his father still lived, what would he make of the hardened, travelled, twenty-nine-year-old who returned in the place of the angry, naïve young man who had walked away from him?
And there was his stepmother, of course. What would Imogen be expecting of the stepson who had not even stayed to see her wed?
She was in for a shock if she thought he would indulge her or had any tender feelings left for her. She could take herself off to the Dower House with her widow’s portion and leave the Castle for the bride he fully intended to install there as soon as possible. And that bride would be a gentle, obedient, chaste young lady of good breeding. He would select her with care and she would provide him with heirs and be an excellent hostess. And she would leave his heart safely untouched—love was for idealists and romantics and he was neither. Not any more.
‘A rupee for your thoughts?’ Dita said, her wary expression replaced with amusement at his abstraction. It almost had him smiling back, seeing a shadow of the patient child in an unusual young lady who did not take offence at a man forgetting she was there. But then, she was probably relieved his attention was elsewhere. ‘Are you daydreaming of home?’
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘But the thought was hardly worth a rupee. Ma’am, it was a pleasure.’ He bowed his hatless head for a moment, turned his horse towards Government House and cantered off.
For a moment there he had been tempted to stay, to offer to escort her back to wherever she was living. He must have hit his head in that fall, Alistair thought, to contemplate such a thing. He was going to be close to Dita Brooke for three months in the narrow confines of the ship, and he had no intention of resuming the role of elder brother, or however she had seen him as a child. He was not going to spend his time getting her out of scrapes and frightening off importunate young men; it made him feel old just thinking about it. As for that impulsive kiss, she had dealt with it briskly enough, even if she had responded to it. She was sophisticated enough to take it at face value as part of the repertoire of a rake, so nothing to worry about there.
Alistair trotted into the stable yard of Government House and dismounted with some care. The Governor General was away, but he was interested in plant hunting, too, and had extended a vague invitation that Alistair had found useful to take up for the few weeks before the ship sailed.
Damn this leg. He supposed he had better go and show it to the Governor’s resident doctor and be lectured on his foolishness in riding so hard with it not properly healed. But the prospect of weeks without energetic exercise had driven him out to ride each day for as long as the cool of the morning lasted. No doubt Dita had been motivated by the same considerations.
Which led him to think of her again, and of violent exercise, and the combination of the two was uncomfortably vivid. No, his feelings were most definitely not brotherly, any more than those damnably persistent dreams about her were. ‘Bloody fool,’ he snapped at himself, startling the jemahdar at the front door.
Intelligent, headstrong, argumentative young women with a scandal in their past and a temper were not what he was looking for. A meek and biddable English rose who would give him no trouble and cause no scandal was what he wanted and Dita Brooke had never been a rosebud, let alone a rose. She was pure briar with thorns all the way.
Chapter Three
As Alistair limped up the staircase to the first floor he thought of Dita’s threat to apply a tourniquet around his neck and laughed out loud at the memory of her face as she said it. The two men coming out of an office stopped at the sound.
‘Hell’s teeth, Lyndon, what’s happened to you?’ It was one of the Chatterton twins, probably Daniel, who had been flirting with Perdita last night. ‘Found that tiger again?’
‘My horse fell on the maidan and I’ve opened up the wound in my thigh. I’d better get a stitch in it—have you seen Dr Evans?’ Stoicism was one thing, being careless with open wounds in this climate quite another.
‘No, no sign of him—but we only dropped in to leave some papers, we haven’t seen anyone. Let’s get you up to your room while they find Evans. Daktar ko bulaiye,’ one twin called down to the jemahdar.
That was Callum, Alistair thought, waving away the offer of an arm in support. The responsible brother, by all accounts. ‘I can manage, but come and have a chota peg while they find him. It’s early, but I could do with it.’
They followed him up to his suite and settled themselves while his sirdar went for brandy. ‘Horse put its foot in a hole?’ Daniel asked.
‘Nothing so ordinary. I damn nearly collided with Lady Perdita, who was riding as if she’d a fox in her sights. I reined in hard to stop a crash and the horse over balanced. She wasn’t hurt,’ he added as Callum opened his mouth. ‘Interesting coincidence, meeting her here. My family are neighbours to hers, but it is years since I have seen her.’
‘Did you quarrel in those days?’ Daniel asked, earning himself a sharp kick on the ankle from his brother.
‘Ah, you noticed a certain friction? When we were children I teased her, as boys will torment small and unprepossessing females who tag around after them. I was not aware she was in India.’
‘Oh, well, after the elopement,’ Daniel began. ‘Er … you did know about that?’
‘Of course,’ Alistair said. Well, he had heard about a scandal yesterday. That was near enough the truth, and he was damnably curious all of a sudden.
‘No harm in speaking of it then, especially as you know the family. My cousin wrote all about it. Lady P. ran off with some fellow, furious father found them on the road to Gretna, old Lady St George was on hand to observe and report on every salacious detail—all the usual stuff and a full-blown scandal as a result.’
‘No so very bad if Lord Wycombe caught them,’ Alistair said casually as the manservant came back, poured brandy and reported that the doctor had gone out, but was expected back soon.
‘Well, yes, normally even Lady St George could have been kept quiet, I expect. Only trouble was, they’d set out from London and Papa caught them halfway up Lancashire.’
‘Ah.’ One night, possibly two, alone with her lover. A scandal indeed. ‘Why didn’t she marry the fellow?’ Wycombe was rich enough and influential enough to force almost anyone, short of a royal duke, to the altar and to keep their mouths shut afterwards. A really unsuitable son-in-law could always be shipped off to a fatally unhealthy spot in the West Indies later.
‘She wouldn’t have him, apparently. Refused point blank. According to my cousin she said he snored, had the courage of a vole and the instincts of a weasel and while she was quite willing to admit she had made a serious mistake she had no intention of living with it. So her father packed her off here to stay with her aunt, Lady Webb.’
‘Daniel,’ Callum snapped, ‘you are gossiping about a lady of our acquaintance.’
‘Who is perfectly willing to mention it herself,’ his twin retorted. ‘I heard her only the other day at the picnic. Miss Eppingham said something snide about scandalous goings-on and Lady Perdita remarked that she was more than happy to pass on the benefits of her experience if it prevented Miss Eppingham making a cake of herself over Major Giddings, who, she could assure her, had the morals of a civet cat and was only after Miss E.’s dowry. I don’t know how I managed not to roar with laughter.’
That sounded like attack as a form of defence, Alistair thought as Daniel knocked back his brandy and Callum shook his head at him. Dita surely couldn’t be so brazen as not to care and he rather admired the courage it showed to acknowledge the facts and bite back. He also admired Wycombe’s masterly manner of dealing with the scandal. He had got his daughter out of London society and at the same time had placed her in a situation where it would be well known that she was not carrying a child. Three months’ passage on an East Indiaman gave no possibility of hiding such a thing.
But what the devil was Dita doing running off with a man