The Untamed Bride by Stephanie Laurens Read Free Book Online

shrubs lined the whitewashed walls, while the open windows and doors gave access to mysteriously dark and inviting comforts. The exotic perfume of a temple flower tree wafted in the night breeze, the shed blossoms lying like snippets of the costliest silk scattered on the stone paving.
    “Oh?” A second voice answered the first through the cool dark.
    The speakers were on the extended open terrace that jutted from the owner’s private sitting room into the courtyard. The second speaker reclined on a sofa piled with silk cushions, while the first paced the edge of the terrace, his bootheels creating a quiet tattoo—one that held a certain tension.
    A third man watched silently from an armchair beside the sofa.
    The night’s shadows cloaked them all.
    “Damn Govind Holkar!” The first speaker paused to rake a hand through thick hair. “I can’t believe he left it this long to send word!”
    “Word of what?” the second asked.
    “He lost my last letter—the one I sent over a month ago trying to persuade him to give us more men. That letter.”
    “By lost, you mean…?”
    “I mean that it went missing from the desk in Holkar’s room at the governor’s palace in Poona while that damned hound of Hastings’s, MacFarlane, just happened to be there, waiting to escort the governor’s niece back to Bombay.”
    “When did this happen?” The second voice was no longer so languid.
    “On the second of the month. At least that’s the day Holkar realized the letter was gone. That was also the day MacFarlane left Poona with his troop and the governor’s niece at dawn. Holkar sent his cultists after them—”
    “Don’t tell me.” The until-then-silent man’s baritone rumbled, a contrast to the others’ lighter voices. “They killed MacFarlane but didn’t find the letter.”
    “Exactly.” The first speaker’s voice dripped frustrated ire.
    “So that’s why we killed MacFarlane—I did wonder.” The second speaker’s cool tones showed little emotion. “Itake it they didn’t learn anything pertinent from him before he died?”
    “No. But one of the sowars who made a stand with him eventually revealed that MacFarlane gave the governor’s niece a packet before sending her on.” The first speaker held up a hand to keep the others from interrupting. “I got word from Holkar only this morning—when he realized the letter had reached Bombay, he decamped to Satara, then he sent me word.”
    “We can deal with Holkar appropriately later,” the second speaker put in.
    “Indeed.” Anticipation colored the first speaker’s voice. “We will. However, once I knew about the letter, I had Larkins see what he could ferret out from the governor’s staff. Apparently, Miss Ensworth, the niece, was greatly distressed when she rode in, but later that afternoon, she took a maid and went to the fort. The maid was overheard saying that, on learning at the gates of MacFarlane’s death, the lady searched out Colonel Delborough, found him in the officers’ bar, and gave him a packet.”
    “So there’s no reason to pursue this Miss Ensworth. Even if she read the letter, she knows nothing of any worth.”
    “True.” The first speaker added, “And that’s just as well, because she’s leaving any day to return to England.”
    The second speaker waved. “Ignore her. So Delborough has the letter, and Holkar is therefore compromised. All his own fault. We’ll just have to find another source of men, and the way our recruitment efforts have been progressing lately, I can’t see Holkar as any great loss.”
    Silence fell, but it was strained, pregnant with unresolved tension.
    The first speaker broke it. “That’s not why we have to get the letter back.”
    The man with the deeper voice spoke again. “Why bother? It’s not as if Delborough can make anything more of it than of the other missives of ours his little group has gathered.They don’t contain anything to link you, personally, with the Black Cobra. Any