The Tiger's Lady (66 page)

An hour later it was done, the roof a blackened scar against the darker vault of the night. Steam still hissed from the charred wood. It had been Nihal’s idea to bring up the elephants and have them empty the tin watering troughs onto the fire.

Even then it had been a near thing, Pagan thought, running a tired, grimy hand across his face. But the roof had been saved and only two rooms in the south wing were gutted.

Unfortunately, his study had been one of them.

“Nihal, see that the elephants go down country to have an extra-long soak in the river. And we celebrate tomorrow. No plucking or work in the drying rooms. I believe you have some of that potent arrack liquor hidden about. See that the men each get a portion. They’ve earned it well enough!”

The colonel appeared out of nowhere, clapping a hand on Pagan’s back.

“Bloody near thing, Dev. Yes, too damned near to think about.”

Pagan only nodded, staring tiredly at the black scar darkening Windhaven’s south wing.

“And now that we’re safe and sound, perhaps you’ll tell me what in bloody hell you were so concerned with retrieving from your study.” The colonel’s voice was hard with accusation. “You nearly killed yourself in there—along with that young woman who was brave enough to go fetch you. Damned rare sort of female, if you ask me. But there—you’ll not distract me. I mean to hear what was in that box.”

A faint smile on his face, Pagan reached down and pulled a small gold-embossed rectangle from inside his shirt. He studied the leather box for a moment, his eyes narrowed. Then he flipped open the clasp and held it out for Hadley’s inspection.

The colonel’s brow knit. He stared down at the little case in patent disbelief. He had considered seeing quite a number of things in the box, but certainly not
this.

Gingerly he lifted the gilt-edged oval. “A portrait miniature?” He looked up at Pagan in surprise. “You risked your life for
this?”

Pagan simply shrugged, studying the figures in the painting.

A tall man with thin lips and an uncompromising jaw.

A frail female in ivory watered silk, her slim white fingers clenched tightly in her lap.

And in front of them, stiff and resolute, a boy of seven. A boy who already felt as if he were a man.

The last figure in the group, ranged before an airy veranda somewhere near Simla where the mountains rose in emerald terraces, was a dark-eyed Indian woman, the ayah, Hadley thought. Her eyes were anxious but unreadable as she stared out from the miniature.

“Oh, but it is
very
important, Adrian. It’s my past that mocks me in that picture, what little past I have left. It wouldn’t do to lose that ever.”

The colonel frowned and looked as if he meant to say something. But he changed his mind and sighed, turning toward the house with a shrug. “Well, it’s the
present
I’m thinking of and you’re dead on your feet, old boy. Best see to some rest while you can. We’ll have little time to see the damage repaired before the monsoon is upon us.”

After giving Pagan a quick, gruff pat on the shoulder, he trudged wearily up the steps toward his room.

He was filthy, Pagan thought grimly, studying his charcoal-streaked sleeve. He smelled of smoke and cinder and he was exhausted.

He should make at least a desultory attempt at cleaning up and then go to bed.

But somehow he found his feet moving along the shadowed veranda in the opposite direction.

Like a figure in a dream, he slid open the concealed latch so that the teak door opened in well-greased silence.

She sat in a chintz chair by the window, bathed in the golden glow of a lone palm-oil lamp. Her hair was unbound, cascading around her shoulders in a bright golden nimbus.

She was more beautiful than he remembered, more beautiful than he could even imagine. Perhaps everything was, in the wake of his brush with death.

His hand tightened on the cold polished doorframe as he stood staring at her, this woman whom he had tried so hard to hate.

Her face was an alabaster oval, her eyes lapis pools. She did not move as he stepped over the threshold.

“Stop me, falcon.” His voice was raw, as dark as the soot streaking his face.

Her lips trembled, but she gave no other sign of response.

“You’re going to Colombo tomorrow,” he muttered, almost as if to himself. “I’ll send Nihal and twenty men, if I have to, but I’ll not see you here even a day longer.”

The woman in the chair flinched imperceptibly.

