Then again, the Jeremys of her dreams had never gone and gotten themselves betrothed to an Indian princess … .
“W-what are you doing back in England?” she stammered. “I thought … It was my understanding that …”
“That what? That I was going to stay in India until I rotted? Well, you thought wrong.”
Maggie glanced toward her bedroom door. It was closed. Where was the princess? Waiting in the hallway outside? “Are you … did you come back … alone?”
“Do you see anyone else in here? Of course I’m alone, Maggie. What’s gotten into you? You’ve gotten absolutely dense since I went away.”
He expected her to take umbrage to that statement. Instead, she continued to stare at him, chewing on her lower lip, her dark eyes troubled. Jeremy wondered, briefly, what ailed her. Guilt, perhaps. Yes, that was it. She was tortured, riddled with guilt over the wrong she’d done him. He sat there, quite pleased with himself, until she said flatly, “You look like hell.”
He did, too. Maggie studied the man on her bed. He certainly looked like Jeremy … or at least like Jeremy as she’d last seen him, climbing down from the terrace outside her bedroom in Herbert Park, five years ago. And by smacking her on the behind, the way he’d done, he had certainly acted like Jeremy. Jeremy would have seized any opportunity to fondle her buttocks, Maggie was quite sure.
And yet this couldn’t be Jeremy Rawlings. Because Jeremy Rawlings, she knew all too well, was thousands of miles away, cutting a wide swath with an imperial sword through Her Majesty’s colonies in India …
… while somewhere, the Star of Jaipur, the prize Jeremy had been awarded for saving the city from ruin, waited for him.
Unless, Maggie thought, with something akin to horror, that prize was here, right here in London.
She swallowed down whatever it was that inevitably rose in her throat every time she thought of the Star of Jaipur. Maybe, she said to herself, this isn’t Jeremy Rawlings at all. Jeremy Rawlings had been handsome—heart-stoppingly so—and this man, with his pallor of poor health, would not have turned a single head along the Ladies’ Mile, even had he been wearing his uniform.
Jeremy had lifted a hand defensively to his face. This was not the sort of greeting he’d been expecting. Some feminine consternation would have been nice, maybe even a few tears. But Maggie exhibited none of these emotions. She looked genuinely concerned—or perhaps disgusted was the better word—about his appearance.
“What do you mean?” Jeremy heard himself demanding defensively. “What do you mean, I look like hell?”
“What happened to your nose?” Maggie asked.
Jeremy lowered his hand from his face and glared at her. “I broke it, all right?”
“Several times, from the looks of it.” Maggie loosened her hold on the pillow. This clearly was Jeremy, in any case. Only he would answer her rude inquiries with matching incivility. “What, they don’t use pistols in India? Everybody throws punches instead?”
“Not everybody,” Jeremy replied calmly. “But when the other officers and I had a disagreement, we tended to resort to—”
“You’d strike one another?” Maggie reached up and flicked a long strand of dark hair back over her shoulder. “How very barbaric. You must have lost quite often, judging from the look of that nose.”
“That isn’t true,” Jeremy began testily. “As a matter of fact, I—”
“Why is your skin such a funny color?” she wanted to know.
Jeremy stared at her. “I’d forgotten,” he said, as if to himself, “what a joy you can be in the morning.”
“If you hadn’t wakened me the way you did,” Maggie pointed out, “I might have welcomed you home more obligingly. As it is, I don’t think you deserve civility. If it’s flattery you’re looking for, you’ve come to quite the wrong place.”
“Yes,” Jeremy said, a little taken aback. He hadn’t exactly expected her to throw her arms around him—well, all right, he had—but this hostility of hers was ridiculous. Was it possible she had never really been in love with him, after all? “I can see that.”
“What time is it, anyway?” Maggie reached down to the foot of her bed and attempted to drag one of the feather-stuffed comforters up toward her. “It’s cold as death in here. Lay another log on the fire, would you?”
Jeremy would not have gotten up if she hadn’t been tugging so adamantly at the duvet upon which he sat. And she was right, it was cold. Colder to him, even, than it could possibly have seemed to her, since she hadn’t spent the past five years under an equatorial sun, and hadn’t contracted any malarial fevers.
