Penelope & Prince Charming (7 page)

On the other side of the room, Michael said, “Yes, I
think it would be best if I go. I will stay until this business with Penelope and this man is settled, and then I shall take Meagan and go back home.”

She spun around. “What are you talking about?”

He watched her for another quiet moment. “I said I would go. It is for the best. People are talking.” He turned away. “Good night, Simone.”

Before her stunned eyes, he opened the door and walked out of the room.

“Michael!” she cried.

The door clicked closed. “Michael, I didn’t mean—”

His footsteps faded as he moved down the hall.

Raw pain washed over her. She couldn’t lose him. She could not.

Lady Trask had never learned how to handle emotion with dignity. She’d never had to. She’d been spoiled as a girl, and her husband had ignored her. Her daughter treated her gently, but deep down, Lady Trask knew that Penelope did not really like her.

She burst into wild tears. She swung to the dressing table and swept bottles, brushes, cosmetics, and perfumes to the floor. Then she sank down amid the broken glass and stench of perfume and beat her fists on the carpet until her hands were cut and bloody.

Down the hall, Damien, sitting before the fire in pantaloons and lawn shirt open to the waist, heard the sudden commotion and Lady Trask’s weeping.

Petri stepped to the door and looked out as hurried footsteps converged on Lady Trask’s room. He watched a moment, then closed the door and returned to his task of carrying a glass of brandy to Damien. “Lady Trask, Highness,” he said. “Upset at the loss of the rubies, no doubt.”

“Mmmph, I do not think so.” Damien took the brandy and cradled the goblet in his palm. He had heard the quiet opening and closing of the door beforehand and imagined that her lover Tavistock had gone to have a word with her. “I believe there is one thing more important to her than jewels.”

Petri looked unconvinced.

Petri, Damien’s valet, was only a few years older than Damien himself. The two men had been raised together, Damien to rule, Petri to serve. Petri had followed him into
exile, finding a young Damien shivering and half-naked in the woods where the Imperial Prince’s men had unceremoniously dumped him. Somehow Petri had gotten them over the pass and down into the Danube Valley before the wolves had found them. Damien knew he would have been dead many times over had it not been for Petri.

Despite their differences in station, Petri was closer to Damien than any brother could be. They could read each other’s moods and almost knew what the other would say before he said it.

Petri pursued women with enthusiasm. Being valet to a prince gave him a certain cachet among the servants of the noble classes of Europe. While duchesses and countesses vied for Damien’s notice, Petri busily seduced their maids.

“Behave yourself while you are here,” Damien had told Petri when he’d arrived.

Petri had widened his blue eyes in innocence. “When have I ever not? Do I not know discretion?”

He did, Damien had to credit him with that. Damien never once had to extricate him from a delicate situation, not even when Petri involved himself with more than one woman at a time. He knew how to woo and seduce, and then withdraw with no anger on either side. Damien had to admire him.

As Damien sipped his brandy—purchased in Paris and lovingly carried by Petri the rest of the journey—he listened to the sounds of a household trying to control its weeping mistress. The walls were thick, but when doors opened and closed, voices drifted down the halls to him.

“My lady, my lady you must not—”

“She is hurt. She is bleeding!”

“Whatever is the matter?”

The last voice was Penelope’s. Her gentle tones rose in exasperation, then the door closed, shutting out her words.

He smiled into his brandy. Penelope made his blood sing.

He wished she didn’t. Damien had survived all this time by not letting himself feel. Flirt, yes. Seduce, yes. Feel, no.

Enchant a woman, enjoy every moment with her, cut the tie, was his rule. Most women with whom he had affairs—upper-class, nobly born widows and married women or high-class courtesans—did the same to him. They did not have the energy to waste letting Damien break their hearts, and he did not have time to cultivate an affair lasting more than a few days.

All that had changed with one smile from Penelope’s lips.

After a time, he heard her leave her mother’s room. “Good night, Mama,” she said firmly, and shut the door behind her.

He grinned. The mother was weak and weeping, the daughter the pillar of strength. Penelope was strong and he liked that.

No, he
needed
that.

“Something funny, Highness?” Petri asked. The man refilled Damien’s glass of brandy, poured one for himself, and sat down facing Damien, choosing a chair less comfortable than the prince’s. Petri always reminded Damien that they came from different classes and always would.

“I am thinking of irony, Petri.” Damien sipped the mellow brandy. “What did I expect to find here? I no longer remember.”

