Читать книгу Princess of Fortune - Miranda Jarrett - Страница 11

M rs. Copperthwaite gasped, audible to all in the suddenly silent shop. It was equally evident that she was reappraising the princess, trying to shift her opinion of the young woman’s flamboyant dress from that of a gaudy actress or mistress to exotic, eccentric royalty.

“Is this—is this so?” she asked tentatively. “Are you truly—”

“Yes,” the princess said softly, her voice scarcely more than a whisper. “I am.”

“Oh, my goodness.” Mrs. Copperthwaite’s hand fluttered over her chest. “Oh, Your Royal Highness, forgive me!”

She sank into a deep curtsy before the princess, her head bowed and meek. One by one, all the other women in the room followed, graceful dips of crushing pale linen and silk.

It was like nothing Tom had ever witnessed, a scene better suited for the boards at Covent Garden than a Bond Street milliner’s: a melodramatic capture, the princess’s true identity revealed by her would-be assassin, and then in unison every person in the whole wretched shop dropped in an awestruck curtsy. The princess herself couldn’t have choreographed it for more self-centered grandeur.

And yet Tom saw at once that she wasn’t enjoying the spectacle at all. Although he’d easily thwarted her attacker, the surprise and shock had shaken the princess in ways he hadn’t expected. She wasn’t accustomed to real danger like that he’d encountered all his life, and it showed. She’d turned uncharacteristically silent, for one thing, and inside the black brim of her bonnet her face had gone as white as bleached linen, her dark eyes enormous with fear and her mouth pinched. All of her imperious mannerisms had fled, and what was left made her seem very young and very, very vulnerable. She’d stopped being the grand royal Monteverdian princess, and become like any other young woman abruptly confronted with her own mortality.

Thomas held his elbow out for her to take, and when she didn’t, he gently captured her little gloved hand himself and tucked it into the crook of his arm. Following his orders, he had wanted to remove her from the store before anyone learned she was a princess. Now, with that secret gone, he realized how much more important it was for the woman herself that he extricate her from this situation as soon as he could.

“Shall we leave now, ma’am?” he asked. “The carriage is just outside.”

She nodded, and took a shuddering breath as she turned toward Mrs. Copperthwaite. “You may rise. No such ceremony is necessary.”

“Oh, but it is, ma’am!” The older woman straightened, her eager smile proof of how much she wished to gain a royal customer. “It’s not every day we have a great lady of your rank honor us with your custom. What pleases you, ma’am? What might I fetch to show you?”

“Another time, perhaps. I find I am no longer in the humor for such diversions.” She raised her chin, a bit of her customary demeanor returning. “Captain, I am ready.”

“Good day, Mrs. Copperthwaite.” Tom bowed solemnly, then led the princess from the store to the carriage. She managed her exit with a sweeping grace, her free arm angled from her body to show off the drape of her shawl, but only he was aware of how heavily she was leaning on his arm for support.

“You were brave, ma’am,” he said as the carriage drew away from the pavement. “That wasn’t easy for you, I’m sure. You did well.”

“I did not.” Unhappily she slumped back against the squabs. “I wasn’t brave. I was unwise. You said so yourself.”

“That was before, ma’am.”

“Saints in heaven, such a mortal difference.” She sighed and pulled off her bonnet, letting it drop onto the seat beside her. Even in the warm carriage, the color had not returned to her cheeks, leaving her with a drained, forlorn pallor. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “I do not wish to speak of this morning again, Captain.”

“I am sorry, ma’am, but you must.” Though he was trying to be kind, there were simply too many unanswered questions about this morning to pretend it hadn’t happened. “You can’t pretend this didn’t happen. I will send for a surgeon to attend you once we return to the house if that will—”

“I told you, Captain, I am not fragile, and I do not require any of your surgeons’ attendings.” She sighed again, wincing as she rubbed her palms together. “Now I wish quiet to contemplate.”

Thomas frowned. The princess did not strike him as a contemplative woman by nature, but if that would help her recover, he could scarcely object.

