Sophisticated Seduction

by Jayne Bauling

  ‘Nowhere and neither of us,’ she said shortly, giving him a last eloquently smouldering look before turning and going back into the palace, well aware that she would only make a fool of herself if she attempted to express all the angry, resentful things boiling over in her mind, and suspecting that she might also burst into tears should she try to say more, if the sudden tightness of her throat was any indication.

  That looked like being the last time she and Nicholas were alone together. Over the next two days, when she wasn’t being driven about the region by the chauffeur Chiranji had provided, selecting fabrics and placing orders, she was in Rohini’s company, being shown the sights and meeting her friends. During meals at the palace, she was always acutely conscious of Nicholas, tensing whenever he looked her way or’spoke to her. She also discovered that it hurt her to look at him, so she stopped doing it.

  Then, over breakfast on their third morning at the palace, having ascertained that Bridget’s business here was completed, Chiranji gave her a broad smile.

  ‘Excellent! Because, although it’s Sunday, my architect and I are going over to inspect my new lake palace, and Nicholas and I thought you would like to see it, Bridget. Our bird should be arriving shortly, so can you be ready in, say, ten minutes?’

  ‘Enjoy yourselves,’ Rohini adjured, and explained to Bridget, ‘I’m not going. I hate helicopters and small planes.’

  Bridget hadn’t realised that the palace had its own landing-pad. She had never been in a helicopter before and, when she said so, she didn’t even mind the indulgent looks the men gave her, too excited by the prospect.

  In fact, she found the experience fairly tame as she felt completely safe, but it was definitely an ideal way of viewing the countryside close up, and the pilot obligingly caused the machine to hover whenever they passed over anything of interest.

  The artificial lake which had cost a phenomenal sum, even in those days of princes with fabulous fortunes, was set below rugged, rocky hills which lay reflected in its placid, steely water, and the palace was some distance out, accessible only by boat or air.

  Approaching it by air and from a distance, the pale rose-pink confection had all the unreality of a fantasy, a distant illusion of domes dreaming and shimmering in the morning heat. Closer, they could see the reality. Smaller than most Rajput palaces, it was breathtaking in concept, touched with genius in its execution, for it had been built to withstand the centuries; and yet, light and airy, all delicacy and grace, it gave the impression of soaring weightlessness.

  Hovering above it, they could see among the domes other flat roofs, of different sizes and on various levels, interlinked by a series of stairs, and these roofs were clearly meant for use, enclosed to waist height with fretted parapets and some graced by marble pavilions.

  ‘You two go and explore while we engage in our usual argument about what must stay and what has to go,’ Chiranji directed Nicholas and Bridget, with a challenging grin for the slim young architect, after he had told the pilot at what time to return for them.

  ‘Enjoying yourself, Bridget?’ Nicholas enquired somewhat edgily as her wondering eyes collided with his after the two men had departed.

  Bridget swallowed. She had been avoiding meeting his gaze lately, finding it the only way she could maintain a semblance of composure in his presence, let alone control her thoughts, which tended to run riot in all sorts of ways whenever she looked at him.

  ‘In fact, I’m suffering from sheer disbelief,’ she finally confessed, with a touch of humour. ‘I never dreamed that such places existed in the world.’

  ‘Such places are probably bad for people like you,’ he returned sardonically. ‘They detach you from reality. You haven’t even put up a struggle against the spell, have you?’

  ‘Why should I? It won’t last when we’re gone from here.’ Her energy had been too much in need for resisting his spell, if the effect he had on her could be called that. ‘Are we going to look around or not?’

  ‘Why so impatient? Because the sooner we start, the sooner it will be over and we can rejoin the others?’ Nicholas guessed bitingly.

  Bridget shot him an angry look from beneath her eyelashes. ‘How did you know?’

  Some of her resentment subsided as they explored the palace from top to bottom because, as he had said, she was under a spell. They wandered through empty chambers which were lit with a cerulean glow by reflected sunlight from the water outside.

