What should she do now? How should she proceed?

Then, as the thunder shook the house and the lightning briefly brightened the room, casting shadows upon the walls and floor, she knew what she must do. She had known all along.

?Seventeen.

Once again, the dreaded pain drove him from his bed.

Chantz tried his hardest to focus on something other than the deep gnawing fire in his flesh. He couldn't wear a shirt, yet even the air scalded him, so there was no relief even in nakedness. The bourbon pulsed in his blood, hot and thick, and the thoughts in his head swarmed like angry bees.

Twice the last days his mother stopped him from riding hell-bound for leather back to Holly and killing Tylor at long last- should have done it the minute Louis pried him out of that bull gator's mouth. But the pain had been too damn bad- not just the punctures in his leg. Not just the fact that Tylor would pull something so stupid- he'd been half expecting it, after all.

No, for the first hours he'd been too immersed in his panic that Tylor, for once in his sorry life, might have been truthful, that Chantz was nothing more than a damn mud dauber. One of the very people that he had both despised and feared all his life- despised for their worthless, wandering, thieving ways. Feared them because, should Maxwell have decided to cut Emmaline off completely, there would have been little choice but to become one of them- begging for food, clothes, shelter.

Hell, illegitimacy was an indignity enough.

But Emmaline had assured him- sworn on his tattered old Bible that Tylor had been lying.

And Christ, oh Christ, he wanted to believe her.

No, it hadn't been Tylor's display of stupidity during the hunt that had filled him with such blinding hate. Whatever minuscule thread of familial responsibility and tolerance Chantz might have held for his half-brother had been obliterated the moment Tylor forced Louis to strap him to that whipping post.

Closing his eyes against the sweat oozing from his hair-line, against the heat building in the shanty room from the cooking fire, Chantz tried not to think about the long excruciating minutes he had hung there, helpless, anticipating each knifelike strike of the whip. He'd known humiliation in his life. He'd tasted hate.

But never as he had in those moments. Perhaps he'd deserved punishment for succumbing to his base needs- for plucking Juliette's prized virginity, for loving her- but not to the extent that Tylor had inflicted. He was lucky there was any flesh at all left on his back.

He glanced toward his bedroom door. At long last, driven to exhaustion by her despair and worry, Emmaline had reluctantly taken to bed. Occasionally he could hear her weep in her sleep. Not for the first time, of course.

As a boy he would lie sleepless in the dark and listen to her cry. He would drift to sleep and imagine growing to be a man who would somehow rectify the mistakes of her life, who would rise up from their squalor and become a man more powerful and successful than Max or Fred Buley or Jack Broussard. He'd imagined cutting the highest, sweetest stalk of cane on the final day of harvest, wrapping it in the traditional blue ribbon and placing it at her feet. Then they would lift bumpers of rum in toast to success, and Little Clara and Simon and Sally and all the other children would dance to the pleasant popping of goatskin drums.

Now, however, Emma cried, not over weariness or hunger or even anger. She wept for his stupidity.

Juliette.

Dropping into the husk-seated chair, his elbows on his knees, he buried his head in his hands and stared at the floor. As thunder shook the house, he imagined Juliette sitting in this very chair those many nights ago, after he had pulled her from the river, staring down into the fire, cheeks tear streaked, her hair a wild red spray and her scent swirling in the air as forcefully as the raging river roaring in the dark.

Desperation and frustration mounting, he futilely tried to refocus his hate for Tylor and Maxwell on his concern for Liza and Louis and Little Clara- all who would surely suffer now that he was gone from Holly. Boris Wilcox would murder them, eventually. Everything that Chantz had built the last years would rot from Boris's neglect and ignorance and slothfulness.

Tylor and Maxwell deserved to suffer from Boris's stupidity.

Maxwell's Negroes did not.

Juliette.

She'd be ruined now.

She deserves it! Emmaline had argued and wept as she ministered to his wounds and held his head.

Because of him. Because of his weakness, she would suffer.

She used you, Chantz! His mother had wept with fury as, even in his excruciating misery, he had risen from his red haze of pain to call out Juliette's name. She used you just like Maxwell has used your intelligence and ethics the last years to succeed. Just like Phyllis used you for her own pleasure caring little for your feelings. Just like the other planters along this river who came to you for advice over the years, and what have any of them done for you in return? A tip of their hat occasionally when they see you on the street?

