by Gaelen Foley
Of course, in all fairness—both training and native inclination tended to make Ian look at everything from both sides of a situation—having witnessed her display of courage back at the fire, having seen for himself that her rescue truly had been a matter of life and death, he could hardly fault her.
The girl had just saved someone’s life. He had never seen a woman risk herself for another that way. In truth, his previous cynicism about the new Georgiana had thinned considerably.
Too, he was only a guest. It was not his place to lecture her or her father on propriety, much as he might have enjoyed doing so; and in light of the fact that riding tandem with the delectable creature had driven his own thoughts into the most lascivious territory, he really had no room to talk. Merciful heaven. Her warm hips rocked snug against his groin, while his hands molded her slender waist. His awareness of her had turned to ferocious want within the first furlong.
Her long legs brushed against his thighs, teasing him; he could feel each subtle flex of her calves as she directed her horse. It was enough to drive a man insane.
He tried to ignore it: Lusting after his host’s virginal daughter was surely the height of bad form.
Then she coughed—a short sound, harsh and dry—and his protective instincts surged instantly to the fore once again.
Furrowing his brow, Ian suddenly realized the girl was experiencing some difficulty with her respiration. Listening more closely, he could hear it in each painful breath she drew, could feel it in the clenched tightness of all the muscles down her back. His face turned grim.
Disapproval and lust both thrown aside, he steadied her with a firmer hold on her waist. “The smoke has distressed your lungs.”
“No—I am well—truly.” She tried to stifle another cough, and he cursed himself for his lechery.
“My dear, you are a very poor liar. Tell me what is wrong,” he ordered in a clipped tone.
“It’s just a—touch of asthma. I’ve had it since childhood. Usually it gives me no trouble, but the smoke—”
“Do you require a doctor?”
“No. Thank you.” She sent him a grateful glance over her shoulder, then hesitated. “When I get home, there are things I’ve learned to do that help.”
“Good, then let’s get you there quickly.” He murmured to her not to try to talk; took the reins gently, brooking no further argument; and let her point the way, his entire focus fixed on getting her to safety, where she could receive the appropriate care.
Relief and gratitude had been Georgie’s main reactions since the moment Lord Griffith had appeared, and she had been savoring with covert pleasure the way his magnificent body enfolded her so safely as they rode together on her horse.
But when he forced her to surrender the reins, her triumph over rescuing Lakshmi turned to a sense of unease. Though she did not argue with him this time, his smooth usurpation of control jarred her memory back to her true and original stance about the man, the one she had formed before he had exploded onto the scene and performed so valiantly back there at the fire—in short, a healthy skepticism.
Oh, yes, she knew that all the world considered the Marquess of Griffith some sort of paragon, a man of justice and sterling integrity. Ever since she had received his letter to Papa informing them of his imminent arrival, she had been asking around about him in Society, trying to gather whatever information—or gossip—she could about their renowned London guest.
A top diplomat and expert negotiator with the Foreign Office, indeed, a personal friend of the Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh, Lord Griffith had averted wars, brokered cease-fires, procured treaties, parlayed for the release of hostages, and stared down power-crazed potentates with, she’d heard, unflinching cool and steely self-control. Whenever there was an explosive conflict brewing somewhere in the world, Lord Griffith was the one the Foreign Office sent in to defuse the most potentially explosive situations.
As a woman who embraced India’s centuries-old Jainist philosophy of nonviolence and social equality, Georgie could not help but respect a man whose driving mission in life was to stop human beings from killing each other.
Still, she had her doubts.
Nobody was that good. The Eastern mystics taught that for every light within a man there was an equal darkness. Besides, she had grown cynical after seeing every new diplomat, politician, and administrator sent from London to help rule India arrive with an ulterior motive—gold. They no sooner stepped off the boat than they began scrambling to line their own pockets with the wealth of the East, usually by exploiting the Indian people. Only the rarest of Englishmen ever cared about them. But Georgie cared intensely.
From the time of her childhood, she had come to think of the Indian people as her second family. After her mother’s death, she had been virtually raised by her kindhearted Indian servants. They had welcomed her, a lonely little orphan girl, into their world—their joyful, dancing, parti-colored, mysterious, paradoxical world.
And it had shaped her.
She used her place in British society to try to protect them from the worst ravages of Western avarice, but women had little power beyond what charm and wits and beauty God gave them. Despite her family’s ducal connections, her father’s rank as a now retired member of the East India Company elite, her brothers’ posts as wildly popular officers with the Regular Army, and her own status as a relatively highborn English debutante, her efforts to aid the Indian people often seemed a losing battle.
And now the power brokers in London had sent Lord Griffith, the heavy cannon in their arsenal.
It did not bode well.
Something big must be happening, and she intended to find out what it was. She had heard rumors of another war against the Maratha Empire, but she prayed to God it was not so, not with two brothers who couldn’t bear to stay away from a battlefield. And then there was that disturbing letter from Meena…
Not long ago, another of her highborn Indian friends from childhood, dear, lovely Meena, had wed King Johar, the mighty Maharajah of Janpur. Handsome and brave, both a warrior and a poet, King Johar ruled one of the most formidable Hindu kingdoms of north-central India. His royal ancestors had been founding members of the Maratha Empire, an alliance of six powerful rajahs with territories around Bombay and the rugged forests of the Deccan Plateau.
