Her Only Desire Read Online Free PDF Page A

the man, the one she had formed before he had exploded onto the scene and performed so valiantly back there at the fire—in short, a healthy skepticism.
    Oh, yes, she knew that all the world considered the Marquess of Griffith some sort of paragon, a man of justice and sterling integrity. Ever since she had received his letter to Papa informing them of his imminent arrival, she had been asking around about him in Society, trying to gather whatever information—or gossip—she could about their renowned London guest.
    A top diplomat and expert negotiator with the Foreign Office, indeed, a personal friend of the Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh, Lord Griffith had averted wars, brokered cease-fires, procured treaties, parlayed for the release of hostages, and stared down power-crazed potentates with, she’d heard, unflinching cool and steely self-control. Whenever there was an explosive conflict brewing somewhere in the world, Lord Griffith was the one the Foreign Office sent in to defuse the most potentially explosive situations.
    As a woman who embraced India’s centuries-old Jainist philosophy of nonviolence and social equality, Georgie could not help but respect a man whose driving mission in life was to stop human beings from killing each other.
    Still, she had her doubts.
    Nobody was that good. The Eastern mystics taught that for every light within a man there was an equal darkness. Besides, she had grown cynical after seeing every new diplomat, politician, and administrator sent from London to help rule India arrive with an ulterior motive—
gold.
They no sooner stepped off the boat than they began scrambling to line their own pockets with the wealth of the East, usually by exploiting the Indian people. Only the rarest of Englishmen ever cared about
them.
But Georgie cared intensely.
    From the time of her childhood, she had come to think of the Indian people as her second family. After her mother’s death, she had been virtually raised by her kindhearted Indian servants. They had welcomed her, a lonely little orphan girl, into their world—their joyful, dancing, parti-colored, mysterious, paradoxical world.
    And it had shaped her.
    She used her place in British society to try to protect them from the worst ravages of Western avarice, but women had little power beyond what charm and wits and beauty God gave them. Despite her family’s ducal connections, her father’s rank as a now retired member of the East India Company elite, her brothers’ posts as wildly popular officers with the Regular Army, and her own status as a relatively highborn English debutante, her efforts to aid the Indian people often seemed a losing battle.
    And now the power brokers in London had sent Lord Griffith, the heavy cannon in their arsenal.
    It did not bode well.
    Something big must be happening, and she intended to find out what it was. She had heard rumors of another war against the Maratha Empire, but she prayed to God it was not so, not with two brothers who couldn’t bear to stay away from a battlefield. And then there was that disturbing letter from Meena…
    Not long ago, another of her highborn Indian friends from childhood, dear, lovely Meena, had wed King Johar, the mighty Maharajah of Janpur. Handsome and brave, both a warrior and a poet, King Johar ruled one of the most formidable Hindu kingdoms of north-central India. His royal ancestors had been founding members of the Maratha Empire, an alliance of six powerful rajahs with territories around Bombay and the rugged forests of the Deccan Plateau.
    Bound by an age-old treaty of mutual defense, which promised that if any one of their kingdoms was attacked, all the others must go to its aid, the Maratha kings of the warrior caste had first united hundreds of years ago to fend off the Mughal invaders who had come storming down from Afghanistan to conquer India.
    To this day, they continued to protect their sovereignty by holding off