It was taking too loooooooong.
Why did everyone get to see him fist?
They weren’t involved with him! They weren’t—
Ridley’s towering frame halted before her with a cane, his well-faded leather belt weighed with pistols and a satchel slung over broad shoulders. The achingly familiar peppery scent of his Parisian cologne drifted toward her through the heat.
She almost fainted.
Between half-breaths, her gaze veered disbelievingly up his military-issued waistcoat. The fabric indented and stretched against a broad torso and thick-bulked biceps, hinting at over-defined muscles pressing beneath every inch of a body she no longer recognized.
Their gazes locked.
Smoldering mercurial amber eyes that were far more soulful and far more everything rattled her into accepting that forever was now.
Her knees felt like targola jelly.
He wore no cravat.
The top ivory button of his linen shirt was seductively unfastened, revealing the curve of a strong throat and the alluring hint of a smooth muscled chest. His face and the skin visible beneath his unfastened shirt was well-bronzed by the sun, hinting months spent in Bombay.
She had promised herself not to be angry.
With a regal bow that was representative of her culture, Jemdanee removed the incense-blessed lotus flower from her hair and lifted her cupped hands toward him, presenting the unfolding pink petals of the lotus. “Namaste. Unto thee, Mr. Ridley, I gift the symbol of India’s supreme beauty: padma. The lotus. Despite its seed growing within the thickness of mud, where its stalks are forced to reside, it rises from dark waters to find the light that produces the glory of this bloom. Despite its arduous journey, it remains remarkably unstained, its vibrant color unaffected by the darkness it had arisen from. It is my hope, that you respect the journey this lotus has taken in your honor and that you never reduce it to mud again.” She stared him down to punctuate the delivery.
The clear-cut lines of Ridley’s rugged features flickered. He searched her face, his shaven jaw working. “I am in need of your forbearance,” his voice was low and broken. “I have dishonored you and myself, Kumar, and am here to return your faith in me. Might you forgive me?”
Tears overwhelmed her. He had almost died twice in her name.
He tapped his chest gently, still holding his cane, imploring silently for an embrace.
A tremor raked through her knowing he had only ever sought to love her.
Unashamed, she threw herself into his arms with the rustle of skirts and fell against his solid frame with a thud, reveling in his warmth, his peppery scent, his tensing muscles, his…
Ridley.
She sobbed, crushing the lotus in her hand.
It was too metaphorical, for she herself had long been crushed by him from the moment she had lain her head onto his lap one dark London night.
Tears traced her cheeks and dripped toward her trembling lips. In her honor, he had not only travelled to her homeland, but had even taken up squadron duty to return to her the freedom she had so foolishly tossed.
She fought against another sob and buried her face against the fabric of his military waistcoat, gripping the linen hard.
Ridley tugged her harder into the bulk of his arms, jerking her upward and off her bare feet. He buried his face into her hair, pressing her savagely against the solid warmth of his chest, tucking and molding her against himself.
It was gloriously too tight.
She quietly sobbed, the joy of holding him outweighing everything.
Slowly setting her feet back onto the ground, his large hands smoothed her hair as his fingers dug into her chignon. “I will never forget this,” he rasped into her hair.
Jemdanee pressed her cheek harder into his cologne-scented waistcoat, drifting through blurring emotions of knowing that whatever they shared, it was too strong to ever break.
His taunt muscles shifted against her, his broad chest rising and falling with ragged breaths. “Your forgiveness means everything.” He tightened his grip in her hair to stinging, his lips digging into her head. “Everything.”
Her quaking fingers tucked the crushed lotus into the upper stitching of his right pocket. She smoothed it whilst sniffing. “I am…still…very angry with you.” She poked at his chest, sniffing at each poke so he knew her tears weren’t frivolous.
He smoothed her hair. “We can be angry with me together,” he murmured.
A choked laugh escaped her.
Dipping his lowered head, he trailed his masculine lips downward from her forehead to her cheek and inward toward her lips.
Everything faded against the hot wind.
Although she didn’t turn her trembling lips up toward his that hovered, she didn’t move, either, chanting to herself that letting him kiss her wouldn’t mean she was weak.
Only that her heart was still his.
Ridley grabbed her face with large hands, tilting her glasses. “Not here,” he rasped against the side of her mouth, smoothing away her remaining tears with his thumbs.
She half-breathed, gripping his waistcoat hard.
He leaned back, the set of his jaw and the lines of his rugged face hinting at his angst as he searched her face and aligned the frame of her spectacles. Kissing her hands, he released her and inclined his head, never once breaking their gaze.
It was like meeting a completely different man.
It felt different. As if every heartbeat was going to matter.
Jemdanee swiped at her tears beneath the frames of her spectacles and eased back into the greeting line. Her limbs were quaking and she could barely stand.
One would think she had drank a quart of bhang lassi.
She was floating.
Adjusting his cane, he tugged out the pink lotus from the stitching of his pocket with his other hand. With a theatrical turn, he veered in close. “Permit me to return this to you in honor of what it represents.”
