Princess (4 page)

“It’s not serious,” he said at last, hoping he was right. He felt the warm trickle of blood inside his shirt, but he didn’t have time to be wounded. He had a job to do.
Thank God for that.

She lifted one brow, giving his skeptical look right back to him.

“It’s nothing,” he reiterated crisply.

“I’ll be the judge of that,” she said, then firmly took his hand again.

He glanced warily at her as she led him down the maze’s narrow lane like an impatient governess with an impossible charge. She seemed very determined about something. He supposed he should probably worry.

At the intersection of the lanes, once more the princess stared at the dead Frenchman as if she could not comprehend how his blond, curly head had come to be skewed at such an impossible angle.

Darius decided he didn’t much like her interest in his handiwork, nor did he appreciate her wary, sideward glance that flicked to his arms, as if to say,
You did that with your bare
hands?

He gave her a quelling look, pulled his hand out of hers, and walked on, striding down the breezy corridor between the hedges. Serafina caught up, skipping now and then to keep up with his longer paces.

“What did they want, anyway? I thought they were my friends.”

“Sorry, they weren’t,” he said, flicking the ashes off his cheroot and trying desperately to regain his sharp, efficient control.

“Napoleon sent them?”

“Fouché, to be exact—Napoleon’s minister of police. Officially speaking, the emperor knows nothing of this.”

“They didn’t want to kill me, surely?” she exclaimed.

“No.”

“To stop my marriage, then?”

Her stunning looks and lighthearted manner made it easy to forget how intelligent she was, he thought, an oversight men made to their folly. With a smile, she could twist any male around her finger, even the mighty Prince Anatole Tyurinov, it seemed, considering the fact that she had managed to wrest some concessions from the Russian about freeing half his serfs over a period of two years.

“Yes,” he answered, “to stop your marriage. If the French had you in their possession, your father would have no choice but to hand over control of Ascencion’s navy. They’ve been polite about it till now, but your fiancé’s introduction into the equation made these despicable, underhanded tactics unavoidable on their part.”

She stifled a sound of impatience as she looked away, scowling prettily again. “But now that Napoleon has command of Spain’s ships, why does he still want my father’s navy?”

“Nothing is ever enough for Bonaparte, you know that,” he answered with an exhalation of smoke. “Besides, he still hasn’t amassed the forces necessary to take England. He’s going to need all the vessels he can get his hands on. Frankly, he’ll never carry it off,” he remarked.

“I hope not.”

The wind rose, carrying to them the smell of the sea as it raked through the towering hedges. She skipped a step to keep up, brushed a long, blowing lock of her hair away from her mouth, and glanced up at him rather anxiously.

“I suppose Napoleon thought he could legitimize kidnapping me by forcing me to marry his little namby-pamby, Eugène?”

“According to my sources, yes, that was the notion.”

She gave a delicate snort.

He suppressed a smile. The Jewel of Ascencion was admittedly hard to impress.

Eugène Beauharnais, Napoleon’s twenty-four-year-old stepson, was perhaps the only contender for Serafina’s hand of whom Darius did not heartily disapprove. The young aristocrat was honorable, loyal, and even-tempered—and any man who dared think of marrying this girl, he knew, would need the patience of Job. Unfortunately, Eugène was on the wrong side of the war. Even still, Darius almost would have preferred him instead of the husband the king had found her to ward off Napoleon’s threatened invasion—the vainglorious golden giant Prince Anatole Tyurinov.

Desirous of a royal bride to overawe his friends and rouse envy in his enemies, the glorious Anatole, as Darius had come mockingly to think of him, had visited the kingdom several months ago to inspect Serafina’s famous beauty. Darius had been on duty in Moscow during their fortnight’s courtship. The match had been quickly arranged.

Too bloody quickly, he thought rather bitterly. He had not even completed his background check on the prospective bride-groom for the king, but the bargain was sealed.

In exchange for her hand, the thirty-three-year-old Russian war hero had pledged to take his army of a hundred thousand troops and bring a rain of fire on Paris itself if Napoleon made any move against the tiny, neutral Ascencion.

