Sandra Hill - [Creole] (11 page)

Harriet thought briefly about escaping from her “captors,” but where would she go? No, it was better to wait things out. Especially if she had two months to wait until her time “hole” opened up again, as she suspected.

They strolled through the kitchen, walking by the startled
cook and maid, who were peeling shrimp on a wide oak table. Obviously knowing their way around, the two men led her into a pristine, walnut-paneled hall whose fine Brussels carpeting cushioned their steps. The air held the scent of talcum powder, freshly ironed linens, liquor, and an indefinable something, which Harriet quickly recognized as sex.

“
Mon cher!
” exclaimed a tall, slim woman with auburn hair piled into a knot atop her head. She rushed through the sliding wood doors of a parlor and into Etienne’s open arms, hugging him warmly.

“Simone,
chérie
!” he greeted her as he whirled her in a circle.

Unlike the hardened soiled doves Harriet had expected to meet in a brothel, Simone could pass for a well-bred Creole virgin…pure as the driven snow. Well, more like pure as the driven slush, Harriet quipped to herself. The woman’s long black skirt and high-necked, white blouse was more what Harriet would have expected of a schoolmarm, not a madam. But her large breasts and slim waist, prominent in the close-fitting garments, would be an asset in her line of work, Harriet observed, perhaps unkindly.

Leaning back slightly, Simone appraised Etienne’s appearance with an uplifted brow, taking in his spectacles and center part, then giggled at Cain’s equally out-of-character garments. “My, my. Who are we today?”

“Morticians,” Etienne said flatly.

“Tsk-tsk!” Simone shook her head at their seeming foolery.

“We need to hide out for the night,” Etienne told her and briefly explained about the men following them.

Simone, immediately serious, assured them she had guards aplenty and all of her employees were closemouthed. They would be safe, at least for a short period of time. After they were safely ensconced in their rooms, she’d go talk to her girls and the guards, she said.

Then, relaxing, Simone moved into Cain’s arms. “
Mon
coeur
.” she sighed, looping her arms around his neck and peering at him through sultry, lowered lids. “So, the swamp doctor returns.”

“He does,” Cain said, smiling widely as he laid wide palms on the woman’s buttocks, pulling her closer.

She immediately moved his roving hands higher to the safe territory of her waist. “But what has happened,
cher?
” she fretted, passing fingertips over his bruised eye and cut chin.

“I ran into a little trouble, love.”

“What? One of your corpses attacked you?” She clucked. “Oooh, that cut needs some stitching.”

“No, it’ll heal on its own,” he said.

“Will you have time to examine my girls for the pox? And did you bring more of those French letters I asked you to order from Paris?”

He nodded. “They’re in Etienne’s satchel. Don’t you have any of the quinine sponges left that I sent you last month?”

“
Certainement!
” Then Simone fluttered her eyelashes flirtatiously. “I have the strangest…itch. Do you think you have a cure for
that
in your medical bag, too?”

“I have just the cure,” he assured her, “but, Simone, my dear, I thought you were saving that…itch for my brother. He would cut off certain of my favorite body parts if I stepped within two feet of your bedchamber.”

Simone laughed, a feminine, rippling sound.

“Where is the scamp?” she asked lightly, but her air of unconcern was belied by the anxious wringing of her hands.

Cain patted her arm. “He should be here soon.”

She nodded, but one hand trembled nervously over her heart.

Hmmm
. There was a story here.

Then Simone’s attention moved to her.

And it was about time. Harriet was practically swooning from loss of blood and all that running and Etienne’s suffocating hold on her as he’d dragged her along.

“And this is?” Simone inquired. “
Une fille de joie?
Oh,
bon Dieu
, I did not notice before. The woman has been injured and you two oafs stand about bantering with me.”

Harriet flashed the two oafs a satisfied smile as Simone fussed over her shoulder, then declared she would soon have the wound cleaned and bandaged properly.

“Simone, may I present Dr. Harriet Ginoza,” Cain said finally.

Simone arched a brow at him.

“She’s a sawbones like me,” he explained “but she’s Etienne’s soul mate, come to rescue him.”

She and Etienne both groaned. That
soul mate
remark of hers was going to stick like Krazy Glue.

“
C’est vrai?
Really?” Simone linked her arm with Cain’s.

“Really. She’s already brought his sense of humor back.”

“
Très bien!
” Simone exclaimed, smiling a welcome to Harriet. “He was becoming such a dour fellow.”

Etienne, leaning casually against a wall, snorted with disgust at all the ribbing.

“And I’m fairly certain the male urges he lost in the war are coming back, too,” Cain confided with exaggerated solemnity, despite Etienne’s warning glare.

