Maharaja's Mistress

Well, he’d hardly want her now, Mia reflected, checking her eyepatch was in place.

‘Well, come on, then,’ Xheni prompted. ‘Tell us about the Maharaja.’

How could she begin to tell them about Ram when he had flashed across her world like the brightest of comets leaving her to clutch in vain at his sparkling dust? When Ram had left England she’d known she would never get over it. There would be no more ridiculous birthday cards, or phone calls requesting a taxi for a maharajah and his elephant—no one twanging her old lute, or whistling ‘My Girl’ ever again—

‘Start with how you came to be driving in the rally with him,’ one of the girls insisted.

‘Or how you came to know Ram would be driving in it,’ Xheni interrupted, wide-eyed, nudging her friend. ‘Well, we’re waiting,’ she said as one by one the girls settled down. ‘We want to know everything about Ram. And you can leave out all the boring bits like what he likes to eat—unless that’s you.’

The girls had completely thrown her out of the past and into the present, and as they laughed their agreement she spluttered, pulling a face. ‘I’m hardly his type.’ Putting it mildly.

‘Who says?’ Xheni demanded. ‘Have you ever put him to the test?’ Resting her chin on the heel of her hand, the pretty young model leaned forward.

‘And how am I supposed to do that?’

‘Hold his gaze…Moisten your lips…’

The girls cheered as Xheni gave a practical example.

‘That would have worked well if I’d tried it out on a hairpin bend—’ And was easy enough for Xheni to say. Like all the girls Mia shared an apartment with, Xheni was stunning and accepted male attention as her due. ‘Anyway, I’m sure he’s got better things to do—’

‘Which is why he asked you out on a date,’ Xheni interrupted.

‘It’s hardly a date,’ Mia argued. ‘It’s more of a debriefing session.’

‘Excellent!’ Xheni screamed to filthy laughter from the other girls.

‘Believe what you will—’

‘Oh, we will,’ the girls assured her, exchanging glances. When Ram was in town there was a buzz of sexual excitement in the air; they’d all felt it.

‘I still want to know how you came to fall for Ram—because you have,’ Xheni insisted, looking to the other girls for agreement.

‘We all have,’ they chorused, hugging themselves as their vivid imaginations got to work.

‘What about the rally?’ Xheni prompted. ‘What did that feel like—pressed up close to him in such a highly charged and dangerous situation?’

Mia pretended bewilderment. ‘We were professional,’ she protested, blushing. ‘How either of us felt about the other had nothing to do with the rally—we just got on with it—’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ the girls chorused.

Mia wasn’t ready to admit how she’d felt—or that she was still coming to terms with how deeply Ram had affected her.

‘A professional situation, huh?’ Xheni teased her. ‘Okay, so let’s start at the beginning and work up to that boring old professional bit.’

Mia shrugged. What could she tell them?

All the bits she didn’t allow herself to dwell on—like filling in the gaps of Tom’s engagement party? When selecting an appropriate look for the evening hadn’t involved finding a suitable eyepatch to wear with her going-out dress…

‘Ram was my brother’s school friend, and things really came to a head on the night of Tom’s engagement party—’

‘Sex was in the air,’ Xheni advised the other girls.

Mia shook her head firmly. ‘We’re talking about my brother and his wife. Love was in the air—’

‘Even better,’ Xheni approved.

The other girls sighed theatrically, but their mischievous glances weren’t lost on Mia, who sat up. ‘If you won’t be serious,’ she warned, pretending stern, ‘I won’t tell you anything.’ She waited for silence, realising just how long she had shut out the details of that night. ‘I was all dressed up in my party frock—’

‘White lace and silk ribbons,’ one of the girls supplied dreamily.

‘We were scholarship kids, remember? My parents lived on the breadline, and even if they did keep up appearances in the crumbling family pile the best they could do for me was a hand-me-down with a rip beneath one arm that my mother stitched up for me. The dress was faded blue and the only thread my mother had was red, but she assured me no one would notice.’

