The Tiger's Lady (44 page)

A man who gave no hint of feeling anything for her beyond raw male lust.

Barrett felt her face flame at the discovery, feeling vulnerable, trapped, like a bird caught on the ground with a broken wing.

Love?
What did she know of love? Even her own name was denied to her, along with the details of her past. How, in the midst of that dark, empty universe could she possibly summon up an all-encompassing emotion like love?

But like the miracle it was, love unfolded, plunging deep roots into the barren, rocky soil of her being and casting its brilliant buds up to flower in the warmth of hope. Trembling, she felt its green leaves unfurl, felt its soft, trembling petals unfold in lush silence, casting their perfume into her very soul.

Her fingers tightened convulsively on the wooden rim of her cot. A hot tear trailed down her cheek as the full import of her discovery washed over her.

Longing welled up in her. She knew a raw need to feel those strong, scarred hands tangled in her hair as his lips melted into hers, drinking every cry. To feel his hard body crushed to hers, just as they had been that night on the beach beneath the dark canopy of heaven while the fish had sung to her of their magic.

Barrett heard that strange lilting song again now, pouring through her veins, flooding out from her heart in a rich, cascading torrent. Every note and beat held a different memory, a different emotion. Put together they formed a dense, wild harmony, like her feelings for this strange, brooding man.

Love?
If so then it was not by her choice, and ran against all reason.

But it was also real and undeniable.

Who was she to give her heart, she who had no past and little more of a future? And why to
this
man, who was as hard and impenetrable as the jungle itself?

She frowned, searching for answers and finding none. Instead she found a thousand memories: Pagan hauling her to safety from the edge of the boar pit; Pagan, his face bloody and calm as he taunted Ruxley’s men so he could draw their attention away from her; Pagan guiding her ear to the branch slanting into the black waters of the lagoon, while rippling notes of magic danced around them.

And always, in back of those images there drifted something else, an unexplained lightness, a warmth of familiarity that she could never quite trace to its source.

Memory? Or simply the self-delusion of a desperate mind?

She sighed, her head beginning to ache just as it had on the trail.

At the desk, the tall Englishman released his map, letting the scroll ends snap together. Barrett watched him frown, his eyes narrowing on the curved hilt of a native dagger lying at the edge of his camp desk.

Her lashes drifted down. She feigned sleep as Pagan muttered something beneath his breath, his face hard. For long moments he watched the lamplight play off the dagger’s jeweled hilt.

Suddenly he looked up. Without warning his dark eyes swept over her.

So intense, so piercing was his gaze that Barrett was certain he must have penetrated her masquerade. But no word left his lips, which flattened to a thin, bitter line.

And this time she read the darkness in his face, the unmistakable hardness at his jaw. Regret she saw written there, along with the weight of harsh and terrible memories. All that she saw, raw and dark on his face now that he felt unobserved, and the naked force of his pain reached out to grip her heart like a vise.

His hands shifted, tightening on the dagger. A muscle flashed at his jaw.

Strangely enough, it was Barrett who first noticed the line of crimson drops trailing down his fingers and pooling up over the map.

Her breath caught sharply and her eyes flashed open. She jerked upright, her eyes huge and luminous. “You—you’ve cut yourself!”

As if in a dream their eyes met, onyx probing haunted teal. Barrett felt her breath squeezed from her lungs as his gaze pored over her, dark and hungry.

A shudder seemed to work through him.

He frowned, looking down at the red drops welling up over his desk. Slowly he released the dagger and opened his hand, staring silently at the gash crossing the base of his thumb. For a moment his lips twisted at some dark, private thought. Then the curtain fell over his features once more.

His expression unchanged, he drew a handkerchief from his pocket and wrapped it around the wound. Then he looked up at Barrett.

The look that passed between them then was electric, tangible, dark with churning emotions. Desire was there, along with wariness, urgency, and regret.

But greatest of all was need, a need so palpable that it throbbed and pulsed with a life of its own.

Wide-eyed, Barrett met that piercing gaze. Vulnerable in the wake of her recent discovery, she felt her body tingle and stir with a strange restlessness. It was only because of the danger they had shared, she told herself.

