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The fact that he had been virtually delirious when he kissed her was no excuse, he told himself savagely. Damn it, George had trusted him with his daughter. The way he felt about George, the man who had given him everything a father should—even his life—practically made the chit his sister. He had told her to trust him himself. But the truth was, from the moment he first saw her, his common sense had gone south along with most of his blood.
He threw down his napkin. I had better get a grip on my self-control again, because anything more than a fuddled kiss when I haven’t the strength to lift myself off the pillows is going to end up at the altar. He thought he could square it with his conscience not to confess last night’s idiocy to George, but anything more and the old man would be reaching for a shotgun, with good cause.
The thought of another marriage made him shiver. Women wanted too much that he could not give and needed too much that it seemed he was unable to provide. He should never have married Miranda. He could not shake off the memory of his wife’s death. The image haunted him of her fragile body, swollen with the child he had planted in her, racked with fever in the steaming heat of a Calcutta summer, too weak to fight.
He had no need of an heir, no title or estates to leave. What wealth he acquired he would leave to some charity or another, his body could moulder away in the English cemetery at South Park Street in Calcutta and the creepers and ferns would mask whatever inscription they put on it soon enough, with no one to shed dutiful tears over it.
‘Sahib? Some more tea, sahib?’
‘No, thank you.’ He was growing thoroughly morbid now. Nick gave himself a mental shake. He had a career, ambition and the world was full of willing women who did not need a ring on their finger. His place in any cemetery would wait for many years, if he had anything to say to it. It must certainly wait until he got Anusha Laurens down river to Calcutta and the new life that awaited her. Moving like an old man, and hating it, Nick hauled himself to his feet and made for the door.
* * *
‘That was easy. I do not know what the fuss was about.’ Anusha sat cross-legged with her back to the mast of the little sailing boat and viewed the prospect of the river in front of them with satisfaction.
‘Easy?’ Nick grunted from the folding canvas chair beside her. ‘You call finding a boat that doesn’t leak, a crew that won’t murder us in our beds, buying sufficient provisions, sorting out the horses and extracting you from Mrs Rowley’s grasp, and me from the doctor’s, all in two days, easy? It was down to my superior logistical skills and force of character.’
It took her a moment to translate that. They were speaking English most of the time now and she found it came back remarkably easily, for Mata had continued to speak it to her as much as she spoke Hindi. But many phrases were strange and needed working out.
‘You are just tired, which makes your mood distempered, so Mrs Rowley said. Does your shoulder give you much pain?’
‘A little.’
She did not know what distemper was, but it seemed unpleasant. Nick had been decidedly short-tempered since he rose from his sick bed. ‘I have unpacked all our things in our cabins. There is not much room—why did you make them put in that wall? With the doors it takes up too much room.’
‘So we have a cabin each.’
Ah, so we are back to that kiss. She could still taste him in her memory, that mixture of brandy and spice and man. Anusha ran her tongue tip over her lips as if she could recapture it.
Nick had said nothing about it since that morning and at first she thought he must simply have dismissed it from his mind. Now she knew he had not, it was flattering to think that he did not trust himself alone with her any more: it made her feel womanly and strangely powerful. On the other hand, if he did kiss her—and do the other things, the things she thought about every time she looked at that long, lean body and those big hands—then he would be even more short-tempered afterwards and if her father found out he would insist Nick married her.
And she did not want to marry a man who, if he wanted her at all, only wanted one thing. She tried to imagine life as Nick’s wife. She would have to be whatever a European wife was. She would not be in a zanana,
she knew that. She would have to wear those horrible clothes and learn to order a household like Mrs Rowley’s and be respectable in the angrezi manner, which seemed even more restricting than the rules of the women’s mahal.
Nick would go off on adventures, or march about the country making war, while she sat at home and had babies in a world that she did not belong to. He would not love her, even if she was unwise enough to fall in love with him. And it would hurt, every day, like tiny knife cuts.
