Drawing on her feminine instincts—she came, after all, from a long line of women—she went to work to pacify the beastly man.
She pushed the chairs outside, placing them side by side in the center of the porch. She dragged out the swing and hung it on chains that dangled from the ceiling of the porch. She gave the swing a push, imagining Dom seated there, reclaiming a bit of his childhood.
The house had been built close to the stream, and in the last place before it rumbled down the mountainside, King Jerome had commanded that a small pool be created. Pail in hand, Laurentia went outside to fill it with water, then carried it inside and scrubbed the dust off the table. She laid out dinner. Cook had packed cold chicken roasted in rosemary and garlic, crusty bread and olive oil, fresh strawberries and clover honey, and a bottle of ruby red wine. Cook had sent cheese, too, but Laurentia would save that for tonight, and hardtack for tomorrow. Laurentia could imagine how word had flown through the palace when she’d asked for these supplies. The speculation would be both vulgar and hopeful—and this time, it would be true.
Dom still hadn’t returned, and Laurentia tried to think of what else she could do to prepare for him, wondering if she dared take the time to wash herself. Yet how did she dare not?
If she moved quickly ... She dragged a linen towel and washcloth from the cupboard, groped in her saddlebags and found her hairbrush, and headed out the back door. She heard cursing from the stable; not pain-cursing, but the monotonous mumble of cursing in which men indulged for no discernable reason. Probably he swore at the slippery straw or the awkward mattress. No matter, as long as he was occupied.
Fist-sized stones lined the edge of the pool, fine rounded gravel formed the basin; King Jerome had wanted only the best for his wife. Laurentia knelt on one wide, flat stone, placed to keep her up out of the dirt, and swished the washcloth in the cool water. Efficiently she went to work, and when she finished every bit of her body not covered by her chemise and boots had been cleansed and dried.
Dom still hadn’t appeared, so she sat down and shook out her hair. Wisps of straw had woven themselves into the tangles, and using both fingers and brush she went to work. But she was the princess; a maid usually brushed her hair, and never when she came here had she been rolling around in the stable in a state of abandon. As she worked she leaned over the water, utilized its quivering surface as a mirror. Yesterday’s scrapes on her face were fading, but she winced and complained under her breath as she brushed.
Sometimes she really enjoyed being wealthy and pampered. She hated learning new skills; except for diplomacy and statehood, she never mastered any subject easily, and she dreaded appearing stupid.
And she had come here to learn from Dom. She felt like the child Laurentia again, faced with a swimming teacher and a deeper pool than this. She remembered only too well how loudly she had squalled. She hadn’t wanted to learn, but her father had insisted, even going so far as to ask if she were a coward.
Laurentia had squalled louder at that, but she had advanced on the water. She had put in a toe, pulled it out with a squeal, and complained about the cold. She’d sat on the side and splashed both her feet, then pulled back. At last, after an hour of working up her nerve, she’d jumped in all the way—and had had to depend on her teacher to keep her from drowning and the water to remain buoyant.
The trouble was, in this case, Dom was both teacher and water.
But she was going to grit her teeth and learn how to make love, no matter how much her virgin body quaked.
“Your Highness?” Dom shouted from the back door, and he didn’t sound happy.
“Here, Dom,” she called.
He followed the sound of her voice, appearing at once around the side of the house, a shining knife in hand. When he saw her, he sheathed the knife in his boot, and glared at her.
Apparently stuffing the mattress hadn’t relieved his ill humor.
So she smiled at him and gestured with the brush. “You can pin hair, and you can unpin hair. Can you untangle it?”
He stalked toward her. “I need to know where you are at all times.”
“You caught the kidnapper yesterday,” she pointed out.
“I caught one of them.” Dom placed his palms on her shoulders. “And he was dead this morning.”
“What?” She swung around, dislodging his hands. “He can’t be dead.”
“Nevertheless, Your Highness, he is. Someone poisoned him.”