“Very well, then,” he said softly. “We shall speak later.”

“Later,” she mumbled, her eyes squeezed shut. “Not now.”

Tom suspected she was only pretending to sleep, just as she was pretending to contemplate, but he would grant her that, too. He could use a bit of contemplation himself. Although he had already realized that nothing concerned with the princess would be easy sailing, even so he couldn’t have predicted the disaster they’d found in that infernal ladies’ shop.

What incredible odds had placed the Monteverdian seamstress in Copperthwaite’s? Monteverde was a tiny country. There couldn’t be that many refugees making their way to England, let alone living and working at a skilled trade in London while they plotted revenge against their former king. How much more were those odds compounded by the preposterous coincidence of the princess impulsively stumbling from the carriage into that particular shop at that particular time? Not even the most confirmed gamblers at White’s could have predicted such a sequence.

And now it would be up to Tom to guess what would happen next, with the princess herself as the stakes.

He watched her as she slept, or contemplated, or whatever it was she was doing to escape his questions. Though her face was at ease, there was a fresh wariness clouding it that hadn’t been there earlier, and he was sorry that he hadn’t been able to spare her that change. The admiral hadn’t told him much of her history, or even the details of how she’d escaped the French to come to England. He didn’t know what had become of her family. War was never a good place for a young woman, and he wondered grimly how many other things she’d witnessed or experienced that she wished never again to discuss.

And he’d meant it when he’d called her brave. When the woman had come at her with the scissors, she hadn’t fainted or screamed or tossed her petticoats over her face, the way too many young ladies would. Perhaps that kind of nonsense was bred out of princesses. True, he’d known no others for comparison. But this princess had stood her ground, with a rare courage and grace that he could understand and respect.

He studied her now, her dark lashes feathered over the curve of her cheeks. Her breathing was deep, making her mostly bare breasts rise and fall above the low neckline of her gown, and with an honorable effort he forced himself to look back to her face. She wasn’t priggish or overly modest, he’d grant her that. Earlier he’d judged her handsome at best, not pretty, but the more time he spent in her company, the more his opinion was changing. She was pretty. Too pretty, if he were honest, and he shook his head as he considered all the trouble such thoughts could bring him.

Her eyes fluttered open, and she stretched her arms before her, relishing the motion like a waking cat. “We have reached the Willoughbys’ house, Captain, have we not?”

He hadn’t even noticed the carriage had stopped. “Ah, it seems we have.” He leaned from the window, swiftly scanning the front of the house and down each side of the street. “Here, let me help you down.”

But she drew back, her chin down and her arms folded over her chest. “I should prefer you to go first, Captain. To make sure that all is as it should be.”

He nodded, understanding, and privately pleased that she’d put her trust in him. Once more he scanned the quiet square, then held his hand out to her.

“All’s snug, ma’am,” he said gallantly. “Come ashore whenever you’re ready.”

But instead of taking his hand, she slipped past him unassisted, dangling her bonnet from her wrist by the ribbons. She hurried up the steps by herself, leaving him once again feeling chagrined and in the uncomfortable position, for any captain, of following instead of leading.

Perhaps, he thought, they’d not made such progress, after all.

“How was your drive, ma’am?” Lady Willoughby was asking as the princess handed her hat to a maid. “Was it pleasant?”

“‘Pleasant’ is not the word I should choose.” The princess paused before the looking glass, patting and plucking at her hair where the bonnet had flattened it. “Unless, of course, your English definition of pleasure is to be beset by murderous anarchists. Isn’t that so, Captain Greaves?”

“We did have our adventure, Lady Willoughby,” Tom said. The countess looked bewildered, yet also clearly relieved that she was no longer the one responsible for the princess’s “adventures.” “But no real harm was done, as you can see. You are certain about not summoning a physician, ma’am?”

“No, no, no.” The princess frowned at his reflection behind hers, clearly displeased that he’d been considerate enough to ask again. “You will come with me now to the garden, Captain.”

