The Runaway Princess (6 page)

She looked ahead at the silent, darker shadow among the shadows.

She was imagining things. Danior really thought she was the princess, and he wouldn't let anyone mistreat her. No, more likely he'd make up some story that she was already his wife so he could keep her in his bed.

Her mouth dried, and she tried to swallow. Her imagination had allowed the skinny, frightened, defiant orphan to make up stories when no hope remained. Her imagination had whisked her from Leona's house in East Little Teignmouth, Cornwall, to China and the Canary Islands and Turkey. Her imagination had been a blessing.

Now, her ability to fantasize placed her between the sheets with Danior, and trapped her between anticipation and fear.

In her quietest voice, she asked the bodyguards, “What would you gentlemen do if you knew I wasn't the real princess?”

To her surprise, Victor answered. “I'd drop you right here in the middle of the path and let the revolutionaries pick you up.”

Victor, she discovered, had no sense of humor at all.

Danior whirled around again. “Santa Leopolda's bones!” Plucking her out of her living chair, he said, “If they can't keep you quiet, I can.”

Danior didn't, as Evangeline feared, throw her over
his shoulder again. This time he held her against his chest—and he was warm. Not like the faded warmth she'd received from the other men, but really warm, like the blacksmith's forge back in East Little Teignmouth, Cornwall.

“If we get caught,” she muttered, “it'll be because of your shouting, Your Highness.”

“I was not shouting.”

Of course he wasn't, it was only that his voice didn't go below a rumble, much like a subterranean volcano. “Almost.”

He put her on her feet so fast that she thought he was going to leave her for Dominic. Instead, he removed his cloak, turned his back, and squatted on his haunches. “Climb on,” he said quietly.

She, too, kept her voice to a murmur. “Wh . . . what?”

“Climb on my back.”

She glanced around, half expecting to see Victor and Rafaello ready to make her obey. They'd faded into the darkness. “Why?”

“I need my hands free.”

What he said made sense, but . . . she looked down at her evening gown. The fine silk skirt was gathered beneath her bosom, with cotton petticoats beneath. “What about my . . . limbs?”

“What about them?”

His obtuse ignorance fed her stubbornness. “They'll be exposed.”

“It won't be the first time I've seen your legs, nor carried you this way. Remember how, when you were a child, you used me as your horsie?”

“No.” She wanted to stomp her foot, but that would hurt the blisters that had formed. “No!”

“We don't have time for these games. Dominic can't be far behind. Get on, girl!” Then Danior corrected himself through clenched teeth. “Highness.”

She couldn't prevail. She either had to walk in her thin shoes and ruin her feet and with them her chances of ever escaping from this madness—or she had to get on his back. But she remembered something from her years of research. A tip from a sixteenth-century Italian mediator.
When your enemy is backed into a corner, that is the time to negotiate
. “Evangeline,” she said.

“What?”

“My name is Evangeline. If you'll call me that, then I'll get on your back”

“I don't believe this.” His tone made it dear he'd been driven to the limit.

“Dominic can't be far behind,” she reminded him.

His teeth gleamed, his breath rasped, his hands twisted, and she realized he was mangling his own
cloak rather than her neck. For one moment, she wondered if he would attack. Then, in a goaded voice, he said, “Get on my back . . . Evangeline.”

She'd won. Oh, God, she'd won a skirmish with Danior! She wanted to jump, to yell, to dance. But the mere fact he'd surrendered—a novel experience for him, she was sure—told her the danger did indeed nip at their heels.

This adventure was a little too real for comfort.

He turned his back again, and she leaned into him, wrapped her arms around his neck. Shaking out his cloak, he gathered it around them and fastened it loosely at his throat, effectively tying them together. To keep her warm, she knew, and probably to conceal her light-colored gown beneath the enveloping black. But it gave her a claustrophobic sensation, and when he rose she just dangled there by her arms.

That detestable name rumbled through his chest. “Ethelinda?”

He obviously knew how to negotiate, too. “Oh, as you demand.” She wrapped her legs around his waist, and he started down the slope after his bodyguards.

Not since the orphanage when the girls huddled together for warmth had she experienced such familiarity—and this was not the same sensation at all. Her arms rested on his shoulders, her head was at the level of his. She could smell the scent of his hair. Her bosom pressed against his back. She experienced his every breath, and found herself pacing her breathing to his. The base of her torso, a place that had tingled when he'd kissed her, rested against
his spine, and the movement of his body gave her an odd thrill, much like the scientific experiment she'd once done for Leona. Electricity, Leona had called it, and it had knocked Evangeline off her feet.

She supposed he'd done the same.

She hugged her legs to his waist tightly, for if they slipped—

His head turned. “What is that noise?”

She stiffened, listening behind them for the crunch of boots or the clatter of hooves.

“You're grumbling.” His lips barely moved, yet she heard his words, or felt them perhaps.

“I am not.” Then she realized what he meant, and admitted, “It's my stomach.”

“You should have eaten your dinner.”

With her mouth close to his ear, she could retort, and the sound did not travel. “For once, you are right.”

They passed Victor and Rafaello, and the bodyguards waved them on.

Danior dug in the pocket of his waistcoat. “Here.” He pressed something into her hand.

Cautiously, she freed her hand from the folds of his cloak and looked. She held a white package—something wrapped in a handkerchief. She opened it, and realized she held a firm, crusty roll.

“Henri insisted I take it for you. He said you'd be hungry.”

“The traitor.”

“You don't have to eat it.”

“Ha.” Bracing her elbows on Danior's shoulders, she lifted the bread to her nose. She inhaled the yeasty smell, then said, “I spent most of my early years hungry. I don't scorn food from any source.”