Bound by an age-old treaty of mutual defense, which promised that if any one of their kingdoms was attacked, all the others must go to its aid, the Maratha kings of the warrior caste had first united hundreds of years ago to fend off the Mughal invaders who had come storming down from Afghanistan to conquer India.
To this day, they continued to protect their sovereignty by holding off the British. There had already been two wars between the English and the Marathas over the past fifty years, but for more than a decade now, thankfully, an uneasy peace had reigned. Many felt, however, that it was only a matter of time before war broke out again.
Georgie worried so. She detested violence and hated the thought of a just ruler like King Johar being brought low. So many proud Indian kingdoms had already fallen to British machinations, some quelled by wars, others by humiliating treaties: Hyderabad, Mysore, even the warlike Rajputs in the north. Only the Marathas remained completely free and independent.
But maybe not for long.
If war broke out and the warrior king were slain in battle, then all thirty of Johar’s wives, including her dear Meena, not to mention his hundreds of concubines, all would burn on his funeral pyre in an act of suttee, just like Lakshmi had nearly done today.
Georgie shuddered at the hideous thought, at which Lord Griffith held her a little closer.
“Are you all right?” he murmured.
What a tender touch he had. His gentleness arrested her attention. She managed a nod. “Yes, thanks,” she forced out, reminded anew that, whatever intrigues were afoot, this man was mixed up in the middle of it all.
She intended to find out through her guest what was going on—though, of c
ourse, she could not do so directly. After all, she was “only a woman.” Lord Griffith would never tell her government secrets, and she had no right to ask. Best, therefore, not to arouse his suspicions in the first place, she decided. If she used her woman’s tools, kept her eyes and ears open, charmed him, soothed his guard down, then she’d soon have all the information she required.
She intended to watch him like a hawk.
As much as she longed to believe in Lord Griffith’s brilliant reputation, she wasn’t that naive. She saw little reason to hope that the supposedly wonderful marquess was in truth any different than all the other greedy Europeans who had come to plunder India for centuries.
If his motives were pure—if he really was here to stop a war from breaking out and could be trusted as a human being, then she would do all she could to help him.
But if it turned out that he was just like all the rest, corrupt and callous, and that his true purpose boiled down to greed—his own, the Company’s, and the Crown’s—then she would stand with her Maratha friends and find a way to work against him.
Having him stay at her house as her guest would help her keep an eye on him; thus, she had sent him that note opening her home to him in hospitality. His visit should give her plenty of time to observe him, get to know him, and judge his true nature for herself.
Presently, they turned onto the broad, elegant avenue known as the Chowringee, Calcutta’s answer to Park Lane. As they rode past the row of stately mansions where the richest English families lived in splendor, Georgie ducked her head, having donned the veil and Eastern clothing to help conceal her identity from her nosy neighbors.
Most of them were probably still sleeping, for there had been a grand ball last night, but she wasn’t taking any chances. She did not want to end up as mired in scandal as her late, great aunt, for she couldn’t be of help to anyone if she was ruined.
No, she embraced the duchess’s ideals, but not her methods.
When they approached her house, she signaled to Lord Griffith to rein in. “Here we are.”
Ian pulled the horse to a halt before the most whimsical home on the stretch. Glancing up at it, he beheld a snow-white Oriental fantasy, an exotic confection topped by a turquoise onion dome with four quaint little towers like minarets rising from the corners. It almost seemed to float before him like that mad poet’s dream of Kubla Khan, a shimmering illusion, gleaming white against the azure sky.
He blinked, half expecting it to vanish.
It remained.
But as he gazed at it, once again, as in the spice market, he had the oddest sensation of being slowly bewitched, overcome, perhaps seduced by this strange land, as though he had caught the subtle whiff of opium fumes.
Jumping down off the horse’s back, he turned automatically to assist Georgiana. As she set her hands on his shoulders and he clasped her waist, setting her down gently on her sandaled feet, they stared at each other for a fleeting instant. Above the translucent veil that draped the lower half of her face, her deep sapphire eyes lured him with hypnotic power. In contrast to those dark violet-blue eyes, she had skin like pure ivory, and midnight hair gathered back tightly in a smooth chignon.
Ian stared. Desire hit him like a fireball shot from a catapult, slamming through the outer wall of all his white-towered chivalry.
“Thank you,” she whispered a tad hoarsely.
Suddenly remembering his annoyance at her, Ian gestured to the front path without a word. She stiffened and dropped her gaze, alerted to his displeasure.
When a liveried Indian groom dashed out, she ordered the man to walk the mare for a while to ensure that she was cool before putting her back into her stall.
The groom bowed. “Yes, memsahib.”
She cast Ian another wary glance full of guarded allure. “Come,” she murmured, then strode ahead of him to the front door, her gait willowy-limbed, gliding. She lifted the hem of her fluid silk sari as she walked with a magical tinkling of bells.
