“There is no one to take his place, Your Grace, and it must be an odd number of dancers, as you know.” Nikolai cleared his throat. “The others, they wished me to approach you to ask you to take Gaius’s place. Everyone knows what an expert you are at the sword dance.”
“Do not flatter me, Nikolai,” Alexander said. “I am competent but not expert.”
Nikolai looked worried. “If you do not agree, then we must cancel. There is no one else.”
“Why not have a second person drop out?” Alexander asked. “Then you would still have your odd number.”
Nikolai looked horrified. “Ask one of the men to sacrifice his part in the sword dance? That would be too devastating for him, and I certainly cannot single out one man and dismiss him. Not if I want to live to see the morning. It must be all of us or none of us.”
Meagan laid her hand on Alexander’s arm and nearly got lost in the warm feel of steely muscles beneath his coat sleeve. “Do help them, Alexander. They have worked so hard.”
She felt the weight of his stare and looked up to find his blue gaze hard on her. Since he’d told her he was part logosh, she’d felt a honing of his attention, his stares becoming more focused and exacting. He looked at one thing at a time now, whereas before he’d had his fingers manipulating the strings of everything around him.
At this moment he looked at Meagan with the keenness of a predator. He wanted her. That was fine, because she wanted him, but she also knew he would not give in to the wanting.
His attention to Meagan closed like a shuttered lantern and refocused again on Nikolai.
“I will do it,” he said. “But do not rejoice yet. If someone gets stabbed, it will be your fault.”
Nikolai beamed. “Excellent, Your Grace. I will tell them the glorious news.” He sprinted away, his step buoyant.
Meagan kept her hand on Alexander’s arm, hoping his intense gaze would return to her. “He seems pleased. Are you really that good at the dance?”
“Competent, as I told him.” Alexander’s gaze still followed the path Nikolai had taken. “The dance is part of every Nvengarian male’s training.”
“Alexander,” Meagan said softly.
At last he looked down at her, and she wanted to take a step back. The anger and impatience in his eyes could have knocked over a house. She moved her hand along the inside of his arm, knowing he’d likely pull away, but not being able to help herself.
His eyes darkened, pupils spreading to drown the blue. “Please walk away from me,” he said, voice unsteady.
Meagan did not answer. She tightened her fingers around the warm cashmere of his coat.
He leaned closer, breath hot on her cheek. “I want to rip that pretty dress to shreds and put my hands all over your body. That is what I will do if you do not walk away from me. Is this what you wish?”
She slanted him a hot smile. “I do, as a matter of fact.”
“In the middle of the ballroom with guests soon arriving?”
“I think I care not whether it is in the ballroom or the morning room or the bedroom.”
He went rigid. “You want me to lose control?”
“No.” Meagan stroked his arm once more, then with great reluctance released him. “I just want you.”
She turned her back on him and glided away. That was what the instructions in Adolpho’s book told her to do. A man could not resist a woman giving him a promising look and then abruptly leaving him. She threw a swift smile over her shoulder, following the lesson to the letter, but Alexander never moved.
He would have her tonight, Alexander determined as the guests began to stream in the door.
He as a good host waited at the top of the stairs to greet them. Meagan stood next to him, her faint spicy perfume filling his nostrils. He could smell the true scent of her under the perfume, his heightened senses letting him find the lush femaleness of her.
She’d known exactly what she was doing earlier today, rubbing his arm and giving him that secretive look, then the little smile over her shoulder as she left him. Seduction number seventeen from Adolpho’s book.
Whoever had given her that book would pay.
Then again, he would not mind reading the book with her, playing along with whichever seduction she chose.
And he would. His lessons with Myn had helped. Learning to let go after twenty years of holding in his true self was proving the most difficult thing he’d ever done. But letting the logosh part of him come into his life without fighting it or trying to control it was the only way, Myn had said.