“How did someone enter into the royal palace and—” She stopped. She knew the answer. “Someone in the palace is a traitor.”
He removed the brush from her white-knuckled grip. “Who?”
Who indeed? “So many people work at the palace.” She pressed her fingertips to her forehead. “So many people have access to the food. The cooks, the butler, the turnspit, the footmen. In the dungeon, the guards.”
“Is there no one you suspect of being a traitor?”
“If I suspected someone, he would already be occupying a cell in the dungeon himself.”
“His Majesty said much the same thing when I told him.”
So Dom had informed her father. “Did His Majesty tell you what happened”—she took a breath— “five years ago?”
Dom focussed exclusively on her. “No. What?”
She sighed. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? You just said—”
“Things happened, but my husband died at the same time, and I... I didn’t...” The guilt of that time rose up to choke her, as it always did. Dom waited while she swallowed and fought for control. “It was only later that I realized how much had changed. My father gave his trust more sparingly and he made extraordinary plans for every circumstance that could affect our kingdom. I was drawn into his confidence in ways I had never been before. I thought at first he did it to distract me from my ... unhappiness. Later I realized some of his closest people were missing and I heard a rumor they had been exiled. He built up his personal guard and the army. And he needed me to take my place at his side.”
Dom slowly slid the brush through the strands around her face, and looked at her with—was it admiration? “You are a very wise and beautiful princess.”
She couldn’t help it. She beamed.
He turned her, then smoothed the bristles through her hair. “So ... we are dealing with more than just a kidnapper now. We are dealing with a murderer,” he said. “Give me your word you won’t disappear on me again.”
“No,” she promised. “I will always let you know where I am.”
Funny, but having her maid brush her hair felt different than having Dom do it. For one thing, her maid didn’t swear when she found a tangle. For another she didn’t smooth it with her hand after every stroke. The birds twittered, the brook burbled, the air smelled like earth and pine, and Laurentia closed her eyes and enjoyed each curse and each caress.
At last he stopped, wrapped his hand around her jaw, and tilted her head back. “Are you going to sleep on me?”
Without opening her eyes, she murmured, “Not at all.”
Leaning down, he kissed her lips, the contact short and sweet. “I’m going inside to eat.”
Her eyes sprang open, and he chuckled at her. Then slowly his amusement died. “When I look at you, I see an untouched land to be conquered and held. Why do you suppose that is, Your Highness?”
His fingers rested on her jugular, and her blood surged and pounded in response to his words. “Typical mercenary thinking,” she retorted weakly.
“Yes.” He rubbed gently down her throat, then pressed the flat of his hand on her chest where her heart beat. “That must be it.”
When Dom bent over her, fixing her with his concerted attention, she could sing an aria, twirl in a pirouette, or just laugh for no reason. Dom made her happy. She lavished a smile on him and extended her hand. “Let’s go feed you.”
And he smiled at her. Really smiled at her. It was, she realized with a shock, the first time she’d see
n genuine pleasure from him.
“Come then, O princess.” Taking her hand, he helped her up, led her to the cottage, and all the while he kept their fingers entwined and that smile on his face.
Just for this moment, she had been born.
She fed him dinner, teasing him, flirting with him as Dulcie instructed, only now her smiles and touches came naturally. He seemed captivated. More than once, he seemed on the verge of one of those genuine smiles—and she wanted another.
When they were done eating, she sent him back out onto the porch and cleaned up quickly, then hustled out. He leaned against a column at the railing, staring out as if he still couldn’t believe the view. She understood that; she couldn’t believe it, and she’d been here many times before. Joining him, she slipped her hand into the crook of his arm.
“Isn’t it glorious?” she inquired.
“Glorious.” He tightened his arm over her hand. “And it’s yours.”
“Mine.”
He glanced down at her, one of those genuine smiles on his face. “If you knew the possessiveness evident in your voice!”
