To Tame a Rogue (12 page)

Philip and Marlena were very much alike. They knew what they wanted and they lived hard. He stared at the small rounded curve of her backside. Very spankable indeed. He grew hard at the thought. Still, when he finally did grow bored of her, he would simply walk away, as he had done so many years ago at Legacy Oaks.

His father grooming him all those years, building him up, expecting him to take over the family business. And now old Caindale was dead and had given everything to Nicholas, the son he had never cared for. Philip seethed.

It was laughable, really. Philip was not a man to settle down in one place. He preferred places like the French Quarter, unpolished places with shambling hordes of others just like himself, marauding through the narrow thoroughfares like they were playgrounds for the demented. The French Quarter was like a woman, a sultry, inviting, seductive, young woman with all the prerequisites of an alluring mistress when you first meet her.

It was late in the evening; the melancholy sound of jazz mingled with the sweet scent of ladies' perfume. Philip generally found most women foolish, imbecilic, their round bottoms in need of good spankings. Marlena had just happened to be married to his brother when they’d met and made love over and over in his room, her husband unaware and just doors away. She’d managed to last longer than any of the others. But the game was beginning to grow old. He hungered lately for a virgin, someone he could seduce and ride and toss away.

He’d thought about taking the pretty little maid servant who kept their rooms while Marlena ran her errands but decided against it for the time being. Still, keeping one woman too long was complicated, and Philip didn’t like complications.

It had been easy to glean information about Caindale’s death and his will; he and Marlena were staying in an out-of-the-way, elegantly furnished Creole townhouse just off the corner of Royal and St. Louis streets. It was owned by his old friend Madame Tussaud—an ancient, greedy hag who didn’t care that he was back and
who
knew little of the Branton family dynamics.

Really, it was quite opulent with its great cupola, columns, and graceful archways, and Philip wouldn’t have it any other way. He would have only the best.

They had the house all to themselves until the big evening approached, and indeed they’d made good use of the high-ceilinged, shuttered rooms, the crushed velvet blankets, Egyptian cotton linens, bathrobes to pad about in, and especially the four-poster beds draped in raw silk. He was still living off money he’d taken from old Caindale, though most of it had slid through
h
is fingers by now. He enjoyed living lavishly, but the fact that his reserves were getting low was a bit troubling. He knew there was a way to get back what was rightfully his. Philip had never had any desire to
work
for a living, and didn’t believe he should have to, whereas Nicholas had worked hard all his life, had had to manage wisely the stingy allowance Caindale provided him until now.

“We only have a few hours to plan our grand entrance,” Philip said, more to himself than to Marlena as he watched a curl of silky white cigar smoke float toward the medallioned ceiling.

She flounced over to him and sat on the edge of the massive bed. “I know what to do,” she said. He laughed at her calculated nature.

“What, my love, a tearful reunion? A duel?”

She purred, running a tanned, slender finger over the muscles in his chest. “Something better. Something that involves his prize horseflesh.” Philip sat up. “Do tell me more.”

“It’s simple, really. As much as it kills me, I’ll remain hidden for a while longer and you’ll crash one of the Brantons’ grand balls. You’ll demand your rightful inheritance—the estates, the business, everything—in front of all the guests.” She frowned, her eyes the color of smoked ash, her lush lips enticing. “Though his marriage to the chit does complicate things. But Nick is a proud man. Of course he’ll tell you to bugger off.”

Philip arched a golden brow, imagining the whole scene.

“Nick never could refuse a good race, now could he? And you’re an excellent horseman, the best, in fact. You’ll challenge him to a race, the prize being of course the estates. You’ll let him choose the horse you’ll ride, any one in his stables. He won’t be able to refuse such a challenge in front of his guests.”

“Your confidence in my skills is quite charming, my dear, but what if he does refuse? What if I don’t win?”

Marlena bent down and licked his nipple, making it hard as her nails dug into the flesh of his golden-haired chest. She smiled wickedly. “He won’t refuse and he
won’t
finish the race, my dear.”

“Whatever do you mean, my scandalous imp?”

“I’ve already arranged to have someone hiding in the bushes. When you round the last bend, hang back a little bit, but not enough to look like you’re throwing the race. A shot will ring out. One that will end Nicholas’ life and free you to step onto the scene and take everything, everything that was yours to begin with. The man is a very good mark. We won’t be caught. It’s foolproof.”

“He damn well better be.”

He picked her up and threw her down on the bed beneath him, driving his hard, hot shaft into her, not caring whether she was ready. She moaned with pleasure and spread her legs wide. When he was done thrusting into her and had come, she wrapped her slim thighs around his back and told him the rest of the plan.

After a respectable amount of time, she would reappear—claiming she’d been kidnapped and held against her will all this time, and of course, the two of them would fall magically in love. They could be married if it would make things look better, not that she
cared for marriage or whether Philip
took other lovers. All that mattered is that they would be back where they belonged—the rightful owners of Legacy Oaks—and Nicholas would be dead.

24

Nicholas had been away for two days and Camille found herself bored. Lonely. Not having a clue as to what she should be doing with her time. The gardens had quickly become a favorite escape of hers, and as she walked in them, she was grateful for the haze of sunshine after the recent rains. Everything glistened with a gold-silver twinge of water drying in the heat.

Taking a seat on a marble bench she enjoyed a moment of quiet, though of late, she did not like to be alone with her thoughts. She hadn’t seen Nicholas since the ball, since he almost….she didn’t like the train of her thoughts so she tried to think of something else.

But he was always there. Why couldn’t she stop thinking about him? About the way his lips and hands had felt on her body? It wasn’t fair, wasn’t fair at all that
he
should evoke these feelings in her. The man who was her husband, the man who had promised he would never truly want her as his wife.

