Her Only Desire (10 page)

At any rate, the fact that Derek and Gabriel had worked with Lord Griffith for nearly a week now, getting to know him and having ample opportunity to size him up for themselves, along with his sterling reputation, no doubt helped to ease their misgivings as their sister marched ahead of him into the private salon.

He held the door for her, and she ignored a frisson of awareness as she brushed past him into the room.

He followed her in, closed the door behind him, and turned to face her, folding his arms across his broad chest. “Well, well, Miss Georgiana. Here we are again,” he said in an ironic tone, but she held up a finger, silencing him while she scanned the room for any sign of a peephole or listening grate.

In these lavish palaces, the very walls had ears.

A painted mural wrapped around the walls depicted the story of the descent of the Ganges, with flying goddesses and stylized heavenly guardians on horseback. A jewel-toned carpet of intricate weave covered the cool flagstone floor. Overhead, an iron chandelier hung from the beamed ceiling, at midday its candles unlit. The only other objects of note in the room were a low-slung couch with red cushions, a long, heavy table with spiral-carved legs, and, flanking the single window, a pair of small mango trees in clay pots.

She went over and glanced out the window to make sure there was no place for anyone outside to overhear their conversation. One couldn't be too careful. “Good,” she murmured, seeing that the window was set high above one corner of the bustling square. “Now we can speak freely.” Or, more to the point, now she could tell the brute exactly what she thought of him.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, watching her with a dark, brooding stare, while his long, tapered fingers slowly began to tap upon his thick biceps.

“I'll ask the questions, you snake!” She swung around to confront him head-on. “You know what you are? You're a despot, a tyrant—”

He laughed softly. “A tyrant?”

“You heard me!” She had been waiting days to give free rein to her outrage. Now she let him have it. “Who do you think you are to tell me what I can and can't do? To lock me up under guard, like a prisoner in my home? You had no right to do that to me! How
dare
you! And—” she interrupted when he tried to speak. “You lied to me!”

He cocked an eyebrow at this accusation, but perhaps now he began to grasp there was a bigger fight brewing than he had anticipated.

“You let me believe like a fool that you were going to include me in your journey, but instead, you locked me up as though I were in purdah and rode away without me! That was low. Altogether low! But as you can see, my dear marquess, you have no control over me.” She held out her hands, presenting herself with a flourish, propping her fists on her waist and lifting her chin. “I'm here, and there's nothing you can do about it! Your little plan to cage me didn't work.”

He studied her coolly for a long moment, but the tension around his hard mouth hinted that he was not so unaffected as he seemed.
Good!
She hoped she made him every bit as furious as he had made her. If she got him angry enough, it might stymie his ability to work his smooth manipulations on her again.

“I asked you repeatedly to stay home, Miss Knight,” he said in a consummately reasonable tone. “To stay out of trouble and to behave yourself. This was for your own protection, as well as the security of my assignment.” He paused and shrugged. “I knew you weren't going to listen. That's why I asked DeWitt to send his men. You gave me no other choice.”

“Rubbish!”

“On the contrary, my dear. You forget, I had already seen the kind of chaos you're capable of, and the situation here is precarious enough as it is. It did not need you barging in like a damned bull in a china shop,” he finished in a sharper tone.

“Bull in a china shop?” she echoed with an indignant gasp. “Well, I never!”

“You had no business coming here.” He started toward her, looming tall, his mask of aloof indifference dissolving to reveal a thunderous scowl. “How dare you completely defy me!”

She laughed. “You're not used to that, are you? Well, I don't grovel for anyone.”

“Obviously, it was too much to hope that my saving your life would count for something—”

“I could've handled those people myself.”

He stopped and looked at her in utter shock. “Ha!”

Georgie pursed her lips and refused to take back her probably overconfident claim.

Staring at her incredulously for a second, the marquess shook his head as though he feared she ought to be locked up with the lunatics. Then he narrowed his eyes and pointed a finger in her face. “You know what your problem is? You're spoiled.”