  After the interior, they returned to the roofs where they had arranged to meet Chiranji and the architect, but there was no sign of them yet. The sun beat down on them, but inside the carved pavilions it was airy and more comfortable than it had been within the palace itself.

  ‘It must have been wonderful up here when the fountains were working,’ Bridget commented dreamily, strolling into another pavilion, visualising herself in a different age. ‘Can’t you imagine it? Long, lazy afternoons…’

  ‘And you for the queen?’ Nicholas guessed what she was doing, his grey eyes dark and knowledgeable as they rested on her slenderness softly draped in a thin cotton wrap-around dress with indigo motifs on a cream background.

  She smiled, refusing to be jerked out of her daydream, and extending a mock-majestic hand.

  ‘This would be my personal pavilion where I’d hold court to the sound of the fountains playing and the sight of the sun outside.’

  ‘And be forever subject to the whim of your prince, sweetheart,’ Nicholas drawled. ‘But if that’s the role you expect me to take in your game, I must decline with thanks. It’s too romantic for my taste.’

  ‘You flatter yourself,’ she snapped, finally forced to react to his mockery.

  ‘I suppose you’re actually wishing you’d lived in those days of regality and romance,’ he went on contemptuously.

  ‘I’m not that stupid,’ Bridget retorted. ‘I probably wouldn’t have got a prince anyway, but, even if I had, Rohini has been telling me their history—it would have meant living in fear—of losing my prince’s favour, of being poisoned by rivals seeking it for themselves, of his end in death and destruction through the misguided pride and chivalry of those times.’

  ‘Ah! So it’s the modern fairy-tale you’re after,’ he taunted. ‘Mutual everlasting love with one man who’ll be faithful to you for all your lives together. And you think you’ve found it with Loris!’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be a fairy-tale…’

  Her voice trailed away and she dropped her eyes as she realised the futility of trying to convince him. It didn’t matter what he believed anyway.

  The absence of any response from Nicholas made her look up. He stood in the entrance to the pavilion, watching her. Bridget was suddenly very still, recognising the sensual awareness beginning to smoulder in his eyes, with an odd thrill that was part alarm and part excitement.

  In silence they stared at each other. The sun piercing the delicately fretted marble of the pavilion put dark red glints in Bridget’s hair, and the play of light and shade on her face softened it into mystery.

  ‘You look so much more of a woman and less of a girl in this light,’ Nicholas remarked, and his voice was freighted with the same thing she was seeing in his eyes.

  ‘No,’ Bridget said tautly as he began to stroll towards her.

  She refused to humiliate herself by backing away from him. It wasn’t Nicholas she was afraid of anyway, but the thing that would happen to her if he touched her, that complete loss of control and inability to think.

  Instead, she lifted her hands open-palmed to his chest, desperate to keep space between them, but Nicholas simply took them away, drawing them down and round behind her, holding them at her back. She might still have resisted then, but a moment later her hands were released and she felt light, warm fingers running up over the backs of her arms, making her shiver violently.

  ‘Your skin is so lovely to touch,’ he murmured almost absently, his eyes resting on her lips. Then his palms were flattening over her shoulder-blades,
drawing her in as her head fell back, and his mouth dropped to hers.

  It was a kiss of fire, and Bridget was shaken by a sense of something being taken from her. At the same time she knew that this was what she had wanted for days past. By now Nicholas had her enfolded in his arms, moulding her slim, trembling body to the tautness of his.

  Already Bridget was lost, desire singing in her veins, her pulses throbbing, and every receptive nerve in her body was somehow aware that Nicholas was feeling this as intensely as she, and it was as if the heated joining of their mouths was the more urgent because their bodies could not be joined.

  She wanted them to be; she wanted more than his hard, hot mouth, his embracing arms and the throb of his body against hers, but through thin layers of clothing. Her breasts were swelling against his chest, her hips pressed against him with gentle, strangely rhythmic little thrusting movements, and her heart seemed to be exploding cataclysmically and reassembling itself in a new shape, now a burning wheel of fire in her breast that would change everything forever.

