Sweeter Savage Love

  When had Etienne dressed?

  Ribet, Ribet!

  Harriet jerked awake. She was hungry, but surely her stomach wasn’t rumbling that loud. Was it?

  Ribet, Ribet!

  “What is that?”

  “A bullfrog,” Etienne told her matter-of-factly.

  “A bullfrog? In a brothel?”

  Etienne laughed. And she thought she heard two other male voices laugh, as well.

  Now fully alert, Harriet sat up and a blinding heat struck her. Opening her eyes slowly, she saw the most amazing sight. Overhead, bright sunlight barely penetrated a thick green canopy of ancient oak trees dripping moss. And the canopy was moving.

  Confused, Harriet leaned back on her elbows and saw Etienne in his shirtsleeves, paddling a big canoe that resembled a hollowed-out tree trunk—a pirogue. Behind him was Cain, also rowing. Stretching her neck to peer behind her, she saw Abel in a yellow dress at the front of the canoe, his sunflower bonnet hanging down his back by its streamers. She was stuffed into a narrow space on the floor of the canoe between Etienne and Abel.

  She put a hand to the back of her neck, which ached, and memory hit her like a two-ton truck. Etienne had pinched her there, on her carotid artery, just before she’d blacked out.

  Oh, God! The slimeball really had dumped her at Simone’s. And now he was kidnapping her. Furious, Harriet pushed herself upward to get to her feet. “Why you no-good, son of a—”

  “No!” all three men yelled at once.

  “Don’t stand,” Etienne warned.

  But it was too late.

  Harriet jumped up. The canoe swayed, then tipped over. Within seconds, they were all in the green, murky water, swimming for shore.

  As she stood on the shoreline, her feet sinking in mud up to her calves, Harriet watched an alligator the size of Vermont cruise by with her briefcase in its snout.

  “Go get that alligator,” she shrieked to Etienne.

  He was tossing his satchel, Cain’s medical bag, and the case holding Abel’s trumpet onto the bank, while the two cursing brothers were righting the canoe. The icy glare Etienne shot her was not promising. Geez, how was she expected to know that the canoe would tip over?

  “Okay, I’ll do it myself,” she said huffily. Slogging out of the mire, she grabbed one of the paddles floating by. Then she stomped along the river’s edge through mud the consistency of pudding, which quickly swallowed her tracks. The whole time, she kept in her sights the alligator, who was swimming near shore with her briefcase.

  “Harriet, come back here. It’s not worth the money. Besides, Abel put your money in his trombone case.”

  “Hah! Who cares about the money? That’s a Louis Vuitton briefcase. Besides, my birth-control pills are in there.”

  “Birth…birth-control pills! You’re chasing a dangerous animal over pills?”

  “Yep!” Raising her paddle overhead, she brought it down hard on the alligator’s head. The surprised animal gave her an astonished once-over with its protrubent eyes, then released its booty. She used the handle of her oar to maneuver her briefcase closer. Stunned, the beast continued to gape at her through its big, lidless eyes.

  She turned to go back and saw immediately that the alligator wasn’t the only one stunned and gaping.

  “Hey,” she explained to the three men who clearly had never seen a real woman in action, “a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do to survive in the jungle.”

  “This isn’t a jungle,” Etienne informed her when he finally got over his shock. “It’s a bayou.”

  Tucking her teeth-imprinted briefcase under her arm—the handle hanging by a thread now—she looked up at the plague of her life. “Same difference, hon. Jungle, bayou, Wall Street, the dating scene…you need a machete to get through all of them.” She tapped his chin as she passed, just to annoy him. What she’d like to do was punch out his lights.

  “Aaarrgh!”

  “Perhaps you could channel some of that hostility into a hobby. Do you have a hobby?”

  He spun on his heel and stomped away in front of her.

  She followed him. “Anger is just an emotional reaction to a frustrating event,” she explained to his back. “A defense mechanism.”

  “Someone must have put a curse on me,” Etienne grumbled.

  “I’ve noticed that you’re often stressed out, and that’s unhealthy. Taking more than eighteen breaths per minute is the stress factor I always use for diagnosing—”

  “You’ve been counting the number of breaths I take?” His eyes flashed with consternation as he turned on her.

