Miranda Jarrett

by Princess of Fortune

  “Are we?” he echoed, but still he left his shirt on the chair.

  “We’re past a good many things, I suppose.” Restlessly she smoothed the tiny curls that had sprung free from her braid. “Besides, soiling your good name is not the reason I’ve come.”

  She fumbled in the deep sleeve of her dressing gown, finally pulling free a thick cream-colored card. “This came for me earlier. The prince remembered his promise after all. He’s invited me to an evening ball at Carlton House.”

  “Has he now?” Tom glanced over the elegantly penned invitation with mixed feelings. He knew this was where she belonged, among royalty like herself, yet he couldn’t help wanting to protect her from the disappointment that he felt certain was sure to come with such an invitation. “You wish to accept?”

  She looked up at him, her dark eyes solemn and oddly expectant. “Should I?”

  “That’s for you to decide.” He looked at her curiously. “You’ve never asked my opinion before this. Why should you begin now?”

  She flushed and plucked the card from his hand. “Because you are supposed to recognize danger and threats that may come to me. Because you are supposed to advise me in such matters. Because—because I did not wish to be alone tonight, and I needed a reason to come to you.”

  Abruptly she pivoted away, her head still high and her shoulders rigid. “Nothing in my life is how it should be, or how it was, or, more than likely, how it will ever be again. The whole wretched mess of it is turned upside down and inside out, without any rightful place for me to be.”

  “You’re doing well enough in London,” he said, that stiff, straight, little back adding a special poignancy to her words. He should have expected this from her. She’d been too calm, too collected, after all she’d been through earlier this day. “Mind, London’s where your mama sent you. For now, you belong here.”

  “But why?” she cried forlornly. “As much as I try, I cannot begin to do what is right. No one wants to listen to me, or to help my country.”

  “Oh, Bella.” He wanted to comfort her, but the words he needed wouldn’t come. “Perhaps the prince’s invitation will begin to change things.”

  “I am not so foolish as to believe that, Tom, not even from you.” She sighed deeply, her shoulders shuddering. “He has invited me because I am young and pretty and amusing. He doesn’t care a fig about Monteverde’s future, or my own, for that matter, except that I might be a kind of talisman to protect him from sharing my family’s fate.”

  “Then the prince is an ass, and blind in the bargain.”

  “And so, perhaps, am I.” At last she turned back around to face him, her mouth twisting as she fought her tears. She flung her arms out to either side, the sleeves of her dressing gown slithering down her bare arms. “Look at me, Tom. Judge me. You said you have no trust in me, but by all the saints in heaven, I still do trust you.”

  “Now hold there, Bella, please,” he murmured as he reached for her. He hated having his own words about trust, spoken in anger and frustration, tossed back at him, and he’d have given much to be able to take them back, or at least to make her forget them. “You’re upset, that is all.”

  “Tell me more than that, Tom.” She scuttled away, out of his reach, her breathing uneven and her voice rasping with misery. “Tell me more! Tell me why I am hated, despised, scorned by the same people who two years ago cheered and tossed flowers in my path.”

  “Bella, don’t—”

  “No, tell me, because I wish to hear it!” she cried, her arms still outstretched and beseeching. “Tell me how a wretched triangle of twigs now means more than the golden lions at our palazzo’s gates. Tell me why I’ve become an evil creature to be—to be killed and ground into the dirt like some loathsome beetle.”

  “It’s not you, Bella, I swear.” He was moving slowly closer to her now, scarcely moving at all from fear of how she’d react. “It’s the Bastille and Marie Antoinette and Buonaparte, and a thousand other things that have nothing to do with you.”

  “But it is me.” She drew her hands in, hugging herself, and her eyes filled with fresh sorrow. “It’s all because I am what I’ve always been proudest to be, and what I am above everything else—a Fortunaro princess.”

  “No,” he said softly. Now he knew what to say. He’d tell her the truth. “No. Forgive me, Your Royal Highness, but you’re wrong about that.”

