The Betrayal of the Blood Lily (29 page)

Lady Frederick stared up at him. A slow smile spread across her face. “I imagine she embroiders you lovely handkerchiefs.”

Those blasted handkerchiefs. He’d had more than his fair share of teasing for those. They had been a birthday present from Kat years ago, marked in hair with his initials. Kat had not been amused when he had wanted to know why she hadn’t just used thread. If he couldn’t appreciate a sentimental gesture, she had told him, she certainly wasn’t going to waste her hair on him, so there.

“No,” he said. “That’s Kat. My other sister. If Lizzy knows how to thread a needle, she’s never shown it.”

Lady Frederick touched a finger lightly to the corner of his lips. “You start to smile when you talk about your family. It suits you.”

Her finger burned against his lips like a brand. Feeling as though he had just drunk too deeply of arrack, Alex stumbled a step back. “Lady Frederick—”

“Call me Penelope,” she invited, strolling forward for every step he took back, like a tiger prowling after its prey.

It wouldn’t, Alex thought, be all that terrible to be caught.

She was married, Alex reminded himself. And not to him. “And scandalize society?” he said with a mildness he was far from feeling. Every sensible instinct he possessed screamed to sprint back towards the Residency before he did something he might regret. Unfortunately, his more sensible instincts were being rapidly shouted down by the rest of him.

Lady Frederick flung out her arms towards the deer park, with its silent audience of sheep and elk and blackbuck. “What society is there to scandalize?”

As if in agreement, a mynah bird gave an emphatic hoot from the branches of a nearby banana tree.

“Your husband,” said Alex bluntly. Lord Frederick struck him as the sort who didn’t have any interest in the contents of his own toy box until he caught someone else playing with them, at which point he would care very, very deeply.

“Oh,
Freddy
.” Lady Frederick dismissed him with a word, but she stopped her forward progress with the abruptness of a child’s toy pulled back on its string.

“I’m not on such familiar terms with him.”

“Lord Frederick, then, if you please.” Lady Frederick took his measure with a sidelong glance. “But I expect you don’t. He doesn’t please you at all.” In a meditative tone that brought gooseflesh to Alex’s arms, she said, “The question is, do I?”

He could feel the tension in the air around them like a premonition of danger. He forced his voice to hardness. “What is this about?”

Lady Frederick wasn’t the least bit put off. Her eyes glinted yellow in the moonlight, tiger’s eyes. “Me. You. A moonlit night. I can think of better uses for it than talking about Freddy. I can think of better uses for it than talking about anything at all.”

She leaned up on her toes, erasing the few inches’ difference in their height. He could feel the brush of her lace frill against his buttons, a startlingly erotic sound in the still night. Her breath whispered across his jaw, a promise of things to come.

An empty promise. It felt practiced. A seduction repeated by rote, no more personal than a tiger’s kill.

Alex rocked back hard on his heels. “What are you trying to do?” he demanded.

“Seduce you, of course,” said Lady Frederick—Penelope—tracing one blunt-nailed finger along his shirtfront. “Is it working?”

If she had looked any lower, she wouldn’t have had to ask that. Alex wondered, with the bit of his brain that remained in proper working order, what in the devil was going on. One minute he had been pacing, brooding about Jack and Cleave and Wellesley, surely the least erotic subject known to man, and the next there was Lady Frederick—Penelope—shimmering among the moonflowers like a vision out of a Mussulman’s heaven. All that was needed were a few piles of cushions and someone playing the zither.

“Is this a game?” he demanded hoarsely.

“It could be,” she said, wetting her lips with her tongue so they glistened in the moonlight. “A very satisfying one.”

Just the way she pronounced the word made him harden.

“You,” he said, feeling like Odysseus tying himself to the mast and plugging his ears against the sirens, “have a husband.”

“Not much of one.” Beneath the seductive purr, there was a definite tinge of pique. Frowning, Alex pulled back. She clapped back on a bright social smile, like a comedienne donning a mask. “Marital fidelity is entirely out of fashion, you know. It wouldn’t do to be less than à la mode.”

Alex looked at her bright smile and her shadowed eyes and knew that she lied. “I don’t believe that. And neither do you.”

“Freddy does.”

Beneath the pretended brightness, her voice was strained, as tense as her shoulders and the odd, watchful glint in her eyes, so foreign to honest desire. There had been rumors of late, in the bazaars, that the new Englishman had taken Nur Bai into keeping—not in hired quarters in the town, with all the inconvenience of having to obtain permission to enter the city after dark, but in his own zenana. Alex had dismissed the rumors as just that, rumors. It just wasn’t done. Not when one had a wife. Discreet rooms in the town, yes. But not in one’s own home. A man would have to hold his wife in utter contempt in order to contemplate a move like that.

Alex looked at Lady Frederick’s pinched, white face and knew that he had been wrong.

“That’s what this is about, isn’t it? Not me, not the moonlight.” He felt vaguely ill himself, with disappointment or disgust or both. Disgust, he told himself. Disgust at Lord Frederick’s wanton cruelty. He had no right to disappointment. “
Christ
. I should have known.”

“You’ll blaspheme but you won’t indulge in a spot of adultery? I call that hypocritical.” Lady Frederick trailed a finger down his cheek, aiming for his lips.

Alex called it too much wine. Grasping her arm by the wrist, he held it suspended in the air between them. “Don’t do anything you’ll regret in the morning. He’s not worth it.”

Lady Frederick twisted her arm away, taking a step back. Her face was bitter in the darkness. “You mean I’m not worth it.”

“You’re worth ten of him,” he said roughly.

Her lips twisted in a lopsided mockery of a smile. “Very kind of you, Captain Reid. Your condescension overwhelms me.”

