Scandal in the Night (4 page)

A large hand closed around her ankle like a shackle, and hauled her back. “Don’t be daft, Cat. You’re not going anywhere before that gunman is stopped. Sit down.” He all but pulled her into his lap. “And don’t argue,” he added before she could protest. “You’ll give away our position.”

As his hands had finally ceased their minute topographical exploration of her person, she did not argue. She had much better save her breath to cool her overheated brain, and think—to find a way out of her latest desperate situation. The children were safe. One blessing, then, in this small ocean of misfortune. And she was still alive. Another blessing from a fickle, disinterested God.

Air crept warily back into her lungs. Catriona subsided into her corner, working hard to regain some composure, to stay calm and think.

It would have to be America for her. Lord and Lady Jeffrey had been generous in her salary, and she had saved almost everything she had earned from her previous employer, Lady Grimoy, as well as most of the money Lord Summers’s mother, the dowager duchess, had settled on her to make her disappear.

She should have known. She should have gone sooner. She had waited too long. She had let herself be lulled into thinking she was safe. She had let herself become accustomed to Lord and Lady Jeffrey’s regard, and let herself become attached to their children despite her best efforts not to—the children who had once again become her family, her only remaining solace.

But the problem still remained. How did she get away from this Thomas Jellicoe?

His left arm was still wrapped around her middle, and his large hand was moving minutely, stroking along her ribs almost idly, as if he were unaware he did it. But she was more than aware. Each one of his small, idle movements sent a shaft of heat tingling under her skin until she began to grow fidgety with sensation. The steady warmth of his body at her side was a marked contrast to the cool damp of the earth beneath her hands, and she dug her fingers into the soil to hold herself still. And to keep from touching him.

All squashed up next to him, feeling the tensile strength of his long, lithe body folded up next to hers, she was overcome with the rush of remembrance. Of wanting him, wanting to rely upon him, his heat and his strength, even as she knew she should not. She could not.

Oh, but she was weak, for she could not help but look at him and marvel at the changes two years had wrought. His smooth chin was tipped skyward, as he listened to whatever clues there were to what was happening beyond the small cocoon of their safe shelter. She had never seen him clean shaven, without the long, carefully groomed beard that was the hallmark of the monotheistic Sikhs of the Punjab. Without it, he looked strangely bare, almost naked, the strong, chiseled plains of his cheekbones and jaw intimately exposed, slightly paler than the rest of his face. And his hair, which had once been long and flowing when he had released it from its winding turban, had been ruthlessly cropped in the English style. Her fingers itched and twitched in the dirt, with the sudden urge to run her fingers through the short, uneven strands.

Too late, Catriona became aware that he was watching her catalogue the altered landscape of his face in amused silence, one corner of his mouth sliding upward to smile in that nearly irresistible way of his. “Well, how do you do, Miss Cates. Here we are. Getting shot at during a garden party, in merry old England. If I had known Hampshire would prove to be so full of such interesting intrigue, I’d have come home much sooner.”

It was so like him, like Tanvir Singh, to find the humor in the ridiculousness of the situation. It was so like him to try to amuse her while her world was falling down around her. She had once found it charming. Now she found it heartbreaking.

Especially when he continued. “Or is it perhaps just
you,
” he said, “and not England, who is full of interesting intrigue. It seems people are always getting shot at when you are involved.”

There it was, finally—the mention of murder.

He had not come to charm and amuse her. He had surely come to accuse her.

But his low voice was full of a strange sort of gentle, exasperated wonder, and he was regarding her through those dangerous, soot-dipped lashes, with such minute attention, as if she looked as strange and foreign as he. As if she were the map of a place he had forgotten he had visited.

No matter how hard her heart, or how turbulent her mind, what remained of her vanity could not withstand the onslaught. She put a hand up to push the messy wisps of her flyaway hair out of her face.

He shook his head silently, a slow negation, before he reached across the gulf between them and ran his thumb along the line of her cheekbone.

