“I fear for her libido if we don’t,” he agreed.
“Hello again, Leo,” Thom said, her hand visible over the heads as she waved at him. Leo couldn’t actually see her through the densely packed bodies, but he acknowledged her with a greeting.
“It’s nice to hear you, Thom, and I’m sure Mrs. Deworthy appreciates you supporting and helping her, but perhaps if some of you—the female some of you—wouldn’t mind returning to the governor’s office, I could actually proceed with ascertaining just what happened earlier today in the baptistery.”
Leo had to raise his voice for the last bit, since Plum and Thom started arguing.
“I don’t see why you insist on having such a hidebound, rigid attitude. Especially after your experience with your first husband.”
“My first husband was an utter and complete abomination—”
“As is Nick.”
“Do you think we could go five minutes without slandering my son?” Noble asked.
“Not to mention the fact that my first marriage has nothing to do with the situation, nothing at all.”
“I say it does. And Harry wouldn’t mind if I just was Nick’s mistress, would you, Harry? I mean, you must have had mistresses before you married Aunt Plum.”
“About this cutting loose—” Leo said, leaning down to speak in Dagmar’s ear.
“Good Lord, I’m not about to discuss that in front of Plum,” Harry said, struggling to get his arms free enough to cover her ears.
Dagmar sniffled quietly and bit her lower lip. He wanted to bite it as well, but a swift calculation of the remaining space—about a spare inch—left him with no room to maneuver himself into position where he could kiss her.
“Well, I don’t care what you say. If that blighted, maggoty rotter ever shows his cowardly face and begs my forgiveness, not that it will be swift in coming because I have five long years’ worth of anger to vent on him, but if he does, then I shall stand firm on the subject.”
The door opened again, and once more smacked Noble on the back. A tall young man squeezed his way in, cracking his shins on the end of the metal cot. Plum, pushed forward, oozed out onto the bed and took up residence on it.
“Hullo,” Nick said as the door thumped softly to a close behind him. “Did I hear myself being abused in no uncertain terms?”
“You did,” Thom said over her shoulder, being too firmly packed into the room to turn around. “And I would say it to your face if I could do so. Noble, would you mind moving forward just a smidgen so that I can abuse your son to his face?”
“Hullo, Papa,” Nick called over her head.
“Hello, Nick. You look well. Gillian, doesn’t he look well?”
“He does, very well indeed, although we would have known that if he’d come to see us the instant he got back in England, instead of lounging around London.”
“Why are you sniffling in that pathetic manner?” Leo asked Dagmar. “More importantly, why do you want to leave me?”
“Because I seduced you. I have to let you go.”
To Leo’s horror, her lower lip quivered for a moment before she sucked it up. He could handle many things in life—being wounded by a saber-wielding maniac, trying to determine the facts behind a bizarre murder, even handling a wife he hadn’t known he’d married—but the sight of Dagmar trying so hard to hold back tears melted his insides. He didn’t want her sad and crying. He wanted her giggly and giving him come-hither looks that sent him thither with a song on his lips and an erection in his trousers.
“Noble, please.”
“Eh? Oh. Gillian, I believe if Plum sits on her heels that you can join her on that repulsive cot, and then we will all be able to breathe a bit easier. We’ll have to burn your gown later, because I have no doubt the cot is infested with all sorts of vermin, but the loss of a gown is a small price to pay in order for Thom to be able to face Nick.”
Gillian hopped on the cot, and the two ladies did, in fact, sit on their heels, both of them watching with interest as Thom was able to turn to face Nick. Noble, with a wink at the rest of them, jostled her straight into his son’s arms.
“My apologies,” he murmured.
Leo took advantage of the fact that everyone was focused on Nick and Thom to speak to his wife. “I don’t know why you believe you seduced me, because I have no recollection of any such event, but since you evidently wish to, then I’ll go along with that. Why, however, does that make you want to leave me?”
“You are a coward,” Thom told Nick, her face pink at the fact that she was more or less pressed up against him, his arms loosely around her.
“Yes, I am.”
“You are despicably slimy and cruel and heartless.”
“And foolish,” he said, kissing the tip of her nose. “Don’t forget foolish.”
“How you could spurn me to go off and do all sorts of good deeds when you knew I would have been happy to do them with you—”
“You wanted to go to that doctoring place in Germany. I knew how much that meant to you, and figured that by the time you were done there, I’d be done doing my work, and we’d both be back in England together. But that didn’t quite work out. You stayed in Germany for two years, and then my work took me back to the Continent.”
“—is beyond the understanding of any normal human being.”
Dagmar, rather than turning toward Leo as he hoped, turned away, her little shoulders tight with anguish. “I don’t want to leave you,” he heard her say in a very small voice.
“Then why, for the love of God, are you attempting to do so?”
She mumbled something that he didn’t hear.
“You didn’t even ask me to wait for you!” Thom yelled at Nick.
He looked highly uncomfortable, no doubt partly because, with the exception of Dagmar and Leo, the occupants of the room were all avidly watching him. He tugged at his neckcloth. “I couldn’t, Thom. Not without having a fortune. It wasn’t fair to you to ask you to wait for a pauper.”