The peace had been preserved by the stalemate, the wedding date set for the first of June, less than a month away, but Darius had already made up his mind that it would never take place.

He stole a covert glance at the breathtaking young woman by his side.

He did not doubt that Serafina had beguiled Tyurinov—she did not often use her beauty for the mighty weapon it was, but when she did, a man didn’t have a chance. But he wondered, not for the first time, what her feelings were in return. Between his blue-blooded pedigree, martial victories, and golden good looks, women tended to go insane over the glorious Anatole. Perhaps Serafina had found him worthy of her. Perhaps she had fallen in love.

The thought coiled his stomach in knots. He decided he didn’t really want to know.

Just then, a low rumble of thunder rolled across the sky.

Serafina and he glanced at each other. He was about to suggest that they run, but he was too late. The summer downpour the sky had promised all evening began, steadily pelting them with soft, fat raindrops.

They both just stood there looking at each other and getting wet.

“Ah, well,” he said at last with a weary sigh. He threw his ruined cheroot into the grass, and lowered his head as the rain soaked his sleeves and his hair.

Serafina tilted her face back to catch the rain. She turned her hands palms upward, cupping them.

He glanced at her standing there in his jacket, which reached almost to her knees. She was bedraggled and barefoot like a waif, basking in the rain like a flower, and out of nowhere, slowly she began to laugh.

At the rich, careless sound of her laughter, he fought a smile, but when she looked over to meet his gaze, laughing at he knew not what, he lost the battle and found himself laughing quietly, too.

She lifted her hands over her head, wrists together, palms open, and twirled around once in a circle, her head thrown back to the rain, her long curls spinning out around her, raindrops on her hair like diamonds.

“Darius!” she exclaimed. “You saved me!”

She danced over to him with a single fairylike motion, laid one warm hand on his belly to brace herself, and, lifting up onto her toes, kissed the hard, wet line of his jaw, rain streaming in rivulets down her face.

With that, she flitted away and ran off like a woodland nymph, trailing silvery laughter through the rain.

Dazed, he could only stand there for a minute, staring after her. Vaguely, he pressed his hand to his stomach where she had touched him. He watched her catching raindrops on her tongue, and for a moment, he ached.

A thunderbolt struck nearer then, like a cannon’s shot, like Zeus’s wrath.

Darius shook his head as if to clear it, raked a hand through his rain-slick hair, and squinted against the rain, wondering who the king would get to take her into hiding and guard her.

Luckily, he himself would be too busy catching spies.

Serafina waited ahead for him, stamping in a grassy puddle. He caught up to her and they left the maze side by side, drenched by the rain as they ran through the octagonal parterres and down the promenade lined by tall columns of bushes sculpted into spirals.

The rain was sizzling on the cobbled path when they arrived at the little waterworks building not far from the maze. Tucked under mounds of lilacs the exact color of her eyes, the sleepy little service building was a small square of red brick.

Both of them soaked to the skin and breathless from running, he held the door for her. Her panting laughter echoed in its single room, empty but for some garden implements and the valves and gauges and metal contraptions which controlled the many fountains on the grounds.

Bending gracefully to the side, Serafina wrung out her long hair with both hands while he groped his way through the pitch-dark, trying to find the small wooden door which led to the passage connecting the waterworks to the palace.

“Wait for me. I can’t see you.”

He stopped, holding out his hand to her. She ran into it in the dark.

“Are you grabbing me?” she asked in playful indignation.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he muttered.

“Exceedingly!”

“Flirt.” He shook his head half in wonder at her swift recovery after her ordeal. Then again, she was much tougher than she normally let on. Like him, she merely played a part, but he had always known the real Serafina. “Young lady, you are definitely due for a lecture.”

“Oh, how I miss your lectures, Darius!”

He bumped into something and muttered an oath.

“The blind leading the blind,” she said, giggling and clinging loosely to his arm.

“What am I to do, take you in through the front entrance? Do you want to meet the Russian diplomats looking like a drowned rat?”

“I never look like a drowned rat. I’m Helen of Troy, remember?”