Liar,
a soft voice whispered.
It is far more than that.

Dry-mouthed, light-headed, she faced Pagan, unable to move, barely able to breathe. In the hot still air of the tent the seconds squeezed past like hours while Barrett’s heart thundered in her ears.

Impossible,
she tried to tell herself.
This cannot be happening!

But the languor that stole through her limbs argued otherwise, as did the dizziness that bubbled through her blood.

She was frozen with the force of his need, and her knowledge that she would be unable to fight it. The thought kindled chill sparks of fear, but even that was not enough to shake her free of the mesmerizing force of his eyes.

In raw, tense silence Pagan pushed slowly to his feet. As he moved toward her his massive body blocked the lamp, casting the tent into darkness.

She shivered, feeling a premonition of danger.

When his fingers traced her brow, light as a bird’s wing, heavy as the weight of the ocean, Barrett was still shivering.

“Better,
Angrezi?”

She could not have spoken if she had to, not with his warm, hair-dusted chest only inches away, not with his taut thigh close enough to touch. His force was palpable, all the hard, sculpted planes of his face thrown into dark, chiseled beauty.

His fingers slid over her cheek and Barrett closed her eyes, feeling ecstasy pour through her, shard-sharp.

What was happening to her?

“Why didn’t you tell me you were so weak?”

She swallowed, forcing her swirling world to rights. “I—I would have managed.”

“Managed?
You were nearly dead on your feet, woman. When did you mean to ask for help?”

Her eyes flashed open. “Never.” Even in that faint voice there was stubbornness and implacability.

“Little fool.” Pagan’s voice was low and harsh. His fingers brushed a stray strand from her cheek, then slid deep into the warm curve of her neck.

Her response was immediate and totally instinctive. She shuddered, feeling her heart slam against her ribs, the fire of his touch lurching all the way to her toes.

She barely managed to catch back a moan as his other hand cupped her shoulder.

“What is it?” Pagan bent close, his fingers sinking deep into her hair.

She blinked, her eyes dim and unfocused. Somehow Pagan couldn’t tear his gaze from those haunted eyes. Uncertainty and something else marred their liquid depths, and he was stunned to realize that other thing was passion.

She was still sitting, rigid, when he eased down beside her and drew her against his chest. He searched her face, and then somehow his eyes dropped to her mouth. Mesmerized, her own eyes fell, tracing the hard, sensual flare of his lower lip.

Heat coursed through Pagan’s body, pooling thickly in his groin.

He caught her to him, forcing her face up to his. His thumb traced the curve of her lip. “That was a bloody stupid thing to do on the trail. When will you begin to stop fighting me and accept my advice?”

“Ad-advice? Or your royal command?” But the protest was watery and faint.

“Perhaps I
was
a touch high-handed,” Pagan conceded, offering her the ghost of a smile.

“Arrogant. In-insulting.” Her voice wavered. “Completely impossible.” Abruptly her eyes darkened, strangely uncertain. “I—I would have died if you hadn’t come, wouldn’t I?”

Silence. Then a muscle flashed at Pagan’s jaw.

It was all the answer she needed.

“It—it seems I owe you my life. The third time, I make it now. Strange, you hardly seem cut out for the role of guardian angel.”

Pagan’s eyes narrowed. “There are many things you don’t know about me,
Angrezi.
” His voice flowed over her like a dark, midnight tide. “But now at least I’ll have time to teach you. And I don’t mean to let you out of my clutches. Not for a long, long time.”

Sometime in the long seconds his touch changed, slower, richer.

Hot, endlessly hot.

“I suppose … I suppose you mean to frighten me,” she said huskily.

“Doesn’t it?” His fingers traced slow, heated circles against her hair.

Barrett felt her bones turning to mush. “No. No, I don’t believe it does.”

“Ah, but it should, Cinnamon.” His voice was velvet over small, rough stones. “It should terrify you.”

Barrett shivered as his fingers found the knot of tense muscles beneath her ear and kneaded them gently, expertly.

With the skills he had learned from a thousand women in a thousand, heated bouts of love, she thought dimly. No, he was not jesting when he warned her of her danger. “And what exactly should I fear,
Tiger-sahib!
That you will beat me cruelly?” Driven by some inexplicable recklessness, she let her eyes fall to his mouth. “That you will offer me unimaginable torment? That you will break me to your will?”

