Alix glanced back at the mob, so close now she could reach out and touch their weapons, then back at her father, his arms crossed over his chest and his eyes dark with disapproval.
“Alexandre Charlotte, you’re just going to get yourself into trouble. Women always do.”
Alix turned to face him. “I won’t get myself into trouble, I won’t.”
“Look at the mess you’ve gotten yourself into already. You need a man to take care of you.”
She felt the mob lifting her, carrying her away from the figure of her father, and she twisted back to see him. “I’ll save myself and the titles, you’ll see.”
She was still screaming, or so it seemed, when she woke.
Clutching the sheet to her chest, her heart pounding and her breath coming in gasps, she tried to make out where she was.
She didn’t remember the room or the bed. She remembered being so tired after her bath, stumbling to the low cot, wrapping herself in a sheet and … Alix glanced down. It was the same sheet but a different bed. A four-poster bed.
His bed.
She surveyed the room, the fear and frustration she feltfrom her dream roiling and melding with shock and anger, finding focus on the tall figure reading in the chair by the fire.
He’d looked up, marking his place with his finger when he’d heard her stir.
“You filthy degenerate, you couldn’t even wait until I woke to put your hands on me.... You’re worse than those men in the streets.... You’re...” She paused, desperately seeking the words to describe his outrageous behavior. “A beast.”
Rafe interrupted her tirade. “I suppose I could have left you to thrash about in Jervis’s bed. You were half-naked and half on the floor when I found you. He’d have appreciated it, but I’ve quite a lot of things for him to do before we leave Paris, and I’d rather he not be distracted.”
He rose. “As for your clothes, well, perhaps you should pack better when you run away from home, Madame la Comtesse.”
“Madame la Comtesse is my mother,” Alix snapped, then hastily covered her mouth as if to recapture the words.
Rafe raised an eyebrow. “That answers my first question, Mademoiselle de La Brou.” Feeling oddly pleased to discover Alix was unmarried, he rummaged in a trunk near the bed and pulled out one of his nightshirts and a shawl he’d purchased for Elizabeth. Tossing them on the bed he said, “I’ll turn my back so you can put those on.”
Alix eyed his broad shoulders balefully. “You won’t turn around?”
“On my honor as a gentleman.”
“Who knows what that’s worth?” she muttered.
“A very ungracious response to a man who saved your life,” he chuckled.
Alix scrambled into the shirt, her mind working as furiously as her fingers. How much did this man know, how did he know? God, she thought as she pulled her hair freefrom the shirt’s collar and reached for the shawl, she knew nothing about him and here she was trapped in his bedchamber, clad in little more than his nightclothes. What had he done? Had he touched her? She shook her head. Grow up Alexandre, she told herself, at this point your virtue is the least of your worries. Folding the cuffs over her hands, she decided frankness was the best approach.
Straightening the shawl over her shoulders and folding her hands in her lap, she said, “You may turn around now.”
Rafe, who’d been leaning against the mantle, turned and cast an appreciative eye over her. “You do clean up nicely,” he said, thinking that she looked most appealing in his nightshirt, her small frame lost in its loose folds, her tousled hair tumbling about her shoulders.
She met his eyes with a piercing stare. “So, Monsieur Harcrest, what do you think you know about me?”
Rafe considered her for a moment then lifted the papers that had been sewn into her stays off the table. He tossed them into her lap along with the jewels and money.
Alix’s eyes grew large. “What kind of man searches a lady’sunmentionables?” she demanded in an outraged voice.
“Jervis,” he replied helpfully. “Jervis thought you might have sticky fingers, but I thought your hands looked a bit too smooth. Have you been denounced?” he asked with studied casualness.
The room was silent for a long moment.
“I don’t know. My mother is missing, so maybe she...” Alix let the words trail off. “My father is dead. Killed. I took his papers because I thought... someday... someday...”
“Someday you might come back for your land,” he said softly. She nodded.