“You’ve dirt,” he murmured, as he smudged something off her skin, “on your face. And you’ve done something to your hair to make it darker and duller. Such a crime. And you are still attiring yourself in that horrid gray. Always gray. But somehow, despite all that, you look so lovely, I have the strongest urge to kiss you.”

That way lay madness. Or at the very least, bad, bad, regrettable decisions. He was no longer Tanvir Singh. He was no longer her friend.

She squelched it all down—the vanity and whatever unmet longing was attempting to stir itself back to life. “I beg you would suppress it.”

“No.” He shook his head again even as the corner of his mouth hitched into a single lovely, bittersweet dimple. “I think not. I think I’ve come a deuced long way to find you, and I’m done with polite, English caution.”

Yet, he took her face in his hands cautiously, slowly and carefully, in the way a man raised a too full glass to his lips, bringing his mouth to hers. Even as she told herself she should not—she should push him away, and run as fast as she could in the opposite direction and not stop until she had reached the ocean—she let him come nearer and nearer. She watched, her eyes open wide, searching his face, helpless with the need to reconcile this handsome Englishman with her memories of Tanvir Singh.

The first touch of his lips was soft, almost tentative, as if he, too, were tasting and comparing. As if he, too, were feeling his way across the passage of time and miles. She prayed fervently for a moment that she might be spared, that she might feel nothing for him, that her well of frustrated longing for him might have finally run dry.

But his lips were still the texture of ripe fruit, smooth and taut, and tasting of plums. He pulled back for a moment, his eyes closed, and took in a deep breath, as if he could take her in. As if she were as necessary to him as air.

In response, her own mouth dropped open, parched and thirsty, longing foolishly—so foolishly—for another taste of him. And like a dying woman in a desert who will drink even the deadliest brine, she took another sip, pressing her lips to his.

He slanted his mouth across hers and kissed her more deeply, searching her out, pushing his hands into the tight constriction she had made of her hair, pulling apart the low fist of the bun, scattering pins into the ground. And she was falling or melting, or going somewhere far, far away, dissolving into nothingness, and everything-ness, all at the same time. With his thumbs fanned along her cheeks and his big hands wrapped around the back of her head, drawing her into him, he kissed her with heat and abandon, drawing her out with lips and tongue, and with the very breath from his body, as if she were his air and his water.

A part of her mind told her she must think, she must use his lust and desire to her own ends, but she could not sustain the thought. Everything else faded, until there was nothing but the longing for the feel of his mouth on hers, and the pleasure so sharp she could not tell it from pain. Catriona was enveloped in the heat and scent of him. The heat, radiating out of him in leaping bonfires, was familiar, though the scent, a uniquely English combination of horse, leather, and privilege, was entirely foreign, and she realized she had been seeking it out—nosing along the slide of his neck below his ear, tasting his skin with little openmouthed kisses—seeking the faint hint of the patchouli that had once perfumed his long, long, beautiful dark hair.

A low growl of appreciation and encouragement wound out of his chest and she lost herself to him. Every pulse in her body beat with him. Every breath was mingled with his. She was weightless, floating higher and higher on the rising tide of her need.

They were no longer tentative. They had nothing left of what he had called English caution. They kissed with the knowledge that they were hidden from anyone else’s eyes and that they wanted this joining—had longed for this fervent press of flesh and pleasure. Indeed, her hands were wrapped around his strong wrists and she was all but pulling him closer, holding him near so she could lose herself in the awful, dangerous pleasure. In the promise of his passion.

The rough texture of his skin, shaved free of his beard, but with the beginning of whiskers, rasped against hers as he arched her head back to kiss down the curve of her throat. His teeth slid down her neck to worry and nip at the hollow at the base of her throat.

“God, yes, Cat. My Cat.”

Her eyes fell shut, and she was nodding in agreement, and waiting for more of the bliss that spread under her skin like honey, hearing nothing but the roaring of her pulse in her ears and the harsh cadence of his breath above her. Her breath was just as unruly. She was all but panting for him. Wanting him. Needing nothing but the feel of his hands on her body and his lips against hers.

“Let me touch you,” he rasped. “Let me have you.”

