Scandal in the Night (2 page)

Because he was afraid to take his eyes off her, lest she waver and disappear like a mirage in the dusty glare of the high desert. But she did not dissolve into the crystalline air. She came on, walking steadily along the level grass, her head bent low to murmur encouragement to the awkward child clinging to her hand.

Impatient bodies interposed themselves between them, blocking his line of sight. He shifted to the right.

“Jack, lad! Come and meet your uncle Thomas.” James was still at his elbow, trying to subtly recall him to his duty, to the attention he owed his family. “I’ve told them what little we’ve known about you, gallivanting about far-off, exotic India.”

Small voices rose around him, clamoring for his attention, until he found himself being bowled into and patted on the back by grubby, admiring hands.

“Uncle Thomas? Is India as hot as they say?”

“You’re awfully brown, like a pirate,” complained a voice. “But you haven’t got a ring in your ear.”

“I don’t like him,” was the final decree from one suspicious moppet. “He doesn’t look like he has any presents.”

But Thomas ignored the voices. He had eyes only for Cat.

She still had not noticed him.

She stopped just beyond the gathered circle of people, waiting with polite disinterest from a distance as his family stirred and swarmed around him. Her eyes followed the children, keeping track as they congregated around him and then broke apart.

My God. Did she not recognize him?

He told himself it was only natural. Six months ago, before he left India, his own family would not have recognized him. “How long has she been here?”

“Beg your pardon?” James did not take his meaning. “I imagine everyone will stay at least a fortnight or so, though Father may have to return to London. We’ve plenty of room. No need to hurry away—”

“No. Her.” Thomas let James follow his gaze. He had lost her before. He would not take his eyes off her now.

“Oh, Miss Cates? I forgot, she will be a stranger to you. Steady on there, Thomas.” James’s voice held the first faint beginnings of a warning. “Miss Cates is our governess. She’s absolutely marvelous with the children. A wonder. They adore her.”

Of course they did. Children, and most people, not to mention any number of species of animals, could not help but adore her. They had an instinct for the truth—something he had lost first, before he had lost her.

But Miss Cates, James had said, not Rowan. That was less than the truth. It meant she was hiding. Clever, clever girl. Right here all along. He couldn’t have thought of any place better himself. Something that he would only allow to be relief welled inside his chest. “Did she ask for me?”

“Miss Cates?” James’s laugh was uneasy, and a little placating. He put a steadying hand to Thomas’s shoulder. “No, Thomas. Why on earth would she?”

A thousand and one reasons, but mostly just one. She was
his.

“How long has she been here?”

James was frowning with more than concern now. “Not above a six-month, though Cassandra has been working for well over a year to steal her from Lady Grimoy, over at Oakley. Vanessa Grimoy was loath to give her up, though her youngest was already out. Why do you ask? Thomas?”

So she was a real, proper governess, not just pretending at it to find a place with his brother’s family. How had she managed to find him when he, a man long experienced in finding out secrets, had spent the better part of the past two years searching fruitlessly for her?

In his frozen state, he could not puzzle it out. But he could not stand there, rooted to the ground like a fakir in his roadside shrine, if he wanted the answer. “Introduce me.”

“To Miss Cates? Thomas, are you quite all right? Come, man, the family is waiting—”

“Introduce me.” His raw voice was nothing short of unconditional. Unmovable as the granite hills.

“All right, if you insist,” James muttered in a frustrated tone that said he didn’t know what else to do with his clearly lunatic brother. “Miss Cates,” he called to her, “may I introduce you to my brother, the Honorable Thomas Jellicoe? My brother is only just lately returned from abroad, from India. Just this moment, in fact. Thomas, Miss Cates.”

She looked up at James, the pale oval of her face showing nothing more than polite interest. But Thomas was sure. His body stirred painfully back to life. He had been half dead with grief, searching for her in vain. But if she were alive—so, too, must he be.

He closed the distance remaining between them as fast as his unsteady legs would allow, and stepped close, so he could satisfy himself it truly was his Cat, and then closer still, so he could smell the mingled scent of lavender and starch rising from her skin. So close, she was forced to change her focus from James and notice him.

