Clara moaned, swayed and crumpled.
She would have collapsed on the ground, if Hartenberg had not swept in and caught her swiftly.
Her face was bloodless, her lips were as white as the wall, so still she might have been dead.
“Clar—I mean, Evie!” Evie choked. This entire trip had, truly, been too much for the poor girl. She had complained about a cold when they’d set out from Vienna, and her condition had rapidly deteriorated as the trip went on. Evie would never forgive herself if she were to lose her.
“Please don’t die!” She shook her arm, but Clara hung like a limp, motionless doll from his arms.
“Call a doctor,” Hartenberg snapped at the innkeeper, who had rushed forward when Clara fainted.
“Jessas na, I refuse to be responsible if she dies in my house,” the innkeeper muttered.
Hartenberg carried her up the stairs, taking the steps two at a time, as though she weighed nothing at all.
Evie looked after him.There he goes, she thought numbly.
My betrothed.
He believes Clara to be me.
Nowwhat?
Chapter Four
Curse those fainting females!
Georg muttered under his breath the entire way up the stairs, carrying the woman who had fallen into a dead swoon barely a minute after they had met. If there was something he abhorred, it was swooning, simpering, helpless women. His ample experience had informed him that this kind of behaviour was usually calculated in his presence; it flummoxed him every time, for he could not understand what, exactly, they hoped to accomplish with it. Was it a form of flirtation? Did they believe men found it attractive? If that was the case, then they had significantly underestimated him.
His mother had perfected the art of flirtation. She had taken countless lovers, claiming to be passionately in love with each and every one of them, betraying his father with all of them in turn. It had bred in him a deeply rooted dislike for such behaviour, and he never understood why men allowed themselves to be ensnared so. He had vowed, when he was but a schoolboy, that he would never be one of them.
But even he could see that this particular woman had keeled over not out of some machination to ensnare him, but from sheer exhaustion. She appeared to be seriously ill.
He placed her carefully on the clean but simple bed of the room he’d obtained. An officer had been turned out of it by the ever-resourceful Schneider, who had contrived the thing without revealing his identity.
He stared down at the pale, still face.
Evangeline Stafford-Hill.
His bride.
How was it possible that their first encounter had happened like this?
He’d been sitting at a table tucked behind one of the wooden partitions in the dining room with Schneider, when the daft poppet from earlier stepped into the room and approached the innkeeper, who was wiping the counter with a cloth. She was now draped in a woollen military coat that she must have wheedled from an unwary officer. Truly, the Austrian Imperial Army was in worse shape than he had feared, if its hardened soldiers were as pliable as clay in that poppet’s scheming hands. He made a mental note to address this issue in the Imperial War Council after he returned to Vienna.
Schneider had eagerly jumped to his feet to assist her, but Georg had pushed him down forcefully with one hand on his shoulder. “Sit.”
He’d followed their conversation as he drank from his beer mug.
English. Most definitely. Her German was good, better than average, but there was that slight rising English intonation at the end of sentences that gave her away.
She was no ordinary traveller, that was clear.
She also seemed distressed at the lack of a room.
Clearly, the woman had expected a room to be ready for her at the snap of her fingers, with the bath drawn, and the sheets aired, preferably with rose petals strewn over the cover. It never once occurred to her to consider that in times like this, the inns were commonly overfilled, with troops and travellers alike on the road.
And outside, a thunderstorm was breaking loose.