She was leading again, and again he was left to follow, this time down the hallway through the house, and he did not like it. He did not like it at all. “Where in blazes are you going now?”

She stopped and turned to face him. “I am going to the garden, Captain,” she explained with the kind of excruciating patience reserved for small, simple children. “You are joining me. There we shall speak to one another. Then when we are done, we shall leave.”

She glanced past him, back to the hovering maidservant. “I want a pot of chocolate brought to me in the garden, a plate of toast, browned on one side only and the crusts cut away, and a small pot of orange marmalade. I will also require a basin of cooled water—cooled, mind, and not cold, or warm, or scalding, or I shall send it back—and a linen cloth for drying.”

So the old princess had returned, ready to demand the sun and the stars, and expecting to get there, too.

Not that he was above giving orders himself. “Another place, ma’am. Not the garden.”

She stopped again, so abruptly they nearly collided. “The garden is safe. The admiral said it was. There are tall brick walls on three sides, and the house on the fourth has the only entrance.”

“I’ve had men on my crews who could scale a twelve-foot wall like cats,” he said. “They’d be over a garden wall in less time than it takes to say it.”

“Ohh.” Her bravado faltered as her face fell, and again he glimpsed the princess from the carriage. “I have sat there for weeks and weeks, not knowing. Now, however, I see that such a place would not be—would not be wise.”

“No, ma’am.” He didn’t elaborate, and he didn’t have to. “Surely there’s another room in this house, a parlor or library.”

She nodded, and turned the knob on the nearest door. “This is the earl’s library.” She went to stand in the center of the room, before the empty fireplace. “You must understand, Captain, that I have not been here before. So many books depress me. Do you care to read, Captain?”

The room was little used and gloomy, with the louvered shutters over the windows closed tight against the sun’s damage to the bindings. There’d be little threat to her in here, that was certain.

“I do,” he said. “On blockade duty, or a tedious voyage with foul weather, a book is often my best companion at sea.”

“I have never found the patience for reading.” Even now she was pacing, short steps that crossed and recrossed the patterned carpet. “I haven’t the concentration. But that is not what we must discuss, is it?”

“Why don’t you sit?” He held a silk-covered armchair for her. “I don’t intend this to be a trial for you, you know, and I—”

“My father is a good king.” Her words were coming out in a rush, as restless as her pacing. “He is fair, and just, and good. I do not know why that—that woman would say otherwise, because it is not true. You must understand that, Captain. You must.”

“I put no weight in what she said, ma’am.” He was careful of what he said, too. He knew little about her father either as a king or a man, but since a country takes its character from its leader, Tom had his doubts about the King of Monteverde, no matter how his daughter pleaded for him. “Every country has its malcontents, and always has. It’s the French and Buonaparte that’s made them bold now.”

“I thank you for your understanding, Captain.” She bowed her head and spread her fingers in a graceful fan of acknowledgment. It wasn’t hard to imagine her at home in a court’s ritual formality, just as he could easily picture her in the thick of that same court’s self-indulgence and flirtation. What was difficult was seeing her so sadly out of place here in London, a bright exotic bird trapped among the dry leather spines of the earl’s library. “And I thank you also for saving me as you did. I thank you with all my soul and my heart.”

He cleared his throat, uneasy with such lavish gratitude. “I was but following my orders, ma’am.”

The wariness remained in her manner, but there was a dare there, too. “You could have followed them without risking your own life. It was all so very fast, you know. No one there would have faulted you. To have seen me die would have likely pleased them more, to see if my foreign blood was as red as this velvet.”

“Don’t jest like that,” he said sharply. “I’d no intention of letting you be murdered.”

“No?” She stopped pacing and looked directly into his eyes, though he could not tell if she were teasing, or taunting, or simply seeking the truth. “You would have been free of the nuisance of me, Captain. Has that no appeal for you?”

“None,” he said firmly. “Not only did my orders oblige me, but my conscience, as well. And no more of this talk from you, mind?”

