Frowning, Penelope peered into the wavy surface of the mirror, where the satiny fabric of her discarded dress had begun to ripple, like moonlight on the water. Penelope stilled in the act of reaching for the clasp of her necklace. She really hadn’t had that much to drink.
Penelope put out a hand to steady the mirror, but the dress continued to rustle, undulating in waves on the floor. A forked tongue flicked out from beneath the embroidered hem.
In the wavering light of the single candle, a cobra wiggled itself free of the folds of satin and began coiling upwards on its speckled tail, its beady eyes fixed on Penelope.
Chapter Eighteen
In the mirror, the snake’s obsidian eyes fixed on Penelope, its pointed tongue flicking in and out of its mouth.
Something about the beady eyes in that wrinkled face, with the hood arching to either side reminded her of the malevolent, ruined face of Mir Alam, the man even a snake wouldn’t bite.
Too bad it wasn’t Mir Alam in the room instead of her. The two reptiles could have had a reunion.
Penelope held herself very still, rather hoping that the snake might take her for a piece of furniture, of no more interest than the post on the bed or the legs of the chair. It was not, she feared, the sort of creature with whom one could come to an amiable arrangement. The snake blocked both the door to the veranda and the door to the hall. She would have to run directly across its path either way and she was willing to wager it could strike faster than she could run.
What did one do about a cobra? Not scream or run or flail, she knew that much. Not that there was any danger of that. Her body had frozen out of sheer instinct and seemed to be intent on turning into a pillar of salt on the spot. Did snakes eat salt? Penelope dismissed that thought as immaterial. What she needed was a scythe, a sword, even a poker or a shovel. But there was nothing of the kind, not even one of Freddy’s ivory-handled canes. The servants were all asleep. There would be no one to hear her if she screamed for help. No one except the snake, of course, who was uncoiling in her direction with a slow determination that Penelope found distinctly unnerving.
Freddy kept a pistol in the dresser drawer.
Penelope’s fingers tingled with nervous energy. It wasn’t much, but it was a chance. If only he had left it where it was supposed to be. It would be just like Freddy to flounce off on a whim, leaving her alone with a cobra. Please, God, Penelope thought, let him not have taken the pistol with him.
Keeping her eyes on the creature in the mirror, Penelope felt blindly for the drawer handle, wincing at the screeching noise the drawer made as she drew it open. Venom dripped off the snake’s fangs, or perhaps that was just the sweat beading off her brow, clouding her vision. Her shift clung damply to her chest as she inched her fingers forward, trying to keep her back as painfully still as any dowager might demand. She could feel the drops of sweat trickling down her spine. Each seemed to take an eternity to travel its way down, vertebra by vertebra, each drop assuming mammoth proportions.
By a miracle, the pistol was where it was meant to be. Penelope didn’t need to look to know what it was, or to feel the familiar weight of it in her palm. She didn’t dare avert her eyes from the creature in the mirror, swaying gently on its tail as the light of the single candle cast its shadow against the far wall, as ominous as any mariner’s nightmare of ship-devouring serpents.
Keeping her elbow stiff, Penelope drew the pistol out of the drawer. It was primed and cocked, and she gave silent thanks that, whatever Freddy’s other flaws, he kept his firearms in good order. It was, he felt, one of the marks of a gentleman, like good horseflesh and shiny boots and a well-dressed wife.
One shot. That was all she would get. Penelope conjured the memory of old targets, playing cards hung from a line in the back garden, with her father cheering her on while her mother lurked disapproving behind bedroom drapes. Under her father’s tutelage, she had shot the pips out of playing cards, but that had been before London, before society demanded that she replace pistol with fan as her weapon of choice. The target had been smaller then, she reminded herself, and the cards had swayed in the breeze just like the snake.
Penelope swallowed hard, her tongue clinging stickily to her palate. It felt like forever that she had stood there, locked in silent battle, but it couldn’t have been more than sixty seconds by the clock, the space of two drops of sweat making their slow journey down her spine. He who hesitates is lost, once more into the breach, and all that rot.
