Linda Needham (7 page)

She pursed her lips and shook her head. “I wasn’t planning to escape, Wexford. I was…looking for something.” She sauntered toward the hearth, her candle leading the way, reminding him of how she’d traipsed along the duke’s garden path earlier in the evening.

She had been looking for something, then…

For someone.

“What exactly were you doing tonight at the ball, Princess, prowling alone through a pitch-dark garden?”

Caro hadn’t yet been able to still the thrashing of her heart since finding the huge man waiting for her just on the other side of her chamber wall, and now the low rumble of his voice curling toward her out of the darkness only made the thrashing worse.

Made her face flame and her fingers tremble.

Turning back to look at him as he emerged from the shadows into the pool of her candlelight hadn’t helped either.

“What I was doing, Lord Wexford, is of no interest to you,” she said, trying to regain her composure because she had been testing her boundaries. “And I wasn’t prowling.”

“You were flitting through the shadows between the topiary sculptures and the fountains, keeping a close eye on the windows and doors of the ballroom.” Wexford had come into the fullness of the candle flame, looking more devilish than human. “Whatever you call it, Princess, you didn’t want anyone to see you.”

“You’re right, I didn’t. But not for any reason you might expect.”

He reached out and took the candlestick from her, his smile never reaching his eyes. “Meeting a lover?”

Caro held back a gasp but not a burst of laughter. “I’m afraid not, Lord Wexford.” That’s the last thing she needed to juggle at the moment.

But her answer only seemed to make him frown more deeply at her. “Had anyone contacted you prior to the ball, requesting to meet you in the maze?”

“I’m not a fool, sir.”

He exhaled hard and frowned at her as he set the candlestick on the mantel. “Then someone else? Someone you might even believe that you can trust?”

“Are all diplomats this suspicious?”

He straightened, focusing all that towering interest on her mouth. “If not an assignation with a lover, who were you going to meet in the maze?”

“Who was I meeting?” Caro laughed at his confusion and sat down on the hearth stool. All right, if he really wanted to know…. “Nicholai Gora.”

“Well, well, well, so there
was
a man. I thought as much.” The earl grunted and leaned down to her. “How well do you know this Nicholai Gora?”

She laughed, because now she held all the secrets for a change. She flicked her fingers in the air, trying to look as careless of her reputation as he must believe of her.

“Actually I don’t know him at all. Though I’ve read enough about him to find him immensely admirable. Yet I assure you that he has nothing to do with your investigation.”

“You’re not in the position to judge. Admirable or not, he could very well be a danger to you.”

“I doubt that very much.” Unless he fell on her.

“Don’t be a fool, Princess.” He knelt and leveled a
finger at her nose, shook it at her. “There’s nothing more dangerous than an unarmed woman, royal or not, agreeing to meet a man, a complete stranger, in a garden maze in the middle of the night, without a bit of protection.”

“You were there,” she said slowly, certain that she’d remember that encounter for the rest of her days.

“You thought you were alone!”

“I was hoping I was.”

“Are you completely mad?” He stood and stalked away to the desk on the opposite wall. “Anything could have happened to you.”

“But that’s not how it turned out, is it? Thanks to your interference, I never got a chance to see him.”

A match flared and Wexford’s deeply planed features flickered to life. “Because I stopped you before you could run headlong into the maze and spring Gora’s nefarious trap. You have to stop trusting so blindly.”

Great heavens, she was enjoying this too much! “I’m sure he wasn’t planning any kind of trap.”

“How the bloody hell did he contact you?” Wexford set the match to the lamp then stalked back to her, never taking his eyes from her. “Was it through one of your servants?”

“Nobody contacted me.” Perhaps she’d let this go on too long, too far. “I’d heard a rumor where I’d find him, so when the opportunity presented itself at the ball tonight, I took advantage and went out to the garden to see him for myself.”

“Without telling anyone what you were doing?”

