Princess Charming (27 page)

“Go back, Lucy. Leave me to my own devices.” He sank down on a fallen log.

“I can’t leave you alone.”

“Neither can you stay. Mr. Selkirk will be up here at any moment, afraid that I’ve compromised the oh-so-proper Lady Lucy.” He’d meant to hide the bitter sting to the words. His reserve, which had not betrayed him since his father and the guards had found him in the mountains so many years ago, felt alarmingly fragile.

“Mr. Selkirk may offer me the protection of his roof, but I will choose my own friends.” Without waiting for an invitation, she lowered herself onto the log next to him. Her nearness twisted through him like a knife.

“Please, Lucy. Go back.” Despite his best efforts, the words held a desperate undertone. “You worry needlessly. I shall be fine.”

And he would be, once she was beyond arm’s reach. Once she had removed herself and all the temptations that were Lucy Charming. It was not just her blue eyes and her curls and her wrongheaded crusade for reform that caused his palms to sweat like a boy plunged headlong into the throes of calf love. No, Lucy Charming’s most tempting asset was her courage, a courage that he had lacked since the age of twelve.

Lucy, though, refused to be so easily dismissed. She slipped her hand between his sleeve and chest and curled her fingers around his arm. Nick willed his pulse not to beat faster. Her touch was both heaven and hell. He wanted her, he could have her, but in the end, she would cost him what little remained of his soul, for marriage meant offspring, and even he knew that he could not allow Santadorra to be denied its heir to the throne.

“Tell me.” She said the words with soft understanding, and his stomach knotted.

“Tell you what? I’ve already told you to go away, and you don’t listen. Would there be any use in telling you anything more?”

She ignored his caustic reply. “Tell me why you behaved so abominably to the Selkirks. For all your faults, you do not usually lack for polite address. Even if those around you are not your equals.”

If he had not revealed so much of himself to Lucy over the last few weeks, she would not now understand so much of his character. She would have chalked up his behavior to princely pride or royal snobbery. To her, he was not Crown Prince Nicholas. He was simply Nick. The thought seduced him even as he fought temptation. He had never met anyone less intimidated by worldly consequence than Lucy Charming, but Nick remained silent. Let her make her own conjectures. Whatever they might be, they were less humiliating than the truth.

“I won’t go back until you tell me why you were so rude.” She squirmed closer to him on the log, and Nick’s pulse accelerated despite his willpower.

“There’s nothing to tell, Lucy. My motives are as base as you say. The Selkirks are beneath me, my inferiors in every regard. What does it matter if I insult them?” The whiskey he’d consumed with the dab of dinner he’d eaten suffused his brain. Nick was no stranger to strong spirits, but those caves must make for some powerful brewing houses. The steady year-round temperature would be ideal. No wonder the log beneath him seemed to tilt first in one direction and then the other.

“What does it matter if you insult them?” Lucy repeated his question, incredulous. “It matters a great deal to me, you
 . . .
” She stopped. “No. I won’t let you distract me. Not again. What is your objection to staying with the Selkirks? I have a right to know.”

Nick laughed. “A right to know? What right?”

“The right of wager, I guess. You did agree that I might select the means of your education about reform.”

He snorted. “Sleeping under the Selkirks’ roof is not part of that education. Attending the reform meeting is.”

“It is all part and parcel of the same thing, Nick.”

With each passing moment, he grew too exhausted to argue with her. “Go away, Lucy.”

“All right. If you answer one question.”

He paused. Agreeing to her request was a gamble, but if it would send her back to the safety of the Selkirks’ abode, it would be worth it.

“Very well. One question.”

“Why are you afraid of caves?”

He slid farther along the log to escape the warmth that radiated from her body like steam from a Santadorran hot spring. “Afraid? How amusing. Is that what you think?” His tone was perfect—bored, distant, cynically detached. She would never push past his reserve, not while he was still conscious and upright, anyway.

“You are. You’re frightened of the caves.”

He gripped the end of the log with one hand, glad to have put some distance between them. “That’s an amusing theory, Lucy, but hardly one with any merit. I simply prefer not to spread my bedroll among such common people.”

“What happened to your mother and sister?”

