Recalled to her grievance, she sat a little straighter on the chair.
“You told Mr. Hillmore to go ahead with his plans to plant orange pekoe without getting approval from me.” Her voice quavered with indignation.
His brows lifted. “So I did.”
Anna was nonplussed. Whatever response she had expected to her accusation, it had not been a cool “So I did”!
“Srinagar belongs to me,” she said at last, getting her bearings again. “I give the orders here. As a matter of fact, I think it is probably a mistake to clear so much land. True, in three years or so we’ll realize a little extra profit, but in the meantime—”
“In the meantime the plants that are there are too overgrown to produce more than the bare minimum of tea. The fields are basically idle anyway, so it makes sense to convert them to something that will eventually pay.”
Again he took her by surprise. “You don’t know anything about tea!”
He puffed on his cigar, then pulled it from his mouth. “Now there’s where you’re wrong. I didn’t know much about tea cultivation when I came, but I’m a quick study, and I’ve made it my business to learn. From what I’ve learned from Hillmore, and your dear friend Dumesne, and the books in your library, I fancy I have at least as good an understanding of what Srinagar needs as you do.”
“You …”
“And as for Srinagar being yours, I would remind you that my hide paid for the place. I know I told you that I would leave when I recover the emeralds, and I will. So all you have to do is bide your time until then, and you can do whatever the hell you want. But in the meantime, I’m going to do what I think best. If you don’t like it, I’m sorry.” He crossed to the corner where she sat, stopping just short of where she perched on the giltwood chair, and stubbed out his cigar on the porcelain dish on the drum table.
“And now that you’ve said your piece, I think it only fair that I have a chance to say mine.”
At the grim tone to his voice, Anna looked up at him, eyes widening.
“If you invade my bedroom again, I’m going to take it as an invitation. I’ve wanted you from the moment I first set eyes on you in Gordon Hall, and I know damned well you want me too. So I suggest, unless it’s your intention to end up in my bed, you get the hell out of here and stay out. Do I make myself clear?”
As she listened to this brutal speech, Anna’s mouth dropped open. As he finished, she shut it with a snap. How dare he speak so to her! She surged to her feet. Her movement brought her just inches from where he stood facing her, but she was too angry to notice, or care.
“You conceited beast! I don’t—want—you, to use your nasty phrase! I came in here to—”
He interrupted her ruthlessly. “You can lie to yourself if you want to, Anna my sweet, but you can’t lie to me. You’re a flesh-and-blood woman, with good hot red blood, and you’re in such an itch to be mounted that you can hardly keep your hands off me. You look at me like a woman looks at a man she wants to bed. Hell, you kiss me like a woman kisses a man she wants to bed. Your breasts swell in my hands and your—”
“Stop it!” Anna cried, almost screeching. “Just stop it!”
“Oh, no, my lovely little hypocrite, it’s too late for that. You had your chance!”
With that he reached out and caught her upper arms. Despite her furious struggles, he dragged her close, until her breasts were crushed against his chest. Then, even as Anna looked up, hurling insults at him like stones, he lowered his mouth to hers.
He kissed her and she was lost. Her head swam under the rough tutelage of that hard mouth, and her knees went suddenly weak. Her hands, which had been beating at his chest, went still and then curled around the cool silk of the lapels of his dressing gown. Beneath the coolness of the cloth her fingers brushed the hair-softened heat of his chest.
Her lips quivered and parted; her tongue answered the fierce demand of his. He no longer had to hold her against him; she pressed close and closer yet, her breasts seeking the hardness of his chest to ease the ache that pierced their softness. Her hands slid up to close behind his neck.
“Now,” he muttered with fierce satisfaction into her mouth, even as his hands sought the first of the buttons at the back of her dress. “Now tell me that you don’t want me.”
The words hit Anna like a bucket of cold water. What was she doing.… How could she let him … Had she no pride at all? With a furious hiss she tore her mouth from beneath his and jerked herself out of his arms.
