The Tiger's Lady

by Skye, Christina

  But he did not, for he was wise enough to know that she had to speak, for her own peace of mind.

  And he had to listen.

  “Heroism is a gravely overrated trait,” he said harshly. “Especially when it carries such a penalty.”

  His voice came from the shadows. The harsh sound came as a shock, and Barrett started visibly, color flaring high in her cheeks. She gave a low, raw laugh then. “One thing is certain, at least. I am no heroine. For in the end I agreed, you see. I agreed to do everything they told me I must.”

  Then her head turned. Her eyes, huge and glistening with unshed tears, claimed Pagan’s. “It was just as you thought, of course. I was sent to that beach for you, Pagan. To entrap you. To entice you. To find the lost ruby along with its source.” Her voice rose, wild and unsteady. “And if I hadn’t struck my head in the struggle to escape, if I hadn’t l-lost my memory, I would have done every s-single thing they wanted!”

  Pagan heard the jagged note of hysteria in her voice and fought down an urge to cut her recitation short. But there was more, he knew, and the memories would fester unless she faced them now and released them.

  “And?” he prompted. His voice was cool and faintly mocking. That would incite her best, he knew. Anger would take her fastest where she needed to go. “Don’t tell me you mean to stop your riveting tale now, Miss Winslow. Not when it has just begun to grow interesting.”

  Barrett flinched as if he had struck her. Color swept her face, right down to the silken expanse of bared skin at her chest and shoulders.

  She gripped the tumbler tightly, her fingers nearly as pale as the crystal. “I almost wish that I had remembered, my lord. A man such as you deserves to be taken down a peg, to be forced to swallow his own medicine at least once in his life.” Her eyes blazed like icy sapphires. “And I might even have enjoyed the task, I think. For why should I feel scruples that you feel naught of? Yes, you are quite right. It is a world for the strong, a world for the cunning, and it’s them I mean to be among from now on.”

  With locked fingers Barrett raised her tumbler in a mocking salute, then lifted it to her lips and drained the last of the sherry.

  Pagan’s face hardened. He flicked a bit of lint from his sleeve. “I’m delighted to hear it, my dear. Now perhaps we can dispense with this irritating talk of scruples and propriety. But come, your story is vastly amusing and you have yet to finish it.”

  Barrett’s eyes snapped at his cool, goading words. “No? I believe I made myself perfectly clear. Did I not, Colonel Hadley?” Her eyes never wavered from Pagan’s face as she spoke.

  “Er, why, very clear, I expect. But—”

  Pagan cut him off, rising in a sharp movement and stalking to her side, sweeping her from her seat with his hands locked around her shoulders. “No, you did not. You still have not mentioned who sent you here. I want to hear the rest of it!”

  Barrett’s hands closed and opened convulsively at her sides. “Are you so sure?”

  “I’m sure, all right. Say it!”

  “Very well. It was Ruxley, of course, the same man you have suspected all along. But you missed one tiny detail in all your keen deductions, my lord. My name is not Brown, nor even miss at all. Now, it is not even Winslow. No, it is a different name, a hated name. It is Ruxley—Mrs. Ruxley, to be precise. For I—I am your worst enemy’s wife.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Hadley burst to his feet, his chair crashing to the ground behind him. “Impossible. I refuse to believe it!”

  Pagan did not move, his hands locked on Barrett’s shoulders. The scar at his brow gleamed coldly, silver in the lantern light. “Indeed. Go on, Angrezi. Now you begin to interest me vastly.”

  Barrett did not demean herself to struggle. She stood stiff in his arms, her face a rigid mask. “He had wanted me for quite some time, it appears, even before he heard that the ruby was to come to auction. He knew my grandfather but that’s another story, one you’d scarcely be interested in.” She steadied her wild pulse and continued. “When—when he heard that the Rajah of Ranapore was to sell the ruby, he was furious. He knew it came from Windhaven land, of course, and he wanted to see your face when he stole it from you.” Barrett frowned, her eyes widening. “But it wouldn’t have changed anything, would it? For you were the rajah. It was you that night in London, wasn’t it?” Her eyes darkened as the memories sharpened, image added to image. She fought down a wild urge to giggle, to throw back her head and roar with laughter—until the tears came. “I felt it was so, but…”

  With a soft sob she forced herself to a semblance of calm. “Yes, that, too, he must have seen. Perhaps that is what decided him in his plan. When he came to me later, in the stinking cabin of a boat docked at the Isle of Dogs, his face was lit by an inner fire. I realized then that he was not quite sane. Before I had only suspected it…” She drew a ragged breath. “Several times I had wondered, of course—”

  “Wondered what?”