“What have they to do with this?” His pulse pounded in his ears. Lucy followed him along the log. If he tried to move away from her again, he would find himself tumbled in a heap on the cold ground.

“The mountains in Santadorra—are there caves, as you told the boys?” Her hand slid down his arm, and her fingers claimed his. The warmth of her touch was his undoing. Or was it the warmth of her heart? Years of shame and humiliation mingled inside him and pressed against one another until they caught fire and burned in his breast.

“Yes, by Jove, there are caves.” Flames rushed through him, scorching him with the shame of his memories. “Miserable, damp, cold caves. Perhaps the soldiers were kind enough to leave my mother and sister’s bodies in one, but they were never found.” With a jerky motion, he rose on unsteady legs, bile rising in his throat. Lucy moved with him, catching his elbow and holding him upright, and heaven help him, he let her. He leaned on her.

“And you? Was there a cave there for you?”

Thank God for the darkness. It hid this unmanly display. Thick tears coursed over his cheeks, tears that he had not cried since that awful night.

“A cave for me? Yes. Of course. A small one. One that only a twelve-year-old boy could squeeze inside. The soldiers were less than a hundred feet away. They camped for the night there. I was afraid to breathe.”

She would try to comfort him. She would murmur platitudes. Nick waited in dread, but Lucy was silent, blissfully silent. He wiped his cheeks with his sleeve. If he were a stronger man, he would shake off her grip on his arm, but that light touch—perhaps he could bear that. If she had tried to embrace him or fawn over him, he could not have borne it. But the gentle pressure of her fingers just above the crook of his arm could be tolerated. It would be so much easier if he didn’t love her. Then he wouldn’t care what she thought of him.

“I’ve never told anyone about that night.” The words escaped before he could weigh their import. They echoed in his head and in the crisp night air, and he wished he could call them back. They revealed too much.

He could tell she was searching his face in the darkness. “Never told anyone? Not even Crispin?”

“No. Only my father.”

“How long ago did it happen?” They stood quietly in the darkness, the lights of Nottingham scattered below them like diamonds on a queen’s mantle.

Nick laughed bitterly. “Sixteen years. The poets like to deceive us by saying that time heals such wounds, but I have not found that to be the case.” No, time had no such efficacious powers. Wagers and drink and women possessed much stronger medicine.

“Time does heal wounds,” Lucy countered softly, “but only if we allow it to do so. You have kept this wound open purposely, Nick. No wonder it has festered.”

Her implied criticism stung, and Nick shook off her grasp as he stepped away from her. What could Lucy Charming know of wounds and their healing? She lived the life she wanted, in the manner she desired.

“What could heal this, Lucy? And why should it be healed? They were my responsibility, and I failed. There is little more to be said.” He wished he had never left the Selkirks’ cave. Confession would never bring the absolution he sought, and once she had seen his weakness, Lucy would have yet another reason not to sign her name to the marriage lines that lay tucked in his vest pocket.

“And so you became profligate. A thorn in your father’s side, so that he would not love you.”

Nick winced. “It required little effort on my part to achieve that goal.” The words had stewed inside him for so long that they were thick with anger. “My father is inclined to believe the worst of me. He does, after all, have history on his side.”

“And what—or whom—do you have on yours?” she asked softly.

Nick’s gut twisted. How could he answer that? He had Crispin, to some extent, but not beyond the bounds of the usual camaraderie between gentlemen. His tailor? No, for he had not paid his bills in some months. Not his boot maker either, obviously. Henny or Madame St. Cloud? For a price. The loyal subjects of Santadorra? It was their attempt to revolt, encouraged by the French soldiers, that had cost him everything he held dear. Whom did he have on his side? He supposed the former climbing boys in Mr. Cartwright’s care might be bothered to consult him on the design and construction of tree houses.

“There is no one, princess.” Grief rose up, inexorably, like a stream fed by summer storms, filling every empty place inside of him. He should have known this would happen. From the moment he had opened his eyes that day in Lady Belmont’s garden and had seen Lucy Charming hovering above him like some angelic visitation, he should have known this very moment would arrive, this confession would become necessary. “I am alone. It is what I like, and that is how I shall remain, even if I marry.”