As she pivoted, fast and furious, she spared a moment’s thought to regret that she hadn’t kissed Captain Reid in the garden that night, with all the moonflowers blooming. It was, after all, in the manner of a last meal.
Affronted, the snake reared up on its tail, hissing its outrage with all the venom in its scaly little soul.
Penelope didn’t bother to pray. As the cobra arched straight for her, she closed one eye, picked her mark, and pressed the trigger home.
Standing outside the bungalow, Alex watched to make sure Penelope got safe inside, thinking thoughts that made him a very inappropriate sort of chaperone. A candle flickered into light through the slats of the screens, casting her silhouette against the wall, tall and graceful. There was no answering male shadow. Lord Frederick was presumably otherwise occupied for the night.
In the bungalow, Penelope was shaking out her hair, dropping pins carelessly as she went. The shadow Penelope lifted her arms above her head to reach the last pin, poised like a dancer on a temple frieze. The vagaries of reflection turned her dress to mist, to nothing more than a smudge along the supple lines of her body.
His entire body tightened at the sight. Christ, but she was—not beautiful. Sensual. Desire embodied in female form. It had taken every ounce of will he possessed not to take her up on what she was so blatantly offering in the garden that night. One moment more and they would have been locked together, with his lips on hers and his fingers in her hair and that would have been that.
Grass-stained clothes and crushed moonflowers—and ruined reputations and a broken marriage, Alex reminded himself. Lord Frederick might be an ass, but that didn’t mean he had to be. She deserved better than to be used so. Penelope. The name suited her much better than Lady Frederick. It fit her, stubborn, brave, resourceful, and just as abandoned as that other Penelope had been, left behind to ward off her suitors while her husband sailed off to dally in the company of seductive sorceresses and assorted sirens.
It was foolish to wish that he had said yes instead of no in the garden, foolish and selfish.
Rubbing one hand against the beginnings of a headache, Alex forced himself to turn away and to think instead of Jack and Cleave and the unwelcome intelligence Cleave had brought. It had been generous of him in its way, all the more so knowing how very much Cleave disliked Alex’s brother and had since they were all children together. By going to Alex, Cleave had offered him a chance, a chance to find Jack and warn him—of what? That Wellesley had a price on his head? If Jack were involved in the sorts of activities Cleave implied, then that certainly wouldn’t be news to him. Alex mocked himself for his credulousness. It was more likely that Cleave hoped he might use the ties of family to prevail upon Jack to turn himself in, and with him precious information on his contacts and activities.
It wasn’t necessarily a bad bargain that Cleave offered—for Cleave. Cleave would get the promotion he so ardently desired; Alex would get a pat on the back and the district commissionership that not all his father’s charm had managed to wrangle for him; and Jack . . . If Cleave’s employer were honorable, Jack might get the option of exile or imprisonment rather than a noose around his neck. Some bargain.
Damn him. Damn Jack, damn Cleave, damn Wellesley, damn their bloody father for never bloody thinking before he hopped from romance to romance and bed to bed, leaving in his wake this legacy of bitterness and muddled loyalties.
As if in agreement, a sound like a rumble of thunder echoed in his ears.
Only, it wasn’t thunder
. It was the muffled report of a gun. And it had come from inside the Staineses’ bungalow.
Alex sprinted for the veranda, his imagination churning with nightmare images of Penelope, sprawled dead on the floor, red blood spreading across the white muslin of her gown, bubbling up at the corner of her lips, while those wicked amber eyes stared forever dulled at the punkah swaying rhythmically back and forth above. There had been murder in Lord Frederick’s eyes when he had hauled his wife away from Fiske earlier that evening. Staines wouldn’t be the first man to imagine himself wronged and to settle it with a bullet.
Using the balustrade as lever, Alex vaulted over the side, pushing the cane screen roughly aside. Inside, he saw Penelope, her hair all about her shoulders, dressed in nothing but a shift. She was upright. She was standing. She was alive.
Thank God.
