Princess Annie

by Linda Lael Miller

Rafael moved up over her then, gracefully, giving her none of his weight. His mouth, as he kissed her, was musky with her own feminine scent. The contact, cautious at first, was soon a battle of wills and tongues, a fencing match with no clear winner.

  He broke away, with a breathless groan, and gazed deep into her eyes. She felt his manhood, hard and vibrant with life, prodding her gently.

  “Annie?” Rafael asked.

  “Yes,” Annie answered, flinging back her head and raising her hips to grant her husband an easy entrance to her body. “Oh, yes!”

  Rafael lunged into her, his thrust deep and powerful, and Annie welcomed him with a cry, her fingers clasping the taut flesh of his buttocks and urging him on.

  The consummation of the royal marriage was a glorious, blazing thing, as ferocious as the mating of two sleek young panthers in some unexplored jungle. Their bodies collided, gathered force, and collided again, and soon they were both drenched in perspiration. Finally, finally, they were one flesh, and their satisfaction was shattering.

  They slept when it was over, arms and legs entwined, their exhaustion so complete that it took them beyond slumber, into a deeper darkness. They awakened and made love again, quickly, fiercely, as though they feared to be stolen one from the other, and then tumbled back into the same black void that had swallowed them before.

  The rain stopped in the night, and began again at dawn. Rafael built up the fire and returned to bed, drawing Annie into his arms.

  All that day, they loved and slept, pretending there was no world beyond the walls of that enchanted cottage. They talked and ate the food that had been brought for them, and told each other the deepest secrets of their hearts.

  That dangerous, magical time was, to Annie, all she needed to know of heaven. They had fallen asleep, late the second night, drunk with the wine of their passion, when suddenly a fist thundered against the cottage door.

  Annie bolted upright with a gasp, and Rafael reached beneath the bed and brought out a pistol. In the next instant, the wooden panel splintered around the knob and crashed against the inside wall.

  Moonlight illuminated the outraged frame of Patrick Trevarren.

  “So, by God,” he bellowed, “it’s true, then!”

  Rafael laid the pistol down on the mattress and struck a match to the wick in the bedside lantern. “Hold your tongue, Trevarren, before you say something that will alienate you from your own child. Annie is my wife.”

  Annie could only nod, peering at her illustrious father over the edge of the sheet. He was a tall, powerfully built man, with ink blue eyes and strong white teeth. His dark hair, fanned with silver at the temples, was fairly long, drawn back at his nape and tied with a thin strip of leather.

  “Your wife, is it?” Patrick demanded, closing the door against the other men in his party who, Annie supposed, would have crowded into the cottage with their eyes popping if he’d let them. “Is this true, Annie Trevarren? I want none of your nonsense.”

  “It’s true, Papa,” Annie said, with unaccustomed meekness. “Rafael and I were married the day before yesterday. You can ask the priest at the keep if you don’t believe me.”

  “Ask the priest,” Patrick scoffed. “Not likely I’d do that. They’ve got enough to think about in the castle, with the rebels about to take the place over.”

  Rafael hurled himself out of bed and began wrenching on his clothes, rasping, “What’s happened?”

  “They’re on the march, that’s all. Ought to be right on top of you by morning.”

  “Get her out of here, Patrick,” Rafael said, as though Annie weren’t there at all, jamming his shirt tails into his breeches as he spoke. “Now, tonight.”

  Patrick gave his daughter a stern look and turned his back to the bed. “Put some clothes on, Daughter. I want you on board the Enchantress before the sun rises.”

  Annie obeyed, moving awkwardly as she tried to pull on her garments and contain her panic at the same time.

  “Why didn’t someone come for me?” Rafael demanded, of himself, Patrick and Fate, as he snatched up the pistol he’d almost used to shoot his father-in-law.

  Patrick looked distinctly uncomfortable. “You were with your new bride,” he reminded the prince, with a gruff clearing of his throat and a faint rise of color on his neck. “Besides, they probably took their time getting over the wedding celebration.”

