“Sasha…”
“What do you want me to say? John is my friend. He likes the same things I do. And right now, we need him. I may not be able to get us home without him.”
A terrible thought occurred to her then. She and Quinn had been together. They were lovers. What if they got home and he didn’t want her anymore? She’d been compromised. She was ruined. Unmarriable. It did not even seem such a terrible fate, really—there was a rumor that her Aunt Margaret was a spinster for exactly this same reason, some summer romance that had ruined her—except that she wasn’t like her Aunt Margaret, able to lock herself away with her books and pets and forget all this. Now that she had been with Quinn, loved him, she couldn’t imagine her life without him. She tried to. She tried to imagine going back to Strange Manor, taking up her old life, her books and experiments, and living alone.
The idea was too terrible to contemplate.
“Sasha,” Quinn said with sudden concern as he read her face. “What is it?”
She blanked her expression. She would not act all weepy in front of Quinn. “I thought I heard something. We should get back to camp.”
She slept soundly that night despite the fears gnawing at the back of her mind. In the morning, she spotted a lone, scrawny Hypsie rooting around their campfire, looking for scraps of food. Quinn and John went off after it, hoping to catch some fresh meat, leaving her alone to reassemble their camp. By midmorning, they returned. They had lost the Hypsie, but John had climbed a butte and spotted a watering hole two miles off, and soon they were on their way.
They refilled their waterskins at the watering hole, but did not linger. Quinn had warned her that in Africa, watering holes attracted all kinds of prey animals, which, in turn, attracted their predators. They hadn’t heard any evidence of She roaming in the night, but they were reluctant to take chances. They took their water and moved on, while a small collection of Hypsies and a distant Deenie looked on with vapid, sun-shriveled interest.
“But it’s simply extraordinary,” John commented a few miles on. “How could an animal develop such a strong dislike for two people? It’s staggering in its implications.”
John never stopped postulating. Sasha had found it engaging once. Now she was tired, worn out, and her mind wouldn’t stop proposing some tragic end to her summer romance with Quinn.
“How is it extraordinary?” Quinn asked. He used his javelin to move along like a walking stick, squinting up at the hellish sun beating down like a hot lead weight upon them all. “In Africa, bull elephants walk their victims into the ground. If you harm one, or its mate, it may follow you for years before attacking you.”
“You keep saying things like that, Mr. Quinn, but this is not Africa.”
“My name isn’t Mr. Quinn,” Quinn said coolly. “It’s Lord Quinn.”
John looked surprised, but not especially impressed. “You Englishmen,” he said only.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You really do need to get over your own importance, your imperial lordship.” John, who invariably walked ahead of their little group, turned and offered Quinn an insouciant smile. “Is Sasha impressed with your title? Is that how you’ve managed to compromise her?”
Sasha gasped and stopped dead in her tracks. Yet again, she felt like crying.
“How dare you,” Quinn answered. He stopped too and even dropped his sack to the hardpacked desert floor. His eyes burned in that way he had, and Sash just knew he was spoiling for a fight. She knew things would eventually come to a head, she just didn’t know how quickly.
Before she could utter a warning, Quinn was upon John. He was a dirty fighter, and he’d had some training in fisticuffs, that much was obvious. In less than two seconds he had dealt John a powerful right hook across the jaw and dropped him. Sasha surged forward, hoping that that was all that would come of the fight. But Quinn wasn’t done. He kicked John in the ribs, not a vicious blow, a killing blow, but more of a punctuation to what had come before. John grunted and grabbed Quinn’s ankle and upended him so Quinn wound up on his back on the desert floor beside him. He let out his breath in a whoosh.
John sprang up, looking extremely satisfied despite the raw red mark across his jaw. “I learned that at West Point, New York, your lordship.”
Quinn kicked out from his position in the ground, clipping John in the breadbasket. John went sprawling in the dust, coughing. Quinn sat up and spat. “I learned that at the Lamb and Flag, in the alley off Covent Garden. The East End.”
Sasha moved between the two men. “Stop it! What’s the matter with you two? What are you doing?”
“We’re about to have one hell of a fight, it seems,” Quinn answered, climbing to his feet and spitting into his hand.
She saw the looming danger of the two sweating, narrowed-eyed men and moved out of the way just in time as they clenched. For the next three minutes they ducked and hooked and threw punches, and speckles of blood fell to the thirsty desert floor as they rolled about and kept jabbing at each other’s faces and bodies like madmen. It was a very long, tiresome three minutes. Sasha screamed at them and demanded that they stop immediately, that they were acting like children, that this was ridiculous. But the two men were oblivious.
Two Hypsies flitted by, squawking excitedly.
Finally overwhelmed, she picked up her rucksack and javelin and stalked off toward the east, trying not to bawl like an adolescent child. She wondered briefly how her life had come down to this. She was walking through a brutal, alien desert full of dinosaurs and danger with two men she cared about on the ground a dozen steps behind her, beating the tar out of each other.
