“Aduel?” Maxim roared.
Nando winced as the carriage rumbled away from Gustavson’s town house. “You needn’t shout so loudly, brother.”
He loved his brother.
Nando was the only family he had left.
But Maxim also wanted to thrash the ever-living hell out of him.
He ground his molars so hard that his teeth ached, trying to calm himself before he responded. Trying to tamp down his inner rage. Telling himself that Nando cared. He wasn’t trying to put everything Maxim had worked for—the prosperity of Varros—in danger. But anger was boiling up inside him, taking root like an evil tree.
And it wouldn’t be answered until he slammed his fists into the squabs at his sides, the satisfying crash of his knuckles into the oiled leather making his brother jump.
“Maxim?” Nando prompted, looking equal parts shamefaced and wary. “You aren’t speaking.”
“That is because I fear what I’ll say,” he bit out tightly.
He had been warned by his closest adviser in his privy council that Nando was reckless. That his recklessness could prove dangerous to their cause and that he should be left behind in Varros. But what his privy council didn’t know—what no one knew, save Nando—was that Maxim needed his muttonheaded, wench-loving brother to help him stay sane.
“Oh,” Nando said with feeling, lacing his hands together in his lap before him as if in prayer.
Perhaps he was.
Maxim narrowed his eyes. “Are you praying?”
Nando swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Mayhap.”
“Then you may as well say a prayer that I don’t kill you for being so stupid,” Maxim said harshly.
The instant the words left him, Maxim regretted them. Nando crumpled before him like a kicked puppy.
“I’m sorry, Maxim.”
“You ought to be sorry,” he said sharply, trying to control his ire. “I asked you to exercise care in your dalliances, did I not?”
“She said her husband would never know.” Nando’s expression was a study in guilt.
Understanding dawned.
“Ye gods, Nando. Tell me the husband didn’t walk in on you in bed with his wife.”
A second wince. “I try never to lie to you, brother.”
“Fuck,” he growled before he could leash his tongue.
Nando had been bedding the cuckold’s wife, the cuckold had interrupted them, and now the cuckold had challenged Nando to a duel. Maxim was busy trying to find an exiled prince, avoid being assassinated, keep his future queen safe, and orchestrate a revolution in a nearby kingdom, and Nando was getting caught bare-arsed by angry husbands. Maxim’s fists landed in the leather squabs again.
“And now the husband has demanded you meet him with pistols at dawn,” he elaborated when he could once more control his temper sufficiently.
“I’m afraid so,” Nando admitted weakly. “You needn’t worry, Maxim. I’ll find a second and meet him. I’m a crack shot.”
“No, you won’t, damn you. I’ve enough to worry about without you killing some English lord because you couldn’t get your prick wet with a proper strumpet.”
“You do know that strumpets aren’t proper, by the very definition of their nature of work, do you not?” Nando dared to ask him, clearly attempting to make light of the circumstances facing them.
But Maxim wasn’t in a laughing mood. He was in a make-heads-roll sort of goddamned mood. A mere half hour ago, Lady Tansy had been in his lap, her lush feminine curves a delicious temptation pressed against him in all the right ways. Her scent still haunted him even as they made their way through the horse-dung-covered streets. And he had been rudely torn away from that idyll by his brother’s endless, careless propensity for wenching.
“Do you think this is the time to make jests?” he returned. “Need I remind you that I am your king and that you are tasked with helping me here in London rather than hindering me?”
