Scandal in the Night (22 page)

The pavilion, which up until that moment had been spacious and cooled by the sweet evening breeze flowing across the high ceilings, had began to narrow, until it held only the small patch of floor upon which she stood.

“And then you looked at me.” Thomas continued to spin the memory out until he could once again feel the stunning sensations he had felt that day. “And I saw something—awareness? Or even perhaps desire warming your eyes. Because you let me look at you, with heat racing across your face and sweeping down your neck, drawing my eye across the delicate architecture of your collarbones and shoulders.” And lower still. He had imagined following that warm flush down, down beneath the long skirts of the fitted dancing robe that would have no stays or petticoats, down the sweet scoop of her belly to her long, pale white legs. “Was I wrong?”

Behind the door, Cat did not answer. But no answer was response enough. She did not deny his claim.

Then he had been right, that night in the Begum’s
zenana.
She
had
looked at him the way a woman looks at a man. A man she wants. He had known it then, and that knowledge had been all the fuel the raging fire of his imagination had needed to conjure up an image of exactly what Catriona Rowan would look like when she was naked beneath him, her body spread before him like a pale pagan offering.

When,
he had thought unequivocally. Not
if
.

Oh, Mina could be proud of her work that day. She had aroused and discomfited them all to a nicety. Just as she had surely hoped and planned. But Mina had known enough to say nothing to him. She had only smiled in her contented way, and turned away to conveniently busy herself with some other task.

But he had not turned away. As if he had no will of his own, as if his hands were not at his mind’s command, the tip of one finger had reached out to trace along the delicate line of her brow.

“I fear you do not approve,
huzoor.
” Her voice had held a whisper of something like pride, or defiance, that pleased him. He could not bear for her to feel anything like shame.

To his own shame, it had taken an effort to speak as Tanvir Singh. “It is not for me to approve or disapprove. Thy body is thine own, to do with as thou likest. Thy body is thine to adorn or not, as thou wouldst please, and not any other.”

But it had pleased him. Immensely. Beneath his
sawar
’s Sikh robe and turban he was simply a man. An Englishman very far from the home he had forgotten, and a man who found the imagined landscape of Miss Catriona Rowan’s pale, smooth, naked body unbearably erotic.

And Mina had known it. She had continued to offer him temptation beyond his power to resist. “Do you like my gift, Tanvir? Does our Catriona not look beautiful and as a woman should?”

“Yes,” was all he had allowed himself to say.

And he had allowed himself to recline on a divan, and watch as Catriona Rowan was persuaded to dance and stretch and move with the grace of the surest cat. His Cat.

Mina was nearly purring with pleasure. With her, his discomfiture slanted toward anger. “Careful, Mina,” he had said in a voice low enough for her ears only. “She is not a doll or a toy for you to play with. And neither am I.”

Mina was unchastened and unbowed. “But how can I resist when you look at her so? When your eyes come alive the way they do when you behold a beautiful horse. You have never shown such interest in a woman before. Not a woman of your own kind.”

Thomas had been startled by the acuity of the soft, spoiled sister of his heart. As far as Thomas knew, only the colonel and the begum knew of his true identity—Mina had been a child of no more than two or three when they had concocted their plan to create Tanvir Singh. “Be careful of your words, sister.”

“Rest easy, my brother,” she had assured him. “She is beautiful, even though she is
angrezi,
and you are alone.”

“And I must stay alone. A horse trader does not take a wife unless he wishes to stop trading horses. And I have no wish to stop trading horses.”

“Ah. It is as I thought. You look at Miss Rowan and already you think of taking a wife.”

“Mina,” he had admonished in his sternest voice.

But she had laughed at him, pleased with herself, and he would get nowhere arguing with her and protesting what she had already confirmed. So he could only join in her teasing. “I think of a great many
other
things to do with Miss Rowan besides take her to wife. Just as you intended, and so cunningly arranged that I should.”

The Princess of Ranpur did not bat an eye. “I must have all the cunning because your Miss Rowan has none.”

