The Runaway Princess (15 page)

She'd been thirsty and hadn't even realized it. How did he know?

He moved about on the shore, arranging a pine bough bed, lining a fire pit, washing some rags in the water—they looked like her clothes—and tossing them over a bush. Rummaging in the bag he'd carried, he extracted several somethings, then once more he strode purposefully into the water.

Nervously she sat up a little straighter, then wished she hadn't. She didn't like the way he stared at her, focused not on her eyes but on her shoulders. The wet chemise clung to them, the cold air brought gooseflesh to her skin, and she wished, not for the first time, that Danior was a normal-sized man. This excess of breadth and height seemed an extravagant array of muscle and bone, especially when she was seated down so low, and the way he stared at her seemed to be some kind of earthy, wordless form of communication. Worse, she thought she comprehended. “What are you going to do?” she whispered.

A prince like the one in her dreams would kneel beside her and say, “I have come to profess my undying love and devotion.”

Danior knelt, plucked her ankle from under the water, and said, “I'm going to clean your wound.”

She had to stop imagining undying love and devotion from Danior. The man was so practical he set her teeth on edge.

Or perhaps it was her cowardice that did that. “No, really, I can clean my wound.” She scrunched up her toes trying to protect her fragile arch from his large, clumsy, invasive fingers.

Glancing around, he found a dry flat stone and laid his instruments there. A small, corked bottle, rags, tweezers, scissors, a needle . . . oh, God.

“I can do it,” she said.

Turning her sole toward the moonlight, he frowned. “Don't worry. I have battleground experience.”

Visions of field amputations floated through her mind, and she sat up again. “I can do it!” She glanced at her injury and wished she hadn't. A slash started at one side of her arch and extended to the other side of her foot, deepening as it went.

Deliberately, Danior placed her foot on his thigh. His big hands approached her face. She backed up tight against the stone, but there was no evading his fingers as they wrapped around her neck and slid into her hair. His thumbs caressed her jaw, slid down the column of her throat, and she didn't know if she was being threatened or pampered.

“Evangeline.”

His voice rumbled like a god's. Not Poseidon, she thought crazily, but Vulcan, appearing and disappearing through the vapors of his mighty forge.

“Evangeline, that chemise is almost transparent.”

Even in the darkness, his eyes glimmered as he stared into her face, absorbed in her: her reactions, her fears, her desires. She wanted to look away. No one had the right to know her so well . . . yet having this powerful man interested in her was a seduction in itself.

“You look like a water nymph who lives to seduce mortal men.”

The sound of his baritone voice sang along her nerves. The drops of water lent an ease to his movement as one of his hands slipped down. She had imagined the waterline as a defense; his hand crossed that boundary with ease, proving once again the flimsiness of her resistance. His palm, callused and practiced, cupped her shoulder and lingered, as if he found pleasure in the stretch of muscle, the density of bone, in the very strength that marked her as a common woman.

That hand traveled down her spine to her waist. His arm wrapped around her and he lifted her from the water, sliding his thigh beneath hers for support, raising her torso toward the stars. Water streamed from her. The chill of the air shocked her. His gaze dropped to the body he had uncovered, and for one moment, as if he couldn't control his reaction, his fingers in her hair clenched.

“I am very mortal, Evangeline.” His head dipped toward her breast. “You're cold and excited, and if you don't let me take care of that slash on your foot, I will succumb to your inducements.”

She couldn't think of him as a prince, and he insisted he was no god. She spoke, and felt each word
transfer itself to the touch of his fingers. “Please, Danior . . .”

“Yes?” He didn't move. He waited on her command.

She should seize this chance. This was a man, healthy, attractive, in his prime. And not just any man. This was Danior, and he wanted her. Not just because he thought she was his princess, but because something in their skins, in their minds, in their hearts mingled and ignited. There wasn't a fire, not yet. But with each word he spoke, each moment he carried her, that something smoldered and she knew it needed only a puff of air to explode into flame.

She had only to ask. “Please . . . please.” She
would
ask. “Please would you tend my injury?”

No! No, that wasn't what she meant to say.

“Evangeline.” He sounded so disappointed. He still held her exposed to the night, and to him. “You are a faintheart.”

“I know.” Oh, how she knew! One last try. “Please, Danior . . .”
Make love to me.

“Say it,” he murmured.