Standing, he paced again and tried to think of the incomplete levee and what would happen to Max's sugarcane if the river rose due to the storms. All that they had toiled to rebuild the last weeks would crumble. Perhaps this time Maxwell's beloved home would be obliterated. That thought should have given him satisfaction, yet...

Juliette.

What had happened to her?

If Tylor harmed her in any way...

If he touched her in any way...

Chantz would hang for certain.

Yet, if she were to show up on his doorstep at that very moment... he feared he would kill her himself.

Chantz!

The wind moaned like a woman's cry.

Chantz Boudreaux!

"Christ, leave me the hell alone," he hissed through his teeth, and squeezed his eyes closed.

Still, the siren howled for him, taunting and tempting amid the gale winds that suddenly drove with a force that smashed the door open and back against the wall with a thunderous crash.

Spinning toward the door, he stared out into the night, into the vague light that poured through the open

entry into the dark.

The winds rushed over the threshold, whipping leaves and brush and bits of grass around his bare feet.

He hardly noticed as his vision sharpened on the image standing just beyond the light like a haunting, hair a mass of wind-whipped banners and her thin dress molded to her body, legs braced apart as the hem of her skirt lifted above her knees and clutched her thighs, outlining their long slim contours that had so easily parted for his hands.

Her big eyes stared at him in fear and anger and the same passion that even now aroused his body to a pain more unendurable than the cuts in his back or the wounds in his leg. All the desperate fury he'd felt for her the last days flared like the fire in the hearth fed by the hot winds whipping through the room.

Chantz.

Her lips moved yet he could not hear her. The words were dashed aside by the wind.

As he moved toward the door, she backed away. Her face glowed ghostly in the dark; her cheeks were

hollow, the set of her chin resolute. There was no child left in her now. There was only madness in her

eyes.

"Don't do it," came his mother's desperate voice behind him, and looking over his shoulder he saw Emmaline silhouetted in the bedroom doorway, her eyes frantic and tear-filled. "Don't do it," she pleaded.

"She's got you just where she wants you now, Chantz. She'll play on your sympathy, on your conscience.

She'll offer you marriage. She may even offer you love. All she wants is Belle Jarod, Chantz, and you're

her only way to get it."

Forcing his legs to move, he stepped from the house, into the wild wind that clawed at his wounds and robbed him of breath... or perhaps it was her inflicting the pain and tearing from him the final shreds of his soul.

As the last of his dignity roused to war against her seduction, he looked into her face and suddenly all that he was, and had been, and might have been, crashed inside him with the ferocity of the storm. Now she stood on the precipice of darkness like a succubus sent from Hell to lure him over the final black abyss.

He ran down the damp and muddy steps, expecting her to dissolve into the night like a spirit. When he reached for her he expected his hand to grasp vapor.

Her body slumped heavily against his. Those eyes, murky green and turbulent as the churning Gulf waters, stared up into his. There radiated no fear in their depths. No fear in her body. Only challenge.

"Marry me," she said.

He blinked and frowned. His fingers curled more forcefully into her arms as his mother's warning slashed like Tylor's whip into his heart.

"Marry you." Chantz laughed sharply and without humor as he lowered his head over hers, head tipped slightly to one side as he looked deeply into her eyes. So easily he could crush her in that instant. Yet, as her lips parted, thoughts of fury and murder tumbled like the whipped debris over the earth. The memory of her taste and smell became his universe. The familiar hunger expanded to every bleeding nerve, raw pain, and exquisite fire.

"You're insane," he said, then he kissed her. His heart began its chest-hammering rhythm and the slow heat of his desire for her oozed through his body as white-hot as molten silver.

At last, he forced himself to move away before he lost total control.

Her eyes flashed. There was fight in her yet. Defiance. Absolute fury. "I won't beg you," she declared over the howl of the wind.

Leaves caught upon her exposed legs that were like soft polished gold in the light spilling from the shanty. "You can go to hell if you so desire, Chantz Boudreaux. You can live out the remainder of your life sweating, your hands bleeding for others. Watching others reap the rewards of your labor. Or you can marry me and Belle Jarod will be yours."

He looked hard into her eyes. Her skirt billowed higher, teasing him. She wore no drawers tonight. No petticoats. For the first time he noticed her cotton dress was soiled and torn.

What the hell had happened to her since his mother carted him away from Holly House? What had they done to her?

