Linda Needham (3 page)

“Sylvia McCallvern!” Lucie giggled like they all had done when they were girls at school. “Don’t tease! Oh, but Princess, he was soooooo lovely.”

“What man exactly, Sylvia?” Caro hadn’t really seen Wexford’s face, beyond the steely planes of moonlight.

“He found us at the dessert table and asked if we were your friends, Lucinda de Taitville and Sylvia McCallvern. We said we were. Then he said that you
would be needing our help before you came back to the ball. And indeed you do.”

“I’m fine, Syl.” Except for the unsettling question of how and why Wexford knew the names of her best friends.

“You don’t look very fine, Princess,” Lucie said, tucking a strand of hair behind Caro’s ear.

“You look like you just had a fight with a cat. And lost.” Sylvia took her by the elbow and led her back through the conservatory and into the well-lighted sewing room.

Caro shocked herself as she looked into the cheval glass. “Oh, dear.”

“We told you so.” Lucie picked a hairpin from Caro’s hair and then stopped to stare into her eyes. “He didn’t do this to you, did he? The handsome messenger?”

Caro opened her mouth to say yes, of course he did. With his boldness and his broad-shouldered heat, his large hot hands traveling where they shouldn’t.

But that wasn’t really the truth. Wexford hadn’t hurt anything more than her pride. And she had been the one to accost
him
. Albeit with a stick.

And besides, Lucie and Syl would just be shocked to their socks. Though she’d known them forever, through joy and sickness and school and everything, she was beginning to feel an ever-widening distance from them. No longer a schoolgirl, too busy with her royal duties.

She missed them dreadfully, but it seemed that was the lot of a princess.

“Don’t worry, Lucie. It was a hedge that got the best of me.” Not the Earl of Wexford.

Not ever.

“We didn’t think so, Princess Caroline,” Syl said, picking the last of the hairpins out of her curls. “Something in those deep, dark eyes told us he was a man of honor.”

“Is that so?” Caro hadn’t seen Wexford clearly enough to tell much about the color of his eyes, let alone the rest of his face.

And a good thing, too. Once she was out on the dance floor again, if she accidentally locked eyes with him, she wouldn’t blush or react at all, because she would never know it was him.

Though she might recognize the unusual breadth of his shoulders.

And the square-edged strength of his chin.

And the sound of his laughter.

Those blatantly sensuous hands.

The luscious scent of him…

His profile.

His power.

Yes, it was a bloody good thing that she wouldn’t be able to recognize the man at all.

She would spend another few hours dancing, suffering the ravaging of her feet by dozens of pairs of ungainly boots, the dreary courting, and then return home to the loads of work she had left to do.

Restoring her father’s old kingdom to its former glory was a devilishly difficult labor.

Even after Lucie and Syl put her hair back to rights and brushed her gown free of debris, Caro wasn’t quite ready to return to the pressures of the ball. So she gossiped and giggled with her friends like in the old days, laughing and joking until she thought she would burst.

Then she steeled herself for the battle, thanked them for their friendship and their discretion, kissed them both on the cheek, and hurried off to the ballroom.

“Ah, there you are, Princess Caroline!” Lord Peverel drawled as he and his two associates met her en masse beneath the ballroom gallery.

“My lords, how delightful to see you all here!” Caro offered her hand to each of her acting ministers, more than grateful for all the advice they had given her about setting up her new government.

“A ball in your honor, Your Highness!” Lord Innes grinned at her with his round cheeks. “We wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

“And, begging your pardon, Princess Caroline, but if you check your dance card, you’ll find me in line with all the others.”

“I’m already looking forward to it, Sir Wellstetter.” She tried to sidle past them, but they were as eager as ever to see to her every need.

“Just some final papers for you to read and sign, Your Highness,” Innes said, beaming at her, “and you’ll be ready for your triumphant return to Boratania.”

Except that she’d never been there.

“So, how is your delightful collection of Boratanian treasures coming along, Your Highness?” Lord Peverel asked, absently straightening the stickpin on his neck cloth.

