The Tiger's Lady (34 page)

So it
was
Barrett.

As he watched, the white-clad figure glided on down the corridor, her hair wild and golden, shot through with a thousand shades of sunlight. Guinea-gold, amber, and copper it was, like a sun exploding from the shadows.

In a haze of anger Pagan watched her glide toward the front door.
So that’s your game, is it, my sweet? In that case, let’s see just whom you ‘re stealing off to meet.

As he waited, silent and motionless, the Englishwoman opened the rattan door and slipped out onto the porch. In angry silence Pagan followed, his hard eyes never moving from her back. To her right lay the kitchens, the servants’ quarters, and the rice stores. To her left lay the tea-drying sheds and Pagan’s workrooms.

Which was it to be?

For long seconds she stood unmoving, her hands clenched at her sides. Her head tilted, she listened to the myriad night noises of the jungle.

Louder and louder grew the pounding of Pagan’s heart. With each passing second the fury in him swelled.

Just a few seconds more, he thought grimly. Then he would have his answers. And he would deal with her treachery exactly as she deserved.

But the object of Pagan’s fury moved neither right nor left. She merely swayed slightly from foot to foot, the trailing white hem of her gown whispering over the veranda’s wooden planks.

Some new trick?
Pagan wondered as he watched her strange, silent dance.

What are you waiting for, Cinnamon? The low whisper of an accomplice somewhere in the night? A furtive light shone from the edge of the path to the beach? Or perhaps the rattle of pebbles against the bamboo lattice at the door?

Does he make your breath catch when he touches you? Do you tremble and sway against
him
as you do to me?

Fury surged through Pagan. How well she had deceived him. It had been cleverly done, the whole bloody plan. No doubt even her name was a lie!

For some reason that thought infuriated Pagan as nothing else had.

He stalked down the hall. His tread was light, his boots noiseless against the cacophony of the jungle night—insects shrill and ceaseless, monkeys chattering, towering trees creaking and groaning in the wind.

Even when he came to a halt inches from her back, she did not move.

“Waiting for someone?”

Pagan waited for her guilty jump, the rush of checked breath, the blur of her white face flashing around to him in fear and consternation.

None of those things happened.

She did not move in the slightest, only continued to stare up in silence at the lantern hanging on a notched post at the roof of the veranda.

“Turn around,
Angrezi,”
Pagan ordered brusquely. The farce had gone on long enough!

She did not move.

Pagan’s lips flattened to a cold line. “I’m speaking to you, damn it!”

Slowly her perfect brow creased. Her lips trembled slightly, then began to move, making no sound.

Pagan could stand no more. With a fierce growl, he seized her lawn-clad shoulders and spun her about to face him. Huge and unfocused, her eyes swept over his face.

And peered right through him.

“What new trick is this, woman?” He shook her sharply, goaded nearly past endurance by her act. But he was treated once again to an unfocused stare.

He felt the first threads of uncertainty curl through him.

Was it possible that she was not pretending?

“Wake up, woman!” He caught her cheeks between his fingers, muttering a curse when she gave no sign of noticing.

The woman was asleep.

Pagan stared down at her in stunned realization. She was unaware of him and everything else around her. He had heard of such things, of course, but never before had he witnessed it firsthand. Perhaps the loss of memory led her to relive the past in her sleep, exploring events closed to her in waking.

With fingers suddenly gentle, Pagan tried to turn her face away from the light, but she would not budge. She stared at the lantern as if obsessed.

And then her lips moved, forming soft, inchoate words. Suddenly she stiffened, then twisted, raising a hand to cover her head, as if warding off a phantom blow. Again and again she dodged, her eyes wide and desperate, fixed on a nonexistent attacker.

The grim pantomime chilled Pagan to the bone. He realized he was watching something from her past.

His strong hands cupped her shoulders. “Come, Cinnamon,” he whispered, sliding an arm beneath her cascading hair and trying to guide her about. “Forget all this. It will only give you pain. You must rest now. You are safe here—safe with me.”

She caught a trembling lip between her teeth. Pagan saw blood pool up on the sensitive skin.

“M-mustn’t tell,” she whispered raggedly. “N-not ever. P-promised Grandfather.” She flinched, perceiving the hands locked at her shoulders. Wildly she twisted, eyes wide, fingers flailing as she tried to claw free of his restraining grip, taking him for her forgotten attacker.

Pagan muttered a curse and caught her wrists to his chest, where she could do no harm—to her or to himself.

She wrenched at him vainly, her lovely eyes laced with tears. “L-let go! Dear heaven—no more! Just let me die!”

Her choked cry plunged dagger-sharp, straight into Pagan’s heart. It sent rage coursing through him, for the fiends who had done such things to her. “Stop it, Barrett,” he ordered.

Did her shoulders stiffen at that name or was it merely his imagination?

“You are safe here,” Pagan said, his words slow and very clear. “But it is late. The moon is nearly mid-heaven. It’s time to go.”

He heard her low, raw whisper. “G-go where?”

“To sleep,
meri jaan,
” he said softly. “To forget—or perhaps to forget that you forget.” With gentle fingers he pushed her about and this time she let herself be guided, leaning slightly against him as they moved inside, back down the hall.

