Chapter 40 #2
“I wasn’t avoiding you,” Constance protested. “I was sleeping! It has been a very busy week, Aai.”
Padma’s eyes glittered like the gold at her wrists and ears. “You and your companions did well.”
Constance set her hands on her hips with a righteous flash of temper. “Then where does the favor tab stand?”
Padma’s expression was as serene as the goddess Lakshmi as she responded. “I believe we can call it even.”
Constance felt a wash of relief.
“And have you learned anything from your adventures here in India?” Padma casually pressed.
“Of course. I know a great deal more about municipal water systems. And Subhas’s friend Jignesh showed me some very interesting new knife maneuvers.”
Padma’s gaze drifted over to where Neil was buried under an additional three children. “That is not exactly what I had in mind.”
Constance’s nerves jumped. “It’s not?”
“Oh!” Padma exclaimed lightly. “That’s the nephew of the Maharaja of Sonepur over by the dessert table. Not too hard to look at, is he?”
Constance involuntarily jerked her head toward the fellow in question, an admittedly handsome man with gleaming hair and a white smile.
“It’s too bad you are set on your English scholar, as Mr. Naru is exceptionally wealthy with an excellent pedigree,” Padma continued. “Though you might at least have a little chat with him. It isn’t too late for you to change your mind, after all.”
Panic whirled up in Constance at her grandmother’s casual suggestion.
Aware that Padma was watching her, Constance plastered an empty smile on her face. “Dr. Fairfax and I are thoroughly devoted to each other, so there’s no need for any of that. If you’ll excuse me?”
The storm inside of her hadn’t settled—only tightened. Constance needed air.
She pushed through the crowd, nearly bumping into Vijay’s younger brother on her way.
She spun past him as he struggled to right his plate of chenna poda. “Sorry, Uncle Balaram! Lovely party!”
Neil glanced up at her with a frown from beneath the pile of her cousins. Constance ignored him, bursting out the door into the night.
She found herself on a pillared passage that overlooked another wing of the palace, framed by a silent courtyard and clandestine gardens.
The only light came from a lamp at the far end of the walkway, cloaking Constance in beneficent shadows as she grasped the balustrade and willed her pulse to steady.
The air was softly cooler than it had been in the salon, the sky violet with the gloaming. Distance dulled the roar of the party to a muffled murmur.
The pounding pressure in her head lingered, refusing to release her.
A footstep sounded against the floor.
Constance whirled, instinctively moving into one of her jiu jitsu stances—only to see Neil standing behind her in his saffron scarf and dinner jacket.
“Are you all right?” he asked carefully.
Constance dropped her martial pose. “I’m fine.”
Neil regarded her with a hint of wariness. “If I join you, are you going to try to throw me onto the floor?”
“What would I do that for?”
“You have before.”
Soft moonlight glinted off his spectacles. The fine lines at the corners of his eyes were drawn with concern.
The tangled nest of emotion inside of her twisted uncomfortably.
Constance turned away from him, planting herself at the railing.
Neil rested his elbows on the stone beside her as he gazed out over the palace. “It is a bit much in there—in a perfectly lovely way, I mean. But one does occasionally feel the need to reassert one’s personal space.”
Constance absorbed the familiar lines of his profile as she plucked a piece of chenna poda from his hair. “You’re very good with them.”
“With who?”
“Children.”
Neil gave her a wary look. “I can’t say I’ve had a great deal of experience.”
“Then I suppose you’re a natural.”
The comment was light and easy, the sort of thing Constance might naturally say to her best friend’s brother.
Good old Stuffy.
Any further tease caught against the sudden tightness in her throat.
Silence stretched, itching up into tension. Constance fought to understand where it came from. She had never been tense around Neil before.
Perhaps it was because she had kissed him, wildly and with ferocious abandon.
“Have you given it any thought, then?” Neil asked awkwardly.
Given it any thought?
She thought about kissing him all the time.
“How we’re going to end this,” Neil elaborated.
It felt as though she hit the ground.
The jarring impact took her breath—not that it wasn’t a reasonable question.
Their arrangement was only meant to last until the threat of a forced marriage was behind her, and the question of how they might reasonably extricate themselves from it still remained.
Neil was perfectly within his rights to ask about it.
So why did the question make her feel so wretched?
She ought to tell him that her Aai had only just renewed the threat a moment before. Or she might reasonably put things off. Let’s just give it another two weeks, or perhaps we can worry about that when we leave Nandapur.
Instead, with a flare of anger and an incongruous stab of hurt, Constance gave an answer like a jab from one of her knives. “However you like, I suppose.”
Neil straightened from the railing. “However I like? I’m not the one who asked for this.”
His response added fuel to her anger—which was a far more comfortable emotion than the others roiling inside of her.
