Only With Your Love (Vallerands #2)(18)

“I c-can’t!” She tried to resist as he grasped her ankle again. Instead of applying the cloth, he searched the back of her heel with his thumb and forefinger. “What are you doing?” she asked in confusion. He pinched deeply into a cluster of nerves until her foot began to feel numb. Slowly she relaxed.

“Better?” he asked.

“Yes, better,” she said with a sigh of relief. Although there was still discomfort, it was not nearly as bad as it had been. Deftly, Griffin continued to clean out the sand and tiny pebbles embedded in the tender sole. “How do you know how to do that?” she asked, giving him her other foot when he gestured for it. He applied the same pressure to the back of it.

“In my far-reaching travels I’ve learned a trick here and there,” Griffin said, and grinned at her. “Later I’ll show you some others.”

“Non, merci, I would rather not…” Her voice trailed into silence as Aug entered the hut carrying a folded cloth sack.

Impassively Aug knelt down beside them, sitting on his heels. He began to pull out a strange assortment of feathers, small stones, lumps of dried clay, bags containing powdered substances.

Griffin held his hand up in a staying gesture. “We don’t have time for charms and fetishes, Aug. Dispense with the voodoo show. All I want is some of the green powder.”

“What is this voodoo?” Celia asked warily.

“Voodoo? It’s magic, medicine, superstition. They practiced it in Haiti, where Aug hails from.”

“What is the green powder?”

“Something we’re going to put on your feet. If, of course, Aug doesn’t insist on some ritual burning of dirt, feathers, and nail cuttings first. Or slaughtering some poor fowl.”

Celia stared at Aug, who was frowning at Griffin’s irreverence. “Does Monsieur Aug worship the devil?” she asked suspiciously. If the answer was yes, she would not allow one particle of green powder near her feet!

Aug replied in the same patois as before, while Celia strained to decipher it.

“Not exactly,” Griffin translated. “But he does believe that the spirits of the dead sometimes return to torment the living.”

“Do you believe so?” Celia asked.

Griffin smiled. “Living people always seem to present more difficulty to me than dead ones.”

Aug reached out to touch her foot, and Celia scuttled back in alarm. For the first time a smile twinkled in his black eyes. He murmured something to Griffin.

Griffin laughed huskily. “Aug wants you to know he has no taste for skinny women. Now let him attend to your feet.”

Solemnly she held still while Aug took her ankle in his broad hand and sprinkled an olive-green substance over her sole. He hummed a soft melody under his breath, winding strips of cloth over and around her foot. Meanwhile, Griffin swabbed his wounded shoulder with whiskey, cursing as the sting of the alcohol sank into the cut.

“Thank you,” Celia murmured to Aug when he had finished bandaging both her feet. She turned her palms up and shrugged helplessly. “I wish…I wish I could repay you somehow.”

Aug pointed to her hair and replied. Celia looked at Griffin questioningly.

“He says he could make some powerful charms if he had a lock of your hair,” Griffin said. He shook his head. “No, Aug.”

Hesitantly Celia reached out to Griffin’s long leg and touched the top of his boot, where she remembered he kept his knife. He arched a winged black eyebrow but made no move to stop her. Her fingertips slid around the solid knife handle and extracted it gently. Trying to comb her hand through her hair, she was dismayed to feel the number of huge snarls and tangles in the golden mass. After she found a small lock near the back, she raised the knife and cut it quickly.

“Here,” she said, handing the glinting skein to Aug, who thanked her with a nod. His blunt fingers moved with surprising delicacy as he wrapped the hair in a scrap of cloth.

“That wasn’t necessary,” Griffin said.

“It was,” Celia replied, watching Aug as he left the hut. She touched one of her neatly wrapped feet. “I owe him a debt for helping me.”

“And you feel obligated to pay your debts?”

“Yes.”

“You owe me your life.”

“Yes.” She met his eyes without blinking.

“I look forward to being reimbursed,” he said mockingly.

Something tightened inside her body, a knot of repulsion and anguish. Her loving husband was dead, and she was the prisoner of this dirty, hairy-faced stranger. He was nothing but a vagabond, a jackal who survived by stealing from others. For a moment her hatred of him outstripped her fear. She hated his rough beard and sullen-looking mouth, his insolence.

“I think,” she said with every ounce of dignity she possessed, “that your pride would not allow you to force yourself on a woman who did not want you.”

Easily reading her contempt for him, Griffin sneered. “There are many things I value over my pride, petite. Your body happens to be one of them.”

As if a swift storm had appeared over an already choppy sea, his mood switched from unpleasant to cruel. When she timidly asked him where she could see to her private needs, he walked her into the woods where the others could not see them, and he mocked her embarrassment. Although he kept his back turned, Celia was mortified to the point of tears. The sound of her quiet sniffling as she rejoined him seemed to annoy him beyond reason.