He halted in mid-stride. For a moment there was nothing but the jolt of surprise. He stared at her, realized he was gaping and closed his mouth. Then like a spring that burst into a fountain, the relief and elation exploded in him, crashing into his fingers and toes. He made a wordless exclamation. A thousand pictures whirled through his head; the things he could do; the life he could have: comfort at last, peace when he wanted it, hell-raising when he didn't, first-class travel to civilized places—and music…oh, God, the music. He could go to Vienna and hear it—Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn…Lord, he could buy orchestras and composers and commission his own damned symphonies. And a French chef…all the soft white rolls a man could consume. He could sleep in soft white rolls. He could seduce women in soft white rolls. He gazed at Julia's bosom, overlaying that image with the floury sweet warmth of baking bread, and found himself chuckling giddily. He heard the crazy note that vibrated beneath the laughter and caught his breath. He managed to silence himself.
"Julia," he said. "Julia. You wouldn't lie to me, love? Not about this."
She shook her head. There was a peculiar tightness around her mouth, but he discounted that as jealousy. Why should she lie? He had a light-headed magnanimous impulse and blurted, "You can live here. Not here, that is—I'm going to demolish this granite horror. I'll build you a lodge off somewhere that you'll like, and you can live there the rest of your life, I promise you."
In the midst of that pledge he realized just what he was saying. The last thing he wanted was an aging whore anchored around his neck, particularly one who would happily slide a knife between his ribs the moment she saw some fun and profit in it. He knew well what Julia was, beneath that veneer of motherly sympathy.
But what of it? Promises were as free as air. And she still had a few good romps left in her, that was certain. He grinned and held out his hand. "We owe you that much, the old man and I."
She did not take his hand. She simply stood watching him. A trickle of premonition seeped in his belly.
"Deal?" he asked, still offering his hand.
She smiled, that dry curl of her lips. The trickle became a flood. Sheridan dropped his hand, suddenly smelling one of his father's jokes so strongly he could have choked on the stench.
"What is it?" he said suspiciously.
She wet her lips, a cat licking cream.
Between one instant and the next he lost himself. The wolf sprang alive, snarling for blood; the battle-fury rushed through his brain like a high wind. "Damn you—where's the catch?" he roared.
She took a step backward, her thick lashes going wide. She seemed to shrink a little, flinching away from him as her glance went warily and instinctively to his fists. Sheridan knew that gesture; had seen it a thousand times in whorehouses and back alleys and on waterfronts all over the world. She thought he was going to hit her.
As if a monstrous wave had washed him and passed on, the madness evaporated. He stared at her, breathing hard, feeling queerly fragile. For one horrible instant he thought he was going to break into tears.
He grabbed the decanter and aimed it at her head, giving her plenty of time to duck. It hurled past and shattered all over the damask wallpaper behind her with a satisfying crash.
She stood straight, only trembling a little. "Are you finished?" she asked when he made no other move.
He walked around her, keeping his face impassive to hide his shaken wits. He made a slow, considering circle. When he was satisfied that he was in full control of himself again, he came to a stop behind her and waited, watching her spine grow tense. Then he lifted an inkpot and dropped it on the bare floor.
She jumped like a cat at the sound.
"Perhaps I'm finished," he said softly. "Perhaps I'm not."
She took a deep breath and turned sharply to face him. "Have your fun," she hissed. "Hero. Maul me if you will. Kill me. And see what it gets you."
Idiotic baggage. She was damned ready with stupid invitations. He watched her narrowly, sniffing at the trap.
"What's the catch?" he said. "Do I have to marry you?"
She laughed at that, archly. "Would you?"
He looked at her, at the way she stood straight in spite of her wariness, and recognized from long experience the posture of someone who was certain they held all the cards. "I can think of worse fates," he said with a little shrug, and then added a nice touch by reaching out and stroking his finger down the line of her cheek. "Far worse," he said softly.
Her eyelashes lowered. She went still for a moment. He deepened his caress, taking her chin and pulling her toward him for a kiss, thinking sourly that it was about what he might have expected, that the old man would dangle all that money and then shackle him to a worn-out whore. Capital joke.