“I didn’t want anyone to know, because they usually don’t understand.” Secrecy was her greatest ally.
“And I wasn’t even sure he was the right one. He’s very old, very fragile.”

“Old?” Wexford eyed her sharply.

“Very old. He was last seen in the chapel of my father’s chateau in Boratania more than twenty years ago.”

The earl shook his head as though trying to clear it of cobwebs. “Are you saying that Nicholas Gora was a friend of your father’s?”

“Not a friend.” It was long past time to confess. “Gora died nearly twelve hundred years ago.”

“Twelve hundred years?” His jaw squared off, became stony. “What the hell are you trying to tell me?”

Feeling just a little guilty for leading him along, Caro stood up. “Simply that I was in the garden tonight, hoping to find the marble statue of Nicholai Gora.”

He blinked at her from beneath a dark brow. “You were looking for a statue?”

“Saint Nicholai Gora. He was a Benedictine martyr killed in the year 632 in a battle with barbarians from the north. He’s mine, Wexford. Boratania’s. He was our greatest hero and I want him back where he belongs.”

He hadn’t moved a muscle. “A
statue
, Princess?”

Perhaps she had taken this ruse a bit far, too much like taunting a bear with a very short stick. Twice in one night. “It’s not just any statue, after all.”

“Bloody hell, madam!”

Drew stopped himself from launching into a longer, darker curse, wanting nothing more than to turn the foolish woman over his knee and…damnation! Not that he’d ever lay a hand on her or
anyone weaker than himself. Violence only begat more violence.

No, but he did want to make her understand, to make her see the danger, the precariousness of her situation.

And, by God, to find out if those luscious, rosy lips that glistened so sweetly in the lamplight really tasted like pink sugar.

God knew his hands had already tasted the perfect roundness of her hips, was bewitched by the know-it-all shape of her pose near the fireplace. Her head tilted, her hip slung against the flat of her hand.

“Is this your plan to thwart me, Princess?” He started toward her, unsure of his own intentions, not sure he cared.

“I don’t know what you mean, Wexford. Nicholai Gora is the patron saint of Boratania. And stay right where you are.” She pointed into the narrowing breach between them.

“Riddles and rhymes, Your Highness? Is that what I’m to expect from you?” And still he advanced on her, ever so slowly, so that he could watch her squirm as he had. “Dancing around the truth, spinning wildly dangerous tales and wasting precious time when your life is hanging in the balance?”

“I did nothing of the sort. I only meant to impress upon you my concern for the past and the future of my lost kingdom. I can’t allow it to fade into history and be forgotten.”

“How can you help to insure Boratania’s future if you’re dead?”

She opened her mouth to speak but chewed on
her lower lip. “You don’t understand what I’m trying to do.”

“And you still don’t believe that nothing stands between you and a bullet but me.”

She had sobered in the last few moments. “I do believe you, Wexford. It’s just…difficult to take in all at once. I’ve never been stalked by an assassin before.”

Hell, now he felt like a loutish barbarian. “Yes, well, then I suppose we can defer this until the morning.”

“Till the morning, then.” She hooked the candlestick off the mantel, then brushed past him.

“One more question, Princess.”

“Yes?” She stopped at the opened panel and turned.

“Do you always use secret passages for your errands?”

She smiled sideways. “Sometimes I even use the hallway. Good night, Wexford.”

Drew held the panel open for his royal charge as she slipped past him into her chamber.

“Sleep well, Princess,” he said, stealing a breath of her warm, trailing scent as he shut the door between them.

Drew leaned against the panel for a long time and listened for suspicious sounds from beyond: heard the padding of her footsteps from her bedside to just on the other side of the wall, and then the thump of her fist. Then across the room to the wardrobe and finally back to the bed.

Until he was hearing—possibly merely imagining—the dip of her weight against the mattress, the shuffle of silk and linen as she slipped between the sheets, a muffled sigh as she lay back against the…

Bloody hell, the woman had a damnably distract
ing effect on him. Sent his thoughts wandering where they shouldn’t, filled him with a longing for the kind of contented bliss he had never imagined possible until Jared had wed Kate.

