The Betrayal of the Blood Lily (33 page)

Alex felt a lopsided smile quirking across his own face, product of fear, adrenaline, and goodness only knew what else.

“Wise decision,” he said, and kissed her.

Her arms clamped around his neck as though he were her only escape from drowning, a desperate, clinging grip that gave the lie to her devil-may-care demeanor. Wrapping his arms around her, he could feel the way her body was shaking through the sodden material of her shift. She trembled as though she were suffering from an ague, with convulsive shivers that trembled through her whole body.

“It’s all right,” he murmured between kisses, stroking soothingly up and down her back. “It’s dead. It’s gone.”

Pulling his head down to hers, she blotted out his reassurances with her lips, kissing him with an openmouthed fervor that made Alex’s ears ring and the rest of his body to respond in an unmistakable and inappropriate way. His better self tried to intervene, reminding him that this was not what he had come for, that he was meant to be comforting her, not—well, whatever the rest of him was thinking.

The clamoring in his ears grew louder.

It took a moment for Alex to realize that the noises weren’t in his head; they were coming from beyond the door and getting louder by the moment, as footsteps clattered in the hallway and agitated voices rose in inquiry. It wasn’t surprising that the shot would have roused the household. What was surprising was that Alex had completely forgotten to think about that before putting the mistress of the house in a decidedly compromising position.

Pushing with both hands against his chest, Penelope extricated herself from his embrace.

“Stay here,” she ordered.

Alex wasn’t quite sure where she expected him to go. Into the armoire, perhaps? The evening was starting to take on all the classic attributes of farce, but for the deadly collection of scales jumbled on the floor.

Penelope whisked blithely around the snake. Yanking open the door, she thrust her head through the gap. “I’m all right!” she shouted down the hall in ungrammatical Urdu. “It was just a snake. It’s dead.”

That apparently occasioned a certain amount of comment. “It’s dead,” Penelope repeated. Sticking her head back inside, she demanded, “How do you say ‘go back to sleep’ in Urdu?”

Feeling rather dazed, Alex told her.

Penelope repeated it with considerably more force. He could see the taut muscles in her upper arms as she held on to the edge of the door, her entire body quivering with a frenetic energy that Alex recognized all too well from his brief stint in the Madras Cavalry. She was soaring on the sheer, exquisite pleasure of being alive, of having survived. In an hour, Alex thought darkly, feeling his own crazy euphoria beginning to dissipate, she would probably have a crashing headache.

“There!” she said, slamming the door and grinning at Alex. “That’s taken care of them.” Her bosom swelled against the neckline of her shift as she drew in a deep breath of pure anticipation. “It’s just us again.”

“About that,” Alex said, in the mildest voice he could muster, keeping his hands firmly at his sides. “Where is your husband?”

The question had the desired effect. Penelope stumbled to a halt, like a mare clipping her foot against a fence. She cast Alex a quick, startled glance before her old mask clamped back down.

She crossed her arms across her chest. “As you can see, he’s not here.”

“I see.” He should have known. Lord Frederick would be with his mistress. “I’m sorry.”

Penelope drew herself up defensively. “I’m not. Oh, don’t look like that! Ours was never a love match.”

“What was it then?” Alex asked, willing her to provide him with an excuse, and just as strongly willing her not to. Honor and desire battled for supremacy, and desire was having by far the better of it.

Biting down on her lower lip, Penelope looked away. It would have to be her lip, already swollen from their kiss. Her mouth was too wide for fashion, generous, flexible. Alex thought it was perfect.

“Boredom,” she said, with a shrug. “Expediency. Bad timing.” She looked up at him, her eyes brilliant. “But it brought me here.”

There was no mistaking her meaning.

Alex tried to make light of it. “To snakes in your bed.”

Penelope wasn’t having any of it. “To all this,” she said, her sweeping gesture taking in the cane screens, the moonlight spilling across the floor, the shadows of trees like filigree. She took a step forward, her bare feet moving soundlessly against the floor. “To you.”

Alex could feel his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he swallowed. “I won’t be your revenge,” he said levelly.

“What if it’s not about revenge?”

“Then what?” demanded Alex, taking a step forward, without realizing that he had. “Boredom? Expediency?”

A whisper away, Penelope’s lips curled as if at a shared joke. “Bad timing,” she said in a way that made it feel as though it were very good timing indeed.

Alex found himself grinning back, a reckless, devil-may-care grin that matched hers.

Reckless. Careless. Like his father’s.

The grin froze on Alex’s face, even as his hands automatically closed around Penelope’s waist. Cold reality crowded in on him, breathy icy prickles down his neck. Who knew what sort of unanticipated outcomes might arise from tonight’s careless carnality? Gossip, scandal, a marriage broken, a child to be raised under another man’s name. He could present arguments against each of those outcomes, specious arguments, designed to comfort his conscience and license his roving hands, but there was still Penelope to be thought of.

As if there could be anything but Penelope to be thought of, with the material of her shift fragile beneath his fingers, damp lawn melting into damp skin, with her eyes glinting up at him, her lips curving into a smile that promised pleasures more wicked than words.

“Where were we before?” Penelope asked, sliding her body up against him. In the shadowed room, the scent of flowers rose from her skin like a drug.

Alex dragged in a deep breath of air, trying to force himself to think, to reason, to do the responsible thing. Penelope might claim she wanted this—with words, smile, lips, hands; oh Lord, the hands; he couldn’t let himself think about what she was doing with her hands, or he would be lost—but how would she feel in the morning, when the potent brew of anger, fear, and lust had run its course? Jack’s mother had followed his father willingly, and look where that had got them.

He wouldn’t hurt Penelope that way. He wouldn’t let her hurt herself that way. In the morning, it would all seem different; in the morning, when the cobra corpse was tidied away and the scent of the flowers had burned away with the dawn.

