thought those dark eyes could see right through her. Read her mind.
‘You’ve grazed your cheek, Miss Varndell,’ he said. She instinctively lifted her hand to check, but he caught her wrist, stopping her. ‘And your knuckles.’
‘It’s nothing,’ she said automatically, her expensive boarding-school having instilled the stern lesson that ladies did not make a fuss.
Fortunately, Alexander Orsino ignored her stoicism.
‘I’ll get someone to see to them,’ he said, every inch the autocrat.
He paused to speak briefly to the footman in a language that wasn’t quite Italian, or French, but a Montorinan dialect that her brain wasn’t quite up to unscrambling at such speed. It was already fully occupied.
The man bowed in acknowledgement and backed away while Prince Alexander, his hand still welded firmly to her elbow, led her towards a wide curving staircase without another word.
She should be looking around, she thought, as she attempted to keep a grip on reality. She should be taking mental notes. But she was having trouble enough just catching her breath.
The man was right. She had to be in shock. That would explain why she had the oddest feeling that she’d stepped into the set of an operetta, with its sweeping staircase, crystal chandeliers and very superior footman wearing black tails.
Add to the mix a cold-hearted prince, a peasant girl and a missing princess—there were all the ingredients for a fairy tale frivolity.
The clothes were all wrong, of course. Peasant girls wore dirndl skirts and embroidered blouses—at least in operetta—while she was wearing a pair of extremely functional cargo pants and a sweatshirt of such antiquity that whatever words had originally been splashed across her bosom had long since faded to illegibility.
Not that the Prince, with his open-necked shirt and cashmere sweater, was getting more than three out of ten for effort. Didn’t he dress for dinner, for heaven’s sake?
Where were his standards?
She dragged herself back from the beckoning arms of hysteria as he opened a door and ushered her into a book-lined room that clearly doubled as sitting room and study.
Here, the baroque evaporated and they were back in the twenty-first century. Computers, a couple of large sofas, a functional desk and enough paperwork to keep an average-sized business going for a month. But running a small country presumably entailed a vast amount of paperwork, and for just a moment she felt a twinge of sympathy for the man. No time to put his feet up with the television, or a pretty girl for this prince.
‘Brandy?’ he offered.
‘What?’ Distracted, she turned back to the Prince. ‘I think the princess’s welfare is more important right now. What are you going to do about finding her?’ she asked. But politely. She suspected that she’d already stretched her luck to breaking point.
‘Nothing. I know where she is. Please make yourself comfortable, Miss Varndell,’ he continued, indicating one of the sofas.
‘You know?’
‘More accurately, I know where she’s going. My niece wished to go to a club with some friends. I refused to give permission. She is, after all, under age.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ve despatched her security officer to bring her home.’
She stared at him. ‘Are you crazy? Weren’t you listening? She had a broken ankle!’
‘Are you absolutely sure about that?’ he replied as he took her hand and placed an exquisite crystal glass in it, closing his long fingers around hers until he was certain she had it safely. Long, slender fingers, one of them bearing a heavy gold signet ring embossed with his personal coat of arms. ‘Did you see it for yourself?’
She blinked, looked up. ‘See what?’
‘Princess Katerina’s ankle?’ he prompted.
‘Oh. Well, no, she was wearing boots, but she said—’
She’d said it was broken—had groaned convincingly. Laura subsided on to the sofa as she realised that, once again, she’d been played for a fool.
‘Oh, I see. You’re suggesting that she was just pretending. Playing hurt to get rid of me while she made good her escape.’
‘I would say it’s more likely than a chance kidnapping, wouldn’t you?’
It would certainly explain why she’d insisted on being left where she was rather than attempting, with help, to make it inside, which would have been her own choice under the circumstances, no matter how painful. She took a sip of the brandy, felt the steadying warmth as it slipped down.
She’d been very convincing.
‘How can you be so sure?’ she asked.
Prince Alexander lifted one eyebrow the merest fraction of a millimetre as he poured another measure for himself.
‘Oh, I see. She’s done this before.’
‘Not Katerina. She wouldn’t have managed it twice,’ he assured her in a tone that left her in no doubt he was telling the truth.
‘So how do you—?’ And then, in a flash of intuition, she realised that the Princess was not the first member of the Royal House of Orsino to have made a break for freedom. Prince Alexander might have had something of a reputation as a young man, but he’d only been following a trail blazed by his older sister.
‘She not only looks like her mother, but has apparently inherited her laissez-faire attitude to personal behaviour,’ he admitted stiffly. ‘You have my sincerest apologies for the fright you’ve been given, Miss Varndell. My niece will make her own apologies in due course.’
Under normal circumstances two Miss Varndells were about as much as she could take before she begged to be called Laura. Outside, on the pavement, she might have begged. Inside, his formality made such a request unthinkable.
‘That’s not important. I’m just relieved that she’s not in danger.’ Then, ‘This security character—he’s not going to haul her out of the club, is he?’ She imagined how humiliated she’d feel under such circumstances. ‘It’ll only make her more resentful,’ she began. Then stopped. ‘I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.’
‘No, it isn’t.’ Then, with the faintest crease softening the corners of his eyes, ‘But if you’ll forgive me for saying so, it’s somewhat sexist of you to assume that her security officer is male.’
A crack in the ice? He was a lot more attractive when he smiled. Almost human.
‘Did you really think I’d send some uniformed heavy to barge in and drag her home?’ The smile deepened in response to her embarrassed flush. ‘There’s no need to answer that. I may be a monster—my niece certainly believes so—Miss Varndell, but I was once a young monster with my own problem with rules.’
‘But you’re still going to have her brought home.’
‘Certainly.’ Then, ‘You have some objection?’
‘It’s