“It’s expanding very nicely, my lord.” Though she’d missed an opportunity just now in the maze, thanks to a certain prowling beast.

“That’s good to hear, my dear Princess,” Lord Peverel said, with a nod to his fellows. “Do let us
know if we can be of assistance. Any time, for any purpose.”

“Thank you, Lord Peverel. I’m very grateful to all of you.” She turned to Sir Wellstetter. “And I’ll see you, my lord, on the dance floor.”

She left the delightfully eccentric little trio speaking overtop each other, wondering what had prompted Queen Victoria to choose these three men as her ministers.

Not that she’d had any complaints about them. It’s just that they were a bit advanced in age and full of differing opinions.

And speaking of dance cards, she could only hope she wouldn’t be accosted again on the dance floor by the bloody “Lord of the Maze.”

He had a good kick in the nether parts coming, if he tried.

“D
rew, old man! There you are!” Ross was leaning smugly against the terrace doorway, detached as always, as always on edge. “Did you find your princess?”

“The woman is well and duly accounted for.” Safely under the care of her friends. Because he’d made damn sure she’d gotten there. And then had skulked the situation long enough to hear them gossiping in the sewing room.

Which had been a good thirty minutes ago. Long enough for the daft woman to have decided to run off on another fool venture.

“You actually met the woman?” Drew nodded and snagged two glasses of champagne from a passing footman and offered one to Ross. “We had a nice, long chat out in the garden.”

At very close quarters. Very.

Ross took the glass with a skeptical brow. “You didn’t do anything to offend her, did you?”

How could he not? The woman was a princess, with delicately cultivated sensibilities.

“When have I ever given offense?”

“That little incident with Grand Duke William Charles springs to mind.”

“The bastard was drunk and brutal and deserved that dunking in the Seine.” Drew ignored Ross’s snort of derision and scanned the roomful of dancers for his troublesome charge, knowing that the woman had yet to return to the ballroom.

“Are you sure you merely chatted with your princess, Wexford?” Ross smiled crookedly as he reached across Drew’s shoulder, then produced a branching twig with two small, shiny leaves attached.

Drew slashed Ross a frown, then grabbed the evidence and stuck it into his coat pocket. “I told you, Ross, we were walking in the garden, chatting.”

Ross snorted. “God help you if she returns bearing a matching leaf. You’ll be the talk of the town.”

“And Palmerston would have my head. Credit me with some sense, Ross.”

Only where the devil had the woman gotten to?

Drew was about to return to the service building to find the princess when he noticed a commotion in one corner of the ballroom. The crowd parted and there she was, entering the dance floor.

Perfectly coifed.

Perfectly gowned.

Perfectly calm.

Perfect, indeed.

A wake formed behind her graceful step, rapt lords, reluctantly dazzled ladies.

Bloody blazes, the woman was magnificent, radiant and distantly regal. And yet her soft scent still
clung to his lapels and his neck cloth, the implacable memory of her silky shoulder against his chin. Her nape just a breath away, the smooth shell of her ear.

A temptation like no other he’d faced.

As he watched her progress through her admirers, he felt an overwhelmingly possessive pride in her bearing. A sense that they now shared secrets between them, and shadows and private hijinks.

Hell, they’d tussled in the bushes, played hide-and-seek, had dashed off an impromptu subterfuge. She’d boldly pinched the back of his leg!

A touch that had caught him off guard, had roused him, and left him aching.

“She looks bloody dangerous to me, Drew.”

“Who is that?”

Ross snorted and gave him a wry look. “Your fairy princess.”

“She’s not mine, Ross.”

“Yours to protect with your life.” Drew could feel his friend eyeing him closely. “So how did the princess react when you told her about your mission to protect her? She must have been wildly grateful to you. Relieved, at the very least. Did she immediately honor you with a Boratanian knighthood? The Royal Order of the Shimmering Blade?”

“Stuff it, Carrington.” The man never missed a bloody nuance, understood both Drew and Jared as intimately as he knew himself.

“Ah, then the mission didn’t begin as well as you planned?”

“Frankly, Ross, I didn’t bring up the matter. Not the right time or place.”

