Princess (2 page)

She shut her eyes briefly and said a prayer, then darted past, stealing a fleeting glance down the lane as she went. Some twenty feet away, Philippe’s thuggish driver lay sprawled on his face, unmoving. A length of wire glinted in the moonlight. He had been garroted, she realized, sickened. Darius had passed this way.

She marched on with stiff, jerky strides while cold horror spiraled down to her belly. The cicadas’ song stretched to one flat, vibrating note she thought would snap her nerves. When she reached the end of the lane, she grimaced, fighting a silent, mighty battle for the courage to look around the corner. She forced herself.

Clear!

The entrance to the courtyard was in sight at the far end of the corridor. She was almost there. All she had to do was pass yet another gap in the bushes halfway down the lane.

She turned the corner and ran for it.

Her breath raked over her teeth, her bare feet bore her swiftly over the silken grass. The break was coming, while straight ahead lay the entrance to the courtyard. The sky flung a handful of rain on the breeze into her face. Clouds covered the gold half-moon.

“Get back here, you little bitch!” a deep voice roared.

She shrieked and looked over her shoulder as Philippe tore around the corner behind her.

As she passed the gap, running full force, Henri exploded out of the intersecting path. He caught her in both arms and she screamed. Philippe was bearing down fast, and then Darius was there, death gliding out of the shadows, attacking with the leap of the wolf.

Henri shouted, lost his hold on her trying to ward off Darius. She tore free, tackled her way clear of him, heard ripping silk as she pulled, wrenching forward. She sprinted toward the courtyard, sobbing now. She stubbed her toe on the bricks, stumbling into the small enclosure. She passed the leering, stone grotesque of the Pan fountain, with its mossy mouth trickling water, and flung herself into the shadowed corner.

She crouched down, praying Philippe would choose to stay and help his friend fight Darius rather than coming straight-away after her, but the prayer was no sooner through her mind than the Frenchman loomed in the entrance between the neatly trimmed hedges.

Panting hard, he saw her at once, and his sneer turned his handsome face ugly. He strode to her and hauled her up from her crouched position. She cried out. He hurled her about face and put a knife to her throat just as Darius came running up to the entrance.

She sobbed his name.

Philippe wrenched her. “Shut up!”

Darius drew himself up short, breathing hard as he took in the scene before him. His fiery onyx eyes pierced the night with hellfire intensity. Heat lightning flashed across the sky with a brilliancy that illuminated his dark, exotic beauty for an instant—then darkness.

Serafina fixed her stare and all her faith on him as she clung with both hands to the steely arm around her throat.

“Stand aside, Santiago,” Philippe warned. “You come any closer, she dies.”

“Don’t be an ass, Saint-Laurent. We both know he doesn’t want her harmed.” His tone was coolly scornful, his stance relaxed, but danger emanated from him as he sauntered into the courtyard, his body sleek and lean, gold moonlight glancing off his broad shoulders. Impeccably attired in black, he moved with predatory grace.

He had a high brow under a glossy, raven forelock. Inky, brooding eyes reflected all the tumult and fire of his passionate, secretive nature. The austere angles of his high-boned cheeks and haughty, aquiline nose warred with the sensuality of his rich, sulky mouth. A small scar like a crescent moon marred the sculpted sweetness of his lips with a bitter twist.

Serafina stared, mesmerized, but Darius did not even look at her, as if she were of no consequence. Instead, he spiked Philippe with a sharp glance, a half-smile on his lips.

“I thought you were a professional, Saint-Laurent,” he said, his soft, lulling voice tinged with a Spanish accent. “Is this how you conduct business? Putting knives to young girls’ throats?” He gestured toward them with idle elegance. “I often wonder how you people stomach it,” he remarked. “Serving a man who is without honor.”

“I didn’t come here to philosophize with you, Santiago,” Philippe ground out, as tense and heated as Darius was cool. “I’m going now, and she’s coming with me.”

“If you believe I shall let you pass,” he said gently, “you are deceiving yourself.”

“I’ll cut her!” Philippe warned.

Darius gave him a chilling smile. “Your master wouldn’t like that.”

The silence sharpened to a razor’s edge as the two men stared at each other, both trained to kill, each waiting for the other to strike, until Serafina couldn’t bear it any longer.