So he rose, and when the duvet came loose quite suddenly in her hands, it caused her to lose her balance and fall back across the pillows, dislodging a fuzzy white thing that yapped indignantly at her before shaking its ears back and forth, causing a flapping noise not unlike the ones the swans at Rawlings Manor used to make when they shook water off their wings.
“Good God,” Jeremy said, pausing beside the hearth with a piece of firewood in his hand. “What is that?”
Maggie had already flung the comforter around her shoulders, and now sat cocooned in its fluffy confines, only her head and neck sticking out. Jeremy mentally kicked himself. He ought to have yanked the nightdress off when he’d had the chance.
“That?” She looked down at the bundle of fur that sat between her pillows. “That’s my dog.”
Jeremy blinked at the small, beady-eyed animal. “It doesn’t look like a dog,” he said. “It looks like a mop.”
Maggie didn’t seem the least bit offended by his accusing her dog of being a mop. She shrugged beneath the comforter and said, “He’s a bichon frise.”
“What the devil is a bichon frise? French for mop?”
“No. It’s a breed of dog, you fool. You haven’t answered my question.”
Jeremy looked away from the dog, who was glaring rather accusingly at him, and continued building up the fire. “Yes?” he said, employing the blower with rather more force than necessary. “Which question?”
“The one about your skin.” Maggie, rather like a dog herself, he noted, wouldn’t let this bone alone. “You look quite ill, you know.”
“That,” Jeremy said, straightening now that he’d got the fire going, “would be because I was ill.”
“Were you?” Maggie observed him through narrowed eyes as he laid aside the bellows. Still every bit as tall as she remembered, Jeremy was also just as broad-shouldered, while still being narrow about the waist and hips. She supposed that whatever illness he’d had, it hadn’t been a wasting one. With the exception of his skin tone, he looked as vigorous as he had the last time she’d seen him … .
And God knew the memory of that day was still as clear and as vivid as if it had been yesterday, and not half a decade ago. In fact, it was a memory Maggie hardly ever allowed herself to think about, since doing so invariably awoke fires she’d rather let lie dormant.
“Your aunt never told me you were ill,” Maggie said, inadvertently revealing something else she’d rather not have let him know.
He was on it in a second, though, like a hawk on a field mouse. Moving back toward the bed, Jeremy sat down, feeling quite pleased with himself. “Oh? You and Aunt Pegeen often discuss me, Mags?”
Maggie, to her humiliation, felt herself flush. Lord, it had been ages since she’d blushed! Why did she have to start doing so now? “Certainly not,” she said with a sniff. “But when Lady Edward starts bragging about you, it’s hard to escape, you know. She does go on and on, when it comes to her darling nephew.”
“Oh.” Feeling slightly let down, Jeremy said, “Well, I didn’t let Uncle Edward and Aunt Pegeen know about this particular illness.”
Maggie sniffed. “No, I would imagine not. You never wrote to them, did you? Every bit of information we heard about you had to come from either the newspapers or Whitehall—”
Jeremy shrugged. “I’m no good at writing letters. They know that. How are they, a
nyway, Mags? Aunt Pegeen and Uncle Edward, I mean.”
“They’re fine.” Maggie poked a hand out from beneath the comforter and laid it upon her dog’s head. He panted appreciatively, his pink tongue lolling. “They’re more than fine, actually. You’ll be able to see for yourself. They ought to be back in town today. Unless …”
“Unless?” Jeremy raised his eyebrows.
“Didn’t she tell you in her last letter?”
He raised his eyebrows expectantly. So, he thought. She’s going to admit the truth about the fiancé at last. “No. Tell me what?”
“Your aunt’s in the last few weeks of her confinement. You’ll probably have another cousin next month.”
“Good God,” Jeremy cried, collapsing back against the mattress. He put both hands behind his head, and stared up at the canopy. “Don’t tell me they’re still at it! Like a couple of rabbits, are Aunt Pegeen and Uncle Ed, don’t you think? And at their age, too. It’s disgusting.”
“Really, Jeremy,” Maggie chastised mildly.
“What is this? Number eight?”
