His filthy meaning didn’t reach her until he was at the end of the hallway. She took off her slipper and threw it at him. It bounced harmlessly off the wooden walls, missing him by an inch. She snarled in frustration and stamped her foot.

“Such temper, Lady Lockhart. Not befitting a proper English countess at all.”

“Go sod yourself, Hunt.”

“I do, daily. You should try it.”

Mocking laughter echoed in his wake, and Sarani was left alone, furious, overheated, and ferociously aroused. That bloody insolent bastard was right as she clamped her trembling thighs together—she was drenched.

Five

The problem with having the last word in a battle of sexual innuendo was dealing with the provocative images that said words produced. Namely that particular woman doing as he’d recklessly advised—fingers lodged between her soft, sweetly scented thighs—and bringing herself to swift, heated completion.

Rhystan had seen the arousal in her overbright eyes. If he’d delved under those skirts, she would have been slick with it. Hell, he was at full mast himself. An hour later at the helm, outrunning a persistent bitch of a storm and sodden to the bone from rain and ice-cold sea spray, his erection had not diminished. Nor had thoughts of her touching herself.

Therein lay the problem.

“Conquered your frustrations yet?” his quartermaster yelled through the wind.

“Fuck off, Gideon.”

“That’s what she said, and what did that get you?”

Rhystan scowled. “When this storm turns, I’m going to thump that shit-eating grin off your face.”

“You can try if it will make you feel better,” Gideon remarked, folding thick arms across his chest and propping a boot on the rail as if the wind wasn’t howling like a wild animal between them. “But I suspect it won’t.”

Rhystan’s fingers tightened on the wheel. If it were a live thing, it would have been strangled to death by that point. Gideon was the only one who knew scant details of what had happened with the woman he’d left behind in Joor.

The memories he’d been fighting came back in force.

He’d been hunkered down in a room at the Flying Elephant when the messenger had come from the princess, missive in hand and followed closely by Markham’s mercenaries. Before he could receive the message, they’d overpowered him at gunpoint, thrashed him senseless, and tossed him unconscious and shackled on a convoy bound for Bombay.

As if being injured and starved wasn’t enough, he had arrived plagued with malaria. Abandoned in the barracks, his fevered brain fought to stay alert. Was Sarani in trouble? Did she need him? The thought of her believing he’d left without her had gutted him. And then, weeks later, when the fever finally broke, Markham had come himself to take great pleasure in giving him the crumpled parchment and informing him of her marriage to the regent.

She had chosen another.