  Annie had gotten into her underthings and the simple cotton dress someone, probably Kathleen, had brought to the cottage for her with the food and clean linens. She stood absolutely still when Rafael came over to her, took her upper arms in his hands and kissed her hard on the mouth.

  “I love you, Annie Trevarren St. James,” he said. “Take care of my child.”

  With that, he turned and strode away, and Annie would have bolted after him if her father hadn’t stopped her with tender force.

  She struggled, sobbing, and Patrick held her tight against his chest. “There now, sweetheart. I know how you’re feeling, but I can’t let you dash headlong into the jaws of a lion.”

  Annie wailed and tried again to get free, but Patrick only hoisted her into his arms and carried her outside. The buggy loomed in the yard, but the horse was gone and so was Rafael.

  Among the trees, other horses waited, and silent men.

  “Papa,” Annie pleaded, when her father set her in the saddle and climbed up behind her, “you’ve got to stop Rafael—please—they’ll kill him!”

  “I’ll come back and do what I can for him,” Patrick said, urging the horse into a trot, “but my first priority is getting you out of this place, and the harder you fight me, the longer it’s going to take.”

  Annie subsided against Patrick’s impervious chest and wept.

  The party had entered the keep through the cave Annie herself had found, and they left it by the same way, leading their horses single file between the two gates. Descending the hillside, with Patrick’s men close behind them, they met a lone rider.

  Patrick spun his horse around with a quick, fierce pull on the reins, to put himself between Annie and the stranger. “Who goes there?” he called, in a tone that would brook no delay. “State your name.”

  “Edmund Barrett,” replied a familiar voice. “I serve the prince, and if you’re enemies, you’d better kill me now, for I won’t turn back.”

  Hope stirred in Annie, and she said quickly, “Mr. Barrett is Rafael’s best friend, Papa. My husband needs him.”

  “Go on with you, then,” Patrick agreed, “but have a care. There’s trouble brewing in St. James Keep tonight.”

  “That is nothing new,” Barrett replied, with wry resignation.

  “Wait,” Annie pleaded, when the captain of the guard would have ridden past them, into the keep. “What about the princess?” she said to him. “Is she safe and well?”

  She thought she saw Mr. Barrett smile, though it was too dark to be sure.

  “Safe, well and furious,” replied Phaedra’s husband. “My wife is in Paris, with friends of mine, learning the virtue of patience.”

  Annie nodded, amused, in spite of everything, by the images Mr. Barrett’s words had brought to mind. “Good luck to you, sir, and thank you for coming back.”

  “There was never any doubt of it,” Barrett replied, touching his brow in a graceful salute and then riding on.

  Annie took comfort in the knowledge that Rafael was not completely friendless after all. Of course, Mr. Barrett was only one man, and the chances were good that he would die with the prince instead of saving him.

  Patrick’s strong arms tightened around his daughter as they rode down the hillside and along the coast road, in the opposite direction from Morovia. Just before sunrise, they came to a beach, where men waited with a small boat.

  Annie, exhausted and distraught to the point of insensibility, didn’t resist when she was lifted inside. After telling his men to wait for him and look after the horses as if they were the last they would ever own, Patrick pushed the dinghy off the sand, c
limbed deftly inside and took up the oars.

  Annie Trevarren was being saved, but in those wretched, despairing moments, salvation was the last thing she wanted.

  “There’s a babe,” Patrick reminded her gently, but sternly, too, after they’d rowed some distance over the dark, star-splattered water. “Reason enough to hold onto your courage with hands, heart and back teeth, I think.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Even in his darkest reflections, Rafael had not begun to imagine the true horror of the invasion. The attack came just after dawn, and the enemy seemed without number, legions of men scaling the walls here, blasting through them with cannon fire there, burrowing beneath like moles in still other places. They poured out of the cellars, a demon army, and even though the prince’s men fought valiantly, defeat came with humiliating dispatch. After only a little over an hour, unwilling for even one more soldier to perish in the pursuit of a lost cause, Rafael gave the command to surrender.

  Reluctantly, the troops laid down their swords and rifles and stepped back from their overheated cannon, hands clasped behind their backs, heads high, eyes insolent.

