My Beautiful Enemy by Sherry Thomas Page B

mountain pass into India, but now he handed it to her.
    “And your tea,” she demanded. “Must set the proper mood for lovemaking, don’t you know.”
    He handed over what little remained of his supply of tea as well, wrapped in pages from a Parsi-language newspaper published in India.
    She filliped the package. “I haven’t forgotten our deal—you can come and watch, just give me a few minutes to get the girls ready.”
    “Of course, make sure you get my money’s worth,” he said.
    “I’d better get inside. Don’t want the ladies to become impatient.”
    “Should we meet here again, this day next year?”
    “This day next year by whose calendar?”
    He grimaced inwardly. He had forgotten that for the Islamic calendar, which relied on lunar observation to determine the beginning of the months, a different locality might have a different set of dates.
    “Let’s just say three hundred fifty-four days from today.”
    By then he should have accrued enough home leave to make the trip to Kashgar.
    “And what? Will you bring more gold for me to steal?”
    With that, she slapped him on the chest and left, disappearing through a curtained doorway.
    Almost immediately he went out to the courtyard, but her horse was already gone. He ran out of the courtyard, but there was no sign of the horse on the street outside. He stood in place, his hand on the support column of an arch. It was completely unsurprising, her departure. She had always given every indication that she would go her own way, but for some reason, he had not wanted to see the inevitable.
    Now the inevitable was a void in his chest.
    His head lifted. He felt inside his robe. The velvet pouch of gems that he always carried on his person, in order to pass for a diamond dealer—it was gone. He remembered her slap across his chest. He remembered her warning that she would rob him blind.
    You are a fool, too
, she had told him.
    Yes, I know.
    He didn’t know. He didn’t know at all.
    “Sir?”
    He turned. It was the serving girl she had taken to “bed.”
    “Your friend asked that this be returned to you, sir.”
    This was the package of tea, as evidenced by the Parsi newspaper from four months ago.
    “Thank you,” he managed to say. “How much do I owe for your . . . hospitality?”
    “Your friend has already paid very handsomely for the wine and the sweets.”
    Of course she would have, the beautiful bastard.
    But something felt different about the tea package. He made sure he was alone before he peeked inside. The velvet pouch. And it did not feel lighter in his hand, but slightly heavier than he remembered.
    Nestled among the uncut gems he had brought, a round bead of green jade, from the tassel of her sword. And next to it, several dried flowers—snow chrysanthemum from the Kunlun Mountains, grown at an altitude of ten thousand feet above sea level.
    She had not robbed him after all.
    Except of his heart.

CHAPTER 5
The Lady
     
    London
    1891
    M r. Lochby, the private investigator, had excellent news. He had easily found information on Master Gordon, who, he informed Catherine, had indeed been a gentleman, a member of an old landowning family of Devonshire—the cadet branch, but all the same, very, very respectable stock.
    Young Herbert Gordon had been educated at Harrow and Cambridge—Trinity College, to be exact. After that, he had lived the life of a man about town. He displayed an interest in the Far East, since his father had spent some time there, but it was the interest of a dilettante, nothing terribly serious. Most of his time was spent doing what pleased himself.
    And then, in October of 1873, he left England abruptly, never to return except upon his death.
    Some of this Catherine knew, some she had guessed, but still, there was so much more she did not know. As a child, she had defined the adults in her life by their roles and never sought to learn about them as individuals until it was too late: She had no knowledge of her mother’s