He had used similar words before with women, said in much more self-deprecating tones. If given the right mixture of haunting tragedy and masculine indifference, most women tumbled at his feet. He hated that Lucy would become just another victim in a long succession of casualties. Like all the others, she would want to heal him. Her instincts for reform would engage, and he would become a project, not a person.

She hovered a few feet away. He would bed her, he supposed, when she came to him. They would be married soon anyway, and he ought to gain some recompense for his confession. Surely he was due some salve to his pride.

With a deep sigh designed to draw her to him, he turned and even opened his arms. In the dark, she was hard to see. In fact, he could not see her at all. He listened. He could not hear her either. The soft breathing that had driven him wild that night at Madame St. Cloud’s was not in evidence.

“Lucy?”

No answer. And then he saw her, farther down the hill. She stood poised at the top of the makeshift stairs.

“Lucy?” Damn, but there was the slightest hint of panic in his voice.

She looked back over her shoulder, and he couldn’t read her expression. He had chosen the darkness to conceal his own feelings, but they hid hers as well.

“Where are you going?”

She stood silhouetted against the night sky by the lights from the caves below. “I’m returning to the Selkirks, as you wished. In my opinion, self-pity is more effective as a solitary occupation.”

Self-pity? Her words hit him with the force of a blow. Nick stood stunned. How dare she? How dare she trivialize his most intimate secrets?

Suddenly, he was moving down the hill. He caught her on the stairway and grabbed her arm. “That is your response to my revelations? You walk away?”

She stopped and glared first at his fingers that held her prisoner and then into his face. They stood close enough now that even in the dim light he could see the color of her eyes, the blue of a Santadorran lake.

“Your Highness, I am mortally tired of being grabbed like some barroom doxy.” She shook off his grip. “Do you never tire of trying to control me? Surely the sport must lose its freshness.”

Nick stared at her in confusion, his heart aching. “I have never deceived myself, Lucy, into thinking I might control your behavior. I have only sought to remedy some of the damage you inflict upon yourself.”

“And what of the damage that you bring upon yourself? Who will remedy that, Nick?” A soft night wind blew her curls into her eyes. He reached out to brush them back but she pushed his hand away. “I am sorry for your loss, but you are not the only person in the world who has ever suffered. You lost your mother and sister. I lost my father. The Selkirks lost their older son when so many of the Luddites were transported to Australia. We have all suffered, Nick, but you have had the comfort of money and position. You have had the security of education and breeding. You and I have never known day upon day of hunger. Nor have we watched our children starve before our eyes. Yes, our sufferings are real, but they are very little when compared with what occurs in the width and breadth of the world.”

Nick wanted to breathe, but his lungs did not seem to be working. He wanted to protest, to defend his right to his pain, but the truth in Lucy’s words rendered him speechless. He had indeed sought heedless self-indulgence as a remedy to his pain, while she had taken on the cause of reform. He had thought her foolish, but, not for the first time, he saw that he was the one who had been a very great fool.

Her expression was as hard and cold as the rock that surrounded them. “I bid you good night, Your Highness. You need not stay in Nottingham. I’m sure you will prefer to return to London in the morning. This wager is a charade that need not be played to its conclusion.”

He would lose her. Nick knew it, felt it in the hollow ache that had taken up residence in his chest. If he let her go now, she would disappear from his life forever.

“No. I desire no such release. The wager still stands. Either you convince me of reform, or you marry me.”

“You will not release me from the wager?” she asked in disbelief. Their gazes held, locked in combat, but Nick refused to relent.

“No. I will not.” He had already lost too much in his lifetime. He would not let her escape him so easily.

“Very well, then,” she conceded, more graciously than he might have hoped. Was that relief he saw in her eyes? “I will see you at breakfast.” She started down the stairs, and Nick stepped back to collect his rucksack and followed her.

“You need not see me to the door,” she snapped, but Nick did not stop. He felt lighter somehow, as if by sharing his memories, he had divested himself of a physical burden. The prospect of the Selkirks’ cave-like abode suddenly seemed less daunting now that he had shared the truth of his fears with Lucy.