‘Dita! Dita, are you all right?’ She looked round, dazed and a little dizzy, to see her friend supporting their weeping chaperon. ‘I don’t think Mrs Bastable can walk back.’
‘Rickshaw,’ Alistair snapped at their two porters. ‘Two. Can you help Lady Perdita, Miss Heydon?’ As Averil’s hand came under her elbow he scooped Mrs Bastable up and followed the porters out of the market.
‘Oh, my,’ Averil said with a laugh that broke on a sob. ‘She’s gone all pink. At least it has stopped her weeping.’
‘Are you all right?’ Better to think about Averil than what might have happened to the child, to Alistair, to her.
‘Me? Oh, yes. I’ve feathers sticking in me and doubtless any number of bruises, but if it wasn’t for you I don’t know what would have happened. You are a heroine, Dita.’
‘No, I’m not,’ she protested. ‘I’m shaking like a leaf and I would like to follow Mrs Bastable’s example and have hysterics right here and now.’ I wish he was holding me. I wish …
Mrs Bastable sank into the rickshaw with a moan. ‘I’ll get in with her,’ Averil said. ‘I have a vinaigrette in my reticule and a handkerchief.’
Dita held on to the side of the other rickshaw while Alistair got Averil settled. She would like to sit down, but she didn’t think she could climb in unaided. Her legs had lost all their strength and the bustling street seemed to be growing oddly distant.
‘Don’t faint on me now.’ Alistair scooped her up, climbed into the rickshaw and sat down with her still in his arms.
‘Can’t I?’ she murmured against his chest. ‘I would like to, I think. But I never have before.’
‘Very well, if you want to.’ There was the faintest thread of amusement in his voice and he shifted on the seat so he could get both arms around her as it tilted back and the man began to trot forwards between the shafts.
‘Perhaps I won’t. This is nice.’ That was he said when he kissed me on the maidan. Nice. ‘Where’s my bonnet?’
‘Goodness knows. Lie still, Dita.’
‘Hmm? Why?’ He is very strong, all those muscles feel so good. His chest was broad, his arms were reassuring and his thighs … she really must stop thinking about his thighs.
‘Never mind.’ He was definitely amused now, although there was something else in his voice. Shock, of course. Alistair wasn’t made of stone and that had been a terrifying few minutes.
‘You are all right, aren’t you?’ she asked after a moment, the panic spiking back. ‘You would tell me if you had been bitten or scratched?’
‘I am all right. And I would tell you if I had been bitten.’ Alistair added the lie as he bent his head so his mouth just touched the tangled brown mass of her hair. He was still shaken to find that his skin was unbroken and his stomach cramped at the thought of those few seconds after the dog had collapsed twitching into the gutter and he had looked, felt, for any wound on his body and on hers.
It was good that he was holding Dita, because he suspected his hands would shake if he was not. Never, in his life, had he been more afraid—for himself, for another person. She thought he had grabbed the knife when he heard the screams because he wanted to save the child and he could not tell her the truth, that he had reacted purely on instinct: she was where those screams had come from.
‘Something smells of fish,’ she said. She still sounded drugged with shock; the sooner she was in bed, warm, the better. Despite the heat she was shivering.
‘I do. That was a fish-gutter’s knife and I ran through those puddles by their stalls to get it.’
She chuckled and he tightened his arms and made himself confront the nightmare that was gibbering at the back of his brain. If he had been bitten, then he would have shot himself. He had seen a man die of the bite of a mad dog and there didn’t seem to be any worse way to go. But what if it had bitten Dita? What if he had arrived just too late? The vision of her slender white throat and the knife and his bloody hands and the dog’s foaming muzzle shifted and blurred in his imagination.
‘Ouch,’ she murmured and he made himself relax his grip. All his young life it seemed he had looked out for Dita, protected her while she got on with being Dita. Eight years later and, under the desire he felt for her, he still felt the need to do that—but would he have had the courage to do for her what he would have done for himself? Would it have been right?
‘Alistair? What is wrong?’ She twisted round and looked up at him, her green eyes dark with concern, and he shook himself mentally and sent the black thoughts back into the darkness where they belonged. The worst hadn’t happened, they were both all right, the child was safe and he had to keep his nightmares at bay in case she read them in his face and was frightened.
‘Our wardrobes are wrecked, I smell of fish and now you probably do too, we haven’t finished our Christmas shopping, Mrs Bastable is still wailing—it is enough to send a man into a decline.’
Her face broke into a smile of unselfconscious amusement and relief. ‘Idiot.’
It was the least provocative thing to say, the least flirtatious smile, but the desire crashed over him like a wave hitting a rock. He wanted her, now. He wanted her hot and trembling and soft and urgent under him. Somehow he knew how she would feel, the scent of her skin, of her arousal. He wanted to take her, to bury himself in her heat and possess her. He wanted her with all the simple urgency of a man who had felt death’s breath on his face and who had tasted more fear in a few seconds than he would surely ever feel for the rest of his life.
She was still looking at him; her wide mouth was still smiling and sweet and her eyes held something very close to hero worship. Alistair bent and kissed her without finesse, his tongue thrusting between lips that parted in a gasp of shock, his hands holding her so that her breasts were crushed against him; the feel of soft, yielding curves against his chest, against his heart, sent his body into violent arousal.
Dita must have felt his erection and she could not escape the message of a kiss that was close to a brutal demand, but she did not fight him. She melted against him, her mouth open and generous, her tongue tangling with his, her hands clinging while he tasted and feasted and felt the need and the primitive triumph surge through him. He had killed the beast for her and now she was his prize.
The seat tilted sharply, almost throwing them out of the rickshaw as the man lowered the shafts to the ground. Alistair grabbed the side with one hand and held tight to Dita with the other, shaken back into reality and the realisation that he had damn near ravished a woman in a rickshaw on the streets of Madras.
‘Hell.’