“Oh, don’t underestimate her. She has enough.”

“Aha. You have what—touched her? Kissed her? Have you had a taste of her yet? Once you have a taste, she will be inside you and will never go away.”

And Mina had been right. The thought of taking Catriona Rowan to wife had set up camp within his head. And it did not go away.

It was still there in the dim afternoon of a gray English day. And Catriona Rowan was still on the other side of the door.

But at least she was no longer on the other side of the world.

She was here now, and if she was not exactly talking, she was at least listening.

“Do you remember the day you went swimming?” He settled down to sit with his back against the wall, so he could turn his head and speak to the crack between the door and the jamb. “I was not at the palace to greet you. I had spent too long trying to convince a Rajput breeder to part with a stallion of Arab blood. And by the time I found my way to Colonel Balfour’s the heat of the day was upon us.”

Her quiet voice carried to him through the panel. “The sun had baked the scent of curry into the air, until the afternoon was drenched in a deluge of spice.”

Yes. That was what the day had been like. That had been the magic swirling in the air. “I thought the ladies of the
zenana
would be dozing upon their cushioned divans with sleepy servants pulling the punkahs to fan the household. I thought perhaps I might be able to get you alone.”

Thomas had followed the liquid sounds of laughter and water along the high screened passageway overlooking the begum’s garden, until the happy shouts and splashing lured him farther, around to the deepest, most private part of the palace. There, at the very heart of the property, a stream that wound its slow way down from the hills had been artfully diverted and dammed to make a deeper, nonornamental swimming pool.

Most of the ladies and children luxuriated around the shallows at the sides in various states of undress, so he stopped and would have turned back, intent upon not intruding upon their privacy.

But there she was, his red-gold goddess, slowly stroking her easy way through the green water on her back, like a naiad or some bright, misplaced Celtic water sprite. Her spun-ginger hair streamed and floated out around her like a living bloom, as did the white cotton of the long chemise she wore to preserve her modesty.

And under the clear green water, her bare limbs had flashed, long and sinuous and luminously white. Her long legs scissored with slow rhythm as her arms stroked through the water, pale and gleaming.

He had held himself entirely still. Well, perhaps not entirely still. The one part of himself he could not discipline into stillness had grown appreciative and hard at the very sight of her.

She dove down smoothly, stroking toward the bottom, and he was treated to the lure of her curved, cotton-clad bottom before she disappeared beneath the surface. In another moment, she surfaced and drew in a deep lungful of air, and then eased onto her back to float.

And his mouth went dry.

Now he understood Mina’s casual invitation for the challenge it was. For as Catriona floated on her back, and closed her eyes to the bright press of the sun, and abandoned herself to the water, his eyes were open wide. He could see through the wet cotton fabric that now clung to her body with glorious transparency. And he could
see
that she was entirely and gloriously naked—he no longer had to imagine what Mina’s talk of threaded eyebrows and beauty had meant. The evidence was now before his eyes. The ladies of the zenana had indeed adorned and pampered Catriona like a princess in accordance with Hind’s standards of beauty. And they had threaded every last tuft of red-gold hair from her body, leaving her mons naked and bare, and through the wet, transparent fabric, unshielded from his eyes.

Lust—deep, unbridled, and uncivilized by any attempt at thought—coiled through him like a snake, steady and potent. If he had wanted her before, he was now stunned by the savage ferocity of his need.

It wasn’t as if he had not seen women similarly groomed before—it was the custom for women to remove the hair from their bodies. But it had never affected him so before. This was not merely the casual appetite for the carnal. This was need, a need that had only to do with her. This white, white Scottish girl, gleaming like the rarest pearl in the sunlight. But unlike the dark-haired beauties he had seen similarly groomed, she did not just look nude. She looked naked.

His mind had chanted the word: naked, naked, naked. Incantation or curse as he watched stupefied with need that was perilously close to yearning. Naked, naked, naked.

And mine. Mine to take. Mine to hold. Mine to keep.

Now.