“What lost urges?” Simone inquired with professional interest as she motioned for the three of them to follow her up the stairs and through the strangely silent house. Nonbusiness hours, Harriet supposed. “He stopped here last year, and Francine never complained,” she told Cain. “In fact, they broke the rope supports on one of the beds. His disguise then was a pirate. Eye-patch, hoop earring, parrot.
Alors!
I never heard so many ‘Land ho, maties’ in all my life. Now that I think on it, the parrot is still here, a pet of Francine’s.”

Harriet heard a choking sound behind her, but she didn’t turn to see if Etienne was amused or outraged this time. She was too busy imagining what kind of strenuous exer
cise would have resulted in a broken bed. And how he would look as a pirate.

“Which would you prefer first,
mes coeurs?
A bed or a tub?”

“A tub,” Etienne put in quickly, still following Harriet up to the third floor. “Harriet and I need to take a bath. For some reason, she smells like an old sock.”

It was Harriet who choked then.

Etienne came up beside her in the hall and grinned.

He had a killer grin. And Harriet had a sudden hatred for killer grins.
Pirate, indeed!

She swallowed hard to keep from grinning back.

“And would that be the single tub you want, or the large double one I’ve installed for my clients’ pleasure?” Simone asked, a mischievous gleam in her hazel eyes.

Cain slapped his knee and chortled gleefully.

Harriet ground her teeth.

“Double, of course.” Etienne said.

Harriet was about to protest, even though images of her in a tub with the dark-skinned scourge of her life tantalized her senses. But she failed to get the words out before Etienne came up with another bright idea.

“Simone, darlin’, I don’t suppose you have enough buttermilk to fill a tub?”

Simone and Cain continued down the hall, chatting amiably, while Etienne shoved her into an outrageously decorated room on the third floor, complete with red velvet drapes and an overabundance of gilt mirrors.

“You don’t have to push me,” she grumbled. “I want to go with Cain and Simone.”

“To help Cain check Simone’s girls for the pox?
Mon Dieu!
Why? Do you have some advice for whores, too?”

“Well, actually, I might. Prostitution is the most gender-oppressed profession in the world. I’ll bet if those women had a support group to vent their frustrations, half of them would hop the next train out of here.”

“And you think Simone would thank you for that?” He pointed a finger at her menacingly. “Don’t interfere with Simone’s business. I don’t want her to suffer for our being here.”

“If you weren’t so stubborn, you’d recognize that I have valuable information to impart.”

He braced both hands on his hips and pressed his lips
together—body signals that he wasn’t receptive to her advice.

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Did you hear about the dumb man who stopped another man from beating a donkey?”

“I warned you not to tell any more of those dumb-men jokes.”

“It was a case of brotherly love,” she quipped.

He clenched his jaw and glared at her.

“Speaking of fallen women…did you hear about the dumb man who saw an old woman fall down and didn’t stop to help her up?”

“I’m not listening,” he said, staring up at the ceiling.

“His mother had warned him against picking up fallen women.”

“Your jokes are not funny.”

“I think they are. And if you had a sense of humor, you’d think so, too. Lighten up, Larry.”

Satisfied that she’d gotten the last word in, Harriet lifted her chin haughtily. Until she got a glimpse of herself in one of the mirrors, that was.

“Eeech!” she squealed, recoiling with disbelief at the sight of herself in a ripped gown hanging off one shoulder practically down to her breast. Not to mention finger-in-the-light-socket hair and smudges of dirt and blood on her cheek. No wonder he’d lost interest.

Glancing to see what was wrong with her now, Etienne’s spectacles slipped down his nose. In all the rush, he must not have realized that he still wore them. Now he took them off and slipped them into his jacket. He probably thought that would be her cue to jump his bones.
As if!

Peering closer at the mirror, she examined the filthy bandage. The wound didn’t really bother her much; it only needed a good cleaning, which she could do herself. Not that she’d tell that to the skunk standing across the room, glaring at her as if she were nothing but trouble for him. She planned to bleed this injury for all it was worth.

But first things first. Harriet had never visited a whorehouse before, and she had to admit to a mild interest.

“Tacky, tacky,” she commented as she sashayed around the room, fingering the satin coverlet on the high, four-poster bed, flicking her fingernail against the ornate crystal wine decanter on a side table, trying to imagine how a low, one-armed velvet fainting couch would fit into the scheme of things, averting her eyes from too close a scrutiny of an oil painting of a nude man and woman over a small mantel. She picked up a stereoscope and casually peeked inside.
Oh, my!
Red-faced, she immediately put it back down.

A blue booklet caught her attention then…appropriately called
The Blue Book
, an annual publication listing all the sporting houses in New Orleans. On each page the “landladies” of the different establishments spelled out the special attractions of their houses, including multilingual prostitutes.
Geez! That must come in handy when moaning, “Ooooh, oooh, oooh, you stud, you
.”