  Barrett shrugged. “Who you really were. Ruxley had predicted you would come to see the ruby sold, but even he did not deem you capable of the raw temerity of feigning an Indian dignitary before half the elite of London.”

  “More than half the elite, I’d wager,” Pagan said with a cool smile.

  “I suppose there is very little you would not do to attain your ends, is there?”

  His fingers bit into the soft, creamy skin of her shoulders, and she shivered. There would be a bruise there tomorrow. How many other bruises had she carried before on her skin?

  But these she wanted, even welcomed with a perverse sort of triumph. For Barrett realized she wanted to carry some mark of Pagan’s when she left.

  For leave she must.

  As soon as she could manage it. The danger here was far, far greater than even Pagan realized, and her staying only made it worse.

  Her eyes flickered to the colonel. Surely he would help her.

  With a curse Pagan released her, then strode to the lacquer side table and poured himself another drink.

  Only when whiskey edged the crystal rim did he slap down the decanter and drain the glass without a halt.

  He turned, his face harsh, unreadable. “Quite right, Angrezi. Bloody little, and what it is, I’ve yet to meet. But continue.”

  Behind him Hadley made a low sound of disapproval. “I hardly see how it can help to push her so, Tiger. After all she’s been through, surely it would be better for her to—”

  Pagan’s eyes hardened. “But Mrs. Ruxley is in a mood to talk, I believe. Who are we to deny her the pleasure in such a case? Tell us more, Cinnamon, especially about this so charming wedding of yours. It was in none of the newspapers, of that I’m certain.”

  Barrett stared back at him, possessed by raw, brittle energy. Her eyes glittered like glass. “No? I’m not surprised to hear it. We were married mid-Channel by a bleary-eyed sea captain three sheets to the wind. He wasn’t overly nice about the details, you see. Such as whether the bride had a ring or a guardian or even a proper name. Or whether she had awakened from the drugs she’d been given by her husband-to-be.”

  “Precisely Ruxley’s style.” A muscle flashed at Pagan’s jaw as he angled his long frame back against the wall by the window. “And am I to take it that your honeymoon was also accomplished mid-Channel?”

  His tone was cold, purposely goading.

  Somehow he managed to ask the question, though her answer was the last thing he wanted to hear.

  Barrett gave a brittle laugh, propelled by sheer nerves. She turned to pace the room tensely. “Honeymoon?” she repeated unsteadily. “Ah yes, the honeymoon. Quite extraordinary, it was. To think that I had somehow managed to forget it.” She stopped for a moment, her hand tense on the edge of the table.

  She swayed then, and Hadley would have gone to her except that she held him back with a sharp, dismissing gesture. “I’m quite all right, Colonel, although I expect you may not be very soon.” Her face was entirely colorless, even the heat of fury faded from h
er cheeks. Her fingers probed restlessly at the edge of the table. “In fact if you’re inclined to a queasy stomach, I really must suggest that you absent yourself. For the next few moments of my tale, at least.”

  “By heaven, I’ll murder the man!” Hadley lifted a cane from its place beside his chair and stabbed the air to punctuate his speech. “I’ll see his neck slit with my own knife, see if I don’t. A monster, that’s what he is! A damned, unholy monster!”

  Barrett only laughed, a low, humorless sound. “To murder him you would first have to find him, Colonel, and I’m afraid that would be as close to impossible as a thing ever was. Even for a man of such limitless arrogance as the Tiger there.”

  Her eyes sought Pagan’s and she shivered at their flat, chill depths. His face was a mask, his body totally still against the wall.

