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“Ah, I do appreciate a well-planned rescue. What, pray tell, will you be rescuing me from?”
“One of two things, but I do hope, for your sake, that it is not both.”
“The first?”
“An interminable stretch of boredom.”
“The second?”
“It occurred to me you might have a woman in your bed.”
He stiffened, but she didn’t seem to mean anything by it. “Most people wouldn’t think I would need rescuing from that.”
She snorted. It was a rough, unaffected, indelicate sound, and he loved it. “Well, I do. I did, after all, meet the women at your party.”
He laughed. She kept making him do that. “As it happens, I only require rescuing from the first of your concerns.”
“Excellent.” She walked to the wall, found handholds and toeholds.
“I could let you in through the ordinary channels,” he called down.
“And have it be said I needed assistance rescuing a gentleman in distress?”
“I think ‘distress’ might be overstating the situation.”
“Princes are always overstating the damsel’s distress in those ridiculous stories.”
“Fair enough,” he conceded. “Should I swoon for the sake equality?”
“I do not think that will be necessary.” She started climbing, but he still couldn’t believe she actually intended to scale three stories until after she’d passed the first one. His heart thudded into his chest, magic spilling out of him in an uncontrolled way it hadn’t since he was young. The moonflower beneath her grew, doubling then tripling in size, ready to catch her if she fell.
She came up alongside the balcony, switched her handholds to the railing and pushed off the wall, legs swinging over to land on the balcony floor. She was dressed in a pair of breeches and a tunic that might be called rags if one was feeling charitable. Her shoes were new, but they were so thin they might as well be slippers. They certainly weren’t intended for midwinter.
He tracked the path she’d climbed from the ground to here, and groaned. “There was a drainpipe outside the window at that damn inn, wasn’t there?” He hadn’t been that careless in years. But he hadn’t been this tired in years, either.
“There might have been.”
“Why did you follow me?”
She shrugged. “I was curious. What did you take?”
“Nothing that ended up being worth anything. I get how you figured that one out, but how did you recognize me as Taius?”
“Your disguises aren’t that good.”
“They are exceptional.” Taius was one he’d used several times over the years. Taius had an apartment in Hightown, his own bank account, and several influential acquaintances who had never once figured out they were talking to Prince Numair, even though both of his personas knew them.
She gave him a maddening smile. “If you say so.”
She really wasn’t going to tell him how she’d known.
“I promise to forget your secrets if you promise to forget mine,” she said.
“I find it difficult to believe you’re the type of person who simply forgets things.”
Her expression soured. “On the contrary, forgetting things is how I stay sane.”
He was silent for a beat, then: “We have that in common.”
