by Princess
Then he realized he would be dead in a few weeks anyway, considering the suicide mission ahead of him once he’d finished routing the spies, so what did it matter?
It was too late to get out of this now and he should at least let her dress the wound.
Maybe she knew what she was doing, which he doubted, but he could talk her through it, and it would save him a trip to the bumbling surgeon’s.
But as he hesitated, strangely, he thought of all the men he’d slammed up against walls over the past few years, warning them away from her, enforcing the ironclad rule that Serafina di Fiore was off limits. The rule applied to him, too.
Especially to him.
Hell, he thought, bristling, he wasn’t the one who had started this tonight.
It wasn’t as if anything was going to happen, after all. He would not let it. Tonight his black temper had slipped the leash, true, but he still ruled over his passions with an iron fist. Not for nothing was he descended on his father’s side from Torquemada of the Spanish Inquisition. Besides, it would be over soon and then she would be somebody else’s problem.
His heart raced faster as she read his wary surrender in his eyes, an answering flicker of anticipation in her own that told him perhaps she wanted to touch him as badly as he wanted her to do so.
“Well?” she asked coolly.
They stared at each other in equal challenge, both riveted, both panting slightly. The moments ticked by, the mantel clock booming in the silence, the rain drumming, wind-driven, against the glass.
Finally, he shrugged in nonchalance, as if nothing mattered a whit to him—if she seduced him or if he bled to death—but he doubted she was fooled.
“Take it off,” she whispered.
He lifted his shirt off over his head and held it bunched in one white-knuckled fist.
The first thing her gaze fixed upon was not his wound, but the tiny silver medal hanging on a long, sturdy chain around his neck.
Ohh, hell, he thought suddenly, his heart sinking.
Now he was in for it. He had forgotten the damned thing was there.
He held very still—trapped, unmasked, revealed to her.
With a look of disbelief, Serafina sank down on her knees between his open thighs and captured the medal reverently in her palm, her knuckles brushing the skin between the swells of his chest. She stared at it, then lifted the violet innocence of her gaze to his, her lips parted slightly in wonder and question.
It was the medal of the Virgin she had given him after he’d been shot like a dog right before her eyes on her twelfth birthday.
To this day, she hated her birthday.
She could never accept that the shooting wasn’t her fault. She had stayed at his bedside constantly. All the while he wandered in the nightmare dreamscapes of fever, he had been vaguely aware of her talking to him, whispering prayers, her soft, froggy little voice his lifeline.
They told him later that when they had tried to make her come away from his bedside, she had gone berserk, kicking and punching, biting and scratching, rather than leave his side.
He had never forgotten that. He had never expected that anyone would ever be that loyal to him. She had put the medal on him herself once he was out of the woods. It would protect him, she had said. And then she’d said that other amusing thing—what was it?
He stared into her eyes, remembering that impish, little-girl whisper close to his ear.
You are the bravest knight in all the world, Darius, and when I grow up, I’m going to marry you.
CHAPTER THREE
“You still have it,” she said faintly, wide-eyed as she stared down at the tiny silver medal, still warm in her palm with his body’s heat.
“Still have it,” he replied, sounding a trifle hoarse.
Wonderstruck, Serafina searched his soulful, onyx eyes. She held her breath, not daring to overstep her bounds again by foolishly reading into this discovery some significance that was not there, but surely, surely it meant something that Darius still wore this trinket she had given him so long ago. It was all she could do not to laugh aloud and hug him.
An indescribable glow of joy, painfully sweet, sparked in her chest and spread, flowing upward, beaming from her suddenly misty eyes. “Told you it would work.”
He gave her an embarrassed, little-boy smile and lowered his gaze.
For a moment, she studied him lovingly by the warm light of the sconces. His sun-bronzed face was more angular than she’d noticed before, and pale from losing blood. His eyes were sharper, more wary than ever, with faint dark circles beneath them, more tiny, careworn lines at their corners. Gorgeous as always, she thought, but he didn’t look altogether well. He was too lean, too intense, with a restless, hunted look.
“You haven’t been eating,” she chided softly.
He shrugged as he mumbled a denial.
Sometimes, she knew, he even starved himself, making austere fasts as part of his self-punishing regimes in his quest for knightly perfection. Constantly he strived, piling glory upon glory as if, deep down, he did not believe he would ever really be good enough. Privately, it broke her heart.
She thought again of the rage he had unleashed on Philippe and wondered about the firestorm inside him just beneath his armor of cool invulnerability, all his suffering concealed by his magnificent pride.
Well, he had made up his mind to let her help him in this way, at least, she thought in determination. It was a start.
She let the medal fall once more against his gleaming chest and rose from her knees, bending to kiss his forehead lightly.
“I’ll be right back,” she whispered, then went to fetch the now-boiling water.
She poured it into two basins, the steam rising to warm her face. She carried the two basins over near the chair where he waited, then she washed her hands thoroughly, wincing at her cut, swollen ring finger.
Briefly she tried to remove the monstrous jewel from her finger, but the gold band was skewed all out of shape. There was no time to muddle with it. She turned to her patient.
