Page 38 of Frankly, My Dear

“I’ve been called a rat by a few of my enemies, but I’ve never had a woman ask me to be her rat.”

Selene furrowed her brow in confusion. Then she couldn’t hold back the smile that twitched the edges of her lips. “Not rat, you fool. Rhett. Rhett Butler was the quintessential Southern gentleman.”

“Well, darlin’,” he drawled. “I’ve never had a woman ask me to be a gentleman, either.” He winked meaningfully.

“Actually, Rhett wasn’t much of a gentleman, now that I think about it. He was a bit of a frog at times, too. Just like you,” she said forlornly.

“Poor Selene,” James said suddenly. “You’ve had a rough couple of days, haven’t you, chérie?” He brushed some strands of hair off her muddy face with gentleness, surprising her after his cutting observations of a few moments before.

Oh, great! Another mood swing to shake my balance. Heck, I’m already teeter-tottering between lust and loathing here, between the urge to kill and the urge to jump his bones. Selene groaned inwardly. Even the slight graze of his knuckles across her cheek heightened her awareness of him as a man. Despite her weariness, despite his brutish nature, Selene yearned inexplicably for James to touch her again.

Day-old whiskers shadowed his face. Perspiration plastered his thin white shirt to his lean body. Rolled-up sleeves exposed the corded muscles of his forearms. The silky, ebony hairs on his chest peeked out from the gap created by three undone buttons.

James was a male chauvinist to the nth degree. Disgustingly arrogant. Blatantly, handsomely virile. He was cynical, even cruel at times. And definitely crude and vulgar. Everything Selene hated in a man.

And she was beginning to fall in love with him a little, she feared, sighing dejectedly. This must be how Scarlett felt: drawn to Rhett even as she was repelled by him.

“You’re looking at me like I’m a beignet, Selene,” James chided her with a mocking laugh.

She came immediately to her senses. “Oh, you are such an egotist! I’m just tired,” she lied.

James gave her a patronizing pat on the behind and pushed her toward the house. “Well, that’s a good thing…because I wouldn’t touch you with a barge pole. You smell like swamp mud, and you look like a warthog.”

That was the last straw for Selene. She had been sling-shotted back 150 years in time, attacked by alligators and monster snakes…well, almost attacked…devoured by kamikaze mosquitoes, and belittled and berated by the world’s most insufferable man. Enough!

Selene turned abruptly and made a flying leap for James’s startled body. He fell backward in the wet earth near the riverbank, and she landed on top of him. Then Selene rubbed her muddy face back and forth against his. With relish, she ran her dirty arms over his white shirt, over and over, until it was as filthy as her dress. Sitting up, she straddled his stunned body and exclaimed, “There! Now you smell like swamp mud, and you look like a warthog, too.”

The effect of her raging tirade was lost, however, when James burst out laughing, and continued to laugh and laugh until tears streamed down his face, making muddy rivulets down to his chin. Startled, Selene watched with fascination the first spontaneous laughter she’d seen James exhibit. The unrestrained emotion transformed his somber face, turning him youthful and impossibly handsome.

He was still laughing when she stood up haughtily and stomped up the bank to the house, ignoring the astonished faces of Reba, James’s men, and their hosts, Pierre and Amelie Gastoneau, not to mention all the children.

Chapter Seven

Several hours later, James sat beside an open cookfire, sipping a cup of strong Acadian coffee. He felt like a new man, having bathed in a clear stream behind the Gastoneau house, shaved, and donned clean clothing. He ran a callused hand over the rough cloth of his dark work trousers and the worn fabric of his blue homespun shirt. He would not miss the finer trappings he was forced to wear when in New Orleans. His father would say his English peasant blood showed through.

James was a man of the soil, not society, and had ever been so. That was what had annoyed his wife, Giselle, so much. From the start, she had hated his remote plantation. She had hated his refusal to move back to the French Quarter she loved. She had hated his dirty fingernails and honest sweat when working alongside his slaves in the sugar fields. She came to hate his “vulgar” touch. She had even hated the child he bred on her, poor Etienne.

But James blamed himself. He should not have taken the innocent Giselle from her home and family. He should have understood that her increasing complaints about the wildness and utter desolation of his home bespoke a greater inner turmoil. He should have seen the signs of her mental strain and rescued her before she ran away into the dangerous swamps. Yes, he blamed himself for many things, including his wife’s death.

He would never, never remarry. And he most certainly would never allow himself to be sucked again into that deceptive abyss some dared to call love. James had failed miserably at marriage, and he’d come to accept that some men were just not suited to the wedded state.

Besides, he had more problems and responsibilities than any one man should have to carry. His time and his energy had to be focused exclusively on the land and making his plantation succeed. A wife…even a mistress…would be a complication he could not handle in his overburdened life. Look how his plantation had floundered on the chasm of ruin during his argument-filled marriage, and during the months after Giselle’s death when he had wallowed in self-recrimination.

That was why he had to keep himself removed, emotionally, from Selene.

Truly, the woman was a puzzle to him. Certainly she did not come from the future. Could she be running from a husband or lover…or even a crime? Was she mad? Or suffering some physical ailment that caused her to hallucinate?

Despite all his misgivings, he barely stifled a smile as he watched her make her way carefully down the steep outside steps of the Gastoneau house, talking all the time to Reba. Lord, the woman could talk, and talk, and talk. He couldn’t believe she had actually knocked him down and covered him with her mud, not that he didn’t deserve her furious reaction after teasing her so. He bit his bottom lip to hide his amusement, then tilted his head in amazement as he realized how much he had smiled in recent days…more than in the last few years, for a certainty…ever since Selene had dropped like a boulder into his life.

He studied her closely as she approached the cookfire, trying to comprehend his unexplainable attraction to her. She had washed all the mud from her body, and her hair had been brushed and clubbed back at the neck with a ribbon.

A clean dress of pale gold trimmed with cream lace hung loosely from her too-tall, too-thin form. Even though she had slathered on her usual coating of “makeup” from her magic box, mosquito bites still dotted her sunburned face and arms. Her beet-red nose was starting to peel.

So why did her mere presence make his heart soar…and another part of his body, as well? James groaned low in his throat at the hardening evidence between his thighs that belied his useless denial of her attraction. He probably should have spent another week in New Orleans, slaking his lustful appetite on Maureen’s lush body.

“What are you growling about now, James?” Selene commented acidly as she sank down on the wooden bench next to him. Reba went over to talk to Fergus, who leaned against a tree smoking a cheroot.

Unfortunately, Selene looked down at his lap before he had a chance to rest his arms across his thighs. Her greenish eyes widened and her face turned even redder. “I thought you said I looked like a warthog,” she said with unwelcome frankness. He could tell she immediately regretted her hasty words.