He tightened his grip on her waist, his fingers biting into her flesh, but she only nestled closer, more secure. He clenched his jaw so hard his teeth ached and thought:Ruby. My love. My own heart.
She would be safe with him. Always. He could not let her down.
He looked up at Gerry over her head. “Hell,” he said. “Looks like we’re all going. Go tell the signore to pack.”
Chapter 24
The princess was a breath away from screaming again.
Tamsin could tell. She had the sight memorized by now—the gulp of air, the flash of teeth. The way Serafina’s mouth parted on a howl.
With a groan, Tamsin put her head back against the elm behind her. “Please,” she muttered. “Don’t.”
The princess released her breath of air on an exasperated huff—nota scream, thank God—and whirled to face Tamsin.
Tamsin winced and closed her eyes, because looking at the princess was like staring at a small, evil sun.
“I am trying,” the princess said, in the patient tones one used with a child, “to find Zenobia.”
“I am aware of that.”
“Or, failing that, some assistance.” Tamsin couldn’t see her, but she couldfeelthe princess put her petite elegant hands on her petite elegant hips. “Perhaps it is not apparent to you that we are in some danger.”
Tamsin was pretty damned cognizant of that fact, yes. Her face was sunburned, and she hadn’t had a drink of water in some time, and she had abroken fucking leg. They were being hunted by mysterious sinister assassins, and she, Tamsin, could not, at this particular juncture, walk. Or move at all.
It had been five days since she, Princess Serafina, and Zenobia had been snatched right out of the harbor in St. Petroc’s. Tamsin had been whacked across the face with something hard and blunt—by the splinters near the enormous goose egg on her forehead, she suspected it had been a wooden plank—and she’d been bleary and confused for half a day thereafter. She had only faint recollections of a dank ship’s hold, her mouth dry and her head aching. Some blissful cool sensation against her bound wrists.
Just as she’d got her wits about her again, she and Serafina had been plucked off the ship and tossed into a miserable, filthy closed coach. Zenobia had not been permitted to enter the carriage, and the sound of her furious barking had trailed them for nearly an hour.
It was at this point that the princess had started screaming.I will kill you all!she’d shrieked.I will tear your flesh from your bones with my teeth and redden my nails with your blood!
Their captors—Verdura’s henchmen, Tamsin supposed—were far gentler with Serafina than they were with Tamsin.Serafinahad not been knocked over the head, despite doing everything in her power to tempt such a fate. When the driver banged on the carriage box and entreated the princess to keep silent, she’d refused to comply, only screamed until she and Tamsin both had been gagged.
It had added a pleasant little soupçon of imminent suffocation to their general torment.
Honestly. The woman was a nightmare.
They’d been in the coach for the better part of a day when Tamsin had managed to get her hands free. She’d yanked off her gag and the princess’s too—despite her reservations about the prudence of such an action—and had had the mediocre pleasure of watching the princess’s mouth work reluctantly around the wordsthankandyou.
They had argued, in hushed, furious whispers, about the wisdom of leaping from the moving carriage.
Tamsin had been against it. They weren’t, so far as she could tell, in immediate danger. Had assassination been their captors’ goal, it could have been accomplished that first night in St. Petroc’s with an ease that made Tamsin sick to think of. She’d made a very practical and reasonable case for waiting until the carriage stopped and mounting their getaway then.
The princess had been all for leaping. “Why,” she had hissed, “would I stay with Verdura’s thugs a second longer than I must?”
“Because we don’t know where we are? And we’re in a moving vehicle? And if they see us leap out, they’re going to bloody well stop and throw us right back in?”
Serafina’s extremely regal and cogent rebuttal had been to break open the door and hurl herself out of it.
Tamsin had gritted her teeth and launched herself after the princess.
They hadn’t been seen. The coach had trundled on, unaware its captives had fled.
It would have been a fairly successful escape attempt, except for the fact that Tamsin had broken her leg when she’d landed.
At least, she thought it was broken. She’d swooned—a terrible and embarrassing experience that she hoped never to repeat—and had woken beneath the elm tree to a pain in her right ankle she couldn’t wrap her mind around.
Luckily, it had stopped hurting an hour or so ago. Unfortunately, she’d also started shivering, and she couldn’t hear very well, and her vision kept getting odd and gray as she looked at the princess’s tiny, irate form. None of it boded well.