Why did they pain her so, those words? It was what she’d waited for, what she’d wanted all along.

Wasn’t it?

“You’ll be safe there,” Pagan said, mid-room now. “I’ll arrange passage for you within a week. To Macao, perhaps. Or do you prefer America?”

Neither,
the woman paralyzed in the armchair thought, her eyes glazed with tears.
It’s here I’d choose to be. Or wherever else
you
were.

Her hands twisted in the white folds of her gauze nightdress. Though she had tossed a crimson and gold cashmere shawl about her shoulders, she felt a shiver work through her and knew it had nothing to do with being cold.

“You don’t protest? I’m glad to hear it,
Angrezi,
because there’s no way in hell you could convince me to let you stay. Not when the danger is so close now, even here at Windhaven, where I hoped you’d be safe. Not when you drag me deeper under your spell every second.”

He was directly before her chair now, his face a harsh mask of light and shadow.

Barrett’s eyes rose, fixed on the vein that throbbed at his temple, just above the silver network of scars that zigzagged across his eyebrow and down toward his cheekbone.

“Nothing,
do you hear? Tomorrow you go. At first light.”

Slowly, with exquisite grace, Barrett rose from her armchair, shrugging off the cashmere shawl as she did so. The lantern light spilled soft and golden through the gauzy folds of her nightgown, revealing each impudent curve and peak in loving detail.

Pagan’s breath checked sharply. “Don’t try to dissuade me, falcon. I warn you, it won’t work.”

Her slim fingers gently traced the silver scar coiling past his eye. The next moment, rising on tiptoe, she planted her lips where her fingers had been, pushing aside his eye patch to kiss the scarred skin beneath.

Pagan’s breath hissed out in a rush. “Holy sweet Lord…”

Her slim hands fell, braced upon his broad shoulders. She could feel the granite muscles tense and bunch beneath the dirt-streaked shirt. His eyes were half closed, his face a mask of control so harsh it bordered on pain.

So it was tomorrow. That left them only tonight…

The words were silent, throbbing, palpable in the heated inches of air around them. Perhaps they came from him, perhaps from her.

Most likely they came from both.

Her fingers shifted, tracing the full, hard line of his lower lip.

Pagan flinched. “Stop,
Angrezi.”

She didn’t. Instead she took a step closer. Her thighs brushed whisper-soft against his and the rapidly peaking tips of her breasts feathered against his chest.

Pagan’s jaw locked and his head fell back as if he were swept with ineffable pain.

Or immeasurable pleasure.

“No,” he growled.

Barrett did not answer, too wise to trust to words when touch could speak so strongly, so much more persuasively. She inched closer, delighting in the leashed tension of his body, in the faint salt tang of his heated skin.

With a soft sigh she brushed her breasts against him, shivering in the little heated jolts of pleasure each touch ignited.

Yes, this was hers. This was real and true. Not even Ruxley’s vile demands could taint this. It was as if nothing else existed beyond the space of the room, beyond the thunder of her heart, the wild hammering in her blood.

And Barrett refused to think of leaving before she tasted this dark pleasure one last time.

Her hands tightened, her nails digging into the steely line of his shoulders. She felt the heat and bulk of him at her belly, and gloried in the unmistakable sign that he was losing, and losing fast.

Casting off restraint or shyness, casting off everything but the wild urge to know him as completely as it was possible to know another human being, Brett molded her soft form to his hard length, shivering when she felt his manhood leap to full, pulsing arousal.

She swayed slightly, levering her body closer, wreaking a velvet torment upon this man who fought her still. She felt him flinch, felt his heart slam against his ribs, felt the raw power of him pour like fire through her thin nightgown.

And then her head fell. She drove the hot, wet point of her tongue into the shadowed recess at the center of his collarbone, nibbling, then nipping sharply.

A harsh groan ripped from Pagan’s throat. In an explosive burst of movement, he seized her hands, his fingers digging deep, so deep that he felt each bone and tendon at her wrist.

