The Seduction of Elliot McBride

by Jennifer Ashley

  He followed Stacy out, then the tent wall fell back down to silence.

  Juliana sat again in a rush, her breath leaving her. She had no idea what to do—stay here? Go after them? Try to talk to Elliot? And should she?

  She didn’t have lists or organized ledgers to help her deal with this. After she’d gotten over her fright of Mr. Stacy appearing out of nowhere, she’d had the idea that he and Elliot would talk, reconcile, become friends again. What had happened with Priti’s mother was years ago—Juliana liked it firmly in the past. They no longer needed to be angry at each other.

  But then Elliot revealed that Mr. Stacy had been responsible for Elliot’s being captured at all. Good Lord, if that were true, Juliana wanted to shoot Mr. Stacy herself.

  How could he not have helped Elliot? Though he might not have known specifically what the tribesmen would do to Elliot, Mr. Stacy must have had some idea generally. And the tribesmen might simply have killed Elliot on the spot.

  But then, Mr. Stacy had felt remorse and had gone back to try to find him. At least, he’d said so.

  One thing shone in crystal clarity. Elliot was in a black rage, and there was no telling what he might do. Juliana shared a bed with him, and his powers of seduction were incredible, but she could not predict his path.

  Juliana made her decision. She rose and stormed for the tent’s entrance, lifting the flap to find a fresh-faced girl just reaching for it.

  “Mrs. McBride, won’t you tell my fortune?” The young woman had a few grinning friends behind her. “All of us? We long for tall, handsome husbands.”

  Juliana managed a smile, trying to mask her worry and rage. “I’m afraid that Madame McBride’s head hurts too much, ladies. The fortune-teller’s tent must close for now.”

  “Aye, we saw Mr. McBride comin’ in to visit ye. No wonder ye look so tired.”

  “I tell fortunes.” Channan’s contralto cut through the girls’ giggling. “I know how. Come.”

  She signaled with a dark hand, swept her scarves around her neck, and ducked inside the tent. Juliana thanked her silently and sped off in the direction of the house.

  She found Mahindar in the middle of the lawn, showing children how to throw the balls at the bottles to knock them down. “Where is Priti?” she asked.

  “With Lady Cameron,” Mahindar said.

  Juliana followed where he pointed and saw Priti peering at the baby Ainsley held down to her. The tall forms of both Cameron and Daniel Mackenzie stood guard behind them.

  “Mahindar, please tell Lady Cameron that I want either Lord Cameron or Mr. Daniel with Priti at all times. Tell them she might be in danger.”

  “In danger.” Mahindar’s eyes widened. “In danger from who?”

  “I don’t know, and it might be all right, but please tell them.”

  “At once, memsahib.” Mahindar dropped the ball he’d been holding and ran across the grass to the little cluster.

  Juliana lifted the scarves that trailed down her gown and hurried on to the house. She found Komal in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, pots on the stove boiling, the fire high under the clay oven.

  “Where is Mr. McBride?”

  Komal still didn’t speak much English, but she got the gist of Juliana’s question. She pointed with the knife to the garden door and said something in Punjabi. Juliana nodded and rushed out to the gardens and down the path.

  When she reached the gate, she saw Elliot returning up the path, his rifle slung over his shoulder. Elliot paused when he saw Juliana, then he came on.

  “I remember telling you to stay in the tent,” he said.

  “Well, I could not, could I? What did you do to Mr. Stacy?”

  “What I told you I’d do. Gave him provisions and money and sent him on his way.”

  “Could we not help him more? He seemed truly sorry.”

  “No.” The word was as harsh as it had been in the tent. “He’s let trouble follow him here. I will not let anything happen to you, or Priti, or Mahindar, or McGregor—anyone. If that means I throw Stacy to the wolves, then I throw him.”

  “It might be too late already, you know. We’ve been insisting to the Dalrymples that Mr. Stacy is alive. While I cannot picture either Mr. or Mrs. Dalrymple as assassins, they might pass information to one.”

  “Possibly. Inspector Fellows told me they’re using false names.”