  “Wrong?” Fat tears had begun to squeeze free of her eyes, sliding down her cheeks before she furiously dashed them away with the heel of her hand. “How can that be wrong?”

  He lowered his voice to calm her and capture her attention. “Because when I look at you, I no longer see the Princess di Fortunaro of Monteverde. What I see first is just Bella.”

  Her face seemed to melt beneath the weight of her emotions. “Oh, Tom,” she whispered. “Why am I so scared?”

  “Oh, sweetheart,” he said. “You’d be daft if you weren’t scared after what you have survived.”

  “But I’m supposed to be brave and strong.”

  “To me you are, and always will be,” he said, and he realized as he spoke that he’d never meant anything more. “But for this night, just be Bella, and I’ll be brave for us both.”

  He held his arms open to her, a sanctuary if only she’d take it. For a handful of moments she hesitated, and in that endless few seconds Tom felt his own kind of despair and doubt, wondering if he’d gambled too much of himself.

  But then with a broken sob, she flung herself at him in a tangle of tears and Genoa silk, her arms tight around his waist and her cheek pressed to his bare chest, over the scar that had, in a way, been the reason they’d met.

  “Don’t make me leave, Tomaso,” she whispered hoarsely. “Let me stay here with you, where I know I will be safe. If you force me to go back to my room alone, I’ll not last the night, I know it!”

  “Hush now, hush,” he said, brushing back the damp hair from her face. How could she imagine he’d ask her to leave? There were few things that had seemed more right in his life than having her in his arms, the glide of light silk and linen only a feather-light barrier between them. He could feel the warmth of her skin and every resilient curve of her body where it pressed against his. It was more temptation than any honorable man should have to face, and far, far more than he’d be likely to withstand after what they’d shared today. “I’m not about to cast you off now. I told you I have courage enough for the two of us, didn’t I?”

  “More than enough!” Her words tumbled out in giddy gulps as she pulled back to search his face, the anxiety and fear still bright in her eyes. “But how many times can we outlast death together, Tomaso? How many times will we be the ones who live, while others die in our place?”

  “You cannot think that way,” he said firmly, unable to imagine anything more vibrantly alive than this woman who had come to mean so much to him. “If you do, you might as well surrender outright. You have to start each day believing you’ll live to see its end.”

  “Then make me think only of life, and forget the rest,” she whispered, and before he realized it, she’d pulled his face down to hers and was kissing him.

  Chapter Ten

  Isabella sank into the kiss, losing whatever resistance she might have had and not caring, either.

  She hadn’t come to Tom’s rooms intending to kiss him like this. She hadn’t intended much beyond sharing the prince’s invitation with him, and then spinning their conversation out as long as she could, keeping him awake to provide her with company. She didn’t mean to admit to more than boredom and sleeplessness, and she certainly hadn’t planned to confess that she had to stay awake because every dream became a nightmare that made her wake gasping with terror and soaked with sweat.

  But once she’d seen the scar that slashed jaggedly across Tom’s chest, tidy little resolves had melted away. The scar reminded her again of death and life, and how tenuous the line between them could be, not just for him, but for her as well. Over and over he’d r
isked his life to save hers, and each time they’d had luck on their side. But luck was fickle, luck was changeable as the wind, and again she wrestled with the awful consequences.

  How easily she could have been killed today, her head cracked open by a swinging board. How easily Tom, too, could have ended his life in the street, lying in a congealing puddle of his blood.

  And how easily it would have all ended without her telling him, showing him, that she couldn’t fathom her own life continuing without him in it.

  She parted her lips and hungrily drew him deeper, slipping her arms around his shoulders to hold herself steady against him. His fingers spread possessively to cover as much of her hips as he could as he drew her closer, and he kissed her more possessively, too, harder and deeper. She could feel how her heart was racing with desire and anticipation, melding together with the last scraps of her fear.

