“But they do not,” he agreed, accepting her offering. “Nothing can.”
He took a healthy swig from the flask, feeling for a moment as if they were the only two people in the world, sharing secrets and whisky. Each witnessing a part of the other that no one else had been permitted to see.
“You loved your father, did you not?”
Her soft voice cut through the quiet, the question like a blade slicing to his black, ash-filled heart.
Maxim thought of the fearless, stoic warrior he had known. The man who had cut down enemy soldiers without pause and yet who had sung him the same Gaelic lullabies his own mother had sung to him years earlier when Maxim had been naught but a lad. He had been soft and yet hard, his father. He’d been what the world had made him. And Maxim was no different.
“He was a good man,” he rasped instead of answering her question directly, for doing so felt far too raw and personal. “He should have been king.”
And yet, his father had never lived to ascend the throne that had rightfully belonged to him. Instead, his father’s half brother, born from an annulled marriage and disavowed by the Varrosian church, had gained the support of powerful members of parliament through bribery and had seized the throne when Father had been a naïve young man himself.
He had paid dearly for his trust in his own kinsman.
And so had many loyal members of the House of Tayrnes, their lives lost during the endless, bloody years of the Varros Great War.
“That is the reason, then,” Lady Tansy said quietly, as if making sense of something.
Perhaps speaking her thoughts aloud unintentionally, with a bit of aid from the whisky she had consumed. He had only the finest delivered to Varros from his grandmother’s family. Potent and smooth.
“The reason?” he prodded, though he suspected he well understood what she was suggesting.
“For your betrothal,” she elaborated. “For the rest.”
Bythe rest, Lady Tansy meant his plot to find the exiled Prince Theodoric St. George, the only man he trusted to restore law and order to Boritania in the wake of the revolution Maxim intended to sow. As the closest and most-trusted female in Princess Anastasia’s circle, Lady Tansy was privy to Maxim’s plot. Her assistance and silence were necessary, given the dangerous nature of their plan. Gustavson had seen his own sister-in-law, Princess Anastasia’s mother, tortured in the dungeons and sent to the gallows for execution. He had also almost certainly murdered his nephew. He had tortured the exiled prince they sought to find.
Maxim inclined his head, taking another pull from his flask and swallowing before answering. “There are many reasons, Lady Tansy.”
He offered her the flask, suspecting she would refuse. But when she reached for it, her fingers yet again glancing against his, he was shocked.
And impressed.
She plucked it from his grasp and raised it to her lips with a bravado he recognized all too well from his years on the battlefield. Lady Tansy Francis was attempting to prove herself to him.
Sweet Christ above, he was experiencing something far worse than an inconvenient hard cock just now. He was experiencing…
Admiration.
That was the word for it. Foreign and familiar at once, for so few of his acquaintance had managed to earn it.
She lowered the flask, only the slightest hint of her distaste for the whisky visible on her lovely countenance now. “Tell me, then.” She paused and, as if remembering their disparity ofstations belatedly, she added, “If it pleases Your Majesty to do so.”
He could think of many, many things that would please him more, but that was base lust inside him, his prick thinking on behalf of his brain. He tamped down such wayward thoughts, unwanted longings.
“Now isn’t the time for such revelations, my lady,” he forced himself to say.
For he didn’t dare lay bare the full extent of his plotting. Not to this lady-in-waiting who tempted him beyond measure. Nor to anyone. His time at war had taught him well.
Trust no one but yourself.
“I should not have been so forward as to ask.” She handed the flask back to him, her voice subdued.
He accepted it, raising the vessel to his lips for a longer draught, but nothing would numb the twinge deep inside him at the change in her demeanor. A change he was responsible for. Nor could he tamp down the stupid, futile urge to confide everything in her.
Perhaps it had been too long since he’d known the comfort of a feminine presence in his life as well as his bed. His mistress Lucinda had never been capable of soothing him the way Mina had.
“I give you leave to be forward with me,” he said, wiping his lips with the back of his hand.