She would. She would say it and snatch her one chance, probably her last chance, to explore the mysteries of intimacy.

But what came out was—“Please, Your Highness, would you tend my wound?”

Danior laughed. Damn him, he laughed, and she shut her eyes and curled her fists.

He
didn't
burn with an incorrigible fire. For some secret, incomprehensible, despicable reason, he tended the flames between them, but kept them well under control.

Yet before he lowered her back into the pool, she felt something warm and intimate on her breast. She knew where his hands were—was that his mouth? Her eyes sprang open, but if he had kissed her, he had straightened immediately.

With her hand, she smoothed her chemise over her breast, trying to verify her suspicion, but he'd left no mark. Of course not, how could he? He was only a man, not some human branding iron that labeled her as his own with a simple kiss—if there had been one.

And she thought she must have imagined it, for he let go of her easily, as if her vacillation did not matter to him. “I am delighted you trust me enough to allow me to tend your wound. But first”—he uncorked the small bottle and handed it to her—“drink the brandy. I had hoped I wouldn't have to use it, but as sensitive as you are, I should have known better.”

“I'm not sensitive.” She took a sip, and it burned all the way down. “I'm as practical as you are.”

“That is the last thing you are.”

She wanted to fight with him, but he took her foot in his hand. She took another sip of the brandy. Could a man as utilitarian as him really imagine that Evangeline Scoffield was an enticing water nymph? No, it was impossible, or he wouldn't have laughed. She couldn't laugh, and all because of what her imagination had conjured.

Damn imagination.

Then Danior's skilled hands opened the wound, and she forgot her quandary. It had to be cleaned, she knew it did, and she knew it was going to hurt.

Danior plunged her foot into the stream and held the skin apart, letting the current tug at the impurities. As if she'd asked him a question, he said, “He's my brother.”

She dragged her mind away from his ministrations, from the impending pain and her fear. “What?”

Catching her gaze with his, he repeated, “Dominic is my brother.”

If Danior was trying to distract her, he'd achieved
his goal. “I see,” she said. Although Evangeline hadn't consciously realized their relationship, still she wasn't surprised. Looking at Dominic had been like seeing the prince through a distorted window. Dominic was slightly shorter. He moved with the whip-cord grace of a great cat rather than the stalwart bulk of a bear, and she hadn't seen his face beneath the scarf, but somehow she thought the bone structure similar to Danior's. Most of all, he had impressed her with that stinging intelligence, more cruel and less scrupulous than Danior's, but comparable nonetheless.

Absently, she rubbed at a painful scratch on her shoulder, a momento of her forced march up the mountain. “Not a legitimate brother, I assume?”

“No.” Danior lifted her foot and dried it on a rag. “My father's sense of honor was less than a king's should be, and he seduced a young woman—a girl, actually—and when he'd had his fill, he abandoned her. Dominic is the result of that particular
mésalliance, and proof positive that there's a price to be paid for every sin.”

The brandy was going down easier now, but it didn't make the tale easier to bear—or, she suspected, easier to tell. Danior believed implicitly in honor and duty; to admit such shallow behavior in his own father must gall him. Silently she offered the bottle.

Silently he accepted and sipped, then corked it and placed it on his stone.

“Your father . . . he didn't take care of the girl or . . . the baby?” she asked.

“My father.” Like Dominic's, Danior's grin looked feral. “He never concerned himself with the fruit of his liaisons, and as I understand it, when the girl's condition was discovered she was thrown from her home. She and the child lived in the most wretched of circumstances. I believe she prostituted herself to feed her son.” With tweezers in hand, Danior began to pluck at Evangeline's wound with small, hurtful results. “She ultimately died from the pox.”

Evangeline didn't like Dominic. Hate bubbled from him like hot water bubbled from some underground hell. She had stood in that hate's way, and she'd come away scalded.

But she, too, had been an unwanted child thrust on the world's uncertain charity, and she shared a reluctant kinship with the royal bastard. “No wonder he's savage.”

“Yes. And while I don't hate my father with quite the virulence of Dominic, I find that I do not respect his memory as a son should.”

It was, she realized, an understatement. Something in his voice, in the way he moved, told
her that his contempt for his perfidious father went bone-deep. And the tale explained his slashing derision for what he considered her lies.

Even though she knew she told the truth, his conviction went so deep that he almost convinced her she was wrong. “No, I suppose not,” she mumbled, avoiding his eyes. Then a thought occurred to her. “Is he your only brother?”