After his imaginings, it was relief enough to see her upright, breathing, alive, whole and unmarred, with no bullet holes charring her skin. Her hair blazed like flame around her white face. In one hand, she held a pistol from which a plume of smoke still trailed.
Alex looked abruptly at the floor. But there was no sign of the lady’s husband, dead or otherwise. No blood, no brains, no powder-singed cravat. Instead, there was the jumbled body of a snake, the spotted scales shining faintly against the darker boards of the floor.
“The devil,” breathed Alex, and, indeed, the smoke tasted like brimstone in the back of his throat. It didn’t take any great herpetolog ical knowledge to identify the body as that of a cobra. The bullet must have gone in somewhere just beneath the eyes, leaving the distinctive hood intact.
Alex looked involuntarily at the gun in Penelope’s hand. That had been either a bloody brilliant shot, or a devilishly lucky one. He wasn’t sure he could have done it, not in that uncertain light and with the odds of failure what they were.
Penelope casually hefted the pistol, twirling it to make the silver facing glisten in the candlelight. “I told you I was a good shot.”
“That,” said Alex flatly, “is a cobra.”
“You mean that was a cobra,” corrected Penelope giddily, tossing the spent weapon onto the bed. She missed. The heavy piece of metal glanced off the side of the mattress, clattering to the hardwood floor.
There were bright patches of color high on each cheekbone and her shift clung damply to her body, even though the night was cool. Her amber eyes glinted feverishly in the light of the single candle, cursed gems at the heart of a haunted mine.
Alex crossed the room in three long strides, grasping Penelope by the arms. “Did it touch you? Bite you?” he demanded tersely, scanning her fevered face.
Her bare arms were clammy beneath his hands, damp with a sheen of sweat that gave the lie to her cocky grin, the grin of a soldier coming out of a cannonade, powder-grimed but whole. “I didn’t give it time.”
Alex felt a lopsided smile quirking across his own face, product of fear, adrenaline, and goodness only knew what else.
“Wise decision,” he said, and kissed her.
Her arms clamped around his neck as though he were her only escape from drowning, a desperate, clinging grip that gave the lie to her devil-may-care demeanor. Wrapping his arms around her, he could feel the way her body was shaking through the sodden material of her shift. She trembled as though she were suffering from an ague, with convulsive shivers that trembled through her whole body.
“It’s all right,” he murmured between kisses, stroking soothingly up and down her back. “It’s dead. It’s gone.”
Pulling his head down to hers, she blotted out his reassurances with her lips, kissing him with an openmouthed fervor that made Alex’s ears ring and the rest of his body to respond in an unmistakable and inappropriate way. His better self tried to intervene, reminding him that this was not what he had come for, that he was meant to be comforting her, not—well, whatever the rest of him was thinking.
The clamoring in his ears grew louder.
It took a moment for Alex to realize that the noises weren’t in his head; they were coming from beyond the door and getting louder by the moment, as footsteps clattered in the hallway and agitated voices rose in inquiry. It wasn’t surprising that the shot would have roused the household. What was surprising was that Alex had completely forgotten to think about that before putting the mistress of the house in a decidedly compromising position.
Pushing with both hands against his chest, Penelope extricated herself from his embrace.
“Stay here,” she ordered.
Alex wasn’t quite sure where she expected him to go. Into the armoire, perhaps? The evening was starting to take on all the classic attributes of farce, but for the deadly collection of scales jumbled on the floor.
Penelope whisked blithely around the snake. Yanking open the door, she thrust her head through the gap. “I’m all right!” she shouted down the hall in ungrammatical Urdu. “It was just a snake. It’s dead.”
That apparently occasioned a certain amount of comment. “It’s dead,” Penelope repeated. Sticking her head back inside, she demanded, “How do you say ‘go back to sleep’ in Urdu?”
Feeling rather dazed, Alex told her.