  Rafael was proud of their dignity and stubborn loyalty, but he knew he would be given no chance to praise them. The rebel general, an imposing savage from a northern province of the country, rode over the drawbridge and beneath the portcullis, which had been raised by his own shouting, triumphant men.

  He seemed to know Rafael, just as Rafael knew him, and rode directly to where the prince stood, beside the fountain in the main courtyard.

  Rafael’s clothes were torn and soaked with a mingling of his own blood and that of several assailants. Four rebel soldiers lay dead and dying at his feet, and he leaned upon his stained sword as though it were a walking stick, unconsciously protecting the deep slash wound in his side.

  “Rafael St. James, prince of Bavia?” inquired the general. He was perhaps thirty-five, with a shock of golden brown hair and blue eyes that showed both intelligence and humor.

  Rafael merely inclined his head in acknowledgment.

  “Simon Carpenter,” the rebel leader supplied, swinging deftly down from the back of his great gray stallion. He was roughly dressed, in loose breeches and a woolen shirt, and his scuffed boots had seen much service.

  With a pleasant smile, Carpenter pulled off his leather riding gloves, secured them beneath his belt and held out one hand for the bloody sword. “Your soldiers will be treated fairly,” he said. “After all, they are Bavians, and cannot be faulted for doing what they perceived as their duty.”

  Rafael said nothing; his throat was filled with bitter gall. He had known this moment was coming, of course—even as a very small boy, in the days before his exile to England, he’d heard his nurse speak of the end of the St. Jameses, and seen her weep over the fate of her charge. It was and had always been his destiny to atone for the many and grievous sins of his forefathers. Still, having known Annie, and loving her as he had never loved another, even Georgiana, Rafael was painfully conscious of all he’d lost.

  Castles and palaces, power and prestige, were the least of it.

  “The sword, Your Highness,” Carpenter urged, with cool civility, his hand still extended.

  Rafael surrendered the weapon, hilt first, heedless of the razor-sharp blade slicing into his fingers.

  Carpenter accepted the sword without drawing it through Rafael’s hand, as many enemies might have done. The two mens’ gazes were interlocked as Carpenter spoke again. “I regret that we’ll have to hang you,” he said. “You’ve shown uncommon courage.”

  “I am an uncommon man,” Rafael replied, lightheaded from a copious loss of blood. He swayed on his feet and then steadied himself, one arm clutching his torn middle.

  “Fetch the surgeon,” Carpenter said, to one of his men, as Rafael’s knees buckled and blackness swamped his senses.

  When the prince regained consciousness, he was lying in fetid straw in one of the dungeons. His side had been crudely stitched and bandaged, and the pain was like a white-hot poker thrust beneath his ribs. He felt a fever brewing in his blood, as well, but his first coherent thought was one of soaring, joyous gratitude.

  Annie was safe with Patrick. He could ask no more of the fates than that.

  Rafael lay still for a long time, struggling to keep from toppling back into the black void. Finally, with an effort so agonizing that sweat came out on every part of his body, he clasped the bars of his cell and hauled himself to his feet. There was a high, narrow window behind him, rimmed in fading sunlight, and through it he heard the steady pounding of a hammer.

  He sighed and rested his forehead against the bars. No doubt the rebels were reconstructing the scaffold from which Peter Maitland had hanged.

  Annie, Rafael thought, grieving not for himself, but for his beautiful, spirited bride and for their child. How wretchedly unfair he had been, how selfish, yielding to his desires and siring an infant who would never see its father.

  His strength ebbing away in a scant tide, Rafael slid to his knees, his fingers still locked around the iron bars, and prayed that Patrick’s ship would carry Annie far from the shores of Bavia.

  When Patrick Trevarren installed his daughter in his own quarters and ordered his things moved to another cabin, she was in a semistupor of shock and despair. He laid her gently on the bed, took off her shoes, and covered her with a blanket. After placing a light kiss on her forehead and murmuring that everything would be all right, he went out.