Danior pressed his thumb lightly along the seam of her gash.

Almost at once she felt something rolling beneath her skin, and she stiffened.

With the tweezers, he removed the tiny pebble, then continued to work his way along the wound. He had a decidedly light touch, she realized, and slowly relaxed each muscle. He knew what he was doing.

He also wasn't answering the question. “Danior?”

“Dominic is my only brother . . . except for Victor and Rafaello.”

“Of course.” She sipped the brandy. What better bodyguards for the prince than his brothers who looked so much like him?

She would not have thought brusque Danior capable of conveying irony, but he did so now. “My father thought the country would be greatly improved by sowing his imperial seed far and wide.”

She thought of Victor and Rafaello, offering their lives for hers. “Well, for the most part, I would agree. But why aren't they bitter like Dominic?”

“They're older than Dominic, and my mother found out about them and insisted on supporting
their mothers and seeing to the boys' care.” With his thumbs, he opened the gash wide and pushed her foot back into the water.

The wound stung again, as badly as it had the first time she submerged it. She twitched, and her eyes filled with tears.

“This pool has healing qualities.” He watched as she sank down until the water lapped her bottom lip. “But I wouldn't drink it. It tastes like fire and brimstone.”

“I won't,” she said in a small voice.

She could see only the gleam of his eyes in the shadows of his face, but he sounded kind as he said, “Before Dominic was born my parents were killed in the rebellion—”

“Then Dominic is young,” she said, shocked.

“Twenty,” Danior confirmed. “Too young to be so rancorous, but my mother wasn't here to tend another of my father's seedlings.”

As the pain began to ease, she laid her head back on her stony pillow.

And stiffened when he said, “Let me assure you that
you
will not have to perform that service for me.”

“Well . . . no. I mean . . . yes.” Irked at her own stammering, she said, “I'm not the princess, so I won't be wedding you, but I'm sure your queen will be relieved to hear that she won't have to trail after you and pay off the products of your liaisons.”

He rumbled on as if she hadn't spoken. “From the moment I realized the anguish my father caused my mother, and the dishonor of a broken marriage vow, I swore to be discreet. I've had few lovers—”

“Really, I don't want to hear about this.”

“—And those were mature women who participated in our pleasure without illusion. I took care that every encounter was without issue, for I am determined the only children of my loins will be ours.”

Our
children.

The phrase resounded in her mind.

He spoke as if their offspring were already conceived, borne, were alive and happy to have two such noble parents. She could almost see them, a tall, thin girl on the cusp of womanhood and a stocky boy with Serephinian eyes. And another girl with raven hair and another boy, and twin toddlers and the baby . . . she brushed her hand over her eyes to dispel the vision. Yes, if she mated with Danior, she had no doubt the union would be fertile. It would be no life for an intelligent woman, a woman better trained to ruling than to parenting. She'd always be with child, or nursing, or running after babies or in bed with Danior making new ones.

“Am I hurting you?”

She stared blankly at Danior. “What?”

“Your toes are curled. Am I hurting you?”

Was he hurting her? He was
killing
her—with temptation. “Yes,” she babbled. “Yes, that's it. You're hurting me, but I know it's the right thing to do. You do the right thing, and I'll do the right thing, and somehow this will come out, um, right.” She thought he was smiling as if he read her thoughts, saw the children she had created out of a few of his simple words.

He was a simple man. He couldn't have planned to trap her in a dream of her own making. Even if he
had, well, she didn't have to let him know he'd succeeded.

Then an extraordinary thought occurred to her. “Wait,” she said. “You
know
I'm not Princess Ethelinda!”

“I do?”

“You wouldn't have told her all this. She would have known it.”

Leaning forward, he spoke in his stuffy noble prince voice, “I would hope that the good sisters at the school would have the sense not to tell you how my father's callous fornication put you in danger from all sides.”

“Oh, you always have an answer.” Stupid to pout, but every, time she thought she could poke a hole in his insufferable armor, he parried and left her without a weapon. “Anyway,” she pointed out logically, “I wouldn't say I'm in danger from all sides. At least Victor and Rafaello are devoted to you.”

“Victor and . . .” His voice faltered. “Just when I think I comprehend the complexities of your mind, Evangeline, you confound me again. How did you read my worry?”

