Princess Charming

by Pattillo, Beth

  “You’ll want this when she wakes. She might be afraid if she finds herself in the dark.”

  “Thank you.” He accepted the candle from Tom and set it on the bench beside him. Strange how tragedy could forge friendships between antagonists.

  “She’ll be all right,” Tom reassured him. “Lady Lucy is strong, far stronger than you’d expect from an—”

  “From an aristocrat?” Nick finished the youth’s sentence with a tired smile.

  Tom dipped his head and then grinned sheepishly in response. “Yes, I suppose so.”

  Nick rubbed his aching eyes with his fingertips. “We’re not so different, you and I, Tom. I’ve learned that much this day.”

  Tom sagged against the doorway for support. “You’re gentry, too, aren’t you?” The question was casual, curious, with no hint of hostility.

  “Royalty, actually,” Nick responded before he thought the better of it.

  “I’m not surprised,” Tom said with a laugh. “You have that princely arrogance about you.”

  Nick nodded. “I suppose I do, Tom. I suppose I do.”

  For a moment, both were silent.

  “She’ll wake soon.” Tom meant to reassure him, but the young man’s doubtful gaze did not match his words.

  “Within the hour, no doubt,” Nick responded, but with little success at injecting optimism into his voice. With each hour that passed, his concern grew. The surgeon had specified twenty-four hours, but Nick couldn’t bear to wait that long.

  “Call me if you need anything,” Tom said and then, with a lift of his hand, left the doorway.

  “The only thing I need you cannot give me, young Tom.” Nick shot a glance toward the door and then eyed the wide space beside Lucy. The cold stone bench was not an inviting bed, and more than anything he wanted to be close to her. He’d rather not shock the Selkirks, but they’d be shocked enough when Nick’s identity was revealed.

  With the ease of much practice, Nick divested himself of his boots, circled to the other side of the bed, and slid beneath the counterpane. How he wished he could undo the events of the last few days, and that he could start again from the last time he’d shared a bed with Lucy, when they’d been trapped in the fairy bower at Madame St. Cloud’s.

  Chapter Sixteen

  A GENTLE buzzing near her ear woke Lucy from a heavy sleep. Reluctantly she opened her eyes, and the world swam before her. Despite the blurring, she recognized the bedroom; it was Mrs. Selkirk’s. The counterpane beneath her fingers was the same one that had covered her the night before. A candle burned by the bedside, providing some illumination in the darkness. From beyond the half-closed door, she could hear voices.

  Lucy gingerly turned toward the door to hear what they were saying, and her head throbbed in response. Gently, she reached up and fingered her temple. She could feel a swath of bandages over her brow. Slowly, she traced the neat edges of the soft linen. She must have struck her head. Gradually her vision grew clearer, and the low buzzing grew more annoying. She turned toward its source and felt every inch of skin tingle when she found Nick’s face no more than a foot from her own.

  Lucy’s heartbeat accelerated, which exacerbated the pounding in her head. He was snoring again. His face was relaxed in sleep, but where repose made most men look boyish, he appeared more mature and handsome than ever. The candlelight lent soft shadows to his face, obscuring the tops of his high cheekbones and the firm line of his chin. She tried to lift her head from the pillow, prepared to protest his presence in the bed, but a wave of nausea rolled over her, and she sank back instead.

  Was she destined to spend her life trapped in a variety of beds with Nicholas St. Germain? The thought held a distressing appeal.

  Since she couldn’t move, and Nick showed no signs of waking, Lucy took advantage of the opportunity to gaze her fill at his devastating face, memorizing each plane and angle. He had the face of an ancient Caesar, the high forehead and strong line of his jaw, the aquiline nose. And though he could look extremely proud, he never lost that air of smoldering sensuality that had so threatened the defenses around her heart.

  Indeed, time and time again, he’d breached the walls she’d constructed in the wake of her father’s scandalous death to keep others at bay. Against good looks alone, she might have held fast. She could steel herself against charm. But when those things were combined with generosity to climbing boys and a heartfelt grief for a lost mother and sister, what could be done? Lucy was lost, had been lost, for longer than she cared to admit. She was thoroughly, irrevocably in love with him.