“Thinking about your new husband?”

Camille looked up in surprise to see Damaris standing by a boxwood hedge, her dark eyes sparkling, a malicious smile on her lips. There was knowledge in her eyes beyond her years, and Camille shivered, rubbing her arms.

“Would you care to join me?” Camille asked. She saw hesitation in the girl’s eyes, but Damaris flounced over and sat down beside her.

“You know, Papa is often gone for long periods of time. I don’t really miss him anymore.” Though she had tried to disguise it, Camille had heard the catch in the child’s voice.

“Never tell me you miss him,” Damaris continued. “You’re not even in love. Why did you marry him? You’re just a tavern chit.”

Camille sighed. “You’re right, Damaris, and very astute. We did not marry for love. I think that’s why people
should
marry, but often times they marry for convenience instead, and love never plays into it.”

Damaris looked surprised. Camille knew the girl was still hurting over the loss of her mother, and now knew how she suffered from Nicholas’ neglect. Camille focused on the fact that she was still a child, and that Camille wasn’t, nor would ever be, a replacement for her mother—no matter how scandalous and uncaring Marlena may have been.

“Is that the best you can do, Damaris? Tavern chit? I mean really. I’ve been insulted by the best, and yours doesn’t even come close.”

“You’re not…mad at me?”

“Heavens, no. It takes a lot more than that to make me mad.”

Damaris thoughtfully chewed her lip. “You haven’t answered my question.”

“You’re right. I’ll be honest. I was forced to marry your father. It was arranged by my uncle. But I’ll tell you something, Damaris. I didn’t want to get married and I’m not trying to take anyone’s place. I’m not your mother, nor will I ever be. And I won’t pretend to understand your anger. But no matter how difficult you make things, I’m going to make the best of the situation. And I’d like to be friends.”

“Friends? Ha! We don’t have anything in common!”

Camille rose from the bench. “Don’t we? I was even younger than you when I lost
my
mother.” With that, Camille rose to go. She was not going to pressure the girl or tell her how to feel. She’d hated it when her uncle had done that to her. “It’s up to you,” she said over her shoulder.

25

 
“Oh stuff and bother!” Josephine exclaimed as the carriage bounced and rocked over yet another rut in the ragged road they were taking into town. She was attempting to pen a letter to her younger sister Caroline, who lived in London. What had possessed her to try to write in a carriage for God's sake?

 
Carrie, steadfastly opposed to the convention of marriage, and to the mere mention of the word itself, had reacted in quite a different manner to their father’s dictatorial ruling of the household as they were growing up. She’d rebelled. Skipped across a continent, refused to bind herself to a man for support, took up educating herself, lived, God forbid,
alone
in a flat, and taught history and mathematics. Carrie had quite a brilliant mind. It wasn’t that she didn’t like men; she just didn’t want to depend on one for any measure of happiness. Josephine smiled as she thought of Carrie smoking her cigarettes and beating most men at a gaming table.

In her latest letter to Josephine, Carrie had asked quite an intriguing question. Why, in God’s good name, had Josephine endured twenty years of marriage to such a miserable cuss as Orvin Huxley?

 
Quite an intriguing question indeed. Orvin was a miser, surly from the day she’d met him, and, in the last two years of his life, had suffered a form of dementia that often led to embarrassing predicaments that Josephine handled with as much grace as she could. Pity was a horrible emotion to experience. Maybe even more horrible than loneliness.

She stopped trying to furiously stroke words onto the delicate egg-white paper set before her on the leather writing pad she’d had installed in the coach years ago. The strap to which the quill was attached was dangerously frayed. In fact, she wrote letters like a lunatic. It was a form of therapy for her. She didn’t always send them; often, she simply stuffed them in the most convenient crevice; the décolletage of her gown, the pockets of her skirts, a desk drawer, the corners of the carriage, even the icebox, for God’s sake. She was continually forgetting about them, finding them at some later date, and tossing them in the furnace like old newsprint.

Then she’d start another. Once she’d inadvertently shown up to a gilded affair with several scraps of paper sticking out from the bodice of her lavender, pearl-encrusted gown.
 

If the ride wasn't so bumpy she'd be writing about how you haven’t lived until you’ve come upon your husband, clad only in his unmentionables, looking like an apple knocker, sitting on some poor unsuspecting family’s front stoop quite out of his head. You haven’t lived until you’ve wiped shit off of a 160-pound man who can’t remember what purpose a chamber pot serves, or your name. Why indeed, she thought.

She'd visited him every day for an entire year right up to the day he died. Sat by his bedside in that God-awful institution, reading to him, adjusting his pillows or coverlet, bringing a glass of water to his lips. And every day, he either thanked her as if she were a stranger and not his wife of twenty years or cursed at her so vilely that she had to leave the room. Why indeed. She didn't know the answer. How unspeakably odious.

And yet she felt some sort of affection for him, she thought. But she suspected it had something to do with duty. He seemed to need her in an odd sort of way. As the elder daughter, Father instilled in her quite a fear of personal expression. She did her duty. Didn't question it. And now, looking back, she wished she hadn't lived the way she did. She wished she'd known she had choices.

She stared out the carriage window and wished she'd looked into her heart instead of locking it up. Her husband had hated everybody and everything. He rarely laughed. He spent most of the time in his apartments, surrounded by his precious shelves of snuff, beautiful jars with their gilt letters, and all the necessary apparatus for moistening and mixing; the snuff boxes he’d collected over the years. The only thing for which he ever felt any affection during the droll course of his life was his light-blue Sevres box.