Penelope repeated it with considerably more force. He could see the taut muscles in her upper arms as she held on to the edge of the door, her entire body quivering with a frenetic energy that Alex recognized all too well from his brief stint in the Madras Cavalry. She was soaring on the sheer, exquisite pleasure of being alive, of having survived. In an hour, Alex thought darkly, feeling his own crazy euphoria beginning to dissipate, she would probably have a crashing headache.
“There!” she said, slamming the door and grinning at Alex. “That’s taken care of them.” Her bosom swelled against the neckline of her shift as she drew in a deep breath of pure anticipation. “It’s just us again.”
“About that,” Alex said, in the mildest voice he could muster, keeping his hands firmly at his sides. “Where is your husband?”
The question had the desired effect. Penelope stumbled to a halt, like a mare clipping her foot against a fence. She cast Alex a quick, startled glance before her old mask clamped back down.
She crossed her arms across her chest. “As you can see, he’s not here.”
“I see.” He should have known. Lord Frederick would be with his mistress. “I’m sorry.”
Penelope drew herself up defensively. “I’m not. Oh, don’t look like that! Ours was never a love match.”
“What was it then?” Alex asked, willing her to provide him with an excuse, and just as strongly willing her not to. Honor and desire battled for supremacy, and desire was having by far the better of it.
Biting down on her lower lip, Penelope looked away. It would have to be her lip, already swollen from their kiss. Her mouth was too wide for fashion, generous, flexible. Alex thought it was perfect.
“Boredom,” she said, with a shrug. “Expediency. Bad timing.” She looked up at him, her eyes brilliant. “But it brought me here.”
There was no mistaking her meaning.
Alex tried to make light of it. “To snakes in your bed.”
Penelope wasn’t having any of it. “To all this,” she said, her sweeping gesture taking in the cane screens, the moonlight spilling across the floor, the shadows of trees like filigree. She took a step forward, her bare feet moving soundlessly against the floor. “To you.”
Alex could feel his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he swallowed. “I won’t be your revenge,” he said levelly.
“What if it’s not about revenge?”
“Then what?” demanded Alex, taking a step forward, without realizing that he had. “Boredom? Expediency?”
A whisper away, Penelope’s lips curled as if at a shared joke. “Bad timing,” she said in a way that made it feel as though it were very good timing indeed.
Alex found himself grinning back, a reckless, devil-may-care grin that matched hers.
Reckless. Careless. Like his father’s.
>
The grin froze on Alex’s face, even as his hands automatically closed around Penelope’s waist. Cold reality crowded in on him, breathy icy prickles down his neck. Who knew what sort of unanticipated outcomes might arise from tonight’s careless carnality? Gossip, scandal, a marriage broken, a child to be raised under another man’s name. He could present arguments against each of those outcomes, specious arguments, designed to comfort his conscience and license his roving hands, but there was still Penelope to be thought of.
As if there could be anything but Penelope to be thought of, with the material of her shift fragile beneath his fingers, damp lawn melting into damp skin, with her eyes glinting up at him, her lips curving into a smile that promised pleasures more wicked than words.
“Where were we before?” Penelope asked, sliding her body up against him. In the shadowed room, the scent of flowers rose from her skin like a drug.
Alex dragged in a deep breath of air, trying to force himself to think, to reason, to do the responsible thing. Penelope might claim she wanted this—with words, smile, lips, hands; oh Lord, the hands; he couldn’t let himself think about what she was doing with her hands, or he would be lost—but how would she feel in the morning, when the potent brew of anger, fear, and lust had run its course? Jack’s mother had followed his father willingly, and look where that had got them.
He wouldn’t hurt Penelope that way. He wouldn’t let her hurt herself that way. In the morning, it would all seem different; in the morning, when the cobra corpse was tidied away and the scent of the flowers had burned away with the dawn.
“No.” He wrenched himself back, away, prying his fingers away from her skin. “I can’t do this.”
Penelope stared at him, frozen, a statue of Aphrodite caught in the middle of a seduction, or Lot’s wife turned to salt at a particularly intimate moment. Shock, dismay, confusion chased one another across her face as she stared at him, her empty hands suspended in air.