Jane Feather - Violet

The widow returned downstairs to see to the water, and Julian, who'd been standing by the window looking out on the street in front of the cottage, said brusquely, ''I'll be on my way.”

“Oh, don't be in such a hurry.” Tamsyn went swiftly to the door, leaning against it, barring his way. She smiled at him. “Why so prudish, milord colonel? We have the time, we have even a bed.”

“I do not have the inclination,” he declared harshly. “Move aside.”

She shook her head, that mischievous smile in her eyes again. She tossed her rifle onto the bed and with a deft movement shrugged off the bandolier, letting it fall to the floor. Then her hands were at her belt and he seemed powerless to move, watching as if only his eyes were alive, imprisoned in a body of stone, as she pushed off her britches and began to unbutton her shirt. The small, perfect breasts were revealed, their rosy crowns pertly erect. She moved away from the door and stepped toward him, her eyes never leaving his face.

He put his hands on her breasts, feeling how they filled his palms. He gazed down at the delicate tracery of blue veins beneath the milk-white skin. The pulse at her throat was beating fast, and the intricate silver locket quivered against her flesh.

Tamsyn didn't move, merely held herself still for his touch as his hands slid down her rib cage, spanned the slender waist, slipped to her back, his fingers insinuating themselves into the waist of her drawers, creeping down over the taut roundness of her buttocks.

“Goddamn it, girl,” he said, his voice husky in the quiet, dim room. “Goddamn it, girl, what are you doing to me?”

“It's more a case of what are you doing to me?” she said as his hands squeezed her backside, pressing her against his loins· where his flesh thrust iron hard against the constraint of his britches.

The sound of heavy footsteps laboring up the wooden stairs outside broke his enchantment. The mist of passion left his bright-blue eyes, and he pulled his hands loose from her skin as if she were a burning brand.

And then he was gone from the room, brushing past Senhora Braganza as she toiled up the stairs with a steaming copper jug, and out into the lowering afternoon filled with the incessant sound of the bombardment.

He walked fast to the stables to reclaim his horse, and the groom quailed at the blue blazing light in the colonel's eyes beneath the thick red-gold eyebrows, and the close-gripped mouth in the grim set of his jaw. He rode out of Elvas and into the encampment to his own tent and the reassuring sanity of his own men. He must be losing his mind. She was a grubby, manipulative, unfeminine, mercenary hellion, and she stirred him to the root of his being.

Tamsyn watched him from the window as he strode down the street as if all the devils in hell were on his heels. “How very ungallant of you, milord colonel,” she murmured to herself “Whatever can you be afraid of? Not of me, surely?”

A tiny smile quirked her lips as she turned from the window to discuss with the widow Braganza the sorry condition of her clothes.

WHERE S OUR GUEST, JULIAN? THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF asked as the colonel entered his apartments before dinner that evening.

“I've sent Sanderson to escort her here,” Julian said, nodding a greeting to the five men, all members of the commander in chief’s staff, gathered to join Wellington for dinner.

“So what d'you think of her, Julian?” Major Carson handed him a glass of sherry. “We're all agog.”

“I wouldn't trust her any farther than I can throw her,” St. Simon stated flatly.

“Considering what a tiny little thing she is, that would be quite a distance.” Wellington laughed at his own witticism, the sound remarkably like the neighing of a horse.

Julian's smile was dour. “You fell for that little act she put on this afternoon.”

“Act?” Wellington raised an eyebrow.

“Trembling and swaying and tottering all over the place. She was exhausted, I grant you that. I don't suppose she's had more than a few hours' sleep in the last five days, and that mostly in the saddle, but swooning… La Violette… pull the other one.” He took a disgusted gulp of his sherry.

“You don't like the lady, Julian?” Brigadier Cornwallis said with a grin.

“No, I dislike her intensely. And I have to tell you, Cornwallis, that 'lady' is a vast misnomer. She's a duplicitous, mercenary, untrustworthy vagabond.”

There was an instant of silence at this brief but comprehensive denunciation; then Colonel Webster said, “Ah, well, Julian, you never did take kindly to being outsmarted.”

You don't know the half of it. But Julian contented himself with another dour smile and said, “Not to mention being dragooned into charging across the country side to remove Cornichet's epaulets.”

“What?” There was a chorus of exclamations, and the colonel obliged with a brief narrative that had everyone but himself chuckling.

“Uh… excuse me, sir.” Lieutenant Sanderson appeared in the doorway.

“Well?” Wellington regarded him with a touch of irritability. It was clear the brigade-major was alone.

“La Violette, sir, she-”

“She's not run off?” Julian interrupted, snapping his glass down on the table.

“Oh, no, Colonel. But she's asleep, sir, and Senhora Braganza couldn't awaken her.”

“Perhaps we should let her sleep, then,” Wellington suggested.

“Oh, she's not asleep,” Julian stated. “It's one of her tricks. I'll have her here in fifteen minutes.” With that he strode from the room.

“Well, well,” murmured Colonel Webster. “I can't wait to meet our guest. She seems to exercise a most powerful effect on St. Simon.”

“Yes,” agreed the commander in chief, frowning thoughtfully. “She does, doesn't she?”

Senhora Braganza greeted the irate colonel's arrival with a voluble flood of Portuguese and much hand waving. Julian, who had a smattering of her language and relatively fluent Spanish, divined that the “poor child” was sleeping like a baby and it would be a crime to awaken her. The partisans could do no wrong among the local populations of Portugal and Spain, and it rather seemed as if the widow was prepared to do battle to protect the sleeping one upstairs.

Julian was obliged to move her bodily aside as she defended the bottom of the stairs. He went up them two at a time with the senhora berating him on his heels. He flung open the door to the small chamber under the eaves and then stopped, something holding him back.

Moonlight from the single round window fell on the narrow cot where Violette lay. She slept on her back, her hands resting on the pillow on either side 'of her head, palms curled like a sleeping child's.

Julian closed the door in the face of the still wailing widow and crossed soft-footed to the cot, where he stood looking down at her. Her face in repose had a youthful innocence that startled him. The dark, thick lashed crescent of her eyelashes lay against the high cheekbones, the smooth, suntanned skin stretched taut across the bones. But sleep softened neither the firm line of her mouth nor the determined set of her jaw.

“Tamsyn?” He spoke her given name softly, unaware that it was the first time he'd used it.

She stirred, her eyelashes fluttered, a soft murmur of protestation came from her lips. But there was. Something about the response, about the speed of it, that convinced him absolutely that she had not been asleep… that she'd been aware of his scrutiny.

His lips tightened. “Get up, Tamsyn. You're not fooling me with this playacting.”

Her eyelashes swept up, and the deep-purple eyes gazed up at him with such a blend of sensual mischief that he caught his breath. Without taking her eyes off his face she drew up her feet in a sudden swift movement, caught the covers, and kicked them off, baring her body, creamy in the moonlight. She smiled up at him, quirking an eyebrow, passing her hands over her body in unmistakable invitation.