The Bride Wore Pearls (11 page)

But he caught her arm, all but forcing her to turn round to face him. “Anisha, I—”

She widened her eyes. “Yes?”

“Tell me, are you all right?”

“All right?” Her delicate eyebrows rose. “In what way?”

She did not mean to make matters easy for him. Well, he did not deserve for her to do so. “Miss de Rohan,” he said, jerking his head toward the gate she’d just exited. “It was rather bold of her to come here, wasn’t it?”

“She strikes me as a rather bold young lady,” said Anisha. “I gather she went all the way to Brussels with Bessett and practically ran some evil Frenchman through with her sword saving that poor child. And Rance, if you mean those flowers to be a gesture of sympathy, you’d best take them away again. I want no one’s pity.”

She had resumed her walking—and her use of his Christian name, as she so often did in private. Lazonby laid the flowers down and went after her, catching her arm again.

She froze, her gaze dropping to his fingers where they gripped her bare arm. He could feel the warmth in her; could almost feel the coursing blood—and coursing emotions—beneath her skin. She was not angry, he sensed, but there was a message in her eyes. Unsure what it was, Lazonby jerked back his hand and extracted the note from inside his coat.

“Those flowers are an act of contrition,” he said. “Along with this abject apology. I behaved abominably yesterday—abominably when I kissed you, and even worse when I—”

“Rance, just
stop
!” Anisha interjected. “I swear, every time you open your mouth nowadays, you dig yourself a deeper hole.”

“What—?” he demanded.

But exasperation had settled over her face. “I grow so weary of men treating me as if I have no mind of my own,” she muttered. “That kiss—I
wanted it,
damn me for a fool. And had I not wanted it, trust me, I would have struck you a cracking good blow across the cheek for your impudence.”

He drew back a pace, a little surprised by the vehemence in her eyes.

“Rance, you have—” She stopped, closed her eyes, and balled up her fists as if fighting the urge to strike him. “
You
have what Bessett does not—you have
raw
passion
. It is what draws everyone into your sphere. It’s what makes you bold on the battlefield, and what makes you burn inside. It is, I daresay, what keeps you up at night. But it isn’t something one ought to apologize for.”

“Come, Anisha, don’t make me out—”

“I don’t make you out anything!” she snapped, eyes flying wide. “But you—
you
make yourself out to be nothing but a charming debauchee one moment, and some misanthropic avenging angel the next—neither of which is what you are.” She snatched the note from his hand. “Thank you. I accept your apology. You made an ass out of yourself with Bessett, and you made me angry.”

He dropped his chin. “I know.”

“But do not apologize for the kiss,” she went on, crushing the note, unread, in her fist. “We are bloody idiots, the both of us. But we are adults, and if we wish to be idiots, that is our God-given right.”

“All right,” he said at last. “I will remember that.” Lazonby hung his head, as if ashamed. “I will remember, Anisha, that you are not a child—”

“Thank you,” she muttered.

“—but that you are, by your own admission, a
bloody idiot.
”

For an instant, the garden went silent, even the birds, it seemed. He could feel her there, quivering with suppressed emotion, though he dared not look. But when at last he lifted his head and cracked one eye, she was shaking.

They burst at once into peals of laughter.

“You
wretch
!” she cried, swinging wide and striking him once on the chest—
hard
.

“You asked for it, Nish,” he declared, catching her arm in his before she could hit him again. “Now, come with me, my girl. We were going to sit in the arbor. And you were going to tell me something.”

“I think I was going to tell you not to let the gate hit you in the arse on the way out,” she grumbled.

He threw back his head and laughed. “No, I’m pretty certain that wasn’t it.”

She jerked away, lifted her skirts a little disdainfully, and swept past him, her spine regally stiff.

But she was not angry; not really. And his sick dread had been for naught.

They were, after all, still friends.

He had not realized until just that moment how terrified he had been of losing that.

He could bear a great deal—indeed, he had borne a great deal; the loss of his good name, his friends and his freedom, the family he’d so dearly loved—but he was not at all certain he could have borne the loss of
her.
It would have been, he was suddenly certain, the very last straw laid upon a very tenuous camel’s back.

And so they were reconciled.

Something stung and swam in Lazonby’s eyes and he blinked it back, unwilling to think what it was. It did not matter. He would simply be more careful in the future; careful to set a little distance between them and to keep things blithe and teasing. He would resume his light flirtation, secure in the knowledge that neither of them needed anything more. His baser needs, those he could slake anywhere. But friendship? Ah, that was rare.

And yet he could not keep himself from watching the way her silk skirts shifted so temptingly over her slender hips. Not for the first time he felt lust stir deep in his loins; something primitive and raw, and he realized with a grim certainty how easy it would be to tumble over that edge from deep affection into raging desire.

He would not do that to her; would not attach so much as a whisper of rumor to her on his account. God knew she had trouble enough as it was. Ruthveyn’s title and wealth might overcome his Anglo-Indian heritage, but Anisha had not his advantage. She did not need her name dragged into the mud, where his already wallowed.

He forced his gaze up to the elegant twist of her hair that was entwined today with silken cords of cerulean blue that matched her vivid blue and white striped frock. The arrangement was elegant in its simplicity, and not especially fashionable. Nonetheless, Anisha had a knack for choosing just the right colors and fabrics to suit her fine bones and dark coloring.

And though she disdained hats, Lazonby had caught sight of her once wearing a diaphanous veil over her hair, one which had hung nearly to her hips, along with one of the brilliantly hued skirts and shawl-like garments which she had brought with her from India.