“You expected a European princess with no chin, bad breath, and an irritating titter.” Petri shrugged. “Or so you said.”

“And I found a beautiful woman with a heart of steel.” He stared moodily at his brandy. “I sound like a fool in a bad Nvengarian drama.”

Petri grinned, his dark face creased. “I know what you need.”

“A hearty kick with a thick boot?”

“A dose of what bit you, sir. You want this woman.”

Damien snorted. “That is so. What betrays me?”

“Perhaps you should consider wearing looser trousers, Highness. At least until we’re finished here.”

“You are exceedingly amusing, my friend.”

“You need a bit of relief, that is all.”

Damien shook his head. He could not imagine going to any other woman now that he’d met Penelope. The women he’d had before, even bejeweled countesses and beautiful duchesses, paled beside this English girl with golden hair and green-gold eyes.

“I will not insult her by going to a courtesan to deflate myself. Besides, I do not think it would work.”

“Of course not. I did not mean that. I meant her.”

Damien had a sudden vision of Penelope beneath him on a bed, her hair loose on the pillow, her eyes heavy with passion. He would lick her swollen breasts as they rose to his mouth, take one taut peak in his teeth.

“‘Tis tempting, Petri,” he said. “But I cannot circumvent the rituals. The prophecy depends on them.” And he would not break the prophecy, no matter what. “Besides, Sasha would kill me.”

“When did you grow interested in following rules, Highness?” Petri asked. “And obeying Sasha’s whims? He’s gone a little mad over this prophecy, I think.”

“He has,” Damien agreed. “But he survived my father’s dungeon by believing that magic would bring me back to him. I did return for him, and so now he is convinced that the prophecy made it happen. His entire life centers on this damned prophecy.”

The prophecy said that Damien would marry the princess and bear a child who would be the glory of Nvengaria. Nvengaria would be united behind Damien
and the princess, and the sorrows that had plagued the country under Damien’s father would be erased.

If he sired the child before the betrothal, it would be illegitimate and not accepted as the next prince or princess, and the prophecy would be broken. He had been very close to laying Penelope down in that meadow today and taking her. He’d throbbed with need, and she’d not fought him.

Thank goodness Sasha had shouted at them just in time. Had Sasha planned that? Or was the prophecy working, putting Sasha in the right place at the right time to prevent the child from being sired too soon?

He was either growing as mad as Sasha, or…

Damien had never believed in magic, but his people did. Damien had arrived home months ago, after a long and treacherous journey, to a chilly welcome. Damien’s father had been feared and hated; Nvengaria had suffered under his long reign. Grand Duke Alexander, head of the Council of Dukes, had ruled from behind the throne the year Damien’s father spent dying. He had effectively taken over, dissolving the Imperial Prince’s power.

Alexander, a man Damien’s own age with cold blue eyes in a dark, handsome face, had calmly and ruthlessly blocked every one of Damien’s attempts to step into his father’s shoes. Alexander had said point-blank that he wished Damien to rule as a puppet prince to Alexander’s dictation—or not at all.

The people of Nvengaria wanted a symbol to adore; very well, Damien could be it. Alexander and the Council would do everything else.

When Damien tried to have Alexander arrested for treason, however, the guards refused to obey him. Alexander had them in his hand. The palace guards and the military had loathed Damien’s father and were as happy as Alexander to see the end of rule by Imperial Prince.

However, there was a prophecy, Alexander had said. His eyes had remained ice-cold, the ruby he wore in his ear winking like a drop of blood. A test of the prince’s true right to rule. Fail that test, and…

The prophecy of the Imperial Prince finding the longlost princess descended from Prince Augustus of old, and reuniting the crown of Nvengaria was an ancient story that every child learned from the cradle. Nvengarians loved legends, the more ancient and ludicrous the better. They’d be ecstatic to learn that Damien would make it come true. And Nvengarians were just volatile enough that if he failed, they’d let their disappointment be known, violently.

Nedrak, head of the Council of Mages, said that the signs pointed to Damien as the prince to fulfill the prophecy. Nedrak was firmly under Alexander’s thumb, but his eyes had glittered with eagerness. He believed in the magic, too.

Word that Damien would fulfill the ancient prophecy had quickly spread. A mob soon surrounded the castle, a peaceful one, come to encourage Damien to ride off on the insane quest. Alexander had not smiled, he never did, but he managed to look pleased. Damien could not refuse, and Alexander knew it.