He laughed, low and rich. “You weren't hungry. You were chubby. But at least I know why you grew so tall.”

She wanted to argue with him. She wanted to eat. And eating, she knew, would provide her with a great deal more satisfaction than banging her head against the immovable wall that was Danior. She nibbled the end of the roll, and sighed as the first bite slid down her throat and comforted her stomach.

“It's good that you're not chubby now,” Danior said. “This trek would be difficult.”

She paused in her gustatory quest. “It must be difficult, anyway.”

“Nonsense. I'm strong.”

Leona had told Evangeline about this, too. Men, she had said, were notoriously proud and stubborn, never admitting to weakness, and a wise woman always catered to that pride.

“Nobody's that strong,” said Evangeline, unwise woman.

“I am.”

He sounded confident, and in fact he moved along the path without pause. The long muscles in his back stretched and contracted as he walked, and she could feel his stomach muscles flexing against her calves like a living illustration of William Harvey's
Studies of Anatomy
.

Too intimate. Much too intimate. Hastily, she asked, “Would you like a bite?”

“
I
ate
my
dinner.”

Briefly she considered crooking her arm under his chin and choking him. Unfortunately, that would
only work if he had a neck, and he didn't. So she ate the sour bread in a brooding silence, which affected him not at all, then she brushed the crumbs off his shoulder.

The trail dipped down into a woods. Nearby a stream trickled over stones, and at the sound, her al ready dry mouth parched.

But she suspected he would take a request for a halt badly. Craftily she asked, “Aren't you getting tired of carrying me?”

“No.”

She'd forgotten. A man never admits weakness. “Perhaps we need to stop and allow your bodyguards to catch up.”

“They've gone different ways to throw Dominic off our track”

She didn't want to say it, but she had to. “I'm thirsty.”

He halted in mid-stride. “How can you be thirsty?”

“The bread was dry.”

“The bread was dry,” he repeated. “I should have stopped and buttered it. And toasted it before the roaring fire
created
by the
bomb
.”

The man had an incredible and uncalled for capacity for sarcasm. “No, Your Highness, but a glass of wine wouldn't have come amiss,” she said tartly. “Let me down by the brook and I'll get a drink.”

He sighed like the blacksmith's bellows, but he changed directions and followed the sound to the creek bank, releasing the fastening of the cloak as he walked. The ease of her victory surprised her,
and she wondered at it, but when he swept off the cloak, she hopped off his back, glad to get away from the brooding disapproval, if only for a moment.

The chill of a mountain night struck her through her gown, and she shivered. The stream ran almost at her feet, catching bits of moonlight as it filtered through the trees. The damp air smelled of moss and pine, and Evangeline took a grateful breath before kneeling at the edge of the water.

He towered over her. “How will you drink?”

“I'll form a bowl with my hands.”

“That sounds easier than it is.”

“I've done it before,” she said haughtily. Tapping the shallow depths, she found a spot lined with rocks where she hoped the water ran dear. Cupping her hands, she brought them to her mouth in one efficient swoop. She slurped undaintily, but she didn't care.

“Where did you learn that?” he asked.

She turned her head and looked up at him, a dark shadow in a land of shadows. “In Cornwall on a bracing walk through the countryside.”

He snorted and moved down the bank, and she continued drinking until her thirst was quenched. As she dabbed at the water she'd splashed on herself, she heard similar slurping sounds from downstream.

Danior had been thirsty, too.

Damn the man, he'd been thirsty, and he hadn't wanted to admit it. If it hadn't been for her insistence, he would have gone forever without stopping until he'd dropped from dehydration.

Had Leona said anything about this masculine aspect? Something about how men created a great and boundless exasperation?

“I'm going upstream a little further,” she announced softly.

The slurping noises stopped. “Why?”

She had known he was going to ask that. “I have other needs.” She enunciated her words carefully, the way she would when teaching a small, intractable boy.

“Ah. That's fine, but don't go too far.” He slurped again. The man was drinking like a long-unwatered horse. “And don't think you can escape me.”

“I am hardly likely to try in an unfamiliar wood in the middle of the night.” No, not here, but when they reached the convent. The bread and water put heart back into her, and she made plans. In a place full of women where Danior was alien, surely she would be able to get help. Don an inconspicuous habit. Or even just climb out a window. It could be done. She would do it.

When she returned, she climbed on his back with less reluctance. She was tired, ready for this pitiable escapade to end, and that wouldn't happen until they reached the convent.

The convent. It had begun to assume the aspect of heaven.

 

“Ethelinda.” He corrected himself before she could. “Evangeline. Look.”

Muzzily, she noted that her cheek rested on the top of his shoulder, that he'd hooked his arms under
her bare knees to keep her in place, that her right heel rested in a place no self-respecting heel would ever visit.

She'd been asleep, and probably been snoring in his ear. Or worse, drooling on his jacket. She was never at her best during slumber.

“Look,” he whispered.

She pried open her eyes. Streaks of dawn light banded the light blue sky like ribbons on an Easter package. Lifting her head, she realized they'd left the cliff sometime in the night and stood just inside the shadow of the forest. Just ahead and across an alpine meadow, Mother Earth gave birth to a split and rocky crag. Behind it the sun was rising, and the rugged stone that lifted itself to the heavens was topped by the spires and walls of a medieval structure. “What is it?” she asked.

“The convent of Santa Leopolda—and our destination.”

She blinked against the light and stared again at the forbidding gray walls perched on the sheer rock spike. This was a Gothic fortress, built to withstand attack and accessible only on a narrow, precipitous path carved into the very rocks that gave it existence. The trail wound its way to a narrow door—the only entrance to Santa Leopolda.

The only exit from Santa Leopolda.

Dear God. She could never escape. Never in this lifetime.