Scandal in the Night (20 page)

She shut her eyes again the moment he pronounced the bastard’s name, as if she could shut the memory off as well. But she denied it instantly. “He doesn’t need me dead. There’s no reason. I’ve given him no reason.”

He came another step closer. “But you do admit that it must be him—Birkstead?”

“No.” She turned back toward the windows, shutting out the idea. “I didn’t— Why should it matter now? It was years ago.”

His gut told him she wasn’t lying, but she was leaving something out. “Yes. It was,” he acknowledged. “But he has every reason. And you must know that.” He was guessing, but it was a guess based on two years of doing nothing but thinking about all the clues, all the possibilities. But he didn’t wait for an answer he knew she would not give. “I think you know more than anyone about what really happened, Cat. And the longer you hold on to that knowledge, the more that knowledge is going to hurt you.”

She said nothing. She blanked her face, as flat and featureless as the moon, and turned away.

He was relentless. “What happened, Cat? Why did you not tell them what happened? You never defended yourself. You just disappeared without telling anyone what you saw in the residency that night when you went running—oh, my God, I still have nightmares about you plunging into that burning building—looking for the girl. When you went in after Alice and—” He would have shut his eyes if it would have blotted out the image. “You never told anyone the truth.”

“No.” Oh, her head came around fast at that. The denial leaped from her mouth like a bullet out of a gun, and she spread her hands before her, reaching toward him as if she could ward him away from the idea. “You’re wrong. Alice wasn’t there. There was no one there. I don’t remember anyone. I don’t remember. I just don’t remember.”

Now he was certain she was lying outright. But she had finally come near him. Near enough so that he could see her lovely solemn face again, clear and open and appealing. And very, very afraid—her eyes had gone dark with the fear she could no longer hide behind buttons and starch.

He was again seized by the same irrational compulsion to grab her. To hold her to him and protect her, no matter the cost. To touch her, and slide his hand along the soft line of her jaw and into her hair.

And it seemed he was actually doing it—touching her—because the moment his hand grazed her skin, he was filled with a relief so profound it was a physical thing, a jolt that brought him back to life, as if he were drawing the first breath of air back into his lungs after having been drowned.

“I remember it, Cat. I remember everything about that night.” The words spilled out of him like water from an overturned pot. “I’ve seen it over and over in my mind like a play, time and time again. I remember everything about you. I remember your taste and your smell. I remember the feel of your skin under the pads of my fingers. I remember the way you looked in the moonlight, luminous as the crescent moon, like a pale slice of a star.”

She didn’t run. She didn’t push him away, or say, “Don’t touch me.” She stayed still and let him touch her, though she trembled under his hands.

He closed his eyes and leaned in, following the homey, starched scent of her, and trailed his mouth along the rigid side of her neck where he could feel the fragile pulsing of her veins beneath his lips. He kissed her there, and slid his lips slowly up the tilted line of her jaw.

“You tasted of almonds,” he whispered to the curved arabesque of her ear. “Do you remember? I remember I took down your hair. It had escaped almost all its pins, but there were one or two still holding it up and I let it down. Like silk, but softer, warmer.”

She had done the same to him—running her hands through his long, unruly hair. And he could see her remembrance in the way she knotted her fingers into tight, tense fists to stave off the memory.

There were more pins now. Hundreds, it seemed, pulling and scraping her hair into obedient order. But it was too fine, too long and flyaway soft to resist the release of his hands. His fingers stole across her scalp, freeing the pins so the fall of her hair could cascade in a silken curtain across her shoulders.

“Yes, it was like that.” The soft strands fell through his fingers, and he held it up to the light to look at the muted, dull colors. Even her hair looked gray. “Such a crime, Cat. What on earth have you done to it?”

“Walnut hulls.” Her voice was the barest whisper of apology.

“Please stop it.” He had loved the bright flame of her hair. He had not been able to light lanterns in order to see it the only other time he had taken it down. He wanted to gather it up in his hands like sheaves of wheat, and tug her head back so her mouth would fall open. He wanted to bury his face against it, and let it hang down to brush against his chest.

He wanted, he wanted. He wanted more from her than he could explain.

