"Get the hell away from there!" he told her.

"Stay away from me! I'll jump!"

He moved toward her. She backed away, until little more than air kept her from plummeting toward the

river. He froze and looked hard into her frightened yet determined eyes.

"Why are you doing this?" he demanded.

"I won't go back. You can't make me!"

"Go back where? What are you talking about?"

She looked over her shoulder, at the water below.

He moved closer. Closer. Stopping short as she turned her eyes on him again. Her white face looked

sad. Hopelessness weighed on her slender shoulders.

"I would rather be dead!" she cried, and tottered. Her arms flailed.

Chantz lunged, snagged the shirt in his fingers.

Her weight drove the air from him as they hit the ground and rolled, over and over, coming to rest at last

in a tangle of pine needles and jasmine vines.

Her fists pounded him. "Je vous maudis! Allez a l'enfer!" she cried, and drove her knee hard into his groin.

Gritting his teeth against the knife-blade pain that ripped through his loins, Chantz pinned her arms to the

ground and wedged his knees between her thighs.

"Be still," he said through his teeth. Behave before I give you a reason to- stop squirming, dammit!"

Her struggling suddenly stopped. But for the rapid rise and fall of her breasts she lay motionless, her gaze

fixed on his, her head resting within a cloud of crushed pale jasmine flowers that scented the air intoxicatingly sweet. Rain beaded on her pale face and ripe lips like tiny dark diamonds.

Most young women in her position at that moment would be fainting of humiliation and fright. Not this one. Damn if she didn't act as if his body on hers was the most natural thing in the world. Damn if she didn't challenge him with her eyes and the pout of her soft mouth that he ached to kiss in that moment even more than he cared to breathe.

Cursing, he rolled away, struggled to his feet, and pulled her up with him. She swung. He ducked. She kicked. He sidestepped, caught her foot in midair and flipped her backward so she sprawled in a puddle.

Had he been a gentleman, he would have averted his eyes. But he wasn't a gentleman any more than she was the daughter of a nun. So he stared. And she stared. Rain ran down her face and body and pooled beneath her where the ends of her hair floated with the jasmine blooms.

Finally, and with a guttural curse, he reached for her again, locked his fingers around her wrist, and hauled her onto her feet.

She followed begrudgingly, feet dragging, occasionally sinking her heels into the mud only to have her arm yanked hard enough to nearly topple her. As they neared the shanty's open front door she gave one last heave against his hold then surrendered. He shoved her into the shanty then kicked the door closed behind them. The dim light of the lantern shimmered off her drenched body and turned his shirt transparent.

"Sit," he ordered her, and nodded toward a chair. When she looked frantically toward the door once again, he pointed one finger at the tip of her nose. "Forget it, sweet cheeks. I'll hog-tie you and hang you from a hook. I'm not a patient man and you've exceeded my endurance. Next time you run out that door I'll chase you down and toss your butt in the river myself and good damn riddance. Any woman who would stoop to kneeing a man who is trying to save her life deserves to be bait for gators."

Her eyes flashed. She swallowed a retort, then turned her back to him and glared into the fire.

"Sit!" he shouted, making her jump and grab a chair which she plunked in front of the fire. She dropped into it and drew her knees up to her chest. Despite the warmth of the night, her body began to shake.

"I'm waiting," he said as he dragged his muddy shirt off over his head.

Her head tipped slightly, and she glanced at him over her shoulder. Her eyelashes, spiked with rain, lowered as she acknowledged him, shirtless, hands on his hips as he regarded her through his dripping hair.

With a lift of one eyebrow, she said, "I'm not accustomed to conversing with half-naked men."

Sweet Mary, she even sounded like her mother. There was a touch of roughness to her voice that made a man think of forbidden passion in clandestine meeting places.

His mouth curled. "I'm more than accustomed to conversing with naked women, so if you would care to give me that shirt you're wearing I'll be more than happy to put it on- wouldn't want to offend your sensibilities, after all."

