Forbidden Jewel of India (Harlequin Historical)

  TO OBEY HIS DUTY IS TO DENY HIS HEART

  Anusha Laurens is in danger. The daughter of an Indian princess and an English peer, she’s the perfect pawn in the opulent courts of Rajasthan. Even so, she will not return to the father who rejected her.

  Arrogant angrezi Major Nicholas Herriard is charged with bringing the alluring princess safely to her new life in Calcutta. Nick’s mission is to protect, to serve—but under the searing Indian sun an initial attraction unfurls into a forbidden temptation.

  This beautiful, impossible princess tests the very limits of his honor—especially when Nick is left with only one option to keep Anusha safe: marriage. But the fast-flowing waters of the Ganges determine a different fate, and duty may separate them forever….

  “You…” she began, her face against the horse’s shoulder. Then she pushed herself upright and turned to face Nick. “You saved my life and I thank you for it.”

  The raw emotion was gone, and as her chin came up and she looked at him she was every inch a princess for all the dust and her travel-stained clothing.

  Her courage doused the fierceness of his anger and the heat in his blood, but Nick could not find it in himself to be gracious. “That is my job,” he said, his voice cool. “To deliver you back alive and in one piece to your father.”

  “You will not let me thank you?” She took a step that brought her toe to toe with him. “They kiss to say thank-you, the English, do they not?”

  With Pavan solid at his back he could not retreat. Anusha put her hands on his shoulders and stood on tiptoe, her body pressed against his. For an endless moment her mouth touched his, warm and soft.

  Her lips parted slightly—an invitation he knew she did not understand. Time stood still while he fought the temptation to snatch her to him, plunder that beautiful mouth, lose himself in an innocence that wanted him. Him.

  *

  Forbidden Jewel of India

  Harlequin® Historical #1121—January 2013

  Praise for Louise Allen

  Married to a Stranger

  “Allen delivers a lovely, sweet story demonstrating

  how strangers can build a relationship based on lost love. The gentle yet powerful emotions of a grieving brother are sure to touch readers, as will the budding romance between him and a shy but emotionally strong woman. Allen reaches into readers’ hearts.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  Seduced by the Scoundrel

  “Allen takes a shipwreck spying adventure

  with lots of sensuality and spins it into a page-turner.

  The strong characters and sexy relationship

  will definitely satisfy readers.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  Ravished by the Rake

  “Allen illuminates a unique side of the Regency

  by setting her latest adventure in India…”

  —RT Book Reviews

  Practical Widow to Passionate Mistress

  “With the first in her new trilogy, Allen hooks readers with her charming and well-portrayed characters, especially the secondary cast. You’ll cheer on the hero

  and the strong-willed heroine to the very end

  of this highly enjoyable and addictive read.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  Louise Allen

  Forbidden Jewel of India

  Available from Harlequin® Historical and LOUISE ALLEN

  The Earl’s Intended Wife #793

  The Society Catch #809

  Moonlight and Mistletoe #830

  A Most Unconventional Courtship #849

  Virgin Slave, Barbarian King #877

  No Place for a Lady #892

  *The Dangerous Mr. Ryder #903

  *The Outrageous Lady Felsham #907

  *The Shocking Lord Standon #911

  *The Disgraceful Mr. Ravenhurst #951

  *The Notorious Mr. Hurst #955

  *The Piratical Miss Ravenhurst #959

  The Viscount’s Betrothal #982

  ††The Lord and the Wayward Lady #996

  ††The Officer and the Proper Lady #1020

  **Practical Widow to Passionate Mistress #1052

  **Vicar’s Daughter to Viscount’s Lady #1056

  **Innocent Courtesan to Adventurer’s Bride #1060

  †Ravished by the Rake #1076

  †Seduced by the Scoundrel #1080

  †Married to a Stranger #1084

  Snowbound Wedding Wishes #1111: “An Earl Beneath the Mistletoe”

  Forbidden Jewel of India #1121

  Other works include Harlequin Historical Undone! ebooks

  *Disrobed and Dishonored

  **Auctioned Virgin to Seduced Bride

  Harlequin Books

  Hot Desert Nights: “Desert Rake”

  Together by Christmas: “A Mistletoe Masquerade”

  *Those Scandalous Ravenhursts

  ††Silk & Scandal

  **The Transformation of the Shelley Sisters

  †Danger & Desire

  Did you know that these novels are also available as ebooks? Visit www.Harlequin.com.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Author’s Note

  Excerpt

  Chapter One

  The palace of Kalatwah, Rajasthan, India—

  March 1788

  Patterns of sunlight and shade fell through the pierced stone panels on to the white marble floor, soothing to the eye after miles of dusty roads. Major Nicholas

  Herriard rolled his shoulders to loosen them as he walked. The physical stresses of the long journey began to fade. A bath, a massage, a change of clothes and he would feel human again.

  Running feet, the faint, sharp scratch of claws on marble. The hilt of the knife in his boot came to hand with the familiarity of long practice as he twisted to face the side passage, crouched to meet an attack.