“Please,” she choked out, “let me go.”

At her plea, Darius’s coal-black eyes flicked to hers. For one disastrous instant, she read the truth there—the fury, the desperation behind his cool control. The fleeting look vanished at once and his scarred lips curved again in that mocking half-smile, but it was too late.

Philippe had seen it, too. “What’s this?” he asked with a taunting laugh. “Have I stumbled upon a weakness? Is it possible the great Santiago has an Achilles’ heel?”

Darius’s finely chiseled face hardened as he cast the facade aside. His long-lashed eyes narrowed on Philippe, glittering in the dark.

“Ah, of course,” Philippe went on, heedless of the danger, “I recall someone telling me you were her bodyguard when she was just a wee thing.”

Darius’s voice softened to a terrifying murmur. “Lower your weapon.”

“Get out of my path.”

“Release the princess. Surrender is your sole option. Your men are dead, and you know full well I want you alive.”

“Hmm, he grows angry,” Philippe mused aloud. “He must be rather attached to you, my dear.”

The words pained her more than he could ever know.

“You are making things worse for yourself, Saint-Laurent. I’ll remember how you annoyed me when you and I have a talk later about your associates and your orders.”

“Ah, but my orders don’t exist, Santiago. I don’t exist. I cannot go back empty-handed, so you see, you’ll get nothing from me,” Philippe snarled.

Darius started toward them with slow, wary strides.

“Stay back!”

He paused. “Move away from the princess,” he said very softly, his stare unwavering, relentless.

Serafina was saying a fragment of a prayer over and over again in her mind. Against her body, she could feel Philippe’s heart pounding in his chest. He tightened his hold on her neck. She felt his increasing desperation as he cast about for some means of escape. She glanced at the knife poised so near her throat, then shut her eyes, praying more desperately.

“Tell me, Santiago . . . between colleagues,” Philippe barked suddenly. “Now that your little charge is so, shall we say, grown up, haven’t you ever wondered? I mean, look at her. Some say she is the most beautiful woman alive—in the top three, at least. Certainly my patron agrees. Helen of Troy, he says. Men fight wars to possess such beauty. Shall we have a look?”

Her eyes flew open wide as Philippe laid hold of her dress where Henri had already torn it. She gasped with shocked horror as he ripped it open down her back with one lightning-like movement.

“There, there,
ma belle,
” Philippe crooned, “don’t fret.”

She sobbed once, cringing where she stood. She lowered her head, powerless to stop him as he pushed the ripped ends of her dress down to her waist, baring her upper body.

This could not be happening, she thought. Not in her beautiful garden, the very heart of her safe, pretty, insulated world. Cheeks aflame, she bit her lower lip, fighting tears of rage. She tried to pull her waist-length hair forward to cover her breasts, but Philippe protested.

“
Non, non, chérie.
Let us see what beauty God hath wrought.” With his left hand, he brushed her hair softly back again behind her shoulders.

“You bastard,” Darius whispered.

She could not bear to meet his eyes.

Hands at her sides, she stood there shaking with humiliation and rage, exposed before the only man she had ever wanted. The only one who did not want her.

Not so very long ago, she had loved Darius Santiago with a painful, adolescent ardor. She had tried to show him three years ago, the night of her debut ball, that she had grown up for him at last, was no longer a child; she had tried to show him that none of his women could love him as she did. But he had fled her and left the island, hurrying off on some new mission. Now he was witness to her humiliation, forced to view her body, the gift she had tried to give him—now, when it meant nothing.

Just then the night sky flung down another swift cloudburst of cold rain. She flinched, then shuddered when the first drops struck her bare skin.

She could feel a volcanic force of pure rage building from where Darius stood, but somehow the only thing she could focus on was her pride, her last defense. She held fast to it as if it were a tangible weapon. She lifted her head high against the crushing shame. Tears in her eyes, she stared straight ahead at nothing.

Philippe laughed at her. “Haughty thing. Yes, you know you are stunning, don’t you?” he murmured, running one finger from the curve of her shoulder down her arm. She fought not to shudder with revulsion. “Skin like silk. Come and touch her, Santiago. She is exquisite. I don’t blame you—any man would have a weakness for such a creature. We can share her if you like.”

