Prologue  

New Orleans, Louisiana
April 1847 

      Christien Lenoir leaned against a Doric column outside the Theatre d’Orleans’s arcaded entrance.  Tension sang along his nerve endings.  The lady should appear at any moment.  A single glimpse was all he required.  It would decide whether he proceeded or called a halt.

      Around him the creme de la creme of the Vieux Carre streamed from the theatre, pouring out into the damp night.  Family groups, courting couples trailed by their duennas, widows and gentlemen on the town, they moved in a murmur of animated conversation and hummed snatches of the music just heard in L’elisir d’amore.  The flickering gaslights mounted above the arched theatre entrance cast a yellow-orange glow over the opera crowd, glinting on jewels, shimmering on silks, satins and velvets, turning white linen a sickly hue.  In the street beyond the wide banquette, it reflected with a glass-like sheen from the wet sides of carriages and horses as swearing drivers jockeyed for position, preparing to take up their owners.  Rain had passed over during the performance, leaving puddles between the paving stones that rose in glittering wavelets as carriage wheels splashed through them.

      Abruptly, Christien straightened.  There she was, Madame Reine Cassard Pingre, just emerging into the lamplight’s glow. Her young daughter was at her side.  They came closer, passing where Christien stood, so near he could hear the silken whisper of the lady’s petticoats, catch a delicate wafting of roses and lavender.  Face set, looking neither left nor right, she seemed intent on reaching the near corner where the rue d’Orleans crossed rue Royale.

      She was of course beautiful, he saw, as all things unattainable are beautiful.  Following her with narrowed eyes, Christien felt a prickling at the back of his neck not unlike the warning when he faced an adversary of unknown skill, uncalculated power.

      The mother and child he watched were strikingly similar.  Bright hair, light brown touched with gold, curled in fine tendrils around their faces.  Though the lady’s tresses crowned the top of her head in an intricate arrangement nestled with pink camellias, the child’s drifted around her in the night wind in fine intimation of how her mother’s might appear if released from its pins.  Wide-spaced eyes, delicately molded noses and determined chins marked them both.  Their slender forms, encased in the lavender-gray silk of demi-mourning, were made to appear fashionably fragile and elegant by some modiste’s clever fingers.  The affection between them was plain to see as the lady glanced down at the child whose small, glove-encased hand rested in hers.

      Christien’s every sense took on a razor-sharp edge.  The street lamps seemed brighter, the night air fresher, the murmur of the crowd around him like a roar.  His heartbeat increased in tempo while a piercing ache of need spread from its heated center.

      It stunned him, that sudden hunger of the heart.  As a maitre d’armes, one of the infamous fencing masters of New Orleans, his days were devoted to masculine pursuits.  Little time was left for feminine company and none at all for respectable females.  He had schooled himself to do without such tender influences, seldom allowed them to cross his mind, never permitted them to hold his thoughts or his desires hostage.  He was immune, or so he’d felt, to the coup de foudre, that thunder clap of infatuation that made fools of other men.

      He had not taken an attraction to his quarry into account.  Nor had he considered how long he had been alone.  It could be a dangerous oversight.

      Mere lust was not the difficulty, though he could not take his eyes from the lady, felt suddenly parched for the taste of her, the feel of her skin against his.  Rather, it was a near desperate urge to stand beside mother and daughter, to walk homeward with them, protect them and, yes, claim them as his own and be claimed by them.

      Christien swallowed on the tightness that invaded his throat.  He understood to a nicety who the mother and daughter were, knew their status in the haut ton of French Creole society.  That he was unacceptable in the close circle of their acquaintance was a given.  Yet the exclusion struck him now as such things had not in some time, making him feel the less for it.

      Madame Pingre had been widowed two seasons ago, so was just beginning to leave off her mourning.  The whispers concerning the death of her husband fretted the edges of Christien’s mind, rumors of bloody and convenient murder.  Seeing her so close, he felt a flicker of disquiet.  She was the kind of woman a man might kill to possess yet he required her to be innocent; it was the only way the business at hand could succeed.  If she was not as expected, he might live to regret his involvement.