  Annie curled into a tight ball when he was gone, so undone and so numb that she couldn’t think or feel or weep. The rocking motion of the ship made her sleep, granting her a merciful release from reality.

  After a while, however, terrible dreams drove her back to the surface of awareness, and she sat bolt upright on the bed, gasping, her skin moist with perspiration. The room was dark, and Annie leaped off the mattress and scrambled across to the door, groping frantically for the latch.

  Annie held her breath for a moment and then tried the handle. The lock was not engaged.

  Weak with relief, she sagged against the heavy door panel, trembling. When that interlude had passed, she felt her way back to the bed, found a lamp on the nighttable and struck a match to the wick. Dim light illuminated the small, tidy room, and Annie looked down at her dress with real despair. It would be impossible to climb, swim or crawl in such a garment, and her trousers and shirt were still at St. James Keep.

  Her eyes fell on a rosewood trunk tucked into a corner, and hope surged through her, along with a burst of determined energy. Her mother, Charlotte, often traveled aboard the Enchantress, and shared her daughter’s fondness for unconventional clothing.

  Within moments, Annie was kneeling before the chest and raising the lid. Inside were gowns, scandalous nightdresses and, glory of glories, breeches and shirts. Annie helped herself to the latter, shed her dress like a snake’s skin, and pulled on her mother’s clothes.

  It was a perfect fit.

  Annie smiled grimly at her reflection in the looking glass affixed to the wall. Now, to find a cap to hide her hair …

  Moments later, she took a quick peek into the passageway and saw that the door was unguarded. Given his daughter’s state of mind earlier that day, Patrick had probably concluded that sentries were unnecessary.

  Annie smiled, in spite of herself, and sneaked down the short hall and up the steps to the main deck. The ship was still at anchor and, she soon discovered, very nearly unmanned. Her father had gone back to St. James Keep, as he had assured her he would, and taken most of his crew with him.

  It was an easy matter, having spent much of her childhood onboard that ship, to lower one of the remaining lifeboats, already rigged, to the water and slide down to it by a dangling rope. Before an alarm could be sounded, Annie was rowing toward shore, the oars dripping black water and starlight as she lifted and then lowered them again.

  Her skill notwithstanding, it took more than fifteen sweaty minutes to reach shallow water, and
it was difficult to find the coast road in the dark. Several times, Annie heard horsemen approaching and hid in the ditch, lest she be captured by rebels or found by her father’s people.

  Dawn was breaking when Annie reached the once-secret gate in the wall of the keep and hurried through it. The keep towered against the sky, stark and broken. The royal flag, usually visible from that spot, had been taken down.

  Fear threatened to swamp her. Rafael might already be dead, and her father too, for that matter. Even if they weren’t, what could she do to save them?

  Annie didn’t have a single plan in her mind, but her heart wouldn’t let her turn back without trying to effect a rescue. Rafael was her husband, the father of her child, and Patrick Trevarren had given her life. She wasn’t about to abandon either of them.

  Taking care not to be seen, Annie made her way toward the castle. The place seemed unnervingly quiet, almost deserted.

  Crossing one of the overgrown gardens, Annie frowned, recalling the tunnels Lucian had shown her that day when they’d gone exploring together. She would find one of those, she decided, crawl through it, arm herself somehow and find Rafael.

  She stopped and looked around, spotting a small stone building on the other side of a thicket of blackberry vines. Thorns tore at the legs of her breeches as she hurried toward it.

  The door was heavy, and when Annie pulled it open, the hinges creaked loudly. She ducked inside, heart pounding, breath rasping in and out of her chest, only to feel two steely arms close around her from behind. A hand covered her mouth and, though she struggled fiercely, it was soon clear that she wouldn’t escape.

  Her captor closed the door and latched it before releasing her with a flinging motion of one arm. Before she’d righted herself, light flared in the tiny, filthy room, and she saw the grim face of Edmund Barrett looming in the glow of a kerosene lantern.

  “You,” he marveled, with heavy resignation. “I don’t believe it.”

  Annie was half-sick with relief, and she saw no need to defend her reasons for returning to St. James Keep. She folded her arms. “Where is Rafael?”