At first, she only looked at the hand he extended, roughened by weather and work with horses, and still far too brown for an Englishman. And then her gaze slid to his wrist, to the single, beaten silver bracelet he still wore.

Yes. Her disbelieving gaze ricocheted up to his face, and her eyes darkened in shock. Remembrance and confusion raced across her skin like a hot shadow, and then fled, leaving her drained of color. Even her freckles blanched. She pulled away abruptly, and pressed her hand to her throat, stumbling a little sideways, as if her world were tilting off its upright, starched axis.

He reached out to right her. In India, she had smelled of jasmine and lemons, not lavender and starch. He would remind her of the jasmine.

“Miss Cates and I are acquainted.”

Chapter Two

Catriona should have had some warning. Some suitably dramatic cataclysm of nature—a fire or a flood—to warn her hell was about to open up and spit out this particularly unexpected devil.

“You are mistaken, sir.” She tried to say the words clearly, but they fell from her numb lips in a whispered rush, drained of all her hard-won confidence.

And he was
mistaken.
Because she had never seen the man standing before her, looking so impossibly handsome in his rumpled yet beautifully tailored English clothes, and so out of place, so exceptionally wrong, standing in front of her in the rolling, green English countryside.

Oh, but she did recognize him. She would know those incandescent green eyes anywhere, even if little else about him—or her—remained the same.

Yet, that was only part of the truth. Miss Anne Cates—as her employers, Viscount Jeffrey and his wife, Lady Cassandra Jeffrey, knew her—was
not
acquainted with the Honorable Thomas Jellicoe. They had
not
been introduced. In fact,
they
had never even met.

Because Catriona Rowan had known him, and he had known her in the fullest sense of the word, as an altogether different man. A man as forbidden to her as the fruit of knowledge was in the Garden of Eden.

Her fall from grace had begun in the bazaar in Saharanpur, the volatile outpost cantonment far north of Delhi, on the edge of the frontier, over two years ago.

If she closed her eyes, Catriona could conjure up the pungent scents of jasmine and marigold that had hung heavy in the still morning air. Flower sellers had spread their garlands of petals in mounding piles over every available inch of space of the Rani Bazaar, in readiness for some Hindu festival she could no longer remember, perfuming the air with a riot of scent to match the riot of hazy, saturated color.

The children in her care, her young cousins, had been delighted by the outing despite the heat. Let loose from the strictures of the English cantonment, they were excited to have the run of the bazaar—Arthur and Alice had wandered ahead, while Charlotte and young George made discoveries closer to their nursemaid.

Catriona had loved it all—the heat and the color. The searing spring sun had felt good on her skin, its warming rays welcome after the cold, raw winds of her recent journey from Scotland.

“Cat, look!” Her cousin Alice held up a garland of bright pink rosebuds, and then darted ahead to a stall filled with vividly colored sari silks.

Catriona had smiled, happy to share the girl’s simple joy. She had come to India to do just that—find some portion of joy. To forgo the crushing bleakness that would have been her life had she stayed in Scotland, and find solace in the only family she had left. To ease the ache that had only just begun to subside. To escape her inescapable grief.

To forget.

She had sailed for India and her aunt, Lady Summers, and her family without asking permission, without even writing to warn them she was coming. There had been no time. She couldn’t afford to wait, and couldn’t risk having them reject her—she had only enough money for the passage, and only enough time for this one, nerve-rattling throw of the dice. Her father had said that Lord Summers was the son of a duke, and that his family had everything Catriona had not—wealth, power, and influence. It had been a terrible gamble, to pitch herself upon their mercy, but Catriona had had nowhere else to go. She had no other escape.

But it wasn’t just escape she had wanted. It was the chance to start anew. The chance to be part of a family. The chance to enjoy these rambunctious, affectionate children.

