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‘You are in great beauty tonight, An...ma’am.’ He’d be stammering like a callow youth in a moment. Nick took in a breath down to his boots.
‘So are you, Major.’ The dark lashes swept up and down as she studied his scarlet dress uniform. ‘As splendid as you were at court.’ She fixed him with that candid-seeming stare that he knew could hide so much and added, ‘I did not expect to see you here. Have you not returned to your regiment?’
‘I am on leave, Miss Laurens.’
‘I thought you must have left Calcutta when you did not join us at breakfast this morning.’ She sent him a very direct look from beneath immaculately plucked brows. A reproof for avoiding her?
‘I had business at the fort all day.’
Anusha glanced around, her expression perfectly pleasant, a smile on her lips as her eyes flickered from side to side. He knew her well enough now to read her. She was nervous and embarrassed in this crowd of strangers, she did not know how to act with the man who had given her her first sexual experience only the night before and it was only pride and her court training that was keeping her standing there.
He began to step back, to leave her to her father and to Lady Hoskins, but she caught at his sleeve. ‘What am I supposed to do now, Nick?’
For a moment, stung by conscience, he thought she meant after his lovemaking, then she whispered, ‘There are so many people I do not know. And men.’
He gently pried open her fingers from their grip on the gold lace. ‘You take my arm.’ He proffered his right arm, bent at the elbow, and murmured, ‘Put your fingertips on my forearm.’ She did so, then looked up at him, a spark of mischief in her eyes. For a moment the trusting Anusha was back with him. ‘Now we take a turn around the room and I introduce you to people.’
‘Men as well? They are all staring at me and there are so many.’
‘Only ten, including me and your father. So eight strange men. And they are staring because they admire you and wish to challenge me for daring to be before them with you.’
‘But you will not leave me?’ Her fingers tightened on his arm.
She still trusts me, still needs me. ‘No,’ Nick promised, dizzy with relief. ‘Not with the men, but I may have to give you up to the ladies.’
‘I do not mind that,’ she said. ‘I am used to women.’
And she was used to the women of a princely court who would be like hunting cats amongst the pretty pigeons that were the young ladies in this room.
Anusha was quiet and serious when introduced to the gentlemen. She curtsied, managed a small smile and a few words, but her hand kept lifting instinctively as if to pull a veil over her face.
‘You have no veil,’ he murmured. ‘Use your fan.’ The trouble with that was the effect of big grey eyes, wide above the painted silk, on men whose imaginations were already overheated by rumour of her origins and whose gaze had been riveted on the graceful sway of her figure.
‘I am proud of you,’ he said when they found themselves alone for a moment at one end of the drawing room.
‘Because I am curtsying just as you taught me? I do not think I can do the flirting, not yet. It is so difficult being with strange men like this.’
‘You managed with me.’ She looked up and met his eyes and the impulse to laugh died. Nick laid his hand over hers and thought of how her slender, soft body felt against his, of how her mouth tasted, of how she had ridden and danced and fought. And shuddered into
ecstasy in my embrace. Of how it was his duty to protect her until she was safe here and found a man to marry. And then he could return to his next assignment and forget her.
‘You are different,’ Anusha said with certainty.
‘Am I forgiven?’ It should not matter—he had done the right thing for her protection.
‘For lying to me about what my father intended?’
‘And for last night,’ he added.
‘That does not require forgiveness. No,’ she interrupted when he opened his mouth to disagree. ‘It was me, too.’
‘We must talk about it, but not here.’
‘No, not here,’ she agreed. ‘And for the other thing, I have forgiven you,’ she said, her face serious and a little troubled. ‘I understand why you deceived me, I know your first loyalty is to my father. But I have not forgotten.’
‘I see. Forgiven but not trusted.’ That was just, but it hurt.
‘I do not trust anyone,’ she said flatly. ‘Not you, not my father, not Lady Hoskins who is sorry her son is not older and who has twice mentioned her brother’s most promising sons and her very wealthy cousin who has just lost his wife.’