  “There. You see?”

  “I will deal with the Dalrymples.”

  “The point is, anyone looking for Mr. Stacy might already be here.”

  “Then it’s a good thing I sent him on his way.” Elliot took his rifle from his shoulder as they entered the kitchen, and opened it to unload it. “Where is Priti?”

  “I told Mahindar to have Daniel or Cameron stay with her.”

  “Good.” Elliot gave her a look of approval. “She stays either with them or with me.” He put the rifle into its cupboard, locked it, and started out of the kitchen as though ready to return to the fête.

  Juliana stepped in front of him. “Elliot.”

  Elliot halted, impatient. “I’ve done what I’ve done, love. That’s an end to it.”

  Behind him, Komal kept chopping vegetables, watching in her quiet way. Juliana gathered strength from the woman’s silent assessment and lifted her chin.

  “I want you to tell me everything that happened to you, Elliot. When you were captured, what they did, and how you escaped. I need to know everything. Please.”

  She could have no idea how beautiful she was with the indigo scarf wrapped around her red hair, the blue and gold silks trailing down her shoulders. The head scarf brought out the blue of her eyes, which were now large in her ashen face.

  “I don’t…”

  The words I don’t want to speak of it came so easily to Elliot’s lips. So easily did they quiet the well-meaning questions put forth by his family, his friends, even Mahindar.

  But Juliana had already heard what he’d spat to Stacy, the festering anguish that had welled up inside him. He’d stopped himself before he’d let worse come out—how he’d been used as a pack animal, the various forms of torture they’d tried on him simply to observe the results.

  Maybe he could hold back the very worst. Elliot didn’t want to watch Juliana’s eyes change when she realized the full horror of it all. He didn’t want to confirm that the lad she’d smiled upon at her debut ball was dead and gone. Juliana had asked to marry the young man who’d charmed her into the kiss, not the wreck of a man who’d dragged her to the altar.

  But he would tell her a part of it. Juliana deserved to know something of the stranger she had married, and why he’d found it necessary to cast Stacy and his plea for help away.

  Elliot gave Juliana a tight nod, took her hand, and led her up the stairs to their bedchamber, where he shut and locked the door behind them.

  Chapter 25

  Elliot told her. He started with Jaya and the fact that at first it had been almost a ménage à trois—he and Stacy had been young and found being lovers to the same woman exciting. Jaya had preferred Stacy, and when Stacy was slow to acknowledge his feelings for her, she came to Elliot.

  Stacy had returned from a business trip to find Jaya giving him an ultimatum—he marry her or she would stay with Elliot. Stacy, realizing that he loved the woman, had grown angry at Elliot, thinking he’d tried to steal Jaya, then Elliot stepped aside and let Jaya leave with him.

  Elliot had thought that the end of the matter. He and Stacy had gone north to Rawalpindi then to the borders of Afghanistan to meet with a trader who ran on up into the Hindu Kush and beyond to Samarkand. Elliot related to Juliana the attack on the English families, the plan to get them to safety, and Stacy abandoning Elliot to his fate.

  As Elliot spoke it came back to him, all the things he tried so hard to push away. The beatings, the night they’d clamped his hands to a table and calmly pulled out his fingernails, one by one. How they’d beat him with metal rods until he couldn’t stop the screams.

 
; They’d sometimes take him out of his cell deep in the tunnels and talk to him. Elliot understood them a little—their dialect had been similar to those in the northern Punjab. They’d thought him a British spy, and asked when the soldiers would come marching. They hadn’t believed Elliot when he said he knew nothing, neither did he care.

  The torture, the alternate starvation and halfhearted feeding, the sleeplessness leading to long periods of unconsciousness had nearly killed Elliot. His captors expected him to die at any moment, they said, had even shown him the pit where they’d throw his body. Wild animals would find him there and tear him apart. They threatened to throw him in even before he was dead.

  Elliot talked in a monotone, relating horror after horror, his eyes closing while his lips moved. He no longer saw the room, or heard the laughter outside, or felt the solidness of the floor beneath him.