Her smile spread slowly, lighting her eyes as she turned her face up to his. He’d never expected her to be shy, but that was there, too, an unmistakable undercurrent to the vulnerability he’d glimpsed earlier.

“You did not have to save my life, yet you did,” she said, her voice low and breathless. “I did not have to thank you, but I did. Is it such a marvel that I trust you, Captain, like no other in this whole English country?”

She was so close to him that her scent, orange blossoms and musk and female, filled his nose, so close that he could see the flecks of gold in her dark eyes, so close he could not miss the sheen of excitement on the twin curves of her breasts, there in the caress of red velvet.

It occurred to him that she expected him to kiss her. It also occurred to him that as much as he would like to oblige her—damnation, as much as he’d like to oblige himself—to do so would be purest madness, and disaster for his career.

He took a step away, clasping his hands behind his back. That was his habit from walking the quarterdeck, but for now it was also the only sure way he’d keep himself from reaching for what she was offering. Even in a wanton place like Monteverde, there had to be other ways of showing trust.

He cleared his throat again. “I am glad that you trust me, ma’am. That should make it easier for you to answer my questions.”

“Your questions.” Her cheeks flushing nearly as red as her gown, she ducked her head and turned away from him. “I had not forgotten, Captain.”

Damnation, he hadn’t intended to shame her, especially when he’d wanted the same thing. Promptly he looked away, too, his own face growing warm, and instead concentrated on a blank-eyed marble bust of Homer that stood on a pillar in the corner.

“There were far too many coincidences this morning for chance alone, ma’am,” he began, striving to be all business. “Have you contacted anyone else from Monteverde since you arrived in London? An ambassador, a friend?”

“The ambassador returned home months ago, before I’d left, to guard his estates from the French,” she said. “I do not believe Father replaced him. Everything was already too unsettled. And as for friends or acquaintances—I have not a one in London, else I would have gone to them instead of here.”

He could not imagine being so entirely adrift in a foreign country. The navy had always been there to support him even if his family and friends had not, and he marveled at the strength this small young woman must possess, forced to depend upon strangers for so much.

“Is there any reason beyond politics that someone would want you dead?” he asked. “Did you bring with you anything of great value? Gold, jewels, paintings?”

She sniffed with indignation. “Lady Willoughby could tell you that. Recall how she and her staff have searched my belongings.”

True enough. That search would have served its purpose, even though Tom didn’t like the notion of her having so little privacy. If anything of real interest had been discovered, then the admiral would likely have relayed it to him.

“Well, then, another reason. Someone who is jealous of your position or rank, or the fact that you escaped while they were forced to remain?”

“No,” she said sadly. “My life has not been so interesting as that. Besides, most Monteverdians would consider my escape a banishment, not something to be envied.”

“There is no one?” He hesitated, wishing he did not have to ask this. “No, ah, no fiancé, or lover?”

“By all the saints in heaven, of course I had no lover!” Her indignation was rising to such heights that he half expected to smell smoke where she’d scorched the carpet. “No Monteverdian princess would dare take a lover before she was wed, and before she’d given her royal husband a legitimate heir.”

“I understand, ma’am,” he said hastily. “You don’t have to say more.”

“But I do,” she insisted, “because you do not understand, else you would never have asked. To risk bearing a bastard child of impure blood, to lose all my value as a bride to any respectable royal house, to sully my family’s name, to be forced to surrender my dowry—I would not do that, Captain, never. Never.”

Oh, hell. Now he’d made a right royal mess, hadn’t he?

“I didn’t say that you had done any of that, ma’am,” he said, wishing desperately for a way to withdraw that particular question. “I was only trying to, ah, to learn if there was anyone else who might wish you harm.”

“Harm, ha,” she said darkly, and muttered some black, incoherent words in Italian that he was certain must be a curse. “I could show you harm, which is what you deserve for that. Because I know exactly what you meant. I may be a virgin, but I am not a fool.”

