by Liz Carlyle
“Nish!” He strode across the room to go down onto one knee, his free hand cupping round the turn of her cheek. “Oh, Anisha, love. Unfair.”
“Is it?” She managed a light shrug. “In any case, I cannot compel you. But I’m done trying to fit myself into a conventional box, Rance. And you cannot compel me to alter how I feel, or too behave as you think I ought.”
“No,” he said dryly, rising. “Apparently not.”
“We are lovers—or were,” she said, lifting her chin to look up at him. “Because you wanted it, Rance. You won’t put this off on me entirely.”
He dragged in his breath. “Aye, you’re right,” he said quietly.
Smoothly, Anisha rose, sliding her hands down her skirts to tidy them. “Do I still have your friendship, then?” she asked softly. “Do you still find me beautiful? Desirable? For those are the things you promised me in the garden that day. And those are the only things I can—or would even attempt—to hold you to.”
He shocked her then by catching her chin between his thumb and forefinger, and lowering his lips to hers. She did not tremble or step away, for it was a kiss of exquisite gentleness. For a seemingly infinite moment, his lips lingered, molded warmly over hers, until Anisha had to close her eyes and almost bite her tongue—all to keep from begging him for something more.
“God, Anisha,” he whispered a long while later. “Yes. You are all those things to me. And more, in ways I dare not think of.”
“But . . . ?”
“But you have taken it upon yourself to unilaterally declare us to be intimate.” His eyes hardened a little. “To take whatever it is we have and drag it out into the open. My servants are by no means loose-lipped. But to come by my house alone, in the middle of the day, love, is to court ruin—”
“Stop.” She laid a finger to his lips. “I came in a closed, unmarked coach with a veil down. I wore a hat, for God’s sake—all to appease you, not me. Do not make worse of this than it is.”
He held her gaze for a long while, his face etched with weariness and concern. “Aye, then,” he said. “Well, why are you here? Going somewhere, am I?”
“Yes,” she said firmly. “To a village called Buckhurst Hill.”
His eyes widened. “Whatever for, pray?”
“To see the gentleman whose name Miss de Rohan—excuse me, Lady Bessett—gave you. And I’m going, too. I’ve brought Raju’s traveling coach, since you insisted on something closed. Now hurry and dress.”
His gaze shifted to deep reluctance. “I’m not going anywhere in that lumbering old contraption,” he said. “Besides, my valet has deserted me.”
Anisha rolled her eyes heavenward, seized him by the arm, and propelled him back into the lion’s den. “Whoa!” he declared.
“No, here’s how it is, Rance,” she said, less gently. “We’re pressed for time, and you are getting dressed. And you don’t need Horsham to help.”
“Do I not?” His mouth twitched. “And you know this how?”
She cast him a humorless glance. “You’re a soldier,” she said, “not some mincing dandy who cares how his cravat gets knotted. Don’t start pretending you give a tuppence how you look.”
“Ouch!” A grin tugged at his mouth. “Aiming for the heart, are you?”
“Oh, just give me the towel,” she said briskly. “Where do you keep your shirts and drawers?”
“Really, Nish?” He lifted both eyebrows. “You think this is appropriate?”
“I’m long past caring,” she said, snatching the towel away.
Somehow, she managed not to ogle his lean, tautly muscled form, or the fine shaft of manhood that lay half-hardened in the nest of curls above his thighs. Instead, she waltzed past him to toss the damp towel into the bathroom, where it landed in a heap by the tub. Then, going to a tallboy by the windows, she yanked open a drawer and began to dig through it.
“Now, I shall find what you need if you’re so pampered you—”
“Nish.” His big hand settled over her smaller, darker one, stilling it on a pile of his handkerchiefs. “Stop all this. There’s no reason to rush off and—”
Something inside her snapped then, and she whirled on him. “But there is every reason!” she cried, throwing her hands up. “Rance, can’t you see? This . . . this black thing hangs over you, blighting your life. I’m tired of it. We must do something. And this man, Anaïs thinks he might be able to—”
“Oh, yes, the all-knowing Anaïs and the ever-popular ‘might’!” Rance cut in, throwing up his hands. “Half my life, Anisha, has been built upon might. I grow mightily tired of it, too. No one outside the Fraternitas family is going to help me, and you know it. So the only choice left to me is to beat the truth of this business out of Jack Coldwater.”
