of her blue woolen gown.
The pair laughed and teased each other as they hurried to undress.
“I'll bet I beat you,” taunted Mitch, his dark navy blouse already stripped off and tossed aside.
“Not on your life,” Suzanna retorted, stepping out of her lace-trimmed petticoats.
Articles of clothing flew across the room as the laughing competitors raced to be first to get naked.
“Looks like I'm going to win, Miss LeGrande,” Mitch proclaimed, as he stuck his thumbs into the waistband of his white linen underwear, the only article of clothing remaining on his tall, lean body.
“I don't think so, Admiral Longley,” Suzanna squealed as she kicked off her white ruffled pantalets.
Naked, they stopped laughing. Wordlessly they stepped into each other's arms atop the soft fur rug. Both shuddered at the initial touch of bare flesh on flesh. They kissed passionately and sank to their knees.
Too long denied the kind of ecstasy that was impossible to ever forget, they couldn't wait. In seconds Mitch was making eager, anxious love to Suzanna on the lush dark fur, while the flickering flames tinted their enjoined bodies a pale orange hue. Their shared orgasm occurred almost the minute he was inside her. That's how hot they were for each other. Neither minded that it was over so soon.
In fact, both were again laughing as the spent Mitch fell over onto his back beside Suzanna. Struggling for breath, they kidded each other about their lack of control. But when finally the laughter subsided and the gasping for breath ceased, Mitch turned onto his side by Suzanna, raised up on an elbow and laid a hand lightly on her stomach.
The tip of his forefinger circling the small indentation of her navel, he said with a sheepish grin, “I don't want you calling me the ‘five-minute man.'”
Suzanna smiled. “Then you'll have to convince me that you aren't.”
Mitch did just that.
He made love to Suzanna again, this time taking it slow and easy, stretching out the pleasure for the better part of an hour, each savoring every sweet moment of the incredible bliss.
“I've just enough time for a bath,” Mitch finally said with a yawn. “Care to join me?”
“Mmm, too lazy,” Suzanna replied, not stirring. “I might just take a catnap right here.”
“Good idea, sweetheart.” Mitch kissed her turned-up nose and agilely rose to his feet.
Once he was out of the room and safely in his tub, Suzanna quickly rose. She rushed out into the foyer and took down Mitch's black naval musette bag, which she carried into the parlor and placed atop the mahogany bar. She opened it and anxiously went through the papers, searching for pertinent dispatches.
Her eyes widened in horror as she read a document setting forth the timeline and exact location where the Union Navy planned to launch a major attack on the unsuspecting Confederate Rapidan River stronghold. Suzanna was trembling with emotion as she carefully placed all the documents back inside the musette bag and returned it to the foyer.
When Mitch walked into the room with a towel around his waist, Suzanna was just as he had left her—stretched out naked before the fire, seemingly dozing.
Mitch looked down at her and weakened. “Perhaps I could stay awhile longer.”
“Could you, darling?” she trilled, rolling up into a sitting position and tugging playfully at his covering towel.
Mitch exhaled heavily. “No. No, I really can't. I must get back to the fleet.”
Reluctantly, he got dressed. When he was once again in full dress blues, he came to her, cupped the back of her head, bent from the waist and kissed her goodbye.
When he straightened, he said, “I'm not sure when I'll be able to get away again.”
Suzanna smiled in understanding, laid her cheek against his trousered leg and said, “Kiss me as if this were the last time.”
He crouched down on his heels, kissed her passionately and said, “I love you, darling.”
“Please be careful,” she murmured in reply.
Rear Admiral Mitchell B. Longley had barely exited the cottage before Suzanna jumped up, took a sheet of vellum paper from the desk in the corner and wrote down everything she had read in the damning dispatch.
She then dressed and trudged two miles through the deepening snow to reach the landmark—a carefully chosen leaning rock near her home—beneath which she consistently hid messages laying out information she had gleaned from the unsuspecting enemy.
A fearless spy for her beloved Confederacy, Suzanna LeGrande hesitated a moment before placing this particular missive under the rock.
If she passed on this vital information, she could be endangering Mitch's life. She could be responsible for her Yankee lover's death. Her heart squeezed painfully in her chest. She felt suddenly dizzy and her cheeks were hot despite the cold of the afternoon.
Suzanna closed her eyes and strongly considered tearing up the note. But only for an instant. She drew a labored breath, hardened her heart and dutifully placed the message beneath the cold stone.
One
On a chilly autumn morning in 1859, the lively mistress of a magnificent mansion came flying down the curving staircase, her lilting laughter echoing throughout the grand residence. Eighteen-year-old Suzanna LeGrande was a happy, carefree young aristocrat who had lived all her life in this stately two-story Virginia manse on the rolling banks of the Potomac River.
The laughing young belle lived with her widowed mother, forty-nine-year-old Emile, and her older brother, twenty-two-year-old Matthew. The frail, quiet Emile LeGrande loved her daughter dearly, but the mercurial Suzanna's rambunctious behavior was prone to give her mother headaches.
The LeGrande siblings were close, and Matthew, being the man of the house, was very protective of his beautiful younger sister. Since the high-spirited Suzanna had turned sixteen, hopeful young suitors had been drawn to the vivacious miss. She was, and had always been, stunningly beautiful, with her flaming red hair, large, wide-set blue eyes and milky-white skin. But Suzanna was not vain about her looks. She had turned heads her entire life and thought nothing of it.
Besides, it was a great deal more than her startling beauty that attracted a growing army of male admirers. She possessed a great zest for life and threw herself into everything she did with such blazing intensity it charmed the young bucks and frightened her sedate mother. Suzanna had a compulsion to dramatize, which made her tremendously fascinating to all her friends.
She was high-strung, sensitive, warmhearted and endlessly entertaining. There was never a dull minute around Suzanna. At an early age she had learned—from her gregarious, red-haired father—to spin yarns that left her listeners wide-eyed and hanging on to every word. It was not only boys who found the outspoken Suzanna intriguing, but girls as well.
She was impetuous and impatient, but so filled with the joy of living that she lifted