She wiped at her tear-streaked cheek and kept walking. Somehow, she felt so much of this was her own fault.
Five minutes later, both men rejoined her. They walked in silence, blood and bruises decorating their faces, their clothes dirty and disheveled. Quinn had a broken lip and a blackened eye, and John’s hat was missing so the bruises that crawled up his chin and jaw were horribly visible. They trudged on, staying a few feet behind her, neither of them saying anything until they reached the Valley of Song at nightfall, some three hours later.
CHAPTER 5
Quinn sat on a rock overlooking the vast canyon below and let Sasha apply astringent to his cuts and bruises, his stony face carved in deep relief by the firelight. The Valley of Song was enormous, chiseled from two tremendously tall, rambling mesas that must have been several miles long. From their vantage point, they could see the gleam of a stream running between the rock walls. The river seemed to go for miles. It reminded her of some of the amazing pictures she’d seen in books of the Grand Canyon in America.
Sasha worked slowly, trying to clean every wound with John’s medical pack. “You act like a child,” she said, surprising herself with her own honesty and the choked emotion in her throat.
“I’m a child for trying to recover your honor?” he said, sounding hurt.
She dabbed more astringent onto a cloth and applied it to his left cheek where a long shallow scratch creased it—too roughly, she supposed, considering how he flinched. “I don’t have any honor left, so you needn’t bother.”
He narrowed his eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh please, Quinn,” she said. Her voice sounded old to her, much older than it ought.
She saw his eyes move as he made the connection. “You believe you’re a dishonorable woman for having given yourself to me?”
She bit her lip. She would not cry.
“You’re ashamed to be my lover?” He sounded surprised and hurt. Hurt, more than anything. He stood up so fast she took a stumbling step back. “Is that true? Is that truly what you feel, Sasha?”
She didn’t know how to respond. She didn’t know how to voice her fears. These past few days Quinn had been ridiculously aloof. And now the backbiting, and the infighting…how else was she supposed to feel, except rejected? It was like Quinn wanted nothing to do with her, or with anyone,
really. She was almost certain he was having second thoughts about the marriage. He was probably missing Africa terribly, and his dead wife Gabrielle, and his dead son Percy. He had fought for her honor because that was what a gentleman did, especially when it was he who had stolen it away.
No, she reminded herself, that wasn’t right. He had not stolen her honor. She had given herself willingly to him. And she knew in her heart that she would give herself to him again, if she only thought he wanted her. She cast around, searching for something to say, staring at the ground as if it might hold the answer.
Finally, she looked up at him. “Why did you accept my father’s invitation to court me?” It was the only thing that came to mind, the one unanswered question.
Quinn looked uncertain, taken aback. “Your father invited me. And we had always been good friends, Albertus and I. You know that.”
“But you had plans to return to Africa before he invited you. Why did you come to the house that night? Why didn’t you simply turn his proposal down?”
“Sasha…this is useless and inappropriate at the moment.”
“I don’t think so. I want to know.” She watched him. She thought about all she knew about him, his past, the drinking, the brawls and bad gambling habits he’d acquired whilst in London. His terrible debts. And then she knew. She was a smart girl, everyone said so. The fact that she hadn’t figured it out until now perhaps proved otherwise. “My father paid you, didn’t he? Or he promised to pay off some of your debts.” She bit back a sob. “But either way, it was all about money, wasn’t it?”
Quinn shook his head, but his eyes were uncertain.
Sasha knew it was the truth. No one back home wanted her. She was truly and completely unmarriable—and long before she had ever given her innocence to Quinn. No man wanted Sasha Strange as a wife, Sasha the impetuous inventor who frightened all the good unmarried men of London society away. And that would have included Lord Sirius Quinn as well, except that Lord Quinn was deeply in debt and in need of relief. And her father was in a position to offer that relief.
She lifted her chin and pinned him with a look. She would not cry, not over him, of all people. “Tell me the truth. I want to know the truth.”
“No,” he said finally, sadly. “You don’t.”
“Tell me.”
“What? That your father paid me to visit you, to court you?” He raised his eyebrows and stared her down. “Is that really what you want to hear, Sasha?”
“I want to hear the truth.”
He let out his breath in exasperation. “Your father paid me to spend an evening with you. He paid me 200 quid.”
She stood very still and absorbed that. She had gotten very strong in the ensuing weeks on the Planet of Dinosaurs. She did not crumble. She sucked up the tears in her nose and throat and straightened her shoulders. “And how much did he agree to pay you to marry me?”
“We did not discuss such matters.”
“A small matter between gentlemen, then.”
“I told him it was highly unlikely we would be compatible and he should not hold out hope for much.”
“I see.”
Suddenly Quinn looked sad. “Albertus and I are very old friends, Sasha. We were at university together. If it makes you feel any better, I did it more to placate him than for the money.”
“But you needed the money.”