  His repeated offers of marriage were all too tempting. Surely, though, after the previous day’s rally, his convictions would be softened, and she would win their wager, and they would part company. She only hoped her untimely accident had not detracted from the effects of a peaceful reform rally. Perhaps she would even travel to Santadorra for the day when Nick granted universal suffrage in his realm. The thought cheered her, even as she knew that once they parted, it would be too painful to see him again.

  She was deep in her reverie, distracted, and so it was a moment before she noticed that the snoring had stopped, and Nick had opened his eyes.

  “Hello, princess.”

  The appellation brought tears to her eyes, but Lucy silently reprimanded herself. She had no more desire for a future with a prince than she had believed one possible with a gardener.

  “Why are you here?” Prickliness was her only defense against his delicious closeness and her own unruly feelings.

  “So that I can watch over you.” He smiled ruefully and rubbed his face with one hand. “Not the most effective keeper of a vigil, I must admit.” He levered himself up on one arm so that she looked straight up into his warm mahogany eyes. “How are you feeling?”

  She willed the tightness in her chest to ease, because Nick, caring and concerned, was far too tempting. “Rather woozy, I’m afraid. But I can manage. Is it morning?” She didn’t want to think about how she felt, physically or otherwise. Feelings were too dangerous, too disconcerting, especially when they centered on Nick St. Germain. Especially when she knew that it was time to let him go.

  Nick glanced toward the candle and then in the direction of the half-open door and the voices coming from the main room. “It must be dawn. Or nearly so.”

  “And why isn’t Mrs. Selkirk in here beating you with her broom? Or ordering Tom to throw you out the front door?” In Lucy’s experience, Mrs. Selkirk was as high a stickler in her own way as the patronesses of Almack’s.

  “She had her hands full with the other young woman, I suspect. I told her I’d stand guard over you.”

  “Other young woman?” His words made no sense. “Nick, what’s happened?”

  He hesitated, and the candlelight revealed the indecision in his eyes.

  “Nick, is something amiss?” Panic stirred within her. Her head injury, Nick in her bed, another woman in the Selkirks’ main room. Something must have happened at the rally, but what?

  “How much do you remember?” His question was carefully phrased, and Lucy paused to consider her answer just as carefully. Even with a bruised head, she could play verbal cat-and-mouse.

  “Remember about what?”

  “About the rally.”

  Lucy was silent for a moment, and she frowned so that he would think she was searching her memory. In truth, she recalled very little, but obviously something quite important had happened, and Nick wanted to use her lack of information to his own advantage. Had she hit her head in the square? Her last memory was of pushing through the crowd as she hurried to the speaker’s platform. Perhaps she had tripped and fallen.

  “So you don’t remember the rally, then.”

  “I remember moving toward the front of the crowd.”

  “But nothing after?”

  He started to turn away, but Lucy reached up and captured his chin in her fingers. His skin was rough with a night’s growth of beard. For a brief moment, she considered running her palm
over the stubble across his jaw. For an even briefer moment, she made the mistake of looking into his eyes. His gaze caught hers, and he tensed beneath her fingertips.

  “Please, Nick. This is too important for games. What happened?” Lucy dropped her hand, willing away the power of the attraction to him that made her heart beat in double time.

  “The dragoons were called in.” His voice was even. Too even.

  “How could they have known? There was no public declaration beforehand. Lord Sidmouth would hardly have sent troops unless he had direct confirmation. There were no spies involved in the planning. I am sure of it.”

  Nick’s face was impassive. “Surely you realized the risk that something like this would happen.”

  “Did a riot break out? There was concern about the men from one of the other shires. They have been unruly elsewhere, but their leaders swore an oath they would not disrupt the rally.”

  “No, Lucy. The lads caused no trouble.”

  She wished she could tell what he was thinking behind that unemotional mask. “What then? Tell me, Nick.” Her head throbbed, worry and tension knotting her neck and shoulders.