Little by little, Alexander was learning to be what he was. Soon, perhaps, he would be able to be himself with Meagan. The night he’d lured her to the maze he had so complacently believed he could control everything—the logosh, himself, the lovemaking.
But that had backfired, Myn told him, because being logosh wasn’t about control, it was about releasing control.
Tonight Alexander would take Meagan upstairs when they were both fatigued by the ball, and he’d undress her. They’d be tired from dancing and smiling at people and solving the little trials that cropped up when one hosted a ball. In their mutual exhaustion, he could commence with slow, quiet lovemaking that eased her to sleep and let him bathe his senses in her.
He sent her a faint smile from time to time, one only for her. When she caught the smile, color rose on her cheeks and her eyes sparkled. She knew.
But first they had to get through the tedious ball. The reception line was long because every single person Meagan had invited had turned up. Refusing an invitation to famous Maysfield House for the Grand Duchess’s first at-home affair would never do.
George IV came, Bath chair and all, and three ladies hovered around him, throwing each other jealous glances. A very elderly dowager duchess arrived, leaning heavily on a pair of walking canes and supported by her granddaughters, because, she said in a booming voice, she wouldn’t miss this for the world.
Meagan had invited the most important and most tastefully elegant people of the ton. Not everyone had a title, but they came from the best families or were the best conversationalists or the most philanthropic in London. His heart swelled with pride at her taste and discernment. Meagan was going to gain a reputation for keeping brilliant company.
Her guest list had extended itself to the lovely Lady Stoke, wife of Viscount Stoke, who, stories went, had once been a pirate, and probably still was. The viscount looked the part—waist-length blond hair tamed into a queue, a broad-shouldered muscular body, and faint lines on his face etched by sun, weather, and harrowing experiences. He had taken well to tonish life, or perhaps that was the influence of his beautiful wife on his arm and his equally beautiful black-haired daughter.
Stoke’s daughter from his mysterious first marriage, with her exotic looks and deep brown eyes, was the same age as Meagan. Miss Maggie Finley had not yet married, and rumor spun that her mother had been a wild Polynesian woman. The ton regarded her with interest but was not certain they wanted such a foreign-looking miss among their ranks. As an outsider to English shores himself, Alexander sympathized with her.
The way Miss Finley smiled at Meagan, and the way Meagan smiled back, however, he was suddenly sure that the two of them would get along well. Alarmingly well.
Stoke’s blue eyes twinkled as he shook Alexander’s hand. “Your Grace, I have been interested to meet you,” he rumbled, his voice like broken gravel. “I assisted your Prince Damien across the Channel last year one step ahead of your assassins.”
Alexander remembered that Damien had slipped from England before Alexander’s hired men could catch up to him and Penelope, taking a pirate ship across to France.
Alexander bowed slightly. “It seems you did. In retrospect, I am grateful.”
Stoke grinned and clapped him on the shoulder. “Always enjoy a challenge.”
“Damien and I work together now,” Alexander said.
“So I heard.” Stoke’s gaze was knowing. “Don’t worry, Your Grace, I
won’t let my band of merry pirates loose in here.”
“I should think not,” his wife said with a look of mock horror. “Once was enough.”
“But it brought me closer to you, love.” Stoke spoke teasingly, but Alexander did not miss the light of affection in his eyes. Lady Stoke blushed at their private joke.
Stoke moved on, his fingers sliding to the small of his wife’s back, a protective move that put him at her side. Alexander envied him his ease with his wife, longing to find that ease with Meagan.
“You are lovely, Miss Finley,” Meagan was saying to the black-haired girl. Maggie Finley had coffee brown eyes that were wide and slightly slanted, high cheekbones, and creamy skin tinged brown. “You must call on me. My dearest friend has gone away, and I desperately need a girlish chat.”
“Why thank you, Your Grace.” Miss Finley opened her eyes wide as though she hadn’t expected to be received with such enthusiasm. Alexander could have told her that Meagan’s interest was genuine. Nothing she did was false.