  “Perhaps it would be easier than you think, my dear. But my stomach is not so queasy. Continue, pray.”

  Barrett’s nails dug into the polished face of the table. “So hungry for details, are you? Very well then.” She straightened her shoulders, her eyes fixed on Pagan’s face. “I was not quite a—a biddable wife, I’m afraid. In fact, he had a difficult time even getting me downstairs to the bed, in spite of the efforts of the two rather sullen types in the captain’s employ.” A shadow darted across her face. “I think he forced more of the drug upon me. Things became rather a blur after that.”

  Behind her the door clicked softly shut. Barrett realized that Colonel Hadley had left the room.

  Pagan said nothing, his expression hooded.

  “It was almost funny really. He tried so hard. So many times.” Barrett’s eyes glittered, hollows of madness in the abalone sweep of her face. “But he couldn’t be a husband, you see. No matter what he did, what he tried to make me do, nothing worked.” She swallowed audibly. “He—his sex was flaccid, shriveled, and would not rise. The lack drove him to a terrible fury.” Her eyes rose then, leaving Pagan’s face to stare into the shadows above his shoulder. “That was the first time he beat me. I supposed he blamed me for it, or supposed that with me it ought to have been different.”

  She bit down a ragged little sob, clutching pale hands tightly to her mouth, as if she were going to be sick.

  “Barrett, don’t.” It was Pagan’s first speech in long minutes.

  She barely heard him. “Later it struck me as wildly humorous. He was so angry that he was pathetic, and it became a dark sort of comedy. But the humor faded when … when he found me and beat me again. He forced me to—to—” She choked, unable to bring herself to say the words, wishing that she could forget those raw, repeated indignities.

  “Good sweet saints, no more!” With a harsh groan Pagan swept across the room, his hands like hot granite on her waist, on her shoulders, on her face and neck. And when his kisses fell on her in a hot, mad rain, Barrett lifted her face to his liquid fury the way a flower does to a raging, April storm, knowing it will buffet but renew.

  What would have happened next she was never to know. At that moment the door burst open.

  “Terribly sorry, Tiger, but—good Lord! Er, ahem—” Hadley quickly took in their frozen embrace, the disordered cloud of Barrett’s hair, the flushed hue of her lips where Pagan had kissed her. “That is—it’s one of the natives. He was caught down in the tea shed with a barrel of kerosene. Seems he meant to taint the whole bloody week’s picking. I thought you’d want to—”

  He didn’t need to finish. Already Pagan had pulled free and was running a hand through his unruly black hair. “Of course, Adrian,” he muttered hoarsely, struggling for control, and not finding it. “In—in a moment.”

  The door closed once more. For long seconds of stormy silence Pagan and Barrett studied one another, the embers of passion white-hot still, flaring at throat and neck and groin.

  “I must go.”

  “Of—of course.”

  “I’ll be back, Cinnamon.”

  “Yes.” It was the merest scrap of sound—low, mechanical. “Yes—yes of course.”

  “It’s over and done now. He’ll never touch you again. As heaven is my witness, I promise you that.”

  “Th-thank you.” Barrett dug her nails into her palms, fighting the tears that threatened to spill free any second. “Go on then. You’ll make an ill sort of planter if you don’t attend to your crop.”

  A muscle flashed at Pagan’s jaw. “I am an ill sort of planter, Angrezi. In more ways than you can know. But are you sure—will you—”

  “I’ll be fine. Just go. Now.”

  Her nails drove deeper. She swallowed the rising wedge in her throat, knowing she would not be able to last much longer. There had been too much horror, too many revelations in the last hours. She felt battered over every inch of her body, bruised from a thousand invisible, assaulting hands.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can. In the meantime, I’ll send Mita to you.”

  She could only nod, not trusting herself to speak. Through a haze of tears she saw his fist clench, saw his hand rise, and thought he meant to reach for her then.

  It would have been too much.

  “Go on with you! I’ve managed all these months, I suppose I can wait a few minutes longer,” she said in a breathless rush.

  Pagan’s jaw hardened. He hesitated on the threshold for a moment, undecided. And then, with a curse, he turned and strode from the room.