“Now, then. Let’s have a look.” Barefoot, she padded around to his left side to tally the latest damage his courage and selfless loyalty had cost him.
His smooth, sun-browned skin twitched at the first touch of her hands as if she’d tickled him. She caressed him firmly to still the involuntary response, trying at the same time to conceal her own reaction to the beauty of his finely honed, powerful body.
His skin was warm and smooth as velvet. His muscles were like tempered steel and she would have liked, she thought, any valid excuse to stroke him and explore him at her leisure. His hard, sculpted chest entranced her. The curve of his throat beguiled her. She could not resist the temptation of running one hand slowly, carefully over the rock-hard musculature of his arm as she approached his wounded shoulder.
Darius sat obediently, head down. She felt him slowly relax, saw his long-lashed eyes drift closed as she began to work on him.
As she wiped the blood away from his left shoulder, she reached over and touched the star-shaped scar just below his right shoulder blade. There, the would-be assassin’s bullet had struck him eight years ago, on her birthday. He should have died of that wound, the doctors said. The priest had given him last rites and Papa had wept, which was unheard-of. She herself had gone a little mad. She didn’t like to think about it, but what she’d seen him go through had inspired her interest in medicine as a hobby.
She wrung out the cloth in the water basin, then examined the knife wound more closely.
It was deep. She probed. It bled.
“Tincture of amaranth will help slow the bleeding, but I’d feel better if we stitched you, just to be safe,” she said thoughtfully after a moment. “You’ll need about nine stitches, I think. Would you like a drink before I begin?”
“I don’t drink spirits.”
She rolled her eyes. “I know that. I’m not suggesting you get foxed, I just thought you might want something for the pain.”
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br /> “No,” he said sternly.
“Suit yourself, you wretched paragon,” she muttered, dousing one of the clean, dry cloths with the whiskey.
She pressed the cloth to the cut, staring at his face because surely now, with alcohol dousing the wound, he would show some reaction. But he merely swallowed down the pain, then turned to her, eyes narrowed, the insolent look firmly in place. She shook her head at him in grudging admiration.
Next she applied some of the pungent tincture from the little vial onto one of the clean hand towels. She held it to the gash for a few minutes.
Darius and she sat in silence. She smiled when she glanced at his face, for he looked like he was falling asleep sitting up.
I’m so damned tired, he’d said. It was the only time in her memory that he’d admitted to any kind of weakness. Frowning slightly, she decided that between his loss of weight, his indifference to his own injury, and the way he’d torn Philippe apart, she was quite worried about him.
Checking the wound a few minutes later, she saw the amaranth had indeed slowed the bleeding. The royal surgeon did not hold with the old herbals and folk medicines, but Serafina had seen them work. When it came time to take up her needle, however, her mouth went dry.
She could do this, she told herself. She had to. His wound required it. She would do it just the way the textbooks said, just the way the royal surgeon had showed her. She had assisted a dozen times in her eagerness to learn and had even performed the procedure once herself with the doctor looking over her shoulder. Besides, she thought, trying to encourage herself, she was excellent at lace and embroidery.
With her left hand she pressed the edges of his incised flesh gently together, then brought up the needle, wincing with hesitation when the moment came to pierce him.
“Hold still, now,” she coached him, stalling. “This won’t hurt a bit.”
He let out an impatient sigh. “Whenever you’re ready, Your Highness. I thought you knew what you were doing.”
She shot a scowl at the back of his glossy black head, but his remark gave her the impetus to do what she must. She pricked the bronze velvet of his skin.
“Ow,” he muttered as she pushed the needle through.
“Aha, so you are human, after all.”
“Watch what you’re doing, please.”
“Thankless rogue,” she mumbled.
Her hands perspired but were steady as she closed the gash with each careful stitch, fully absorbed in her task as his blood stained her hands. She lost herself in concentration, until at last she tied off the thread and snipped it triumphantly with her sewing scissors. Reaching for the cloth, she wiped away the slight amount of bleeding that had occurred during the procedure.
“There you are. How does it feel?” she asked as she washed her hands in the second basin, then dried them.
“Better.”
“Hmm, now you’re humoring me. Try not to move it too much for a few days.”
“Right,” he said cynically.
“You are impossible,” she murmured. She stepped near him again, examining her work.
It was somehow automatic to run her hand through his hair now that the crisis was past, second nature to bend down and kiss him lightly on the temple.
“You were very brave,” she murmured playfully.
Only when Darius tilted his head back and looked at her for a long moment did it occur to her that perhaps she was being too forward with him again. Instantly she blushed, scolding herself. She was not a child anymore who could climb all over him like he was her own pet wolf.
She looked away. “Never fear, Santiago,” she said with forced lightness, “I shall not hurl myself at you again.” She picked up her scissors and began sharply ripping a clean linen sheet into strips to use as bandages for him. “Ow!”
“What is it?”
“I hurt my hand when I smashed Philippe a facer,” she muttered.
“What?” Darius began to laugh skeptically.
“You think I’m joking? I got him with my ring. See?” She stepped nearer and held out her injured left hand to show him.
He took her outstretched hand and examined it, his black forelock veiling his eyes.