Then, without a word, she dealt him a slap that rocked his head.
For a moment he stood there simply looking at her while the imprint of her hand on his cheek slowly filled with dark red blood. Then he raised his hand to the hurt, and his eyes went as black as jet.
“If you know what’s good for you, you’ll get the hell out of my sight,” he said.
Anna drew in a deep, shaken breath, took one final look at those blazing black eyes, then turned on her heel and fled.
XXII
The monsoon started, a little later than usual, some four days afterward on the second of August. Anna lay in bed listening to the wind blowing and shivered. So had the wind sounded at precisely this time last year.
At this same time she had been sitting beside Paul’s bed, his still-warm hand in hers, his dying breath in her ears, listening to the rushing of the wind.
It had sounded just as it did now. Only the last time it had come, it had taken Paul’s soul away with it.
Anna couldn’t bear the sound.
She got up from bed and crossed to the window, pulling aside the flimsy muslin curtain. It was well past midnight, and she had been in bed for hours. But she had not been able to sleep, and now she knew that she would not. Not this night.
It was one year ago to the day that Paul had died.
Shadows shrouded the garden, dancing eerily in the pale moonlight as branches and clouds were blown about by the wind. The wind’s whistling took on an eerie, keening note, as if it, too, mourned.
Beyond the garden, the small fenced-in enclosure at the top of the knoll was thick with shadows. Anna thought she could just make out Paul’s tombstone, shimmering white through the darkness. Calling to her.
For a while her loss had been so painful that it was like a blade twisting constantly in her heart. Then, slowly, so slowly that she scarcely realized it at the time, she had started to recover. A whole day would go by, and she wouldn’t think of Paul. At night she was able to sleep, untroubled by dream-time visits from his shade. She’d started to feel again, sharply: anger, fear, joy. And passion. Passion the like of which she had never experienced. A passion so strong and intense that it frightened her even to admit it. Even as her heart had grieved, her body had awakened. Perhaps the new vitality of her senses had worked some magic on the ache in her heart.
It was because of Julian, of course. Guiltily, Anna finally admitted to herself what she’d been afraid to face before: he was absolutely right when he accused her of wanting him. Dear Lord, how she wanted him! She wanted to kiss that hard mouth, to touch him all over, to have him touch her.
She wanted to sleep with him, God forgive her.
Anna closed her eyes, clenching her fists as she tried to will the thought away. But it refused to be banished. Suddenly she felt sick to her stomach. On this, the one-year anniversary of her husband’s death, it was depraved that she could stare through the darkness at his grave and think indecent thoughts of another man.
Anna reached for her wrapper across the foot of the bed. She tied the garment’s belt tightly around her waist, then slid her feet into her slippers.
She needed to be close to Paul. She needed to talk to him, as she had talked to him in the weeks just after he had died. She needed to know that, after all, the love they had shared from childhood had not died with him. Just because her body quivered with hunger for another man in a purely physical attraction did not mean Paul no longer held premier place in her heart.
What kind of fic
kle, feckless creature would that make her, if she could so soon replace in her affections the kind, gentle man who had been her dearest friend for most of her life?
Anna left her bedroom and moved soundlessly down the stairs and along the corridor toward the rear of the house. From somewhere behind her she heard a scuttling movement. Glancing over her shoulder, momentarily afraid, she was reassured by two small bright eyes gleaming at her from near floor level. Moti. Of course he had the run of the house at night. Reassured, Anna continued on her way, lifting the leather latch that secured the back door and letting herself out of the house.
The tendrils of hair around her face, which had worked free of their nightly confinement, were whipped upward by the wind. She had plaited the long mass for sleeping, as she always did, and it hung in a single braid down her back to her waist. The wind caught at the skirts of her simple white nightgown and wrapper, swirling them around her legs. Above her head branches blew and creaked. Leaves rustled all around her, or maybe the sounds were caused by small things wandering through the night. Anna neither knew nor cared. She felt removed from herself, caught up in a dream, almost as if she were one with the shadows and the wind and the creatures of the night as she climbed the hill behind the house.
