The Runaway Princess

by Christina Dodd

  She filled her cupped hands with water and washed her face. She scrubbed at her skin beneath the water. Then she slipped beneath the surface and scoured her scalp with her fingertips. Dirt and ash slipped away, and not even the uneven stubble of her burned hair could distress her now.

  Coming up for a breath, she breathed deeply of the cold mountain air, and she smiled.

  Amazing how a brush with death could transform the loss of a modish haircut into a triviality.

  She let the current push her spine against the gentle slope of the rough-textured stone. Her head fell back, and her eyes closed as heat enveloped her. Her mind drifted with the current, free of earthly care.

  “Don’t you ever stay where you are put?” he said from directly above her.

  Opening her eyes, she smiled on Danior—until she took in his dishabille. He wasn’t wearing a shirt or trousers. His only garment was a tight white pair of underdrawers that made her thankful for the darkness, although the night’s illumination made it possible to view the muscles in his shoulders and arms. “Huh?”

  The moon, almost round, sailed directly above them. His head was bent and his face shadowed, but she thought he surveyed her thoroughly. Seemingly satisfied to find her unharmed, he stirred the contents of a small bowl with his finger. “No harm done.”

  “Good of you to approve.” She wanted to wave her hand airily, but found it too much trouble to lift her arm. Yet through the layers of relaxation, she felt the stirring of wonder and a distant unease.

  It seemed a little late to wonder what he must have thought upon returning and seeing her gown and petticoat strewn about. Did he consider it an invitation? Did he think she wished to become intimate with him?

  And did Evangeline care?

  Leona had warned her about men like this. Why hadn’t she warned her about her own wanting, need, softness?

  As he strode toward the shore, she noted his broad shoulders. He could push a plow all day—or carry a woman all night.

  He made his way into a small cluster of stones from which steam rose in unsteady puffs. Kneeling, he placed the bowl inside, then picked up a small clay crock—where did he get that?—and waded back to her. His legs cleaved the water, his arms swung freely; maybe he wasn’t a peasant, or a prince, but Poseidon rising to claim his bride.

  The thought fed that tingle of uneasiness.

  “Here.” He thrust the crock toward her. “Drink this.”

  Visions of a mysterious drug slipped through her mind. “What is it?”

  “Fresh water from a cold spring. Drink.”

  Thrusting it into her hands, he turned and left her feeling foolish.

  But still she sniffed the crock before she drank. It smelled like dirt, but the contents were water, and she tipped it up and swallowed.

  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?�
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  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.”

  Nineteen

  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 tw
o 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.