“I am not!” she huffed as his words struck a nerve. “You don't know me!”

“Let's look at the facts!
You
had to see
your
friend, the princess;
you
wanted to see
your
brothers—and to blazes with everything and everybody else!” he said angrily, the volume of his deep voice climbing. “Do you have any idea what's at stake here? Why can't you blasted women ever learn to use your heads?”

Georgie clamped her jaw shut and looked away, striving for patience. She took a deep breath, steadied herself, and regrouped. “All right, let's just calm down here—”

“I
am
calm!” he bellowed.

She ignored him. “I see now why you fail to understand me. That much is my fault. You judge me spoiled, but that's only because I have not been entirely…forthcoming with you about my real concerns. But, as it seems you're too
thick
for the subtle approach—”

“The subtle approach?” he exclaimed with a bark of laughter. “Where was that, pray tell? I must have missed it.”

She shot him a warning look. “Instead, I must be frank.”

“Please do. Oh, this should be most enlightening.” He propped his foot on the stool nearby and leaned down, resting his elbow on his bent knee. He waited with an expectant gaze, taunting amusement written all over his handsome face.

“I am not the vapid debutante you think I am,” she said. “Do you really believe I'd come all this way for a social call?”

The question appeared to take him off guard. He studied her warily for a second, then shrugged. “Very well, I'll bite. If not for a social call, then why
did
you come, Georgiana?”

She held him in a piercing stare. “Because of you.”

“Me?” Again, he appeared startled by her answer, a flicker of confused, adorable modesty flaring in his eyes, but then he was back on his guard again, and let out a cynical scoff. “Right. I'm very flattered, but—”

“Don't be. It's not your well-turned calves that interest me, Lord Griffith, but the substance of your mission here at Janpur.” She paused and pinned him in a no-nonsense stare. “I want you to tell me, right now, what is going on here.”

He went very still, then lowered his foot from the stool and turned to her. “Why should I do that?”

She gave a demure shrug and clasped her hands behind her back. “Because I have influence here, Lord Griffith. I have the ear of the king's favorite, and am privy to information that you have no way of obtaining. All this means I can either help or hinder your progress, depending on your aims, so I suggest you start with the truth.”

His green eyes narrowed like those of an angry tiger.

She forged on. “I want to know what you're here to try to accomplish. If you refuse to tell me, then I must assume the worst. Which means I'm going straight to Meena and telling her to warn her husband not to trust you.”

There.

He had thought her idle and indulged, but now he would begin to see that she was deadly serious.

He said nothing; though his eyes glittered angrily, he looked stunned down to his lordly fingertips. What, had he never met a woman with brains before?

Reveling in his new understanding of her nature, Georgie lifted her chin. “In Calcutta, you told me you had been sent to stop a war. If that is true, then we are in accord. Naturally, I would much rather work with you than against you. Yet, somehow, after what you did to me, I have trouble believing your motives are so pure.”

He looked away in fury and pretended to study the mural. “You are a fascinating woman, Georgiana.”

“Thank you,” she replied. “So, which is it? Is peace your true goal, or are your dealings here are just another devious trick aimed at expanding the East India Company's grasp?”

He slanted her a brooding glance and seemed to grow larger as he took offense. “Do I look like some merchant's errand boy to you?”

“Not at all. But that doesn't answer my question.”

He looked away again with a silent curse on his lips and began to scowl.

Georgie watched him, intrigued. “You are offended. Well, that is why I tried to find out nicely first,” she explained with a shrug. “If you had accepted my hospitality in Calcutta and talked with me a while, I could have found the answer for myself without perturbing you.”

“I doubt it,” he growled.

