A Season For Love

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A tilt of his head was Cullen’s only response.

“Then I’ll watch over her now, Cullen. Until she wakes.”

Rising from his chair, with his gardening book folded under his arm, the islander opened the door that would lead to the suite where Maria had been kept safe. Jericho stepped through and turned, the tray still in his hands. “Thank you, Cullen, for everything.”

Cullen smiled and stepped into the elevator. With his huge hand he kept the door ajar. “Keeping watch was my pleasure, Sheriff. Miss Delacroix reminds me of Miss Eden.” His words were a low rumble, meant only for Jericho. “A brave woman, but deeply hurt by life, and sad.”

“Her name is Rivers, Cullen. Maria Elena Rivers. We were married eighteen years ago.” Jericho should have been surprised that he’d said the words. He wasn’t. But the last sin that could be laid at Cullen’s door was gossip. The man held his confidences as determinedly as a clam.

The islander’s smile gleamed brighter, with no trace of surprise. “Then, now that you’re here, perhaps Mrs. Rivers’s sadness will ease. As it did for Miss Eden when Adams came home to her.”

Cullen took his hand away. The door began to close. “Have a good night, sir. Rest assured I won’t be far away.”

Jericho had no chance to acknowledge the islander’s assurance, but he knew Cullen well enough to know he didn’t expect a response. Instead he closed the door, set the supper tray on the nearest table, and went in search of Maria.

The suite was typically Eden. Large rooms, minimally but elegantly appointed. And, of course, there were flowers. In every alcove there was whatever arrangement the space and design could accommodate. Yet even in that, Eden’s taste and preference erred on the side of pleasing rather than overwhelming. But that there were flowers was the important factor.

Maria Elena loved flowers. Jericho liked to think their little girl would have loved them as well.

The bedroom was darkened by closed shutters. The massive bed, lying in disarray, was empty. His seeking gaze followed a muted beam of light to Maria.

She stood before a narrow door, its shutter half open, letting the light of the setting sun spill through it. Maria wore a gown and a robe of silk that gleamed in the little light like a pale emerald. Her arms were crossed beneath her breasts, the tousled mass of her hair tumbled against her cheek as she stared down on the gardens of River Walk.

“Have you considered how ironic it is, after all these years, and all that’s happened, that I’m here, Jericho?”

Jericho had paused where he was. He had no idea how she knew she wasn’t alone, or even who waited in the doorway. Perhaps the cadence of his quiet step? A familiar scent? The sixth sense of lovers with its knowing recognition?

“Do you mean here in Belle Terre? Here at River Walk? Or on Fancy Row?” he asked softly, though he was sure he knew.

“Fancy Row—that says it all, doesn’t it?” She turned to him then, and he saw that if she’d slept, it hadn’t been restful. “Fancy for the sort of women who lived here. The mistresses of wealthy planters who kept them in luxury and dressed them like queens, yet wouldn’t recognize either the women or the children they bore them. Row, because even these homes among the finest in the city didn’t deserve the respect of having a street.”

“What you say was true, but no more,” he countered as she paced toward him, the gown skimming her knees, the robe swaying over her unbound breasts. “Times change, Maria Elena. So do people.”

“Do they?” In a familiar gesture, she threaded her fingers through her hair, combing it back from her face. Before her hand had moved completely away, the dark strands were falling again in a veil over her cheek. “There are those who will think it’s fitting that I’m staying here. The child of a Delacroix, living on the street where the Delacroix courtesans plied their sinful trade.”

“Legend has it the Delacroix were the most beautiful, most accomplished women in the low country. A prize for one man to claim. Even to duel for, Maria Elena. Yet you paint them as whores, little better than streetwalkers going from man to man.”

“Not from man to man,” Maria corrected bitterly. “To the highest bidder.”

“To one man, to whom each was faithful,” he reminded.

“For whom they bore illegitimate children. Always to be known as Delacroix, never by their father’s name.”

“Keeping a mistress, being a mistress, was an accepted practice of the time, my love. But nothing to do with you.” He would have reached out to take her in his arms, but he knew that in this mood, she would reject him.