He felt himself flush again, something that had not happened since his voice had cracked at age twelve. But then, he could not recall ever having had any woman, young, old, or in between, speak to him so frankly of her virginity.

No wonder he was feeling mortifyingly out of his depth, and sinking fast.

“I assure you, ma’am, there was no disrespect—”

“No more of your assurances.” Suddenly she was standing between him and Homer, her dark eyes full of sparks and a fierce tilt to her chin that had nothing shy about it. She snapped her fingers before him, as if to flick away the word itself. “No more of your harms, and your coincidences, and—and no more of your ridiculous ‘ma’am’s,’ either. It is the insipid sound a nanny goat makes, and it does not please me.”

He frowned down at her. He’d always respected titles and ranks, whether it was a senior officer, or his father the earl, and he wasn’t sure why anyone would choose to do otherwise.

“But ‘ma’am’ is the proper way to address you. Even our own queen is called ‘Your Majesty’ only for the first greeting, and ‘ma’am’ after that.”

“I am not your queen, am I?” Her frown matched his. “I am different. You are different. You are the only Londoner who has spoken to me in my own language, and it seems most barbarously wrong of you not to call me by my given name while we converse.”

“Call you by your Christian name?” he asked, incredulous. His experience with ladies might be limited, but he did know that most did not wish to be addressed after a few hours’ acquaintance with the same jolly familiarity used with a drinking crony in a tavern. Here he’d been worrying that he’d been too free, yet she was offended instead by his being too formal.

“Yes, yes. It will give me great comfort, and be so much better than the nanny-goat bleat.” She nodded with satisfaction, as if everything had been decided. “Whenever we are alone, or speaking Italian as we are now, you will call me Isabella. I give you leave. We will speak as friends, eh?”

How could he possibly refuse her when she’d no other real friends in the entire country? How cruel would it be to turn down such a humble request?

She snapped her fingers again, now less from annoyance than for emphasis. “In turn I shall call you whatever your name might be instead of ‘Captain.’ You do have another, don’t you?”

“It’s Thomas,” he said reluctantly. “Tom for short. But I’m not certain this is—”

“Thomas,” she repeated, testing the sound of the name. “Tom. Tomaso. That will do. Ah, here is that lazy maid at last with my chocolate. Set it down there, on that table.”

Tomaso: no one had called him that since he’d been a boy traveling the Continent with his family. Yet from her lips it sounded different, a silky, luxuriant ripple that couldn’t possibly refer to him.

So how in blazes was he supposed to say her name? “Ma’am” might sound like a goat’s bleat to her, but at least it had none of the sinuous, sensuous entrapment of Isabella.

He was saved for the moment as the servants entered with her requests, and he watched her dictate to them with appalling precision. The maid must place the silver tray with the chocolate pot and toast here, squared to the edge of the table. The footman must present the basin of water, holding it steady while she dipped one fingertip into the surface to judge the temperature, and then place it before the wicker-backed chaise, with the linen cloth folded in half over the arm.

“I know you judge me to be too picky, Tomaso,” she said once the servants left. “Perhaps I am. But there is a proper way for things to be done, and an improper one, as well. If standards aren’t kept, why, then, civilization is meaningless, and we should just as well go back to grunting and rooting about naked in the dirt like little piglets.”

“Yes, ma’am.” The unbidden image of her naked made him forget her request.

“Isabella,” she corrected him, fortunately unaware of his true thoughts as she sat on the settee and swung her legs up before her. “You will call me Isabella. Now be an honorable gentleman, and look away while I tend my sorry knees.”

But it was already too late for honorable discretion. Without waiting for him to oblige, she’d pulled her skirts up high over her garters and bent over to inspect her bruised, scraped knees.

She winced as she dribbled the cool water over them, then glanced up at Tom through her lashes.

“I told you to look away,” she said, wrinkling her nose and mouth at the sting of the cold water. “You are not being honorable.”

