Page 28 of Frankly, My Dear

“Oh, heck! I read this book called The Perfect Fit. The authors claim there is this one sexual position where the male and female bodies are so perfectly aligned that the sexual pleasure can go on for hours and hours before climax.”

“Hours and hours!” Reba’s face brightened hopefully. “See! I knew you could help me,” she gushed. “That’s just the kind of information I need. The Perfect Fit, you say. And it works?”

“I don’t know if it works,” Selene said, immediately defensive. Hey, she’d mentioned it to Devon once, and he’d laughed cruelly at her as if she’d been grasping for straws in a hopeless attempt to be more sexual.

Reba grabbed Selene’s hand and squeezed it in thanks. “I’m so glad you’re coming back to Bayou Noir. I just know we’re going to be good friends.” When she realized she was holding Selene’s hand, she dropped it immediately and looked down with embarrassment.

They entered the St. Louis Hotel, and Selene saw a large number of people in the central rotunda with its marvelous skylights. “What’s going on?”

“The auctions. People come from all around for the daily sales. See, Fergus and Mr. Baptiste are over there.”

Selene had been to a few auctions in the past…at Sotheby’s. This was vastly different. Some auctioneers shouted out details about household furnishings from bankrupt estates—Turkish rugs, Italian marble, furniture from Paris, London, Philadelphia, and New York, silks from China, casks of French wine, coffee from Martinique. Other auctioneers pointed to cotton bales and barrels of sugarcane syrup. But Selene sensed that most of the people weren’t there to bid on fine art, or antiques, or plantation products.

A slave auction drew the liveliest bidding.

And James was one of the bidders.

Damn him!

James needed a drink. Badly.

He motioned for Fergus to sign the papers for the young buck he’d just purchased, bringing his total up to twelve Negro slaves, all males under age twenty, to work his sugar fields. One of them, younger than the rest, sobbed quietly with humiliation. James forced himself to look away, raking his fingers through his hair with frustration. He understood too well the boy’s shame in being purchased—like a horse, but less prized. As soon as he completed his transactions here, James intended to lock himself in his hotel room with a bottle of bourbon. Hell, maybe two bottles.

He watched as an obese merchant next to him ogled a coal-black Mandingo girl, no more than twelve. He wouldn’t intervene. In truth, her fate was no worse than most, and better than some. She could have been sold to the Fancy Trade, not an easy life for beautiful Negro women, sentenced to a lifetime of prostitution. Fancy Girls, they were called, but there was nothing fancy about their sordid life.

Even worse, there were evil men like Jake Colbert, his father’s overseer, who stood across from him, fingering his huge drooping mustache and a knotted whip—both his trademarks. The vicious Colbert bought only prime young males to work the Baptiste cotton fields. Within a year, they’d be worn down to skin and bones, working fifteen to twenty hours a day, scarred for life.

Hell and damnation! How he hated slavery! Almost as much as he hated owning slaves himself. Five years of working side by side with the natives on a Santo Domingo sugar plantation as an indentured servant had taught him good and well what servitude felt like. But he’d had an opportunity to buy his freedom in the end, unlike these helpless slaves.

Well, that wasn’t quite true, at least for his slaves. James, much to the ire of his fellow planters, offered his slaves an incentive to freedom. If they worked to his satisfaction for five years, he freed them on the condition that they gave him five additional years of indenture. Thus far, his slaves had worked harder than those on any of the surrounding plantations.

But still, slavery was slavery, no matter how he sugar-coated it, and it left a bitter taste in his mouth. Selene had asked him about his dreams, his fondest wish. Escape…that was what he yearned for—escape from the burdens of running a struggling sugar plantation, escape from the responsibilities of a family that was splintering apart, escape from the loneliness of his self-imposed exile. Most of all, escape from the system of slavery he abhorred and yet benefitted from.

Sometimes he thought he was as much a prisoner as his slaves.

James noticed Selene enter the hotel with Reba. Fergus approached the two women, taking an overflowing basket from his wife’s hands. James thanked God for his good fortune in Fergus Cameron, who’d hired on as his overseer five years ago. He was an honest, hardworking man. A friend. And an experienced sugar maker—an invaluable asset which James unhesitatingly rewarded with a percentage of the cane profits each year.

Selene moved away from Reba and Fergus and continued onward, stomping toward him in a most unfeminine manner, a storm brewing in her hazelnut eyes. Slipping his hands into the pockets of his trousers, he waited, wondering what he’d done to raise her ire this time. It didn’t take much.

He gazed at her indulgently, rather amused by the strange woman who’d come into his life only yesterday. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

A group of men accidentally jostled Selene as they passed, but, other than perfunctory apologies, she garnered no attention from them, being too tall and thin for most tastes. Hell, her bony body had more angles than a Louisiana bayou.

Amazingly, he was beginning to see an attractiveness in Selene that he hadn’t perceived at their first meeting. Oh, he wouldn’t call her beautiful, despite all her claims of being a beauty in her time. Time! That was another thing James couldn’t accept. No, the mad wench was probably just a little unsettled in her mind. High-strung women often were.

But to give her credit, these men in the rotunda who ignored her hadn’t seen her “strut her stuff,” as she’d so vividly called that outrageous demonstration in the park. He grinned at the recollection. He’d like to see her repeat the performance wearing a lot less clothing.

And the lady did kiss rather nicely, James thought, honing in on the thick, sensual lips that invited a man’s touch. He felt a quickening at the juncture of his thighs at the memory of her soft lips under his. He ran the fingertips of his right hand across his lips, as if he could still feel her touch.

Selene’s face flushed prettily as she followed the movement of his fingers. For a brief second, their eyes held and he knew Selene was remembering the kiss, too.

Hmmm. Maybe he would forget the bourbon and just take Selene back to his hotel room. If he drew the drapes, he might be able to ignore her jutting ribs and bony arms. As he recalled, her legs were long and nicely shaped. And her breasts, of course. Ah, yes, her breasts could balance out a thousand imperfections on the scales.

He opened his mouth to suggest just such a proposition, perhaps even offer to purchase some beignets at a boulangerie along the way as further enticement. But then he noticed that the flush of sensuality on her tanned face had turned to anger. Her eyes practically threw sparks at him.

Uncaring of the spectators around them, she placed a palm against his chest and backed him up against the rotunda wall. He was too stunned to protest.

“You low-down dog! I have a bone to pick with you.”