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turns out, I didn’t know Neville at all. And I will not make the same mistake with you.”
    “I have no intention of marrying, so I wouldn’t offer you a false promise,” Quinn said.
    “I don’t need a promise. I just need honesty.”
    “What’s more honest than this?”
    “Nothing if you think we are no more than what we can see. You won’t offer me yourself. Only your body.” She ran her hands across his shoulders and down his arms. “Magnificent as you are, tempting as you are, that’s not enough.”
    That wall she’d seen behind his eyes once before rose up afresh. He turned and stalked out the door.
     

 

     
     

CHAPTER 6
     
     
    Quin n feared he was doomed to a state of perpetual erection. He made six circuits of the ship’s rail before his blood started to cool and his body finally settled. He leaned on the gunwale and watched whitecaps flick over the black sea, brief flashes of silver in the moonlight.
    “Your dinner was unsatisfactory, sahib?”
    “The meal was fine, Sanjay.”
    “But you and the memsahib are not—”
    “No, we’re not.”
    “Good. When a man takes a woman he cannot trust to his bed, it is like taking fire to his bosom.” Sanjay leaned on the rail beside him. “The Lady Viola is lovely. A most tempting armful, as you Angrezi say. You have done well to show such restraint, my friend.”
    “The restraint is not my doing.”
    “Hmph.” Sanjay made a noise of surprise. “The lady is a thief. Such a one has many tricks up her lacy sleeve. I was sure she would use her body to distract you from our purpose, but perhaps she has another plan.”
    She does , Quinn thought ruefully. A plan to know him, God help him.
    With Padmaa, it had all seemed so simple. A man and a woman’s bodies were designed to give each other pleasure. Why did women, Western women in any case, have to make a physical relationship so complicated?
    “If she manages to pass in your London society as a lady, she is no stranger to deception,” Sanjay said. “Baaghh kaa kkhuun exerts much influence over those whose minds are already open to dark forces. Such a one will easily succumb to its power.”
    Oh, Lord, not the evil diamond diatribe again . Once he started on that saga of gloom and doom, Sanjay would put the chorus of a Greek tragedy to shame.
    “Didn’t you just hear me say the lady is not the succumbing type?”
    Sanjay shook his head. “You misunderstand me. She may well resist your charm, sahib. But you do not have the weight of thousands of years behind your seduction. The diamond tempts people with what they want most. It senses a person’s need and feeds it until they are powerless to resist.”
    “Mm-hmm.” Quinn had lived in India long enough to realize that Asiatics didn’t share Englishmen’s high regard for the truth. They considered truth a dangerous commodity, not one to be broadcast about like a handful of seeds. Why divulge the truth if a lie will serve, a holy man had told him once.
    So a number of lies and legends had sprung up about Baaghh kaa kkhuun.
    It drove men mad, Sanjay claimed. Hundreds of years ago, the man who gave the stone its original rose-style cut would only handle it long enough to make one strike every seven days and even so, he was drooling and hearing voices of the dead by the time he chipped away the last bit.
    “It will drain a man’s life force if he does not break free of it,” Sanjay said.
    “Hokum.” The word escaped Quinn’s lips before he realized it had formed on his tongue. He sighed. “I mean no disrespect but—”
    “You do not believe,” Sanjay finished for him. “Whether you believe it or not, the red diamond’s history is a bloody one. It has incited murder. War, even. Some say that is how it came by its color in the first place.”
    “If that were true, why has the East India Company never heard of these killings?”
    Quinn would’ve put a stop to them. He was proud of the way he and the men under his command imposed