  A mongoose shot out of the opening, skidded to a halt and chittered at him, every hair on its body fluffed up with aggravation, its tail stuck out behind like a bottle-brush.

  ‘Idiot animal,’ Nick said in Hindi as the patter of running feet became louder and a girl followed the mongoose, her wide crimson skirts swirling around her as she caught her balance and stopped. Not a girl, a woman, unveiled and unescorted. The part of his brain that was still dealing with an attack analysed the sound of her footsteps: she had changed direction twice just before she emerged, which meant this was one of the off-set entrances to the zanana.

  She should not be here, outside the women’s quarters. He should not be here, staring at her with all the blood in his brain heading south, his body poised for violence and a weapon in his hand.

  ‘You may put away your dagger,’ she said and it took him a moment to adjust and realise she was speaking in lightly accented English. ‘Tavi and I are unarmed. Except for teeth,’ she added, showing hers, white and regular between lips that curved into a smile of faint mockery. It masked, he was certain, shock. The mongoose twined between her bare, hennaed feet, still grumbling to itself. It wore a gem-studded collar.

&nbs
p; Nick got a grip on himself, pushed the knife back into its sheath as he straightened and brought his hands together. ‘Namaste.’

  ‘Namaste.’ Over her own joined hands dark grey eyes studied him. The shock seemed to have turned to suspicion edged with hostility and she was making no effort to disguise either emotion.

  Grey eyes? And skin like golden honey and hair that showed streaks of mahogany and deep brown as it fell down her back in a thick plait. His quarry, it seemed, had found him.

  She did not appear disconcerted to be alone, unveiled, with a strange man, but stood there and contemplated him. Her full red skirts, weighted with heavy silver embroidery, hung just above her ankles, giving a glimpse of close-fitting trousers. Her tight choli revealed not only delightful curves and elegantly rounded arms decked in silver bangles, but also an unsettling band of smooth golden midriff.

  ‘I should go. Excuse me for disturbing you,’ Nick said in English and wondered if he was perhaps the more unsettled of the two of them.

  ‘You have not,’ she replied with crushing simplicity in the same language. She turned and walked through the opening she had appeared from. ‘Mere pichhe aye, Tavi,’ she called as the skirts of her lehenga whisked out of sight. The mongoose followed obediently, the faint click of its claws fading along with her light footsteps.

  ‘Hell,’ Nick said to the empty passageway. ‘That is quite definitely her father’s daughter.’ Suddenly a simple duty had become something else entirely. He squared his shoulders and strode off in the direction that led to his rooms. A man did not become a major with the British East India Company by being disconcerted by acid-tongued young women, however beautiful. He needed to clean himself up and seek an audience with the raja, her uncle. And after that, all he had to do was to transport Miss Anusha Laurens safely halfway across India, back to her father.

  *

  ‘Paravi! Quickly!’

  ‘Speak Hindi,’ Paravi reproved as Anusha entered her room in a flurry of skirts and trailing scarf.

  ‘Maf kijiye,’ Anusha apologised. ‘I have just this moment been speaking to an Englishman and my head is still translating.’

  ‘Angrezi? How can you be speaking to any man, let alone an angrezi?’ Paravi, plump and indolent and her uncle’s third wife, raised one exquisitely plucked eyebrow, but she pushed aside the chessboard she had been studying and sat upright.

  ‘He was in the corridor when I chased Tavi just now. Very big with hair of pale gilt and in the red uniform of the Company’s soldiers. An officer, I think—he had much gold on his coat. Come and see him.’

  ‘Why so curious? Is he so handsome, this big

  angrezi?’

  ‘I do not know what he is,’ Anusha confessed. ‘I have not seen one so close since I left my father’s house.’ But she was curious. And there was something else, a tug of yearning, deep inside, at the memory of another male voice speaking English, of another big man, scooping her up in his arms, laughing with her, playing with her. The man who had rejected her and her mother, she reminded herself as the memory turned sour.

  ‘He is different from the men I am used to, so I cannot decide if he is handsome or not. His hair is so pale and tied back tightly and his eyes are green and he is tall.’ She waved her hands to illustrate. ‘He is big all over—broad shoulders, long legs.’

  ‘Is he very white? I have never seen an angrezi before except from a long way away.’ Paravi was becoming interested.

  ‘His face and his hands are golden.’ Like my father’s were. ‘But the skin of all the Europeans goes brown in the sun, you know. Perhaps the rest of him is white.’

  Imagining all of the big Englishman produced a not-unpleasurable shiver which he did not merit. But any novelty was welcome in the restricted world of the

  zanana, even if this novelty brought with him unsettling reminders of the world outside the fort. The faint sensual tingle was lost in a wave of something close to apprehension. This man made her uneasy.

  ‘Where has he gone now?’ Paravi uncoiled herself from the heap of cushions she had been occupying. The mongoose immediately dived into the warm spot she had created and curled up. ‘I would like to look on a man who makes all those expressions chase across your face.’