  By the time his boots hammered out to the front foyer, Barrett had dissolved into low, wracking sobs, which she muffled in her voluminous skirts.

  At least they had turned out to be good for something, she thought, with a wild, disjointed pleasure that she still could find a trace of humor in the bleak world around her.

  An hour later Barrett undressed mechanically, washed, brushed her hair free, then climbed into bed. She wore only a thin gown of silk gauze, whose virginal hue was in striking contrast to its indecent transparency.

  And that was the most modest among the frothy confections Mita had pulled from the trunks.

  But somehow Barrett was too exhausted to summon anger at this new instance of Pagan’s insolence, this casual assumption that she should dress for his pleasure and not her own.

  She was, in fact, too tired to do anything but close her eyes and slide instantly, miraculously, into a dreamless sleep.

  Her terrors faced, her memory almost completely restored, she had no further need to claw at phantoms in the night.

  “Damn it, the fellow knew nothing, just like all the others!”

  The moon drifted in and out of a bank of clouds as Pagan and Hadley trudged up the winding path to the main house.

  Pagan’s expression was hard. “I can’t say I expected anything else. Ruxley is very thorough, after all. Otherwise he could never have gotten where he is today: London’s Merchant Prince with a personal worth exceeding five hundred thousand pounds.”

  The colonel knocked a bough out of his way with unnecessary force. “How can you be so damned dispassionate, man? There have been far too many of these ‘accidents’. So far you’ve managed to thwart them in time, but what about the next one? And the one after that? You know as well as I do that there will be a next time. What will you do if you’re not clever enough or fast enough then?”

  Pagan’s face was unreadable in the darkness. “I expect, my dear Adrian, that I’ll pick myself up and start over again. Just as I have done any number of times before.”

  The colonel snorted, muttering something that sounded suspiciously like, “Cold-blooded, slack-witted fool.”

  In fact Pagan was far from dispassionate. Inside he was seized with fury, dreaming of nothing but crushing every bit of life from Ruxley’s foul body. But there was no sense in revealing his fury to Hadley. Very young, Pagan had learned that strength was bought with secrecy, with concealing all the important things beneath a careful veneer of indifference.

  But the effort was costing him something. Even now his hands clenched on the cool, polished butt of his rifle as he remembered his interv
iew with the clearly terrified Tamil who had been discovered in the drying shed.

  The man had protested wildly. He had seen nothing, heard nothing. He was simply delivering a package out of courtesy to a friend!

  But in the drying shed?

  He’d gotten confused, had been drinking arrack punch.

  And the friend?

  Disappeared.

  And the tin of kerosene by the door?

  Nothing to do with him. Most assuredly, it had been there before he had arrived!

  Where was this package he meant to deliver then?

  The frightened man tugged it quickly from its resting place on the ground.

  All the questions had been anticipated. Once again there was no clue, no flaw.

  With a raw curse Pagan had let the man go, warning him that if he ever again set foot on Windhaven soil he would be staked out and left for the leeches.

  The man’s face, as he’d run off into the night, had been the color of bruised, unhealthy bananas.

  Pagan said nothing more until they reached the house. The light in the dining room was gone, as was that in Barrett’s room. Her shuttered windows were easily visible from the path that led down to the tea fields.

  He felt a sudden, sharp sense of regret. Of gut-wrenching loneliness.

  “Thank you for your assistance, Adrian.”

  “Nonsense, old man. Just a case of being in the right place at the right time. Happy to have been of help.” The colonel shifted his eyes away, uncomfortable at Pagan’s praise and at his obvious melancholy. “Think I’ll be off to bed now. Been one bloody long day.”

  Pagan listened to his steps die away down the corridor. The house lay silent now, wrapped in dreams. He found himself turning toward the room with the darkened shutters.

  The room where she slept, blissfully ignorant of the danger that stalked them all.

  Only at the threshold did he catch himself up sharply. Then with a curse, he spun about, making for his study.

  Yes, by his desk he had a very fine old bottle of whiskey he’d been keeping for a special occasion.