Not with the princess as angry as a wasp, and used to getting her own way in everything.

Except, it seemed, in dance partners. To his experienced eye, she didn’t look at all happy at the moment, though she was putting up an excellent front. Graciously laughing at every jest, changing partners endlessly, chatting politely as she was waltzed and flung around the room by every prince and peer at the party.

Occasionally her gaze left the dance floor and scanned the edge of the massive ballroom as though looking for someone or something.

The lover she’d stood up in the garden because of his following her?

A clock?

Another quick exit?

Her gaze landed on him for the briefest moment. She quirked her eyebrows with a question, but then glanced away from him without a hint of recognition.

Not an angry frown or even a snub.

Which could very well be the case—that she didn’t recognize him at this distance. She might not have seen him well enough in the shadowy garden to remember him in the glaring light of the ballroom.

A pleasant advantage which kept him on the sidelines and out of the general disorder until the wee hours, when people began to leave the ball.

Ross had left at two, and Jared had taken his lovely Kate back to their town house for an early morning return to their refuge in the country.

“The trout are rising, Drew,” Kate had said, with a gentle kiss against his cheek as the pair were leaving. “And you know how my Jared loves to fish!”

Jared had only smiled that new cat smile of his and swept his incredible wife into the night.

Lucky bastard.

“Ah, here you are, Wexford.” Lord Palmerston steamed his way up the short flight of stairs toward Drew. “Behaving yourself, I see.”

“While you were out on the dance floor romancing the ladies, you old fox.”

Palmerston stopped on the step below Drew and put a finger to his lips as though revealing a great state secret. “Don’t tell a soul, Wexford, but this is by far my favorite duty as foreign minister—dancing with the ladies.”

“Your secret’s safe with me, Palmerston.” Daft or not, Drew had always liked the eccentric Palmerston—admired the man’s quicksilver sense of outrage and his willingness to throw himself into the fray, no matter the cost.

“Which is the very reason I chose you for this assignment, Wexford.” Palmerston joined him on the landing.

“Because I’m a fool?”

“Because you and your operatives will keep the entire investigation a secret.” The man leaned sideways, speaking out of the corner of his mouth. “And you’ll protect the princess with your life.”

“That’s my intention.” Which meant that the sooner the reckless woman was off his hands the better.

Palmerston turned and narrowed his eyes at Drew. “She’s not ever to know the rest of it, Wexford.”

Drew stilled the sudden tic of irritation in his jaw. “By ‘the rest of it,’ Palmerston, you mean the truth about her.” As though he had ever spilled a secret or failed to deliver as promised.

“Not
ever
, Wexford.” Palmerston shook his head
fiercely, frowning deeply, his gray brows twitching. “It wouldn’t serve the princess and there’s far, far too much at stake.”

Merely the fate and future of the great families of Europe. Drew understood only too well.

“Yes, I know, Palmerston.” He clapped the man on the shoulder, hoping to alter his mood. “As I also know the princess is going to be spitting mad when she learns that you’ve turned her over to me, lock, stock and bloody barrel.”

“Spitting mad, you say?” Palmerston drew back. “What the devil makes you think that?”

Drew decided not to explain his recent encounter in the garden with the nettlesome princess. It would only worry the man.

“Intuition,” he said instead.

“Balderdash! Princess Caroline hasn’t a quarrelsome bone in her body. She’s quite the finest young woman you’ll ever have the pleasure to meet.”

Certainly the most beautiful. The most brazen.

“We’ll see, Palmerston, I’ll be waiting for your delivery. Shall we say a half hour. If you can drag the princess away from her admirers.”

“A half hour then, Wexford!”

Drew made his way through the unsettling gauntlet of the Duchess of Bradford and her three immodestly marriageable daughters and out into the courtyard.

“To the Huntsman, Henry,” Drew said to his coachman as he climbed into the cab.

“A bit of late-night gaming for you, sir?” Henry asked from the open door.

“A bit of late-night work, I’m afraid.”

Henry’s eyes glittered beneath the brim of his cap. “Ah, more of the usual?”

