Prince Charming (33 page)

“If I tell you, I will be in mortal danger!” he whispered, mopping his brow with his damp handkerchief. “I will need constant protection!”

“From whom? I’m not going to play a guessing game with you, Bulbati. Name this mystery man or you are done for.”

Sweat poured down Bulbati’s face, dampening his frilly cravat. He tugged at the lacy bow as though he couldn’t breathe. “Please don’t cross him, Your Highness. It’s better just to put it under the rug. I’ll pay back all the money—”

“His name.”

“I’m not the only one working for him, you know, a-and it isn’t just the Ministry of Finance! He is more powerful than you know! He has influence in every branch of government.”

“Give me his name, damn it!” Rafe bellowed, slamming his fist on the desk.

The man stared like a startled feeder hog, slipped his thick fingers into his waistcoat as though trying to still his heart, then closed his eyes and seemed to gather himself.

“Orlando.”

Rafe sat in complete silence for a very long moment.

It was difficult in that moment to say what he felt. Numb. Reeling. Blank. Then anger flooded him.

“You lie.”

“N-no, Your Highness! It is the truth!”

“You expect me to believe you, an honorless swine, over a duke of the royal blood?” Rafe rose slowly from his chair, glowering. “How dare you accuse my kinsman? Take it back! Where is your proof?”

“I—I have no proof. I am telling you the truth, Your Highness. It’s true!”

“It is a lie!”
he roared, slamming his fist down on the desk, but the reflex of wanting to believe the best about someone he cared about was not working this time. Horror ran like poison in his veins—not the horror of surprise, but worse, that of recognition. Still he fought it. “Guard!” he barked.

Bulbati was already scrambling up from the creaking chair and waddling hurriedly toward the door as the Royal Guardsmen posted outside the salon stepped in.

“Keep this man in custody overnight, but for now, get him out of my sight. We’ll see if he changes his story tomorrow,” he snarled.

“Yes, sir,” they answered, and took the count away.

The door closed behind them and Rafe closed his eyes, his temples pounding. Hands on hips, he paced to the window and stared out at the long shadows stretched across the park lawn, nearly blind with fury and utterly routed.

He did not know what to think.

In the two years since Orlando had moved from Florence and established himself on Ascencion, Rafe had often sensed that the man was not exactly what he seemed. But Rafe had always felt a bit sorry for his strange, brooding, solitary cousin, who had no immediate living family and no real friends that Rafe knew of. He had supposed Orlando was a trifle jealous of him, as most men were, regrettably. But if Orlando’s rancor ran deeper than surface jealousy, Rafe was not sure he wanted to know it.

Ever since he had found out that Orlando had gone behind his back to talk to Daniela, Rafe had been wary of his cousin, inevitably. Even if his kinsman’s intentions had indeed been to protect him and the family, Orlando’s private talk with Dani was a breach of trust. That had been a personal matter, but this accusation from Count Bulbati had more profound and far-reaching implications.

Strangest of all was Bulbati’s repeated statement that Orlando had vast power and would actually kill him if he revealed his name. Rafe frowned to himself. Surely that sloppy swine was lying.

Why, he had seen Orlando that very morning and had read nothing unusual in his cousin’s attitude. The duke had been present for the meetings of Rafe’s new, woefully green cabinet. He had been glad of his cousin’s presence, since Orlando was older and had more experience than any other man he had appointed.

Orlando had behaved naturally and Rafe had shrugged off his uneasiness, for if he didn’t trust his own family, whom could he trust? Mulling on it now, that seemed like a hopelessly naive philosophy.

Julia would have laughed at him for it.

His arms folded over his chest, Rafe lifted a fist to his mouth as he stood, brooding and motionless, at the window.

He did not like the train of his own thoughts. He had deliberately avoided becoming a suspicious and untrusting man, because that would have meant that Julia, in her treachery, had won, but this time, he forced himself to imagine the most diabolical scenario. It would not do to be taken by surprise.

Father was ailing. Stomach cancer.
Supposedly.
As crown prince, he was the heir to the throne and so far had no sons.
Orlando had convinced Dani not to sleep with him.