Taken aback by the cynicism undercutting her blithe tone, he merely said, “Trust me.”

“Lord, are you going to find it or not? I haven’t got all night.”

“Eureka,” he replied.

He opened the little door. It creaked in the dark.

She peered warily into the doorway. “It’s black as a tomb down there.”

“Never fear, I know the way.”

By his early twenties, he had worked his way up to the post of captain of the Royal Guard, heading palace security, but he’d known of the secret passages within the building since he was a lad. Underfoot while the palace was under construction, he’d explored every inch of it, almost as if he had known that once it was completed and filled with lords and courtiers and such, there would be no real place here for a young half-Gypsy thief, no matter how much he adored the godlike man and gentle lady who had taken him in when he’d had nothing and no one.

Even as a boy, it had been important to show King Lazar and Queen Allegra that their generosity was not misplaced. He had been fairly sure they wouldn’t send him away, for they treated him like a member of their own family, but he wasn’t taking any chances. He had applied himself to learning to read, getting an education, silently studying the people around him, and mastering every weapon he could find. He had been given the chance to become something higher and better than he was, and he channeled his anger into striving for excellence. As a ward of the king, he could have had countless advantages, but he had insisted on lifting himself up by his own merit, for he never wanted his benefactors to think for one second that he served them out of any other motive than gratitude, honor, loyalty, and love.

Carefully, he led their daughter down the spiraling metal stairs to the passage below.

Because the corridor was perfectly lightless, he let her keep holding his arm, but in the dark, with her so close and with the warmth and the scent of her enveloping him, it was strange how vivid his imagination grew.

Visions came to him of maneuvering her against the smooth stuccoed wall and kissing her, tasting her mouth, parting his jacket, and cupping her beautiful breasts in his hands, caressing her until she forgot the other man’s touch on her silken skin, until he had obliterated it with his own.

Shaken by the intensity of the impulse, he squared his shoulders, lifted his chin, and picked up the pace, his spurs striking the flagstones with each swift stride.

He could have any woman he wanted.

Any but this
one
.

“So, Darius, how did you manage to be in the right place at the exact moment I needed you?” she asked, giving his arm another fond tug. “Gypsy magic?”

She was the only person who could mention the more disgraceful half of his heritage without insulting him.

“Hardly. It was no coincidence. I tried to come ashore in secret but Saint-Laurent must have caught wind of my arrival. I presume he felt forced to make his move whether he was ready or not.”

“I see.” She was silent for a moment, then her tone was hesitant. “Darius, I know you must report to Papa, but I don’t want you to tell him what Philippe . . . did. It would only hurt him.”

Her request startled him—he didn’t think she could see that far beyond herself—but his own ready compliance surprised him even more. Lazar would want to know the full extent of the French insult to his daughter, but she was right. What purpose would it serve? It would only inflame the proud King Lazar di Fiore to agitate Napoleon worse.

“Yes, Your Highness,” he murmured with the disquieting thought that he was adding up all sorts of secrets from the king these days.

“First we’ll have to go to my apartments so I can change this dress. If Papa sees how torn it is . . .”

“I understand.”

“Thank you,” she whispered. And after a moment she added, “I am so very glad you are home, Darius. I worry for you so when you are gone.”

He felt her hands slide down his arm, gently clasping his hand in both of hers. He swallowed hard. In the darkness, he opened his hand and linked his fingers through hers, pulling her gently around the corner.

Soon they ascended the lightless, narrow stairs. They turned on the landing, but as they started up the second flight, he began to feel disturbingly light-headed. He ignored the faint, sick dizziness at first, but midway up the stairs he leaned against the wall suddenly, overcome by a wave of nausea which he knew could only be the result of blood loss. His shoulder hurt like hell.

“Darius? What is it?”

“I’m all right.” Stars burst before his eyes on the blackness.

“Sit down. I’ll go for the surgeon.”

“No, it’s nothing, I don’t—want that—bumbling idiot. I’ll just—” He lost track of what he was saying in a wave of dizziness. His breath turned to shallow panting. He sagged against the wall.