Though in all honesty, she’d thrown it at him enough times herself in the past weeks. She wanted to throw more, including her body. Love made people stupid, evidently.

Is it love?

She’d devoured enough Sanskrit mythology to suspect it very well could be. The Mahabharata, the Ramayana. Her people loved their epic romances, and their gods and goddesses were renowned for celebrating life, devotion, and fertility. At the last, she flushed and bit her lip, her cheeks hot as the handmaidens dressed her in her flimsy nightclothes.

She wished she had someone to talk to, someone to confide in, but her mother had died from a mysterious stomach ailment a few years before. The doctor had said it was caused by diseased water, though Sarani had had her suspicions. A woman didn’t go from being perfectly healthy to deathly ill in the space of one day unless she’d been poisoned.

Someone had wanted her dead.

Assassination wasn’t a stretch. Some of her distant cousins in line for the throne had always scorned her mother. They worried she would birth a son. But mostly they resented her. She wished they didn’t, but she understood why…she was an outsider. Her mother had taught her to judge people on their internal merits rather than their exterior appearances, but most people did not think like that. Not some of the locals, and certainly not the self-aggrandizing British who swarmed her father’s palace.

Even with her status as a princess, Sarani wasn’t truly accepted by the hundreds of English officers and their wives currently occupying Joor. They afforded her respect, of course, because of her station, but she wasn’t immune to their whispered remarks and snide comments hidden behind fans and sugary smiles.

Sarani sighed. Only Rhystan had treated her as if her mixed bloodlines didn’t matter. He reminded her so much of her mother in the way that he approached things—with fairness and an open mind. He had strong opinions about the corrupt agenda and actions of the East India Company and had ideas to dismantle them from within.

“I’ll write to my father,” he’d told her.

“Is he powerful?” she had said and then frowned. “But you don’t speak to him.”

His eyes had shuttered, but he’d nodded. “He has connections, and this is important.”

Not that one man could fight the will or the arm of the British Crown, but her mother had once said that one stone could still cause ripples in the largest sea. The fact that Rhystan was willing to approach his estranged father based upon what she had shared with him spoke volumes. The truth was, the more time she spent with him, the more compromised her heart and mind became.

“Thinking about your handsome young suitor?” her maid, Asha, teased from where she was braiding and brushing Sarani’s hair.

“No.” But her fierce blush gave her away.