Indians living in our home! A squaw in the bed where Pierre slept with good Marie-Blanche!
How could Pierre do such a thing, after what the Indians had done to Helene? After Raoul had spent two years beaten and enslaved by Black Salmon? How could Papa permit it?
Clarissa turned, holding out before her a lighted white candle in a little pewter dish. She didn't seem so shy now about letting him see her naked. He let his eyes linger over her melon-shaped breasts, narrow waist, the brown puff of hair where her long legs joined her wide hips.
He'd often felt a hankering for Clarissa since he'd hired her father, Eli Greenglove, to help him run the trading post. But he'd thought it unwise to get mixed up with her. Eli was a dangerous man. Last night that hadn't seemed to matter.
After Armand had brought him the bad news, he'd turned to Kentucky whiskey—Old Kaintuck—and to Clarissa, dancing with her to Registre Bosquet's fiddle in the taproom to take his mind off this sudden insult Pierre had flung at him. Late in the evening he'd stumbled upstairs behind Clarissa to his bedroom in the inn, his hands up her skirts, feeling the satiny skin of her legs.
And then down on the bed, and—whiskey and all—six times!
But this morning his pleasure in her was spoiled by this treachery of Pierre's.
A squaw and a redskinned mongrel. Raoul wouldn't want Indians on the estate even as servants. Now Pierre was talking about these savages living in Victoire as part of the family.
He felt a sudden, stinging bite down near his rear end, under the covers. Angrily, he slapped at himself. Damned fleas and bedbugs. Levi Pope's wife made a piss-poor job of laundering the bedding for the inn.
If I had a wife I'd make sure she kept the bugs out of my sheets.