“You don’t know that!” she cried, catching his arm. “Just stop saying it! It is getting you nowhere. And leave Jack Coldwater alone, do you hear me? He cannot help you. And your obsession with him is . . . is simply unnatural.”
Rance froze. “Unnatural?” His voice had dropped to a whisper. “Perhaps, Anisha, you’d like to clarify that?”
She did not answer but instead yanked a pair of drawers from the chest. “Just put those on,” she said, hurling them at him.
“No.” He snatched them in midair, stalking toward her. “No, Anisha, I don’t think I will. Not until we settle this business. You are referring, I take it, to that afternoon at the St. James Society? When you found Jack with me in the bookroom?”
“Yes.” Her voice falling to a whisper, Anisha realized tears had sprung to her eyes. “Yes, that’s precisely it.”
“And what, precisely, did you think was going on?” he rasped.
She looked at him accusingly. “You were—the two of you were—” She stopped and shook her head. “I don’t know what you were. But ever since that day, Rance, your obsession with him has worsened, and it needs to stop. Not for me. For you.”
Rance snapped out the drawers. “I will not stand here stark-arsed whilst we bicker like fishwives,” he said, yanking them on almost savagely. “Pull the bloody bell, since you’re so very much at home here. Tell Emmit to bring round my curricle.”
“So now we don’t need a closed carriage?” Anisha retorted.
“What we need is to make haste and get back before dark,” he answered, throwing open a massive mahogany armoire. “The day is getting on.”
“And whose fault is that?”
“Mine,” he shouted, yanking out a fresh shirt and hurling it onto the bed. “There, Nish, are you pleased? Every damned bit of this is my fault. Hell, all the world’s ills are likely my fault.”
“How like you to exaggerate!” she snapped. “It’s no more than half, at best.”
An hour later, his jaw gritted hard, Rance watched as the edges of greater London went flying past his carriage. Anisha sat stiffly on the seat beside him, her shoulders rigid as rafters, her bobbinet veil down and her parasol up. No one could possibly have identified her—not, he reminded himself, that there was any problem with a respectable widow spending the afternoon alone with a gentleman, enjoying the countryside.
Not if the gentleman himself were respectable.
But they had spent a great deal of time together of late. Too much. Rance forced away the thought and tried to ignore the dull ache still lingering across the base of his skull. At least his head was clear now. The day, however, had turned hazy, the air dangerously still. Rance cast a glance heavenward and did not like what he saw.
“It is going to rain.”
“What of it?” she said.
“Perhaps we should have kept Ruthveyn’s carriage,” he muttered.
With an impatient gesture, Anisha reached up and snapped her parasol shut. “You wanted to make better time,” she said tartly. “Drive on. I’ll run the risk of returning to London in a downpour.”
“Out of the question,” he snapped. “You might take ill.”
She turned to him with a mockingly sweet expression. “Mus
t we have an argument before its time?” she asked. “There are so many more pertinent quarrels to be had. Shall I choose one?”
“If I’m such vexing company, I wonder you insist on coming along,” he grumbled.
“Oh, I am not coming along,” she answered. “I am making you go. Trust me, Rance, there is a world of difference.”
He cut her a dark, sidelong glance but felt his lips twitch tellingly. “The dictionary according to Anisha, eh?” he said, wishing to the devil he could stay angry with her.
Had he been able to, perhaps he could have shut out the sense of impending doom that had begun to haunt him. That awful black feeling that trailed him like a bloodhound and nudged him from his sleep. That grim realization that needled him in the middle of dinner, stilled his hand upon his whisky glass, and fluttered vaguely about in the back of his mind through his every waking moment.
