The Price of Desire by Leda Swann

at the ill-timed crisis with one of his major investments that had called him away from London at this juncture. Though ordinarily he would have been pleased to escape the dull, gray monotony of London skies for the clean air of one of the smaller country towns through which his railways ran, right at this moment London held a major attraction for him.

    The last place he wanted to be was in this godforsaken inn in this tiny town where the beds were bad, the food was worse, and the inhabitants demanding in the extreme. If it weren’t for their unreasonable demands and the stringent conditions they wanted to place on him before he could build his railway through their land—the railway that would put their town on the map and bring them unlooked for prosperity—he would still be in London. Curled up not in a cold, lumpy, single bed by himself, but in his own clean and sweet-smelling bed, pillowed next to the delightfully soft and warm Miss Caroline.
     
    Caroline Clemens. He rolled the name around on his tongue. It tasted sweet, as sweet as she had tasted that night in the conservatory of the oh so very proper Finsburys. A grin crept over his face as he thought of the forbiddingly fierce and purple-turbaned matron whose conservatory he had christened in such a manner. Thank Heaven that Mrs. Amelia Finsbury had no idea as to what transpired between him and the delectable Caroline among the potted ferns, or she would never speak to him again or invite him to another of her soirees.

    Offending Mrs. Finsbury would, certainly, have had certain advantages. If he could thoroughly upset her, she would no longer try quite so hard to throw one of her dour-faced daughters at him. Her machinations so far to get him to take an interest in one of them had been embarrassingly, and at times painfully, obvious.
     
    When he had expressed his surprise at the transparency of her efforts to get his attention, his fellows merely laughed at his naiveté. Such tactics were quite the norm in London. Every father wanted to get his daughters suitably settled in the world, to sons-in-law who would not embarrass the family with spendthrift habits or indigent relatives.

    Social niceties were quite different from what they had been in India, where he was born and where, with the exception of a few miserable years at boarding school in the north of England, he had lived all his life. Until now.
     
    Society in India had tried hard, too hard, to mimic exactly the manners and customs of the mother country. But nothing, not even English manners, could survive in another country, another culture, completely unscathed.

    Despite his great wealth, he was forced to tread carefully in order to avoid giving offense to the grand society matrons such as Amelia Finsbury who had accepted him into their houses and their society. Fucking Caroline Clemens in the conservatory at a soiree was without a doubt enough of a social solecism to get him barred forever from the houses of respectable folk.
     
    Not that he cared for anyone’s feelings in the matter. Other than Caroline’s, of course. He would not like to see her reputation shredded. She was his woman now, his glorious English lover. With their first kiss, he had claimed her. She belonged to him.

    His groin tightened at the mere thought of her. She was far from the upright icicle maiden that he’d been warned to expect before he left India. English girls, he was informed by more than one well-meaning friend, were unfortunately not like Indian girls, not like the wonderful woman he had married. Maya, his dear, beloved Maya, whose loss had left a wound in his soul that not even time could heal.
     
    Girls in India had their blood heated by the hot, hot sun. They were openly passionate, and none of them that he’d ever taken to his bed had any qualms about enjoying the act of love just as much as he had. Maya had certainly enticed him with her lush body, giving in to him one minute and the next minute drawing