Scandal in the Night (23 page)

She did not try to deny that truth. “Why?” she asked instead, her voice soft with the first faint bruising of hurt. “You said all men and women are equal in God’s eyes. Why may we not be equal enough to even kiss?”

Because once he started kissing her, he might not be able to stop. “Because God does not make all the rules. Men do.”

But he did not believe in the rules—he had spent the greater part of his life as Tanvir Singh flouting them. So he gave lie to everything he had just said, and bent his head and touched his lips to hers with a swift surety that made her breath come fluttering out of her mouth in surprise.

She watched with open, wondering eyes as his mouth took sure possession of hers. Her lips were soft—so deeply, deeply soft—and pliant, and moved ever so slightly, so tentatively, against his. He did nothing more to touch her, only kept his lips against hers, tasting slowly, taking little sips of her, never drinking too deeply. It was she who put her hands on him, she who grasped his sleeves, holding him still before her, so he would not move away, so he would not leave before she could think better of this kissing in the gathering dark.

But she did not think better of it. She kissed him back, learning how to appease the low thrum of pleasure he knew he was evoking within her. When her eyes fell shut with the effort to contain all the sensations, and the butterfly ends of her eyelashes swept against his cheek, he was done in.

His hands rose to touch her, to find the delicate solidity of her arms within the voluminous folds of her sleeves, and gather her against his chest. Encouraging her to follow her desire. Asking her to trust him with her pleasure.

She warmed to the physical passion slowly, unbending by degrees, learning her way by delicate increments. And he led her on, with longer kisses, moving from the pliant softness of her lips to the long slide of skin along the side of her neck, teasing his mouth down the tendons, letting his fingers delineate the edge of her high neckline. Discovering the arrow-straight line of her collarbone beneath the sturdy cotton of her collar. Pressing the heat of his desire against the fabric, nipping gently through the layers to find the skin beneath.

And her head was tipping back, giving him permission, acquiescing to the intoxication of pleasure. He ran his hands up the side of her neck and into her hair, cradling the fragile strength of her skull, angling her face just so, stroking his thumbs along her cheeks until she opened to him.

He tasted her carefully, savoring the tart pomegranate tang of her lips, and easing his way within the softness of her mouth. He breathed in her sweetness and her goodness as if they would save him from himself. As if the fragile scent that arose from behind her ear could hold his baser instincts in check. But when she brought her hands to his waist, and pressed herself into him, he could feel his control slipping away, degree by degree, until his hands had stolen around her back and he had gathered her to him, kissing her over and over, bending her back over his arms and holding on to her as if she alone could tether him to this world. As though she alone could save him.

From what, he did not know.

He only knew that she felt perfect in his arms. She felt right.

As if she were the rightest thing he had ever done in his life. As if the press of her lips against his had changed him in some basic, profound way.

She had felt it, too. She had opened her eyes and looked at him, running the soft pads of her fingers across his features with inquisitive wonder, as if she would memorize each and every line and curve of his face. As if he had been something new and unknown she had chanced to discover for the very first time.

“Tanvir Singh,” she whispered. But she had looked at him with such wonder and trust, the weary heart he had never thought capable of deeper sentiment turned over in his chest and began to throb with something perilously close to gratitude.

And then she lit his gratitude and sentiment on fire when she smiled, and threw back her head and gasped and laughed with such wicked, slippery delight that he wanted to show her just how much more wicked he could be. How much more delight he was prepared to give her. So much delight she would laugh and gasp for hours and days. She would laugh and gasp with pleasure until they were old and gray.

He bent his head to take the lobe of her ear between his teeth. He bit down gently, delicately, and a shivering shudder ran down through her body, and Thomas knew there was an answering echo in his.

He maneuvered her back against the wall so he could lean into her, and ease himself with the weight of his body bearing into her. She answered not with passivity, but with a renewed energy. She wrapped her arms around him and held him tight to her, as if she wanted nothing more in the world than to be as close to him as possible.