“You’re wrong, Jericho. It has everything to do with me. I’m a Delacroix, a reminder of an accepted but unsavory custom. In Belle Terre, nothing is ever forgotten. Why else did I lose our child?”

“They were just boys, Maria Elena. Certainly misguided, certainly cruel. But still boys. Foolish, thoughtless boys.”

“And bigots,” Maria snapped. With her arms clutched ever more tightly about her, she turned her back on him. “Like all the good citizens of Belle Terre.”

Jericho hadn’t bothered to change out of his uniform, but his broad-brimmed hat had been left downstairs. Now, in frustration, he scrubbed a hand over his eyes and his forehead, dislodging a dark lock that drifted over his temple. Letting his hand fall away in a loosely curled fist, he asked softly, “Does that sweeping opinion include me? Or Eden? How about Adams and his brothers? Or Lady Mary? Have you forgotten she was kind to you?”

Her back was still turned to him. When her tirade began, her shoulders had been stiffly erect. Now they curled as if she flinched from the acrimony of her bitter judgment.

“Does it, Maria Elena? Are we all intolerant snobs, simply because we aren’t all descendants of the Delacroix beauties? Have you forgotten that your lost summer girl was my little girl and my loss, as well?”

“I…no.” Keeping her back to him, she shook her head slowly, then fell silent to stand mutely in sunset.

In the broken denial, Jericho heard the threat of tears. He had to go to her then. Nothing on earth could have stopped him from holding her. Not even fear of rejection. Nor rejection itself.

Yet when he gathered her in his embrace, she turned to him, her arms hard about him, her mouth lifting greedily to his.

With Maria the initiator and the leader, their kiss was long and wild and deep. Her teeth nipped at his lips, but only for her tongue to soothe the hurt. Her hands slipped between the crush of their bodies to slide over his chest, his throat. Circling to his nape, her fingers tangled in the dark hair brushing his collar, but only to drag him fiercely down to her. She couldn’t get him close enough. The teasing caress of probing, twining tongues wasn’t deep enough, hard enough.

“More,” she muttered as she released the clutch of his hair, and turned her attention to the buttons of his shirt. “I want to feel you. I want the touch of your skin on mine. I want your hands on me. I want you. Only and forever, you.”

“No, my love. No.” He caught her hands, pinning them between the unyielding musculature of his chest and the enticing softness of her breasts. “I’m sooty. I stink of smoke and grease.”

“You’re Jericho. That’s all that matters.” As she whispered the last, she leaned to kiss their joined hands. Then, slowly, her head lifted and she rose on tiptoe to touch her lips to the pulse that fluttered like a captured bird at the hollow of his throat. The touch of her tongue sent the heat of an inferno racing from his throat to pool hot and heavy in his groin.

Then, she lifted her head to let her gaze reach into his. In the half light of twilight in an ever-darkening room, he saw that her eyes of shimmering silver were filled with fear. Not fear of dying, but of never having truly lived.

She wanted him now, as an affirmation of life. In her eyes he saw grief for the little life they’d lost, for the life they’d never had together, even the life they might never have. But this moment was theirs. No one and nothing could take it from them.

“Yes.” He answered the question she hadn’t asked, except with her eyes. “Yes.”

In a single motion he nearly ripped her nightclothes from her body. Before the emerald silk could pool at her feet, he swept her into his arms to stalk the length of the room. Laying her gently on the bed, he straightened to tear away his own clothes.

She watched him. As buttons ripped from their moorings, her gaze raked over every inch of exposed flesh. Next his belt was flung away. The snap at the waist of his trousers opened, the zipper growled. As if by magic, trousers and boots and every shred of clothing were gone from him.

He towered over her, all six and a half manly feet of Jericho Rivers. So handsome, so aroused, so ready. He wanted her. He needed her more than he’d ever wanted, ever needed, before. Yet with all the strength and reason he possessed, he waited.

Maria understood. She must set the pace. Allowing herself one last worshiping look, she opened her arms, whispering, “Make me feel real, Jericho. Teach me to be glad I’m alive.”