“Why not?” Her pride for Bertinierre sang in her soul. “From here, I can see my kingdom, all of my kingdom, all the way to the sea, spread before me in the most breathtaking spectacle on earth.”
“You love it.”
“Of course I do. Who wouldn’t?” She laughed. “Don’t you?”
He looked out again. He didn’t answer right away, and when he did the admission seemed torn from him. “Yes. Yes, I love the view. From up here, it almost reminds me ...”
She held her breath. He was on the verge of disclosing some tidbit of his life, volunteering the information willingly, and she wanted it. She wanted any piece of him she could have.
“If it weren’t for the sea in the distance, I would think I was in Baminia.”
She let out her breath. There. He’d done it. “We do share a border with... with Sereminia, as they call it now. These mountains are a branch of the Pyrenees. And while the roads aren’t that well traveled, if you ride northwest from here, you can reach Sereminia in less than a day.” A geography lesson! She could do better than this. “Do you miss Sereminia?”
He shrugged. “I haven’t been there in twelve years. I was used to being away.”
“That’s not the same as not missing it.” Again he didn’t reply, and was silent for such a long time she started to wonder if she’d crossed that invisible privacy line he drew, and if she would be forced to retreat.
But as she searched in her mind for banal subjects to introduce, he answered at last. “I didn’t miss it for the longest time. I had my friends, my mercenaries, and they were all Baminian. I had the battles. I had the money. But when war took my friends and the buffer between me and the world disappeared ... I just wanted to go home.” His voice changed from yearning to disgust. “Crawl home like a wounded dog.”
“Of course you did.” To her that was so obvious. “Where else do you go when you’re hurt, but home?”
He turned on her so quickly she stepped back. “You don’t understand. You—yes, you would want to go home. For you, home is father and food and warmth and love. For me, Baminia held nothing but pain. Do you know who I am?”
“The king’s son.”
“Not the only king’s son. That old Judas professed love to dozens of women, and got children on four of them. Only Danior was legitimate, but the other two were taken care of.”
“Why weren’t you?”
“I was conceived just before the revolution of ‘96.” He smiled, but it wasn’t his genuine smile. It was more a curl of the lips. “The queen, his true wife, was killed before Mama could go to her for succor.”
Laurentia suspected she didn’t want to hear the rest. She suspected this tale would haunt her in its horror. But she had to go on, had to find out what made Dom the competent, cruel, hard man she had seen just yesterday. “What happened to your mother?”
“When her father found out she was with child, he threw her out of her home. The revolution had begun. She found her way to the city, I don’t know how. When I think ...” His hands clenched into fists, his knuckles white with the need to change a past that had happened before he was born. “Even after she’d lived in the brothel for all those years, Mama was pretty. Delicate, like you, with a smile that I adored.”
A brothel. Laurentia swallowed the lump in her throat. The best refuge his mother had been able to find was in the stews. Laurentia couldn’t even imagine the horror of that. Of having to sell her body over and over again to strangers. And Dom had seen it.
“That’s why she got to keep me with her,” he said. “Because the men liked her smile, liked her shape, and the old whore who ran the place didn’t want her to leave.”
“Would you have been better off in an orphanage?” Laurentia asked timidly.
“The revolution left the country starving, and orphans are disposable.” He rotated his shoulders as if tension held his muscles in thrall. “Especially the son of a king whom everyone blamed for their troubles.”
“How did they know you were the king’s son?”
“Mama proclaimed it proudly. She still loved him, damn her”—love and agony etched his face—“so she told everyone and everyone knew I was the only bastard rejected.”
Laurentia didn’t have any words to comfort him. What could be said that would make an old child’s pain go away? She knew of nothing, and she groped for his hand. His fingers closed around hers, and he gripped too hard, but she knew he didn’t realize it, didn’t know anything but his own anguish.
“I never met my father. He and the queen were killed together, but every time I look in the mirror I see him. I look like him. I look like my brothers. I look like the Leons.”