Not his impending doom. Hers.
Anisha was going to end up with him if he was not very, very careful.
She and Tom and Teddy were going to be saddled with him and his vile reputation for the rest of their natural lives. And regardless of what she said, it did matter. It mattered greatly. The blight upon his name would become a blight upon her family. She would have sacrificed her home, her country, and her life in order to make a better one for her boys, only to toss it all away again—and for what? For him?
It was madness.
Dismayed, he looked about and realized they had entered Hackney; there was no shorter way to Buckhurst Hill. They were going to drive straight past Coldwater’s house. As traffic had fallen away now, he clicked up his horses. But he could not make the place invisible.
As the King’s Arms flew past, he tilted his head toward the large white cottage beyond. “Coldwater’s house,” he said. “Or his sister’s, I should say. I tracked him up here a time or two.”
Anisha turned to look at it. “How lovely,” she said neutrally. “The family must be prosperous.”
“Aye, American newspaper money,” he said. “They hail from Boston.”
“Oh.”
The silence felt heavy. “I went there last night,” he finally said. “The sister—I met her. I just knocked on the door and claimed I was looking for Jack. I don’t know, really, what I hoped to learn.”
“What was she like?”
“She was . . . strange.” Rance tried to put it into words. “Taunting—like Jack, but more subtle. Whatever he’s up to, she’s part and parcel to it.”
He didn’t know what else to say; the woman was like Jack. She muddled his ordinarily acute senses in a way he couldn’t quite grasp.
“And that was the end of it?” Anisha pressed. “You just . . . left?”
“Not exactly.” He cut her a sheepish look. “I broke into Coldwater’s flat and had a poke around. But there was nothing. The place looked scarcely lived in.”
Her eyes flashed disapprovingly. “Hmm.”
Silence fell over them again, and soon Hackney was vanishing in the distance. After a time they came to a stretch punctuated by nothing but the occasional farmhouse, with empty green fields rolling out to either side and no traffic in either direction.
Rance considered his next words carefully. “You wanted to know about Jack,” he finally said. “About that day in the bookroom.”
“No.” Anisha did not look at him. “I didn’t.”
He resisted the urge to snap his whip over his horses’ heads, since none of this was their fault. “Let me rephrase that,” he said tightly. “You are suffering under a misconception—one from which I insist upon disabusing you.”
Her face having lost much of its color, Anisha’s gaze focused straight down the lane. “I should rather you kept your thoughts of Mr. Coldwater private.”
“No,” he said. “I will not. That is what the word insist means, you see. You insist upon accompanying me to Essex. In turn, I insist upon your listening to me—since you are, by your own choice, my captive audience.”
Anisha colored furiously and tightened her grip on the seat. “So you have a strange obsession with Coldwater,” she said. “I do not judge. Even the ancient scriptures are vague on this subject. Indeed, the Kāmashastra says that men may—”
“Anisha, do hush,” he cut in sharply.
She did, shooting him a dark, sidelong glance.
And then, to his horror, Rance did not know what to say.
“Nish, I do not—” Here, he seized the excuse of cutting his horses round an especially deep rut. But the rut was not deep enough to long save him.
“I do not sexually desire Jack Coldwater,” he finally added. “I loathe the little bastard. I’ve tried to beat him senseless on numerous occasions, but someone always stops me.”
“Yes, but what you describe is passion,” said Anisha coolly.
“Passion? Are you mad—?”
She lifted one slender shoulder beneath the black bombazine of her gown. “Passion is an emotion that takes many forms. Passion is deceptive; it can transform itself into something else altogether before one is fully aware.”
He turned to glare at her. “Aye, and right now the passion I feel for you is transforming itself into a burning desire to turn you over my knee.”
She flashed a crooked smile. “And thus is my point proven.”
Rance returned his gaze to the road and felt his teeth grind. “I was trying to throttle Coldwater, and that’s all,” he barked. “He said something about Geoff—about how I’d conned a once-decent man into falling in with my lies, and now he meant to ruin us both. He said he knew Geoff had a secret. Something he meant to expose—and you can guess what it was.”
