Midnight Bayou

climb, she rose quickly. Her arms tightened in a circle of protection around the baby as she turned toward the crib.
    She heard Julian come through the door and knew without seeing he would be drunk. He was nearly always drunk or on his way to becoming so.
    Abby didn’t speak. She lay the baby in the crib, and when Marie Rose whimpered restlessly, stroked her quiet again.
    “Where’s the nursemaid?” he demanded.
    Still, Abby didn’t turn. “I don’t want you in here when you’ve been drinking.”
    “Giving orders now?” His voice was slurred, his balance impaired. But he was thinking clearly enough. Liquor, he’d always believed, helped clarify the mind.
    And his was clarified when it came to his brother’s wife. If Lucian had a thing—and what was a woman but a thing?—Julian wanted it.
    She was small, almost delicate of build. But she had good strong legs. He could see the shape of them where the firelight in the nursery grate shimmered through her thin nightclothes. Those legs would wrap around him as easily as they did his brother.
    Her breasts were high and full, fuller now since she’d had the whelp. He’d gotten his hands on them once, and she’d slapped him for it. As if she had a say in who touched her.
    He closed the door at his back. The whore he’d bought that night had only whetted his appetite. It was time to sate it.
    “Where’s the other bayou slut?”
    Abby’s hand fisted at her side. She turned now,guarding the crib with her body. He looked so like Lucian, but there was a hardness in him Lucian lacked. A darkness.
    She wondered if it was true, what her grand-mère said. That with twins, sometimes traits get divvied up in the womb. One gets the good, the other the bad.
    She didn’t know if Julian had come into the world already spoiled. But she knew he was dangerous when drunk. It was time he learned she was dangerous as well.
    “Claudine is my friend, and you have no right to speak of her that way. Get out. You have no right to come in here and insult me. This time Lucian will hear of it.”
    She saw his gaze slide down from her face, watched lust come into his eyes. Quickly, she tugged her wrapper over the breast still partially exposed from nursing. “You’re disgusting. Cochon! To come in a child’s room with your wicked thoughts for your brother’s wife.”
    “Brother’s whore.” He thought he could smell her anger and her fear now. A heady perfume. “You’d have spread your legs for me if I’d been born fifteen minutes sooner. But you wouldn’t have stolen my name the way you stole his.”
    Her chin came up. “I don’t even see you. No one does. You’re nothing beside him. A shadow, and one that stinks of whiskey and the brothel.”
    She wanted to run. He frightened her, had always frightened her on a deep, primal level. But she wouldn’t risk leaving him with the baby. “When I tell Lucian of this, he’ll send you away.”
    “He has no power here, and we all know it.” He came closer, easing his way like a hunter through the woods. “My mother holds the power in this house. I’m her favorite. Timing at birth doesn’t change that.”
    “He will send you away.” Tears stung the back of her throat because she knew Julian was right. It was Josephine who reigned in Manet Hall.
    “Lucian did me a favor marrying you.” His voice was alazy drawl now, almost conversational. He knew she had nowhere to run. “She’s already cut him out of her will. Oh, he’ll get the house, she can’t change that, but I’ll get her money. And it’s her money that runs this place.”
    “Take the money, take the house.” She flung out her hands, dismissing them, and him. “Take it all. And go to hell with it.”
    “He’s weak. My sainted brother. Saints always are, under all the piety.”
    “He’s a man, so much more a man than you.”
    She’d hoped to make him angry, angry enough to strike her and storm out. Instead he laughed, low and quiet, and edged closer.
    When she saw the intent in his eyes, she opened her mouth to scream. His hand whipped out, gripped a hank of the dark hair that curled to her waist. And yanking had her scream gurgling into a gasp. His free hand circled her throat, squeezed.
    “I always take what’s Lucian’s. Even his whores.”
    She beat at him, slapped, bit. And when she could draw in air, screamed. He tore at her wrapper, pawed at her breasts. In the crib, the baby began to wail.
    Fueled by the sound of her child’s distress,