Chapter One

London, 1856

Susannah was wearing the corset. From his vantage point, looking in her window from the balcony of his townhouse next door, Carlyle Jameson could see it and more. What a glorious woman.

She heaved a sigh and Carlyle almost stopped breathing. Still partly concealed by the camisole that she wore underneath it, her full breasts were nicely cupped and lifted high by the frilled top.

His gaze moved to the ribbon rosebuds sewn into the frill, which put him in mind of nipples he could not see. Carlyle had to adjust his trousers when Susannah toyed absently with one rosebud, waiting for Lakshmi, her Indian maid, to finish loosening her laces in back.

Susannah slipped a hand beneath the ribbed silk, rubbing her skin. “One can scarcely breathe in these things,” she said over her shoulder to the maid, “though this one is pretty.”

Carlyle would have to agree. The corset was dangerously pretty. Lakshmi had concealed a fortune in gems in it before all three of them had left India never to return. Susannah had no idea and he had only found out afterward.

The maid had hidden the thing among the clothes in Susannah’s trunks. Once in London, Lakshmi had confessed everything and shown the corset to Carlyle, whom she regarded as her protector. He had been in a way. But he had no idea what to do about the gems, and told her to put it back where it was.

Certainly he had never expected to see Susannah wearing it. Or any other corset. A few minutes ago, thinking she was at the theater, Carlyle had come out onto the balcony that overlooked the back gardens of their side-by-side houses and happened to glance that way.

The dangerous corset fit her perfectly. In fact, it was a marvel of its kind, a hybrid of British rigor and a very Indian love of ornament, made of pink silk. Each of the ribbon rosebuds had its own stem of seed pearls, further adorned with openwork leaves and fanciful tendrils and hundreds more seed pearls covered the corset’s numerous ribs-applied by Lakshmi in hopes of interfering with a woman’s fine sense of touch. The padded ribs concealed rubies and sapphires, while the ribbon rosebuds hid diamonds from the mines of Golconda, six in all.

He wondered why Susannah had donned it tonight-perhaps it was only a whim. Her maid could not very well refuse her.

Susannah plucked at a thread too fine for him to see. “Oh dear. A few of the pearls have come loose.”

The maid circled around her to look, clucking with distress.

“I shall fix it. You cannot sew by candlelight, Lakshmi.”

The maid begged to differ, apparently, murmuring something he couldn’t hear that made Susannah give in. “Oh, if you must. But wait until morning-I insist. Perhaps the sun will appear tomorrow.”

Ah. He heard the sadness in her voice. The gray skies and cold, rainy weather of England oppressed her. That was to be expected for someone who had lived all her life until now in the sensual, enfolding heat of India.

He watched as Lakshmi came around her mistress to unhook the front of the corset and remove it. She folded the thing with some difficulty-it was quite stiff-and set it on the chest of drawers. Then she hovered nearby, not wanting to leave the room for reasons Carlyle could certainly understand.

He had to smile. Kind to a fault, Susannah was waving her maid away.

“That is all the help I need, Lakshmi. Thank you. You may go to bed.”

The Indian woman nodded and withdrew, casting one last glance at the corset. With her gone, Carlyle felt even more like a bounder for continuing to watch Susannah. He too glanced at the corset on the dresser, as if that gave him a reason.

Hah. You would trade all the gems in it-no, all the gems in the world-for a kiss from Susannah. One perfect kiss. But the gems are not yours and neither is she.

He looked back at her. Now clad in only a thin camisole from the waist up and billowing petticoats from the waist down, Susannah seated herself before a mirror mounted on a small table and began to unpin her hair. Down it came in waves of rich, dark brown that made Carlyle long to feel its heavy softness running through his fingers.

How delightful it would be to kiss the nape of her neck until her lips parted. Her eyes would close with dreamy pleasure…Carlyle chided himself again for thinking such things about her, innocent that she was.

Susannah picked up a brush and began to run it through her hair, her beautiful breasts moving with every stroke.

He was mesmerized-and he was on fire with lust. Her rounded rump, evident even under several petticoats, shifted on the padded stool as she leaned forward, pouting at her reflection, idly brushing her hair back over her shoulders. The brown waves fell to her slender waist.