His fingers were plucking at the lacing of her gray gown, and a feeling of such abiding sweetness and relief blossomed within her, she felt almost faint. “Tanvir,” she whispered.

“Yes, my
kaur,
yes. I’ve found you. I’ve got you.”

She opened her eyes to see him, to find the promise of his dark green eyes. But he was not Tanvir Singh. He was not her lover. He was an Englishman named Thomas. A man who had shared his body, but never his truth.

She was not his
kaur,
because he was no longer her Tanvir. And even if he were, all Tanvir Singh had apparently ever wanted from her was what she was currently so foolishly giving him.

The realization stopped her cold.

She brought her elbows between them and levered herself away. “Oh, God. What am I doing? I don’t
know
you.”

He let her go, and blew out a low gust of frustrated laughter, though his breath was sawing in and out of his chest as if he had run a race. And his eyes, those laughing, mocking eyes, regarded her steadily through a fall of dark hair, like a jackal staring down a hare.

“You don’t know me? Well, let me enlighten you,
kaur.
I’m the man you once fucked as ruthlessly as any courtesan.”

Catriona flinched. She should have known some accusation, heavy as a blow, was coming. She should have been prepared. She should have understood that despite his kisses, he thought the very worst of her.

Fine. If he had not forgiven her mistakes, she would not forgive his deceit. “Don’t call me that. I am not your princess, nor was I ever. You
left
me. You left me there to die. Or had
you
forgotten?” She shoved at his chest. “Get away from me. Don’t touch me.”

This time, it was
his
head that reeled back as if she had hit him. The tight set of his jaw told her the truth of her accusation had found its mark.

“Perhaps,” he said when he had recovered, “I should have just let whoever the bastard is who wants to kill you put a bullet between your eyes. Then you wouldn’t give a damn who touched you. Because you’d already be dead.” He leaned forward, his fire-green eyes lancing into her. “But I’ll be damned if I’ve come all this way to find you, just to let that happen. So you’d better get bloody used to me,
kaur
.”

Whoever the bastard is.

He didn’t know who wanted to kill her?

She ought to feel some relief. But the tight, caged feeling in her lungs was still too close to panic for anything approaching relief. And the intense heat in his eyes, scant inches from hers, pouring his angry distrust over her, was enough to make her want to weep.

How could he
not
know—he who had seen everything? How had they come to this—this intensely hard feeling that was perilously close to hate? How had something so sweet and fine become so twisted and mean? But she would not cry. She would not. She was done with spilling useless tears for him. “Leave me alone.”

“Sir?” The tentative call came from the lawn beyond their dark shelter. “Mr. Jellicoe? Can you hear me? Lord Jeffrey sent me to give you the all clear.”

Thomas Jellicoe looked for a moment as if he would not reveal their place, as if he would keep her there by force and be-damned to the consequences. But finally he rose, and pushed his way through the dense branches, holding them back and extending his hand to assist her.

But she would not willingly touch him again. Catriona turned her shoulder and edged around him, heedless of the clawing branches scratching at her skin and gown.

He ignored her snub and snared her elbow in his implacable grip. “Thank you,” he addressed Michael, the groundskeeper’s son, who knuckled his forehead in response. “Has the bastard been caught?”

“Was anybody hit?” Catriona interrupted with her own pressing question instead. “The children?”

“No, miss. Nary a one. We seem to have come through this all to rights.”

“Thank God.” Now she did feel at least some relief. She drew a shaky breath into her cold lungs.

“And the gunman?” Thomas Jellicoe repeated his question.

“No. If it please you, sir,” Michael answered, “my father tracked fresh hoofprints south back down the road from Sixpenny Handley. And his lordship’s set him to take riders to follow and track the assassin down.”

Thomas Jellicoe nodded, and narrowed his eyes to scan the tree line beyond the manor walls. In that moment, she could see the canny Punjabi, the wily and brilliant
sawar
Tanvir Singh inside the trappings of this English gentleman. But when he spoke, his voice was again that of Lord Jeffrey’s brother, son of the Earl Sanderson, all assumed, imperious command. “Good man. Where are Lord Jeffrey and the earl, now?”