Thom managed to shove him in the shoulder. “You have a fortune! Your father gave you one! Enough for us to live on, anyway.”
“But it’s not really mine—”
“And I have a dowry!”
“She does,” Harry agreed. “Gave it to her myself.”
“We could have lived on either of those, but no, you didn’t want to!”
“Thom, you don’t understand—”
“No, I don’t! Explain it to me!”
Nick opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, finally looking with desperation at his father.
“Don’t look at me,” Noble said, shaking his head. “I thought you should have wed her before you went.”
“Noble!” Gillian protested. “That’s not what you told him at the time!”
“I told him what he wanted to hear because he thought he was going to be killed. Do you think I’d send my son off to do dangerous work with an uneasy mind that could distract him at a vital moment?”
“I suppose not,” Gillian allowed. “But that was years ago, and now Nick needs to just do what he should have done then and marry Thom.”
“That’s all right,” Thom said, sniffing as she pushed away from Nick’s embrace. “It’s clear he doesn’t want me. I’ll just go back to Germany and take care of donkeys and horses and those adorable cows with the pretty eyes and enormously long eyelashes.”
Nick glanced heavenward, but his expression of long-suffering martyrdom switched to one of fury when Thom added, “And I’ll find a nice goatherd who isn’t a bastard and become his mistress.”
“You’ll do no such thing. You’ll marry me, and we’ll live on my father’s money, and you’ll like it,” Nick said savagely, but immediately began laughing when Thom spun around and punched him in the shoulder.
“We’ll live on Harry’s money!”
<
br /> “We’ll pool the money together and live on that, all right?” he asked, pulling her back into his arms.
She smiled and leaned up to kiss him. “After you’ve apologized.”
“This is so romantic,” Gillian whispered to Plum.
“It really is.” Plum dabbed at her eyes, then nudged Gillian. “Now we just need to fix Leo.”
Leo, who had been distracted by the Nick/Thom scene, was about to demand that his wife tell him what was wrong but paused to glare at the two women. “I don’t need fixing!”
“No, of course you don’t. Only Dagmar seems to think you do,” Plum said quickly, giving him a sympathetic look. “You enjoyed her seducing you, didn’t you? Apparently, she thinks that you didn’t have a say in the matter.”
“We told her that was ridiculous,” Gillian added, nodding at Plum. “But she just said something about despair and living by herself, and you being as free as some very free thing, and it all got a bit confusing.”
“By then we’d emptied the bottle,” Plum admitted. “That probably had something to do with it.”
“Did you offer them a copy of your new book?”
“No, no, the new one isn’t ready yet.” Plum blushed a pleasant shade of pink, sending Harry a quick look under her lashes that he returned with a bawdy grin. “We’re still perfecting a few of the more…advanced…positions.”
“Wait’ll you see Panther Dancing at Newly Dawned Morn. It’ll knock your boots right off your feet,” Harry told Noble with a wink.
“If you do it correctly, yes, it should. But about you, Leo—”
Leo had enough of Dagmar avoiding his gaze. “What,” he asked her, interrupting Plum, “is this nonsense about you seducing me?”
Dagmar shot a look around the room. “This really isn’t the place for this conversation.”
“I don’t know why not,” Nick said, looking up from where he had been whispering in Thom’s ear. “Lord knows I was made to bare my private affairs in front of everyone. I don’t see why you shouldn’t as well.”
“This is different,” Leo said and bodily forced himself past Noble and Harry, dragging a resistant Dagmar behind him. “We’ll be back in a minute. Nick, would you mind moving to the side? Thank you.”
They managed to squeeze themselves out the door, emerging from the cell with what Leo imagined was a popping noise. Once in the corridor, he took Dagmar with his good arm and bent to kiss her. She turned her face away with another lift of that damned stubborn chin. “All right, we’re alone. What’s all this business? Why won’t you let me kiss you as is my right and duty as a thoughtful husband bent on ensuring your complete and utter satisfaction with all things husbandly? Why do you think you seduced me, and most of all, why do you want to leave me?”
“I don’t want to,” Dagmar all but wailed, tearing herself away from him to move a few steps away. “Aren’t you listening to me? I keep saying I don’t want to, but that I have to.”
“I apologize,” he said, making her a little bow. “It was a bit distracting in there, what with Nick and Thom working out their differences, and Plum going on about panthers. Why, if you do not wish to abandon me, are you insistent on doing so?”
She took a deep breath and turned to face him. He had to admire her pluck—she clearly felt she was performing some horrible but vital chore. “It’s because of the way we were married. Don’t you see, Leo? I married you when you were less than sensible of your surroundings.”
“You did that because you thought I was dying. And I likely would be dead if not for you.”
“That’s beside the point.”
“I don’t think it is, no,” he said, shaking his head.
“And then I put you on the ship to bring you home, because I thought you were on your way home, but again, you had no choice in the matter. I made the decision for you.”
“Ah,” he said, light beginning to dawn. “You believe you seduced me into bedding you, thus eliminating the ability to annul the marriage?”
