The Wild Princess

Thirty-one



It happened so fast, Louise didn’t have a chance to protest. She was still preoccupied with catching her breath when she realized he was wrapping a leather strap he’d pulled from his pocket around the two exterior door handles, effectively locking the doors with the two of them outside.

She touched wary fingertips to the pearls at her throat. “What is that for?”

“So we won’t be disturbed. You wanted a report?”

“Yes. Darvey.” She breathed a little easier. “Have you dealt with that cruel man? Are Amanda and her family safe now?”

Byrne walked over to the ornate stone balustrade that edged the balcony, his boots striking the paving stones forcefully, his expression unreadable. “The pimp has gone missing.”

Louise frowned. “Maybe we should consider that good news? He’s been frightened off, knowing the police will arrest him for arson.”

“I doubt it. The police, at least some among them, are likely to have been paid to protect Darvey’s business. And that might extend to his other shenanigans.”

She huffed. “I hardly call burning down a building with people inside it ‘shenanigans.’ As if he were a schoolboy prankster.”

“Despite our differences in word choice,” he said, fixing her with a dark stare, “the man’s lying low. I’ll catch up with him eventually. In the meantime, I’ve visited the Lococks and let them know to stay close to home. Henry promised to meet with as many of his patients as possible in his examination room, rather than making calls. That way, he’ll be better able to keep an eye on his wife and child.”

Louise was trying to pay attention to what he was saying. But even as he spoke, Byrne was observing her with an intensity she found worrisome, almost predatory.

“Then I suppose,” she said, “there’s nothing more you can do for the time being.”

“There is the other matter. Donovan. Your young lover.”

“Yes, what have you—” She cut herself off, realizing he’d tricked her. “Don’t be crude,” she snapped. “I never said we were anything but friends.”

“No, you didn’t,” he said and stepped closer to her. “But you were more than friends. You were lovers.”

Louise was certain she’d stopped breathing entirely now. She opened her mouth to speak but found she could not. Not a word. Not a whisper.

“Louise, it’s insane what you’re doing. You’re hiding things from me. You expect me to help you, but you refuse to give me what I need to do my job.”

“But I—”

“You can’t go on protecting secrets that need to be brought out into the open, at least between us.”

Emotion surged through her, cramping her chest, sending a lightning bolt of pain from one side of her forehead to the other. She balled her fists in rage. “How dare you presume to require personal information from me. You have been commissioned to do two jobs for the royal family. One for the queen, officially, and one for me, unofficially. That is all you need to know.” Was there ever a more infuriating man? “I stand under no obligation to feed your curiosity by . . . by spilling out the events of my personal life for your entertainment.”

He seemed not to have even heard her reprimand. “It’s not Amanda’s safety that’s so very important to you, is it?” His voice had become as still as a pond. His eyes so dark she lost herself in them. They were no less fascinating than the distant black spaces between the stars overhead. He stepped toward her. “Is it?” he repeated.

“Of course Amanda’s welfare is important.” How had they come to be standing so close? She could hardly draw a breath without the bodice of her gown brushing his lapels. “She’s my dearest friend.”

“But there is, or was, someone even more precious to you than Amanda Locock.”

She felt confused, then terrified. No. No, he can’t have found out! She fell back into the safety net of her practiced story. “Donovan was a fellow artist and friend whose—”

“Donovan be damned!” Byrne roared, making her jump. He took a breath, calmed himself again with obvious effort, but his expression remained pained when he at last spoke again. “There was a child. That’s the secret you’re trying to protect. What happened to it?”

Before she could answer, a loud pounding set the terrace doors shivering. “Your Highness, are you there? Are you all right?”

In desperation, she glanced back the way she’d come, toward the ballroom. “It’s our guardsmen,” she whispered. “Someone must have seen us come this way.”

“Answer,” Byrne said. “Tell them you’re safe.”

Was she? One scream from her, and the Hussars would break through and escort her back to her brothers, and take Byrne away.

“I’m fine,” she called out shakily. “Please, I just need a little fresh air.”

Louise heard muffled conversation then retreating footsteps but was pretty sure they’d have left a man close to the door in case she should need him. The orchestra began to play another dance. She squeezed her eyes shut and fought a fresh surge of panic. He couldn’t force her to tell him. She could run . . . just dash for the door and call out to the guard—

Byrne seized her arm as if he knew escape was on her mind. “Not this time. You’re staying here until I hear the whole story. No more lies, Louise.”

She tried to shake him off, but he held all the tighter, pulling her closer still, lowering his face to capture her frantically wandering eyes with his. The muscles along his jaw tightened, as rigid as carriage springs. His gaze turned brittle with determination.

“Louise, please, tell me. What really happened between you and the queen and your mother’s physician Charles Locock? Did you give birth to a baby out of wedlock?”

She gave her head a violent shake. Lost. Everything is lost now, she thought miserably.

Stephen Byrne had discovered her shame. And now he would force her to return to that fateful night.

Had anyone else found out, she might have borne it. But this was a man she’d come to respect, if only for his dedication to her family and stubborn insistence on the truth.

