My Cherie Amour by Shara Azod 2 This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. My Cherie Amour by Shara Azod Red Rose Publishing Copyright© 2007 Shara Azod ISBN: 978-1-60435-044-9 ISBN: 1-60435-044-X Cover Artist: Sheba Productions Editor: Terri M All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews. Due to copyright laws you can not trade, sell or give any ebooks away. Red Rose Publishing www.redrosepublishing.com Forestport, NY 13338 3 My Cherie Amour by Shara Azod 4 CHAPTER ONE Claude Bonnet had been a simple sailor. He never had illusions of grandeur, never wanted more than his simple lot in life. He had been perfectly content with his meager salary as a deck hand on a regular cargo ship that traveled from Savannah to New Orleans on to various ports in the Caribbean. That was before he met Agathe Durand. Many in Baton Rouge society considered her to be quite on the shelf and homely to boot, but what Agathe lacked in looks, she more than made up for in cunning and determination. Bullying a local boy into marriage was not an option, they knew her to be the shrew she was, and steered clear of her. She would have to find a husband from somewhere other than Baton Rouge. It was a stroke of luck for her when on one of many family trips to New Orleans to visit less well to do relatives she ran smack into a friend of a distant cousin, Claude Bonnet. While many looking for a husband would insist on some sort of achievements, at the very least, money enough to support a family, Agathe did not have that option. She persuaded her father to buy them a small plantation along the Mississippi conveniently between New Orleans and Baton Rogue, including a fair amount of his own slave stock; she taught Claude not only how to run the plantation, but also how to use their location between the two major cities to turn a tidy profit in trade goods. 5 The tiny plantation of Bellemere grew prosperous over the years. Agathe spent a great deal of time in Baton Rouge with her head held high. She had married beneath her, but now she was richer than the merciless bitches that had sneered at her behind her back. She loved flaunting her wealth in front of those who, in her mind, had wronged her. Life was perfect, almost. The one thing Agathe had not been able to succeed in was giving her husband a son. In the beginning of their marriage, Claude had been attentive. He visited her room nightly, treating her with gentleness she would not have expected from simple sailor. But the months ran into years, and still she could not conceive. Claude‟s visits began to decrease, slowly, but definitively. After five years of marriage, he ceased to darken her bedroom doorway. He still treated her with the utmost respect, though Agathe secretly thought he should be a hell of a lot more grateful. After all, she made him what he was, a wealthy landowner, the crème of Creole society, hadn‟t she? All in all, she could not complain. He allowed her to go into town for weeks at a time, even buying fashionable townhouses in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. So what if she could not have a child? Perhaps it was for the best. Claude was not exactly descended from aristocracy as she and her family were. He had served his purpose; he was her husband, ensuring her place in society. She would never have tolerated being delegated to a poor, pitied spinster. He had more than he ever could have hoped. He should be thanking her on bended knee. 6 Had Claude been aware of his wife‟s train of thought, he have would probably been amused. He knew Agathe believed she had convinced him to marry her using promises of wealth as persuasion, but in truth, it was Monsieur Gasper Durand, his good wife‟s father who had given him the incentive. For marrying the painfully plain spinster, he had received his true heart‟s desire, Amélie. As beautiful as Agathe was plain, Amélie was the product of Monsieur Durand and a woman who had been his slave before she became his mistress. Amélie was everything Agathe was not. Her caramel colored skin glowed with health and vitality, turquoise eyes twinkled with laughter, sultry lips begged for kisses. She was the reason Claude had given up life at sea; it had been thankless, true, but nothing Agathe had to offer could have made him give up the adventure. But for Amélie, he would. Claude spared very little thought for his wife while she was at Bellemere, and much less when she was away. Amélie was, for intents and purposes, the mistress of Bellemere. It was she who convinced Claude and his cousin, Luc, to have all of the slaves on an incentive program, where they could receive their freedom after five years. Agathe had never noticed the high rate of turnover. Most of the newly freed slaves went north, but some stayed and worked for a decent salary. Some families received large four bedroom