thusly in front of the General and the Duke, a sign of her father’s esteem for her. But it was an honour that made her uncomfortable and yet she could not refuse. The words had brought Amesbury’s intent gaze her direction, his pale blue eyes narrowed in speculation as he drawled, ‘Yes, Klara, you know him best, it seems. You’ve spent more time with him than any of us.’ His words carried a subtle accusatory edge to them.
She locked eyes with Amesbury. She was not afraid of him and his veiled accusation that spending time with Nikolay had been somehow inappropriate. He might intimidate others with his power and his wealth, but not her. She had those things, too. Any thought of demurring faded. She couldn’t afford to. It would mean she was soft, that perhaps she harboured a burgeoning attraction to the Kubanian Prince. Amesbury had noticed their tête-à-tête in the drawing room before dinner. To confirm that impression would be disastrous. It would raise the Duke’s hackles, which would not please her father, and it would prove she was indeed as vacuous as any other female whose head was turned by a handsome face. There was a certain mordancy that the best protection she could give Nikolay was through betrayal.
‘As soon as he knows it’s not a trap, he will follow your breadcrumbs and decide if he can afford to join you,’ she said. It was a small betrayal of Nikolay to be sure, based on her intuition only. But she knew her intuition spoke the truth; the hesitation he’d shown in the park, the ferocity when he’d told her he could not go back to his country, proved her correct. Reticence was a reflex often ascribed to a man who had something to hide, a man who was wary of a trap that would seek to expose what he protected.
Her father and the General nodded. Amesbury sneered. ‘Since you are playing the fortune-teller, perhaps you can tell us if your Prince will join us? Since you know him so well.’
‘My prince? He is hardly that,’ Klara snapped, her hand clenching around the little stem of her viche pitia glass. It was a struggle to keep her tone neutral. Amesbury was jealous. He had no reason to be. Nikolay Baklanov might flirt with a woman, but he was not the sort of man who allowed himself to belong to one. She did not think Nikolay’s flirtation, as delightful, as sensual as it was, was an exclusive commodity. ‘If you are asking about his willingness to join the Union of Salvation, I cannot say. You saw tonight that he is no newcomer to court intrigue. He will not readily reveal his secrets to anyone.’
Her father split a swift glance between the two of them and intervened. He speared Amesbury with a quelling look. ‘There is no need to fight amongst ourselves. Klara was doing the job we assigned her. We must convince the Prince of the rightness of our cause and the importance of him taking a role in it. We need him to take the arms to St Petersburg and to help rally the troops when the time comes. He’s a man others will follow.’ He turned his diplomatic censure on Klara. ‘However, we all risk much by taking him in too soon. We must be sure of him. The group depends on the quality of its associates. One weak link and we go from being patriots to traitors. The line is very thin. Our next step is to discover what has brought Prince Baklanov to England and talk then.’
The glasses were empty and her father made no move to refill them, a polite signal that it was time to leave. General Vasilev rose and made his farewells, but Amesbury lingered, his thin, aristocratic mouth—proof of generations of impeccable English breeding—tight. ‘Walk me to the door, Klara, I’d like a word.’
Klara obliged, for how could she refuse? On the surface, everyone would assume the Duke wanted a moment to apologise for his rudeness, that he would explain it away as a sign of his concern for her. But those assumptions would be false. The Duke apologised to no one and for nothing. Although he was similar to her father in many regards, his inability to apologise was not one of them.
The Duke was a big man with a bearing that neared military in stature. Even though she was tall, Klara had to fight the feeling of ‘smallness’ in his presence, for she did indeed feel small with him, unlike with Nikolay who was his equal in height. Some might call the Duke handsome with his strong facial bones and the grooves etched on either side of his mouth, reinforcing the sternness, the hardness of him. She called him cold, an iceberg personified, complete with glacial blue eyes. She walked beside him in silence, waiting for him to speak.
‘I did not want to say anything in front of the others,’ Amesbury began, ‘However, since I have much at stake in this venture, and perhaps...’ he paused here, attempting a modest demeanour that failed to convince ‘...a certain burgeoning relationship of a personal nature with you, I have the right to ask. How have you come by your information, Klara?’
‘What are you suggesting?’ She removed her hand from his arm and stood apart from him, erasing any façade of a polite couple. She had to stop those presumptions right here. If he presumed they had the foundations of a relationship, who knew what else he would presume? His arrogance would promote all nature of assumption beginning with the idea that a woman couldn’t possibly find him resistible.
‘I’m suggesting that you would have had to work hard to get that information. A man like Baklanov, who likely has much to protect, would not give up information easily. We saw that tonight. How is it that you’ve been privy to such insight? He is not immune to your charms. That was made clear tonight as well. I saw the two of you with your heads together.’
Klara did not flinch at his accusation. She crossed her arms. ‘You call yourself a gentleman and yet you dare to accuse me of seducing the Prince. That’s what you’re implying, isn’t it? That I’ve inappropriately enticed him? The Prince has acted far more the gentleman than you.’
He strode towards her and gripped her arm, his voice a menacing growl. ‘The Prince, a gentleman? Is that what you call him? He had his damn mouth at your ear with all the presumption of a lover.’ His grip hurt, hard enough to bruise. ‘Forgive me my conclusions. You have never allowed me such liberties.’
But he was taking them anyway. The tenacity of his grip of her arm was more than a little frightening. It took all her cool élan not to let him see it. He had never laid hands on her in such a fashion before and this glimpse of possessive violence made her uneasy. What made him think he could do so now? It was a disturbing insight into what relationship with such a man might be like and Klara was determined to put a stop to it.
‘Take your hands off me. The Prince and I rode in the park and we talked.’ All true, but slightly incomplete. There was that kiss, that glorious kiss with an erotic roughness behind it that was far different than the harshness the Duke was exhibiting here in the hall. She would combat the Duke’s physical boldness with a boldness of her own. ‘Jealousy does not become you, nor do you have any claim to such envy.’
‘Perhaps not yet. However, it cannot have escaped your notice that I aspire to have such a claim.’ He removed his hand and stepped back with a curt nod, his words causing an uneasiness in her stomach that rivalled the violence of his touch. ‘I’ll say goodnight, then, Klara.’ There had been no ‘forgive me’ or ‘I beg your pardon’. Simply ‘goodnight.’ Asking for forgiveness would imply he’d done something wrong, an impossibility to Amesbury’s arrogant mind.
She breathed easier when the door was shut behind him. She’d never liked Amesbury. But until recently, she’d never disliked him either. She’d merely found him blandly neutral, a shuttered, arrogant man who held himself aloof from others by nature of his birth. Now, she’d had a glimpse behind those shutters and it had been quite frightening. Klara wrapped her arms about herself. He’d laid angry hands on her in her own home. Perhaps she was reading far too much into it. Men were by nature competitive creatures and Nikolay had provoked him, perhaps she had provoked him. She’d known the Duke watched her. She hadn’t been unaware of how she and Nikolay would have appeared to an outsider. Maybe she had even encouraged it. If one didn’t poke the sleeping dog, it wouldn’t bite you. Recklessness had its consequences, after all. But such reasoning didn’t dispel the shiver that took