Except that Julia was not precisely worn out yet. She pressed up against him, writhing gently beneath his hands. When he finally had to come up for air, she leaned back in his arms, her eyes half closed. "Damn you," she whispered. "Damn you for a beautiful lying bastard."
He couldn't see damning himself for that, since it was clearly an advantage with the likes of Julia Plumb. If he wouldn't hit her, it was just as well the evil hussy lusted after him. So he gave her a squeeze and tried to kiss her again.
She pulled away, though, and stood breathing unsteadily. "Enough of that," she said, with a little proud toss of her head. "I want to talk."
But she had a look in her eyes that suggested if he chose to override her, he needn't expect to meet serious resistance. To put her in mind of who'd come spooning around whom in the first place, he cut her dead; let her stand there ogling him, with her lips parted and her breasts heaving, until he reckoned she must have realized how fatuous she looked. Then he said in lazy mockery, "Oh, God, Juli—don't. How can I stand it when you tease me like that?"
Her mouth snapped shut. Color surged into her face. "I wasn't—" she said, and then, "You beast. I don't have to take this from you."
He watched her face, the little quivers of emotion and stress that flitted across it. "Why not?" he asked softly. "What do I owe you, Julia?"
It took her a moment to get her old dry curling smile back. "You don't owe me anything. But you'll give me some respect, ducky, I swear an' you will—you'll come when I call an' go when I tell you, and you'll smile about it, you will."
He took note of the way the Cockney crept in: she was rattled, all right—but not as rattled as he. That belligerent self-assurance gave him the willies. It belonged on bucko first mates and sargeants of marines, not aging East End jades. He frowned down at her, and for an instant she looked just slightly intimidated, but the arrogance surged back and she turned away with a proud sweep.
"The money is in trust," she said calmly. "You are the only beneficiary. Your father's solicitor is the only trustee." She lifted her head and looked over her shoulder at him. "You touch nothing yourself. The trustee dispenses all funds at his discretion. He has but one obligation, and one only—"
His jaw stiffened. She held the moment as if she were a painted tart in a Covent Garden melodrama.
"—to act solely and unquestioningly under the direction—under the 'whim,' as the will stated it—of a single person."
Sheridan took a step forward. He stopped. She smiled up at him in dry triumph.
"Myself."
"It is the grandest thing," squeaked Mrs. What's-'Er-Name, clasping plump hands and gazing at Sheridan like a cow in milk. "Everyone will be green, Mrs. Plumb, they absolutely will. It's just the peak of good fortune that I thought to call this morning."
Right-ho, Sheridan thought. The peak.
She picked up her cup and took an excited slurp of tea. Sheridan wished heartily for a brandy. He looked around Julia's tastefully furnished drawing room in despair, finding nothing more promising than a delicate little sewing caddy opened to reveal the glint of scissors and a pile of gaily colored floss.
"You must tell me everything, Captain Drake—but no, I should call you sir, I'm sure—Sir Drake—but that's no
t right, is it? Why, you see what bumpkins we are here-abouts—I haven't the least notion how you should properly be addressed!"
"'Sheridan' will do, ma'am," he said. He didn't wish her to exert herself. Might fall dead of an overtaxed brain.
"And how wonderfully condescending! But I mustn't be so familiar. Sir Sheridan it is, of course. Start at the beginning, Sir Sheridan. How did you come to save the fleet?"
It'd be steep work with this female, clearly. "Please, ma'am," he said with a remote smile. "I didn't actually save the fleet."
Mrs. Whoever gave a little squealing sigh. "So modest! Oh, but you saved the admiral, and I'm sure anyone would agree it is the same thing. What is that old saying? 'For want of a shoe, a horse was lost; for want of a horse—'et cetera. I'm not perfectly certain of the sequence, but it leads right up to commanders and kings and countries, you know, and if you saved your admiral that is quite splendidly identical to saving England herself. Rushing beneath a falling mast to drag him to safety—did you ever think, Mrs. Plumb! Right here in your drawing room!"