  He hadn’t realized that his words had drifted to silence. His eyes remaining closed, his lids too heavy to open.

  Then he smelled the rosewater soap Juliana liked so well, sensed the brush of her on his skin. Her warmth slid along his body, and still he couldn’t open his eyes or reach for her.

  “I never told them about you,” he said, his lips stiff. “They questioned me and tortured me, but I never once said your name. You were mine, my secret. The one thing they could never take from me.”

  She skimmed her fingers up his arm under his loose sleeve. “I don’t feel worthy of that.”

  “You were light and life. You are heat, and I’m so damn cold.”

  Elliot opened his eyes. Juliana a hairsbreadth from him, surrounding him with her beautiful scent, her warmth. She was life, and home.

  “How did you get away from them?” she asked, her voice holding a little tremor.

  “They’d taught me to kill. When I helped kill some of their enemies, the leader started treating me better. Then one of the men became jealous of me, killed another, and blamed it on me.”

  “Oh.” Juliana’s hands came to rest on his chest, fingers points of warmth through his shirt.

  “I knew they’d come for me right away. I hid in the dark. They sent in only one man to fetch me, because they didn’t fear me enough. I had to kill him before he could make a sound. I dressed in his clothes. In the dark, I crept into the tunnel where they kept the guns and stole my Winchester back, and what was left of the ammunition.

  “Someone saw me. I shot at him, and I ran. I disappeared into those hills so fast, I never looked back. I can’t remember most of that run, but they were after me.”

  He felt a smile coming on. “But I was good. I always had been. I eluded them like an animal, laying false trails and crossing rivers, and praying I didn’t step on a cobra and end everything. I had to get back home. I mean to Scotland. Had to.” He brushed Juliana’s hair back from her face. “I had to get home to you.”

  Tears trickled from her eyes. “I was so afraid every minute you were missing. I thought of you every day, every hour.”

  “I think I knew that. I could see you so clearly, even in the worst of the dark.”

  “How did you manage to get back to your plantation?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea, love. At some point, I crossed the border back into the Punjab, and kept wandering. I suppose I simply knew my way home. Mahindar says he found me about ten miles away from my plantation, crawling, half blind with infection. But he knew it was me.”

  Mahindar had fallen to his knees and gathered Elliot, who was filthy and infested with vermin, to him and held him hard. The man had cried, rocking back and forth, saying over and over, Sahib, I have found you. I have found you.

  Elliot vaguely remembered the kitchen of his plantation house, Komal and Channan exclaiming and crying, the three rushing to find water, food, clothing, a razor to remove the matted hair from his head and face. He remembered them showing him Priti, not two months old, and explaining that Jaya had died. Stacy had abandoned the child and gone who knew where, leaving Priti with Mahindar.

  The weeks between then and Elliot’s first convalescence in Scotland were a blur. Elliot moved in a daze, certain he was in the dream.

  He’d realized one day, in Patrick’s house in Edinburgh, that he couldn’t hover in that bedchamber forever. He’d come up with a plan to bring himself back to life.

  Juliana rested her head against his chest, her hands soft through his shirt, and Elliot rested his cheek against the scarf over her hair. She was everything he was not, whole and beautiful, kind and sensible. He might once have been charming as she’d claimed today, but he’d also been arrogant and confident that he could take on the world and win. Elliot had learned too late that he was as weak as those foolish English people who’d wandered too far into the Afghan hills, people he’d despised even as he’d helped them to safety.

  “I’m not who I was,” he finished. “Sometimes I thank God for that. I lost most of myself in those caves as a prisoner. I’m not sure who it was who came out.”

  “You’re Elliot,” Juliana said. “My Elliot.”

  “Not what you thought you were getting, eh, lass?”

  She raised her head, her eyes still wet. “You are too hard on yourself. You are exactly what I wanted.”

  “I thought if I came here to this house and married you, I would get well.” Elliot knew the rest with certainty. “But I might never get well.”

  “You will,” Juliana said with conviction. “I know you will.”