She was assertive in her recklessness, exploring the taste and texture of his skin. Stroking the backs of her fingers across his beard, placing one curious thumb above the heavy pulse at the hollow of his throat, curling her hands around the back of his neck, holding on to him with a pliant strength that drew him harder against her.

They had kissed and kissed, and he had fallen so deeply under her spell, he could not remember who he was, or who he was supposed to be, as if he had drunk too deeply of her intoxicating allure.

It wasn’t until he curved his palm over the top of her breast that she drew back, startled and even a little afraid of what she wanted. She stared at him, fear and desire pushing and pulling at her with almost equal force. But fear, or awareness, or some other scruple cleared the haze of pleasure from her brain, because she grew pale in the twilight.

She opened her mouth as if she would speak, and then either changed her mind, or simply could not think of the right words.

“Thank you,” he offered to stem the silence, “for the gift of yourself and your beauty.” And he stroked his thumb over her lower lip, both to reassure her of his sincerity, and to satisfy his unassuaged compulsion to touch her. He threaded his fingers through hers—a gesture of intimacy and trust. A gesture of companionship, and of complicity. “You must know I dream of showing you what I know of love,” he told her. “How I dream of you doing the same. I dream of you baring your body, and I arranging you on scented pillows for my pleasure. For our pleasure.”

She had retreated from him at that, frowning at his words, until he realized he had spoken as Thomas Jellicoe, and not Tanvir Singh. That he had instinctively spoken as his true self.

But the inconsistency was enough to make her retreat from her fearlessness. She turned away. “I know nothing of love.”

He drew her back by cupping her face in his hands. “Catriona. Thou mayest know little of this kind of love, of touching and intimacies shared in the quiet dark, but thou knowest a different sort of love—the love of living with an open heart.”

She looked up at him, her pale, oval face painted shimmering silver by the purple light of the evening sky. “Tanvir. Is this madness to hope we can share our hearts?”

“No, this is my only bulwark against insanity. This is real, all else is madness.”

*   *   *

And it still was.

He still burned for her.

“Cat.” At Wimbourne Thomas felt as gray and flat as the afternoon light falling on the stoic wood of her bedchamber door, and just as stripped bare. “Was I so easy to forget?”

Catriona did him the honor of giving him the truth, though her answer was so low he could barely hear her through the stout panel. “No.”

Thank God. “I’ve never forgotten you. Never. Every day you are the first thing on my mind when I wake in the morning, and every night, the last.”

Her sigh was so deep it was audible. “You seem to have forgotten
some
things. You seem to have forgotten that you abandoned me.” Her voice gained fragile strength, as if she were steeling herself for the uncomfortable task at hand. “You said you loved me—or maybe you didn’t. Maybe I just imagined that you said you loved me. But you never meant it, or else you would have waited for me. But you didn’t mean it then, so you can’t mean it now. You’re only saying it so you can get me to go back. To make it easy for you.”

There was too much, too many different accusations to answer. “I didn’t leave you that last night.” Of this he was sure. The night she spoke of—the final night they had been together, only a day after their first kiss along the cantonment wall—was indelibly etched in his memory. “You’re the one who left. You’re the one who never came back.”

“I came back, Tanvir—” She stopped herself from saying his name, and he felt all the weight of her confusion and disappointment. “I came and you were gone. All of your camp along the flaming river—every tent and cushion, every last horse. Everything. Even the dung had already been scavenged.”

“No.” He was on his feet now, and rattling at the door. “No. I came for you. I came. I followed you. The moment I let you leave my tent that bloody last night. I knew it—I knew it was a mistake, so I followed. I was practically upon your heels when you got to the residency. I called to you. I tried to stop you.”

“No. I never saw you there.” Her voice was just as sure. “And you weren’t at Colonel Balfour’s, either.”