He wanted her love. He wanted her trust. He needed her absolution.

And he could not stop touching her. Lightly, gently, slowly. Waiting for her fear and her distrust to wane. Letting his hands barely skim the surface of her face. Tracing his way back to her, charting the minute changes the years had wrought—the silvery pallor that washed her once glowing skin. The tiny lines of worry that crept toward the corners of her eyes.

Those eyes fell shut as his fingertips grazed across her cheekbones, and caressed down the straight line of her nose, and back around again. His thumbs rose to trace the elegant sweep of her brows.

And lust, pure, undiluted, and primal, roared to life within him, drowning out all thought and sound but the pounding of blood in his ears.

“Ah,” he managed to say, though his voice sounded as if it came from far, far away. “You didn’t let them grow in.”

Her eyes flew open, and for a single, unguarded moment her gray eyes went dark, before she immediately began to back away. But he had seen her knowledge, and he had felt her instinctive response. He had felt the heat ignite under her skin.

“Oh, my God, Cat. What else remains the same?”

Chapter Twelve

Catriona was on fire with mortification. And something much, much more powerful. And more seductive. He pulled her closer and let his eyes roam over her face. And then his hand followed where his eyes had been, tracing along the line of her eyebrows, smoothing the pad of his thumb over her skin.

She turned her head away sharply to dislodge his touch, to keep him from prying any more secrets out of her. He disobliged her by taking her chin in his hand and turning her back to face him. “It’s remarkable that you’ve kept threading your eyebrows.”

Awareness blossomed under the newly sensitive surface of her skin. “You are imagining things, Mr. Jellicoe. There is no one with threads in England.”

He smiled then, his slow, lazy smile, and his eyes drifted almost closed. “Oh, by all means, yes, I am imagining things. I am imagining exactly what I will find if I raised your very sensible, long skirts, and felt my way over your ankle boots and higher, over the top of your sensible, practical stockings, and felt the bare skin of your legs. Oh, yes, I am imagining things.”

Catriona could feel the answering heat spread, stretching and coiling inward, deep into her belly. “Stop it.”

“If you wish,” he said reasonably, in that low, sooty whisper. “I will stop imagining things, and I will remember instead.” He leaned his mouth closer to her ear so his voice could insinuate itself deep inside her. “I remember the day you did this—the day you let Mira’s
ayah
thread your eyebrows and the hair from your skin. I remember what you looked like that day, fresh and startled. And I remember what you looked like later, beneath the prim and proper clothes you wear like armor, when you came to me.”

He leaned in to put his mouth so close to her ear that she could feel the warm brush of his breath against her skin. “I remember that even then, under my robes, I was Thomas Jellicoe and not Tanvir Singh. Because I liked it. And I think you liked it, too. And I have been imagining in maddening detail”—his finger glanced over her eyes—“all the other things you may have kept the same. But don’t worry. Your secrets are all quite safe with me, Miss Cates. I’ll take them to my grave.”

There was so much—so many memories and feelings—she had tried to shut away, but he kept unearthing them, one by one. Laying her foibles and failings and petty vanities out in the sun like coffins on the grass.

He would notice her eyebrows. He who saw every little detail and could tease out its meaning without conscious thought. Such a tiny piece of vanity, plucking her brows into a neat curve—something she did now without thinking, without remembering anything at all. She hardly ever thought of Mina and the begum. She had forced herself not to. It was better that way. Safer.

But safety seemed to be as slender as the arch of an eyebrow.

“You are mistaken.” Her words sounded feeble to her own ears, but he did not protest her obvious deflection from the truth. In fact, he looked as if he were in pain—his eyes were open and unfocused in the sort of blissful agony of a Renaissance saint in the midst of a vision.

She stepped around him, and quickly reached the sanctuary of her room, sliding behind the barrier of the door before he could recover himself sufficiently to stop her, or say anything else inflammatory. Unlike the nursery-suite door, hers did have a lock—a token effort meant to preserve some semblance of privacy from the omnivorous curiosity of the children. But it was solid and thick, her door, and she put her back to it so she could slide to the floor as her knees gave way beneath her.