The attire had looked at once sensual, practical, and elegant; her mother Sarah’s things, mostly, Ruthveyn had said, for until her death, the pair had been inseparable. After Sarah’s death, however, their father had had little use for a daughter. Anisha had been left to the care of their few Rajasthani servants and a maternal aunt, sent out to Calcutta to care for her.

It was the way of things, Lazonby supposed. But as he watched her now, he wondered if anyone had ever appreciated Anisha Stafford simply for what she was. Her boys, of course, loved her as their mother; Lucan doubtless felt similarly. In other words, they loved her for what she gave to them. Her husband, according to Ruthveyn’s intimations, had loved mostly her dowry. Ruthveyn adored her but saw her also as an obligation, and tried to swaddle her in cotton wool.

And Anisha knew all of this. One could see it in the infinite sadness that sometimes softened her eyes.

She drew up by the arbor seat and smoothed her skirts gracefully beneath her as she sat, then motioned for him to join her. “So, I called on Mr. Napier this morning as promised,” she said, coming straight to the point. “Unfortunately, he was out again.”

“Did you wait?”

“It would have been a long one,” said Anisha. “He’s off to Burlingame again, and if his clerks know why or how long he means to be, they weren’t about to tell me.”

Rance cursed softly beneath his breath. “At least a week, don’t you reckon?”

“I do,” she said a little grimly. “In any case, it seems we’ll be busy with a wedding. This dinner party will be only the beginning.” She stopped, and sighed. “Oh, I
do
wish Raju and Grace had not gone away.”

He laid an arm loosely along the back of the arbor seat, careful not to actually touch her. “I know you miss them, old thing,” he said lightly, “but you and young Lucan can throw a dinner party as well as anyone.”

She looked up at him and smiled. “I daresay.”

“I confess, though, to being surprised.” He let his gaze drift over her face, still searching for hurt or unhappiness. “You don’t have to do this, Nish. No one expects it of you.”

“No, they expect me to be crushed,” she said. “Or angry. I’m neither, and I’ll have no one thinking I am. Even I have a little pride.”

“I don’t believe Bessett’s intentions were too widely known,” Lazonby reassured her. “Though both he and Ruthveyn mentioned it to me.”

Anisha lifted both shoulders in a resigned gesture. “I should have liked to have been spared even that,” she said. “But in any case, this is what my brother would wish done. He would want us to welcome Miss de Rohan into the
Fraternitas,
and into our family.”

Lazonby was not entirely sure of the first. “You understand, then,” he said quietly, “that Sutherland has initiated her?”

“And I think better of him for having done it,” said Anisha. “But I am exceedingly glad not to be her.”

He smiled down at her. “Ah, but I think you are very bold, Nish, in your own quiet way.”

Anisha shrugged. “That life is not for me,” she said softly. “My boys, Rance, they are my life. And I am glad to have been born when the stars were otherwise aligned—not that my father would ever have agreed to such a thing.”

“I’m not sure hers did,” said Lazonby dryly, his gaze drifting over a long swath of daffodils. “In any case, you saw her hand today. She claims she does not have the Gift. Do you believe her?”

Anisha lifted her narrow shoulders. “How does one define that word?” she mused. “I have never understood. Do I have the Gift? Do you? Miss de Rohan reads the tarot, she says. Is that a Gift? I do not know.”

“You can read palms and the night sky, so what is the diff—”

“Those are
sciences,
Rance,” she said in a tone of exasperation. “For many long years I studied, first with my mother, then with my aunt, to gain that knowledge. Do not disparage my hard work by claiming it was
gifted
to me. As to Miss de Rohan, she has . . . good instincts. But nothing haunts her dreams, waking or otherwise.”

“Ah,” he murmured. “But your skills go a little beyond mere study, Nish. You know they do.”

Anisha chose to ignore that. “Miss de Rohan is more like you than Geoffrey,” she added. “She senses things—but she does not
see
anything. Moreover, it is a skill she does not yet entirely fathom.”

“Saw all that in her hand, did you?” he remarked.

But he did not for a moment doubt that she had done so.

It was their strange mix of Scottish and Rajasthani blood, Ruthveyn had once said. Their father’s line had been a part of the
Fraternitas
since the time of the Druid priests, and their mother had been a
rishika—
a sort of mystic, well-read and given to extraordinary visions; visions that had left her princely Rajput father eager to marry her off to anyone who would take her, for such a gift, while highly prized, was still unwelcome in a wife.

Anisha’s father, apparently, had not understood quite what he’d been getting in his Anglo-Indian political alliance. Saraswati Singh might have been rechristened Sarah Forsythe, but the truth had told in their children. Anisha’s gift was not the same as her mother’s, nor even her elder brother’s, but like her mother, she had studied the ancient Indian scripts, and she understood things like medicine, palmistry, and the movement of the heavens in a way few Englishmen could have comprehended.

Lazonby understood, too, what Anisha meant about Miss de Rohan not entirely fathoming her abilities. He had been nearly a man grown before he had truly comprehended that he sensed things others did not—and even then, he had denied it.

His father had likened it to the story of their old smithy, Clackham, who, as an apprentice, had been ordered to fetch some wealthy young lordling’s green curricle from the local inn for repairs. But finding nothing wrong with it, Clackham had simply rubbed a little rust off the shaft shackles and returned it to the inn-yard, for as every working man knew, there was no accounting for the folly of the rich.

The young lordling had not been amused; he had been left with a cracked axel and missed the 2000 Guineas Stakes at Newmarket. And afterward, no one had been able to explain to Clackham that he had taken a
red
curricle, not even when his irate customer had parked them side-by-side, forced him underneath, and shoved his face into the broken axel.

Poor Clackham had not understood he was partly color-blind. His arrogant customer had been blind, too, for he’d been unable to grasp that one man could discern what another so plainly could not.