Susannah set down the brush and picked up a bottle of eau de cologne, squeezing its tasseled bulb to spray a fine mist over her bosom and neck. Her dampened camisole made her nipples stand out underneath it, as pink and tight as the ribbon rosebuds on her cast-aside corset. She shivered, chilled by the draft from the open window behind her.

Carlyle would have walked through a brick wall at that moment to have her, to claim her body, to hear her whisper words of love in answer to his own…he shut his eyes to regain his equilibrium, breathing deeply.

He opened them. Susannah was reaching out through the open window to close the shutters. Thank God she did not see him, even though he was less than ten feet away. Lit from behind, her upper body was a curving silhouette beneath her camisole. With her hair tumbling around her face, her expression held a mysterious tenderness, as if she expected a lover to come to her that very night.

Then, reaching out with both hands, she pulled the shutters in. He heard her latch them, then close the window.

Carlyle sighed. He would have to be careful to make no sound when he went inside.

Susannah settled herself once more on the padded stool, rubbing her bare arms to warm them. The fragrance of the garden, even filtered through the sooty air of London, had brought to mind a night in India.

She and Carlyle Jameson had been waiting for the moon to rise in an open-air pavilion of pierced stone, looking out over a reflecting pool. A palace musician began an evening raga, whose haunting melody reached its climax just as the moon appeared, casting silvery light over the water.

It had been a magical moment-and she had almost thought then that Carlyle would kiss her. But, watched as they were by her old ayah a few yards away and a couple of miscellaneous aunties pretending not to notice a thing, he had only smiled.

She had been rather put out, although she could not say that Carlyle had refused her, since she hadn’t offered him anything. As she remembered it, she had been explaining the intricacies of the Indian musical scale…and then suddenly she’d thought about being kissed. By him.

She still wanted him to. But he seemed to want to marry her off to the highest bidder in London, something she was not at all sure she desired.

Growing up in a maharajah’s palace in Jaipur, Susannah had enjoyed a great deal of freedom, especially since her mother, a girl of eighteen when she had married Susannah’s father, had died so young. She’d had the benefit of an excellent, if somewhat improvisational education and the run of the maharajah’s library, which boasted innumerable volumes, some quite rare and some quite scandalous, on every subject under the sun, including love.

Love. Had she found a chance to sin-she hadn’t-she would have been only an auntie away from discovery. There was no end of them in India, where families were large and there was no such thing as privacy.

Certainly Carlyle was the only man she had ever wanted to kiss. The feeling was so strong that it had surprised her. They talked freely, spent happy hours in each other’s company, but he kept a courteous distance, perhaps because he was fifteen years older. She had been just twenty-one then, with no experience of life beyond India, save what she could learn from the illustrated London magazines that sometimes reached Jaipur a year or more after the news in them was truly news.

Good or bad, the world beyond the palace walls had seemed too distant to worry about. Her father’s death had changed all that. Her heart had been shattered.

Almost too numb to feel anything, she’d been grateful for Carlyle’s guidance. He’d followed Mr. Fowler’s instructions to the letter and brought them all from India to this bewildering city, where she knew no one well besides Carlyle. He saw to it that she had whatever she needed and her father’s name opened some-but not all-doors. Alfred Fowler had earned a measure of fame dealing in gems, and the maharajah had kept him on retainer for just that reason. He’d made a small fortune that would have lasted a lifetime in India. But not in London. Therefore, she must marry.

Susannah looked at her reflection as she began to brush her hair again, singing under her breath, an Indian melody from long ago. A lonely woman awaited her lover, who did not come to her-oh, how did it go? The words escaped her. After many months in London, she had forgotten a great deal. There was no one to speak Hindi with, and Lakshmi preferred the dialect of her village.

By a happy accident, on one of their recent excursions, her maid had found a few of her Rajasthan countrymen selling carpets in a cluttered shop. Lakshmi had chattered eagerly with the buxom wife of one, promising to return to the unfamiliar lane into which they had ventured, but Susannah could not remember where it was.

She would have to get a street map of London and try to retrace their path. It would do Lakshmi good to be among people who understood her, to eat familiar food, and be made welcome. The maid was gawked at whenever she went out, and she preferred to stay in the house, hovering over Susannah in a way that was not healthy.