      The pair lived in one of the town houses on Royale, a pied-a-terre kept for the saison des visites, the annual escape from country life into the city for the social season now winding down as spring advanced.  Not for them the interminable wait to have a carriage brought around, peering down the street for its arrival among the others that clattered up the mud-streaked thoroughfare.  They would simply walk home along the wet banquette.

      The lady seemed headed in that direction.  The slight smile that curved her lips had a strained edge to it, Christien thought, and her attention was centered on the child with little left over for those around her.  She moved in an aura of isolation and seemed to prefer it that way.

      A male escort should have been with them.  No doubt the lady’s father, Monsieur Cassard, was around somewhere but delayed as he spoke to acquaintances.  Madame Pingre and her daughter were left unprotected for the moment.  Christien’s frown deepened as he saw it.

      Just ahead of her, a dowager in moss green cut-velvet and cascades of pearls turned and called a greeting.  Reine Pingre flushed a little, but paused in her escape.  Her expression was polite as she exchanged compliments and listened to a spate of complaint that seemed directed toward the acting ability of the tenor they had just heard.  The child, young Marguerite Pingre, stood swinging her mother’s hand as she gazed around her in bored impatience.

      She glanced Christien’s way, her attention snared perhaps by his intent appraisal.  The small girl blinked then returned it in solemn interest.  Christien smiled and inclined his head, a consciously gallant gesture.

      Young Marguerite’s mouth turned down.  She spun around, putting her back to him.  Clutching her mother’s fingers with both hands, she put her forehead against the bunched wrist of her opera-length kid glove.  For long seconds, she hid her face there.  Then she risked another quick glance over her shoulder.

      It seemed a great victory, one more flattering than any coquette’s show of interest.  Christien felt his mouth curve again in wry appreciation.

      The youngster’s gaze slid away somewhere past his right shoulder.  Abruptly, she stiffened.  Her face drained of color.  With a small cry, she jerked free of her mother’s hold.  In a flutter of skirts above small, white satin shoes, she darted from the banquette into the street.

      Just down the way, a cabriolet pulled by matched grays rounded the street corner on two wheels.  It straightened, racing toward the theatre.  The child jerked her head toward the sound.  She halted on tiptoe, a small, pale statue in the center of the muddy street.

      Madame Pingre swung, searching for her daughter with a startled gaze.  Her eyes widened as she caught sight of her in the path of the jangling carriage.  Snatching at her skirts, she sprang from the banquette.

      Christien was already moving, shoving his way through the stunned onlookers.  With a single glance for the wild-eyed carriage horses and the cursing driver sawing on their reins, he launched himself after the lady.  Reaching with long arms hardened by unrelenting practice with foil and rapier, he caught her around the waist just as she jerked up her daughter.  He flung himself toward the far edge, clutching the pair in an iron hold as he plunged, turning in midair.

      The street came up to meet him, slamming into his back in a welter of slime and dirty water.  Breath left him in a hard grunt, and the night sky above him spun for an instant.  Lying with mother and child locked to his chest and his pulse thudding in his ears, he felt the carriage wheels grind past so close they brushed his hair and the vibration shuddered through every fiber of his body.

      The clatter of hooves died away as the carriage came to a standstill down the street.  Somewhere a young boy whistled in shrill admiration.  People were babbling, shouting, applauding.  A stray dog barked its excitement.  Men ran to halt other wheeled traffic, gathered close with urgent queries to know if the three of them were injured, were alive.

      Christien had only a distant awareness of the commotion.  His arms were full, as was his heart that shuddered against his ribs.  A deliciously rounded, most definitely adult female form was pressed against him from chest to ankles on his right side, a warm armful of soft curves under a welter of silk topped by a mass of shining curls that tickled the underside of his chin.  On his left, a smaller shape trembled against him, pressing a small, tear-wet face into his neck.

      “Papa,” the child whispered, her lips moving against his skin with the delicate brush of butterfly wings.  “Oh, Papa.”