  “I do it reflexively,” she admitted.

  “How have you managed to live so long?” He pulled his own hair with exasperation.

  Geez, the guy really did need an anxiety overhaul. Being a softie at heart, she decided to help. “I’ve developed a good exercise for recovering from an energy drain of negative emotions.”

  She waited for him to ask her to elaborate. When he didn’t, merely rolled his eyes heavenward, she went on anyhow. “With your mouth closed, curl your tongue under, and hum for three minutes. It works every time.”

  At first, he seemed to consider her words, probably testing how to curl his tongue.

  “You have to hum, too.”

  He made a grunting sound of disgust. “The first thing I’m going to do when I get to Bayou Noir is find a voodoo priestess to remove the curse.”

  Abel, who’d just come up, must have overheard. He appeared to be trying out the tongue routine. Or maybe that humming sound was suppressed laughter.

  Actually, all three men were laughing now.

  “Do you understand half of what she says, Etienne?” Abel choked out.

  “No. Just smile and nod. That works with most women.”

  The jerk! “I’ve decided to make you three the control group for my MCP study. Jerks Anonymous, that’s what I’ll call you.”

  “What’s an MCP?” Abel inquired of Cain.

  “Male chauvinist pig,” Cain answered, to her amazement. She hadn’t realized he’d been listening so closely.

  “You missed all the good lectures Dr. Ginny’s been giving us while you were off cavorting in Memphis,” Etienne added.

  “Cavorting?” Abel snapped. “If someone hadn’t been havin’ his rooster groomed at the wrong time back on that train, we would all have been on our way to Texas by now.”

  “Texas? You’re going to Texas? Oh, no! I am not going to Texas. That’s too far away from the entry point of this time hole I’ve fallen into.”

  “I’m gonna need a whole wagonload of voodoo priestesses to get rid of this curse.” Etienne said, shaking his head.

  “Perhaps you should try some tongue humming,” Abel suggested to Etienne. “You’re lookin’ mighty tense. Is it sexual deprivation?”

  “Abel, you are a really dumb man with your continual sexual innuendoes. I’ve found that men who talk too much about sex are usually less than proficient in the sack,” she observed. “For example, do you know the difference between a golf ball and a g-spot? What am I thinking? Of course, you don’t.”

  “Another dumb-men joke!” the three dumb men complained.

  “The answer is: A man will search forty-five minutes for a golf ball.” She folded her arms with a self-satisfied “Hmpfh!”

  “What’s a golf ball?” Cain asked, puzzled.

  “Damned if I know,” Etienne answered. “What’s a g-spot?”

  “Is she questioning my abilities as a lover?” Abel wanted to know.

  “Durn tootin’ I am. You have this real fixation with sex, Abel. In fact, all men do.”

  Etienne, Cain and Abel all said at the same time, “Who? Me?”

  She took a deep breath and threw out one last shot. “Most of all, I think it’s really true what scientists say about men reaching their sexual prime at age eighteen. Everything is downhill from then on. So stop fighting nature, guys. There’s nothing worse than an overaged studmuffin.”

  All three
sets of jaws dropped in astonishment.

  “I’m not downhill. Are you two downhill?” Abel asked.

  “What’s a studmuffin?” Etienne asked.

  “I can’t believe a lady would talk about such intimate matters,” Cain said.

  “I think I’ll put her jokes to music,” Abel announced.

  “If you do, I’m going to stuff that trumpet down your throat,” Etienne threatened.

  Harriet plopped down to the ground and sighed, suddenly bone-weary. Like a slow-motion recap, all the horrible events of the past two days flicked through Harriet’s mind. The train derailment. Her time-travel. Being locked in a coffin. Making love in a brothel. Her escape, then the kidnapping. And finally, a confrontation with an alligator. It was just too darn much for one woman to handle.

  “Chérie, don’t cry.”

  Harriet looked up to see Etienne hunkered at her side. He reached out a thumb and wiped a fat tear off her cheek. She hadn’t even realized she’d been weeping. How sappy of her! But Harriet came to an even more alarming conclusion in that moment as she met Etienne’s gentle gaze.