Condescension? If she thought that was all it was, she was more naïve than she looked. His body was screaming to reassure her that condescension was the last thing he had on his mind. It might even be called a kindness.

A sick sort of kindness, to use her pain as an excuse for his own desires. Do that, and he’d be even more of a cad than her ass of a husband.

“Go home—Penelope.” He very deliberately employed her given name. “Go home and sleep it off.”

Lady Frederick’s mouth opened in soundless laughter. “You think I’m foxed? Trust me, Captain, I can hold my liquor better than that.”

“Drunk on revenge,” he corrected bluntly. “You’ll feel differently in the morning.”

“Will I?” she said, and her gaze swept him up and down, taking in every last detail, as someone anticipating thirst might drain the last drops of water from a dipper.

There was an odd, forlorn note in her voice that made Alex wonder, with a dangerous burst of exhilaration, if he might have gotten it all topsy-turvy, if it might not be at least a little bit about him and a little bit less about revenge. He made a move towards her, not towards Lady Frederick, but towards Penelope, forthright and honest and calling to him.

But he left it too late.

She turned, abruptly, missing the hand that had begun to reach for her.

“If you don’t appreciate my company,” she said flippantly, looking pointedly back towards the Residency, “I’ll find someone who will.”

Her back was towards him, the slim column of her throat held as high as it would go. She was every inch Lady Frederick again, as hard and glittering as the marble columns supporting the Residency veranda.

Alex tasted regret, as pungent as sour wine. Regret and pity.

Even though he knew she wouldn’t thank him for it, he called after her, “Lady Frederick—Penelope.”

She stopped at the sound of his voice, wary, waiting.

He couldn’t bring himself to say what he really wanted to. “Don’t sell yourself too cheaply.”

He saw the flicker of her lashes as she glanced back at the shadow figures on the veranda. “That’s the bother of it, Captain Reid. I already have.”

It was midnight, bleak and frigid cold, by the time I struggled up the Tube steps at Bayswater Station.

There was no self-indulgent cab on the way home from the movies. It was nearly midnight and Cinderella’s coach had turned back into a pumpkin. Or a Tube train, as the case might be.

I huddled down into my coat and clamped my elbow over my bag as I navigated my way down Queensway. It wasn’t entirely deserted—there were still lights on in the pub at one end of the road and the odd group of roving tourists—but the daytime crowds had gone and the shops were shuttered. Crumpled take-out wrappers and abandoned tourist brochures littered the street, bumping along in the wind like an urban version of tumbleweed. The whole stretch had the derelict feel of a party space after the party had gone.

The James Bond theme music was still playing in my head, bringing with it that rush one gets after a really good action movie. I wasn’t ready to go home and go virtuously to bed. I wanted lights, people, conversation.

There wasn’t much I could do about the first two, but I could manage the third. As I turned off Queensway, I fished my mobile out of my bag. It was a bit late to be calling, but that was the nice thing—well, one of the nice things—about having a boyfriend. You didn’t have to worry about things like socially acceptable calling hours with them.

Scrolling down through my contacts list, I hit “Colin.” It had taken me a while to program him into my phone, as though by presuming him permanent enough to be enshrined in my contacts list along with my parents, Pammy, and my favorite pizza place, I might somehow jinx the whole thing.

The phone rang twice, then three times, before Colin finally picked up. “Selwick.”

I must have caught him in the middle of working on something, because his voice had a preoccupied sound to it and I could hear the
clack, clack, clack
of computer keys still going in the background. Or that might have just been the static on the line. Cell to cell does not always make for the best connection.

“Hi!” I shrilled, my breath coming in pants as I tried to walk, talk, and keep my head down against the wind all at the same time. “It’s me.”

“Me?” The
clack, clack, clack
had stopped at least.

“Eloise,” I specified. I stopped short of adding “your girlfriend.” Although I was pretty sure I was, we had never actually specified that bit. “How many women do you have calling you in the wee hours?”

“The hour isn’t exactly wee yet,” pointed out Colin, with that amused note in his voice that I loved so well. I could picture him settling back in his incredibly uncomfortable desk chair, wedging his mobile more snugly against his ear. “It’s not yet midnight.”

“Close enough,” I chattered. “How’s the book going?”

“Slowly.” Colin was, or so he claimed, working on a spy novel. I wasn’t sure what the plot was, but it seemed to have something to do with international mobsters operating out of Dubai. Or was it Moscow? He was very cagey about the whole project. “Are you outside?”

“Yup!” I hitched up the strap of my bag, nearly dislodging the phone from my ear in the process. “I’m just on my way back from going to the movies with Serena! We saw the new James Bond.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line, followed by, “Oh.” And then, “Was Pammy with you?”

It was a logical question. Pammy had gone to school—to different schools—with both me and Serena, so she was the natural connecting link. “Nope. Just me and Serena.”

Silence.

“Hello?” I said, frowning at my cell. “Hello? Oh, good, you’re still there. I thought the line had gone.”

“I’m still here,” said Colin, but there was something flat about it. I couldn’t tell whether he was displeased or just preoccupied. Whatever it was, it wasn’t the warm and fuzzy reception I had been hoping for.

I hate cell phones sometimes. It’s impossible to pick up nuances of tone, especially with the wind driving your hair between your ear and the phone and the sound of your own breath rasping into the receiver.

I soldiered on, turning the corner onto Leinster Street. “Guess who we ran into in the movies?”

“Dr. Evil?”

Okay, it couldn’t be that bad if he was making Austin Powers jokes. He was probably just checking e-mail while talking to me. I do that sometimes. It’s awful of me and I know I shouldn’t, but I do it anyway. “No. Your friend Nick. He was there with some little blond chicky.”