanette—these supplies of cotton and salt and other Southern goods, they could be meant for Juarez.”

  Yes, she could understand the Federal Army’s predicament very well. And she could see that her next trip would be to Monterrey!

  But first there was the Frenchman to deal with.

  Alejandro watched Jeanette with a cockeyed grin. Nevertheless, she detected in his gaze a gleam of admiration for the young woman he had contemptuously thought of as a frail boy with all the courage of a startled jackrabbit. Her last encounter with him was the ignominious return to shore after her near-fatal injury to his captain. By then everyone on board the Revenge knew she was a female; fortunately, though, her identity remained a secret.

  Facing into the winter wind that blew off the Gulf, facing the rapidly approaching great hull of the Revenge, she wondered where the courage was that had empowered her to make the dangerous runs through countryside rife with marauding bandits who would as soon kill as talk. She needed that courage now. No sweat broke out on her brow. Her stomach did not quiver like a mass of marmalade. Yet she was so terrified of the confrontation that loomed before her like the gates of Hell that at any moment she expected to swoon. And she would never forgive herself for such a lapse.

  Solis waited for her when she swung her body over the ship’s bulwarks and dropped to the deck. If she expected any recrimination from the Frenchman’s right-hand man, she found none. Rather, she saw the light of compassion in the raisin-brown eyes. Surely the Frenchman planned no revenge so long a time after his shooting?

  Then she understood Solis’s look. Twenty feet away Rubia descended the set of shallow stairs from the quarterdeck. She was dressed in a pert mulberry-blue chip hat that matched her paletot, a knee-length cape of plush trimmed with gimp cord and Spanish lace. Her preoccupied gaze vanished as it crossed that of Jeanette. Jeanette, dressed in shabby dungarees and soil-blackened cowhide jacket with her disreputable felt hat flopping over her nose, wanted to sink through the deck. First Rubia, next her— the rutting Frenchman might as well be running a brothel!

  The two women nodded civilly. “Hello, Señora Cavazos,” Rubia said quietly.

  “Good afternoon, Rubia,” Jeanette said. She liked the young woman and tried to keep the anger, which was really for the Frenchman, out of her voice. She watched as Solis gently, almost tenderly, lifted Rubia over the railing. Envy for the woman who was fortunate to have finished her meeting with the Revenge's captain battered at Jeanette. She repressed the cowardly urge to dash for the bulwarks and hurl herself over the side.

  Squaring her shoulders, she waited for Solis to return. Overhead the wind whistled in the masts, and the seagulls cried stridently. Waves slapped at the brig’s broadsides. All around her was the smell
of wet ropes, tar, and damp canvas. She noticed with something akin to hope that the crew, a motley collection of nationalities dressed warmly in duck trousers, heavy woolen jackets, and various colored stocking caps, were preparing to sail. Perhaps this . . . meeting would not take long after all!

  Solis tied the bandanna over her eyes and the leather thongs round her wrists, this time leaving her hands before her—perhaps the Frenchman realized the extreme discomfort she endured at having her hands tied behind her back and was being more lenient. Lenient, perhaps; careless, no. For her wrists were bound more tightly.

  She was almost afraid to hope that she would be spared the further indignity of once again bartering her body. Her heart thudded in tempo with Solis’s rap on the heavy door. The door’s hinges creaked. The cabin’s warm air, pungent with the smell of tobacco, wafted over her, seeping through the bandanna that partially covered her nostrils. But her sixth sense, sheer instinct, informed her that the Frenchman stood before her. She could sense his enormous height, his solid breadth merely by the flow of air about them. Yet she would have known his proximity had they been in the vacuum of Galileo’s galaxies.

  Solis’s hand at her elbow propelled her halting steps over the cabin’s threshold. The door slammed shut on any hope of retreat. A long moment passed. Then large hands slipped under her arms, down her rib cage, over her hips. Feeling, she realized, for concealed weapons. It was a terrible indignity; worse when the hands moved up to briskly pat the inside of her thighs. She steeled her mind to a blankness. But when one hand slid beneath the jacket to cup a breast, surprise, followed by outrage, brought her to her full height, some thirteen inches short of the man who dared to touch intimately a bound and helpless woman.

  She told him as much. “You jackanapes! You have not the courage to loose my hands! You know this time I would kill you, you—you scum of the earth!”

  "Non, si vous desirez les fusils," replied the seductive baritone voice with a hint of amusement in it.

  All she understood was the word for firearms. “Speak English, you cowardly cur!”

  Rich, low laughter. And the soft but firm squeezing of her breast. The thumb and forefinger rotated the rapidly peaking nipple. She was so furious at her helplessness she wanted to cry! Instead she blindly spit in the direction of the rogue’s face. Instantly her breast was freed. But his other hand still gripped her waist. She went rigid, expecting at any second the jarring impact of a fist slamming against her jaw. Like a frightened parakeet, her heart swooped and spiraled against her rib cage.

  Again that damnable low laughter. Suddenly she was swept up high, high against the Frenchman’s chest. Ridiculously, all she could think of at that moment was how far she would fall, with her bound hands unable to break the fall, should he drop her. She could hear the heavy, erratic pounding of his heart against her ear. Sweet Heaven, but this man was excited with passion! Despite his bedding of another woman only moments earlier! She had to give him credit for his prowess. She did give him credit, for she knew all too well the effect his lovemaking had on her. Damn him and double damn him!

  Her last vestige of hope expired like a snuffed candle when her body sank into the fluffy mattress. The Frenchman meant to take her. When his hands glided her britches down over her thighs and ankles, all fight went out of her. She forgot to fight him—to fight the feelings he generated. She wanted to forget. For just once she wanted to surrender.