The iron spikes of the fence surrounding the small graveyard were cold against her hand. Anna felt for rather than saw the latch. Lifting it, swinging open the gate, she let herself into the tiny cemetery.
There, in the very center, was Paul’s grave.
The vines and creeping vegetation that threatened to take over every other bit of arable land were kept at bay here, on Anna’s orders. Good English grass had been planted and was kept neatly scythed. The marker was of the local moonstone, carved simply with Paul’s name and the dates of his birth and death. At one end of the small plot a temple tree grew, its tiny white blossoms perfuming the air.
The moon peeping through the scudding clouds picked up the crystals in the moonstone, causing the headstone to seem to glow. Anna stood looking at it, her hands clasped in front of her, her head bowed.
As a girl she had loved him so much. He had been the embodiment of her every childhood dream. The handsome son of the local lord, as far above her touch as if he were a prince of the blood, and also her dearest friend. They had played together, had lessons together, and learned about loving together. Finally, they had run off together, married, come to this strange land and begotten Chelsea. And then he had died.
Now she had no more of him than this shimmering stone atop a plot of earth, and fading memories.
Surely a man as fine and good as Paul deserved more of a memorial than that.
Anna tried to conjure up his face, but his features kept getting confused with Chelsea’s in her mind. His face would not become clear. The admission brought tears to her eyes, scalding tears that spilled over her lids to run unchecked down her face.
How could she have forgotten already?
Falling to her knees beside the grave, she dropped her head in her hands and cried.
It began to rain. At first the drops were hesitant, slow fat drops that plopped when they landed. Then they increased in number and intensity until the rain was pouring down with as much force as her tears.
The wind whistled, the rain fell, and Anna wept on, oblivious.
Until a voice cut through the darkness with the angry ferocity of a sharpened knife.
“Just what the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?”
XXIII
Anna looked up to find Julian looming beside her, looking bigger and more powerful than ever with the night turning him into an enormous shape shrouded in shadows. Hastily she averted her face, swiping at her cheeks with her hands, desperate that he not know she had been crying as if all the oceans of tears in the world were hers to command. But he ignored her bid for privacy, if he even saw it, leaning over her and catching her chin with his hand, tilting her face up to his.
His eyes glittered down at her, black as jet in the darkness. He looked angry—no, furious. The rain washed her face. Her eyes closed against it—and him.
“You bloody little fool,” he snarled. “You’ll catch your death.”
Then, before she could gather her facilities enough to enable her to reply, he scooped her up in his arms, his movements rough, and bore her out of the graveyard. Anna turned her face into the damp cloth of his shirt, breathing in the smell of him, burrowing against the solid warmth of his shoulder.
He was so blessedly alive. She was so horribly, guiltily, glad of that.
The thought brought more tears with it.
As he felt fresh sobs shake her, Julian cursed viciously under his breath. Then, so abruptly that it shocked her, the arm beneath her knees dropped. Anna found herself on her feet, her breasts pressed against his chest as his other arm wrapped around her back. She looked up at him, surprised, only to find that his head was descending. Before she could so much as register his intent, his mouth found hers, claimed it. He kissed her with savage hunger that left no room for gentleness, kissed her with a fierceness that rocked her to her toes and made her insides quake.
That kiss reduced her to mindlessness. Anna felt her wits and her will melt away, leaving her helpless to deny him or herself.
Julian gathered her close, pulling her up on tiptoe so that she was aware of the whole muscled length of him with every millimeter of her skin. Anna quivered in his hold, then gave in to what every instinct she possessed screamed for her to do and slid her arms around his neck. He pressed her head against his shoulder, his mouth ruthlessly forcing apart her lips, and she did not resist. Did not want to resist.