Now he’d found himself judging every woman he met against his hopes. Clear eyes, a willing soul, softly ringing laughter, delight and determination.

Not Jared’s life, but his own, with all the trappings. Children and noise and someone to share it all with.

He hadn’t meant to notice the clarity of the princess’s eyes, or the willingness of her soul, but he had. Not that it mattered in the least.

She was someone else’s happily ever after.

And it was his responsibility to see that she survived, whether she approved or not.

Expecting more of her tomfoolery at any moment, he changed out of his formal clothes into a shirt and a suitable pair of trousers, then pulled up an upholstered chair in front of the panel, sat down and propped his feet onto a stool.

He slept with one ear open to the sounds from the next room and woke to the banging of a fist on the secret door at his back.

“My lord! She’s missing, my lord!”

The princess! Damnation!

Drew was already pulling on his boots when he opened the panel to Mrs. Tweeg’s frenetic pounding and her head poking through.

“She’s vanished, my lord! Into thin air.”

“I doubt that, Tweeg.” Drew shrugged into his coat and buttoned it as he followed the woman back through the passage into the princess’s chamber.

“See for yourself, sir. Gone like a vapor.”

“She’s an ordinary flesh-and-blood woman.” Ruled by a mind rife with royal mischief.

“She didn’t pass by me, sir, and Gerald saw no one come down the trellis, or over the top of the roof.” Mrs. Tweeg must have already drawn open the shutters and drapes and she was now gesturing out into the blazing sunlight.

Drew walked along the opposite wall. “And I checked when we were here last evening after she left for the ball: There’s no secret door in the east wall as there is in the west. She escaped some other way.”

The little fool. Drew scrubbed his fingers through his hair, the action causing him to study the pale green panels in the ceiling.

“Look there, Mrs. Tweeg.” Each of the gilt-framed panels was identical to the others but for one, just to the left above the wardrobe, where a fine-lined shadow sharpened one edge.

“I’ll be jigged, sir. So your princess disappeared through a trap door in the ceiling. Just like a regular mountebank!”

An exit he hadn’t discovered among the many others on his earlier inspection.

“Doubtless a bloody drop-down stairs from the room above.” Damn the woman and her antics. “You stay here and look for more, Tweeg. I’m going after her.”

Hoping the woman hadn’t gone gallivanting across the countryside just to thwart him, Drew grabbed his jacket, then left the chamber and found his first clue to her whereabouts with Mackenzie and his kitchen staff.

“Breakfast for you, my lord?” The tall man was bent over a large iron pot, humming.

“Maybe later, Mackenzie. Right now, I’m looking for our peripatetic princess.”

“A lovely young woman, she is, sir.”

“Except that she’s not where I left her in her chamber last night.”

“She’s an early riser, this one. Not like some royals we’ve tended.”

“You’ve seen Princess Caroline this morning?”

Mackenzie squinted at the case clock on the window sill. “Fifty-three minutes ago, my lord. Wearing the plainest rag of a gown and an apron that she surely must have stolen from the scullery.”

To play peasant girl out in the lane? Without an ounce of protection? “Why, Mackenzie? Where is she now?”

“She left here with Wheeler close on her heels. She said something about the orangery.”

“Blast it all.”

“T
he bloody orangery,” Drew muttered as he stalked into the new investigation room that he had hastily arranged in the east-facing parlor. “Where the devil is the orangery?”

His most efficient intelligence clerks from the Factory popped up out of their chairs and dashed to the wall where a tapestry had been removed and stored and an overlarge map of the estate now hung in its place.

“Here it is, sir!” the men said as one voice, a pair of fingers flanking a building on the map, a good six hundred yards from the main house.

“You’ll find it perched on the pinnacle of a south-facing berm….”

“Thank you, Mr. Helston!” Drew left the house in the middle of Helston’s description and was striding toward the blasted orangery less than five minutes later.