If both he and Father were dead, the succession of the throne would fall to Leo, with the bombastic Bishop Justinian as his regent.

The bishop disapproved heartily of Rafe but was zealously devoted to the king and to Leo, as well. No, he thought, the priest was no traitor. However…if Leo was in power, hypothetically, and Bishop Justinian died before the boy-king came of age, who, then, would become Leo’s regent?

The question made Rafe mildly ill.

He wanted to think it would be Darius Santiago, his fierce brother-in-law. But Darius had lived in Spain for four years, was out of touch with what was happening on Ascencion, and was, when it came down to it, a warrior, not a statesman.

Prime Minister Arturo di Sansevero might be chosen—but then, Rafe knew who Don Arturo’s favorite was.

Orlando.

And if Orlando got control of Leo, who could say if the child would ever live to see the age of eighteen, when he would come to power?

The line of his own thoughts sickened him. Surely,
surely
he was blowing everything out of all reasonable proportion. After all, there was no evidence yet that Father’s illness was anything other than the stomach cancer which had been diagnosed, and as for him, there had been no attempts on his life.

None at all.

Suddenly unable to stand still, Rafe pivoted and left the room, striding out into the hall in a rush of determination to have a talk with Orlando’s superior, the old, white-haired Don Francisco, venerated head of the Ministry of Finance for the past twenty years.

Rafe’s heart was full of foreboding, but he moved with caution, not wanting even to think how the equation might change if and when Dani became pregnant. If she bore him a son, Leo would not succeed to the throne, Rafe’s heir would.

He checked the flow of rage that gusted through him to contemplate that he might have brought Dani into danger by marrying her. Hadn’t Orlando sought her out in private once already?

On his way to the royal livery, he ordered more guards posted around her, specifying that they were not to let her out of their sight for a minute.

He said nothing about his cousin, deciding not to put them on Orlando’s trail yet, for the simple reason that if his crafty cousin was indeed guilty of something, he didn’t want to give Orlando any prior warning that witless Rafe the Rake was finally on to him.

Since he did not want his visit to Don Francisco to be noted by the world at large, he took an unmarked coach to the old man’s elegant city palazzo.

Rafe sent his footman to the door while he waited in the carriage, but the servant came back reporting that the old financier was not at home, having gone out on a fishing trip, making the most of the temporary recess of the cabinet which Rafe had ordered in his foolish fit of anger, firing all of his father’s trusted advisers.

He stifled a sigh and scratched his forehead.

An inspiration came to him. He ordered the coachman to take him to the wheelwright’s large, noisy shop where his phaeton was being repaired.

They were just about to close for the day, but when he arrived, the wheelwright and his apprentices fell all over him in their efforts to serve their royal patron. The master wheelwright led him over to his phaeton, which was being given a final polish before being returned to him, the repairs complete.

When Rafe asked to see the broken axle which had been removed, the man’s cheerful countenance turned puzzled.

“Of course, Your Highness,” he said, looking at him oddly. He ordered a couple of his apprentices to bring it from the pile of broken wheels and other carriage parts in a corner of the stable yard behind the sprawling shop.

Rafe waited restlessly, glancing over his stylish vehicle. It was merely a tickle of ominous intuition, but he wanted to examine the axle, just to assure himself that no one had tampered with it.

Miraculously, he had walked away from the carriage accident without a scratch, but if he had been one jot less of a skilled driver, and if he had not leaped out of the thundering vehicle at the last minute, he could have been thrown from the twisting phaeton or pinned under its splintered halves and dragged while the team kept running.

Collecting his note for fifty thousand from the loser of the wager, he had laughed off the mishap at the time and merely steadied himself with a swallow of whiskey, but now the full knowledge of what could have happened chilled him.

He turned when the lads came back a few minutes later, then went stock-still as they reported that the broken pieces of the axle were gone. Missing. Vanished.

The carriage-maker looked flustered at this news, embarrassed in front of his royal patron, and yelled at them. “Are you blind? Excuse me, Your Highness. I’ll find it myself.”