  Oh, my God! I’m falling in love with a jerk. A ten.

  Chapter Eleven

  As dusk began to descend on the bayou, Etienne leaned his head back against an ancient cypress tree and folded his legs at the ankles, almost at the water’s lapping edge. With an inner sigh, he took in the peace and beauty of the land he loved.

  His family had moved from the remote southern Louisiana swamplands of Bayou Noir in Terrebonne Parish when he was six years old. Even though he’d been raised most of his life in California, had traveled the length and breadth of the United States before and after the war, had studied in Europe’s most cosmopolitan cities, it was the bayou that felt like home to him.

  There wasn’t an animal or plant he didn’t know in this semitropical paradise. And he held a special affection for all of them, whether they were deadly or beneficial to humankind. It was this landscape Etienne had dreamed of when life seemed most hopeless to him in prison. Here was simplicity. Every animal and plant had a purpose. This life he could understand.

  He smiled as a spotted skunk waddled out of the bushes, and raccoons, opossums and moles scurried out of its path. Poor thing! Although it was smaller than a house cat, one squirt of this little fellow’s musk could render the fiercest beast temporarily blind. And the stench had been known to carry for over a mile.

  In the sky, thousands of squealing bats swept out en masse like black sheets floating on the wind. Flying squirrels glided through the dense trees, being careful to avoid the perched night owls. Across the stream a rare red wolf and her litter of four rangy cubs drank warily, watching him the entire time. Gators of every size and description—the undisputed royalty of this territory—glided by, surveying their domain.

  If only his own life were so uncomplicated.

  His gaze slid to his current complication, a few feet away near the fire. Harriet was prattling to Abel about his music and something akin to it, called jazz, in a faraway time. Words like Dizzy, Jelly Roll, Louis, blues, ragtime and improvisation rippled off her tongue and held Abel spellbound.

  Cain was sleeping soundly on a mound of pine needles on the other side of the clearing. Earlier she’d kept him enthralled with her tales of modern medicine. The cures that were to come for such diseases as typhoid, smallpox and diphtheria. And the horrendous new diseases, like AIDS.

  Cain was lying in his three-sided shebang—a crude temporary shelter comprised of brush and blankets. They’d decided to rotate guard duty during the night. The fire would keep most animals away, but it was best to be sure in this deadly environment.

  “Oh, my goodness!” Harriet exclaimed to Abel, jarring Etienne to attention. She put a hand over her heart. “It just occurred to me. New Orleans was the birthplace of jazz after the Civil War.”

  “Jazz?” Abel laughed. “Is that what they’ll call the new music?”

  “Why is that so funny?”

  “Honey, jass is a French word for…ah, fornicating. Same as that famous f-word. A jazzbow is a real Don Juan.”

  She smiled.

  “Well, I guess the word’s appropriate, though, because this kind of music is best when it’s low-down and dirty, like sex.”

  “Leave it to you, Abel, to bring the subject back to sex. But, really, there’s another reason I was so surprised before. What’s your last name?”

  “Lincoln,” Abel said, perplexed at her question.

  Harriet raised an eyebrow. “Abe-l Lincoln?”

  “Yes,” Abel chuckled. “White folks didn’t give their slaves last names. So me and Cain decided Lincoln would do us fine.”

  “There was a man…” Harriet started to say, staring at Abel now as if he were some sort of God. “Oh, this is incredible, but there was a black man called A. B. Lincoln whom historians refer to as the godfather of jazz. A lot of early jazz wasn’t written down; so it would have been easy to get the names mixed up, or mispronounced.”

  “Me? A godfather?” Abel scoffed, but he held his shoulders a little higher.

  “And Abel, I just thought of something else.” There were tears in her eyes. “One of the most famous jazz songs written by A. B. Lincoln was ‘My Simone.’ Experts say it is pure poetry.”

  Abel just gaped at her incredulously, and there were tears in his eyes, too.

  “You and Cain were slaves?” she asked, referring back to Abel’s earlier words.