She lowered her head. “You haven't lived in India, my lord. You haven't seen how the Company ruins all it touches, like cursed King Midas, destroying everything it tries to turn to gold. The Indian people have borne the brunt of this curse. They've watched the Company armies defeat one ancient kingdom after another, and always some corrupt, indifferent Englishman is put in charge.” She checked the note of anguish that had crept into her voice. “The Company's administrators don't give a fig about this land or its people. All they care about is lining their own pockets by whatever means they can devise.”

He eyed her warily.

“This cannot be allowed to happen to King Johar. He is a good ruler and a just man, and his people need him. And if I have to fight you to help save his reign,” she added in a harder tone, “I will.”

“Aha.” He pinched the bridge of his patrician nose for a second, clearly striving for patience, then he let out a low, cynical sigh and his hand fell back down to his side. “So, this is the direct approach?”

She just looked at him.

“Why didn't you tell me any of this before? You should have told me in Calcutta what was really on your mind.”

“I didn't know if I could trust you.”

“Thus the need for subtlety….” He let out another musing sigh. “Well, perhaps we both have hidden from each other too much of what we are.”

“I have been honest with you now.” Her expectant pause invited him to do the same.

“Very well, since this obviously means a great deal to you, let me first assure you that I am not the Company's lackey, nor the Crown's.” His tone turned steely, for, after all, she had insulted his pride. “I have no interest in ‘lining my pockets' with the wealth of the East. I did not come to India seeking profit. In fact, I was on holiday in Ceylon, minding my own business, when they called me in to deal with this. I gave up my holiday to help, and if you still don't believe that I did not come here seeking Indian treasures, then you'll pardon the vulgarity of my informing you that I already happen to be extremely rich. Born with the silver spoon in my mouth, if you must know, and if I lived like a profligate for the rest of my life, I would still die with more gold in my coffers than most men could spend in three lifetimes.”

Georgie absorbed his terse chastisement with a downcast gaze. “Oh.”

“Furthermore, if I thought our aims in this matter were unjust, I would have refused the mission.”

She could feel him staring at her.

“In short, I don't do this job for the pay, Georgiana. I am here for the good of my country, in the hopes of saving lives. If there is any meaning to my life, I've dedicated everything to trying to make the world at least a slightly more civilized place, so I really don't appreciate your insinuations about my character.”

She wilted further and kept her gaze down, her cheeks turning scarlet as she began once more to recall all the admirable things that people in Society had told her he had done. Averting wars, negotiating truces…she hadn't believed a word of it, in her general prejudice against men, learned from the pages of her aunt's book and the injustice toward women she so often saw around her.

Even now, that prejudice hung on like a terrier with its teeth in her ankle. “You still haven't told me what your business is in Janpur,” she mumbled with a slight tremble. Her head down, she glanced at him warily from under her lashes.

He laughed and shook his head. “You're not going to let this go, are you?”

“I cannot. These people are my friends.”

“Well, you are loyal. I'll give you that.” He snorted to himself and sauntered off toward the window.

Holding her ground, she said nothing, but found the strength to lift her head again and meet his gaze.

He rested his arm along the window sill, studying her; then he looked outside, squinting against the brilliance of the light. “Once again, you leave me little choice.” He shrugged. “On the other hand, I've been in this business long enough to know that you women have…your ways. So, whatever mysterious back channels you are privy to, Miss Knight, if you want to see this maharajah keep his throne, then let him be persuaded to take the deal we're offering.” Lord Griffith paused, then continued in a lower tone. “It's not Johar who is slated for destruction, but his brother-in-law, Baji Rao. Have you heard of him?”

She nodded, and her heart leaped with hope that he was finally going to take her into his confidence. “Baji Rao is the Peshwa, head of the Maratha Empire,” she answered, eager to display for him her familiarity with the region.

“Well, the man has become quite a thorn in our side.”

She leaned her hip against the sofa's arm, considering this. “I cannot say I am surprised. Baji Rao is no Johar. He has a reputation as a coward and a bully with a cruel streak. Even his own people hate him.”