Bold Destiny

by Jane Feather

  “But you might not be able to concentrate,” she objected, that gleam deepening. “On either the play or the tale.”

  “You do believe in sailing close to the wind, don’t you,” he commented, pushing her backward onto the bed. Slipping his hands beneath the tunic, he found the hip-fastening of the chalvar.

  Laughing, she tried to push his hands away, wriggling to the far side of the bed. But he flung a leg over her thighs, holding her with his weight as he unclasped the trousers. “Lift your bottom, Miss Spencer.”

  “Bully!” she accused, but raised her hips so that he could pull the garment down and off. He let the weight of his leg fall across her again and gazed down into her eyes, his arms braced on either side of her.

  “You are the most exciting woman,” he murmured. “All sinuous promise and challenge.” Shifting his weight onto one elbow, he stroked the slender length of her bared legs with his free hand, tickling behind her knee so that she squirmed and he chuckled, using his imprisoning leg to push apart her thighs.

  Her eyes no longer held their challenge. As his fingers pit-patted over the satin softness of her inner thighs, naked desire leaped into the jade depths to match the hunger in the gray eyes. Her body shifted on the mattress as he pushed up the hem of her tunic, baring her belly, and a little shiver rippled her skin. He bent to kiss her stomach as he continued to push up the tunic, his breath rustling warmly over her skin, and she yielded to the invasion of his mouth and stroking hand with a shudder of anticipation, the wondrous tension building deep within her as the sap of love rose in moistening expectation.

  Lifting her against him, he drew the tunic up and over her head, letting her fall back again on the bed, where the quilted coverlet cooled her heated skin for a second before it absorbed her own warmth. He cupped one breast in the palm of his hand, lifting the nipple with a grazing forefinger before taking it in his mouth, his flickering tongue drawing a whimper of pleasure from her. Long, sensitive fingers opened her, unfurling the velvety petals of her essence, leading her ever closer to that place where the mind holds no sway.

  He took her to the brink of that plane and held her there in tormented ecstasy, his eyes seeming to swallow hers as she looked up at him lost in the wonder of her body, half pleading for release, half willing the instant to last for infinity. Then the heated adhesion of his mouth replaced his hand and the enchanted landscape engulfed her, tossing her in a sensual maelstrom, whirling, swirling crimson glory until she was swept exhausted to the bank, there to lie, trembling, awash with languor, until the violent jarring of her heart died. He stroked her body as she returned to life, whispering softly until her eyes recognized him again and a smile quivered on her lips.

  “I am sorry,” he whispered, “but I have the most powerful need of you now. Have I exhausted you completely?”

  “It’s been a long time since we were truly together,” she said in answer, holding out her arms to him as he undressed with rough haste. “Not since that long night in September. But this time I do not have—”

  “I do,” he said softly, opening the drawer in the night table.

  “I’ve enough strength to do that for you,” she whispered, taking the sheath from him as he knelt beside her. “You are very beautiful, Christopher Ralston.” She kissed the powerful hardness of him, and he threw back his head on a shudder of pleasure. “I want you inside me,” she said, with an ardent directness that thrilled him. “Come into me.”

  Sliding his hands beneath her buttocks, he lifted her to meet him as he entered her body, gasping with joy as her velvety softness tightened around him, gripped and released him in a rhythm unlike any he had experienced. He looked down at her in wonder. She lay spread beneath him, her arms flung wide, only the lower part of her body moving in a caress of such wickedly skilled eroticism that he entered unknown and unimagined realms of voluptuous delight. And all the while she watched him, waiting for the moment when his face dissolved in ecstasy. And with the glory of his climax pulsing within her, her body exploded once more in its own glory, the bright bubble of shared rapture bursting around them.

  “Dear Lord,” Kit whispered when he could begin to feel his separateness again. “You are a magical creature. What are you, Annabel-Ayesha? No ordinary woman, that’s for sure.” His lips nuzzled her neck as he lay heavily on top of her, still within her.