He hadn’t had a spare moment to study the map of
the grounds. Hell, he’d only learned three days ago that Princess Caroline was the target and the last thing he had expected when he arrived back in London yesterday morning with the report on the assassination plot was that Palmerston would assign the blasted project to him.

He should have insisted that Ross take it from—

Hell and damnation! That was the orangery! Could the building have been more exposed, more vulnerable to an assault? It was a huge, hexagonal structure of glass and brick and iron, the inside visible from four sides. And one of the myriad doors was gaping open and unattended.

He edged up to the building and peered through the doorway, expecting to find it lush with palms and ferns. Instead, it was stacked high with islands of crates and barrels.

But nothing moved.

Nothing. Not a sound.

And the silence clenched at his gut.

His nerves on edge, his ears alert for any movement, he walked the outside perimeter of the enclosure, looking for breaks in the glass and jimmied latches, the telltale marks of an attempt to gain entry.

He caught a movement at the far edge of the woods, but relaxed almost immediately as he recognized Blackburn patrolling the grounds, knowing that Shepherd would be close behind.

And still he found no sign of scraped iron or distressed glass, no footprints along the massive glass walls, no suspiciously matted grass that might indicate that someone had lain in wait for a perfect shot at the princess.

Nothing but a hauntingly familiar voice coming from around the brick-end of the building.

“If we give that crate a shove, Mr. Wheeler, I think it’ll fit right back here.”

And Wheeler’s groaning reply. “What’ve you got in here, Princess, lead shot?”

Drew exhaled a blue curse and a grunt of relief as he strode toward the open doors of the wagon shed.

The princess and Wheeler were just hoisting a small crate up onto the tailgate of a wagon, both of them straining at the task until the crate dropped into place, causing the bed to sag slightly.

He should have been blazing with outrage at the woman’s antics. Instead, he found himself pausing at the door like a besotted swain, watching her in silence, his heart beating more steadily now that he’d found the blasted woman, though his pulse took a profound turn toward the hotly carnal when she looked up and into his eyes.

Golden tendrils of curling hair cascaded off her shoulders. A rag-plain dress, just as Mackenzie had described, complete with cobwebs and bits of grass. But she wore it like a dewy fairy queen.

“Good morning, Wexford,” she said with a cocky tilt of her head and a slow, sweeping glance that raked upward from his boots to the top of his head, finally resting softly on his face.

“Princess,” he was all he managed through a throat that had dried up along with his anger.

“Ah, g’d morning, sir.” Wheeler gave him a rueful nod as he touched the brim of his cap. “Thought it best to give Princess Caroline a hand with her chores.”

The man had the instincts of a fox. “Indeed, Wheeler.”

“And you’ve been the greatest help to me, Mr. Wheeler. I thank you.” She grinned at the man, whose eyes went a little moony while she efficiently brushed a stripe of dust off his jacket sleeve. “However, I think this is about the last of it for today.”

“If you’re certain, Your Highness.” Wheeler shot a glance at Drew, obviously looking to do right by the situation.

“If she needs anything else moved, Wheeler, I’m sure I can handle it.”

The princess sighed and teased a wink at Wheeler. “I suppose his lordship can manage, Mr. Wheeler.”

He’d never seen the hard-nosed Wheeler blush before, or stammer, but there it was. “Ah, good then, Your Highness, I’ll be off for a quick breakfast.”

The princess took a startled breath. “You haven’t eaten, Mr. Wheeler? Great heavens! Why didn’t you say something earlier?”

“Well, I—” Wheeler cast Drew another “help me please” smile.

“Because you needed him, Princess,” Drew said. “That’s his job.” And she couldn’t have chosen better. Wheeler was a crack shot. The shed was well protected from snipers and yet had excellent sightlines against a sneak attempt.

She flexed her brow at Drew, then softened it for Wheeler. “Next time, Mr. Wheeler, just tell me. I’ll not have my staff thinking I’m an ogre.”