“Oh!” Anisha’s hand went to her heart. “No.”
Rance winced, though the sun wasn’t in his eyes. “It had begun to feel, Nish, as if everyone I loved was going to pay for my sins,” he rasped. “My mother and father both dead. Sutherland’s living gone. Old Sir Greville lost half his business filing my pleas, and Ruthveyn called in every diplomatic chit he ever had with the Queen merely to—”
“Raju wanted to,” she interjected. “It was his duty.”
“Still, to then see Geoff hurt—well, I just snapped. I went for Jack across the sofa, I guess, and that bloody porcelain thing—Aristotle, or whoever the chap was—I knocked him over and he shattered into a hundred pieces, and all I could think was that now Ruthveyn was going to kill me. That I’d broken his blasted sculpture and he would be furious and it was all Jack’s fault—which gave me two reasons to throttle him—and then I got hold of him and . . . and . . . and . . .”
Anisha laid a hand on his arm. “Breathe,” she said. “Deeply.”
“Breathing, Nish, is not the solution to every damned thing!” he snapped. “I’m just trying to tell you how it was. I got him forced up against the wall, and got my hands round his throat, and then you and Ruthveyn burst in. And that’s all it was.”
Anisha cut him an odd glance. “Raju thought you were forcing him into something rather more intimate,” she said calmly. “As did I, frankly. That’s . . . that’s what it looked like. Like a man taking the spoils of war. Jack was terrified. He ran past me in a blind panic.”
“A wise choice,” gritted Rance.
She hesitated a heartbeat. “But Rance, Coldwater had never been afraid of you before,” she quietly pointed out. “He never ran away before—not even when he should have done.”
Rance just shook his head and pressed his lips into a thin line. Her words left him vaguely ill, for there was some truth in what she said.
He had been a soldier for nearly a third of his life; he had seen violence heaped upon violence; seen men rape and pillage without restraint. But never had he done so, nor even felt the temptation. And yet what he had felt that day in the study had frightened him. He had wanted, fleetingly, to teach Jack Coldwater a lesson; a lesson that had had little to do with Jack’s insults, and everything to do with raw dominance and power.
He had wanted Jack to pay the ultimate pr
ice.
But why that price?
Why not just kill him? That, he could have got away with. Murder done under the roof of the St. James Society, surrounded by the brotherhood—hell, they could have buried the bastard in their secret, underground chapel and none the wiser.
It was chilling to realize how near the truth Anisha was.
But never would he admit it. “You’re asking me to explain Jack Coldwater’s motivations,” he answered, evading the subject like another rut in the road, “something I’ve never been able to do. Isn’t that the very reason we’re going to Essex?”
Anisha cut a quick, assessing glance at him. “No, we’re going to see this Mr. Kemble who once had connections to the underworld,” she said. “We are going to see if he can tell us what Ned Quartermaine could not—the name of the person who so desperately wanted you hanged all those years ago. And that person was most assuredly not Coldwater. He can’t be a day over twenty-five.”
The home of Mr. George Jacob Kemble was an elegant Georgian manor house well northwest of the village, tucked into a crook of forestland that swept around it like a verdant embrace. It was the prettiest house Anisha had ever seen—once they actually found it, for the house stood at the end of a half-mile carriage lane and required them to ask further directions at an inn, a public house, and a cow byre, where a laconic farmer merely leaned on his pitchfork and pointed at a gap in the hedgerow.
After that, everything was a little too easy. At the end of the drive, a footman hastened down the front steps to take Rance’s horses well before they had drawn up. At the top of the staircase, a second man, a sort of butler, took their cards and swept out an arm, motioning down the polished marble passageway that bisected the opulent home from front to back.
“Theez way, s’il vous plaît,” he said. “Monsieur Kemble eez een hez rose garden.”
Anisha hesitated. “You will not wish to enquire of him first?”
