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‘We are all agog and you will know, Major Herriard,’ Miss Annis Wilkinson breathed. ‘Is it true that Sir George Laurens has his natural daughter staying with him and she is an Indian princess?’ She made Anusha
sound as exotic as a cage full of white tigers, but he supposed none of these girls would ever have met a member of the royal courts.
‘Miss Laurens has been residing with her uncle, the Raja of Kalatwah. The state has recently been attacked by a neighbouring prince, so I escorted Miss Laurens home to her father.’ There was no point in making a mystery of the basic facts.
‘Escorted her?’
Nick injected every bit of ennui he could into his reply and managed without an outright lie. ‘Court progresses are the slowest, most tedious thing imaginable. Bullock carts, palanquins, the zanana tents to shield the ladies...’
‘Oh!’ A frisson of delighted horror at the thought of the zanana ran through the group. ‘And does she go everywhere escorted by an enormous eunuch?’
There was a stir near the door and the butler announced, ‘Sir George Laurens, Miss Laurens.’
‘You may see for yourself,’ Nick said, turning to look. He had avoided the main part of the house all day, and sent a message to George that he had business at the fort. He was not at all sure that either he or Anusha could control their expressions or their reactions if they met just yet and he had no desire to explain to George why his daughter was slapping his face.
Last night had been exquisite, insane and appallingly dangerous. He had been unable to get the taste or the scent of Anusha out of his head all day. Somehow he had to talk to her, assure her that it would never happen again, that he would protect her innocence at whatever cost to himself, because today she must be angry, frightened and shocked.
He stared over the heads of the crowd. He could see George, talking to his host, but he could not see Anusha.
‘But she looks quite ordinary,’ one of the girls said, her voice flat with disappointment. ‘Just like us.’
‘I can’t—’ Good God. The slight figure next to Sir George was Anusha. Her hair was piled up into an elaborate arrangement with one glossy ringlet left to lie on her shoulder. Her waist looked minute rising from the bell of her skirts and she tossed the lace back from her sleeves as she lifted her fan in a movement that was pure coquette. Nick found his voice. ‘Ordinary?’
Chapter Sixteen
Nick swallowed and got his face back under control.
‘I expected she would have a sari and rings in her nose and she’d be dark skinned with black hair and big brown eyes. But she is just like us, only her skin looks as though she has been in the sun too much,’ Miss Wilkinson observed. There was a murmur of agreement. ‘I like that amber silk.’
Then Anusha moved, walking into the room beside her father, and Nick felt every man in the room under eighty draw a breath. She might look like a golden-skinned version of any young lady who was fashionably gowned and coiffed, but she moved like the trained dancer she was, with a feline grace that took him in the throat and then, inevitably, considerably lower. God, he wanted her. How the hell had he ever managed to stop himself last night?
‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I must go and speak to Sir George and be introduced to Miss Laurens.’
‘But you’ve met her,’ Miss Wilkinson protested. ‘You escorted her. You must have seen her. And you live with Sir George, do you not?’
‘The zanana, remember? And I have my own wing of the house. And not this woman, he added under his breath. I have never seen this woman.
He had seen so many faces of Anusha. A haughty Indian princess in a temper; a brave, tired girl in youth’s clothing fighting fear and hardship; a wrong-headed young woman with a completely unrealistic dream of freedom. Then there was the passionate half-innocent who had known all the theory and none of the realities of what happened between men and women until he had let his control slip and had shown her a little, just a glimpse of what he wanted to do with her.
But he had not met this woman, Miss Anusha Laurens, back where she belonged on her father’s arm at an East India Company dinner party.
‘Miss Laurens.’ He bowed and wondered what she saw when she looked at him: the soldier in his dress uniform, controlled and disciplined—or the man from last night, half-naked, in thrall to her and to his desires?
‘Major Herriard.’ She curtsied, her face showing nothing but polite interest. But her eyes sparkled. Temper or desire?