With every step Pagan’s agony increased. He fought but could not ignore the tormenting outline of her shadowed nipples beneath the thin chemise. The wild throb of the vein at her neck. The golden curl that spilled forward onto his naked chest, making heat pool thickly at his groin.

And like a thousand other times since his return from London, Pagan found himself cursing James Ruxley’s fanatic obsession. But most of all he cursed himself.

For being neither strong enough nor smart enough to avoid falling into Ruxley’s last trap, the most ingenious trap of all.

For loving her.

She slept, tugging the tangled sheet to her cheek like a child with a cherished blanket.

But Barrett was no more a child. Already her body had begun its sweet, sensual awakening. She shivered, stirred with a strange energy at her limbs. All unprepared, she was swept into an uncharted realm where giving meant receiving, where torment and pleasure were one.

She slept and dreamed—and knew that she was dreaming.

She forgot, then forgot her forgetting.

And in her dreams she wore golden bells and finest silk—and nothing else. Her hair swayed, unbound, catching the light of a thousand candles, and she was the fairest candle among them, her skin glistening with a flame reflected from deep within.

It was the flame of love, and he its object, a man forged of shadows and steel, his eyes the eyes of night itself. It seemed to her that she had loved him forever, this hard-faced stranger, girded in darkness and in dreams.

Or in nightmares.

She gasped, staring at his rippling strength, feeling keenest pain and a hunger for—

For she knew not what. And desired it still.

She closed her eyes, biting back a cry. In the next heartbeat his hands were there, holding her, stroking her, learning her.

Stop,
she tried to order, but he did not, for now her voice was low and raw with the soft cries of her own need.

He bared her. He opened her to hot, shivering pleasure and a thousand stunned discoveries. He closed her to her own past and made this thing between them her only future. In his hands hunger was made solid, pleasure made palpable, breath linked to breath and skin to aching skin.

In her dream she died, wrapped in burning silence, flaming against the darkness in fiery ecstasy. And he was there to catch her, pillowing her against his hard bronze body. In taut silence he began to move again, with slow, honeyed strokes that showed her this death was only the beginning and that the hunger never stopped, only changed, like the shadows dancing in the tide, like the changing phosphorous trails that speckled the night sea.

“Now,” he whispered, bringing the fire deep within her.

“Mine,” he sighed, burying himself so deep that the fire melted them into one.
“Mine,
now and forever.”

Barrett shivered blindly, taking the heat he gave and adding to it her own. She did not fight him now, too rapt with the sudden, shattering newness, wondering at this strange hard man who turned her own body strange and new.

And ineffably beautiful.

“Yours,” she answered, not knowing what it meant, nor even caring.

All she did was forget. And in that forgetting she was whole again, new and strong.

And completely
his.

She slept for hours or perhaps for aeons, like the fabled beauty in her thorn-locked bower.

When she awoke, it was not to dreams but to the shrill cry of insects and the sound of raucous laughter.

Gone the velvet darkness, gone the perfect pairing of sleek hot flesh.

Now her head throbbed and her back prickled, dry and rasping.

Her eyelids flickered open, and she saw a large green parakeet sitting on the windowsill shrieking at a lizard.

Memory—and all her terrible lack of it—rushed over her.

Her eyes closed and she dug shaking fingers into her forehead.

Better to forget. No,
essential
to forget, for there was too much pain lurking there. Sometime, when the pain faded, she might finally begin to remember.

But for now she had a name! The memory would anchor her until all the other memories returned.

Outside her window, a tree shook wildly. Slowly Barrett sat up, her back pressed against the rattan headboard.
Dear heaven, please not a leopard
.

She had had enough of leopards, beautiful though they were.

The next moment a furry form dropped onto the sill, where she perched daintily, surveying the room with a piquant little face framed in a halo of silver fur.

It was Pagan’s inquisitive pet.

“Magic? That’s what Pagan calls you, isn’t it?”

The monkey turned liquid eyes on the woman in the bed. A moment later the creature hopped down, darted across the floor, and skittered beneath the edge of the mosquito net. Chattering brightly, she jumped up beside Barrett, her small head bobbing all the while.

Only then did Barrett see that the monkey carried a wadded mass of white.

With a smile, Barrett accepted the precious offering. It was her corset—lumpy, the stays misshapen, the laces all knotted. It looked creased and well handled, the monkey’s work, no doubt. “Why thank you, Magic. Have you finally discovered it’s no use to you?”

The little gray monkey slanted her head, reaching furry fingers up to scratch one ear. Suddenly she emitted a shrill burst of sound, then began to jump up and down on the coverlet.

Barrett eased sideways, making a spot for her newfound friend. The primate sat down daintily, rocking back and forth and making a soft comfortable sound somewhere between a chortle and a whistle. A moment later, she reached out to stroke Barrett’s unbound hair, her black cheeks puffed wide in wonder.

She studied the long golden strands, then slowly raised them atop her own head. Curling her lips, she stared up at Barrett, as if to ask her estimate of this new coiffure.

“Very—er, nice, Magic. Except that that particular bit of hair is fastened to my own head, and I see no reasonable way of removing it, even for you, my little friend.”

With a low cooing noise, the monkey rocked back on her ankles, releasing Barrett’s hair. Suddenly the keen black eyes narrowed. Jumping up, the creature began to tug at the covers.