So Damien made a fair speech to the multitude from the balcony of the Imperial Prince’s castle, packed his bags, and traveled thousands of miles on the word of a nervous mage and a half-mad advisor to find the village of Little Marching, Oxfordshire.

He remembered the faces of his people when he had ridden out of Narato with his entourage, how the citizens had lined up to see him off in a fervor of cheering, their eyes shining with hope. Damien was the new Imperial Prince, he was following the prophecy, and everything would be put right again.

And so, he would do what Sasha told him and observe the rituals and pretend he believed it. He would drag Nvengaria out of the dust into which his father had ground it and save it from Alexander at any cost.

Neither he nor Alexander truly believed in the prophecy, but he had to admit that perhaps Sasha was not wrong about it. Events that had occurred since he’d left Nvengaria were nudging him toward belief.
Something
out there had pushed Damien unerringly to Penelope’s doorstep. And he’d tumbled immediately into love.

He came out of his thoughts to find Petri grinning at him.

“What are you smiling about?” Damien asked irritably.

Petri’s grin widened. He set down his glass and got to his feet. “I want to show you something.”

He rose and walked to Damien’s bed. As Damien watched, he moved the night table and swung open a door-sized panel in the wall beside it. “I found it when I checked the room. It is a passage behind the walls.”

Petri always searched Damien’s chambers even after the bodyguards did. Assassins liked to pop up and shoot things at Damien, so Petri went over every building carefully himself, not trusting anyone else to do the job properly. It was not a matter of
if
, but of
when
Alexander’s assassins would strike.

Damien got to his feet. “Where does it lead?”

“Not far. It runs behind the corridor and opens to a bedchamber at the end.”

Damien raised his brows. “Hmm, now, for what reason does a man build a house with a passage that leads secretly from one bedchamber to another?”

“I cannot imagine,” Petri said, eyes twinkling.

“Penelope’s great-grandfather must have been a rogue. To whose bedchamber does it lead?”

Petri grinned again. “Want to look?”

He held a candle at the ready. The black square tapering to darkness made something deep within Damien shudder, but he mastered himself.

Petri led him inside in silence, his lone candle making the passage bright. The low-ceilinged corridor ran straight, this wing of the house narrow and long.

A stone wall stopped their progress after about fifty feet, where the architect had decided to forget about the passage and get back to the business of building the house.

Petri gestured to their right, to wooden paneling that ran behind the chambers. A few feet above the floor was a small hinged panel, about six inches square.

In silence, Petri eased the panel open. Damien crouched down and put his eyes to it.

A night table half covered the hole, but he could see plenty. The room was a bedroom, a charming, girlish one. The bed had thin posts painted white, carving picked out in soft green, and was hung with green damask. A chair covered in the same fabric reposed by the fire, a comfortable seat for reading the stacks of books piled next to it, probably Penelope’s collection of fairy tales.

A writing table stood nearby, papers stacked neatly, the chair square in front of it as though she lined it up precisely when she finished at the desk every day. The thought made him smile.

Penelope herself sat at a dressing table as neat as her desk on the opposite side of the room. Facing an oval mirror, she brushed out her long hair, which crackled and shone, beautiful, long, and golden. Damien had touched it when he’d kissed her in the folly, warm silk spreading under his fingers, soft and smelling of the lavender in which she must rinse it.

She stared at her reflection as she slowly pulled the brush through her hair, as though her mind were miles away. She wore only a dressing gown, presumably over
her night rail, the gold and green brocade almost a match of the chair and bed hangings. Perhaps they were her favorite colors. Her hands were slim, holding the hairbrush gently, her movements graceful.

If Petri thought this would help ease Damien’s arousal, he was very much mistaken.

With a quiet smile, Petri pointed to the hinges of a larger door, similar to the one in Damien’s own room.

I ought to leave her alone,
Damien thought.
Let her get used to me and what she must do.

The trouble was, he had no time. If he’d had a year, he’d woo her gently, seducing her with words and gifts and small delights of kissing. Damien knew how to seduce. He’d become expert during his years of exile, when he’d learned to be the best player of all the games of the bedroom. He had learned that the only way to stay alive was to act the part of playboy prince, carefree and amusing, thinking of nothing more than the next woman in his bed.

Outwardly. Under the table, he had kept his hand in the affairs of European politics, forging ties toward the far-off day he would inherit his father’s kingdom. That day had come sooner than he’d imagined, but the ties had been in place.