“I would tell you, but you don’t seem at all inclined to listen.” Evie glared at him.
“I would if you, for once, would stop spewing forth nonsense and get to the point.”
“Schneider.” Evie addressed his aide-de-camp directly. “Your field marshal is most obnoxious and unreasonable, did you know that?”
“Erm.” Schneider looked helplessly at him.
“Get her out of here, Schneider.”
“Yes, Your Exc?—”
“I really cannot abide men who claim they know everything and are not in the least inclined to listen to those who might know better. And who, furthermore, have a tyrannical disposition and are not in the least willing to see reason when the situation demands it. I have seen these traits in your personality from the very first, sir, and I must say I cannot say I like them.”
“You have been rather true to my first impression as well, sugar poppet.”
Evie grew pale with rage. “Schneider!”
Schneider stood to attention.
“Your field marshal is a tyrannical, despotic, thick-witted, bovine, beetle-brained, chuckle-headed bottle brain!”
Schneider’s jaw dropped.
“I have taken a profound dislike towards you, to such an extent that I find myself forced to call off this betrothal. I no longer wish to marry you. Not ten horses, not a hundred, could drag me to the altar with you.”
He registered the words with the same cold precision with which he registered any battlefield development. She was clearly throwing a tantrum, however magnificently delivered, and deviating from the matter at hand. This tactic was called diversion. One had best ignore it.
“Could we possibly discuss this in a more private setting?”
“No, we can’t.”
At that, something snapped in him. His entire breeding as a gentleman, the painstaking discipline for which he’d been famed throughout his career, abandoned him entirely.
He grabbed her and threw her over his shoulder as if she were a sack of oats.
Then he strode out of the door and down the corridor, with a shrieking, flailing bundle that was Evie on his shoulder, past the astonished officers who jumped aside in evident shock, with Schneider hurrying after them, wringing his hands.
Never mind the talk that this would create.
Never mind that he was behaving most irregularly and would, most likely, regret it most heartily the next day.
But, by God, that woman made him see red.
By the time he reached the staircase, she’d stopped shrieking.
“Let me down, Hartenberg,” she said in a more reasonable voice.
Over his dead body.
He tightened his grip on her.
“If you let me down and we can manage to talk reasonably, I will tell you about the Widows’ Circle.”
He came to a full stop, thinking he’d misheard.
“And the list. You do want to know about the list, don’t you?”
Schneider came to a full stop next to him, panting. “What do you mean, Lady Evangeline?”