  Her hands rested on his back. She had not the strength to hold him, so they lay limply, flattened against his damp skin. “Afghanistan is bordered by India and Persia,” she murmured, managing a tiny chuckle. “Such neighbors have more to offer than Bokhara carpets and Persian silks.”

  Kit, with a supreme effort, disengaged, rolling onto the bed beside her. He propped himself on one elbow and looked down at her. “Are you telling me you learned … Oh, never mind. I don’t want to know.” He shook his head. “I shall just be grateful.”

  “Why should it disturb you?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t really, except that it makes me realize anew how vastly different you are … how you don’t fit any mold that I am familiar with.” He smiled ruefully. “And it makes me uneasy.”

  “I don’t see why it should,” she said. “If you believe with the Afghans that our destiny is written unchangeably, then what does it matter?”

  “Do you believe that?”

  Her milk-white shoulders lifted in a light shrug. “Why not? It’s a relaxing creed. Whatever’s going to happen will happen, and how we behave is preordained, so there’s no point feeling uneasy about anything.”

  He lay down beside her again, his hand resting on her hip. “It does have some appealing features, I grant you. Particularly at the moment, when I cannot envisage what is to happen … to you … or, indeed, to me.”

  “Then stop worrying about it and tell me the story of the ugly joke and the woman.”

  “I drink too much,” he declared.

  “I rather thought so,” she responded calmly. “But I wasn’t sure, since I don’t really know how much is too much.”

  “It’s too much when you do asinine things,” he said. “Unfortunately, it’s all too common a vice amongst the people I know. We start in school and go on from there.”

  “Why?”

  “Boredom, mostly.” He turned his head to look at her face beside his. “There aren’t too many people like you around, you see, to keep boredom at bay.”

  “But you’re in the army. Surely that isn’t boring?”

  “Oh, Annabel! It is excruciating.”

  “Then why did you join?”

  “Because every son and heir to the Ralston line has joined the Seventh Light Dragoons for the last hundred and fifty years,” he told her. “I would have been happier staying at Oxford, I think, if I’d had any sense, but having been sent down for two terms for some bloody stupid drunken prank, I decided I’d had enough of the ivory tower and followed the family path with a degree of mistaken enthusiasm.”

  “But you aren’t in the dragoons now, are you?”

  “No,” he said shortly. “I was obliged to resign my commission and accept a transfer to the East India Company’s Cavalry.”

  “Oh, so that’s what Harley meant about being a long way from Horseguards Parade, out here among the heathen.”

  “Did he say that?”

  “He did. He also said you had a roving eye, and it wasn’t all that surprising you ended up here with the way you were carrying on.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned!” Kit sat up abruptly. “The cheek of the man!”

  Annabel chuckled. “You can’t really blame him if it’s your fault he’s stuck out here.”

  “He didn’t have to come,” Kit said. “He chose to transfer with me. God knows why.”

  “Perhaps he likes you.”

  He looked down at her, then smiled. “Yes, perhaps he does. I am actually very lucky to have him.”

  “So are you ever going to tell me what happened?”

  “If you insist. But it’s not at all a pretty st
ory.” Leaning back against the headboard, he propped the pillows behind him. “Come here.” Pulling her up beside him, he settled her with her head in the crook of his shoulder. “That’s better. Now, if I had a brandy, I should want for nothing.”

  She looked across at him and saw he was smiling in self-mockery. “Enough of that!”

  He nodded. “Once upon a time there was a girl called Lucy who worked in a milliner’s. She was round and pretty and a little plump, but very sweet-natured and thought I was the most wonderful of God’s creatures.”

  “That can’t have been very good for you,” judiciously observed Annabel.

  “That is not an encouraging observation. Anyway, as is frequently done in such instances, I set Lucy up in a house in Hampstead, where she was most amazingly happy as far as I could tell, and seemed to enjoy housekeeping and warming my slippers and—”

  “Warming other things,” Annabel supplied helpfully.