When Miss Finley flowed off after her father and stepmother, Meagan smiled at Alexander. “Oh dear, if we become friends, we shall be known as Meagan and Maggie. People will laugh.”
Her red-lipped smile and the happy sparkle in her eyes made him want to forget the rest of the ball and drag her by the hand to their private rooms and begin the gown ripping.
Not yet. The love spell and the logosh were still too strong, and he wanted to be tired enough to tamp them down. “Later, my love,” he whispered into her ear.
He had not answered her comment, but Meagan understood and blushed rosy red. The warmth of the blush crept to her décolletage and beneath, drawing his eyes to the firm swell of her bosom.
The next guest was approaching, and Alexander reluctantly turned away. But before the guest, a gray-haired baron, reached them, Lady Anastasia swept in past the majordomo and grasped Alexander’s gloved hand. A wash of perfume swamped him, and she smiled her most vivacious and brittle smile.
“Alexander,” she said. “Your Grace, I must speak to you—in private.” She flashed a smile at Meagan. “You do not mind, my dear, do you?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The naive Meagan of six weeks ago would have been confused and jealous to watch Anastasia latch on to Alexander and drag him away to the French anteroom. The more seasoned Meagan knew that Anastasia would not so obviously take him off unless she knew a piece of intrigue that worried her. And because Lady Anastasia worried, Meagan worried.
As soon as she could, Meagan slipped away from the gray-haired baron and hurried across the landing to the French anteroom, so named because every gilded object in it had been purchased—legally or illegally—from Versailles.
She paused in the doorway. Alexander and Anastasia faced each other, heads bent, on chairs in which Louis XVI and his queen had reposed before fleeing the mob.
“Has something happened?” Meagan asked softly.
They turned to her, Alexander with his Nvengarian blue eyes and Anastasia who looked just as foreign but in a different way.
“Close the door,” Alexander instructed.
Heart speeding, Meagan eased the door shut behind her. Part of her was pleased that Alexander did not send her away by saying it was Nvengarian business, but she also knew that the truth would not be pretty.
“Von Hohenzahl still boasts he will best you, Alexander,” Anastasia was saying in prettily accented English. “And that you will be his best chance to restore himself to Metternich’s graces.”
Alexander made a dismissive gesture. “I never believed I tamed von Hohenzahl. My men are watching him, and he does not make a move without my knowing. For instance, I know that his underling, Peterli, offered you a vast sum tonight to seduce me and hand me over to him. And that you took the money.”
Anastasia flushed. “I did so to make him tell me what he plots.”
“And did he?”
She looked glum. “No, he told me nothing but that I was to bring you to him.”
Alexander arched a brow. “Perhaps we should consider me seduced, and you can truss me up and deliver me as promised.”
Meagan strode to them. “What on earth for?”
Alexander’s eyes had gone chill, the calculating, scheming Grand Duke coming to the fore. “To see what he plans, my love. Villains like to gloat of their intrigue in front of their victims. It makes them feel clever.”
“And there you’ll be, bound helpless in front of him.” Meagan flushed. “I believe that is a flawed plan.”
“I never intend to be helpless. I will have my men in place to retrieve me, and I might have a few surprises for him.”
“Now who is being overly clever?” Meagan planted her hands on her hips. “You would put your life in danger, not to mention the lives of your loyal men, just so this Herr von Hohenzahl will tell you his plans?”
“My bodyguards are Nvengarian. They would be offended if I did not put their lives in danger.”
“What of your wife and son? Are we to stay at home wringing our hands wondering whether you live or die?”
“She has a point, Alexander,” Anastasia put in.
Alexander remained maddeningly calm. “I would be well looked after. The time spent wondering would be short.”
Meagan leaned forward until she was eye level with Alexander. “I know Nvengarians, my dearest darling. They would delight in getting themselves killed for you, the more bloodshed the better. You might die with them, but oh, the ballads that would be sung afterward.”