Twirling the stem, Ridley tapped it against her nose and tucked it back into her hair, pushing it into place. “You will always be the lotus and I the mud,” he offered in a low, husky tone. “This mud acknowledges that.”
Their eyes met and her core quavered.
His hovering knuckles trailed across her gathered hair toward her forehead and touched the bindi she had never worn in his presence.
Her soul tingled.
Leaning back, he widened his stance, the intensity of his gaze remaining riveted to her face before raking over the rest of her. Shifting his jaw, he dropped his eyes from her glasses to her exposed shoulders to her corseted breasts.
A knot rose in her throat in an attempt to remain indifferent to his uncensored perusal.
His brows came together. Using the end of his cane, he dragged it against the silk folds of her Russian gown, rearranging the fullness around her thighs and knees. “What are you wearing?”
Her heart jolted and her insides jangled. It was as if he didn’t like it. “Surely, you jest.”
He held her gaze. “This concoction of a raiment announces you have no understanding of what we share. It’s ninety-four degrees out. Burying yourself in more fabric than a field of cotton is lunacy. You should have worn a sari.”
Only a man who dismantled everything with his investigative mind would turn her gown into a lecture. “Do forgive the disappointment.”
His countenance softened. “You look extraordinary, but I came for something else. Pardon me for being a complete exhibitionist in a greeting line full of thirty men but I have to do it.”
Tossing his cane to an officer beside them who fumbled with it, Ridley captured her hands with his large calloused fingers and brought them up and molded her fingers into the heat of his wide palms one by one, threading their fingers together as if stitching them together for life.
Skin to skin, palm to palm, finger to pressing finger, his mellow baritone remained edged with what he was most known for: control. “This is what we share, Kumar. This is wh
at matters. Pulse to pulse. Do you understand?”
Between steadying breaths, she tightened her own fingers on his.
This was why she had been unable to embrace any other.
Never once breaking their gaze, he squeezed his dominating hold tighter and too tight, as if to ensure she felt his pulse and the bones beneath. “There is no need to impress me with silk. You are the silk.”
Every inch of her, including both of her well-gripped hands, burned.
This is what Bradley and others didn’t and couldn’t bring: sweaty appendages.
Dipping his head downward, Ridley feathered his masculine lips against the inside of each wrist before dragging his teeth across her skin. “Kumar?”
Her bare feet, buried beneath the weight of her gown, seemed to drift off the gravel. “Yes?”
Lowering his gaze to her hands, he outlined them with large fingers and paused at seeing the gouge on her palm from the pin. He grazed it and kissed it. Twice.
Because she wasn’t cursed enough to revere him.
He dragged his full lips across four out of her five fingers as his other hand drifted up from his pocket and slipped a black diamond ring onto her finger.
Her eyes widened. Unable to keep her quaking hand still, she swallowed.
“A token of my commitment.” Ridley dragged his hands out of hers with rigid fingertips. Taking back his cane from the officer, he gripped it. Inclining his head, he offered, “In ten minutes, mon dévot, we will return to each other.”
Averting his gaze, he stepped back, shifting his weight into the cane. Being further directed by the Field Marshal, he stiffly sidestepped to another officer beside her.
With a pang she felt all too deeply knowing he was still limping but attempting to hide it, she swallowed against the tightness of her throat.
He had once told her that the right man would know how to put her together when it was time, yet probably he did not expect that it would be the right woman putting him back together.
Everything after that was a droning blur.
Her trembling fingers grazed the glinting three-carat black diamond that weighed her scarred finger, hinting at the weight of everything to come.
She knew his mind well enough to say he was paying homage to a past that seemed to whisper of a dream. Her raw wrists he had tended to and saved without having ever asked anything of her.
He’d even kissed her scarred fingers which had been gashed by his teeth during his seizure.
In between his conversation with several officers grouped together, Ridley locked a hand behind his broad back, widening his stance and cane. His brows drawn, he commented about something in a deep low tone she couldn’t quite make out given the distance between them.
Unlike all the other officers, he wasn’t wearing a coat, so she could see that hidden beneath his loose-fitting linen trousers was a muscled rear and equally well-muscled thighs set below overly broad shoulders.
She was in angst.
To be so close to him yet…so far.
Feeling unashamedly needful and lustful from looking at his rear, she fought against the equally searing heat of the gravel that continued to annoyingly pinch into her toes.
A patch of grass to stand upon would have been nice.
Turning, she made her way toward—
Her pulse roared.
In the distance, Bradley was propped against one of the columns, the collar of his uniform unbuttoned to the chest and his blond hair scattered against the wind as he smoked a bidi and sketched. He blew out smoke through lips and nostrils, whispering of things she didn’t know.
Was that her bidi?!
The one she had left half-burning in the vase?
Noticing that she was watching him, he wagged it, as if announcing he was turning a new leaf, and returned to sketching.
It unnerved her. What if he did something stupid and complicated everything?
She would kill him!
Hearing heavy boots slowly thudding into the gravel, she knew Ridley was coming.
Chanting to herself to remain regal and calm, she turned with a sweeping effect and froze, realizing a chest was already blocking her entire view.
It was Ridley.