  “I didn’t see the cause of the trouble. I was trapped behind Mrs. Selkirk.”

  His veiled expression gave nothing away. “Then the rally was cut short? Well, we will try again, perhaps in another place, although Nottingham was ideal.”

  “Lucy, it was a great deal more than cut short.”

  Her heart seemed to stop. “What do you mean?”

  Nick looked troubled, an unaccustomed expression for him. “The troops charged the crowd.”

  Lucy’s breathing stopped as well as her heart, and then she sat up, ignoring her swimming senses. She must go to the square. It required little imagination to envision the damage that mounted soldiers could inflict upon an unarmed peasantry.

  “They must be stopped.” She swung out of bed, reaching for the bedpost and then realized there wasn’t one. Her hand swung through empty air, and she pitched forward. She braced herself for impact against the stone floor, but at the last moment a pair of strong arms caught her, and she was hauled against Nick’s chest.

  “You’re shivering,” he said. With one hand, he jerked the counterpane from the bedstead and wrapped it around her. “You need to be in bed.”

  Lucy clung to Nick as if he were the only solid thing in the world. “Were they hurt, then?” Her voice sounded small in her own ears. She despised it when her voice sounded small.

  “The Selkirks? No.”

  “Not the Selkirks. The people.”

  “Which people?”

  “Any of them.”

  He hesitated. Dear God, it was worse than she’d feared. “Are there dead? How many injured?” She wanted to pound his chest, to force him to tell her, but she doubted Nick would respond to such measures, and she was too weak to hit him properly.

  “Two dead. A boy and one of the speakers who got tangled in the bunting and fell from the platform.” The platform to which she’d been determinedly moving, Lucy thought, choking back tears.

  “And injured?”

  “A great number.”

  It seemed unreal. A thing not to be believed. They had planned so carefully. The soldiers had acted without provocation, she was sure of it. The mere threat of the common people assembled sent Sidmouth and his ilk into panic. But how had the Home Secretary known? He would never act on mere rumor. Someone, someone creditable, had communicated the reformers’ plans to Whitehall.

  Lucy dropped her fingers from Nick’s shoulders and stepped back, willing strength into her limbs. “At least now you see the justice of my cause.” She had wanted to win the wager with Nick, but never would she have imagined proving victorious in such a horrible manner. “A terrible price to pay to win a mere wager, but at least some good may come of it,” she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “The men of England must return home and wait for justice another day, but their brothers in Santadorra will join the ranks of voting men.”

  Nick dropped his arms, and Lucy missed the warmth of his embrace keenly. “What are you assuming, princess? That the irresponsible actions of a company of soldiers will change my views? Surely I’ve shown myself more steadfast than that.”

  Cold enveloped her, sending chills through her chest and down her limbs. She clutched the coverlet more tightly about her.

  “When soldiers attack their own citizenry without provocation, then it is indeed time for reform. Even you cannot argue that point.”

  He arched a brow. “Without provocation? A thousand men assemble in a town to demand the repeal of established law, and that is not cause for the government to worry? After what happened to the aristocracy in France, it is only prudent.”

  Lucy could hardly believe her ears. “You have not changed your mind, then?”

  He shook his head. “I have not, and tomorrow we will wed as our bargain decrees.”

  White-hot fury ripped through her. “I will not marry you, Nick. I will maintain my betrothal to Mr. Whippet.”

  His lips tightened into a firm line. “A commitment you have no intention of honoring. You made this wager of your own free will, Lady Lucy. It is not very becoming to accept the consequences so churlishly.”

  Lucy flushed. He was right, even if he was not just. She could acknowledge that, but she was not yet ready to concede. She needed time to think, to plan. Her head ached, not just from her injury but from the complicated mess her life had become.

  “If we are to be held to a gentleman’s standards, Your Highness,” she drawled his title, “then let us be held to them indeed. Your presence in this room is unseemly.”

  “Unseemly?” His cheeks reddened with anger, but the effect did not last long. He quickly brought his response under control. “I suppose you are right, princess. Filled with irony, but right nonetheless.”