  “You could say that. Would you mind keeping your comments to yourself? I do not find them of the least assistance in the telling of this narrative.”

  “I beg your pardon.” She closed her lips firmly.

  “Well, as I was saying. Lucy was very content, and I was perfectly content, visiting her whenever I felt so inclined and the exigencies of regimental life would permit … card parties, balls, dinners … that sort of thing.”

  Mockery laced his voice and he stared over the burnished head on his shoulder as if looking into some other world. “I was rarely sober, but then neither was anyone else. We had little need or reason to be. Unfortunately, brandy can bring out the less pleasant side of some people. Three of my brother officers decided one night that my possession of such an enchanting and accommodating mistress was unjustly exclusive.”

  He brushed a tickling wisp of her hair from his chin where it had drifted. The mockery had left his voice, which was flat, almost expressionless.

  “They were all drunk, and I do not think they really intended Lucy any harm. But she was only a shop girl, after all, and for these gods of the aristocracy, fair game, particularly as she had already demonstrated she was not virtuous.”

  Annabel pushed away from his embrace and twisted to look at him, an expression of horror and disgust on her face. “Did they rape her?”

  Kit shook his head. “I arrived just in time, after a particularly unsuccessful night at the tables and an excess of brandy. They were still in the process of … of … persuading … Lucy to accommodate them. She was terrified, poor girl, but quite frankly I think they were all too far under the hatches to have succeeded in anything. But I wasn’t thinking too clearly either. An ugly brawl ensued, ending with my issuing challenges to all three of them.” He laughed, a short, bitter laugh. “Pistols at dawn.”

  She stared. “You fought a duel?”

  “Three to be precise, one after the other.” He lay back against the pillows and closed his eyes. “Madness. Sheer madness.”

  “Did you kill them?”

  “No, of course not … just pinked them. But it caused a monumental scandal. One does not fight duels over shop girls, you understand. One should not fight duels at all, but in true matters of honor, the authorities will turn a blind eye. Shop girls are not considered matters of honor.”

  “So what happened?”

  Kit shrugged. “I was forced to resign my commission in the dragoons. My behavior was ungentlemanly, you see.”

  “It seems entirely chivalrous to me,” she said stoutly. “An Afghan would have chopped them in tiny pieces very slowly.”

  “This was Horseguards Parade, sweetheart.”

  “Well, why did you join the East India Cavalry? I would have thought you’d had enough of soldiering.”

  “I had, but my sire had had enough of me.” Kit laughed that hollow laugh again. “He had been very patient for a very long time, but this last scandal was too much. And since my way of life was … is … entirely dependent upon his generosity until I come into my inheritance, I had little choice but to follow instruction and leave the country. And here I am.”

  “Yes, here you are,” Annabel mused, sitting cross-legged on the bed facing him, regarding him with smiling eyes. “And just think, if none of those things had happened, we would not be in this room together. It’s destiny … unchangeable destiny. And I would not have it any different.”

  “No,” he murmured huskily, “neither would I. I am prepared to embrace destiny with open arms.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “Captain Mackenzie, the water supply is barely sufficient now to succor the wounded. And we have shot for only a few more hours if we continue returning their fire at this rate.”

  Colin Mackenzie glanced wearily at the lieutenant who had brought him this grim but predictable report. The air was acrid with smoke and powder, the noise of firing ceaseless, the cries of the wounded a melancholy and relentless accompaniment. He turned to look over the parapet, to where, in the gathering dusk, the enemy pressed ever closer to the gates of Shah Soojah’s commissariat fort, pushing their mines forward at an inexorable pace. The captain had been holding his garrison for two days against attacks that increased in ferocity, the enemy seeming to propagate in direct proportion to his own heavy losses.

  “I do not understand why they have sent no reinforcements,” he said, rubbing his eyes, which were smarting with fatigue and gun smoke. “Don’t they know we are under attack?”

  The lieutenant accepted the question as rhetorical and made no response.