“Needed the money. Need the money.” He looked about the desert and threw up his hands in fury. “What difference does it make now?”
“It means nothing now,” she agreed, glancing at the looming shadows of the desert, the cool wind rustling her braids. “But at least I know my worth. How many people can say the same? 200 quid for an unmarriable bride.”
She started to walk away, tears welling up in a freshet in her eyes, but Quinn grabbed her arm, halting her in mid-step.
“Do not walk away from me, Sasha Strange.”
“Let me go.”
“No.”
“Let me go, Quinn, or I shall make an even bigger fool of myself!” She was going to cry. There was no stopping that. But she would not do it in front of him. She would not do it for him.
He looked at her carefully. “Do you love me?” he asked suddenly.
She breathed in and out, in and out. “I thought I did.” She held his eyes but steeled herself. “But I won’t be some bargaining chip. I won’t be sold like a draft horse at market. I’m worth more than that, Quinn.”
“I have no intention of buying you,” he told her. He sounded angry, hurt, as if his pride was being tested. “When we return to London—assuming we do—I have every intention of returning to Africa and reopening the tobacco fields to pay back my debts. I shan’t need your father’s money. I told Albertus as much that night, but he refused to believe I could do it. Once a drunk, always a drunk, he said.”
Sasha stared at him in horror. “But you have no slaves or servants,” she pointed out. He was ruined, penniless; he probably couldn’t even afford a valet. And he’d told her long ago that Gabrielle had insisted on him letting their slaves go, which Quinn had done for her sake. Gabrielle had believed in the value of human life, something that made Sasha admire her even if they would never meet in this world.
Quinn shrugged. “I’ll work the fields myself, if need be.”
“Alone?”
He smiled, grimly. “I’ve gotten rather strong since this little adventure began. I don’t see the trouble. At least I won’t be chased by dinosaurs anymore.”
She almost laughed then, despite the tears.
He held her eyes, but grew very still, very serious. “I deeply regret that our first meeting was so unfortunate, Sasha Strange. And I’m sorry that I’ve taken your honor and complicated your situation. I realize the price you will be forced to pay for it.” He closed his eyes and thought for a moment. “I am prepared to make it up to you as a gentleman. Assuming we’re able to get home, I’ll be happy to render to you whatever profits from my plantation you feel are appropriate for your recompense.” He released her arm and took her hand instead, holding it gallantly between his own. “It’s true that I’m destitute at present, and deeply in debt—and, frankly, my house is a terrible ruin—but it should not take me very long to turn profits, and then you will have a tidy sum to build your life upon alone or with John. That, of course, will be your decision.”
She thought about that. She was very confused by his words, and why he would bring John into the equation. But his offer intrigued her. She shook her head. “I don’t want your money, Quinn. But I am interested in a partnership.”
He raised his eyebrows at that. “If that’s what it takes to settle my debt of honor with you, then yes, of course.”
The tears had stopped. She watched him carefully, his desperate, breathing silence, the way he seemed to wait for her response. Her father was a good businessman. And she was his daughter. “Fifty percent of your plantation.”
He looked surprised but not exceptionally appalled. “If you wish. If that’s what it takes.”
“And fifty percent of your house in Africa, even if it is in ruins.”
Now he looked confused. “What shall you do with fifty percent of my house? I dare say, it’s a pile.”
She smiled through her tears. “I thought I should enjoy living in it. Perhaps repairing it and then filling it up.” She watched his startled expression. “I mean, with my books at first. But perhaps later with some children. Not many, mind you, as I have no idea what breed of a mother I’ll make. I thought perhaps a boy and a girl to start.” She waited, her heart clocking so rapidly she thought it must burst from her chest. Surely Quinn could hear it. “You do want children someday again?”
It was almost impossible to gauge his expression. She knew his history, how he had lost his son and wife to malaria. He knew how much this subject pained him. It took him two tries to answer her. “You…want to proceed with the marriage?”
“Do you?”
He brightened and his face looke
d younger. “Yes, of course. But…I thought you were cross with me.”
“I am cross with you, Lord Sirius Quinn,” she told him, wagging her finger in his face. “You were fighting with John like a couple of toerags just two hours ago. John is my friend. I shouldn’t want you fighting with him over some silly male ego thing.”
“I wasn’t fighting him over some silly male ego thing, Sasha. I was fighting him over you.”
She started then. She looked at him more closely. Was he mad?
Quinn moved his hand from her wrist up her arm to her shoulder, then to her face. He cupped her cheek familiarly and drew her nearer him so all the sun-baked warmth in his clothes engulfed her. His hand splayed over that side of her face and his thumb played briefly across her lower lip. He looked at her in that way he had, like he’d like to eat her like…well, like some ravenous dinosaur. “You did not notice?” he asked her.
Planet of Dinosaurs, The Complete Collection (Includes Planet of Dinosaurs, Sea of Serpents, & Valley of Dragons) Page 21