Penelope wished, with a burning intensity that balled her hands into fists, that she had allowed him under her skirts that night. She wished she had done everything people whispered of her and more. If she was a whore, shouldn’t she at least have the pleasure of it?

Her nails cut purpled crescents into the skin of her palm.

She had left her gloves back in the bungalow, she realized. Never mind that. She wasn’t going back for them. The thought of having to go back to the bungalow, knowing that that thing was under the same roof, made her stomach cramp with physical pain.

“Lady Frederick?”

Someone else was out walking in the night, walking with a feroc ity that equaled her own, walking like someone trying to escape the devil — or with the devil in him.

Apparently, the entertainment didn’t agree with Captain Reid either. Perhaps he had a bibi hidden away somewhere, too, thought Penelope savagely, tucked away like summer ices stored in a nest of chipped ice, waiting to be taken out and licked to melting, all that fleeting sweetness hidden and hoarded and enjoyed in gluttonous wantonness in a cool and scented room.

Penelope found that she was shaking again, as with the ague.

His eyes narrowing on her, Captain Reid took a quick step forward. “Lady Frederick? Are you unwell?”

“You needn’t concern yourself.” Penelope rubbed her hands hard against her upper arms to warm herself, feeling the flesh cold and clammy beneath her palms. “It’s only a flesh wound. Nothing mortal.”

Captain Reid didn’t seem convinced. “Is there anything I can do for you? Bring you?”

Her dignity? She didn’t think she could get that back, not now, at any rate.

“I’d like to walk a bit. Walk with me, Captain Reid? It’s too lovely a night to be wasted.”

There was an edge to Lady Frederick’s voice that Alex didn’t like, but he fell obediently into step all the same, rather than leave her to walk alone. It was a lovely night, as she had claimed. There had been a ruined pleasure garden on the site where the Residency stood and James had taken it and enlarged it, adding groves of peach and mango, banana trees and toddy palms. Night-blooming flowers lined the paths, perfuming the air with their sweetness. Moonlight silvered the tall pillar of James’s pigeon tower, turning it into something out of myth or fantasy, a ruined palace for a sleeping princess, to be wooed with birdsong and moonshine and borne triumphantly home on a palanquin woven of maiden dreams.

Lady Frederick’s dreams were obviously not pleasant ones. Despite her lip service to the beauties of the scenery, Lady Frederick didn’t seem to notice them. She moved by his side like a sleepwalker, un-speaking, unseeing, caught in a cage of her own thoughts. From time to time, she breathed in deeply, raising her hands to rub them against her arms like Lady Macbeth’s trying to scrub out blood.

“Are you cold?” he asked. “Would you like to go back?”

Beneath lowered lashes, Lady Frederick’s eyes glittered amber. “Why? Am I keeping you from your Lizzy?” she said silkily.

“My who?” Alex tried to figure out what she could be talking about and came up blank. “The only Lizzy of my acquaintance is my sister. I don’t imagine she’s missing me at the moment.”

Lady Frederick stared up at him. A slow smile spread across her face. “I imagine she embroiders you lovely handkerchiefs.”

Those blasted handkerchiefs. He’d had more than his fair share of teasing for those. They had been a birthday present from Kat years ago, marked in hair with his initials. Kat had not been amused when he had wanted to know why she hadn’t just used thread. If he couldn’t appreciate a sentimental gesture, she had told him, she certainly wasn’t going to waste her hair on him, so there.

“No,” he said. “That’s Kat. My other sister. If Lizzy knows how to thread a needle, she’s never shown it.”

Lady Frederick touched a finger lightly to the corner of his lips. “You start to smile when you talk about your family. It suits you.”

Her finger burned against his lips like a brand. Feeling as though he had just drunk too deeply of arrack, Alex stumbled a step back. “Lady Frederick — ”

“Call me Penelope,” she invited, strolling forward for every step he took back, like a tiger prowling after its prey.

It wouldn’t, Alex thought, be all that terrible to be caught.

She was married, Alex reminded himself. And not to him. “And scandalize society?” he said with a mildness he was far from feeling. Every sensible instinct he possessed screamed to sprint back towards the Residency before he did something he might regret. Unfortunately, his more sensible instincts were being rapidly shouted down by the rest of him.

Lady Frederick flung out her arms towards the deer park, with its silent audience of sheep and elk and blackbuck. “What society is there to scandalize?”