Harriet tossed the book aside with disgust and scanned the room again. “The only thing missing is the whips and chains.”

Etienne looked up from where he was dumping his leather satchel and her briefcase in a far corner. “I’ll bring them when I come back. They should prove useful in your torture.”

“Torture schmorture,” she scoffed, then focused on something else he’d said. He was riffling through his bag for clean garments. “Where are you going?”

“It’s none of your concern where I go…unless, of course, you intend to report it back to your superior.” He slitted his eyes at her menacingly. “Now, if you’d like to confess to your spying, perhaps I would consider leniency.”

“I spy. You spy. We all spy,” she replied in a singsong chant. “Gosh, you’ve got a one-track mind.”

“Did you just admit to being a spy?”

“No, I didn’t admit to being a spy. I was joking. Can’t you take a joke?”

“A joke,” he sputtered. “I’m seriously contemplating murder, and you think it’s a joke?”

“You’d better watch that vein in your forehead. All that repressed hostility could result in a stroke,” she told him bravely, refusing to cower under his continual accusations. “On the other hand, it’s kind of a nice complement to those two lovely black-and-blue goose eggs.” He had a lump the size of a small golf ball on his forehead and another on top of his head, right in the middle of his ridiculous center part. It made the cowlick stand up straighter.

Etienne clenched his fists and said through gritted teeth “Know this, you foolish wench, you will either tell the truth when I come back, or I’ll torture it out of you. Don’t think I won’t. And you’ll pay for the
lovely
bumps on my head, as well.”

She stuck her tongue out at him, which was a mistake, not to mention juvenile and totally out of character.

“Later, darlin’”—he laughed, despite himself—“provided you’ve got a lily-white past. Well, not lily-white, but spy-free. I can’t say you’re the type of woman I usually fancy, but you’ll do in a pinch, I reckon.”

“In a pinch? Like I would even let you touch me with a ten-foot pole!”

“Oh, I’ll touch you with a pole, all right, but I would never claim ten feet.” He wiggled his eyebrows meaningfully.

She was too revolted by his crude double entendre to speak.

But he was so cute when he did that eyebrow thing.
Jeesh!
Harriet damned herself for the way in which this vulgar, chauvinistic Neanderthal flustered her.

Oh, God! I’m falling apart at the seams here. Next he’ll blow a raspberry at me, and I’ll think that’s cute, too
.

Harriet had never been a weak woman. Far from it. But this man…this infuriating man…had an effect on her
that she abhorred, one she couldn’t seem to control or pigeonhole as she did all other aspects of her life.

He was responsible for her being caught in this time warp, or whatever it was. And he must be the key to her solving the mystery and returning home. So she couldn’t alienate him. Not totally, anyhow.

He smiled at her knowingly. But it wasn’t a cruel, mocking smile, as some of his were. It was open and warm and appreciative, as if he enjoyed bantering with her and considered her equal to his challenges.

There I go again. Practically swooning
. “Oooh, don’t think you can flash that killer smile at me and everything is peachy keen again.”

“Killer smile?” he asked, and smiled even wider.

“You know what I mean. The flick-my-Bic, I-know-how-to-light-your-fire-anytime-anywhere smile.”

At first, he frowned with confusion. Then the smile returned, slow and lazy. “Does that translate into your being attracted to me?”

“Attracted? Attracted? Haven’t you been listening to me for the past ten hours? Why do you think I’ve been engaging in those loathsome dream bouts with you if I wasn’t attracted?”

“Oh, no, not the dream nonsense again!” he complained, then put a hand to his chin thoughtfully. “How loathsome?”

Harriet clamped her mouth shut.
Add motormouth to my list of sins
.

Seeing that she wasn’t going to divulge anything more, Etienne started for the door. He rubbed his forehead as he walked, no doubt trying to massage out a migraine.

“I could get rid of your headache for you,” she blurted out.

Etienne stopped with his hand on the doorknob. “Lady, you’re the one who gave me this headache.”

“You deserved both of those whacks, but that’s beside the point. I often use hypnotherapy in my practice to cure
clients of migraine headaches. My success rate is very high.”

“Forgive me, God, for asking,” he muttered, rolling his eyes heavenward, then addressed her. “Hypnotherapy?”

“I hypnotize my patients into a trance and then talk them through the cause of their pain.”

“You get rid of headaches with your talking? I don’t think so.” Etienne put a hand to his head as if she were giving him an even bigger headache, just by offering to help.

“Really. Most headaches aren’t caused by physical disorders. Work stress and marital problems are two of the biggest culprits, but, of course, there can be any number of other factors.” She brightened. “Even impotence. Although it’s six of one, half dozen of the other whether impotence generates the migraines or vice versa.”