“That’s my hope, Henry.” The usual assignment, the usual royal. With such marvelously unusual eyes.

Henry nodded and smiled. “To the Huntsman then.”

The Huntsman. His refuge.

Hell, lately the bloody club had become his home. As if he were some lonely old childless bachelor.

Scratch off
old
and that’s just what he had become.

No, not lonely. He always had Ross to run with. And his operatives. The Factory.

And yet in the nearly two years since Jared had married Kate, he’d begun to notice an emptiness in his life, especially when he was alone, a great gaping hole that seemed to be opening ever wider in his chest, leaving a deepening need for something.

Someone.

I’m not meeting a lover, sir, not that it’s any business of yours.

Not this particular someone.

Yet, for the moment, the princess was his business. Her every waking moment would be his business and his focus.

“I said, we’re here, sir.” Henry was holding open the carriage door and staring at him.

Doddering. Add
doddering
to
childless old bachelor
, and he was the exact image of old Biffy Tuckerton, who’d moved into the Huntsman five years ago and to anyone’s knowledge hadn’t stepped foot outside since.

“Thanks, Henry. Get yourself a catnap; I’ll be needing you around the back in about an hour.”

The club was nearly empty as Drew made his way up the wide front stairs and into the main lobby, across the marble inlaid floor, to the club room, then into the map room. He was just lighting a second lamp when he heard Palmerston’s carriage enter the private alley at the back of the club.

The knock on the outside door came before Drew reached it. He opened it to Palmerston’s footman and Palmerston himself standing at the base of the carriage steps.

“Please come out of the carriage, Your Highness.” Palmerston seemed his most cajoling.

“For Heaven’s sake, Palmy, why?” came the familiar voice from the darkness of the carriage, a little weary now, tinged with a yawn and more than a little annoyed.

Palmerston cast Drew a pleading frown and then peered back into the carriage. “Believe me, Your Highness, I’m only acting in your best interest.”

“Going home and getting a good night’s sleep is in my best interest,” the woman said, still deep within the carriage. “Please, let’s go. It’s the dead of night. I’m exhausted and I think Fontmere broke my little toe with his enormous boots.”

“I’m sorry for your toe, but you know I wouldn’t have brought you here, Your Highness, if I didn’t believe this a most important meeting.”

A hugely impatient sigh rattled the carriage on its springs. “And what kind of meeting begins at three o’clock in the morning?”

Palmerston shot another glance at Drew, who was beginning to regret agreeing to the assignment. “The kind of meeting you can’t afford to miss.”

Drew heard the distinct sound of fingertips drumming on the interior wall of the carriage, and then, “If you really think it’s that important…”

“It’s about the future of Boratania.”

Silence and then a little moan of distress. “Why didn’t you say so immediately?”

Palmerston gave a little bow as he reached into the carriage and drew out the long, slender, gloved arm and then, inch by inch, the magnificent princess attached to it.

First, her satin slippered foot against the step, then her pale, trim ankle.

Then one flounce after the next, a foamy froth of beads and lace and chiffon.

And without a doubt, if one looked with a forensic eye, random bits of twiggy leaf entangled in the beading.

Her face was lit by the lanterns glowing from either side of the Huntsman’s backdoor, her tiara removed, her golden hair, more enchanting for the slightly disheveled curls as she glided lightly down the steps and onto the cobbles. Her mouth was moist and imperial, her brow lightly fretting in her impatience as she touched Palmerston’s arm.

“Then let’s get this meeting over with, Palmy.” She hiked a velvety dark cloak over her shoulders.

“My thought exactly, Princess,” Drew said, a little bit in awe of all that beauty in motion, and a whole lot roused by the rosy sweet scent of her curling up the stairs.

Instead of waiting to be met by those dangerously blue eyes, Drew turned and slipped into the dimness of the Huntsman.

But not before catching the stubborn woman’s very satisfying gasp of horror from the steps.

Yes, we all have our secrets, Princess
, he thought with a jangling breath and the distinct feeling that he was already in more deeply than he’d planned.

I won’t tell yours, if you don’t tell mine.