Chapter 4
Everything grew quiet, save her own breaths and the chirping of birds.
At over six feet, compared to her five, Ridley towered above her like a stone temple awaiting neck-craning worship.
He said nothing despite his eyes saying everything.
The muscles quivered in her thighs.
Adjusting the heaviness of the black diamond ring on her finger – upon her soul was it unusual and gorgeous! – she forced her body and her mind to remain calm.
She sensed he was determined to make them both crawl.
“Apparently, you have arranged for us to stay at Spence’s.” Although it was the swankiest of luxury hotels in all of India built barely three years earlier, located across the street from the Government House itself, she feigned ignorance and offered him her sultriest of voices. “How are the accommodations?”
His amber eyes prolonged the moment. “As resplendent as you,” he offered in husky tone. “How have you been, Kumar?”
Sweat tricked down her neck and into the silk of her gown as the sun blazed over their heads through the shade of the gulmohar trees. Why was she nervous?!
This was not the conversation she had expected to have with him after the letters he’d been writing. “Why not altogether discuss the weather, Mr. Ridley?”
He lifted a brow. “‘Tis Ridley, if you please. Or Evan. Or Oswald. No mister. I belong to you now. Much like you belong to me, Jemdanee.” Rounding her slowly, he held her gaze. “What were you hoping to discuss?” The low pitch of his voice was like hearing the roll of his hips.
She couldn’t breathe. He clearly sought to be the stone and make her the vine.
Little did he know a vine knew how to find cracks and invade the mortar.
She set her chin. “I find your attempt to control your passion for me amusing.”
His mouth quirked. “We have plenty of time to pursue passion and what it will bring and do to us. Why annihilate the inevitable?”
She wanted to grab him and rip every piece of clothing from his body so all of India might know of it. “In other words, three years was merely an introduction to a lifetime of suffering.”
“You introduced it.” He loomed before her and angled his cane. “Explain to me, mon dévot, why you didn’t write for three years. I want to hear it before we move on to the esoteric subject of our passion.”
Uff. Why did she feel as if she were talking with a professor moving into his own classroom?
She had written.
Enough to make her fingers sore and her heart sick. She simply never sent any through courier for they were either too loving or too harsh and she hadn’t really wanted to corner herself into being either. “Perhaps I required your commitment to be far greater than mine after what I went through. For although I am permitting us to embrace whatever our association will bring, it does come with a baleful warning.”
She stared him down, letting the sting of her seriousness gash him with a stern tone. “You will not be given permission to turn my life into a mess like you did back in London. Tears I do not need. Pain I do not want. Freedom from both was why I left. I may have forgiven you, Ridley, but I still remember the savagery of the pain you made me feel. It will always be there and if you ever tug on that pain again, ever, I will lay with another man that same night merely to make you perish. Do you understand?”
There was an arrested expression on his face.
Edging in close, he reached out and dragged the entire bridge of his rigid thumb across the fullness of her mouth, before smearing her still-wet lip rouge slowly down to her chin with calloused fingertips. “Perfectly.”
To her exasperation, the fluttering of her heart betrayed the nail-scraping, lip-biting, knees-digging attraction that had never left her.
She jerked her chin away from those large fingers and stared up at him with enough sauce to ensure he knew where to dip it. “Was it necessary to assault the rouge?”
He lowered his gaze to her. “Mon coeur,” he rumbled out. “Nothing I ever do is unnecessary. The smearing of your lip rouge is allegorical. For now you look exactly how I feel. Smeared to the chin by what we share. Unrecognizable.” He leaned down and breathed hotly into her ear, “Imagine what will become of us once we kneel to this. We’ll be fucked.”
Jemdanee swallowed.
Leaning back, he snapped out a handkerchief from his waistcoat. He unfolded it and dragged it across her lips, rubbing the softness of the linen against her chin and mouth. “Hold still.”
More than her lips trembled.
With the tilt of his head that sent thick chestnut hair falling onto his brow, he watched his fingers curve the linen beneath her lower lip. “Red lip rouge signifies audacity, confidence, and a need to be noticed. You should make it your signature. One that only I get to smear.”
His gaze bore into her in expectation, tingling her stomach.
There had never been a man who had ever captivated her with such alluring and equally dark but gentlemanly mystery.
He was the enigma she sought to lick with her soul.
Folding the handkerchief with one hand, he leaned in, the scent of his Parisian cologne drifting toward her. He held up the folded handkerchief. “You cried into this same handkerchief when I first met you. I freed you from prison only to then chain myself. In honor of what we share, I promise you will never cry into this linen again.”
She melted.
Ridley tucked it into his pocket, thudding it into place. “Now I have a memento. Your rouge on the same linen that introduced us.”
Unable to hold in her adoration, she gushed, “I had hoped you were still the same.”
“The same? No. Worthier? By a touch.” He held her gaze. “Did you read all of my letters?”
Her mouth went dry. Those. “Haan. I did. Some of them more than once. Some of them as many as fourteen times to ensure I was reading what I thought I was reading and it was exactly what I thought I was reading. They were all very…”
The Devil is French: A Whipping Society Novel Page 6