The only thought that had kept him from going to her then had been that he was in Augustus Balfour’s home, in the begum’s palace. Thomas’s peculiar sense of honor, and years of self-discipline and privation, kept him in place, even when his naked red-gold goddess made her way to the shallows and began to climb out.

He had turned his back to further spare himself the sight of her long, lithe body as she took up the napped cotton cloth a servant handed her to dry herself, and closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the cool of the wall.

But there was no escape. He had burned for her.

He still did.

Chapter Thirteen

From that moment on, he had stopped thinking. The years of service, his duty to the company, his allegiance to Colonel Balfour—all fell away before the need that was an ache that grew unbridled, until he was sure it would rend him in two.

But he had waited calmly, even patiently, by the palace gate to escort her back to the residency, until she came into sight. Somehow, even in the aftermath of his clandestine violation of her privacy, it was even more erotic to see her in her own constricting, buttoned-up European clothes. To know that beneath all those concealing layers of cotton, behind those stiff whalebone stays, underneath those yards of dull gray fabric, her luminous skin lay hidden, like a pearl beneath the callused, rough shell of the clam.

He helped her mount Puithar, and the burgeoning feeling of possessiveness grew stronger when he had her under his hands. His palms lingered at the smooth curve of her waist. His fingers slid over the strong architecture of her booted ankle to arrange her stirrup just so. Any excuse to touch her. Any excuse to stay close enough to inhale the lush scent of jasmine and lemons that clung to her like joy. Any excuse to merge reality with his dreams.

They walked their mounts out of the gates, and through the waning day slowly, letting the children ride ahead, drawing out every possible minute of the quiet dusk by some unspoken agreement. Evening was falling upon the land, and the sky was lit with a hundred delicate colors of pink and orange and purple like a signpost of God’s quiet extravagance.

Side by side they rode on, and he was aware only of her. Conscious only of the yard of space separating them, attuned only to the small movements of her hands and feet as she brought the mare fractionally closer. And closer still. He checked himself, making sure that it was she who was inexorably and purposely closing the gap, and not he. He watched, drunk with anticipation and need, heady with hope, praying to every god he had ever loved to make it real, and let him not be imagining the blissful fact that his goddess was drawing ever closer.

And then her knee was whispering against him, her thigh nearly touching his thigh.

She did not look at him. She kept her gaze steadfastly forward, and so he reached very carefully between them—he could no longer resist the compulsion to let his fingers caress a fold of her long riding skirt. Just the once, before he made his fingers fall away from her. But though she would not look, he would, and he saw her eyes blaze shut like a falling star, an omen of benediction.

When they neared the cantonment the dusk had deepened, and so he let the children draw ahead through the gate before he steered Catriona away, down along the long line of deep, shaded shadow against the enclave’s tall, bricked wall. He lifted her from the saddle, and she braced her hands against his shoulders as he set her down, sliding them slowly down his arms, as if she were as loath to stop touching him as he was to release her.

“Tanvir Singh.” She said his name, and he wanted nothing more in that moment than to tell her the truth, and ask her to call him Thomas. Just that once. Just so he might hear his own name on her lips when he kissed her for the first time.

“It’s all so very strange. I feel—I want…” Her voice was a whisper of confused hope that trailed off into silence, unable to articulate the need that crackled between them like the frisson of heat from a lightning storm.

But he knew what she wanted from him, even if she did not.

“Yes.” That much he managed to say before the drunken mixture of lust—confined only by furious amounts of self-restraint—and relief had spilled into his blood like the spring rains swelling a river.

Because she looked up at him with the entirety of her open soul shining in her eyes like the pale gray moon, and he knew nothing was going to keep him from kissing her.

But she was young, and too trusting, and he had to be sure.

“Mem,” he began. And then he gave himself the gratification of saying her name—the pleasure of having the pomegranate taste of it on his lips. “Catriona. I am thy friend. So I will tell thee the truth, which is that I very, very much would like to kiss thee. And more, much, much more. But thou art … confused in thy feelings. And thou art forbidden to me.”