And as she had stood in the middle of the bazaar watching those rambunctious children,
he
had appeared. Riding at the head of a caravan of horses clattering over the hard-packed roadway, like a vision from a storybook, a secret prince full of magic and mischief—all swirling turban, flowing robes, and plush, full
salwar
riding trousers spilling over the tops of his wine-red, soft leather boots.

An Afghani or Pathan, she guessed, thinking of her reading on the fierce tribes to the north, with his waistband bristling with ancient-looking guns and knives. Certainly the man was striking. His piercing, almost glowing green eyes were a startling contrast to the dark caramel of his skin. But it was his smile, a blinding slash of white teeth across the darkness of his beard, that snared her as easily as a fishnet. A roguish, knowing smile. A ready smile—as if he held himself ready to be pleased with life, ready to snatch up any and all pleasures that wandered too close to his tenacious grasp. Such a smile that everyone who saw it was included in its laughter, and Catriona had found her mouth curving as well, hopelessly drawn into the circle of his infectious enthusiasm.

“Who is that man?”

The
ayah,
Namita, who had been assigned to be her constant shadow ever since the day Catriona had arrived unescorted and unexpected at her aunt and uncle’s doorstep, did not need any further direction. “Oho, mem! That man is
Huzoor
Tanvir Singh, the great horse trader of the Punjab.” Namita’s eyes were bright with admiration—an admiration reflected in the eyes and smiles of nearly every other female in the bazaar between the ages of eight and eighty. “He is a wealthy and influential trader. His caravans are said to travel to the back of beyond, far into the mountains and countries to the north.”

Of course he was a horseman. Catriona looked with better informed eyes and saw he could be nothing else, even with the bright warrior’s dagger thrust into his belt. The Punjabi was both relaxed and instinctively in tune with his animal, his hands light and quiet on the reins, his knee glued to the horse’s side, as if the two were but one being, even though he had slung his other leg casually across the pommel of his saddle. The trader walked the horse easily through the throng, presenting a picture of innate horsemanship as he laughed out loud in answer to the raucous, high-spirited cries of the people who called out to him along the whole length of the bazaar while he tossed mangoes from his copious pockets to the children gathered by the sides of the stalls.

His passage, Catriona realized, was meant to be noted by one and all. So that within minutes, word might pass from tongue to ear, and ear to tongue, from the bazaar throughout all Saharanpur, that Tanvir Singh had brought his caravan of fine, northern-blood horses down from the mountains to sell.

Cat knew his horse-trading kind of old, for hadn’t she taken the measure of his like along the meandering banks of the Clyde, and a hundred small towns and villages between there and Glasgow when she was a girl? And she knew a rogue when she saw one. But he knew his business, this rogue, this storybook prince of a horseman. Despite the heat and dust, despite what must have been long weeks of marches down through the mountains at the back of beyond, as the
ayah
called the
Himalaya
, the horses were fit and fine—strong boned and well muscled, sleek and well fed. Her grandfather would have loved to have seen such well-bred animals, and to have mentally compared their lines to his own tall Clyde-bred draft horses.

But her grandfather was cold in his grave, Scotland was thousands of miles away, across the dark, brooding sea, and all the horses were sold and led away.

The sharp stab of pain and longing, at the thought of all she had lost, was as familiar as it was quick, yet under the wide umbrella of the Punjabi’s dazzling smile, she was able to deflect it to the side, an ache to nurse later. She would not brood now. Not when there were such horses as Tanvir Singh’s to be seen.

Without another thought, her feet carried her forward.

“Aie,” the
ayah
cried in fear, pulling at Catriona’s arm. “Thou wilt be crushed by the beasts!”

But Catriona had no fear of such high-bred horses. They were brother and sister to her. She could divine their hearts and minds as easily as she could divine her own. Even as she went forward—instinctively crooning soft words of praise in Scots Gaelic, though she knew the horse would not understand her—a haughty, curious black mare with high, white stockings turned her long, noble head and stepped carefully forward the few feet her lead rope would allow to twitch her ears and whuff at the air by way of greeting.

As the mare came near enough to lower her head to have her ears scratched, Catriona closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. The achingly familiar, soft, earthy scent of the animal was like a balm to her soul.