Creole Fires Read Free Page A

Times had been hard of late. She and her mother had been careful with every penny.
    “M’sieur du Villier has already taken care of it.”
    “He has?” Nicki said in English, falling back into the language she spoke at home, though her father was French, and at the Salem Academy, the school she attended.
    “Pardon, mademoiselle?
”
    “
Excusez-moi.
Tell M’sieur du Villier I am grateful for his kind assistance.” Her father wouldn’t like the idea, but maybe he wouldn’t have to know. And the du Villiers could certainly afford it more than her family could right now. Just this once, she decided, she would ignore her damnable pride and be practical.
    As long as she didn’t have to face him.
    Determined to be gone before her handsome rescuer returned, Nicki finished brushing the dirt and leaves from her underthings, and pulled the pretty pink muslin dress on over her head.
    “Where is she?”
    “La petite mademoiselle?”
Madame Gaudin asked, amused by the handsome Frenchman’s obvious interest.
    “Who else?” he grumbled. “How many half-naked young women do you have in your fitting rooms?”
    Madame Gaudin pursed her lips and shrugged her pudgy shoulders. “Gone, m’sieur. She was afraid her parents would worry. Henri took her home in the wagon.”
    Henri was Madame Gaudin’s scarecrowlike husband. Sending the lovely mademoiselle home with noone to protect her but Henri Gaudin only increased Alexandre’s worry.
    “He also took a pistol,” she said in answer to his deepening scowl. “You did not find the men who attacked her?”
    “Not a trace. But with the swamp and the river to hide them, there was little chance.”
    “Sacrebleu!
What kind of men would harm such an innocent?”
    Alex’s jaw tightened. “Who was she? Does she live near here?”
    “Non
, she is just here visiting friends.” Madame Gaudin smiled at his look of disappointment. “You should be grateful you are leaving.
La petite mademoiselle
is far too young for you—only fifteen, she said.”
    Alex’s brow shot up. “Fifteen?” he repeated, incredulous.
    “If you had been paying attention to her face and not her ripe little body you would have noticed.”
    Alex chuckled softly. Being twelve years her senior, he should have been more observant, but he rarely found himself attracted to one so young. “I suppose you’re right.”
    “What a beauty,
n’est-ce pas?
Like an angel.”
    Alex smiled. “An angel with copper hair and aqua eyes and a body ripe for a man’s touch …. As you say, I’m fortunate to be leaving such dangerous temptations to somebody else.”
    But all the way to the docks, and later as he watched the cane fields along the Mississippi disappear and the lights of New Orleans approach, he couldn’t help envying the man who would finally bed her.
    By the time he reached the shores of France, he had all but forgotten her. Only once, when he caught sight of a woman with eyes not nearly so vivid, did he wonder who that fortunate man might be.

2

    New Orleans, 1840
    Nicole St. Claire huddled in the corner of her damp and musty cell in the police prison of the Second Municipality on Baronne Street.
    On a rough-hewn plank table a single white candle flickered against the damp rock walls, casting eerie, ominous shadows. Several uniformed watchmen stood outside the door, but they paid Nicole no heed. Instead, their attention focused on the activity in another small cell where two other women had been brought in several hours earlier.
    “I can’t stand to hear them screaming,” Nicki whispered, pressing her hands against her ears.
The women’s anguished cries, and the rats.
These were the things she hated most about the dismal prison. And missing the warmth of the sun. She had been cold since the day she’d arrived two weeks ago, cold and desolate, and afraid clear to her bones.
    “It’ll be over soon,” said Lorna Mackintosh, the buxom, dark-haired girl who shared her cell.
    “I wish there was something