Belozersky put his hand to his heart. “Lady Charlotte, you must not worry.Ishall not be drunk.”
“Neither shall I,” Wolfgang said coolly as a footman brought his snifter over.
He lifted the glass and drained it.
CHAPTER 25
God save me from idiots!
As Charlotte huffed her way across the room and clambered into bed, it struck her that perhaps her prayer wasn’t specific enough.
God save me from men!
Why did gentlemen consider liquor somehow manly? Both Warrick and Belozersky had gotten sloshed on self-righteousness as much as vodka, even as they began to sweat alcohol and behave like a pair of orangutans. After half a bottle of vodka, the prince had spent the rest of the night speaking only in Russian and gesticulating wildly. At one point, Charlotte suspected he was reciting poetry, and later his eyes went heavy and she was fairly certain that he had said something filthy, but she’d stopped trying to understand him when he scooped up his poor borzoi and danced her mournfully around the room.
Warrick was a colder, steelier kind of drunk. When the bottle was empty, he sat at the table, looking murderous but talking little, until it came time to retire to the drawing room.
“No.” He had shaken his head when Lord Lysander offered to help haul him from his seat. “They got me on the last charge, Lysander. Go on without me! Save yourself, brother!”
Nothing they said had convinced Warrick that he wasn’t dying, so Marby, Lord Lysander, and two of the strongest footmen hadhad to lift up his chair and carry him up to his bedchamber, promising to administer last rites.
Charlotte shot a withering glare at the thin wall separating their two rooms.
Time was flying by, each day faster than the last, and at summer’s end she had to pay her mother’s debt and choose a husbandor else. Yet here she was, lying in bed and thinking about Warrick of all people.
Stop it!she told herself firmly, but her mind was a weasel and it twisted and squirmed back to its favorite topic. She thwacked her pillow until it puffed up high, and yet it still felt as lumpy as a coal scuttle.
Oh bollocks!
How could she moon over that man? He’d dropped her like a rock three years ago, making it as clear as the glassy waters of the Medway that he wanted nothing to do with her. And yet—sometimes she caught him staring with the oddest expression, his eyes overheated and that wretchedly talented mouth practically panting at her, but with suchsadnesson his face.
Charlotte’s pillow was too hot, so she flipped it to the cooler side, but it was no use. Sleep was a weasel, too, dashing close and then slipping out of reach again.
Blast it, she ought to be tossing and turning for the prince.
Certainly, he was one of the most promising of her suitors.Hismouth was almost unnervingly excellent, as if God had wondered what would happen if he took a man’s chiseled face and slapped a pair of courtesan’s lips on it. She ought to be yearning for him, or at least returning the heavy-lidded glances he shot at her.
And she would!
First thing tomorrow.
A crash shook the walls, and Charlotte scrambled out of bed and onto her feet.
The noise had come from Warrick’s room, but she didn’t hear the stream of curses she’d expect from a drunk man falling out of bed.
Instead, she heard… nothing?
“Your Grace?” she called tentatively.
Charlotte tiptoed closer to the wall between their rooms, listening intently. She pressed her ear up against the hand-painted silk wallpaper but was greeted only by the creaks of an old house settling into its bones.
“Your Grace?” she called again.
Her own voice echoed back at her.
She knocked on the wall. “Your Grace? Can you hear me?”
Still nothing.