“Seven,” Maggie corrected him. “Really, Jerry. They’re your family.”
“I suppose.”
Jeremy rolled over onto his stomach and looked at her. She rather wished he wouldn’t. It was exceedingly strange, having a man in her bedroom … even stranger having one in her bed. The last thing she wanted to do, however, was convey how strange she thought it to him. Five years had passed since that last … incident … and Maggie was a thousand times more sophisticated now than she’d been back then. After all, she’d lived in Paris. She’d seen something of the world outside of Yorkshire. She’d sketched and painted naked men. She’d been extremely alarmed about doing so, at first, but there was no need for Jeremy to know that. All he needed to know was that Maggie Herbert knew her way around the male body. Granted, only with a pencil or paintbrush, but that was beside the point. She’d overcome her shyness and most of her unease with the society of those outside her own family. She’d conversed with intelligent and witty people, and had been acknowledged as intelligent and witty in her own right.
And, most importantly of all, she’d gotten over her attachment to Jeremy Rawlings.
Oh, it hadn’t been easy. It had taken a long, long time. But she’d done it. She was cured. There was nothing he could do or say that would affect her. Nothing at all.
“I was sorry to hear about your mother, Mags,” Jeremy said, in a voice so gentle that Maggie nearly jumped out of her skin with surprise.
Trying to appear as nonchalant as he evidently felt, sprawled as he was at the end of her bed, Maggie said airily, “Oh, you heard about that? I suppose your aunt wrote you.”
Abruptly, Jeremy sat up on his elbows, his gray eyes very bright on her face. “Of course I heard about it,” he said, in the same deep voice. “Didn’t you get my letter?”
“Letter?” Maggie blinked a few times. “I never received a letter from you, Jeremy.” She tried not to sound as pathetic as she suddenly felt. No, she had never gotten a letter from him. Not when her mother died. Not when the newspapers had announced his victory in Jaipur. Not when word of the nature of his reward for having done so began to circulate … .
“Well, I wrote to you,” Jeremy said. His voice wasn’t gentle anymore. Now he sounded outraged. “It was a good letter, too. Where the hell could it have got to? I sent it to Herbert Park.”
Maggie, a little alarmed at his vehemence, said, “Well, it likely went astray. Letters do, sometimes. I wouldn’t worry about it. It was kind of you to think of me—”
The gray eyes glowed silver now as Jeremy stared at her in the rosy light from the fire. “Christ, Maggie. Of course I thought of you.”
Maggie looked quickly away. It wasn’t so much his eyes—though God knew, his eyes were troubling enough, glowing the way they did, like an animal’s eyes, caught at night in lantern light. No, she was over that now. He couldn’t affect her that way. But mention of her mother’s death did, every time, too. Dead almost a year, and Maggie still couldn’t think of her, or of the way her father’s face had looked upon hearing Mr. Parks’s solemn announcement that Lady Herbert had passed, without her eyes filling up.
Something warm settled over Maggie’s hand. Looking down, thinking it was the dog, Maggie was surprised to see Jeremy’s large brown fingers close reassuringly around her own slim white ones.
“Mags?” He was sitting just a few inches away from her, his head and shoulders taking up all of the space in her field of vision. His face wore an expression of concern. “Maggie? Are you all right?”
She nodded, not trusting her voice to speak.
“Are you sure?”
When she nodded again, he lifted her hand and casually, the way he had when they’d been children, he began inspecting her fingers.
“Ah,” he said happily. “I see we’ve been working in umber lately. And what’s this? What’s this? Some black! How bold of you, young lady. You didn’t used to be partial to black. What else? Ah, some sky-blue—”
“Azure,” Maggie said, a laugh escaping, in spite of the fact that she knew she ought to draw her hand away. Supposing her maid walked in? How shocked would Hill be, finding a man in her mistress’s bedroom? Never mind that the man was master of the house. Hill would surely scold her in the morning for even having spent the night in the same house as an unmarried man, let alone having entertained that man in her bedroom … .
“Azure?” Jeremy shot her a suspicious look. “A fancy art-school term, I suppose. What’s wrong with sky-blue?”