cabins and worked as sharecroppers under the protection of Bellemere. It was this that made Bellemere so prosperous. The workers gave their all because they were not abused or misused, and hard work was always 7 rewarded. Amélie had a natural gift with numbers, so she handled all of the plantations accounts and finances. Agathe believed she was the brain behind the remarkable wealth Bellemere had begun to accumulate, but in reality, it was Amélie, with a shrewd business sense learned at her father‟s knee. Monsieur Durand was a pragmatist; the world was a cruel enough place, but it was damn near impossible for his half-breed children. All six of the sons born of his mistress, Solange, were successful businessmen in France. Their only daughter chose Claude Bonnet, but she would not go without her own skills. Amélie was everything Claude could ever want, just as Monsieur Durand had planned. Claude and Agathe had been married for seven years before she found out about her husband‟s lover. What had started as a few weeks away here and there had gradually progressed to just about all of her time spent away from Bellemere. She was in Baton Rouge during the rainy season, New Orleans for the winter, and at her father‟s largest plantation in Natchez with the majority of the extended family (excluding Monsieur Durand, of course) for the entire summer. It just so happened on a jaunt from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, the steamboat was traveling a little too close to shore and ran aground. Agathe considered it providence that they just happened to be a few miles from Bellemere. She imperiously informed the hassled captain she would be spending the night at her plantation, and if by chance the 8 steamboat was towed out of its current predicament, he was to wait for her return. She was after all, the only daughter of the richest man in all of New Orleans. After hiring a sad old, musty carriage that broke down at least five times on the way, Agathe finally made it to Bellemere after full dark. There were no houseboys to assist her luggage from the dilapidated carriage; there were no lanterns lighted outside, the front door was unlocked and unguarded. After imposing on the elderly Cajun who drove her home to drag her luggage into the foyer, Agathe made her way up the winding staircase to her husband‟s suite determined to get answers. There were no servants anywhere in the house, which was completely unacceptable. She was going to have to set the house to rights in the morning, but for now, Claude would have to bring her luggage upstairs and find Luc to have him bring a ladies‟ maid immediately. Agathe sailed through the sitting room that adjoined Claude‟s bedroom in high dungeon. This entire situation was too much to be borne. Why she had ever expected a peasant to care properly for all she had given him she would never know. She had just swung the bedroom door open prepared to wake her errant husband when the words died on her tongue. There on the huge four-poster bed was her husband kissing some slave woman with all the passion he had never once showed her, while Luc had his head buried between her shapely thighs. Claude was caressing her rather full breasts as the woman whimpered into his mouth. 9 As much as she wished she could, Agathe could not turn away. She was both repulsed and fascinated by the scene unfolding before her. Her heart sped in her chest, her mouth felt dry, and an uncomfortable moist heat began to pool between her legs. The woman had begun to moan in earnest as Claude moved from her lips to trail kisses all over the woman‟s face, down her neck, to suckle the nipple on one breast while his hand moved to pinch the nipple of the other. Agathe watched in fascination at the way her husband‟s fingers alternately squeezed and rolled the chocolate protrusion while nipping and suckling the other as if it were some delectable treat. The woman was thrusting her hips into Luc‟s face in earnest while her head rolled back and forth on the pillow, waves of silky black hair spilling across the virginal white of the crisp cotton sheets. Her gasps and moans increased in pace and tempo until she screamed clutching Claude‟s head as she did so. Luc moved up the woman‟s body, kissing a trail from her thighs to her stomach as Claude lay on his back, pulling her to a sitting position on top of him. Were they done? But no, Claude lifted the woman up slightly as Luc reached between Claude‟s legs to clasp his impossibly hard manhood placing it at the woman‟s opening. Claude had never been so eager for her, Agathe thought peevishly while pressing her thighs together tightly. The achy heat was becoming unbearable. Never in her life had Agathe felt the feverish feelings now coursing through her body. She had to press a hand to the V where her legs met, trying to rub the throbbing ache away. 10