Then he came down to her. There was no seduction, no foreplay. The time for that had passed. Maria Elena wanted what he wanted. She needed what he needed—his body joining with hers, stroking hers, hard, fast, deep. Over and over again until their bodies lifted and arched seeking even more.

He didn’t think of hurting her. He didn’t feel her nails tearing across his shoulders and down his chest. He only heard her whisper yes, and yes, and yes, as he gathered her wrists in his hands and pinned them over her head.

With her hands held captive as she arched to meet the power of his thrust, he bent to kiss her breast. Yet despite their madness, his suckling was as gentle as their mating was fierce.

Her breasts were fragrant from the bath oils for which the Inn at River Walk was famous. Their flavor gathered in his lungs, on his skin, and his tongue. Flavors and scents that banished the acrid memory of explosives and fire. There was no car, no young thief, no burned hulk. Only a man and a woman. Only Jericho and Maria Elena.

When he bent to suckle for the last time, he felt the first beginning shudders clasping him. Then she was struggling to free her hands, but only to draw his mouth to hers. Only to mate with him with lips and tongue, as she had with soul and body.

This had begun out of unfathomed need. As coupling in animal heat. As lust. As sex. But it was cleansing passion and abiding love that drew them to its splendid conclusion.

As she wrapped him in that splendor, giving of herself even as she took from him, she was his friend, the center of his universe. His reason for living.

The woman he loved.

His wife.

Four

Jericho woke with the dawn, out of habit and custom. As he had before, he sat by Maria’s bed watching her sleep, while memories swirled through his mind. Not just memories of the night, but of their years as children and teens in Belle Terre.

In the pall of those long-ago memories, a smile bearing no trace of humor or joy twisted his lips and turned his eyes to seething pits. He’d known Maria Elena Delacroix almost all his life. And loved her passionately and hopelessly for nineteen of those years. Sometimes, as now, he suspected he had loved her even longer.

During the night, they’d roused, showered together and made love again. Now, as she slept, with her drying hair rippling over the pillow, in spite of telltale marks of intemperate passion, it was the innocence of a frightened girl he saw. An exquisite young girl eager to be accepted, eager to be liked.

But that was before she truly understood what it meant to be a Delacroix. Especially in Belle Terre. Before she discovered she would never be forgiven for the perceived sins of any number of distant grandmothers, aunts, and cousins. Before she realized that being smarter and more beautiful than the other girls of Belle Terre Academy, and a Delacroix, was an unforgivable combination.

The first time he’d seen her, she was a scrawny little thing, with changeable gray eyes too big for her face, and a wealth of shiny hair as black as sin. She was just ten, a brand-new student at the academy. More than a little lost and confused, and totally overwhelmed by the affluence of her new surroundings. He was eleven, almost twelve, a veteran of six years at the private academy.

While she was unbelievably tiny, he was already the biggest kid his side of high school. So, on her first day, when she’d fumbled unfamiliarly with her locker, spilling her new books all over the hall, it seemed natural that he would pick them up, then offer to carry them as he showed her to her first class.

That was the beginning of “Jericho and Maria.” Out of a simple courtesy that was second nature to a tenderhearted boy, grew a unique friendship that forged a lasting bond.

There were repercussions from the beginning. Some vicious teasing, hate-filled remarks. Later, he understood that his classmates were parroting parental attitudes. A few of the boys scoffed at him for liking any girl. But especially the new girl, whom everyone seemed to be certain shouldn’t be attending the academy at all.

But even at eleven, almost twelve, Jericho had liked her smile. He liked the serious gaze that always seemed to find him, no matter where he was or what he was doing. He liked pretty Maria and her eyes and her smile more than he hated the teasing.

He knew she was different from the other girls. He knew there was something more than the unspoken class system of the proud Southern town that set her apart. But Jericho’s mother was a Yankee and a maverick, the only black mark against the most aristocratic Rivers name. In her own words, Leah Rivers didn’t give “a cup of tea in hell” for the townfolk’s preoccupation with whose father was who and had what. She didn’t care whose long-lost ancestor had signed what document or led what cavalry charge where. She found the deadly serious celebration of family connections and claim of old money foolish and intolerably arrogant.