“Yes. I did seduce you, Leo, no matter what you say, and I can see that you’re going to protest that I didn’t, but that is just your manly pride at being the one in charge of such things. The truth is far less flattering. In every important matter, I have taken your choices away and made the decisions for you, and that is the reason I must now set you free. It’s not right that you should have so little say in your own life, although I will say in my own defense that I never meant anything but good for you.”
He watched her silently, his heart filled with a sensation that he was hard put to name until it occurred to him that it was love—actual love, not just lust or fondness or even a strong liking, but outright love, romantic, all-consuming love. He loved Dagmar. He loved the way she stood there and argued with him; he loved the way her mind worked, even if it was at the moment going off on a bizarre track that he doubted he’d ever be able to follow; and most of all, he loved the fact that she loved him enough to sacrifice her own happiness for his. What a wonderful, marvelous woman she was.
“You utter idiot,” he told her, taking her in his arms before she could bristle at the tenderly spoken words. “You adorable, fascinating, completely and wholly illogical woman. You love me.”
“I am not illogical!” Dagmar said, looking duly outraged at the very idea. “And I object strongly to you saying so. I am the most logical person I know. I think things through. I make plans. I consider alternatives. If that’s not logical, then I don’t know what is!”
He waited until she wound down, then said casually, “Not going to dispute it?”
Her lips thinned. She knew exactly what he was talking about, because she was the person meant to light his life with her delectable self, whether or not she wished to admit it. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’re not a very good liar, though. Not that I want a wife who lies to me, but there are times when such a skill comes in handy, as I’ve frequently found. There was a time when the late czar asked me what I thought of his favorite mistress, and if I’d spoken the truth, even a diplomatic version, I wouldn’t have seen the next morning. No, on the whole, I think it would be better if you learned how to prevaricate convincingly, especially if one day the local vicar of wherever we end up living asks you to judge flowers. Or babies. Or the many things that ladies of the manor are asked to judge. But never you fear, my darling, I shall teach you. And you will learn because you love me.”
“Stop saying that!” She stomped her foot. “I’m letting you go, dammit! You’re going to be a free man again. Stop making plans to teach me to lie to a vicar because we aren’t going to have a manor house. We aren’t going to have a life where I will judge babies and flowers. I am going to live above a small shop, the specifics of which I have not yet ascertained, and you will go about being a highly desirable earl who holds one shoulder just the teensiest bit higher than the other but which doesn’t detract from his handsomeness one little bit.”
He laughed. “Now I know you’re in love with me. No one else has ever called me handsome. Dagmar.”
“What?” She frowned at his shoulder, clearly annoyed with him, and that delighted him all the more.
He leaned down to whisper in her ear, “I happen to love you too.”
“You don’t!” Her eyes were wide with surprise. “You’re just saying that because you’re suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude for the fact that I, a princess of noble blood, married you and saved your life.”
“You’re fooling yourself if you think either of those things matters. I’ll be eternally grateful to you for saving my wretched hide, but only because it means I get to spend the balance of my life with you. Now kiss me, tell me that you love me, and that you’ve given up all ideas of abandoning me, because you know I won’t let that happen.”
“But, Leo—”
“No.”
“I took a
way all your choices—”
“You saved my life and acted in my best interests in bringing me home.”
“I seduced—”
“You did no such thing. Darling, do you think I don’t have the wherewithal to resist even the most alluring of women if I chose to do so?” He laughed at her outraged expression and laughed even harder when she pinched his good arm. “It was your first time. I wanted you to be comfortable with what was going to happen, so I let you take the initiative that night. You didn’t seduce me; if anything, I was guilty of putting you in a position where I knew your curiosity would triumph over what might be considered better sense.”
“What better sense?” she said, her cheeks deliciously pink. She didn’t turn away when he bent down to kiss her again.
“You’ve been so focused on how I wasn’t worthy of a wife who took action when it was needed that you never once considered whether or not you should be congratulated or commiserated for having such a lame husband. I’m an odd duck, my darling. I have a title and a suitable fortune to sustain myself, but no family and few close friends. I have fewer connections in polite society and, regrettably, even less of a desire to cultivate the same. I much prefer to live by my wits than to retire to the country and become a squire. In short, my gorgeous bundle of princess, I am not a very good catch. You’d be far better off without me.”
She gazed at him with those lovely hazel eyes, now filled with serious consideration. “I don’t particularly wish to live in the country and judge babies either. Will you take me with you on your missions?”
He hesitated, thoughts flashing through his mind about keeping her safe, locked away from harm and danger. That balanced with the delightful image of Dagmar at his side as he trod the delicate paths of intrigue at the various foreign courts into which his missions took him. He would conduct all manner of secret arrangements, negotiations, and agreements, while she enthralled and captivated everyone with her unique charm. He grinned. “We’ll make an unstoppable team.”
“A team? Do you mean we will work together?”
“Yes. You’ll have to leave the more dangerous work to me, but I can see where a wife would be an asset to many of my jobs.”
Truth about Leo Page 23