  They were both breathing raggedly and their skins were damp, dewed with perspiration, as Nicholas pulled his mouth away and stared at her with blazing eyes for a moment.

  ‘Nicholas…’ It was an uneven whisper that pleaded.

  ‘No!’ He denied the entreaty harshly, pushing her away and turning his back on her, going to stand in the pavilion’s entrance again. ‘Not unless you’re ready to end your relationship with my cousin first, Bridget.’

  Bridget stared at his tense back, understanding that it was her heart that had been taken from her, stolen by this man who didn’t even believe in love.

  She felt the blood drain from her face as he swung round to face her.

  ‘Well, are you?’ he grated savagely. ‘When you’re having such a difficult time resisting temptation, how do you think I’m feeling, especially when you keep looking at me as if I really might be a prince? This can’t go on! I just want you too badly!’

  It was so accusing that Bridget was incensed.

  ‘I don’t know why you should, when I seem to irritate you so much, and I didn’t—I didn’t give you anything last time, when we nearly…when we—’

  ‘When we nearly became lovers,’ he supplied grimly. ‘But you did! That’s partly what’s inciting my lust, your incredible responsiveness, because I keep imagining how it might be between us.’

  ‘Nicholas…’ Bridget was no longer pale, warm colour flooding her face as she too imagined how it might be, but imagining was all she would ever have.

  ‘And you’re imagining too,’ Nicholas realised perspicaciously, the way he ran his fingers through his black hair eloquent of angry frustration. ‘But until you end your relationship with my cousin that’s all either of us is going to be doing. I told you, I don’t share.’

  Bridget almost told him the truth then, but she stopped herself in time. What would be the point? He didn’t love her, and she knew she couldn’t handle an affair in which all the loving came from her side.

  ‘I notice I don’t get given any say.’ She saw the flicker of impatience in his eyes and continued hurriedly, ‘But that doesn’t really matter, because I don’t want anything to do with you! I’d hate to—to be involved with you like that. Virginia was right—you’d destroy me.’

  ‘Because I wouldn’t let you comfort yourself with the illusion that we were in love?’ he suggested sardonically, his face still tight.

  ‘Because—’

  ‘Are you all right?’ he interrupted shortly. ‘I can hear the others coming.’

  He stood in the entrance, talking to Chiranji for a few moments, giving her time to compose herself, and Bridget was grateful to him, and unwillingly touched that he should show that much consideration. When the helicopter returned for them and Nicholas automatically put out a hand to help her in, then withdrew it again, blankfaced, she knew she should have been relieved instead of subject to wrenching despair.

  Bridget spent very little time reflecting on her reasons for having fallen in love with Nicholas, or wishing she hadn’t. It had happened and was unalterable. She loved Nicholas, and she was very unhappy because she knew there was no chance of him ever loving her back. It was as simple as that.

  It was just surprising that he should have desired her at all and have continued to do so, but that would probably have been a thing of the past by now, had they actually become lovers.

  The only comfort she could find in her fate was its confirmation that she wasn’t, after all, a wanton slave to physical attraction; that the realm of the senses into which she had been so ashamed to find herself drawn was in fact the world of the heart.

  And her heart ached all the time now, this loving so completely different from her imagined feeling for Loris Stirling and the boys she had gone out with so briefly as a schoolgirl. There, she had dreamed mostly of them loving her, but, while she did long for Nicholas to love her, the whole of the feeling was so much bigger and more complex. She wanted to serve him, to give to him and make him happy—only she had nothing he wanted save the one thing, and she knew him well enough by now to know that having it wouldn’t make him happy.

  The following day’s drive back to Delhi was probably as much of a strain for Nicholas as it was for her and, because she loved him, Bridget was sorry. She wished there were something she could do to ease the situation, but she was so unpractised in pretence that her attempts at lightly impersonal conversation fell flat, or he bit her head off, and her few questions about the places they passed through received brief, irritable answers.

  It was torture to be sitting there so close beside him for all that time, within easy touching distance, aching to reach out and lay a hand on his thigh, and knowing she must not.