Constance embraced it. “As I recall, I very clearly told you I’d changed my mind.”
Neil’s expression shuttered as he stepped back. “Right. I made it my mess. So I’ll clean it up.”
He turned and walked away.
Constance stepped after him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Neil whirled back. “Does it matter?”
It shouldn’t.
The thought felt like a wound—but this fake engagement should never have happened. It had always been a bad idea, and it had been Neil who had plummeted them both into it. Why shouldn’t he be the one to get them out?
Constance knew all of that was true—and yet part of her still rebelled fiercely against the idea.
“You might do it wrong,” she shot back.
Neil let out a helpless, terrible laugh. His eyes were hollow behind his spectacles.
“Connie, if there is one thing in all of this we can be sure of, it’s that I’m probably going to do it wrong.”
Anger burst through her. “Don’t say that.”
“Because it’s not true?” Neil pressed mercilessly.
The veranda seemed to grow smaller. Constance’s head throbbed. “Why are we even talking about this right now?”
It took Neil a moment to answer.
She raised her gaze to him again as the silence lingered. His face was pale—his shoulders heavy as if burdened with some terrible weight.
“Because I’m a wretched actor. I’ve never been able to hide what I’m really feeling. And I just don’t know how long I can go on doing this.”
The words stung her with an exquisitely sharp hurt.
How long I can go on doing this.
“You mean pretending to be engaged to me,” Constance pushed coldly.
Neil gazed down at her through the cobalt gloom. “Yes, Connie. Pretending.”
The hurt stabbed deeper, writhing its way through years of other hurts—comments about being difficult, or a little too much sometimes.
Constance lashed out against it with the only weapon she could find. “It didn’t feel like pretending in the stepwell.”
Neil burst out with the opposite of the reaction she had expected.
“That’s exactly the bloody point!” he shouted, throwing out his arms as the words echoed down the empty walkway.
Constance shook her head, grasping the railing. “I don’t understand.”
Neil’s voice was raw and unsteady. “I know.”
And just like that, he spun on his heel and walked away.
For a moment, Constance stared after him, frozen in place by surprise. Then the surprise crumbled in a rising wave of furious desperation.
“Oh no, you don’t,” Constance growled—and ran at him.
She caught him by his golden scarf, whirling him around to face her—and hauled him down for a kiss.
He stiffened with shock for a breath—and then met her with a hot, wild fervor.
His hands plunged into her hair, scattering pins to the stones as he ravaged her lips. Constance groaned into his mouth with desperate approval and tore open the buttons on his waistcoat.
She ran her hands up the fabric of his shirt, feeling the taut planes of his chest—then burned with frustration at the barrier between her and what she wanted.
She yanked the shirt from his trousers and tried again.
Her fingers glided up smooth skin. Lean muscle flexed beneath her touch with bare control.
Neil set his hands to her hips and drove her backwards, Constance blindly stumbling until she bumped up against one of the pillars.
Then he grabbed her thighs and lifted them around his waist.
Blinding, ravenous sensation flooded through her. Constance used the power in her legs to lift herself higher, tugging back Neil’s head and plunging her tongue into his mouth.
Neil’s scent enveloped her—ink and paper, amber and cinnamon. Hot, strong hands gripped her through the silk of her skirt as he pressed himself closer.
Everything about it felt so bloody good… and Constance wanted more.
She hooked her ankles behind his hips and bit his earlobe.
Neil’s curse was accented by the soft crash of shattering porcelain.
Constance looked over Neil’s shoulder to where Ellie stared at her with wide-eyed shock, a broken plate of pastries lying at her feet.
Adam stepped out from the doorway behind her and took in the scene with a glance.
Constance burned with the knowledge of what he saw.
Neil stood with his shirt untucked and his spectacles askew. Constance’s dress was pulled down at the shoulder where Neil had been tracing lines of fire across her collarbone with his lips. Her hair had fallen into an abandoned mess.
Her legs were still locked around his body.
Neil released his hold on her thighs, and Constance’s feet dropped back to the floor. She took a quick, shaking step back as she tugged up her sleeve.
Her forced, cheerful tone rang with jarring falseness. “Oh. There you two are.”
Neil said nothing. He made no effort to right himself. He just stared at his sister helplessly—and then turned to Constance.
His look pinned her in place as the heat faded from the places where he had touched her skin. She tried to read the poetic lines of his face, wondering urgently what he seemed to want—no, need—to say.
Aai’s voice sang from the door to the hall. “Kondi!”
Neil spun on his heel and ran.
Constance froze with the sense of being torn in four different directions. All of them felt important—but she knew without a shadow of a doubt which one mattered most.
She looked to her friends urgently.
“Stall for me!” she begged Ellie and Adam. “Please!”
Then she bolted after Neil.