“Another good point,” Anastasia murmured.
“I do not like loose ends,” Alexander said coldly, his eyes so blue and so close to hers that the love spell started to touch her. “Von Hohenzahl is a loose end, and I will snip him. My greatest fear is that he will get behind me and use you somehow, you and Alex. You two are my weak points, and my enemies know it.”
“Your weak points. How very flattering.”
“Perhaps my English is faulty. I mean to say you are the key to my heart. If something happens to you, it will break me.”
Meagan stopped, her body going warm, lonely, empty places inside of her suddenly filling.
“If we end the love spell, perhaps that key will go away,” she said. “At least in regard to me.”
He gave her a steady look that let her see straight into him. No taint of love spell, no fear of logosh, no cold Grand Duke, just Alexander. “I no longer believe that ending the love spell will make any difference.”
Their gazes caught and tangled, Alexander’s eyes as blue as a summer lake.
In that moment, Meagan realized she loved him. Not with the craving lust of the spell, and not with the need of her newly awakened desires—she loved the man who’d swept into her life and carried her off to this fantastic fairy-tale house and showered her with gifts like she was a princess.
Alexander could have married her and shoved her into a garret or sent her to some lonely house far away. He could have abandoned her altogether after taking her virginity, simply walking away and leaving her to her ruin. He was a powerful man, and her family had no power at all. He would have gotten away with it.
Instead he’d defied gossip and the requirements of his position to take a nobody miss to wife. Then he’d proceeded to draw Meagan into his home and his life in ways he did not have to. He could have let her believe Anastasia was his mistress instead of telling her the truth, he could have condemned her for spoiling Alex’s routine instead of joining her in the fishing expedition, and he could simply have ignored her as so many society husbands did their wives.
She’d thought he was different from the everyday English husband because he was foreign, but she realized with sudden clarity that Alexander’s kindness and compassion came from within himself. Surprising he had compassion at all, really, after the horrible things he’d gone through as a child.
To the rest of the world he showed the hard, cold man who had learned to suppress his turbulent emotions to survive. To Mea
gan he showed glimpses of the other man, the one who so carefully lifted his son onto his high-strung horse and held him steadily while they rode. The one who avoided Meagan for fear of hurting her. The one who told her exactly what to expect from his life so she would not be blindsided by the danger and intrigue surrounding him.
In that moment when their gazes met, Meagan let herself nurse a wild hope that Alexander loved her too. He was capable of deep love, and her greatest happiness would be to have that love directed at her.
Anastasia was watching them with avid interest, in no way about to turn her head and pretend not to notice them. “I dislike to interrupt, Alexander, but you do remember von Hohenzahl, do you not?”
Alexander slowly dropped his gaze and looked away, taking the warmth with him. Meagan felt suddenly cold and rubbed her hands along her arms.
“I will take care of von Hohenzahl,” he told Anastasia.
“Alexander,” Anastasia began.
She was interrupted by the door opening. All three swung around, but it was only Myn who slipped into the room and closed the door behind him. His black hair hung long and loose down his back, and his intense blue eyes went directly to Anastasia and stayed there.
She flushed berry red, the fear with which she’d previously regarded Myn gone. Meagan looked at her in surprise, but noted that Alexander did not look amazed in the least. Her mind connected things, and her eyes widened.
Alexander gave a little shake of his head, as though telling her to say nothing. She frowned back at him. He’d known about Myn and Anastasia, drat him, and hadn’t said a word.
Alexander rose to his feet and took Meagan’s elbow. “Anastasia, tell Myn what you just told me, but neither of you act yet. I will decide whether I should let you deliver me to him. For now, I need to be a host and keep my guests speculating on why I like to disappear into anterooms with both my wife and my mistress.”
Myn remained silent, but this was usual for him. He glanced at Meagan and Alexander as Alexander guided Meagan toward the door, but his gaze moved back to Anastasia as though he could not keep it from her.