New Orleans, Louisiana

April 1847

Christien Lenoir leaned against a Doric column outside the
Théâtre 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 crème de la crème of the Vieux Carré
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 maître 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-à-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.”