“Madam, I fear you labor under erroneous notions concerning my involvement with such persons, although I certainly thank you for the compliment. Perhaps you should ask Lord Crispin himself?” He tilted his head as though suggesting the obvious. But she had never been slow-witted. She had come to him because she knew. A hot, insistent pressure began beneath Ben’s ribs and threaded across his chest.
The fine line of her jaw set. “Denying your business will not make it nonexistent.”
“I have little to do with those matters, and less interest. My employees deal with India House here in London, and others abroad.”
“You know I am not talking about the East India Company.” Her breasts rose upon a short, jagged inhalation, a hint of color staining her smooth cheeks. But her carriage remained erect, her chin level. She was frustrated, but in perfect control of her emotions. Nothing remained in this cool, exquisite woman of the laughing, feeling girl he remembered. But then, nothing remained of the youth who had known that girl for a brief, time-out-of-place moment.
Almost nothing.
“I am afraid, Miss Pierce, that as this conversation fails to progress, we must remain at a stalemate.” He pushed away from the piano. “The footman will see you out.”
Her eyes flashed, then the look faltered and she blinked rapidly. Her lips parted, color rising full in her cheeks. Desire, thick and hard like Ben hadn’t felt in years, ground in his gut.
“Is that all?” she said. “Am I to be dismissed without any consideration whatsoever?”
He moved across the chamber toward her. Her gaze held, widening only slightly as he neared. He halted close and her scent filled his senses, Indian roses, sweet and musky. Sunlight slanting through the windows danced upon her soft skin and in her hair the color of fire opals. In seven years she had matured into her beauty, and it sat like a mantle of royalty upon her, rendering her untouchable, distant.
All the better.
“Miss Pierce,” he said evenly, “you have intruded upon me at home, accused me of consorting with low characters, and suggested that I am in the habit of lying. What more than dismissal do you imagine I owe you?”
A tiny breath of sound escaped her lips. He looked, and cursed himself for not being man enough to look away.
Her mouth tightened into a line again, and he lifted his gaze to her eyes. They were shuttered once more.
“How foolish of me,” she said. “Of course, I am no one. You owe me nothing.” She turned and strode from the chamber.
He stood motionless for an interval that might have been one minute or thirty. Finally he ran a palm over his face and stepped into the corridor. The footman did not so much as blink.
“Samuel, send word to the stable to have my horse saddled and brought around.”
“Yes, my lord.” He moved off toward the rear of the house. Ben hadn’t the need to instruct him not to repeat anything she had said. His employees knew him well, each of them loyal and discreet.
One, however, he would have a word with. She mustn’t come to his house again. But perhaps he had already taken care of that problem himself.
She should not have come.
“Home, please, Abha,” Tavy threw over her shoulder. She could not speed quickly enough down the steps of the imposing mansion. What had she been thinking? He might have a network of spies and underlings involved in clandestine business throughout India, England, and the whole world for all she knew, not to mention a fleet of ships. That did not make him her only resource for helping Marcus.
Abha closed the carriage door and they jolted into motion.
Tavy dropped her face into her hands. Dear Lord, what a fool she still was. She had come for the worst reason. For Marcus, yes, but more for herself.
Years ago she had convinced herself there had been nothing between them, that she invented the warmth in his watchful gaze, even her own profound reaction to him, his pull upon her from someplace inside that left her breathless. She had been so young, so na?ve and full of imagination. Just a girl.
Now she knew she had not invented it.
His voice was wonderfully rich, deep and almost musical, beautiful—more beautiful even than she remembered it. And he seemed taller, broader, his shoulders filled out and square jaw firmer, the slightest creases about his mouth and brow. He was no longer the young man she had been infatuated with. He was a titled lord, power and strength in his very stance. But his eyes were the same, black, long-lashed, languid and intense at once.
A shiver ran along her spine, curling into her belly.
She pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes. The heat in the pit of her stomach and the ache of longing in her chest, both dormant for so long, stirred the moment he had spoken. He merely looked at her and she was eighteen again, in the garden crying for him.
She threw back her head and sucked in a deep breath. All these years—years—should have taught her.
The carriage halted before her sister’s town house. Tavy smoothed her hair and straightened her shoulders. Abha let down the step.
“Abha, this afternoon I should like you to accompany me to visit Sir St. John at his office at the docks.”
Lines gathered upon his high, flat brow. “Memsahib, is this wise?”
“You needn’t come if you don’t like it.” She climbed from the carriage. “I am perfectly able to go searching out a shady character on my own. No one else seems to wish to help me, after all.” She strode into the house.
In the upstairs parlor, Lady Ashford sat beside Tavy’s sister, both cooing over the bundle in Alethea’s arms. It was a cozy scene and peaceful, unencumbered with high emotion. Tavy drew a steadying breath and smiled despite the roiling inside her.
“How is my nephew this morning?”
“Hello, Octavia dear.” Valerie extended her hand to squeeze Tavy’s. “He is perfectly precious.”
“Do you think so?” Alethea tucked a corner of swaddling around the sleeping infant, hazel eyes misty. After nine years awaiting the miracle in her arms, Tavy could not blame her. Alethea was such a sensible person, much more so than she herself, who had spent her childhood dreaming of traveling the world, especially of seeing India, her head constantly in the clouds. Alethea deserved her mistiness now, and Tavy must settle back into the measured temper she had so carefully cultivated over the past seven years.
“It is not merely a mother’s fondness?” Alethea asked.
“Or a father’s?” St. John entered the chamber and briefly passed his hand across the back of his wife’s thick chestnut locks. He often did that, touched Alethea in some subtle way as though conveying his attachment to her with the gesture. Each time Tavy saw it her throat thickened.
“You will always see your son as beautiful and perfect, unless he is being horrid, like mine at the moment,” Valerie said on a laugh. “Steven has been detained in Paris and will not return this week as planned. Max is threatening to stow away upon the first ship that will put him into Calais and reunite him with his father more quickly.”
“Precocious for eight,” St. John commented. “Send him to me and I will find him a berth upon a comfortable vessel.”
The viscountess grinned. “You are all kindness, sir, but when I wish for your help, I will ask for it.”
St. John’s fair good looks and phlegmatic air belied a thoughtful man of business. But when Alethea had entered her confinement while they were still aboard ship sailing north along the Spanish coast, strain had shown on his brow and in his blue eyes. Now he gazed upon his wife and newborn son with evident pleasure, the tension of so many months entirely erased.