  Abel shook his head. “We were born at Bayou Noir, where our mother, Iris, was a slave. When Etienne’s papa, James Baptiste, bought the sugar plantation, he gave the slaves a chance to earn their freedom. Our mother was freed soon after we were born.”

  “How fascinating!”

  Abel nodded. “Mr. Baptiste hated slavery, just like Etienne did. That’s why Etienne left college to fight in the war. That’s why—”

  “Abel,” Etienne interrupted, not wanting him discussing his personal life. The witch knew too much about him already.

  Harriet turned her head to look at him, and scowled. He understood. She feared the powerful feelings that had overcome them both the night before, and she wanted no repetition, especially after his “dumping” her, as she so aptly described his actions.

  And he had the same fears. Sometimes she made him feel as helpless as a turtle on its back. So, for the past few hours, he’d avoided close contact with her, not even an accidental brush of flesh in passing. Mostly, he’d just watched and listened during the preparation and eating of their hastily gathered supper—a bayou hodgepodge of succulent frog legs and catfish cooked over the open fire, with tart wild cherries and crab apples for dessert. Like the rest of them, Harriet had eaten heartily. But then, all her appetites appeared to be hearty, he realized with a slow smile of remembrance.

  “Are you laughing at me? Again?” Harriet sniped, getting to her feet. Abel got up and, yawning widely, ambled off into the trees to relieve himself.

  Harriet was wearing an old shirt of Etienne’s with the sleeves rolled up numerous times to the elbow and the tails knotted at her midsection. His mortician trousers were much too big, but she’d managed to rope in the waist and roll up the pant legs so that they wouldn’t slip down or trip her bare feet. And, blessed Lord, she had the sexiest feet in the world—narrow and high-arched with pink-painted toenails.

  Maybe he was a pervert, after all. Getting all hot-blooded over toes, of all things! And what he’d like to do with those slim appendages!

  Using soapwort leaves for lather, they’d all bathed earlier in the stream, including Harriet, who insisted on privacy, even though he’d seen all she had to offer. But he hadn’t objected. He didn’t need that kind of temptation, or complication, in his life right now. Even fully covered in her mannish attire, she enticed him. Mightily.

  “No, I’m not laughing at you, Harriet,” he said finally, coming to his feet as well. They stood yards apart, but still too close. “I’m…I’m just surprised that you’ve bewitched Ca
in and Abel so quickly with your stories of the future.”

  “Bewitched? I don’t know about that. They do seem to believe that I’ve time-traveled, even though I can hardly accept it myself.”

  He shrugged. “There just doesn’t seem to be any other explanation. You have to understand that superstition and belief in unnatural events, like voodoo, are part of the Negro culture.”

  “And you?” she asked, tilting her head, which caused her hair to come undone from its loosely tied queue.

  “Creoles are raised under the dictates of the Roman Catholic Church. Miracles are a big part of its dogma. Despite my absence from the church all these years, I believe in miracles.”

  She smiled.

  And his traitorous heart skipped a beat.

  “So you consider me a miracle?”

  He had to smile back. “Hardly. Your method of coming here might be a miracle, but whoever sent you intended it as a curse on me. Perhaps for my misspent youth.”

  “Is that why you kidnapped me in New Orleans and forced me to come with you? And by the way, I don’t appreciate your pinching the carotid artery in my neck; you could have done permanent nerve damage. Was it because you felt a responsibility for my being here?”

  “No…well, perhaps. Mostly it was an impulse, engendered by your foolish escape and then selling the gold bar. You are in danger now, too, sweetheart. Don’t for a second doubt that.”

  “Here I thought you were so overpowered with love for me that you couldn’t help yourself.”

  He couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or serious.

  “I think of this as some kind of divine intervention, too,” she added. “I doubt there’s any logical scientific explanation. Yep, I was sent here for a purpose.”

  “And that is?”

  “I haven’t figured that out yet, but it’s all tied in with you somehow.”

  He groaned.

  “Changing the subject, there is something I want you to know. You treated me like a whore last night, leaving me the way you did, with no good-bye or explanation. But I—”