"You don't have to love me," came her words, drawing his focus away from her thighs and back to her eyes. There were scratches on her cheeks and her hair was a nest of tangles. "Your only obligation will be to Belle Jarod. I want her reconstructed, Chantz. I want cane in those damn fields. I want Maxwell Hollinsworth to suffer each time he rides by Belle and sees her flourishing."

"You're crazy," he shouted down at her. "It'll take a king's fortune to rebuild Belle-"

"It's the cane I want, Chantz. I'll live in a slave shanty if I must. I'll furrow the earth with my own hands if I must. I'll cut every damned stalk of cane with my own two hands if I must."

"Then what the hell do you need me for?"

"To teach me."

Turning on his heels, he climbed the steps.

"Obviously I was wrong about you," came her words.

Halting, he turned. Her hair blew partially over her face, nearly obscuring her eyes. The slant of smugness on her mouth replenished his desire to crush her.

"You struck me as a man with aspiration. Intelligence. Hunger to rise beyond mediocrity, not to mention poverty. Instead, you would waste your life drudging to line the pockets of buffoons like Maxwell and Fred Buley because you're too much the coward to risk failure."

She moved toward him, into the light. Her eyes were like ice on fire and her cheeks aflame with color.

"I'll do it with or without you, Chantz." Lifting her chin a notch, she raised one eyebrow and added, "If for no other reason, just imagine how Maxwell would suffer over our union. I suspect the pleasure you would feel over such revenge would make marriage to Maureen's daughter worth the bite of bitter gall you may occasionally experience from compromising your healthy dignity by marrying me."

When he spoke his voice sounded level, almost matter of fact. Only the clenching of his fists, their trembling, betrayed the upheaval of emotion he felt in that moment- certain knowledge that his mother had been right all along. Suddenly all his faculties felt numb and the silence that followed, interspersed by the groan of wind, sounded intensely loud and seemed to stretch for a painful eternity. Every deep lash in his back hurt with new ferocity.

He looked down into her eyes for a long time, his face grave and still, then said, very deliberately, although his voice caught on the words, "In other words, darlin', I'm nothing more than a means to an end to you, right, Juliette? Get your hands legally on Belle Jarod and at the same time have your revenge on Maxwell, make him suffer over destroying your father."

Her expression stunned, Juliette said nothing.

More slowly, the deep throbbing ache in his leg and back causing sweat to rise to his brow, Chantz turned back to the house, paused in the threshold, fighting the desperate need for her to call out and deny his accusation, fighting his need to walk back into her arms and forget his goddamn pride and foolish sense of dignity... or what dignity he had left.

But there came no response.

Shutting the door against her, he pressed his forehead to the barrier and closed his eyes, swallowed back the lump in his throat.

Oh, God, he thought with sinking despair. What have I just done?

India and her family returned again and again. More frequently they remained, sleeping on the floor on mattresses they plumped with goose feathers and moss. They strung ropes from tree to tree and over them tossed Spanish moss. Drying, they turned black and were ready to be stuffed into the old settee and chairs and between quilts for mattresses. The window shutters were repaired. The floors and walls were scrubbed.

Mounds of silt accumulated on the gallery were shoveled away, the bricks scraped of lichen, and though no longer white but dingy gray, the high square columns, without the mire of vegetation, were magnificent once again. The bricks, each one hand-made and baked in the sun, had been stamped with her mother's initials.

Sitting on the front gallery steps, her hair concealed under a tignon, she stretched her legs out before her. The back of her ragged skirt had been drawn up between her thighs and tucked into the rope around her waist, revealing her shins that had been scratched by briars and whelped by mosquito bites.

She watched Jasper and Custis drive their old gray mule Snapper with shouts and whistles. The animal lunged to drag the weight of a fallen live oak from what once was the long drive covered in crushed white oyster shells. At long last, Juliette could see sunlight through the trees and, occasionally, flashes of sunlight on the river. The anticipation of revealing Belle Jarod to the world had driven her to work from sunup to sundown. Yet, she no longer ached. Her slim, hard body had become capable of hoisting weight upon her back and shoulders that would make Phyllis Buley and those like her pale in mortification.

Still, no matter that India and her family had been sent like angels from heaven to help her, the reality remained. Belle Jarod would never thrive again without a miracle. No matter the progress they made each day hacking away tupelo gums and maypop vines and elderberry trees, the thousands of acres crying for cane remained abandoned. Most of Belle's roof remained a charred and crumbled mess. Without money, there was no hope.