She hadn't, of course. If he hid anxiety about Victor and Rafaello, she hadn't known it. Asking about them had been a lucky chance, because she was not, was
not
, tuned in to Danior's thoughts.

“You say they are devoted to me. Yes, I had thought so.” His thumbs probed the gash again. “Everything's out of this cut. I'll check it again in the morning.”

Wisps of steam and darkness teased her, concealing him from her scrutiny. Frustrated, she said, “Tell me about Victor and Rafaello.”

“You know what I think, or you wouldn't have asked. We are not at the village of Chute although I made it appear we were going there.” With a groan, he threw out his arms and splashed back into the pool.

Not even the tip of his nose showed above the surface, and she wished she could pummel him for throwing out such an interesting tidbit and then disappearing. Groping under the water, she found his extended leg and curled her fingers around it.

He came up at once. “What?”

“Why aren't we in Chute?”

The muscle in his calf tightened to whipcord constriction beneath her palm. “Because either Victor or Rafaello, or both, are betraying us to Dominic.”

Her jaw dropped, but she never thought to argue with him. If Danior thought so, then Danior had reason. “You don't think it was an accident that the rebels found us at Château Fortuné?”

“I did at first. Not any longer. We—Victor, Rafaello, and I—learned to lose trackers in the best school possible in the war, with Napoleon's huntsmen hot on our trails. We took chances no one else would take, and if we had been unsuccessful, we would have been dead.” Leaning on one elbow, he wiped his dripping hair out of his face. “Now, suddenly, we cannot shake Dominic? No.”

“But your brothers have been with you all this time! Why would they betray you now?”

“Before we were fighting for our families and our country. Now we're fighting for a way of life many remember as oppressive and barren. The
countries haven't been prosperous for the last fifty years. My father ate well for a man whose people were starving. Your mother dressed fashionably for a woman whose people shivered in the cold. No one knows how I'll rule as king, or if you'll be compassionate as queen. I've promised my brothers a just reward for their services, but perhaps one of them sees a chance for more.” Sitting up, he scrubbed his face as she had done, and rubbed at his shoulders, arms, and chest. “Perhaps if you and I were out of the way, there would be a place on the throne for a royal bastard.”

For years she had lived in a small village, surrounded by people she greeted by name, people who watched her every action, people who immediately recognized a stranger and made it their affair to discover his business. She had thought she liked being away from that constant, gossipy watchfulness.

No man-made surroundings could compare to the grandeur of these mountains, glowing faintly in the moonlight, to those stars, a swathe of silver scattered across a black velvet sky, to these pines, tall, primal, satiated with fragrance.

Yet the sweet hush of silence that enveloped the pond seemed suddenly menacing and oppressive. This place made her aware of her insignificance, of how easily her essence could be extinguished by in-different nature or by unrelenting enemies. She strained to hear any sound beyond the occasional slight rush of the stream, then very, very quietly, she asked, “Are you sure we're safe?”

“After I left you here, I backtracked. No one has followed us. I took care to leave no sign of our
passing. And few know of this place, certainly not Victor or Rafaello.” Danior's voice deepened and became warm, enfolding her as surely as the water itself. “We are safe for as long as we wish to stay.”

What layers of meaning were wrapped inside his words? “That can't be too long,” she said nervously. “You must get to Plaisance in time for Revealing in, what, three days?”

“
We
must get to Plaisance for Revealing, difficult though that may be. No one said the way to the throne would be easy—Your Highness.” His hands disappeared under the water.

She realized he was scrubbing everything. All of him. She didn't want to think about what that entailed, and hastily she removed her hand from his calf and looked anywhere but at him.

Yet she could still hear the splash of water and feel the faint current created by his ablutions. She feared enemies of the royal family, known and unknown, it was true. But more than that, she feared Danior. One instinct urged her to flee. Another instinct told her that any movement, however slight, would attract his attention. And in the base of her being she knew that if she stayed, he would inevitably reach for her.

Slowly, taking care to make no noise, she began to stand, to inch away from him, from his too-close proximity and his watchful, beckoning gaze.

But his hand landed on her collarbone. “Wait. I don't want you to put that foot down. Let me get the ointment and the rags to dry and wrap it.” His fingers massaged the joint of her shoulder, then slid down to her elbow. “Trust me, Evangeline. I'll take
care of you.” He didn't sound stuffy or princely or superior.