She closed her eyes on a wave of vertigo that nearly sent her plummeting to the stone terrace at his feet. “It’s the past,” she whispered, clutching his lapels to keep from falling. “For god’s sake, leave it be. Please, don’t make me revisit—”

“Listen to me,” he said between gritted teeth. “If you are ever to find happiness, woman, you must confront the truth. Don’t let it defeat you.”

Why had she let this man into her world? What insanity had gripped her to make her believe she could trust him?

She rallied the little pride still left to her and looked him in the eyes. “Sir, I order you to release me. I absolve you of all commitments to me.” She struggled to pull out of his grip, but he held firm. “I insist you allow me to return to—”

“You killed it, didn’t you?” Any warmth his voice had held a moment earlier dispersed like vapors into the night.

Her eyes widened. She thought she might swoon, except he was holding her up by both arms now, fixing those mesmerizing black eyes on hers, demanding she confess all. Torturing her by ordering her to relive the worst days of her life.

“Louise.” He gave her a shake.

Her throat burned with the salt of unshed tears. “I—didn’t—kill—anyone,” she whimpered. Her tongue felt so heavy in her mouth she could barely form the words.

He released a strained breath. “If you can’t say it, I will.”

Her eyes widened with dread. “Please. No! Don’t.”

He ignored her and continued in a low voice. “This is how I believe it happened, Princess. A few months after you started a love affair with the young artist Donovan Heath, your mother suspected you were sleeping with him. She decided she must find out for certain if she’d guessed right and put an end to the affair. She ordered her gynecologist, Doctor Charles Locock, to examine you. He not only found you were no longer a virgin, a blow to Victoria, who had hoped for a royal match such as she’d already arranged for your older sisters, but you were pregnant. This news may have been as much a shock to you as it was to your mother.”

Byrne watched her face, waiting for a response. Louise could only stare at him, feeling the world slipping away beneath her feet. Her body went mercifully numb.

He continued. “The queen must have been desperate. She had to work fast to avoid scandal. She commanded Locock to get rid of the illegitimate fetus. Is that much right?”

Before she could stop herself, she’d given him a tiny nod.

“Right,” Byrne growled. “The rest is conjecture on my part, but let’s see how close I can come.” She shrank from his condemning glare. “You begged your mother to spare your baby. Whether you wished to give it up for adoption or keep it, I don’t know. But neither option would have satisfied Victoria. So long as you refused the procedure to end the pregnancy, the scandal threatened to tear holes in the royal family. To the queen’s way of seeing things, permanently disposing of the problem was still the only solution.”

His voice gentled at seeing the agony reflected in her eyes. “Louise, I’m not saying you wanted your baby to die. Victoria is a powerful, determined woman. She probably talked you into going off to the family home on the Isle of Wight for your confinement, letting you think it would be only to deliver the baby away from prying eyes.”

Louise wept openly now, no more able to stop her tears than she could have willed away a monsoon. Her breast heaved, wracking her entire body. “How can you be so cruel? I hate you, you monster!” She sobbed. “To speak of such things—”

Inconceivably, Stephen Byrne pulled her into his arms. He cradled her head against his deep chest, the coolness of his military medals soothing her flaming cheek. “I’m sorry. Truly I am, Louise. But you need to face what happened and leave the guilt behind.”

“Oh Lord!” she cried.

He was ruthless. Why wouldn’t he just shut up? But she let him hold her, feeling so much safer in his arms than standing apart from him on the balcony, in the chill wind.

He kept on talking, more to himself than to her now. Fitting pieces of the puzzle together in his mind, a man obsessed with the desire to understand. “You gave birth to your baby. Sir Charles Locock, father to Amanda’s husband, attended. You probably weren’t even allowed to see the child. Maybe Locock told you it was stillborn. Maybe you didn’t believe him. Therefore your resentment of your mother and the closeness you’ve developed with your best friend’s child. Ironically, Edward Locock, the doctor’s grandson, has become a surrogate son to you.”

Louise tearfully shook her head, rejecting his words. What she had done had been wrong. Loving Donovan. Deceiving her family. Keeping her pregnancy from the world. But she couldn’t let Stephen Byrne think her sins were as black as he painted them.

She sucked down a deep, shuddering breath and seized fragile control of her thoughts. The truth. There was nowhere to go now but to the truth.

“It—wasn’t—like—that.” She gulped down air between convulsing sobs.

“No? Then tell me how it was,” he murmured into her hair.

Louise closed her eyes, pressing her feverish cheek against Byrne’s chest. She listened to his heart, strong and steady and reassuring against her ear. She breathed in the scent of him, and he wrapped his arms even tighter around her. Only in his embrace did she find the strength to remember how it had been, and say the words out loud.

“You’re right,” she whispered, drifting back in time, “but only about some of it.”

And then she was in that horrid room again. The old doctor and his wife standing over her bed. The crashing sounds of the ocean pounding the rocks outside her window, and the unbearable pain tearing apart her body as she struggled to bring her baby into the world.

She remembered every detail as if it were yesterday . . .