Page 8 of Frankly, My Dear

His lips pursed skeptically. “How do I know she still has a maidenhead?”

The slimy lech was staring at that part of her lower anatomy as if he could see through her gown. And how dare he demand “purity” of a woman? Odds were that he wasn’t a virgin himself.

Raffine slapped a hand to her chest as if offended that Henri would even ask such a question.

“A virgin! A virgin!” Selene shrieked, finally fed up with the whole unbelievable scene. “I haven’t had a…a maidenhead in ten years, not that it’s any of your business.”

James choked.

Selene darted him a look that she hoped told him how much she would love to whack him on the head.

Raffine gasped and started hyperventilating, as if in the throes of a heart attack. “Oh, Lordy! Now you done it, good and proper. I ain’t never gonna find you a protector.”

Henri’s prissy mouth dropped open. Then he spun on his tiny feet and stalked away, murmuring something about “soiled goods.” In moments, she saw more and more people staring her way as word passed of her damaged reputation.

“Tonight…you…leave…my…house,” Raffine ordered, spacing her words evenly in fury. “Go back to your stepdaddy, or to the devil. I don’t care. I don’t want nuthin’ to do with you no more.” With that, Raffine lifted all three of her chins haughtily and stomped away.

For a moment, Selene stood watching the angry woman depart and she questioned her own sanity. This was the craziest dream she’d ever had. But maybe it wasn’t a dream, after all. Maybe, with all the stress of Tessa’s death, and her breakup with Devon, and then her last modeling assignment in New Orleans, well, maybe she’d gone off the deep end.

Or had she died, and this was the other world? She didn’t feel dead. But then, how did one know for sure how death felt? No, she just knew this wasn’t heaven. Or even hell.

She fought the idea that Lilith’s curse had actually sent her back in time. And, yet, unbelievably, she suspected that was exactly what had happened.

Confused and disoriented, she wondered what she should do next. Her head began to throb with a killer migraine. Noticing her makeup case still sitting on the floor near the window seat, she went over and rummaged until she found a bottle of aspirin. Without any liquid, she popped two of the coated pills onto her tongue and scrunched up her mouth as she forced them down her throat.

Selene turned then to see James still standing in the doorway, smoking his thin cigar. He shook his head in amusement at the show she’d just put on. Eying him speculatively, she made a sudden decision.

“Well, it looks like I’ll have to go with you,” she announced glumly.

“Never!”

Selene ignored the stab of hurt at his quick rejection. “You asked me earlier about teaching young children. I can do that,” she declared more positively than she felt. “How many kids, anyway? And how old?”

“Five years old. And only one—Etienne.”

“One child? Piece of cake.”

“What?”

“Just an expression, James. Is it your child?”

He nodded, a closed expression on his brooding face.

“Shouldn’t your wife be doing the interviewing and hiring?”

“I have no wife.”

“Oh.” Selene felt a curious comfort in that knowledge. Then she thought of something else. “Hey, do you know anywhere we can get a few beignets?”

Selene decided then and there, if she was going to have the dream of a lifetime, she was not going to be on a diet.

James tipped his chair against the wall of the Restaurant d’Orleans, sipping from a glass of absinthe—his fourth of the evening, two more than his usual self-imposed limit. Feeling a slight buzz in his head, he twirled the crystal stem distractedly as he examined the potent, green liqueur, inhaling deeply of the intoxicating anise aroma.

And he wondered how he could rid himself of the troublesome wench who’d latched onto him at the Quadroon Ball. In a weak moment, he’d agreed to take her across the street from the Salle d’Orleans to Gabriel Julian’s fine eating establishment. Little did he know that she could consume enough food to fill a starving sailor—seafood gumbo, crayfish, black beans and rice, beignets…oh, Lord, could she eat beignets!

James berated himself for wasting much-needed money and time on the stranger. Especially when his plantation was mortgaged to its crumbling eaves since the bank crash of ’37. Hell, he was lucky to have survived, unlike the more than 150 planters who were not so fortunate. Even more depressing, he faced a shortage of workers in his sugar fields, and that meant he would have to buy more slaves on this trip, at a time when he wished he could just free them all.

Most of all, he worried about his five-year-old son, Etienne, who’d become so unruly of late that even his cane-wielding cook Blossom couldn’t control him anymore. And his mère…James’s poor demented mother, who had managed his household in the past…had taken this past year to locking herself in her room for weeks on end to nurture her sad fantasies.