“Far worse,
Angrezi.
I will fire your blood until you moan my name and forget everything but how good it feels between us. For I mean to learn every hot, sweet inch of you, and when I’m done I’ll learn you again, with tongue and teeth.” His eyes bored deep inside her, hard with savage hunger. “I mean to have you, Cinnamon. In every way a man can have a woman. Until you wear my scent on your skin, my teeth marks on your velvet thighs. Until dreams of my body haunt your every hour of sleep and torment your days.”

Barrett’s breath caught. The air around them seemed to shimmer, charged with tension.
You already have me,
she wanted to answer.
You already have stolen my peace of mind, invaded my days and nights.

Only her pride kept her silent.

His rough thumb traced her lower lip. “You know, don’t you? You can feel already how it will be between us.”

Barrett swallowed. The steel of his rampant sex grazed her hip. Her breath caught, and madness coursed through her.

For it
was
madness. Total madness.

The jungle coiled and pressed around them, deadly as krait and cobra. How could she think of anything but survival at such a time?

But maybe this
was
part of surviving. Maybe she would only feel alive when she was caught tightly in Pagan’s arms.

Had she been a different woman—a woman less proud or more experienced—Barrett would have said as much. But she could not.

Seized with panic, she caught a jerky breath, feeling heat flood her cheeks.

She closed her eyes, bewildered, unable to face his probing stare. She was only Ruxley’s latest scheme, after all. How could Pagan think her anything else?

With her eyes shut, she did not see the wild hope that flared in Pagan’s face.

His fingers slipped from her hair and she shivered at the pain of his withdrawal.
Better this way, fool,
she tried to tell herself.
Far better. The man, like Caro’s Byron, is “mad, bad, and dangerous.”

Let it go.

“Cinnamon.”

When the first gentle brush of air met her neck, she barely noticed, too caught up in her own efforts at control. Only when the current swept her bared chest did she stiffen.

Pagan’s lips traced the curve of her ear. Her eyes flashed open. She saw Pagan’s long fingers at the collar of her shirt. Her breath caught as she watched those fingers slip down, slowly, reverently, peeling back white cloth to bare the blushing swell of breast and rosy nipple beneath.

She heard Pagan groan deep in his throat. His strong fingers rose, spanning her fullness, claiming the peaked bud at her center.

Barrett shuddered as he found the proud thrust of her nipple and eased his fingers around her. Heat flared as she watched his dark hands play over her white skin.

She had to stop him, stop this. It was wrong to feel so wild, so reckless. To be so lost to everything but his touch.

She opened her mouth to tell him so, to make him stop, but all that emerged was a long, heated sigh as his other hand rose, easing off her shirt and then claiming her other breast.

A strange humming rose in her ears. She shifted restlessly, an alien tension coiling through her limbs.

“You are fire itself,
Angrezi,
” he whispered. “Can you feel how perfectly you fill my hands?” He palmed her rich curves, idling over her in rhythmic circles until she shivered and arched back against him. “And now you feel what it is to burn—just as you make my own blood burn.”

“Pagan.” It was the only word left to her, the only thing that made any sense in the trackless storm of sensation where she pitched and swayed. “What—what madness is this?”

“Hush and I’ll tell you, beauty. With many words and in many tongues. But none will be half so beautiful as you are.” He shifted and slanted a hot trail of kisses down her neck.

Her head fell back. Without thought she opened herself to him, her tawny hair spilling over his chest.

In raw, dark words he spoke her beauty, in strange phrases that Barrett understood nothing of. But she felt every beat of magic, every hot nuance of feeling. And when at last his mouth slid over her swollen, aching crest, she moaned, wild with need.

“Yes, little falcon, feel my heat. Feel my fire in your blood.”

Time wrenched to a frozen, breathless halt.

In dark compulsion Barrett’s eyes opened. She watched, spellbound, as Pagan’s tongue circled one dusky, swollen bud. Dark and feral, his eyes found hers. He watched her as he took her into his mouth, suckling fiercely.