With a tiny whimper she surrendered utterly, her hands curling into the broad damp shoulders, her mouth opening for his plundering.
And plunder he did. His tongue was a bold invader, claiming everything in its path. He stroked her tongue and the roof of her mouth and her teeth, demanding an equal response from her. Anna gave it to him, quivering and quaking as she returned passion for passion, kissing him back with all the pent-up longing she had tried in vain to suppress.
Never in her life had she felt anything like the burning desire that was turning her into flame in his arms. Never in her life had she wanted anything as, in that moment, she wanted him.
They stood like that for countless moments, kissing in the night-dark, rain-washed garden with the wind blowing her hair and her skirts and both their garments getting soaked to the skin.
Then he seemed to come to some awareness of their surroundings. He muttered something and gathered her up in his arms again.
Heart pounding, arms curled around his neck, Anna lay quiescent in his arms as he carried her across the gallery and into the house.
Neither of them spoke as he bore her along the hall, and this time Anna wasn’t even aware of the gleaming watchfulness of Moti’s eyes. Her own heart pounded like a kettledrum as she listened, head nestled against his chest, to the rapid thudding of his. Dizzy with passion, she drank in the strength of his arms as he carried her up the stairs with obvious ease, reveling in the solid breadth of his chest, the warmth of him, the smell of him.
There, in the silent darkness of the sleeping house, she somehow lost the person she knew herself to be. She wasn’t Anna anymore, but only a woman, and he wasn’t Julian, but only a man.
The woman in her, hungry, needy, cried out to the man in him.
Her arms tightened around his neck as he bore her along the upstairs hallway and then, easing open the door, carried her into her room.
XXIV
“You’re not going to send me away.” It was a rough whisper, part order, part question.
Her face buried in his shoulder, Anna shook her head. She felt rather than saw the harsh indrawing of his breath. The door clicked shut behind him, and then he was standing her on her own two feet with rather more gentleness than he had shown so far.
“Let’s get these wet things off you.”
The curtain that she had drawn away f
rom the window earlier permitted the smallest glimmer of pale gray light to invade the darkness. By it, she was able to watch him as he undressed her. He was very big, very dark, very intent as his long fingers dealt clumsily with her bows and buttons. His head was bowed to her so that she could just make out the beads of water glinting on his black hair. His lashes veiled his eyes, but his mouth was hard and straight, not smiling but rather almost grim. Sliding the wrapper from her shoulders, he chanced to glance up and meet her eyes. Still he didn’t smile, just watched her, those gypsy-dark eyes glittering.
Still watching her, he reached out and closed a hand around one small, taut breast. The single layer of damp cloth that still covered her was no protection from the fierce heat of his touch.
Anna gasped as a pleasure so exquisite that it was almost an ache quaked through her. Her head fell back on her neck, and her eyes closed. She trembled, but she didn’t back away. Instead one small hand lifted to close over the large, masculine one that was holding her breast.
It was Julian who broke the spell, muttering something hard and fast under his breath as he pulled her into his arms again. He kissed her, endlessly, passionately, and she rose up on her tiptoes and locked her arms around his neck and kissed him back. When his mouth slid down to her ear and then her neck, he, like she, was trembling. Anna could feel the shudders racking the arms that held her, and trembled more in reply.
“Christ,” he breathed, and put her away from him. When she reached for him, he shook his head and set himself to undoing the dozens of tiny buttons that closed her gown from neck to waist. His fingers shook so that each button took him several tries. Finally Anna brushed his hands away.
“Let me,” she whispered, more wanton than she had ever dreamed she could be. Still she could not quite bring herself to look up at him as she unfastened her gown. When at last it was done she chanced a glance, feeling both bold and incredibly shy. He was watching her with a dark, hooded expression that she couldn’t read. The only thing that told her he was as hungry as she was the obsidian gleam of his eyes.
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