  Without his shirt, she was newly aware of his scent, of the difference between the wiry dark hair of his chest and the smoothness of his skin, as well as the intensity of the heat that simmered between them, burning everywhere they touched. She could feel the hard ridge of his erection through his breeches, pressing there against her hip, and realized with heady joy that he wanted her—no, needed her—as much as she needed him.

  She slid her lips from his mouth to his cheek, feathering little kisses across the length of his jaw. She loved the rough-smooth texture of his stubbled beard against her lower lip, his beard darkening his cheeks by this hour. She dipped lower, to the place on the side of his neck where his heart beat, and kissed that, too, her own heart quickening to match his.

  “Damnation, Bella,” he said raggedly, even as he slid his hand up the length of her spine. “You’re playing with tinder, lass.”

  “We are, Tomaso,” she said, urgency making her voice husky. The sash of her dressing gown had come unfastened, and with a little shrug of her shoulders, she let it slide down her arms. Only the thin white holland of her night shift covered her now, no real covering at all. “Together.”

  He groaned deep in his chest as he realized how little she now wore. “You’re making it precious hard for me to remember who you are.”

  “For tonight I’m just Bella,” she whispered, kissing the salty little hollow at the base of his throat. “You said so yourself.”

  He turned her face up to kiss her again. “But in the morning you’ll once again be Princess di Fortunaro.”

  “Oh, yes, for all that may be worth,” she said, unable to hide her unhappiness. “Only a glorious past that may get me killed, and not much of a future.”

  “It’s still worth a great deal. At least an invitation to Carlton House.”

  She sniffed. “The Fortunari were already great princes when the Hanovers were still barbarians, living along the Palatine in huts made of straw and mud.”

  “There, now, you make my point.” He’d continued to stroke her back, down her spine to the curve of her bottom and up again, enough to make her arch like a cat. “You’re a Fortunaro through and through.”

  “But I’ll be Bella to you, as long as you wish it.” She looked up at him through her lashes. “That is, if you wish it.”

  “How in blazes could I not?” he asked. “Bella, you’d tempt a saint to sin.”

  He hooked his thumb through the narrow strap of her night shift and eased it over her shoulder. The front of her shift slipped lower, and his thumb followed, tracing and teasing the swell of her breast until she shivered. She could feel her nipple pucker and harden, begging to be touched next. She flushed and didn’t dare look down, sure the crest must show through the thin linen to betray her.

  “Oh, my,” she breathed. “That—that feels quite fine, Tom.”

  “It’s supposed to, lass. There’s no other reason to do it,” he said gruffly, then paused. “Damnation, Bella. Did that bastard do this to your shoulder today?”

  “Yes,” she admitted with a quick gasp, forcing herself not to flinch as he traced the livid outline of the bruise with infinite care. “But it doesn’t signify.”

  “It does, because it’s you.” His concern touched her almost as much as his caress. “You said I was the first man to kiss you. Does that mean you haven’t—”

  “I’ve never done any of this,” she confessed quickly, blushing again. “Princesses don’t. But I’m not one of your silly ignorant English virgins. We are much less prudish in Monteverde, and what my mother didn’t explain, her ladies-in-waiting did. Oh, and my friends and my cousins. I was the only one who hadn’t been married yet, on account of Buonaparte causing so much mischief among the other royal houses. But they told me everything about their wedding nights.”

  “I’ll wager they did.” He swallowed so hard it was more of a gulp, and he was unable to look away from her breasts. “But you are a virgin.”

  “I told you that already. I was being saved for the proper royal husband, who may now never appear. Exiled princesses are of little political value, you know, because my poor father had no power left to make me useful except for producing heirs with an ancient lineage.”

  “They should value you for yourself. You’re not a broodmare.”

  “That’s exactly what a princess is. The Queen of Naples has at least sixteen children, and is much praised for her fecundity.” Because she was nervous, she knew she was talking too fast, babbling and saying too much, until she truly was like one of those foolish English virgins. To make things worse, Tom was sliding his finger back and forth just inside her shift, grazing the side of her breast at the same time in a way that was exceptionally distracting. “I don’t have any yet, of course.”