  ‘Don’t try so hard, Bridget,’ Nicholas snapped, when she made one last nervous attempt to talk of neutral things. ‘There’s an easier way, and the only way, but you won’t do it.’

  ‘I’m ’

  Guessing what the instinctive apology would provoke, Bridget swallowed the rest of it and saw Nicholas smile for almost the first time that day, although the savagery of it almost reduced her to tears.

  It was a relief to reach the house in Delhi. Nicholas was behind her with their small amount of luggage as the double doors were flung open.

  Instead of Sita, Virginia Stirling stood there.

  ‘Bridget! I’d worked out that you must be coming back from Rajasthan today. How—? Nicholas!’ Virginia acknowledged her brother rather aggressively. ‘Where have you been? And what are you doing with Bridget?’

  ‘Nothing—at present—and she has been doing your job for you in Rajasthan,’ Nicholas responded caustically. ‘What are you doing here? Tired of the elderly boyfriend already?’

  ‘He is not elderly, and you’d better learn to use a nicer tone when you talk about him because he’s going to be your brother-in-law. He’s here with me now.’ Then Virginia grew urgent as she rushed on, ‘Only you’ve got to help us, Nicholas. That’s why we’re here. Mortimer’s wife is suddenly being difficult about the divorce, delaying it by making all sorts of impossible demands, out of pure spite, I’m sure. You’ve got lots of influence in all sorts of ways, or else maybe you could make it worth her while to let it go through easily.’

  Bridget saw that Nicholas wore the look of a man burdened by irritation and facing the one extra annoyance that signalled overload.

  He said bitingly, ‘Would you mind allowing me to get our luggage in properly and have a drink before you tell me just why I should assist you in committing the mistake of your life, Virginia? Lime with soda, please.’

  Bridget and Virginia looked at each other as he stalked out of the hallway.

  ‘Well!’ Virginia finally exclaimed exasperatedly. ‘What’s he in such a temper about? How is the buying going, Bridget? Don’t look so worried—you aren’t about to be sent home, because we won’t be staying long. Mortimer has an assignment in Nepal, but I thought we must stop over here and see what Nichola
s can do to help us… Why are you looking at me as if I’ve turned into a monster? What’s wrong?’

  Bridget shook her head unhappily. ‘You told me Nicholas interfered in your life, but you demand it of him, don’t you? You and your cousins, you expect him to step in and straighten things out for you, to save you the trouble of having to sort out your own problems. I know it’s none of my business, but it has been a difficult day and he has just driven from Rajasthan, so please— can’t you at least wait until he has had a chance to unwind before you bother him?’

  Nicholas rejoined them as she concluded the soft appeal and Bridget had never seen such total fury in his grey eyes before. Alarmingly, it seemed to be directed at her, although he addressed them both.

  ‘Why are you still standing around here? Where’s that drink?’

  ‘I’ll get it,’ Bridget offered hurriedly, and fled.

  Sita was absent from the kitchen, and she had just found a tall glass when Nicholas followed her in.

  ‘You were so right, Bridget.’ Somehow the quiet, tightly controlled tone made his rage seem the more deadly, especially as his eyes were blazing. ‘Our family affairs are none of your damned business, and I will not tolerate your interference.’

  ‘I was trying to help you,’ she protested agitatedly.

  ‘You know what I want from you, and it’s not your help.’ The control was abandoned and he spoke savagely now. ‘Nor do I want you waiting on me. I can get my own drink, as it’s apparently too much trouble for Virginia.’

  He took the glass out of her hand. Humiliation was heating her face, but then anger surfaced.

  ‘You don’t deserve any sort of consideration from anyone if you can be so ungracious about mine.’ Her voice was shaking with the intensity of her feelings. ‘And as for interference, maybe now you’ll have some idea of how I’ve felt when you’ve been organising me, altering my arrangements—although I am sorry for all the things I’ve said about your interfering in your family’s lives, because it’s obvious that they—’