  The thud of boots, a belt, the slither of clothes being shed. The bed creaked as his great body lowered to pin her small frame to the mattress like a butterfly pinned to a collector’s board. But for that eternal moment in time she would forget that she was a collector’s item, one of the many women the Frenchman took and mounted.

  Her arms came up. She hooked the leather thong knotted about her wrists behind his neck and drew his face down to hers. With a sigh she felt his lips, firm yet pliant, close over hers. The kiss seemed to last forever, a deep one that left her wanting more. His lips released hers and plundered a trail of soft, hungry kisses across her cheekbone, pausing at a heavily lashed eyelid, then moving to burn the shell of her ear. "Ma chérie, mon coeur, mon âme,” he rasped.

  Beginning at her fingertips, she vibrated like a plucked violin string at the sensuous way his breath caressed and teased her ear. “Pourquoi ne peut-il être comme cela tou jours?”

  She neither knew nor cared what he murmured. Her lips parted to the pirate’s tongue, which conquered her mouth as surely as any sword conquers the unarmed. But she was armed—with the passion she had to give him. And the conqueror went down in defeat before the love-making of the conquered. Wrists bound, her arms moved questioningly over the width of the shoulders, lower along the spine. Her fingertips touched, then gripped, the firmly rounded buttocks, pressing them downward against her arching hips.

  “Morbleu!’ he groaned.

  She ignored the oath, lost as she was in her need for this desperado who obeyed no law but his own. A self-proclaimed rebel, his kind knew no fear. But his kind would early in life know the hangman’s rope. She would taste of the man—his skin, bone, muscle fiber; she would drink of his essence—while still there was life in him. And in her. For some voice in the recesses of her mind whispered that she possessed the same temperament as the Frenchman. And that she, too, could soon face the gallows.

  That knowledge slammed into her with a clarity that startled her, that left her breathless as a blow to the windpipe. She faced the abyss of death. She walked the precarious ledge that made life all the sweeter.

  And so she abandoned herself to lovemaking, matching the Frenchman’s passion with her own strong, heated desire. He nipped her neck. She shuddered and bit his nipple. The salty taste of a man’s skin. It was an aphrodisiac. She thirsted for more!

  “Kitt,” she murmured in a voice husky with desire.

  "Oui? ” he whispered against a fleshy, milk-white globe heavy with the need for release.

  Arms at either side of his jaw, she tugged downward. She arched her back to make her breast more accessible, and through the pressure of her arms directed his mouth to her turgid nipple. She nurtured him there, glad that she could not be disappointed by the sight of his face. He had to possess a strong face, not a handsome one necessarily, but one with the characteristics of the proud lion, the fierce eagle.

  She gave up her speculations on the Frenchman’s appearance as he suckled her breast, giving her an intense feeling of pleasure. “Kitt,” she said again and hurried on before prudish Victorian shame would halt her words. “I want to taste of you.”

  She heard the swift intake of his breath. He understood her. A long moment passed. Then he shifted his position. She grew giddy with the realization of what she was about.

  Now he straddled her, his knees anchored at either side of her ribs. A faint, sensuously musky odor reached her and set off some primeval urge in her.

  Her fingers touched with wonder the tumescent proof of his virility. She wished she could see. She had never really had the courage to look at Armand. Hard. Veined. Pulsating. Around its thickness her fingers failed short of meeting her thumb. Her hand, hampered by the binding, moved to cup the rough-textured sacs that were as heavy with need as her breasts and was rewarded with his grunted, “Merde!”

  A blind person’s touch sometimes reveals more than sight would. She smiled, delighted that she had found the courage, at least for the moment, to shed her female inhibitions. But then wearing a blindfold lent false courage. She would never in a million years be able to look the Frenchman in the face should she chance to meet him in a crowded room. Never! Oh, God forbid that the Frenchman frequented the parlors of Brownsville!

  A hot flush washed over her, and she groaned with anxiety that such a thing could possibly happen. Her fingers slackened their inspection. Yet the vessel she held begged to be emptied, tickled her lips as his hands cupped her cheeks and guided her. And she drank of this man who quenched her thirst as Armand never had.

  CHAPTER TWENTY
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br />   The sunlight shafted down from the Protestant church’s high stained-glass window. Its beams coalesced the air’s dusty particles into an ethereal halo about Jeanette’s lovely head. No woman, Cristobal thought, could look more angelic—and behave in such a devilish fashion. Too well he remembered their parting scene aboard the Revenge nearly six weeks earlier and the vehemence of her hissing epitaphs. Choice Spanish curse words no doubt learned from the campesinos.

  He could almost swear she enjoyed the act of lovemaking as much as he, that her delight was no performance; yet when the time had come for him to sail, she had coldly left his bed. Averting her bandannaed face as he dressed her, she had spat, “I shall yet see you swinging from a rope!” He thought he knew her well enough; that her anger was directed at herself and her weakness in wanting a man she perceived was using her. Perhaps he was—he knew that he was also weak; that he could not pass up the opportunity to hold her, to bury himself in the woman he had always loved and always would love. He was taking uncalculated risks now, in order to hasten his voyages, in order to return to this one woman.

  “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound—

  That saved a wretch like me,

  I once was lost, but now I’m found.

  Was blind but now I see.”

  Jeanette’s voice broke on a last shrill note, and Cristobal shuddered. The damned macaw sang better than his wife. Ah, his fair love was not perfect! Thank God she wasn’t, or he would not have enjoyed her so much over the years. Never had she bored him. Living with her, he was certain, must be like visiting Bedlam. She flicked him a sheepish sideways glance, and he was unable to hold back his grin.