“Balfour’s?” His voice rose until he was sure half the house could hear him. He didn’t care. “But you went to the residency. I saw you running into the bloody
residency
. Everyone else, all the servants, and even some of the people from the cantonment who had come, were running the other way, abandoning the place, but you—you went
in.
”

Flames had been coming out of the windows on the upper floor by the time Thomas got there—their orange glow could be seen from across the city. Thomas closed his eyes and he could instantly see the nightmare scene before him. He could still smell the sulfuric stink of desperation. “My God. The place was a holocaust. Of course I was there, Cat. Did you honestly think I didn’t come to help you? To find you?”

He should never have let her go that last evening, the last time he had seen her. Never let her leave him. He should have heeded his instincts and kept her by his side. He should have held her and protected her and loved her until she had no more thoughts of the residency or the people there. He should have.

But he had not. He had kissed her and let her go, and let her walk out of his tent and into the enveloping dark until she was lost from his sight.

Her departure had filled him with a gnawing emptiness—with suspicions and doubts about her ability to return to him—that he could not explain and could not exercise. He tried to allay his sudden misgivings with action by calling his
sa’is,
and ordering his caravan to break their camp by the river, and be gone as soon as possible. He wanted his men gone long before dawn, headed northwest for the Punjab and the passes through the Hindu Kush. He had wanted no trace of Tanvir Singh left in Saharanpur.

Because somehow, some way, he was going to take her with him, and a Punjabi
sawar
did not ride slowly into the mountains with the much beloved kinswoman of his Excellency the Resident Commissioner, Lord Summers. Not if he wanted to keep his head attached to his shoulders.

But he had wanted her more than he had wanted his head. He had been more than willing to take the risk. She would be worth any price. So he would disappear. They would disappear together.

Yet, he hadn’t been just a Punjabi horse trader—he had been a spy. And the spy Tanvir Singh had no business taking Catriona Rowan, a pale British girl, with him upon the road, roaming across mountains and deserts in search of secrets. What if the privations of his rough, nomadic life wore her down and eroded her steely sweetness? What if the hardships that would surely befall them washed her desire for him away like the lashing winds that poured through the mountains?

No. He had pushed such misgivings aside. She was not some soft, cosseted girl. She would take to his life, to his horses and his freedoms, as if she were made for it. Made for him. He felt the truth of it deep in his gut.

And perhaps he didn’t have to run away with her in the dawn. Perhaps now that she had chosen him, now that he was sure of her, he could also be Thomas Jellicoe, if he chose to. Perhaps he could regain the other half of his life. Perhaps he should. He should make plans and think of the future—a different future, in a different land. They could go anywhere. He could even take her back to England, to Downpark. He could save her from the harsh winds of fate, and give her a life of comfortable ease. He could give her the life of a princess.

“Huzoor, huzoor!”
The whisper had roused Thomas out of his fantasy.

A stable boy from the residency—the stable boy to whom Thomas had passed a steady supply of rupees to keep Tanvir Singh informed of the Memsahib Rowan’s comings and goings, and the second servant to come from the residency that night—stood at the corner of his tent, beckoning urgently and pointing to the south. “
Huzoor,
thou shouldst know. All is in an uproar!”

Thomas had turned from his tent, and followed the direction of the boy’s arm, up and away into the distance. To the south, and the direction of the cantonment, where an immense column of smoke roiled like a huge chimney into the purple evening sky. Where some distant building was outlined against the black of the night sky by fire.

The residency. Where Cat had gone.

Thomas was already running, shouting orders as he went for his horse, trying to think of possibilities and plans, contingencies and stratagems, but there had been nothing but a cold blade of dread and fear shredding his chest and clouding his brain. Every fiber of his being, every muscle and bone and sinew strained to get to her. To stop her. To save her from the danger boiling like molten death into the dark sky.

And as he jumped on his horse, racing toward the smoke that curled through the sky, filling it with inky soot and the acrid scent of ash and destruction, the first tongues of orange flame licked the darkening sky.

The top floor at the rear of the building was almost entirely engaged by the time Thomas tore through the cantonment gate past the wildly shouting porter.