  Elliot didn’t share her confidence. Telling her the story had drained him, and he had nothing left for hope for the future. Tomorrow he could hope again. Tonight…

  Tonight he had to be lord of the manor and let dozens of people into his house to see what he’d done with it. Tonight he’d dance with his wife and show the world the woman he’d caught.

  He tilted Juliana’s face up to his and kissed her.

  Juliana rose on tiptoes into the kiss, seeking him, needing him. Everything Elliot had told her settled onto her like a black miasma. How a man could endure so much, how he could transition back to the calm, the everyday, was beyond her comprehension.

  If she could wash it all away from him, she would. Juliana kissed his lips, running her hands over his broad shoulders. She marveled that such a strong man could have anything wrong with him at all. He’d returned to full health in the time he’d taken to recover and put his affairs in order. She couldn’t ever imagine him weak.

  Only a man as strong as Elliot could have survived the ordeal, in any case. His ten months as a prisoner might have taken away his youth but hadn’t been able to break him, not completely.

  Juliana sought him with hunger she didn’t understand. Her blood burned for him, but not for the pleasure he could give her. She wanted to give to him, to heal him. She needed to.

  Juliana tasted the desperation in him, the pain and the hunger, as his kisses turned fierce. He’d been alone in the dark for so long.

  Elliot stripped the silken scarf from her head, then the one she wore like a shawl. The light fabric slithered to the floor, brushing her arms as it went.

  He undressed her then, a layer at a time, kissing what he bared as he peeled away her gown, her petticoats, her corset. His lips touched her neck, her shoulders, the inside of her wrists, her breasts, her abdomen as he knelt to loosen the top of her combinations. When Elliot slid her drawers from her, he leaned into her and kissed the join of her legs.

  He got to his feet without continuing to explore her there, to her vague disappointment, and swept up the silk scarves on his way. Juliana expected him to carry her to the bed, but instead, he brushed the silk up over her bare buttocks and back.

  The cool fabric whispered against her skin, her flesh rising in goose bumps. Elliot drew the silk down her breasts, his gaze dropping to them as her nipples hardened into tight points.

  He guided her backward to the bed, then up onto the mattress, settling her on her back. He continued to glide the silk across her skin, teasing her nipples, her belly, the twist of h
air between her legs.

  He brought the silk to his lips and kissed it, then he laid it over her body while he shed his clothes.

  The shirt and boots came off quickly, and Juliana watched with appreciation as he approached the bed, wearing nothing but his kilt. He unpinned it and let the folds drop, then slung the plaid on the bed to mix with the silk.

  Elliot came down to kiss her. Juliana reached for him, but he evaded her, kissing her neck and throat, pinning her hands above her head to take his mouth down her body. He licked one nipple and drew it into his mouth, teasing with teeth and lips. He did the same to the other, taking more time with it. He lingered to nibble, tugging the nipple long, before he released it to lick it once more.

  Elliot moved down to kiss between her legs again, but as her hips rose, Juliana wanting more, Elliot turned her over, to her surprise, and eased her onto her hands and knees. Her fingers and toes sank into the silk and wool on the bed, then Elliot came behind her, spreading her knees, his hand opening her, stirring her need.

  Juliana felt his hardness against her entrance, strong and blunt, touching her lightly. She tensed, uncertain, then dragged in a sharp breath when Elliot pushed into her.

  She felt not pain but impossible joy. He opened her, his hardness thick and long, the sensation incredible. Juliana uttered a cry, her climax already taking her, and Elliot had not even started to move.

  He stilled inside her a moment, letting her get used to the fullness, the intense feeling of him in this position, then he began to move in and out.

  Coherent thought deserted her. Juliana floated on feeling—of Elliot thrusting swiftly and fiercely, the pumping of his thighs against her buttocks, his fingers firm on her hips. Beneath her, both the rough of the kilt and the fineness of the silk rubbed her knees.

  More sensations—his sweat dropping to her back, the intense heat of him against her legs, the sounds that came from his mouth. Not words, only sounds, a man in ecstasy.