Being one of a royal family ... ah, this she understood. “Everyone mocked you, blamed you for their troubles, and envied you your bloodlines.”
He looked at her. “Clairvoyant, Your Highness?”
He had transferred his hostility to her, she realized. The gulf between the legitimate and illegitimate stretched so wide not even empathy could bridge it. But she answered anyway, paying for his confession with a piece of her own heart. “Sometimes people who don’t know me think I’m not too bright, and they ridicule me in sly ways—as if I’m not going to comprehend their beastliness—or they hate me because they think I’m better than they are.” She flushed as she recalled the unsubtle mockery. “They think.”
Tilting his head, he studied her with a little less animosity and a little more interest. “I would have never guessed we had that in common. Did you beat up everyone who mocked you, too?”
“No, but I wanted to.” Hastily she added, “I’m not dismissing your adversities.”
“I didn’t think you were.”
She’d interrupted the flow of his confidences, she realized, and she hadn’t meant to do that. Neither did she want to force him to remember the agony of his youth.
She needn’t have worried.
He withdrew from the wreckage of his life, withdrew from her, and finished his story without a hint of emotion. “My mother got sick. I was put to work pleasuring women. My mother died. I left.” That crooked smile bit into his face, and he confessed the last of it. The worst of it. “I led the next revolution to dispose of my brother. I failed.” He crossed his arms across his chest, waiting for her reaction.
Shock? Horror? Yes, but not because he’d led a revolution against the Sereminian royal family. Laurentia ached for his pain, for the boy he had been, growing up loving his mother, hating her life, knowing what she had given up for him. A thousand memories haunted him, worse than she could have ever imagined. “What did you do then?”
“I took my band and we sold ourselves as mercenaries.”
“How did they die?”
“I picked the wrong side in a stupid little war, and they all—” He stopped. Obviously, this wound was too recent. He couldn’t separate himself from this grief, from this gu
ilt.
“All were killed?”
“There is Brat. Just one of the original band.”
“Where is Brat now?”
“Poking through the inns and along the docks, trying to find out more about the kidnapping.” Turning away, Dom looked out over the trees again, but Laurentia didn’t think he saw Bertinierre in all its glory. He saw only, she suspected, corpses on the battlefield. “I miss them. The camaraderie, the jokes. We had done everything together, and been together so long, we knew each other’s thoughts without speaking. It was my fault they died, you comprehend, and I have to ... salvage something for them. Raise one good thing in their memory.”
He vibrated with pain and resolve, and Laurentia respected his determination. “Whatever you do, I know it will be the right thing.”
He turned on her like a snarling wildcat. “You’re really not too bright. I don’t do the right thing. I’m Dominic of Baminia. I leave death and carnage behind everywhere I go.”
“You used to do that,” she corrected. “You’re like your mother. She did what she had to do. You did what you had to do.”
“Such an understanding princess,” he mocked.
She could see his temper rising, although she could not fathom why. “No, you’re wrong. I could never understand, because I have never had any experience to match yours.”
Her tenderness put him into a fury. She saw it in his blue eyes, lit by a flame, and in the way he gathered her into his arms, like a man taking possession. “Are you happy now, Your Highness? You got me to talk.”
“ ‘Happy’ isn’t exactly—”
“Now I’ll do that other thing you require of me.” He bent close to her face, so his breath brushed her lips. “I’ll kiss.”
“If you don’t want to—”
He took her lips like the mercenary he was, boldly, without compassion. He opened her to his tongue, probed her, stroked her until she ran out of breath and good sense at the same time. When she sank her claws into his shoulders, he pulled back and stared at her, tucked into his arm. Holding her immobile, he slashed at her with his words. “You chose a good candidate to bed you, Your Highness. I learned a lot in the whorehouse. I can bring to you pleasure with my hands, with my mouth.” Taking her hand, he placed it on his crotch. “With this.”
Someday My Prince Page 17