The wood flexed beneath her back—Thomas Jellicoe must have leaned against it on the other side. “I’m not giving up, Cat.” His voice vibrated through the wood, and hummed its way deep into her bones. “You can’t just keep running away. It won’t work. I will follow you, Catriona Rowan, day and night, up corridor and down, until you remember the way it was. Until you trust me again.”

Oh, but he was wrong. She did remember. And she did want to trust him.

She wanted to trust the anguish she could hear in his voice, and the fierce intelligence behind his penetrating green eyes. She wanted to let him share the burden she had been carrying with her like a tombstone. She wanted to let him hold her, and take the pain and the loneliness away. She wanted him to fight her battles and slay her dragons.

But life wasn’t like that. If there were dragons to be slain—and clearly there were—she was going to have to sharpen her own sword, and fend them off herself. Anything else was fantasy.

Because there were some dragons that couldn’t be slain with one sharp thrust from a well-honed blade. Some dragons were impervious.

And because she had promised never to tell. She had given her word.

There could be no return to the days of peaceful, carefree sensuality in the begum’s
zenana,
or to the serene hours she had spent there. To the colorful garden perfumed by the scent of night jasmine, and to the cool, deep blue of the tiled pool.

It was a gift he had given her, Tanvir Singh, those seemingly endless days, those marvelously selfish hours in the
zenana,
when she hadn’t needed to think about anyone or anything else. For the first time in her life, others had taken care of her, instead of the other way round. Not that she had begrudged her young cousins even a second of the hours she spent taking care of them, and reading to them, and playing with them. She did not. She had loved them, and loved every moment of every day they had had together. She loved them still.

And oh, how she missed them. Their absence in her life left a hole in her heart that could never be filled. Never. God and Saint Margaret knew she had tried.

But the
zenana
had been special. It had been the beginning of another entirely new world for Catriona. A world full of exotic, delicious food and clothing in brilliant, saturated colors. A world filled with beautiful, impromptu music and dance, and evocative readings of poetry and literature. A world full of language with subtle meanings that often left her baffled, but always left her wanting to learn more.

And she did learn more. She experienced more.

Mina was a great patron of the arts and always kept a coterie of artists—female poets, musicians, and dancers—who entertained them whenever the mood should strike. She was also attended by many body servants who seemed to exist for no other reason than to pamper and adorn the princess and the begum with oils and perfumes and silks and satins and jewels too costly to enumerate.

Catriona had come to treasure her afternoons in the ancient stone halls of the begum’s palace. She had been given an open invitation to visit the ladies of the house any time she might break away from the residency, and she made good use of it. Most days she made herself wait until the children had been seen to, and given their lessons, before she could find the time to indulge herself, but Mina had laughed at her conscientious diligence, and told her to bring the children as well, to play in the cool stone pavilions and frolic in the clear pools, if that would bring Catriona to them sooner and more often. And so she did.

Most days, they went when the full, steaming heat of the day was upon them, when Aunt Lettice napped and no one in the residency or cantonment would miss them, or remark upon their whereabouts, and when the streets were deserted of almost everyone save the
sa’is
—as she had learned to call the grooms Tanvir Singh sent to accompany her—who rode at a distance behind them as they slipped out of the cantonment lines.

Other days, if it were earlier, or cooler, or for any reason that she could create, Catriona would lead her cousins down the path along the river, because with only a slight divergence from the shortest route to Balfour’s palace, they could pass Tanvir Singh’s colorful encampment. And often it happened that Tanvir Singh would be making his way to his friend Colonel Balfour’s comfortable home at the same time, so they might ride together.

It was always the best part of her day. So good, in fact, that she didn’t remark upon Tanvir Singh’s almost uncanny ability to anticipate her. She had never thought to question why he was always available to her. Because she didn’t want to. She wanted to be with him. With Tanvir Singh, she didn’t have to keep to a sedate pace, and she could abandon the parasol meant to shade her fair skin from freckling. She didn’t care about freckles—the sun felt good on her face and shoulders. She liked the warmth of the earth seeping into her. She liked the freedom of her mare, and being able to choose her own friends.