“Damnation, you have not given me the chance before you go and hike up your skirts!” he sputtered. She was wearing yellow lisle stockings with dark blue garters, the ribbons embroidered with red roses that, unfortunately, matched the scrapes on her knees—pale, plump knees which, scraped or not, were still quite fine to look upon. “What honorable lady would do such a thing, I ask you, let alone ask a gentleman to ignore it?”

She blinked, not at all embarrassed. “But I am not an honorable English lady, Tomaso. I am a princess, and I am entitled to ask whatever I please.”

He took a deep breath, making himself once again look at her face, an event that seemed to be happening far too frequently with her.

“Not that, ma’am,” he said as firmly as he could. “My orders regard your safety and well-being, not your—your modesty.”

“My modesty. How very English that sounds!” She grinned, and widened her eyes for emphasis. “Well, then. You have reasoned this better than any periwig judge. Since we are in England, I rescind my order. Look at my sad little knees if you wish, and I shall not protest.”

With a groan of frustration he dropped into the chair across from her, wondering if even one of those great admiralty lords had any idea of what he was going through.

“Why the devil aren’t you having one of the lady’s maids tend to you? What reason could you have for doing this here instead, except to plague me?”

“Because you are the only one who knows how it happened,” she said, dabbing at her knees. “I was impulsive and—and unwise. Stepping from a carriage without waiting for the step is something a simpleton would do, not a princess. The maidservants in this house whisper about me enough. They do not need to see that I have skinned my knees like a clumsy child. But you—I cannot have such a secret from you, can I?”

He hadn’t expected that. “You are fortunate you weren’t more badly hurt,” he said gruffly. “You could have broken your leg, or worse.”

“I’m fortunate in a great many ways, I suppose.” She dried her knees and flipped her skirts back down, smoothing them around her ankles for good measure. “I could also have been stabbed with a pair of embroidery scissors which, given my ineptitude at handwork, would have been most ironic.”

He frowned grimly. He supposed it was good that she could make light of it, but he could not. “‘Ironic’ isn’t the word I would have chosen.”

“It is better than the alternative, yes?” Her smile turned wistful. “What happened today in that shop was not your fault, Tomaso. You couldn’t have stopped more than you did. I have lived most of my life with the whole world watching, and I know no other way.”

“But I shouldn’t have let you go into that infernal shop in the first place.”

“That’s because you believe the best way to keep me safe is to lock me away, but that won’t do for me, not at all.”

She smoothed a stray lock of hair behind her ear, her smile turning bittersweet. “On my family’s crest are three lions, brave and fierce and ready for any challenge. That is how I am, too, Tomaso. Why else would I have come all this way on my own, away from my family and my home? I would rather face life with a roar than hide and quake with my hands over my eyes. Can’t you understand that, Tomaso, even being English?”

He grumbled, but he nodded, because it was the easiest reply, if not the best.

But he understood, all right. He understood that he was becoming more and more tangled in the complicated life of this small, fierce lioness, and there wasn’t a blasted thing he could do about it.

With her legs curled up beneath her, Isabella sat in the center of her bed and listened. She’d always been good at listening, particularly like this in the dark. There were a great many things that could be learned that way, stray bits and scraps of interesting information that others tossed away without a thought, information that could prove most useful.

Consider all she’d learned of Lord and Lady Willoughby and their establishment in the few short weeks that she’d been their guest. Simply by listening, she’d learned that the earl stayed downstairs drinking long after the countess had retired, and that when he finally came upstairs—his footsteps unsteady, muttering to himself—he’d go not to his wife’s bed, or even his own, but up another flight of stairs to the servants’ rooms, where he’d make the kitchen maid’s iron bedstead squeak off and on all night.

Isabella herself did not care about the earl’s proclivities. She’d certainly overheard worse things in her parents’ palace. The earl was a man, and a lord; he could do what he pleased. But because all the other servants seemed to know, too, the house was closed for the night far earlier than was fashionable, the fires banked, the candles doused, and everyone in their beds. But for Isabella, the moment she heard the earl’s footsteps meant the moment she knew she’d be undisturbed. Until morning, there’d be no more servants knocking at Isabella’s door, no more invented reasons for the countess to come chirping into her rooms, hoping to discover who knew what. Locking her bedchamber door was useless, for the countess held the keys to all the rooms in the house, and had no reluctance to use them.