Ian watched her through narrowed eyes, feeling a bit like Odysseus, far from home, being lured into Circe’s den.
Most ancient bards agreed that lusting after a sorceress was imprudent in the extreme. It would probably serve him right if she turned him into a newt.
He followed anyway.
Tracking her to the entrance, he stole one last, vigilant glance over his shoulder. With any luck, his hasty exit from the marketplace may have shaken off anyone following him. Narrowing his eyes against the sun, Ian scanned the broad, green park across the street, then the parade ground that wrapped around Fort William.
A haze of humidity softened the hard angles of the looming, octangular stronghold. Imprinting his surroundings on his memory, he saw no one who looked suspicious. So far, thankfully, it appeared they had not been pursued by the dead man’s relatives, either.
Then he followed Georgiana over the threshold.
Inside, her household was in an uproar with the arrival moments ago of the Indian lady, delivered by the young gentleman whom Ian had also seen riding away from the fire. He gathered that the lad had carried the woman upstairs to recuperate from her ordeal.
Meanwhile, a score of Indian servants of all shapes and sizes were running to and fro in panicked disorder, alarmed and scandalized, it seemed, by this turn of events. They clustered around their mistress the moment she walked in the door, and all began talking at once. The lightning-fast dialogue in Bengali was too rapid for Ian to understand.
He waited for a moment or two, but neither her father nor brothers appeared; so, while Georgiana attempted to answer all their questions and soothe their fears, answering them in their own language and calmly giving them their instructions, Ian took matters into his own hands, making sure that the house was secure in case that angry mob came after them.
He locked the front door behind him and then prowled from room to room throughout the first floor, closing windows and doors. Along the way, he was bemused to find that the decor inside the house was similar to that of any wealthy home in London, for all its exterior whimsy. The only real difference was a profusion of lush tropical palms that flourished in huge stone urns here and there.
When all the windows and doors were locked, and he had glanced out from various positions around the house to make sure no one was coming, Ian returned to the entrance hall, satisfied that at least these basic precautions had been taken. Georgiana finished dealing with her anxious staff.
She turned and looked at him in mild surprise, as though she had been wondering where he’d gone.
Scanning her face, Ian marched to her side and took her elbow, gently steering her toward the nearest chair. “How are your lungs?”
“Much better now—thank you.”
“You are pale. Please sit down. Let me send for a doctor—”
“No—truly, my lord, I will be fine,” she interrupted. “The worst has passed now. Besides, I have—other medicine.”
He frowned, folding his arms across his chest. “Very well, then. Go on and take it. I will wait.”
Goodness, he was an imperious fellow, giving orders mere moments after stepping through her door! Admittedly, he meant well, she thought. Still, she was uneager to share with him the full extent of her eccentricity. Best to keep it vague. “It’s, ah, not exactly a potion or pill.”
His eyebrow lifted in skeptical fashion.
Reading his stern countenance, polite but all business, Georgie recognized the piercing stare of a male in full protective mode and sighed. If he was anything like her domineering brothers, that stare meant that he had no intention of leaving the subject alone. “Very well. If you must know, there are breathing exercises I was taught when I was small—to help address the problem. Stretches, too, which benefit the lungs.”
“I see.” His stare intensified. He did not look entirely convinced.
“It’s called yoga,” she mumbled. “It’s the only thing that helps.”
“Ah, I have heard of this.” He nodded slowly, studying
her in wary interest. “An ancient art, is it not?”
“Indeed. More importantly, it works,” she replied, surprised that he showed no sign of condemnation. Outside of her family, she did not like to admit to any of her British acquaintances that she practiced yoga, for most of them would have considered it over the line.
Many in local Society already thought she had “gone native,” but all that the British doctors had ever been able to do for her was to bleed her with horrid leeches and to give her doses of laudanum, liquid opium, that had made the paintings in her bedroom come alive and the ceiling squirm. If she had stayed on that path, she’d have become an addict and an invalid by now.
Fortunately, years ago, her beloved ayah, or Indian nurse, Purnima, had reached her wit’s end with her young charge’s ailment, and had sent for her kinsman, a yogi mystic, who had instructed Georgie in all the asanas to relax her chest and back and open up her lungs again.
It had also been wise old Purnima who had pointed out that Georgie’s attacks seemed to have something to do with her loved ones leaving her. The ailment had become serious only after her mother’s death, striking hardest whenever Papa had to go away on business again, or when her brothers had to leave once more for boarding school.
As a little girl, crying inconsolably with the panic of being left alone, she would sob until her grief impaired her breathing, turning from a fit of wild, wailing temper into a gasping, choking struggle for air. Whenever her loved ones left her behind, she had always felt like she was dying.
Thus the importance of her friends. She had learned to cope with her loneliness by surrounding herself with so many companions that no matter who left her, there were always a dozen others on hand to take their place. British or brown-skinned, female or male, all friends had always been welcome in her life.
By now, she knew nearly everyone in both Calcutta and Bombay, where her family had a second home—but she had never met the likes of Lord Griffith before.