But as sunset cooled the sweltering shop, the master wheelwright didn’t find the axle, either.

Rafe walked out of the shop amid their profuse apologies.

The evening was filled with beautiful waning pink light, but he stood on the sidewalk with knots in his stomach, staring down the street to the left then the right, dazed, struggling merely to get his bearings. He rested his hands on his hips and tried to gather his thoughts. Clearly he had come out of his sleep not a moment too soon.

He began walking to no place in particular. He waved off his coachman and ignored the constant stares of people in the street. For once, couldn’t he just walk down the street like anybody else, until he had figured out what the hell was going on?

He barely acknowledged the citizens who called to him, bowed, curtsied everywhere he went—all these people who were counting on him to take care of them when he couldn’t even adequately protect his young wife under his own roof.

He could barely think. He was too furious. Head down, hands in his trouser pockets, he walked until twilight turned the city pearl-gray, not even noticing where he was going.

When his fury smoothed out to a calmer, slow-burning anger, it left him with a kind of despair. He had failed. So soon, he had failed.

He saw he was going to have to send for Father to come back because he didn’t know what to do. God forbid he should do the wrong thing. He was not afraid of Orlando, but he was petrified of blundering. The stakes were too high to be left to someone like him, a stupid, overgrown adolescent.

Rafe the Rake, he thought, hating himself. He was nothing but a gaudy showpiece.

But damn it, even Father would have been hard-pressed to know what to do in this situation, he was sure. Well, what
would
Father do? he demanded of himself.

Confront him head on,
he thought at once.
Hit him like a battering ram.

But that wouldn’t work. If Orlando had been sitting there smiling at them for the past two years, a face-to-face confrontation would be pointless. Obviously the man was a consummate liar. So where did that leave him?

Hell, even Darius would know what to do better than he. Darius would have handled it by playing just as dirty as Orlando until he had gathered proof of his guilt, then he would…do what? Rafe wondered, racking his brain. Knowing Santiago, he would probably mete out his own justice, simply cut the man’s throat, and wipe his hands of the matter. But Rafe was not the professional government assassin that his brother-in-law had been trained to be.

Besides, his mother had raised him to use violence only as an absolute final measure. Because he would be king, she had taught him to use his strength gently, lest he turn into a tyrant and harm those whom it was his God-given duty to protect.

The lamplighter, ladder under his arm, walked past him, not even recognizing him, Rafe noted gladly. The blue-uniformed man merely went about his business, lighting the gas lamps in the fashionable neighborhood that he had wandered into.

Ambling along the sidewalks, enjoying the calm cool of night, Rafe took a peppermint out of his pocket tin and sucked it, head down, hands in pockets.

Passing in solitude beneath a lamplight’s feeble sphere of golden light, he suddenly heard a carriage jingle to a halt next to him amid tinkling laughter, while a familiar male voice called a halt to the smart black team.

“Whoa!”

“Rafe? Darling, is that you?”

With a depressed sigh, he turned and looked up slowly to find Chloe and Adriano seated side by side in a dashing cabriolet, the black leather hood raised over them.

“Well, if it isn’t the married man,” Chloe drawled.

“Rafe? What are you doing out here?” Adriano asked in puzzlement.

“Dear me, he looks lost.”

“Is everything all right?”

Rafe merely lifted his gaze heavily to his friend’s, then glanced at Chloe.

Under her frilly parasol and elaborately brimmed hat, his ex-mistress’s delicate face glowed by the lamplight, but her artificial smile faded as her gaze took in his grim expression. “My God, darling, what is wrong?”

Adriano frowned at him, too. “Has something happened?”

“Get in this carriage right now,” she ordered, sliding over on the seat to make room for him as the mockery fled her perfect face.

He didn’t move.

He had not visited Chloe since he’d met Daniela, but he knew he could have her back in a heartbeat. He was in no mood to be plagued with guilt on top of everything else. Society recognized his right as a wealthy male to keep a mistress if he chose, and if his wife’s sensibilities, insecurities, and fears were going to stop her from fulfilling his needs, why should he not seek his pleasure elsewhere?