Nando frowned. “I amtryingto help you, curse you. But you scarcely entrust me with any information. You’re always either hiding in the study with Felix or off somewhere attending gods know whom. A fellow eventually suffers from sufficient ennui, leading him to seek entertainment and enlightenment.”
“Up a married woman’s skirts, apparently,” he muttered.
Nando had always been a scapegrace. But this—dallying with a married woman beneath her husband’s nose while Maxim was undertaking a very important and very dangerous series of missions in England—was the most foolish bit of nonsense inwhich he’d found himself yet. And the timing could not have been worse.
“Perhaps if you found your way up a woman’s skirts now and again, you wouldn’t be so blasted angry all the time,” Nando suggested.
And just like that, all the fury Maxim had been endeavoring to control roared to life once again.
“Apologize,” he bit out.
His brother sighed, looking instantly contrite. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have spoken of it. Forgive me.”
“No, you should not have,” he agreed tightly, for the subject, like the war, was one about which they had agreed to never speak.
After Mina’s death, Maxim had lived like a monk for many years, until Lucinda had come into his life. But he had found solace in Lucinda’s arms and her welcoming bed. Not true and abiding emotion, nothing deeper than a mutual need for each other’s company and the release it provided. Lucinda could never compare to the woman he had loved and lost, what now seemed a lifetime ago.
Unbidden, thoughts of Lady Tansy intruded, along with a tantalizing question that felt like a crude betrayal of what he’d shared with Mina. What if Lady Tansy could compare? The wayward notion didn’t matter, he told himself sternly. He was marrying Princess Anastasia, not her lady-in-waiting.
But he wouldn’t lie. The prospect of taking Lady Tansy as his mistress held sudden, tremendous appeal. He couldn’t recall being so stirred by a woman. Not since Mina.
“I’m sorry about the duel,” Nando was saying, bringing Maxim back to the present with a jolt. “It was never my intention to cause you problems here in London. I was simply trying to occupy myself, to keep out of your way. Perhaps if you wouldentrust me with a more important position, I wouldn’t need to seek out diversions.”
Maxim forced his clenched fists to open. Pummeling inanimate objects was beneath him, and it didn’t solve anything. But he was beginning to think he had misjudged his hellion brother.
“Are you suggesting that if I placed a greater weight of responsibility on your shoulders, you wouldn’t go about shagging every woman in sight?” he asked crudely.
Nando brushed at the sleeve of his coat, red staining his high cheekbones as he cleared his throat. “It is hardly every woman in sight. I do have requirements.”
“Quite a reassurance.” He drummed his fingers on the bench at his side, trying to keep his anger restrained as he reminded himself that Nando had good intentions. He just tended to go about them all wrong. “The more pressing matter, for now, is what you intend to do about the duel.”
“As I said, I’m going to meet the Earl of Levering tomorrow morning at dawn,” Nando said, as if it were a matter of course. “You can’t order me about.”
“The devil I can’t. I may be your brother, but I am also your king. You will do as I say.” He paused, taking a deep breath and reminding himself this was not the battlefield, even if, in some ways, the plotting he’d been orchestrating here in London made it feel that way.
Already, he could feel the hair beginning to stand on end on his arms, his heart starting to pound harder, his mouth going dry. That wouldn’t do. He couldn’t have one of his fits now. And not so soon after the last one. He had known that the dangers swirling around him would produce a strain, but he hadn’t realized they would affect him so strongly and so quickly.
“What is it you command me to do?” Nando asked dourly, dredging Maxim’s thoughts from the grip of impending madness.
“We will find the earl and persuade him to nullify his challenge,” Maxim said, one of his booted feet tapping in a marching rhythm.
There, that served to take the edge off his discomfiture.
He rapped on the carriage roof, issuing new orders to his coachman.
“And how will we do that?” His brother wanted to know, mulish as ever.
“Simple.” Maxim flashed his brother a grim smile. “Bribery.”
“King Maximilian has promisedhe will return to see you,” Tansy warned Princess Anastasia as she worked a bit more of the soothing balm she had made into the small bruise on the princess’s throat.
A bruise she had spied the evening before when the princess had returned late from her assignation with Archer Tierney. Initially, Tansy’s heart had leapt at the thought that her friend had been set upon by one of London’s notorious footpads. But the princess had quickly dispelled the notion.
“Why would he wish to see me?” Princess Anastasia asked, frowning. “I’m an invalid.”
The vibrant, lovely woman before Tansy was as far from an invalid as one could reasonably get.
“Perhaps to lend credence,” she whispered, careful to omit any incriminating words.