Sheridan considered explaining that he'd been out of his wits at the time; that he'd meant to push the old imbecile in the other direction and make him into mutton hash. But Mrs. Mental Acuity's intellect was obviously in no case to survive a concerted attack of rational thought, so he refrained.
Julia looked on with a cool smile while her caller purred and cooed and fluttered. Sheridan stirred sugar into his tea and sank deeper into quiet desperation. Outside the comfortable house by the river it was sleeting rain, which was evidently the new national climate voted in by Parliament, inasmuch as it hadn't let up for a minute since he'd set foot in England. The ice crystals stung the windows and slid down the panes, creating little prison bars of light and shadow.
He caught Julia's eye once. She must have read something of the rebellion that was growing at the back of his throat, for she began efficiently to dispatch Mrs. God-Knew-Who back out into the rain. When the door had closed on the lady's laced-up rump, Sheridan sprang out of his chair and began to pace.
Julia walked back across the room and sat down next to the tea tray. "There," she said, "she is gone, is she not? Silly bitch. Sit down, now—I won't let anyone else come in and torment you, I promise."
He stopped and looked toward her. With bleak relish, he envisioned her stripped and tied to the shrouds, where she could find out the real meaning of that word, the same way he had.
His mouth tightened. He stared at her a moment and wondered, not for the first time, if she had known of his father's greatest joke—if she had been aware when the old man had called him down from school at the age of ten and told him his childhood dreams were coming true: he was going to Vienna to study his music with the masters—here was the ship, here was the name of the captain who would take him, here were his new clothes and his own trunk and some jolly good fellows who'd look out for him on the trip…
"Sheridan," she said. "Sit down."
It was intolerable. Now he must have Julia to pacify him and Julia to pet him and Julia to tell him what to do with every moment of his life.
"Sheridan," she said again.
He thought of debtors' prison. And India.
He sat down.
"Her Highness will return from her walk quite soon, I'm sure," Julia said, taking up the embroidery from the sewing box.
Sheridan balled one white-gloved fist inside the other and rested his elbows on his knees. Then he cradled his head in his hands, staring at his boots. "Haven't you got a bottle stashed somewhere about the place?" he asked peevishly.
"Nerves?" She looked up from her needle. "And thought you were such a lady-killer."
"Excellent notion. God knows I'd be pleased to kill you, but then you ain't a lady."
"I can't think what is keeping the princess. I asked her to stay home this morning, but Her Highness must have her constitutional, even in this weather. I'm afraid she will freeze if she walks all the way to Upwell."
"Her Confounded Highness can walk all the way to Peking, for my money," he snapped, "and I hope she does."
Julia slid a bit of embroidery floss through her teeth to make a knot. "I must say, you're acting very badly about this. It seems to me you would view it as a golden opportunity."
Sheridan took a hold on his temper. He stood up again. "I'm here to rescue the princess from her dragon, am I not?" he asked sweetly. He waved his hand. "We knights simply dote on this kind of work. And what do I get for it?"
"The princess." She said it so matter-of-factly that for an instant he didn't see the slight dry smile directed down at her stitching.
"Oh, it's riotously funny, ain't it?" He narrowed his eyes at her. "You've got me in a cleft stick, no doubt about it. Promise to make a payment on that debt, let me do your dirty work and then go back on the bargain—there's a clever scheme, eh? It ought to work for another week or so, until the constable comes after me."
"Obviously I won't let the constable come after you." She set the embroidery down in her lap and looked at him. "When you accomplish what I've asked, of course the debt will be paid." She smiled her faint smile and went back to her work. "Naturally we cannot have a Prince of Oriens dragged off by the constable, however little difference it might make if he dragged off Sheridan Drake."
Sheridan took her point on that, infernal piece of impertinence though it was. What she wanted him to do didn't gall him half so much as being blackmailed into doing it. All for patriotic purposes, of course. It occurred to him that he'd been blackmailed for patriotic purposes with depressing regularity in his life. Shot, starved, drowned and damned near strangled, too. If someone had asked him a month ago if he'd like to marry a princess, have all his debts paid and live like royalty for the rest of his life, he'd gladly have kissed a frog and begged for the honor of its webbed foot just on the off chance.
