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Her simply query was not an attempt to fish for compliments, as Miss Walpole would have done. Miss Herwood seemed genuinely mystified. He watched as she nibbled on the food, waiting patiently for his answer.
“Or is it any skirt would do for you?” she prompted.
“I sensed in you a spirit of adventure. Have I not alluded to this before?”
“And what, pray tell, did you find in me that would suggest I liked my arse whipped by an overbearing baron?”
He grinned. There were many women he found more attractive the less they spoke, but he enjoyed the repartee with Miss Herwood. “In truth, it was a wild gamble. But one that has paid off, has it not?”
She blushed. He liked the rosiness in her countenance. Liked that it owed its appearance to him.
She lowered her gaze. “I have astounded myself, to say the least.”
He covered her hand with his, an instinctual move and not one he necessarily intended. “Do not be ashamed.”
She gazed at his hand upon hers. “I am not as ‘practiced,’ shall we say, as you.”
Retracting his hand, he helped himself to the bread. “And you have shown fortitude and adeptness despite your inexperience.”
“How did...it start for you?”
Vivid images danced in his mind. Silhouettes of a man and a woman behind beaded curtains.
“It began in a bagnio in Bombay,” he related. “A Japanese sailor, Hideo, used to frequent the same. I witnessed what he did with his strumpet and how she seemed to enjoy it. She seemed happiest when he arrived and so very sullen when he departed. I began experimenting, but my hand was awkward. Hideo came upon me and the poor kanya that was my subject at the time and took it upon himself to learn me the proper skills, the most important of which is developing an acute sense of what one’s partner is feeling.”
He eyed her carefully but saw no judgment in her reaction.
“Do you find many women receptive to your predilections?” she asked.
“You think me a rakehell.”
She said nothing.
“I was, of sorts, in my younger days in India,” he admitted. “But despite what you may think now, I do not often take women to bed.”
“You are not a frequent guest of Madame Follet?”
“Has Bhadra not informed you it has been some time since last I was here?”
Her mouth fell open that he knew of their conversation. Of course he had not wasted a moment that first night before mining Bhadra for all the information she could offer on Miss Herwood.
“How did Bhadra come to England?”
Ah, she wanted to know his relation to the maid. But he did not mind her inquisition, though he usually had little patience for prying questions, even from Lucille, who seemed to produce a great many.
“I brought her here,” he replied. “Her mother was my amah. Bhadra had been married less than a sixmonth when her husband died. His family wanted her to commit sati.”
At her quizzical glance, he explained, “It is a practice wherein the widow immolates herself upon her husband’s funeral pyre.”
She put her hand to her mouth.
“My amah begged me to save her daughter.”
The look in her eyes had softened as she beheld him.
“Do not think me a hero, Miss Herwood. I do not go about the Indian countryside rescuing damsels from sati.”
“How is this sati permissible?”