  “Because you’re a virgin.”

  “Yes.” She smiled uncertainly. She’d always heard that gentlemen liked being the first love in a woman’s life. Why else were there so many songs and stories whose entire point seemed to be deflowering maidens? “But I do not see this as a hindrance to you.”

  “A virgin, and a princess whose purpose in life is to be fertile. Oh, blast. Blast and hell.” He took a deep breath and carefully pulled the lace-trimmed strap back over her shoulder. “I’m sorry, lass, more sorry than you’ll ever know. But my orders are to keep you safe. Taking you to my bed wouldn’t qualify.”

  “I suppose it would not.” She sighed with unhappy frustration, and fidgeted with the strap he’d just replaced. “But I don’t answer to your admiralty, do I? And you would not ‘take’ me to your bed. I would go because I wished to be there. Because you are the only rock left in my life, and because—because I do not want to die a virgin.”

  “Bella, I never said—”

  “Stop, Captain, I am not done yet.” She was making him angry now, testing his precious self-control, and she didn’t care. “I will tell you what I have never told another man, Captain Greaves, not anywhere under heaven. I love you. I love you. There, I have said it, and now if you die or I am killed by my enemies, then at least I—”

  “Damnation, Bella, I will not let them take you from me!” He seized her by the shoulders and kissed her again, his mouth hot and demanding and leaving no space for her to protest. She twisted against him, pushing back, and felt herself swaying off balance. She clung to him to keep from falling, but instead he crooked his arm beneath the back of her knees and swept her backward onto the bed.

  With a gasp of surprise, she sank deep into the feather bed, and then sank further still as Tom stretched out over her. He was holding most of his weight on his arms, but she was still acutely aware of how much larger and stronger he was than she, of his body against hers and all the places they touched, especially since so many of them now were skin against skin. Her bruised shoulder hurt, too, but if she told him, he’d stop.

  “Don’t talk to me of death and love together, Bella,” he whispered hoarsely, his breath hot on her cheek. “Not for us.”

  “Not love?” she whispered fiercely, daring him, refusing to back down, even if she was already lying beneath him. “Or not death?”

  “D
idn’t I tell you to believe in life?” He bent to kiss her, his mouth pulling such dizzying pleasure from her that she whimpered, a sound lost between their mouths. But he heard it, tasted it, retreating just far enough to nip at the lobe of her ear, making sure she listened in return. “This is life, lass. This is for you.”

  “Then this is love.” Her heart was racing with excitement and anticipation of what would happen next. She wriggled beneath him, struggling to pull her shift back down over her bare thighs, but all the wriggling seemed to do was settle him more intimately between her legs, making him groan. “Even I can tell that.”

  “Can you now?” He pushed aside the fragile bodice of her shift, and his hand closed over her bared breast. Gently he cupped the soft flesh and rubbed his thumb over her nipple until it began to harden and peak. She gasped at the unfamiliar sensation, stunned by how instantly her body reacted to his touch.

  Her own hands were sliding up and down his back, her fingers moving almost convulsively over the knotted muscles and smooth skin. She loved touching him as much as she loved being touched, and she doubted she’d ever tire of either. She was hot inside and out, her breath so tight that she felt as if she had hot coals in her chest, and her limbs seemed at once both languorous and restless with a yearning that she still didn’t quite understand.

  Knowing what to expect was one thing, but she was fast realizing that experience—and its lack—was quite another.

  “Ah, Tom!” She dug her fingers into the dark silk of his hair as she turned his mouth back to hers. “This is passion, too, yes?”

  “Yes,” he growled, and she tasted the single word on his lips as he kissed her again. Yet it wasn’t the same as when he’d kissed her before, because now he was reaching down to raise the hem of her night shift, his hands seeking her nakedness beneath. He slid his palm along the inside of her thigh, higher, higher, until he reached the softest place of all.