“Ah, did you now? You may be right. You wanted to prove that you could jump from the barn roof as much as any lad. You were terrified, yet jump you did. Except the haystack underneath was not hay, but manure.” He shook his head. “Always stubborn, always proving a point. The situation now is not so different.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “In case it has escaped your attention, due to the nature of our stations, I must do whatever you order me to do. If you ordered me to jump out of the window, I would have to obey. At least according to Frau Benedikt. Because you are a blastedarchduke, and apparently your word is holier than the Pope’s.” She huffed.
“Fascinating that I seem to hold so much power over you. How far would you have gone, I wonder?” He traced the shadows under her eyes with one finger. “Would you truly do everything I ordered you to?” His voice had turned husky.
Pippa stilled. She stared at him with wide eyes.
“Because I am an archduke, as you say. An archduke doesn’t need to ask permission. Especially not from a mere chambermaid.” His finger moved down her cheek, tracing gently, ever so gently, the upper curve of her lip. “We archdukes can really do whatever we want. Whatever takes our fancy.” The amused look had left his eyes, replaced by something intense, burning.
“You would not,” Pippa whispered.
“Would I not?” His tone was thoughtful. His gaze travelled over her face, then lower, lingering on the creamy expanse of her neck. His finger moved from the corner of her mouth along her jawline, down her neck, to the small hollow at the base of her throat. He lingered there as though he found the spot fascinating.
Her heart jolted, and her pulse raced. A tingling spread through the pit of her stomach.
She swallowed. “Yes, an archduke can ask for whatever he wants, and his word is law and must be obeyed. We servants have no choice. But you—you, you would not. Never.”
That was not the Klemens she knew. He would never abuse his power. Never. She said it with confidence, though inside shequaked.
“Are you so sure?” He said it with such a quiet voice that all the hairs on her arm stood on end.
They called him Prince Lucifer after all, a little voice whispered. She remembered the debauched party with the naked woman the day before. He’d claimed she was there for the Tsar’s amusement…but what did she really know?
In the ensuing pause, her breath quickened.
“No, you are right.” He asserted with a small, rueful smile. “I would not.” He dropped his hand. “So you see, I am not such a stranger as you think. You seem to know me rather well after all.”
Pippa fidgeted on his lap, lightheaded with relief.
“I am so very sorry about your father, Pippa. I truly am.” His voice was different now, serious, and the sudden change of topic left her disoriented. “I learned the news too late. I was devastated and wanted to hurry to you, but it was not possible.” He shifted her in his lap, and her cheek came to rest against his chest, where she could hear his heart beating, steady and safe. He leaned his chin on the top of her head. “I was not there when he was ill, I missed the funeral, and by the time I heard that you’d lost your home it was too late.” He sighed. “And I was so overloaded with duty that I could not go to you. I can’t just come and go at my will, you know. Each of my steps is watched, everything I do and say recorded, every missive I send intercepted and read by the secret police. My summers with you and Professor Cranwell had to be meticulously planned and executed. I had to travel incognito so as not to be discovered. Even taking Kovacz along was a risk.”
A clump formed in Pippa’s throat. Deep down, she knew all this now. An archduke couldn’t come and go as he wished. His every movement was scrutinised, and the burden of duty must have been suffocating.
“It pained me deeply to learn of his passing. You know how much I esteemed him.” He buried his face in her hair before continuing. “He was more of a father to me than my own. He was one of the most brilliant men I have ever known. Which leads us to another matter.” He turned her sideways in his lap so he could see her face and scowled. “What possessed you to become a servant in the palace? This work is leagues beneath you. You are a gentlewoman, the daughter of an esteemed professor, and you should not be cleaning for others.”
“And what else, pray, should I be doing?” Pippa retorted. “My father died; our property was confiscated, and his debts were enormous. I could not even pay Sepp and Lotta, and they had to seek positions elsewhere. I have not a kreuzer to my name. Unless I starve or walk the streets, what else am I to do but clear chamber pots for other people?”
“You should have applied to me for help!” His voice rose sharply.
“You make no sense at all!” she cried. “How could I apply to you when I did not even know where you were? You were the one who stopped answering my letters, if I may remind you. And you just said yourself that your letters might have been intercepted.”
“You should have trusted that I would make contact eventually!” He dragged a hand through his hair in frustration. “I had planned to send Kovacz to you with a missive. Iwas working on a way to take you to Innsbruck to stay with a family I trust until the congress was over. Instead, hothead that you are, you decided to come to Vienna to look for me, just when I’d sent out someone to look for you.”
“And how was I to know that was your plan? Do I possess second sight? What would you have done in my place? What choice did I have?”
“Stay with Sepp and Lotta until further notice!” He roared so loudly the chandelier rattled.
“You are not listening! We got evicted! Sepp and Lotta had to leave! Where were we supposed to wait for you? In the ditch until His Imperial Highness deigned to remember us?” Pippa was every bit his match when it came to roaring back.
He closed his eyes as if counting to ten. “Then at least you should have waited at theGoldene Lamm,” he said more evenly.
Pippa felt as though she were striking her head against a stone wall. “That is what I intended to do, except I was robbed, and the innkeeper refused to take me in, even when I offered to work for him.”
His gaze snapped to her face with a frown. “You were what?”
She recounted the entire sorry story, how she found herself without papers and not a single kreuzer to her name, how she ended up at thePolizeihofstelle, was offered the position at the palace in exchange for information.
Klemens groaned. “Von Hager. Naturally. You must send him daily reports? How?”