He turned his back on Julia and looked through the rippled glass into the empty street below. It was stupid to fight it, really. Julia had the right idea, living high and respectable off the Foreign Office—although how the deuce they'd come to the conclusion she was fit to be seen in polite society, much less qualified to chaperon a princess, he couldn't imagine. His father must have gotten her the position; it sounded like one of his pranks.
Well, if that was the kind of loose company royalty was keeping these days, Sheridan reckoned he was just the ticket.
There was apparently a shortage of available royal blood, but the prepared announcement Julia had shown him made much of his knighthood and his medals and his left-handed descent from Sir Francis—the bastard line of an English hero apparently being preferable to a strain of legitimate nobodies. More to the point, they'd even contrived to find a drop of blue blood in his pedigree—a great-uncle on his mother's side purported to have been the archduke of some piffling Prussian kingdom with a name long enough to stretch from one national border to the other. Sheridan wasn't inquiring too closely on that point; if the Foreign Office was down to scraping the bottom of the barrel as far as princes went, it wasn't his concern.
At the sound of the front door opening below, Julia put her embroidery aside and rose. Sheridan gathered himself up to charm his princess.
"I'll send her in directly," Julia said, looking over her shoulder with her hand on the knob. "Remember your situation, Sheridan. Don't fail me."
That was a prompt he didn't need. Four hundred thousand pounds wasn't something he was likely to forget—much as he'd like to, since it played hell with his beauty rest.
Four
* * *
The second time in her life that Olympia looked up and saw Captain Sir Sheridan Drake was as disconcerting as the first.
He stood by the fireplace, smiling a little, a dark glittering figure in blue and white, golden epaulettes and medals, the broad star and red ribbon of his knighthood fixed bandolier-fashion across one shoulder. As she halted just inside the door, he made a court bow—deep, sternly formal. The fringes of his epaulettes slid and sparkled a
nd light gleamed on the gold tassel that hung from the hilt of his dress sword.
Olympia heard the door close behind her. It dawned upon her that Julia had left them alone. Silence smothered everything except the hum of the coal fire and the faint, bitter crackle of sleet at the window. She found herself staring at his gloves, pale against the midnight blue. He came forward, one hand resting on his sword hilt as he reached out with the other.
He lifted her fingers to his lips, not quite touching, and then gently lowered her hand and let it go.
It seemed so preposterously formal after their first meeting a week before that she ducked her head and burst out, "Oh, please—I'm not a princess!" She clenched her hands at her own foolishness. "I mean, I am, but I'm not at all good at it, and I dislike it extremely, and I wish you would not think you must be—like this!" She waved her hand in a nervous circle toward him. Then she bit her lip and gathered herself and sank into a deep curtsy. "It is I who should honor you," she said in a whisper.
There was another moment of profound silence while she bowed before him on trembling knees. Then in a soft, amused voice, he said, "Here, now—we can't have this." He caught her arms and raised her. "If we're both going to grovel, let's call it even and save our backs."
She lifted her face under the firm pressure of his gloved fist beneath her chin.
"Silly princess," he murmured. "Haven't they taught you how to play the game?"
Olympia had no answer for that. She gazed at him, at his smoky eyes and the curve of his mouth, the tiny pale scar that cut the outer edge of one dark eyebrow. He was smiling, a half-kind, half-teasing smile. She felt the pitch and dip of her heart as it tumbled helplessly in her breast.
"You obviously need better instruction," he informed her gravely. "You're not nearly majestic enough. I've been to see the King, you know. You should hold your chin like so—" He adjusted her head in a regal pose. "And look down your nose at me like so—and say, 'Good work, old chap; honor of England and all that.' Then you bash me on the shoulder with a sword—while I hope to God you're sober enough not to slit my throat—hand over my ribbon and call for another round of rum punch to go with that syllabub and meringue. Easy enough, hey?" He tilted his head and regarded her. "But I'm afraid you'll have to put on about ten stone to get the proper effect."