At this, her stricken gaze flew to Darius, but then a cold shaft of horror spiked down her spine, for he was feasting his eyes on her bare breasts, his gaze devouring her nakedness.

“Darius?” she asked in a pleading whisper.

Philippe’s fingers flicked in eager agitation over the knife’s hilt, but his smooth, sure voice held a note of triumph. “Come and taste her. No one needs to know. Really, after all you’ve done for your king, isn’t she the least you deserve?”

Finally, Darius looked up from his intimate perusal of her body. She caught the flash of white teeth in his cold, wicked smile. He began sauntering slowly toward them, and directed his question to Philippe. “What do you suggest?”

Her very mind choked. Images exploded in her memory of the last time she had seen Darius, six months ago. As usual he had ignored her from the moment he set foot in the palace, but that day, she had opened the door to the music room in the middle of the afternoon to find him ravishing one of his many lovers against the wall. His loose white shirt had been hanging from his shoulders, brown chest bared, his black breeches clinging upon his lean hips as the woman with her skirts hitched up fumbled to undress him. When Serafina had opened the door, he had looked over and held her shocked gaze for a second.

She still remembered the smoldering look in his eyes as she stood in the doorway, mouth agape, eyes wide. She remembered the mocking smile of seduction he had sent her before she slammed the door and fled. It was quite the same as the one on his scarred lips now.

“I’ll hold her for you,” Philippe said.

“Oh, she wouldn’t fight me,” he murmured. “Would you, angel?”

Her cheeks turned crimson. She lowered her head, heart pounding madly. Trembling violently, she could not bear to look at him as he stalked toward them.

She swore to herself this was part of a ruse. She was the Princess Royal! Darius would never—never.

But he was unlike any man she knew, this Spaniard with his terrible beauty. She could neither predict nor manage him as she did the others. She only knew that he feared nothing and that, for all his loyalty to her father, he obeyed no law but his own.

One slow, relentless stride after another, he came to stand perhaps three inches away from her, so close his chest nearly brushed her breasts. She could feel him breathing against her.

She was trapped between the two tall, ruthless men, her breath jagged, her exposed skin racing with shivers, hot and cold. He was going to touch her at any moment, she knew. Cheeks blazing, she wanted to die for shame of the perverse desire he wove into her fear. Usually she was quick-witted, but at the moment she was mute, staring brokenly at a silver button on his coat right at her eye level.

She could not think of a single thing to say to try to save herself, could not find her voice to invoke her father’s name, nor her fiancé’s—in this moment, she could not even picture Anatole’s face. Terror wiped her mind blank, and Darius filled her senses—fierce, elemental.

His nearness, the sheer male force of him, overwhelmed her. Her nostrils were filled with the clean, musky scent of him, mingled with the smell of horses and leather, the exotic spice of the cheroots he was always smoking, and the coppery taint of blood. She could feel the heat radiating from his powerful body, feel the thrumming tension coiled in his hard, sinewy form.

Then it all happened at once. He seized Philippe by the throat and knocked her out of his grasp. Philippe’s blade flashed, stabbing at him. He ducked back, grasping Philippe’s right wrist while Serafina went stumbling, landing on her hands and knees near the edge of the courtyard. Pulling the remnants of her bodice up over her shoulders with shaking hands, she immediately scrambled about face to see if Darius was hurt. The fountain partly blocked her view. There was a clatter of metal.

Philippe cursed as his weapon went skittering across the bricks. He lunged after it. Darius kicked it away and laid hold of him. Flailing wildly, Philippe tore free and bolted.

Darius was upon him. He grabbed Philippe by the back of the collar and hurled him around, throwing him down onto the flagstone, blocking the exit.

She looked up in dread when she heard the whisper of metal, and saw Darius’s ebony-handled dagger, the slim elegance of the blade kissed by moonlight.

Oh, God.

When Philippe threw up both hands to ward off the first blow, Darius’s dagger slashed across both his open palms.

Serafina turned her face away, but she heard every dragging second of their fight, every gasp and choke and low curse as Darius savaged him.

The cicadas screamed. She longed to run. When Darius swore in some unknown language, she opened her eyes and saw him lift his dagger in both hands for the final cut, saw his beautiful face alight with savagery.