Her cheeks flushed with hot color. Yet, she did not look away. Her perusal took a slow journey down his body, hesitated at his muddy booted feet, then back up again, to his mouth, then his eyes. An intensity passed over her features, then, with effort, she turned away and gave him her shoulder.

"Where am I?" she asked in a monotone.

"I fished you out of the river. And you're welcome, by the way. Now I want an explanation. Who the blazes are you running from and why?"

"I hardly think that is your concern, Monsieur."

"The hell you say."

She flashed him a slanted, angry look. Glimpses of her mother again. He'd seen Maureen's tantrums

turned on Jack Broussard enough to know there was a firebrand lurking within.

"Juliette, when a woman contemplates throwing herself into a raging river, there had better be a damn good reason for it."

"How do you know my name?"

"Don't change the subject."

"I didn't ask you to fish me from the damnable river, did I?"

He flung his shirt as hard as he could toward the fire.

She flinched, drew her shoulders back, and looked stiffly around at the shanty. "This house is rather

pitiful, isn't it? I assume you're poor?"

"Actually this is my summer home. I have a chateau in Biloxi where I keep a staff of twenty and a stable of imported warm bloods."

She smiled at the fire. "I doubt it. There's nothing remotely refined about you. Except perhaps your

boots. Those breeches are of coarse material as is this pitifully thin shirt I'm wearing. Your skin is much too dark, which means you spend most of your time out of doors. You're a farmer, perhaps. A farmer who too often works with his shirt off." Turning her eyes back to his, she added, "A gentleman of breeding would not have that sort of musculature."

"You've seen a great many gentlemen with their shirts off, have you?"

That, of course, wouldn't have surprised him, not if she was anything at all like her mother morally.

"You're a ruffian," she told him. "Judging by your injuries, and the scars on your knuckles, you like to

fight. You probably participate in those dreadful bare-knuckle punching matches where men smoke and drink to extremes and place wagers on who will knock out whom first. Where is your wife?"

"Not married." His eyes narrowed.

Her lips curved and she looked back at him again. "I'm not surprised."

He frowned. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"I find you... raw. Too hard. Too... fierce."

"And you're an ill-tempered, ungrateful spoiled brat who needs her bottom smacked."

He moved to her side, his face burning, not just from the pain of his "dreadful bare-knuckle punching" but because she could so easily determine by a glance what he was.

Lifting a tendril of her damp hair, he curled it around his fingers. "You look like a whore I once knew," he said in a soft, husky voice meant to taunt her. "She had hair like this. Like blood fire. Wild, untamable curls that she would occasionally try to twist up in coils and pin with pretty combs that her lovers brought her from Paris and London. Didn't do her much good, though. That damn hair had a life of its own. Sooner or later it would fall like hot-copper threads over her shoulders.

"She had skin like yours. Smooth and pale as polished pearl. She enjoyed showing it off. Wore her dresses cut so low the whole of Louisiana held its breath when she walked. She had a mouth like the heart of a sweet ripe plum. I heard that one kiss of her lips would ruin a man. Make him crazy with a need to own her.

"She finally snared herself a wealthy Frenchman. A man who didn't care that she'd bedded most of the men in Louisiana and Mississippi, too. He had the crazy notion that he could change her. He built her a house fit for a queen. Spent a king's fortune on clothes and jewels and horseflesh to occupy her afternoons while he was out overseeing his cane crops.

"But when a woman is born to hunger for a man between her legs, no amount of pretty threads and dazzling jewels are gonna keep her from prowling. And prowl she did. Right up until the day her husband came home unexpectedly and found her with another man."

Silence, but for the snap of burning kindling.

Her shoulders looked rigid, as if she would disintegrate if he so much as touched her. He caught her chin with the tip of his finger and turned her face toward his. Her green eyes were glassy; tears streamed down her white cheeks, wet threads painted gold by the firelight. Her lower lip quivered.