So they were
her
staff now. Good.

Wheeler turned a goofy grin at her. “Oh, we’d never think that of you, Your Highness. Never.” He dipped the princess a courtly bow and left them at a jog.

She watched the man for a moment then scrubbed her palms together, and turned all that bewitching charm on him, stunning him for a moment. “I hope you slept well, Wexford. You’ll need your strength if you’re to keep up with me today. Even here in my own home.”

He knew that she was waiting for him to take the bait, to demand to know what the devil she was doing out here in the open and how she had escaped him out of her chamber.

Let her wait. Keeping a royal off balance kept the control in his court.

“I slept like the dead, Princess,” he said, stifling the sudden yawn that would give him away.

She dipped him the tiniest frown and then blinded him with a smile. “I’m pleased to hear it, Lord Wexford. I hope you don’t mind my borrowing one of your operatives, since you’ve sent off all my assistants on an expense paid holiday.”

“I’m actually pleased to see you abiding by at least one of my rules, Princess: taking an escort with you wherever you go. However you seemed to have forgotten that you weren’t supposed to leave the house.”

“I never promised that I would abide by your rules, my lord.” She flashed him a challenging smile as she climbed nimbly up onto the wagon’s running board. “Only that I would ride in your carriage and keep your investigation a secret. And I will.”

Drew scrubbed at his raspy chin, finding his jaw tightly clenched beneath. “Madam, your safety is the paramount concern in any policy that I establish—”

“I’m glad you brought that up, Wexford,” she said, leaning easily against the side of the wagon, her el
bow resting between the horizontal slats, “because I’ve had time to think about the threat to my life and though I absolutely believe everything you’ve told me—that someone out there”—she gestured to the wide, random world—“is determined to kill me, I just can’t allow a cowardly enemy to keep me from my official duties.”

“What the devil does that mean, madam?” Fearing the worst of the woman’s stubbornness, Drew caught the top slat with his hand, purposely towering over her. “Your official duty is to stay alive.”

“Which I plan to do, Wexford, by allowing you to conduct your investigation as you see fit.” She reached into the wagon bed and struggled for a moment to shift one of the crates, before Drew gave it a simple shove and it clunked into place.

“You’re
allowing
me, madam?”

She nodded blithely. “
And
I’m accepting your protection—”

“Accepting it?”

She looked up at him with honesty blazing in her blue eyes. “With my heartfelt gratitude for risking your life, but with one condition.”

Drew caught her upper arm and eyed her closely, knowing that he’d regret asking the question because he couldn’t possibly go along with any of her harebrained suggestions. “What condition is that?”

“You can follow me as closely as you like, bundle me up in your bulletproof carriage, install your operatives in my house, surround me with a battalion of sharpshooters, whatever you need to do”—she blinked up at him, then touched the center of his chest with the tip of her hot little finger—“as long as
you stay out of my way so that I can go about my business.”

“Stay out of your way?” He laughed out loud—couldn’t help it. “Madam, your safety is not a matter presented to you for your approval.”

“Who else then, if not me?” She snorted lightly, bent down behind her, then lifted a small keg onto the tailgate. “It’s my life. My kingdom. My future. I’d like to think I have some say in it.”

He still had time to foist off the case on Ross. The man had certainly seemed willing to take his place last night.

More than willing.

“Well, have I, Wexford?” She had hoisted herself into the wagon bed, where she now stood glaring down at him with blue-tinged determination in her eyes, her hands braced against her lithely perfect hips. “A moderate say in my own life?”

He doubted she had a moderate bone in her body. “That depends, madam, on what you mean by
moderate
.”

“What I mean, Wexford, is that I won’t be put into a hatbox for safekeeping. But neither will I fight your efforts to protect me, if…you don’t try to stop me from coming and going as I need to.”