“No.” He wrenched himself back, away, prying his fingers away from her skin. “I can’t do this.”

Penelope stared at him, frozen, a statue of Aphrodite caught in the middle of a seduction, or Lot’s wife turned to salt at a particularly intimate moment. Shock, dismay, confusion chased one another across her face as she stared at him, her empty hands suspended in air.

“Wha—” She shook her head, but the words didn’t seem to come out. For once in her life, Penelope Deveraux Staines was rendered completely and entirely without words. He could see her trying to comprehend, trying to figure out how they had gone from there to here, and failing entirely. He wasn’t entirely sure he understood himself. “You—I—what?”

She was owed an explanation. He didn’t have one. At least, not one he could cram into coherence.

“I just . . . I can’t do this.”

Penelope’s cheekbones suddenly seemed very prominent and there were hollows under them that had not been there before. “Do what?” she demanded, never letting go of his gaze, daring him to say it out loud. “What? Make love to me? Take me to bed?”

“Your husband’s bed.” That was the crux of it. There was no way around it. Damn it, it was for her own good.

Penelope turned on him a glare of truly ferocious proportions. “Don’t say his name.”

Alex’s lips tightened. Managing, by heroic effort, to keep his voice level, he said, “I am in his house, in his room, with his wife. What am I supposed to say?”

His words had an incendiary effect. “Is that how you think of me? As someone else’s chattel?
His
house,
his
room,
his
wife?” Penelope mimicked. “Nothing more than an appendage of Lord Frederick Staines, Special Envoy to His Majesty the Nizam?”

Alex looked at her in surprise at the vehemence of her reaction. “You know it’s not.”

Penelope drew a breath in sharply through her nostrils. “It is, isn’t it? Just another piece of baggage to be carted about from place to place, preferably shoved into a palanquin where it won’t bother anyone. Perhaps you might ask Freddy if he’d be willing to let you borrow me. You’d do the same for his horse, wouldn’t you? Or his pistol, or his sword, or his snuffbox, or his—”

“Don’t,” he said roughly, breaking into her matter-of-fact catalogue of Lord Frederick’s possessions, before it could go on and on, through neck cloths and stickpins and pantaloons. There was something in her face that unnerved him. A bleakness so staggering that he felt all his anger collide and crumble against it. “Good God. I had no idea you felt that way. Penelope—”

Anger turning to concern, he reached for her, but she jerked away from his hand, pushing past him so abruptly that the force of her passage sent him staggering against the bed, clipping his shins on the baseboard. Off balance, Alex grabbed blindly at the mosquito netting, but his hand passed through empty air, and he landed heavily with one hand against the mattress.

Where was the bloody mosquito netting?

Across the room, Penelope pivoted on her heel to face him, like an entire artillery regiment about to go blazing into battle.

“Well, I’m not his bloody pistol,” she announced, bright patches of color burning in her hollow cheeks. “Or his horse, or anything else belonging to Freddy bloody Staines. It’s
my
body,
my
life,
my
choice. Not his and certainly not yours.”

It would have been a very effective oration, but Alex was distracted by the mosquito netting, or rather the lack of it. The bars were bare. The fine film of mosquito netting that usually hung from the poles, shrouding the bed in folds of fabric, was missing. There was something about its absence that niggled at him.

“Well?” Penelope demanded, one foot tapping against the bare boards of the floor. “What do you have to say?”

Alex squinted up at the bare poles where the mosquito netting should have hung. “What happened to the mosquito netting?”

“The
what
?” Penelope stared at him as though he had just grown an extra head.

“The mosquito netting,” said Alex.

“The mosquito netting,” Penelope repeated, her voice dripping with a nicely calculated mixture of derision and incredulity. “You are asking me about the mosquito netting.”

“Yes,” replied Alex, goaded. “The transparent thing that usually hangs from the bed.”

Penelope tossed her head, sending the strap of her shift sliding down one shoulder, revealing the upper curve of one breast. “It was off when I came in. At least, it must have been. I don’t remember moving it. I didn’t think about it.” Nor should he, her tone seemed to imply.

“One generally wouldn’t.” A horrible suspicion was beginning to coalesce in Alex’s mind, blotting out other, lesser concerns. His troubled eyes met hers. “When was the last time you saw it in place?”

Penelope shrugged, sending her shift plunging still lower. “You needn’t pretend an interest in my sleeping arrangements,” she said caustically. “We’ve covered that quite thoroughly already.”

Alex gave her an exasperated look. “This isn’t bloody about that.” Before she could launch whatever sarcastic comment was cruising to her lips, Alex said hurriedly, “What happened with the snake? Where was it when you first saw it?”

Turning sharply away, Penelope yanked her strap back into place. “There’s nothing to tell. I tossed my dress onto the floor and it must have landed on that hideous thing. It got annoyed. I shot it.”

“But how did it get here?”

“I think we should name it,” said Penelope flippantly. “It seems disrespectful to just refer to it as ‘it.’ How about Marmaduke?”

Irritable with frustrated desire, Alex snapped, “I’m not calling the bloody snake Marmaduke!”

Penelope raised an eyebrow at him. The strap of her shift had begun to slide again.

Flushing, Alex looked away. “Fine. Did you consider that, er, Marmaduke might not have made his way here of his own accord?”

“Are you suggesting that Marmaduke didn’t want to see me?” Penelope lowered her lashes suggestively, but underneath them, her eyes were wary. He knew she knew what he was driving at. But Alex spelled it out anyway.

“What I’m suggesting is that someone else was quite eager for Marmaduke”—did they really have to keep calling it that?—“to make your acquaintance.”

Tilting her head back, Penelope looked Alex square in the eye. “Why not just say it? You think someone wants me dead.”