In that moment he felt awash with the same hunger that must have driven a thousand men mindless with the ache to have her mother- not just to bed her, but to possess her, body and soul. The craving rushed through his blood like white heat, worse than any niggling of lust he had ever experienced for Phyllis Buley and those like her who thought toying with a man of low birth with dirt under his fingernails was exciting and dangerous.

His hand slid around her head, tunneled through her tangled hair; he drew her out of the chair and against him, so close he could feel her warm breath against his mouth. Her body heat curled over his damp skin like slow moist tongues of fire.

She didn't move, didn't breathe, just stared up into his eyes, hers wide and unblinking. Her body felt fragile and tense and trembling. Her breasts within the thin barrier of his shirt pressed against his naked chest, and he felt her heart beat against his.

Reason flurried in his brain, and he did his best to rouse that child image of a pouting little minx eating ho'hound candy and skipping in the sunlight like a vibrant butterfly, but that pretty picture coalesced into the supple warm body in his arms, stirring up sensations that made him hard and aching in a way he had never ached. Desire felt as out of control as the river rampaging beyond its boundaries eating everything up in its path.

He drew her closer. She struggled, briefly, until his hands twisted her hair so tightly she could but stand, frozen, her eyes burning into his. "What the devil were you doing in that river, Juliette?" His breath touched her lips and she shivered.

"Going home," she said in her faintly husky voice. "To Belle Jarod."

"Darlin', there is no Belle Jarod to go home to, or didn't your daddy ever tell you that story?"

"I'll live in a shanty-"

"No you won't. You're not a shanty kind of woman, Miss Broussard. But you didn't answer my question. Why were you out in this storm-"

"Because I like it," she declared with a defiant flash of her eyes. "I enjoy the power. It makes me feel vibrantly alive."

"I think you're just a little bit crazy. I think you'd look God right in his eyes and defy Him to his face, if you could. Is that what you're doing when you're playing with lightning, Juliette? You challenging God to strike you dead?"

"What I do with my soul, Monsieur, is no concern of yours."

Her lips parted with a murmured French curse as she fixed him with a look that was as damning as it was challenging. He suspected he could tear out her hair by fistfuls and she wouldn't shed so much as a tear just to spite him.

Thunder rolled and memories stirred- long forgotten. Her face blurred into another, sweating and panting upon bloody sheets, her screams as piercing as the lightning thrusting through the boiling clouds.

"You were born on a night much like this one," he told her, his voice soft and distant even to his own ears. "My own mother was there, bathing Maureen's brow with rose-scented water. I stood outside the door, watching it all. I was eleven at the time but I had already seen at least fifty babies born but never ever to the anticipation of this one.

"I'd never seen a man as proud as your daddy. He'd invited his closest friends to share in the occasion. While they laughed and slapped one another on the back and raised fluted crystal glasses of French champagne in celebration, not just for the birth but because that summer had brought Jack the finest crop of cane in the parish, thunder and lightning shook Belle's foundation like it was made of tarpaper.

"An old slave name Mavney crouched between Maureen's legs. She was seventy at the time, little more than a bag of bones, with hair white as dogwood petals. She'd pray in one breath. The next she'd roll her frightened eyes toward my mother and swear there was a curse on Maureen's soul for the devils to be dancing so fiercely over the house."

Chantz touched Juliette's full lower lip with his finger, traced the curve of it, feeling again the odd sentiment that had sluiced through his chest as Mavney lifted the bloody child in her hands. The night had fallen still and quiet, heat pulsing the air. She'd slapped the babe hard, waiting for the squall of life. Nothing.

"That's when lightning struck the tree at the top of the hill," he said into her eyes that were as spellbound as they were beautiful and willful and roiling with emotion that he could feel heating her body pressed against his. "Light speared through that room so heated and brilliant we were blinded. Until her dying breath Mavney declared that bolt of lightning speared right into that child, filling her with a heart and spirit of restlessness, fire, and devilment.

"Now here you are again, Juliette, all grown up, dancing in the dark with lightning, devilment a tumult in your eyes."