‘Except Ram did,’ Xheni guessed.

‘Because he couldn’t stop looking at you,’ another girl suggested with a sigh.

‘Only to check I wasn’t chewing gum. Anyway, who’s telling this story?’ Mia demanded.

‘Go on,’ the girls begged her, thoroughly enthralled now.

‘Okay,’ Mia agreed, sighing as she remembered. ‘When Ram arrived I was surprised when he took me to one side.’

‘But you quickly adapted to this new development,’ Xheni said hopefully.

‘Of course. I explained I couldn’t leave the entrance hall,’ Mia continued, refusing to be sidetracked.

‘What?’ the girls demanded to Xheni’s moan of despair.

‘My job was to greet my parents’ guests and show everyone where to go.’

There was a chorus of groans, which Xheni quickly shushed.

‘Ram insisted on seeing me in private—and so I showed him into the library.’

‘The library?’ Xheni exclaimed with despair, but when something wistful came into Mia’s face all the girls fell silent.

‘Ram had changed somehow—and in a way that frightened me, because it changed everything between us. He was cold, and yet…not cold. At least, his eyes were hot.’ She bit her lip as she remembered. ‘He’d bought me a dress from Paris—a dream of a dress. I’d never seen anything like it before except in magazines. It was my first full-length ball gown. He’d guessed my size and everything,’ she added with innocent surprise, but this provoked a chorus of laughter.

‘I have to say Ram’s good with figures,’ Xheni exclaimed, clutching her chest as she gasped for breath. Reaching for a nearby newspaper, she brandished the front page that estimated Ram’s fortune in billions.

‘Go on,’ the other girls encouraged Mia.

‘Ram told me to go and put the dress on so he could see me wearing it.’

‘And, of course, you obeyed him?’ One of the girls suggested, with a wink.

‘No,’ Mia said quietly. ‘Actually, I refused.’

‘You refused?’ Xheni demanded to a murmur of disapproval from the other girls.

‘I didn’t want to upset my mother—I didn’t want her to think that the dres

s she had so carefully mended wasn’t good enough for me.’

The girls looked at each other, understanding. None of them had enjoyed easy lives.

‘Do you still have the dress?’ Xheni demanded.

‘I think it’s still at home somewhere. I didn’t want to offend Ram either, and so I thanked him for his lovely gift and put it away upstairs.’

‘And you’ve never worn it since?’ Xheni guessed.

‘No, I never have,’ Mia confirmed, remembering back to how she’d reverently untied the black silk bow on the powder-pink gown box and lifted out the exquisite dress Ram had bought for her from its nest of ivory tissue paper, knowing she would never wear it. Holding it up in front of her body, she had stood in front of the mirror pretending Ram was holding her and they were dancing.

And the rest…

What she could never have imagined was that Ram would come to find out what was keeping her. ‘You haven’t changed your dress,’ he had accused her when she answered his rap on her bedroom door.

‘There isn’t time for me to change,’ she had lied, trying to force the door closed—which wasn’t an easy thing to do when there was a maharajah’s foot in the way.

Ram’s dark eyes had called her a liar and when she had given up on the door and tried to slip past him he’d caught hold of her and pinned her to the wall, demanding, ‘You don’t like it, do you?’

Ram had always teased her, but on this occasion his face had been very close—and she hadn’t been a baby any longer—or a tomboy to be teased. And had he even been talking about the dress? She had been too naive to know. She could only remember that Ram’s eyes had been full of teasing laughter and there had been a dangerous frisson of something running down her spine, and her head had been full of thoughts of her bed just a few tantalising feet away from them—

‘You only have to say if you don’t like the dress I bought you,’ Ram had murmured, his lips so close to her own that hers had tingled.

‘I love it.’ And then she’d been angry when Ram had straightened up and pulled away—angry with herself for being such a girl when Ram was already a man. If she had been one of the older girls with her eye on him, she would have shut the door with both of them on the bedroom side of it.