“Aaarrgh! I am
not
impotent. And you are truly demented if you think I would allow you to mesmerize me into a helpless trance. Not that I think you could.” He closed his eyes for a moment, as if counting to ten. When he opened them, he wagged a finger at her, ordering, “Stay right there. I’ll be back shortly, and then you will answer all my questions, truthfully, or I’ll be the one putting you into a trance. A permanent one.”

“I’m coming with you,” she decided.

“No, you are not.” He folded his arms across his chest. The mulish expression on his face did not bode well for her.

“You can’t make me stay here,” she asserted.

He raised his eyebrows, then jauntily tossed a large key into the air, catching it deftly. Before she could register that it was her door key, he began to exit.

“Oh,
merde!
” Etienne swore as he almost ran into a fortyish, six-foot-tall woman with the shoulders of a linebacker who filled the doorway. The no-nonsense glint in the amazon’s eyes said she wouldn’t think twice about us
ing the pistol stuffed in the gun belt she wore over her blue calico gown.

With a mocking bow, Etienne introduced the two women. “Harriet,
honey
, I forgot to tell you. This is your…guard. Joleen, do you think you can keep my captive here till I return?”

Joleen raised her chin with affront. “Better’n you could any day, you swamp weasel.”

Weasel? Oh, yeah!
, Harriet thought.

With a dramatic flourish, Etienne handed the door key to Joleen. “Guard her well then. And don’t turn your back on her. She has a fondness for whacking.”

“Whacking? What’s whacking? I don’t do perverted things with women,” Joleen told Etienne.

He let loose with a hoot of laughter.

Harriet tried to step around the woman, who snorted with glee at her daring and gave her a shove in the chest. Harriet lost her balance and staggered backward, landing against the bed. She sat down with a whoosh, then stood huffily.

Time for a switch in plans. “I thought I was going to get a bath,” she reminded Etienne, who didn’t even chastise the woman for her rough treatment.

He grinned, obviously thinking she was anxious to jump in a tub with him.

Hah! That would be the day
. Just because she’d admitted to an attraction didn’t mean he could have her. Not anymore. She’d changed her mind about making love till she got bored with him. “We need to talk, Etienne.”

“Later.” With that single word, he spun on his heel and was gone, leaving a stunned Harriet to face the woman who might as well be a brick wall. The weasel had actually left her here to fend for herself. Well, she’d show him.

Her guard was about to go out the door, as well.

“Did you know that Etienne is a necrophiliac?”

The woman turned, trying to appear uninterested, but finally she gave in to her innate curiosity. “What’s a neck-row…whatever you said?”

“A person who likes to have sex with dead people,” Harriet explained with a great deal of satisfaction.

“Really?” Joleen exclaimed. “Mr. Baptiste is one of them?”

“Really.” Harriet crossed her heart for emphasis. “I know for a fact he was screwing around in a coffin back on the train just a few hours ago.”

By the look on Joleen’s face, Harriet just knew the word would pass along the whorehouse grapevine faster than the juiciest gossip. The weasel deserved it.

“Hey, some men feel the need to make love with anything that moves. Then there are those who don’t want to limit themselves.”

“Ain’t that the truth!” Joleen agreed.

Then, recalling her guard job, Joleen plastered a glower on her face. Once again, she was about to leave.

“Who are you?” Harriet asked, ambling closer, thinking she might establish a friendship with the woman and thus find a way out of this place.

“Huh? I’m Joleen. Your man already told you that.” The woman was clearly uneasy standing there talking with her.

My man?
“Are you a…a…” Harriet felt her face redden as she searched for the right word.

“Hooker?” the woman offered, amused at Harriet’s discomfort. “I usta be, but I ain’t serviced a man, for coin, in more’n five years. Got plum tuckered out durin’ the war. Practically got calluses on my backside.” She chortled at her own jest.

An ex-hooker?
“I didn’t know they used that word now. Hooker, I mean.” Harriet was rambling, trying to distract the woman and ease her way out the still-open doorway.

“Ain’t you ever heard of General Joe Hooker? Durin’ the war, all the soldiers was huntin’ for a bit of it, but Joe Hooker…he was a real handsome figure of a man…he visited so many of the bawdy houses in Nawleans, they renamed it Hooker’s Division. Hee, hee, hee! An’ they named us gals after ’im.” Joleen laughed heartily in re
membrance, then proceeded to describe in graphic detail the size of the general’s equipment, and she didn’t mean his cannon. She probably hoped to shock Harriet.

Instead, Harriet informed her, “You know, a man’s virility is not commensurate with the size of his bodily appendages.”