Deceive Not My Heart by Shirlee Busbee

even certain why, he decided it would make an excellent charm. At any rate, every time he saw it he would remember that women were ever deceivers—even whores!
    * * *
    Leonie missed her mother's crucifix almost as soon as she reached home. Slipping breathlessly in the side door that Yvette had left unlocked for her, she had instinctively reached up to touch the cross in thankfulness for having at last returned to the safety of the house, and with a soft cry of distress, she had discovered its loss.
    In view of what had transpired this terrible evening, to lose her one tangible link with her mother seemed the final, punishing blow, and whether she cried for her lost virginity or the loss of her treasured crucifix, she was never quite certain. Unaware of the tears trickling down her cheeks, she slowly, painfully made her way to her bedroom, wondering if the damned vowels had been worth what she had suffered.
    Throwing herself down on the bed, she decided that they hadn't been —grand-pere would just go out again tomorrow and sign away more. Her spirits lower than they had ever been in her young life, for the first time Leonie allowed herself to be swamped by the thought of the dismal future. Grand-pere was going to cause them ruin; he was going to force her to marry a man she had never met... and everything she had done would have been for nothing!
    Her entire body ached, her mouth throbbed from the stranger's ravenous kisses; beneath her eyes were purple smudges of exhaustion and between her legs there was a dull pain that would not go away. Tiredly she removed her brown dress, and the sight of a blood-streaked petticoat brought an anguished moan from her. She was ruined! And for what? she thought with a sudden violent spurt of temper. Grand-pere's gaming debts! With a flash of hatred, she glared across the room to where she had flung the old reticule that contained the vowels. I must have been mad to think of such a scheme, she decided with a burst of returning spirit.
    Leonie was a strong, resilient young woman, and while the rape she had suffered tonight would scar deeply, she was fast recovering her usual fire. The taking of her virginity had been neither brutal nor cruel, and Leonie admitted reluctantly that the stranger had not known what he was doing. It didn't make it any easier for her to accept and she found herself growing even more furious as she thought of it, but she was an honest enough young woman to admit that she had been partially at fault for what had happened. If she had never gone to the governor's, and if she had not been slinking like a criminal through the house, she never would have met the man in the darkened room, and he would never have mistaken her for the whore Gayoso had apparently meant to send to his room.
    Her face twisted in the darkness of her own room. Did women truly offer their bodies to men that way? To a complete stranger, she had never met and would never meet again? Thinking of confronting, in the revealing light of day, the man who had possessed her body this night, Leonie shuddered.
    She never wanted to meet that particular man face to face. Intrepid as she was, her cheeks flamed at the idea of standing in front of the man who had so intimately explored her body. Mon Dieu! I would die of shame or claw his eyes out!
    A faint scratching at the door brought her up with a jerk; she crossed the room and opened the door to find Yvette in a long cotton nightdress, her face white with anxiety.
    "Oh, Leonie, you are home at last!" she cried in a low tone. "I have been so worried."
    Leonie shushed her, and sending a wary glance down the hall where her grandfather's room was located, she pulled her half-sister into the room. "I just arrived not many minutes ago," she admitted.
    "I know—I have been checking your rooms every little bit," Yvette confessed. "I meant to wait up for you, but when your grand-pere came home, he ordered me to bed. I was afraid for him to catch me by the door, so I