LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

about her waist. He growled, “Impertinent trespasser! Shall I throw him out on his ear, Laury?”

      Her eyes touched his face a moment. “This is my husband, Colonel. Billy Joe Stafford, of Stafford Hall. Colonel Edmund Emerson.”

      “God’s love!” Emerson whispered.

      Stafford came forward to bow stiffly, a grim smile on his lips. Golden epaulets and a sword dangling from leather straps made Emerson seem a fine figure of a soldier to Stafford, who was used to the ragged Continentals and the buckskinned Marylanders and Virginians.

      “I’ve been rude, Colonel,” Stafford said. “I should have come with bugles blowing and heralds before me. Then I wouldn’t have found you at such a loss.” He swung to Laura Lee. “Four years is a long time, Laura. I can understand your state of shock. Shall we adjourn to the upstairs parlor?”

      He was deliberately cold, almost aloof, but inside him he was fighting the same sort of seething madness that had taken his grandfather to his death on a dueling plot and sent his father racing off to two wars.

      Laura Lee Stafford stared from the white lips of her husband to the florid countenance of the Colonel. Her smile was forced as she said, “Of course, darling! You’ll excuse us, Colonel?”

      The Colonel was profuse in his protestations of delight at being left alone. Stafford eyed the thin film of sweat on his forehead and smiled mirthlessly. He gave his elbow to Laura Lee, and noticed that the hand she rested on it trembled faintly.

      With her painted satin skirts swishing crisply beside him, with her fragrance all around him, he led her to the doorway. As he turned, he saw the Colonel dabbling at his flushed face with a kerchief. Stafford bowed and closed the door.

      Laura Lee took him up the spiraling staircase, wide hips swaying to each stride, past the paintings by Benjamin West and Sir Joshua Reynolds in their carved, gilded frames. Then the poplar planks of the upper floor were under their feet and she was pushing open the door to the upstairs parlor and moving into it.

      Stafford followed, closing the door and putting his back to it. His eyes touched the smooth skin of her shoulders and strayed to the cleft of her bosom.

      He sighed and said, “You’ve no idea how I looked forward to this home-coming, Laura. I pictured it to myself so many times. Each time it was different. Yet in all the different ways I pictured it, none mirrored the reality of your conduct with that lobsterback!”

      Her ringed fingers clasped her little fan until the knuckles showed white. “Am I to be denied friends, even if they don’t wear your precious Continental rags? You ran away, Billy. You left me all alone. I was never sure you’d come back.”

      His laughter was harsh. “Old Gem was sure. But then, Old Gem loves me.”

      She came forward three steps, until she stood close to him. Her eyes were dark and glowing beneath their long lashes. “You didn’t run out on Old Gem! Ah, I waited. Waited and yearned for you to come back! But was I to bury myself like a nun in your absence? Don mourning clothes? I managed the plantation. I made new friends.”

      “The time must have gone very swiftly, in your amusements with His Majesty’s officers!” He spoke out of the bitterness and the jealousy welling up inside him, born of the years of campfire dreams and the endless marches and retreats.

      She came nearer, swaying easily, the smile on her moist red lips an intimate thing. Her body was soft and yielding as she pressed herself against him where he stood with his back to the white door. Tenderly she kissed his chin, standing on her toes. From his chin her mouth slid to the corner of his lips.

      “Have you seen the house and outbuildings, the fields beyond them, dearest Billy? We have twenty more slaves and half a hundred more horses. And a fine new carriage. In the deepest part of the icehouse there are two chests buried. Each chest is filled with gold. I’ve been a good overseer in your absence.”

      Despite his anger and his hurt, she was a temptation to a man. Her breath was honey, and her stayless gown permitted him to feel the softness of her thighs and middle. She laughed and writhed lazily, lifting her bared arms to coil them about his neck.

      “Are you supposing I’ve been unfaithful to you, Billy Joe? Do you accuse me in your mind of bundling with every officer in a red jacket that comes with payment for the goods I sell him? Is that what eats in your heart when it should be filled only with love for me?”

      “Laura, Laura,” he whispered, and moved his head so that her lips were grazing his. He shivered to their teasing while she whispered.

      “We’ve a new bedroom suite,” she told him, “done in mahogany by Thomas Chippendale of London town. You’ve never seen it, Billy Joe.”

      His palms were sliding up over her arms to her satiny shoulders, and down her back to the lacings of her French gown. Almost unconsciously his fingers worked at those laces, until the gown fell apart to the small of her back.

      Dimly he was aware that she was choosing this method of making him her slave again, as she had done those years before, when she had come as a bride to the Hall. She had come a virgin to his big canopied bed, but she had brought her library with her, and such wisdom as she had culled from the pages of Ovid and Jean de la Fontaine and Restif de la Bretonne. Her desire to test that wisdom was as fierce as his anxiety to share it. With languor and with hungry sensuality they had learned together the arts of the flesh.

      Her thin silken shift parted as he ripped it. Now her entire back was like creamy satin under his hands and fingers, as far down as her rounded hips. Moaning softly, she arched to him. A single movement of his hands would bring gown and panniers, modesty bit and Medici collar from her body, leaving her naked to his eyes.

      “Billy Joe! It’s been so long, so long!”

      “Too long, Laura. Too long!”

      What thought had he for the fact that she was a Tory and he a rebel? She was his wife, and he had not seen her for four years. She was in his arms now and quivering against him, pleading a little, with her wet lips to his ear, her own hands like hungry talons. Of this pressure of lips to lips and hands moving easily on soft flesh he had dreamed in camps from Quebec to Valley Forge. Now the opportunity was with him to turn those dreams to reality.

      His cry was harsh and frantic as he brought his arms down, his hands filled with lace and satin. For an instant he paused, staring at the white body that was even more intoxicating than he remembered, and then he was lifting her and moving toward the bedroom suite that he had never seen.

      The sweetish scent of bayberry candles, the clink of Stourbridge glassware, and the muted drone of conversation made Stafford drowsy. He lolled against the high back of his Elfe chair, aware that the officers of His Majesty’s Thirty-third Foot, Thirty-seventh Foot, and Royal Welsh Fusileers were drinking his health and the health of his beautiful wife in rich red port. His buff and purple coat and breeches, hurriedly altered and refitted by a tailoress in from the slave cabins on the Dan, fitted him exactly, so that he seemed a very Beau Nash for elegance.

      The war was far away. It was good to sit here, with the candles guttering softly, with the wild turkey he had just eaten and the varieties of wines he had quaffed in pleasant toasts to the standards of the several British regiments warm within him. He looked at Laura Lee, and smiled contentedly. In the upper bedroom that long afternoon, she had made his every dream a reality, draining him of the hungers that had run in him for a seeming eternity. He put his thoughts of the war behind him and reached for the goblet that Old Gem was filling.

      Over the rim of the goblet he caught Colonel Edmund Emerson staring at him with savage intentness. He had seen men who looked at him like that before, over the muskets that King George III issued to his soldiers. Then Emerson was glancing aside, and Stafford put the look he imagined down to the jealousy that had burned in him that afternoon.

      A chair scraped. A scabbard clanked on its chains. Golden epaulets caught the gleam of the table candles. They were rising, these British officers and the women they had brought with them from Winnsboro and from Charles Town, to adjourn to the large ballroom

Скачать книгу