Penelope straightened in the saddle. Not that she needed a champion, of course. She was perfectly capable of fighting her own battles — or unearthing her own spies, if it came down to it.

“Is there really a Guignon?” she asked, at random.

“Very much so. I have it on good authority that he’s been skulking around the province again. That’s why his name came so easily to mind.”

“I wouldn’t have thought you had it in you to lie so effectively,” said Penelope admiringly.

“You were distracted,” said Alex generously. “And on uncertain terrain. I had the advantage of you.”

In one thing, she still had the advantage of him. After an internal wrangle, Penelope said brusquely, “While we’re coming clean, I have a confession to make.”

“If you tell me you’re the Marigold, I won’t believe you.”

“I, um, found something at the tomb that day. A little piece of paper. It was a message, presumably from the Marigold, advising the recipient to await his coming for the great work to be set into motion. Or something like that. I can’t remember the exact phrasing.”

Alex scrubbed his hand against his eyes, looking unutterably bleak. “That proves it, then. Cleave was right.”

“You don’t know that Jack dropped it.” Odd to be talking about a man she had never met on first-name terms, and a nickname, at that. But, then, it would be even odder thinking about him as Mr. Reid. Lieutenant Reid? Penelope had no idea what sort of titles they handed out in Scindia’s armies.

“Then who did? The pixies?”

“French pixies,” agreed Penelope. “Back in Hyderabad without leave. Shall we stop soon? It will be dark before long.”

The real world would be with them soon enough. Penelope refused to spend their last night together on depressing reflections that could only cause one of them pain. This was their last night in Eden and she intended to make the most of it, even if the snakes were already beginning to slither about in the underbrush and half-eaten apples littered the ground beneath the tree, conveying their cursed burden of partial knowledge.

She didn’t need to explain what she meant. He knew. Without another word, he nodded ahead. “If I recall, there’s a lake not fifteen minutes from here. We can camp there.”

They plunged determinedly into mundanities: where to camp, what to eat for dinner. Alex teased Penelope about her cooking and Penelope retorted that if she wasn’t such a good shot there would be nothing for them to eat, and so the yards passed on, and with every hoofbeat, Penelope could hear echoing in her ears, It’s over, it’s over, it’s over .

Not yet, she told herself fiercely. Not yet.

The lake was a small one, tucked away in a copse of banyan trees, the water thick with lily pads bearing brilliantly blue lotus flowers. Penelope’s riding habit had begun its life as a similar color, but three days of dust and grime had turned it into a mottled gray.

“I smell,” said Penelope with disgust, turning her head to sniff at her shoulder. Wearing the same habit for three days in very hot climatic conditions did not do wonders for one’s personal hygiene. She wished she had thought to bring a change of clothes, or at least of linen.

Undaunted, her lover drew her to him, uttering those romantic words, “So do I.”

“Yes, worse than me,” agreed Penelope pertly, and kissed him hard on the lips, before pushing away. She yanked at the buttons on her habit. “I am having a bath, and I am having one now .”

Alex cast a critical eye over the dark water of the lake, made darker by the dropping dusk. “You don’t want to jump into that. You don’t know what’s in it.”

“An apt metaphor for life, I imagine.” Dropping to her knees, Penelope wiggled her fingers in the water to test the temperature. The water felt like heaven against her heat-swollen hands. “One I’ve never heeded.”

“Let me.” Taking a cloth, Alex dipped it into the water, wrung it out, and applied it to Penelope’s sticky shoulders.

“Mmm,” sighed Penelope, tilting back her head, as the cool water trickled down between her breasts. She could feel it mingling with the sweat that already dampened her shift. “Heaven.”

Raising her hands in the air, she waited for him to peel her shift off her body. The night breeze felt heavenly on her sweaty body. The mosquitoes weren’t quite so heavenly, but Penelope was prepared to be philosophical about that. Penelope could feel her skin prickling from the air and the water and pure, undiluted anticipation. Desperately wanting his mouth on her breasts, she thrust her chest out, but perversely, maddeningly, he continued his own set course, dragging the damp cloth down the hollow of her belly, stroking across each hip, before —

Returning to the lake to dip the cloth again in water.