  ‘To the visitors’ wing—where else should he go?’ Anusha tried not to snap. It was not flattering to be told her face betrayed her. ‘He was very dusty from the road, he will not be seeking audience with my uncle like that.’ She gave herself a little shake to chase away the foolish fancies. ‘Come with me to the Sunset Terrace.’

  Anusha led the way through the familiar maze of passages, rooms and galleries that filled the western wing of the palace.

  ‘Your dupatta,’ her friend hissed as they left the women’s quarters to cross the wide terrace where the raja would sometimes sit to watch the sun sink over his kingdom. ‘There are no grilles here.’

  Anusha clicked her tongue in irritation, but unwound the neglected length of cerise gauze from her neck and draped it so it covered her face to the chin. She leaned on the inner balustrade of the terrace and looked down into the courtyard below. ‘There he is,’ she whispered.

  Below, on the edge of a garden threaded with rills of water in the Persian manner, the big angrezi was talking to a slender Indian she did not recognise. His body servant, no doubt. The man gestured towards a door.

  ‘He is telling him where the bath house is,’ Paravi whispered from behind her own dupatta of golden gauze. ‘There is your chance to see whether Englishmen are white all over.’

  ‘That is ridiculous. And immodest.’ She heard Paravi laugh softly and bristled. ‘Besides, I am not in the slightest bit interested.’ Just burningly, and inexplicably, curious. The two men had vanished into the guest rooms overlooking the garden. ‘But I suppose I had better see whether the water has been heated and someone is in attendance.’

  Paravi leaned one rounded hip against the parapet and glanced up as a flock of green parakeets screeched overhead. ‘This man must be important, do you not think? He is from the East India Company and they are all-powerful in the whole land now, my lord says. Far more important than the Emperor in Delhi, even if they do put the Emperor’s head on their coins. I wonder if he is to be the Resident here. My lord said nothing about that last night.’

  Anusha rested her elbows on the parapet and noted that her friend seemed to be in favour with her husband. ‘Why would we need a Resident? We do not do so very much trade with them.’ The intriguingly pale head appeared below as the man re-emerged from the door to the guest rooms. ‘I suppose we might be in a useful position for their expansion—that is what Mata used to say. Strategic.’ Her mother had much to say on most subjects, being both well read and greatly indulged by her brother the raja.

  ‘Your father is still a friend to my lord, even though he never comes here. They exchange letters. He is a great man in the Company: perhaps he thinks we are more important these days and deserving of a Resident.’

  ‘It must be a matter of great importance for him to bestir himself to think of us,’ Anusha said. Her father had not visited the state of Kalatwah since the day, twelve years ago, when he had sent his twelve-year-old daughter and her mother back, displaced from his home and his heart by the arrival of his English wife.

  He sent money, but that was all. Her uncle added it to her dowry chest when she refused to spend it. He told her that she was foolish, that her father had no choice but to send her and her mother home and that Sir George was an honourable man and a good ally of Kalatwah. But that was the talk of men, of politics, not of the love that broke her mother’s heart, even while she agreed with her brother that there had been no other option.

  Her father wrote to her uncle, she knew that, for he would tell her there were messages. There had been a note a year ago when her mother had died. She had not read it any more than she had read the others. The moment she saw her father’s name she had thrown it on the brazier and watched it burn to ash.

  From the flas
h of dark eyes behind the veil Paravi was sending her sympathetic glances, which is not what she wanted. No one had any right to be sorry for her. Was she not, at twenty-two, the pampered niece of the Raja of Kalatwah? Was she not indulged with the right to turn down every approach that had been made for her hand in marriage? Was she not supplied lavishly with clothes and jewels and servants and all the luxury she wished for? Did she not possess everything that she could possibly want?

  Except knowing where I belong, the nagging little voice in her head said, the voice that, for some reason, always spoke English. Except knowing who I am and why I am and what I am going to do with the rest of my life. Except for freedom.

  ‘The angrezi is going to the bath.’ Paravi drew back a pace from the parapet even as she craned to see. ‘That is a fine robe. His hair is long now it is loose,’ she added. ‘What a colour! It is like that stallion my lord sent to the Maharaja of Altaphur as a gift when the monsoon ended, the horse they called the Gilded One.’

  ‘He has probably got as high an opinion of himself as that animal had,’ Anusha said. ‘But at least he bathes. Do you know, many of them do not? They think it unhealthy! My father said that they do not have champo in Europe—they powder their hair instead. And just wash their hands and faces. They think hot water is bad for them.’

  ‘Ugh! Go and see and tell me about him.’ Paravi gave her a little push. ‘I am curious, but my lord would not be pleased if he thought I was looking upon an angrezi without his clothes.’

  He would also have much to say if his niece was discovered doing just that, Anusha reflected as she ran down the narrow stairway and along the passage. She was not at all sure why she wanted to get closer to this stranger. It was not any desire to attract his attention, despite the shiver which was, of course, simply a normal female reaction to a man in his prime—far from it. She did not want those green eyes studying her—they seemed to see too much. There had been a flash of recognition in them when they had met. Recognition and something far more basic and male.