So in the dark Isabella listened, straining her ears, and smiled when she finally heard those last footsteps of the day. The door upstairs opened and shut, and Isabella hopped off her bed. Barefoot, so she’d make as little noise as possible, she lifted the chair from her dressing table to the top of the trunk at the end of her bed. Then she climbed up first onto the trunk and then the chair, steadying herself with one hand around the bedpost. Her heart was racing with excited dread, and she had to remind herself to take care, and not fall again as she had earlier.

Now she could see over the top carved wooden frame that supported the bed’s curtains. The bottom of the frame was lined with the same brocade as the curtain, gathered into a showy sunburst over the mattress, but the top, here where no one would ever see, was covered by a stitched piece of coarse muslin, tacked into place only in the corners. Using a butter knife that she’d kept from her breakfast tray for the purpose, Isabella pried the tacks free, slowly peeled back the muslin and sighed with relief.

There, sandwiched between the lining and the muslin, lay the quilted linen petticoat of her traveling clothes, the skirts spread out in a fan so the outline wouldn’t show from below. Gently she touched the petticoat, reassuring herself that it hadn’t been touched, and again whispered thanks to her mother for suggesting such a clever hiding place. No one, certainly not foolish Lady Willoughby, would ever think to look here.

Lightly she traced one quilted channel, her fingers following the lumpy outlines of the treasure stitched within for safekeeping. Scores of gold coins, each stamped with the Fortunaro lions, were only the beginning. The real prize was the oval rubies, big as pigeon’s eggs and set in hammered gold, that had been in her family since the first Fortunaro had stolen them from the Caesars in Rome and made them the centerpiece of the crown jewels, a symbol of everything grand in her country.

On the voyage to England, the sheer weight of the petticoat and its hidden treasure had been a constant burden to Isabella, but that was nothing compared to the responsibility that had pressed upon her every minute since she’d left Monteverde. Not even her father the king had known she had the jewels, and Mama had made her swear terrible oaths never to tell another.

Isabella’s fingers stilled over the largest ruby, the one etched with the Fortunaro lion. Captain Lord Thomas Greaves had asked her if she’d anything that someone would kill her for. She hadn’t answered him honestly about that, nor had she told him how she’d seen the little triangle made of twigs around the woman’s neck. She couldn’t, not without raising too many other questions she’d no wish to answer. But he’d listened to her, anyway, and the readiness with which he’d accepted her evasion had saddened her no end.

How could it not? He was appallingly masculine in a rough English way, and if she were a sleek Italian lioness, then he was surely the model for the blustery wild lion that stood behind the British throne. No wonder she’d been drawn to him the moment she’d entered the drawing room, and no wonder, too, that she’d wanted to kiss him this afternoon, a giddy, foolish impulse that she’d regretted at once.

Flirtation was not why she’d been sent on this journey. She was not here to amuse herself with the man assigned to watch over her, no matter how broad his shoulders might be, or that he alone in London had made the effort to speak her language. In the long, long lineage of the Fortunaro, she was an insignificant nothing, except for what she might do now for her family’s honor.

As if to remind herself, she touched the jewels one last time before she pulled the muslin back in place and pressed the tacks back into the corners with her thumbs. But instead of climbing down to the floor, she slumped wearily on the chair, her hands resting on her bruised knees and her bare legs dangling over the chest.

She liked Tom Greaves, and she trusted him, and if they’d been born any other two people in this world, then that would have been plenty. But not only were those rubies hidden in the canopy reason for someone to pursue her; for a Monteverdian princess, they were also reason to die.

With a little sob, Isabella buried her face in her hands, and gave in to the unfairness that had become her life.