“You really are quite maddening,” she informed him hoarsely.

On one knee, Alex’s dark eyes glinted up at her. “Am I?” he said, decisively wringing out the cloth. The touch of the damp fabric against the inside of one ankle made Penelope shiver. He worked the cloth slowly up the inside of her leg, his eyes intent on hers.

Penelope swallowed hard. “But in a very nice way,” she amended, as the cloth worked its way up the other side, pausing, tantalizingly, just between her legs, brushing and retreating. She bit down hard on her lip, stifling a gasp, as he worked the cloth up between the delicate folds, the moisture of her body mixing with the cool of the lake water while the twisted piece of fabric worked back and forth against a point of extreme sensitivity.

“Very, very nice,” she said breathlessly.

Alex moved lower, his lips following the path of the cloth, and Penelope thankfully gave herself over to thinking of nothing at all.

It was only long afterward, after making love and eating supper and making love again, as they lay together beneath a single blanket, the small flame of their fire reflecting off the waters of the lake, that Alex ignored his own advice and ventured into dangerous waters of quite another variety.

“We should reach the border tomorrow,” he said casually. Too casually.

“Is there any way of making the border move back?” asked Penelope drowsily. “Just a few miles would be nice.”

“I’m afraid not.” Alex’s voice was serious. They were clearly going to have A Talk, whether she wanted to or not.

Penelope buried her head in his chest and wished they could stay this way for always. Without talking about it.

“What happens next?” Alex asked, as she had known he was going to.

“You know what happens,” said Penelope, although she found it far harder to do so than she had three days before. Almost four days now, she corrected herself. She wouldn’t want to cut their time together short by so much as an hour. “You have your work in Hyderabad. Freddy and I will eventually return to London.”

“Do you want to go back?” Alex asked seriously.

Penelope bit her lips. “No,” she admitted.

Funny, that the prospect should seem such a bleak one. Only a month ago, she would have been glad to go back to London, to take tea with Henrietta and Charlotte again and listen to the familiar rant ings of the Dowager Duchess of Dovedale. But she was becoming accustomed to India. She liked it. She liked the strange, spicy food and the sunshine that turned her face to freckles and the curious, gnarled faces of monkeys that scowled and chattered at her from between the branches of the trees.

And she liked Alex. She liked him too much. But that didn’t bear thinking about, so Penelope didn’t. Or, at least, she tried not to. She had always been very good about not thinking about things. It was much easier to act, as rashly as possible, trusting to the resulting ruckus to blot out any danger of reflection or introspection.

Shifting, Alex wrapped his arms more comfortably around her. “You know,” he said, his vocal chords burring against her ear. “There are ways.”

“Ways?”

“I’ve been thinking about it,” he said thoughtfully, “and India is a large country. If you were to retire to the hills for your health — ”

“ — You could come with me?” It was a pretty fairy tale, but that was all it was, no more realistic than one of Charlotte’s novels. She didn’t have a fairy godmother to wave a wand and make it all turn out right.

“Yes.”

Penelope shook her head against his chest. “And leave here? You wouldn’t.” More matter-of-factly, she added, “I wouldn’t want you to. You would hate me before long if you did.”

He paused just a moment too long before answering, long enough to know that her words had struck home. “I wouldn’t hate you.” But he didn’t sound quite as certain as he had before.

Penelope tried not to sound as desolate as she felt. “Resent me, then. It’s close enough. Either way, you would be unhappy. And I would be unhappy for making you unhappy and then we would both be unhappy, and where would we be?”

Together, prompted a dulcet little voice in her head.

“Miserable,” she finished, more forcefully than she had intended. “Stranded out in the hills in disgrace with nothing to do but snap at each other.”

Alex’s hand stroked softly up and down her arm. “Does the disgrace bit bother you?”

Since he had asked it honestly, Penelope did him the courtesy of actually thinking about it before answering, rather than shooting off the flippant answer that came too easily to her lips.

“No,” she said at last, twining her fingers absently through the dark hair on his chest. “I’ve been in disgrace before. I’m very good at being in disgrace,” she added, and was rewarded by the rumble of a chuckle beneath her ear.