His eyes were hooded, raw with dark fires and a hunger that went on forever. “Damn you, witch,” he said harshly, catching her wrists together in one hand and sweeping her up against him with the other. “It’s been like this since the first moment I saw you. I never fooled you for a second, did I?”

Barrett was too awash with her own hunger to smile, to feel triumph in his revelation. She only pressed closer, desperate to feel his heat and his velvet hardness deep inside her.

“Please, Pagan.” It was a soft, ragged plea.

“It’s beyond pleasure now. It’s beyond stopping.” Pagan’s tongue lapped slick and hot against her ear, driving Barrett to arch against him like a cat. “Your body whispers to me,
Angrezi.
Of hot dreams and wild places. By Shiva, it will take us to the very edge of heaven, I think.”

He eased her backward, his fingers fierce on her buttocks.

The next moment she felt a cool smooth surface at her hips—the rosewood desk, she realized.

With a shiver of white-hot desire, she realized they were not even going to make it to the bed.

He swept the fragile silk from her shoulders until it puddled around her waist. Dark and half-mad with hunger, his eyes devoured her lush, naked beauty, dazzling in the golden lamplight.

“Damn you,
Angrezi.”
Pagan captured the pouting rose-red peaks between his strong, callused fingers, tugging and stroking until she moaned. “I never had a chance, did I? Maybe neither of us did.”

And then his head fell, his tongue lapping the aching crowns furled so perfectly beneath him. He tasted the flare of her pulse, the fire of her wild response. Each place he touched came alive, burning with the raw energy of life.

He tongued her and stroked her, whispering raw, strange words in a dark litany against her skin.

Barrett had no thought of stopping him, everything forgotten but the wild joy he gave her in singing blood and racing muscle, in hot, tortured skin.

She clutched his shoulder and began to jerk wildly at the buttons of his shirt, wrenching them free. Breathlessly she dragged the wet, soot-streaked linen from his tensed shoulders.

Pagan bit back a groan. “It is folly, the worst sort of folly, but I’ll have you,
Angrezi.
This time I mean to have your very soul!”

Wild with need, Barrett pressed her lips to his chest, sliding the tip of her tongue into the crisp mat of his hair. His smell was tea and smoke and eucalyptus, salt and dusky male. His skin was warm velvet over hot, sleek steel.

Knowing it was madness but far beyond caring, she burrowed closer, capturing a springy strand between her teeth and tugging sharply.

Pagan stiffened, muttered something in Hindi, and captured her buttocks with his hard fingers. With a groan he kneed apart her thighs and drove her hard into the saddle of his thighs.

He was huge and hot and throbbing.

Barrett felt an instant of fear, but an instant only, for the sensual storm in her blood burned the fear away with her next breath.

Her breath checked, she searched out his flat male nipple, found it, nibbled it wantonly, while Pagan’s heartbeat grew to an angry thunder against her ear. He shuddered at her touch, conqueror now the conquered.

With slow exquisite torment she teased his aching skin, driven by a dark knowledge that had nothing to do with memory and everything to do with blind, female instinct. Suddenly she was every woman who had ever lived, every woman who had ever loved a man to raw, blinding madness.

With a growl Pagan captured her buttocks and drove her upward, his blade like hot, forged steel between her thighs.

And Barrett fitted herself to his hardness, desperate to taste more, to feel all he had to give her. Eyes closed, hair spilling wild and golden around her shoulders, she arched against him, locking her long legs around his waist.

“I’m going to enjoy feeling you everywhere,
Angrezi.
I’m going to enjoy every soft panting moan, every wild tremor. When I’m done you’re going to feel me everywhere, too. So deep, you’ll never be able to forget me.”

With one sharp movement he shredded her gown and flung it away behind him until there, was nothing but steamy, scented air between them. She twisted and clawed at him, moaning like a wild sleek cat, and Pagan delighted in her sweet wanton ferocity. Later he knew he would regret this folly, but now he had not the strength to stop, to let such rare beauty slip by untasted and untried.