The gold filigree of the setting had bent with the force of the blow. The acorn-sized diamond of her engagement ring was squashed off to the side. The gold band had buckled slightly on an angle, cutting into the tender flesh between her fingers.
“I punched him. That’s how I was able to get away from them. I ran into the maze. I thought I could hide there. It always worked when I was trying to evade my governess.”
He lifted his head and stared up at her in frank amazement. “Well done, Serafina.”
Usually the compliments of men made her yawn, but the simple acknowledgement from him made her blush bright red.
He gently drew her closer. “Come here. You sit right down, girl,” he murmured. “You should have looked after yourself first.”
She stammered a self-conscious protest, but she obeyed when he directed her with a nod to the ottoman across from him. Muscles rippling all down his chiseled belly, Darius reached over and lifted the second basin of now-tepid water from the low table nearby. He set the basin on her lap, his fingertips brushing her knee. She steadied the basin with her right hand as he picked up the soap and let it float in the water.
“Let’s get this off you.”
“It’s stuck.”
“We’ll see about that,” he growled. Taking her left hand gently between both of his, he dunked her hand in the basin all the way up to her wrist. He held it under the water for a moment.
Both staring down at their joined hands, neither of them spoke.
Next, he took the small oval of soap, smoothing it back and forth across her palm with his thumb until tiny bubbles appeared. He massaged the bubbles gently all over her hand, up the tapered length of each finger and her thumb. She could have groaned aloud with the pleasure of his touch, tingling all the way up her arm. Her heartbeat quickened with each caress of skin on wet, slick skin.
When he had coated her hand in the pearly sheen of the suds, he took the gold band of the ring between his thumb and forefinger, squeezing it hard, but with precision. She kept her head down, biting her lip against the pain, but she watched the powerful muscles leap all the way up his arm with his careful exertion. Then he changed his grip, holding the gold band with all four fingers and thumb, and began working it off of her finger.
“Am I hurting you?” he murmured.
She shook her head, her voice captured in her throat.
The ring was still bent too much to fit over her swollen middle knuckle.
“A little more,” he said.
Again, he soaped her hand, sliding his wet forefinger slowly into the V between each of her fingers. She watched the play of muscle across his hard chest, gazed longingly at the small, tawny circles of his nipples, and the silver medal shining against his gold, gleaming skin.
So beautiful, she thought with a soul-deep ache, for he would never be hers. Her longing for him filled her with self-directed anger and misery. Would she never get over this man? Had she no pride? She had tried to hate him but could not.
She stared sorrowfully at his downswept lashes and high cheekbones and the intent look on his finely sculpted face as he squeezed the gold band back into a rough circle and tried to pull it off her. Again, it didn’t work.
“I think there is no getting rid of it,” she whispered.
Under his forelock, he looked up, meeting her gaze with a directness that nearly knocked the breath from her. His voice was soft but ferocious. “I will free you from it. Trust me.”
She stared at him, taken aback.
He lowered his head again. Carefully he eased the ring over her knuckle at last and removed it from her finger. When he looked up and met her gaze, the fiery intensity glowed in his eyes, this time with dark satisfaction.
“You did it,” she breathed.
“Leave it off.”
“A-all right,” she stammered, wide-eyed.
He rinsed the suds from her skin very tenderly. Placing the broken ring in her hand, he curled her fingers around it in his own. The curved scar on his lip tilted as he gave her his rarest, truest smile. He had a smile like molasses, dark and rich and bittersweet, and it melted her completely.
“Get dressed, Princesa, then we’ll go see your father,” he murmured, but before he let her go, he lifted her hand to his lips.
She stared in amazement as he closed his eyes, bent his head, and pressed to her injured knuckle a single, ardent kiss.
Serafina had gone into the dressing room to put on a fresh gown while Darius slipped his damp, bloodied shirt back on and went out into the hallway, where he ordered a footman to fetch his aide, Lieutenant Alec Giroux. He instructed the servant to have Alec meet him at his suite in the royal block as soon as possible.
Shirt flowing open down his chest, Darius paced in the sitting room while Serafina dressed in the adjoining compartment.
Those moments with her had fired his resolve with new passion.
Now all he had to do was meet with the king, catch the spies, and be on his way to Milan.
Seven weeks ago, when one of his most trusted contacts informed him of the French spies who had infiltrated the palace, Darius had left Moscow at once. He had been forced to cut short his meticulous background investigation of Anatole Tyurinov, but he had already learned more than he needed to know, and there had been no time to lose.
On the voyage back from Russia to Ascencion, he had spent the weeks at sea refining his plans and making peace with his fate.
He knew what he had to do. The king’s hands were tied in this matter, but his own were not.
Serafina would not be the virgin sacrifice to buy them protection from the tyrant Napoleon.
The brute Tyurinov would never get his hands on her.
At the same time, Darius could not allow Napoleon to invade with his superior forces and take Lazar’s throne from him. He had to protect his benefactor, the kingdom, and Serafina all at once. It was an impossible situation, but he had one final bit of Gypsy magic up his sleeve. He need only go to the heart of the problem.