Forbidden Jewel of India

For a long unfathomable moment he stared down into her eyes and his own seemed to darken. Nick stopped laughing. For an instant she thought he had stopped breathing.

‘It is not seemly,’ she managed to say as her mind tried to assimilate all the new sensations of a hard male body pressed against her own softness. She liked them. All of them.

‘No, it is not.’ Nick rolled off her and got to his feet in one fluid movement. He is as supple as a young sapling, Paravi had said. Heat washed through her. ‘I am sorry, I could not resist it. You were quivering like a hound wanting to be let off the leash.’

‘I was listening for shots,’ Anusha said with as much dignity as she could muster, flat on her back and filled with what she was horribly afraid was sexual desire. ‘Have they gone?’

‘They have, no doubt thinking that only a fool would head into the wilds with only two horses and a princess.’

He meant to mock her when he called her princess, she knew that. ‘And are you a fool?’

Nick reached down a hand and hauled her to her feet. ‘No, but I am going to do it anyway.’ He pulled the blankets off the horses and brought them to their feet with a whistle, shaking like dogs to get rid of the dust. ‘We will ride on a league or so and when we are out of earshot I will bring down some game for dinner. Then the muskets will be empty. We will rest a while, drink and I will show you how to load.’ He picked up one of the guns and looked from it to her with a grin. ‘Although I think you will have to stand on a rock to do it, Miss Laurens.’

‘Do not call me that.’ It was intolerable that he should treat her so casually and yet address her with angrezi formality by the name she rejected.

‘Anusha, then?’

‘Anusha,’ she agreed warily. ‘Nick.’

They remounted and rode on in a silence that seemed somehow more companionable than it had yet done.

* * *

After two leagues Nick halted and left her with the horses while he took the guns and padded off into the scrub. ‘Drink,’ he said, ‘and get into the shade.’

‘Yes, Major,’ she muttered, but did as she was told, not that there was much shade to be had.

Anusha heard four gunshots and when he returned Nick had a sand grouse and a hare dangling from his hand. That was good shooting with a musket, she knew.

He hunkered down in the small patch of shade beside her and reached for the canteen of water. It spilled from the sides of his mouth and she watched it run through the stubble on his cheeks, saw his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed.

‘You are a soldier, so this is taking you from the army,’ she said when he put down the water and ran the back of his hand across his mouth. ‘Why did they not send a diplomat for me?’

‘Because there was always the chance that something like this might happen. And I am a diplomat, of sorts. I move between the army and the princely courts as the Company requires.’ It explained why his Hindi was so good.

‘But this is not for the Company, this is for my father.’

‘His interests and those of the Company coincide when it comes to removing you from this situation,’ Nick said drily. ‘But he is so senior that if he wished me to go on his personal business there would be no objection.’

Sir George is like a father to me, he had said with the force of deeply held feeling. At the time the words had been a puzzle. Now, watching the relaxed, broad-shouldered figure, a startling idea struck her, and with it a stab of something that was disconcertingly like jealousy.

‘Are you my father’s son?’ she demanded.

‘No!’ Nick frowned at her. ‘Whatever made you think that?’

‘You look like him, you said he was a father to you.’ Now she felt a fool. But a suspicious fool, even so.

‘I do not look like him. I am the same height, the same build. But my eyes are green, his are grey—like yours. His nose is hooked, mine is straighter, my hair is lighter.’

Why was that a relief? If he was her half-brother, then she would have nothing to fear from him as a man, or from her own unruly desires. ‘But if you feel so much for him, then I suppose your real father is dead.’

‘No, he is in England. I have not seen him for twelve years, when he sent me out to join the Company as a writer at the age of seventeen.’

‘A clerk? That is very humble for a gentleman.’ Her mind kept worrying at that flash of relief. Surely she would not be jealous if Nick was her brother? That was very petty, for she did not love her father, after all. He could have fathered half-siblings all over Calcutta for all she cared—he would treat them and their mothers as badly as he had her, she was sure. She did not want to think about him—he did not want her and she did not want him. She should forget him, but the pain would not let her, like an old wound around her heart, forever nagging and weakening.