As if in agreement, a mynah bird gave an emphatic hoot from the branches of a nearby banana tree.

“Your husband,” said Alex bluntly. Lord Frederick struck him as the sort who didn’t have any interest in the contents of his own toy box until he caught someone else playing with them, at which point he would care very, very deeply.

“Oh, Freddy .” Lady Frederick dismissed him with a word, but she stopped her forward progress with the abruptness of a child’s toy pulled back on its string.

“I’m not on such familiar terms with him.”

“Lord Frederick, then, if you please.” Lady Frederick took his measure with a sidelong glance. “But I expect you don’t. He doesn’t please you at all.” In a meditative tone that brought gooseflesh to Alex’s arms, she said, “The question is, do I?”

He could feel the tension in the air around them like a premonition of danger. He forced his voice to hardness. “What is this about?”

Lady Frederick wasn’t the least bit put off. Her eyes glinted yellow in the moonlight, tiger’s eyes. “Me. You. A moonlit night. I can think of better uses for it than talking about Freddy. I can think of better uses for it than talking about anything at all.”

She leaned up on her toes, erasing the few inches’ difference in their height. He could feel the brush of her lace frill against his buttons, a startlingly erotic sound in the still night. Her breath whispered across his jaw, a promise of things to come.

An empty promise. It felt practiced. A seduction repeated by rote, no more personal than a tiger’s kill.

Alex rocked back hard on his heels. “What are you trying to do?” he demanded.

“Seduce you, of course,” said Lady Frederick — Penelope — tracing one blunt-nailed finger along his shirtfront. “Is it working?”

If she had looked any lower, she wouldn’t have had to ask that. Alex wondered, with the bit of his brain that remained in proper working order, what in the devil was going on. One minute he had been pacing, brooding about Jack and Cleave and Wellesley, surely the least erotic subject known to man, and the next there was Lady Frederick — Penelope — shimmering among the moonflowers like a vision out of a Mussulman’s heaven. All that was needed were a few piles of cushions and someone playing the zither.

“Is this a game?” he demanded hoarsely.

“It could be,” she said, wetting her lips with her tongue so they glistened in the moonlight. “A very satisfying one.”

Just the way she pronounced the word made him harden.

“You,” he said, feeling like Odysseus tying himself to the mast and plugging his ears against the sirens, “have a husband.”

“Not much of one.” Beneath the seductive purr, there was a definite tinge of pique. Frowning, Alex pulled back. She clapped back on a bright social smile, like a comedienne donning a mask. “Marital fidelity is entirely out of fashion, you know. It wouldn’t do to be less than à la mode.”

Alex looked at her bright smile and her shadowed eyes and knew that she lied. “I don’t believe that. And neither do you.”

“Freddy does.”

Beneath the pretended brightness, her voice was strained, as tense as her shoulders and the odd, watchful glint in her eyes, so foreign to honest desire. There had been rumors of late, in the bazaars, that the new Englishman had taken Nur Bai into keeping — not in hired quarters in the town, with all the inconvenience of having to obtain permission to enter the city after dark, but in his own zenana. Alex had dismissed the rumors as just that, rumors. It just wasn’t done. Not when one had a wife. Discreet rooms in the town, yes. But not in one’s own home. A man would have to hold his wife in utter contempt in order to contemplate a move like that.

Alex looked at Lady Frederick’s pinched, white face and knew that he had been wrong.

“That’s what this is about, isn’t it? Not me, not the moonlight.” He felt vaguely ill himself, with disappointment or disgust or both. Disgust, he told himself. Disgust at Lord Frederick’s wanton cruelty. He had no right to disappointment. “Christ . I should have known.”

“You’ll blaspheme but you won’t indulge in a spot of adultery? I call that hypocritical.” Lady Frederick trailed a finger down his cheek, aiming for his lips.

Alex called it too much wine. Grasping her arm by the wrist, he held it suspended in the air between them. “Don’t do anything you’ll regret in the morning. He’s not worth it.”

Lady Frederick twisted her arm away, taking a step back. Her face was bitter in the darkness. “You mean I’m not worth it.”

“You’re worth ten of him,” he said roughly.

Her lips twisted in a lopsided mockery of a smile. “Very kind of you, Captain Reid. Your condescension overwhelms me.”