“Nothing,” Maggie said, more warmly, perhaps, than she ought to have. So warmly, in fact, that Jeremy cast her a startled look over her fingertips.
Oh, Lord, she thought, he’s going to kiss me. Suddenly, her heart began that same uneven tattoo from five years earlier … . They were alone in her bedroom, and this time, there wouldn’t be anyone to stop them. Maggie didn’t know what time it was, but she suspected, due to the darkness outside her bedroom windows, that it was early, too early for even Hill to be up yet. If he were to kiss her, and she was once again too caught up in his embrace to stop him, what would happen?
Chapter 12
Jeremy didn’t kiss her. The thought crossed his mind, as it had a hundred times since she’d opened those big, luminous brown eyes. But something held him back, some inner voice told him the time wasn’t yet right … .
And of course, there was the fiance to consider, as well. Not that Jeremy cared a jot about him. He did want a glimpse at the bloody ass, though. He wanted to avoid having to kill him, if at all possible. In the past five years, Jeremy had grown rather tired of killing, and sometimes found it less messy, overall, to allow someone to live, instead of dispatching him. Not that Jeremy would mind killing the fiance. Not at all. It would, however, complicate matters if it turned out Maggie was genuinely fond of the bastard.
So instead of kissing her, Jeremy tossed her hand away.
“So,” he said, as if continuing a conversation begun previously. “You’re a famous artist now. At least, that’s what Pegeen said in her last letter.”
Maggie, her relief at having escaped his embrace palpable, was nevertheless a little disappointed that he hadn’t kissed her after all. Her heart was still pounding rather sickeningly inside her chest. But she had to remember that his kisses were forbidden to her now. They belonged, as she knew only too well, to someone else.
“I don’t know about famous,” she said cautiously. Yes, it was all right. Her voice wasn’t obviously shaking. “But I’m an artist, anyway. At least, I suppose so.”
“Yes?” Jeremy climbed to his feet, and instantly regretted doing so. The room swam a little before him. Still, he couldn’t show weakness in front of Maggie, so he rallied his strength, and took a few steps until he could sink onto one of the brocade-covered chairs by the fire. “So what you’re telling me, Mags, is that people actually pay you for your doodlings now?”
“They aren’t doodli
ngs,” Maggie said, her back suddenly stiff as a rake. “They’re portraits, and people pay me quite a lot for them, actually.”
“Really?” Jeremy leaned forward and lifted the stuffed bird from the ivory-topped table. “And is this how they pay you? In children’s toys?”
“Certainly not,” Maggie said. “They pay me in the queen’s sterling. The toys are to entertain the children while I endeavor to sketch them. I specialize in children’s portraits.”
“Children?” Jeremy echoed, curling his upper lip in distaste. “What about pets? Do you still do pets, too?”
“Sometimes,” Maggie said. What cheek! She couldn’t believe it, the way he was strutting about her bedroom as if he owned it. Which, in fact, he did. But that didn’t give him the right to toss about her things. The army had certainly failed to teach Jeremy Rawlings anything about gentlemanly behavior. She longed to get out of bed and snatch the bird away from him, but dreaded parading around in only her nightdress, with no corset underneath to keep her bosom from bouncing. She knew only too well how much she had to hide, and how ill-equipped mere cotton was at hiding it. “When I must, occasionally, to pay the bills.”
“Bills?” Jeremy laid the bird down, and picked up the mechanical horse. “What bills could you possibly have? Surely you aren’t paying Uncle Edward and Aunt Pegeen to let you stay here!”
“Of course not,” Maggie said. “But I rent a little studio down in Chelsea, so I don’t stink up your house with the smell of turpentine. And there’s canvas to buy, not to mention stretchers and paints, and I pay for my own transportation to and from the homes of my sitters, and my meals when I can’t make it back here in time for them, and then there’s Hilt—”
Jeremy, in the act of winding up the mechanical horse, stopped and stared at her as if she’d suggested she liked to eat dirt. “What on earth,” he said, with genuine shock, “are you doing, paying for all of that yourself? Don’t tell me Sir Arthur’s put you on some kind of allowance. Surely your mother left you something … .”
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