She could have no idea how beautiful she was with the indigo scarf wrapped around her red hair, the blue and gold silks trailing down her shoulders. The head scarf brought out the blue of her eyes, which were now large in her ashen face.
“I don’t…”
The words I don’t want to speak of it came so easily to Elliot’s lips. So easily did they quiet the well-meaning questions put forth by his family, his friends, even Mahindar.
But Juliana had already heard what he’d spat to Stacy, the festering anguish that had welled up inside him. He’d stopped himself before he’d let worse come out—how he’d been used as a pack animal, the various forms of torture they’d tried on him simply to observe the results.
Maybe he could hold back the very worst. Elliot didn’t want to watch Juliana’s eyes change when she realized the full horror of it all. He didn’t want to confirm that the lad she’d smiled upon at her debut ball was dead and gone. Juliana had asked to marry the young man who’d charmed her into the kiss, not the wreck of a man who’d dragged her to the altar.
But he would tell her a part of it. Juliana deserved to know something of the stranger she had married, and why he’d found it necessary to cast Stacy and his plea for help away.
Elliot gave Juliana a tight nod, took her hand, and led her up the stairs to their bedchamber, where he shut and locked the door behind them.
Chapter 25
Elliot told her. He started with Jaya and the fact that at first it had been almost a ménage à trois—he and Stacy had been young and found being lovers to the same woman exciting. Jaya had preferred Stacy, and when Stacy was slow to acknowledge his feelings for her, she came to Elliot.
Stacy had returned from a business trip to find Jaya giving him an ultimatum—he marry her or she would stay with Elliot. Stacy, realizing that he loved the woman, had grown angry at Elliot, thinking he’d tried to steal Jaya, then Elliot stepped aside and let Jaya leave with him.
Elliot had thought that the end of the matter. He and Stacy had gone north to Rawalpindi then to the borders of Afghanistan to meet with a trader who ran on up into the Hindu Kush and beyond to Samarkand. Elliot related to Juliana the attack on the English families, the plan to get them to safety, and Stacy abandoning Elliot to his fate.
As Elliot spoke it came back to him, all the things he tried so hard to push away. The beatings, the night they’d clamped his hands to a table and calmly pulled out his fingernails, one by one. How they’d beat him with metal rods until he couldn’t stop the screams.
They’d sometimes take him out of his cell deep in the tunnels and talk to him. Elliot understood them a little—their dialect had been similar to those in the northern Punjab. They’d thought him a British spy, and asked when the soldiers would come marching. They hadn’t believed Elliot when he said he knew nothing, neither did he care.
The torture, the alternate starvation and halfhearted feeding, the sleeplessness leading to long periods of unconsciousness had nearly killed Elliot. His captors expected him to die at any moment, they said, had even shown him the pit where they’d throw his body. Wild animals would find him there and tear him apart. They threatened to throw him in even before he was dead.
Elliot talked in a monotone, relating horror after horror, his eyes closing while his lips moved. He no longer saw the room, or heard the laughter outside, or felt the solidness of the floor beneath him.
He hadn’t realized that his words had drifted to silence. His eyes remaining closed, his lids too heavy to open.
Then he smelled the rosewater soap Juliana liked so well, sensed the brush of her on his skin. Her warmth slid along his body, and still he couldn’t open his eyes or reach for her.
“I never told them about you,” he said, his lips stiff. “They questioned me and tortured me, but I never once said your name. You were mine, my secret. The one thing they could never take from me.”
She skimmed her fingers up his arm under his loose sleeve. “I don’t feel worthy of that.”
“You were light and life. You are heat, and I’m so damn cold.”
Elliot opened his eyes. Juliana a hairsbreadth from him, surrounding him with her beautiful scent, her warmth. She was life, and home.
“How did you get away from them?” she asked, her voice holding a little tremor.
“They’d taught me to kill. When I helped kill some of their enemies, the leader started treating me better. Then one of the men became jealous of me, killed another, and blamed it on me.”
“Oh.” Juliana’s hands came to rest on his chest, fingers points of warmth through his shirt.
“I knew they’d come for me right away. I hid in the dark. They sent in only one man to fetch me, because they didn’t fear me enough. I had to kill him before he could make a sound. I dressed in his clothes. In the dark, I crept into the tunnel where they kept the guns and stole my Winchester back, and what was left of the ammunition.
“Someone saw me. I shot at him, and I ran. I disappeared into those hills so fast, I never looked back. I can’t remember most of that run, but they were after me.”
He felt a smile coming on. “But I was good. I always had been. I eluded them like an animal, laying false trails and crossing rivers, and praying I didn’t step on a cobra and end everything. I had to get back home. I mean to Scotland. Had to.” He brushed Juliana’s hair back from her face. “I had to get home to you.”
Tears trickled from her eyes. “I was so afraid every minute you were missing. I thought of you every day, every hour.”
“I think I knew that. I could see you so clearly, even in the worst of the dark.”
“How did you manage to get back to your plantation?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea, love. At some point, I crossed the border back into the Punjab, and kept wandering. I suppose I simply knew my way home. Mahindar says he found me about ten miles away from my plantation, crawling, half blind with infection. But he knew it was me.”
Mahindar had fallen to his knees and gathered Elliot, who was filthy and infested with vermin, to him and held him hard. The man had cried, rocking back and forth, saying over and over, Sahib, I have found you. I have found you.
Elliot vaguely remembered the kitchen of his plantation house, Komal and Channan exclaiming and crying, the three rushing to find water, food, clothing, a razor to remove the matted hair from his head and face. He remembered them showing him Priti, not two months old, and explaining that Jaya had died. Stacy had abandoned the child and gone who knew where, leaving Priti with Mahindar.