He tamped down his urge to bellow at her. “Princess—”

She knelt down to him from the wagon bed, her eyes narrowed and only inches from his. “Believe me, Wexford, if I could spend the next three weeks locked in my library reading or having tea with my much neglected friends, I would do so gladly. I would love to live the life of an ordinary royal. But I can’t.”

An ordinary royal? Bloody hell, the woman wasn’t ordinary in the least.

“I’m a princess, soon to be the empress of my father’s long-lost kingdom. My duties and obligations are legion and they must come first, yesterday, today and always. Otherwise, I might as well not be a princess at all. So you’ll have to work around me, sir, or work with me. If you want my cooperation, you’re going to have to employ an ounce or two of your own. Do you understand?”

He understood only too well: that his princess would be uncompromising in her demands, that he was in for a rocky journey.

And that Ross had been far too willing to take on the case. Let him find his own princess.

“Work around you, madam?” he asked, grasping at any straw that might mitigate the situation. “What exactly do you plan to be doing for the next three weeks?” He knew her schedule, but not the details.

Her eyes brightened as though she knew she’d beaten him, then her smile returned with the flick of a fawn-colored brow.

“This, my lord,” she said, standing as she spread her arms to encompass the wagon and the shed and the many containers stacked around it. “The Great Exhibition is only two weeks away.”

Excellent. Good. Grand. He chewed on the side of his tongue and then asked as calmly as he knew how. “And this is part of your display?”

Reluctant to give the inch that might become half a league, Drew picked up two kegs off the ground and set them into the wagon bed for her.

An offering of sorts. An unsettled contract.

“This is but a small part of the treasure.” She
rammed the two kegs against the others then sat down on the tailgate, tucking a loose strand of hair over her ear, her legs dangling amongst the folds of her skirts.

“What treasure?” He didn’t like the sound of that. A storehouse of riches to tempt a hundred thieves, a thousand assassins.

“Come, let me show you.”

Before he could offer to help her down from the tailgate, she scooted forward, only to snag her skirt on something behind her. His endlessly tempting, pink-cheeked princess trapped and fully at his mercy.

“Well, blast, I’m stuck.” Again. Just like last night in the maze. She twisted around to free herself, but Drew caught her left wrist with her first awkward tug.

“Allow me, Princess.” Drew leaned around her, suddenly overwhelmed by the nearness of her warmth, by the golden hair tumbling over her shoulder, by her enchanting scent of morning glories and sunlight.

By the rousing closeness of her as she whispered so near his temple. “It’s good to know, my lord, that you’re not only prepared to protect me from hedge mazes, but also from dangerous splinter attacks.”

Caro couldn’t remember ever having a man take such liberties with her person as Wexford had done repeatedly in the last ten hours. Certainly never a man with such broad shoulders, with such an encompassing presence.

And now he was nearly wrapped around her once again, in the full light of day, his hot chest pressed against her thigh, sending little vibrations rippling through her like a pebble tossed into a warm summer pool.

“I’m bound to protect you from anything at all, Princess.” One of his powerful arms was working at her skirts and the wagon bed, the other was gripping his own knee as though it would, on its own power, attempt to grip hers. “However, you need to lean away from me so that I can—”

He stopped abruptly as she leaned away from him, then took a deep breath, cleared his throat, gave a tug and then her skirt came free of the thick, daggerlike splinter.

His gaze was fierce and fixed on hers as he lifted her off the tailgate and set her onto her feet before backing away from her. “Don’t do that again, Princess.”

As though she’d had any choice. “I’ll do my best to stay clear of all splinters, nails and button hooks.”

“See that you do.” Then the man stalked past her and into the orangery, stopping abruptly a dozen feet inside the door, his fists stuffed against his hips as he surveyed her carefully arranged stacks of crates and barrels.

“Why, Princess, are you keeping all the treasures of Boratania in an unguarded glass building?”

“I’m not that foolish, Wexford.” But appeasing him somewhat might aid in her negotiations with the hardheaded man. “The orangery was built on top of the undercroft of a twelfth-century abbey. Which makes for a very secure treasure vault beneath.”