  He turned to go, and Lucy’s heart ached. Why couldn’t he see? Why wouldn’t he believe the evidence of his own eyes and ears? The past should never have that strong a hold on the present. Despair settled over her, enveloping her as surely as the coverlet covered her from head to toe. If the devastation he must have seen in the market square could not change him, then nothing could.

  “Are you certain you still want to wed?” she called after him and winced at the fear in her voice. “You do not have to marry me, Nick. I release you from the wager.” How could she bear it, to be married to a man whom she loved desperately but who did not love her?

  He turned in the doorway, his fingers curled around the frame. “But I do not offer you release, Lucy. At least,” he paused, and his gaze held hers, filled with dark promise, “at least, not yet.”

  NICK PASSED through the main room as quickly as possible without glancing at any of the occupants. Mrs. Selkirk called after him, but he continued through the door and out into the gray dawn. He should have brought the leather vest that fitted over his smock, for the morning air was quite cool. Perhaps it was just as well. Waking up to Lucy Charming in his bed had made him altogether too warm to begin with.

  She would be the ruination of him. He saw that now and could even smile at the humor of it. Their first meeting had been highly symbolic, and he would have been better prepared for this eventuality if he’d understood the symbolism at the time.

  No more wagers, he’d bragged to Wellington. No more heroism, and less than ten minutes later he’d been forced to eat his words when he’d bashed the burly thug over the head with a flowerpot. Lucy Charming was the cause of each transgression, and now she’d been the cause of his biggest sin of all. It was a sin against honor, and one from which he’d always prided himself on abstaining.

  Still, he had lied.

  He had lied to her, to the woman he loved.

  Nick did not lie on principle. It was dishonorable, and too easy a path to dishonor at that. But principles were gone, and he’d lied to Lucy, lied grievously, and lied so that she would be joined to him for a lifetime. Old ghosts, damp caves, lifelong co
nvictions—all held no sway when he’d stood in the midst of the crowd in the market square and watched the soldiers thunder toward the speaker’s platform. For a fraction of a moment, he’d felt like the child he’d been in Santadorra when the peasants and the French soldiers had stormed the palace, but the screams had quickly pulled him back to the present. The terror-filled eyes of the young woman who’d thrust her baby at him had been his mother’s eyes. The older woman who had keened over the body of her son had wept as bitterly as his mother must have when they’d snatched four-year-old Josephine from her arms. Nick clutched his midsection, for the thought was like a physical pain. But he was not a boy any longer. He was a man, and it had been a man, not a frightened boy, who acted in the Nottingham market square. The young woman stood a good chance of recovery in the Selkirks’ care. The grieving mother could never be comforted, and so there was nothing more he could do. Most of all—thank God, most of all—Lucy was safe and for the most part unharmed. If her anger at his falsehoods was any indication of her returning strength, she would soon be as well as she’d ever been.

  But he would still be a liar.

  Nick turned back between the little cottages carved into the hillside and mounted the uneven stairs he’d climbed two nights before. He strode up the slope until he came to the log he and Lucy had occupied that night. She’d shown him no pity then. That was one of the reasons he loved her, he supposed. Despite his fears that he would become one of her reform projects, she hadn’t turned his transformation into a civic duty. Perhaps it would have been better if she had.

  Nick sank down on the log. He was not altogether converted to her cause, he admitted to himself as he rubbed his arms to keep warm. He still saw the dangers of mass gatherings. He still believed that the nobility held a sacred charge to govern their lands. Yet now he understood, as he supposed he should have understood before, what it meant to be without a voice in determining one’s own destiny. He’d already known how it felt to stand at the wrong end of a bayonet, but he had not known the feeling of injustice when soldiers attacked an unarmed populace. He had known what it meant to diminish his belief in his religion for the sake of social acceptance, but he had not known how it felt to understand that a place in the social order would forever be denied him. She had changed him, damn her eyes, when he had not wanted to be changed. It was too difficult. Much easier to find solace in whiskey and wagers and little acts of heroism.