  “How are the men, Bill?”

  “Discouraged, sir,” the lieutenant replied frankly. “Our losses are so heavy and the wounded are dying like flies for lack of attention. And they’re concerned for their families. It’s the thought of their wives and children falling into the hands of those savages …”

  “Dammit! Where the hell is Elphinstone?” Mackenzie swung away from the parapet, just as a man came scrambling up the stone steps from the courtyard below.

  “They’re firing the south gate, sir.”

  Mackenzie stood silent for a minute, facing the brutal, unpalatable reality. If he was to have the slightest chance of saving his wounded and the families under his protection, he was going to have to abandon his post.

  “Very well. Prepare to evacuate the fort. We’ll fight our way back to the cantonment.” His expression was perfectly composed, and his men could only guess what it cost him to give the order.

  A square of infantry fought a last-ditch defense at the south gate, keeping back the screaming, scimitar-wielding horde until the wounded and the women and children, in litters and on horseback, were out of the fort by the north gate, flanked by ranks of cavalry. Then the infantry retreated, fighting every step until they too were out in the open plain.

  It was full night now, and the darkness provided some hindrance to their attackers, who seemed less vigorous than the defense, who drew strength from desperation and the possibility that action might bring salvation, and fought with fierce single-mindedness.

  “Sound the call to arms,” Mackenzie instructed the bugler, and the notes rang out across the plain a rousing call of encouragement. The standard bearer rode in the van beside the captain, who could take some grim satisfaction that even in retreat, his small garrison would behave with gallantry.

  Kit was with Bob Markham at the command post at the gate to the cantonment when the first sound of the bugle echoed faintly through the darkness.

  “It has to be Colin Mackenzie,” Bob said.

  “Then let’s bring him in!” Kit was already running to the gate. “Light the flares,” he commanded the guards, who were peering into the night. “And get the damn gates open!”

  He could hear Bob shouting orders as he mustered the troop of sepoy cavalry on duty at the gate. The night was abruptly lit as the great flares went up. Kit flung himself onto his own horse as the troop under Bob’s command galloped through the gate.

  “Hope you don’t mind if I muscle in on this one,” Kit said, a laugh of
pure exhilaration crackling in the frosty air.

  “Be my guest,” Bob returned with his own laugh. “By God, we owe Mackenzie something!”

  The troop charged across the plain toward the clear and unmistakable sounds of fighting. The bugle continued to blow its repetitive call, vibrant above the ferocious screams of the enemy and the constant crack of rifles. The night-dark yielded to shadowy visibility, sparked by the fire exploding from gun barrels.

  With their own inarticulate battle cry born of the days of frustrating inaction and their own savage need to attack, the two officers led their band of sepoys into the thick of the fight. The suddenness of their arrival and the ferocity of their onslaught caught the enemy by surprise, just as it gave one final, necessary spurt to Mackenzie’s beleaguered force.

  Half an hour later, they entered the cantonment, their reinforcements, not weakened by two days of unremitting attack and the march across the plain, covering their rear, and following them in only when the last exhausted infantryman was safely inside. The great gates clanged shut, the men on the earthworks offering their own covering fire, finally sending off the enemy, who for the first time had met significant resistance.

  People poured forth from bungalows and barracks, rushing to offer assistance to the exhausted and terrified women and children in the party.

  “You certainly took your time,” Colin commented, still sitting his horse as straight as if he had just mounted after a long night’s sleep.

  “Not for want of trying,” Kit said mildly, not taking offense. “Bob went at Elphinstone until he was blue in the face, but—” He shrugged and dismounted.

  “Aye. I can guess how it was.” Mackenzie rubbed his fingertips over dry, cracked lips. “My thanks to you both, anyway. I suppose I had better go and make my report.” He swung off his horse and looked around the barrack square, seething with activity and lit as bright as day from the oil lamps set in windows and open doorways, and held high by servants as surgeons moved amongst the wounded, making examination and disposition. “At least those poor devils will get attention now.”