“I did not wish to.” Her voice cracked. “I would never have left India if my family had not.”
Footsteps sounded at the door. Tavy whirled around. A footman stood upon the threshold.
“My lord, more guests have arrived,” he said hurriedly as a gentleman came into view behind him.
Marcus paused in the doorway then strode forward.
“Ah, there you are, my dear. Good day, Doreé. Your housekeeper sent me looking for you. She said you were giving my fiancée a tour of your impressive castle. What an attractive chamber.” He glanced around, bowed to his host, and grasped Tavy’s hands. “You suit it beautifully, my lady.” He lifted her fingers and kissed them.
Ice lodged in the pit of Tavy’s belly, spreading like frost into her hot cheeks and trembling hands. She drew out of his grasp, heart pounding, and sought Ben’s gaze.
His languid eyes were cold, his beautiful mouth a line. He met her regard like a stranger, and the binding around Tavy’s heart that she had tied there so carefully seven years ago seemed to tear apart.
No. God, no. Not again.
She grabbed onto speech, forming words from desperation.
“How was your journey, Lord Crispin?”
Marcus seemed not to note anything amiss. “Swift. I am sorry I could not travel with you. I had a business matter to see to this morning.” He turned to the marquess and smiled conspiratorially. “Don’t be cagey about it, Doreé. You have business in mind this week, I suspect. I saw Nathans in the parlor, and Gosworth’s carriage pulled up a minute ago. Having the Bengal Club out as well, I daresay?”
“I haven’t any such august plans, my lord. Merely a bit of shooting,” Ben said with casual ease. “But perhaps we should postpone discussion of that until later. I am certain your fiancée hasn’t the least interest in weapons and birds. Now, if you will excuse me, I must be off to change before more of my guests arrive.”
He bent and retrieved his gloves from the floor, Marcus’s gaze following the action carefully.
Ben bowed. “Madam.” Without a flicker of his dark gaze, he strode from the ballroom.
“What were you doing with that fellow, Octavia?” Behind her, Marcus’s voice had lost its friendly animation.
Her throat and stomach burned, melting the ice in a flash. Hands gripped into fists, she turned to him on leaden limbs.
“He is our host, Marcus, not a fellow.”
He seemed to study her cheeks, then her mouth. “You should not have been alone in his company.”
Her insides hurt. No, she should not have been alone with him. No.
“He offered a tour of his house. It is impressive.” Her tone splintered. “But that is hardly at issue here. Marcus, I am not your fiancée. I believe I made that clear the other day. Why did you say what you did, and call me that?”
“You will be my lady soon enough.” He reached for her hands, his smile reappearing. Tavy backed away, her body shaking, shock and anger running in tandem through her.
“I have not yet given you my reply.”
“Doreé is not to be trusted.” His grin disappeared again and something unsettling lit his gaze. Something that looked peculiarly like the panic she had felt earlier. “You are a beautiful woman and—”
“No.” She thrust up a palm. “I cannot hear this.” She hurried toward the door, heat prickling behind her eyes. Dear God, she didn’t even know where her bedchamber was in this vast place. Pressing back on tears, she hurried toward the entrance hall.
“Octavia, wait. I do not wish to distress you, but you must know the way of it.”
The butler stood in the foyer.
“Sir, could you direct me to my quarters?”
The servant glanced over her shoulder at the baron approaching, and gestured her toward the stairs. She barely saw the corridors he led her through. Inside her bedchamber, she snapped the bolt across the door and moved to the elegant dressing table.
She met her reflection in the glass then dropped her face into her hands. A shuddering breath escaped her. But the tears, so hot behind her eyes minutes earlier, would not come. Instead, memory did, hard and fast with a welling up of thick heat in her chest, as she had not allowed for years. Now, with the sensation of his touch so fresh, the feeling of his body against hers, his hands and mouth upon her skin, she could no longer resist.
Marcus called her beautiful, but on the cusp of her eighteenth birthday she had not been anything of the sort. An awkward girl, too lanky and uncomfortable in her new woman’s shape, still she hadn’t much cared about that, only about being released from the cage of proper English girlhood to explore the world she had lived in for nearly two years yet had not been allowed to experience.
Aunt Imene took her to tea amongst the English ladies, always making certain to comment on her poor looks, pointing out how lovely Alethea had been at that age and tut-tutting Tavy’s lack of grace and fashion. Going mad with confinement, Tavy mostly ignored her gaoler. Instead she begged her uncle to take her along when he did errands about town. He complied, but he never allowed her out of the carriage. Enveloped in humid heat, she stared through windows at the world just beyond her reach, the color and beauty she had dreamt of for so many years but was not permitted to touch.
Then Aunt Imene suffered a fever. During her lengthy recovery, with help from discreet servants with whom Tavy had made friends in her two years of incarceration, finally she escaped to the market. Always she stole away at the hottest part of the day when the English and high-caste Indians all reclined upon their fanned verandas.
Lingering over a shopkeeper’s wares on one of those escapes, drawing the scents of spiced fruit into her nostrils and shaded by her parasol, she met him for the second time.
“No longer in need of rescuing, shalabha?”
Warmth shivered along Tavy’s shoulders. She turned and her gaze traveled up a perfectly proportioned male chest encased in a bright blue and gold waistcoat of the finest silk only an Indian prince would wear.
But Lord Benjirou Doreé was exactly that now, a mercantile prince. His uncle had died of fever months earlier, and when his heir returned to India from university in England, Tavy heard news from the servants. She had wondered whether the English were discussing it too, the spectacular funeral that filled the streets, the blazing white procession through Madras to mourn its lost son, friend to peasants, princes, Mughals, soldiers, and Company officials alike. There must be talk. After all, the Indian manufacturer’s heir was an English nobleman, the son of a peer.
His black eyes glinted with gentle pleasure as he gazed down at her, one hand slung casually over the edge of the shop awning beneath which she stood. He was twenty-two, with the sleek grace of a tiger and the confident carriage of a young lord.
“Oh, no,” she said breezily, brushing an errant wisp of hair from her brow with quivering fingers. “Now I am the one who does the rescuing.”
His mouth curved into a slow smile. “Do you often find the need?”
“All the time, I daresay.” She waved her hand about. “Why, just the other day Mrs. Fletcher tripped over a stack of tea bricks and fell flat upon her face on the baker’s stoop. I was obliged to pass smelling salts beneath her nose at least thrice before she revived.”
“How unfortunate for her,” he said solemnly, but a small crescent-shaped dent appeared in his cheek. He had beautiful skin, the color of firelight glinting off teakwood, or polished bronze. His features were neither English nor Indian, but a melding of both only a master artist could have invented—lean cheeks that lent him the air of an aesthete, square jaw, aristocratically straight nose, and ink-black hair worn considerably too long for a student at Cambridge. Tavy had never seen the Marquess of Doreé and rarely his second wife, who was always thoroughly wrapped in sumptuous saris and flowing veils when she left her villa next door. She supposed they both must be quite handsome to have produced such a son.