In an inexplicable peculiarity of the cliquish Southern town, this very disdain made Leah Rivers one of Belle Terre’s most respected women. Because she practiced her beliefs, judging people by their own accomplishments, Jericho never understood the parroted slurs. It was a classmate who enlightened him, whispering behind a shielding hand a tale of half truths and embellished lies of what the Delacroix women had been nearly a century before.

It was then he’d visited his grandmother. His father’s mother, Grandmère Rivers, as she preferred to be addressed. More than an equal and a match for her daughter-in-law in brutal frankness, this proud and patrician old lady was, nevertheless, the revered ruler of society in Belle Terre. But, as she warned him in the course of their talk, even she couldn’t control the misguided cruelties and injustices of prejudice.

He was thirteen the day of their talk, and admittedly naive. But before she was through, he understood the facts, the myths, the foibles, and the pain of the wealthy Southern gentleman’s penchant for keeping a mistress and even a second family. He understood that once it had been a common, expected social institution.

Grandmère had saved the Delacroix women for last. With her back ramrod straight and her chin tilted, she’d spoken of a family of daughters. Girls of lesser means, noticed first for their comeliness, then their innate soft-spoken gentility. Traits that became consistent as their name and beauty became legend.

They were few, their intelligence and style always unique. Making their liaisons the most sought after, bringing the highest prices on the bidders’s market. Eventually it became an accepted fact that the prettiest Delacroix girlchild would be groomed from birth to be a courtesan. Yet, only if the young woman accepted the terms of the bidder. If she accepted, the relationship would be permanent.

“It was rare, almost unheard of, that a Delacroix ever had more than one lover,” Grandmère emphasized. “Beyond his wife, neither would her patron.

“Not a good practice, Jericho.” Almost too softly to be heard, she added, “But not the worst that could have happened for all who were involved either.”

There was more, Jericho remembered. Over lemonade and Grandmère’s special sugar cookies, she explained many customs of the past. Some good. Some bad. Some a mix of both. Some silly. Some confusing. Some surprising.

But the greatest shock of all was learning that his own grandfather, in the course of a life cut short, had kept a mistress.

“Ah, yes,” Grandmère assured him. “She was a pretty little thing. Not big and horsey as I. Your grandfather kept her in exquisite style for years. With my blessing. But, thank God, there were no children.”

Faded eyes that once had been the exact color of his own, searched his face. “Rest assured, Jericho, my sweet boy, you have no secret uncles, or aunts, or cousins strolling the streets of Belle Terre. Your grandfather might have been a bounder, he might have thrown away half a fortune, his excesses might have led to an early death, but, in the little he did right, a second family was not an added complication.”

“Didn’t you care, Grandmère?”

He could still remember how his voice trembled when he thought of how the man who had never been more to him than a portrait over the dining room mantle and a name on a gravestone must have hurt this grand and beloved lady.

But when she’d glimpsed his sickened expression, Letitia Rivers had taken his face between her pale beringed hands, saying the words he had never forgotten.

“Jericho, my sweet child, your not-so-dear departed grandfather is proof one’s station in life does not guarantee a good and wise, or even a kind, person. That you must always understand.

“But most important, you must know and believe that your grandfather’s having kept a mistress doesn’t make you a bad person. No more that the Delacroix women having been mistresses makes your little friend anything but what she is—a sweet, beautiful, and intelligent child.”

“Then I should keep on being her friend, Grandmère?” he asked, too preoccupied by all she’d told him to wonder how at seventy-two Letitia Rivers could know that Maria Elena was sweet, beautiful, intelligent, or anything at all.

When he remembered later, he’d shrugged it off. After all, in his eyes, Grandmère Rivers, grand dame of Belle Terre society, knew everything.

She’d peered at him over the lorgnette she stubbornly preferred to glasses. As if she’d assessed his courage and approved, at last, she nodded. “Of course you should.”

“Good,” he replied as he leaned to kiss her wrinkled cheek, “’cause I intended to all along.”

Grandmère Rivers chuckled, delighted with him. As he left the room, she called after him, “Bring little Miss Delacroix by to see me one day. We’ll have lemonade and sugar cookies.”

“I will,” he promised.