Page 1 of Lord Fournier’s Shameless Princess (Scarlett Affairs #4)

10 Frederickstrasse

Karlsruhe, Margravate of Baden

June 10, 1803

S he had four words to say to this man tonight. Four. She would do the work he could not, had not. Why and how his mission was unfinished did not concern her. She was charged with the completion of this and she would see it done.

Her hired traveling carriage with good fittings and four fine horses covered the last miles from Ettenheim to Karlsruhe with speed. If comfort were rather lacking, and she bounced along the rough road that her distant cousin the Margrave of Baden had not cleared well despite his excellent funds from Bonaparte, she endured.

She huffed and buried her fingers in the thick wool coach blanket. She disliked riding at night, when the chill of the evening invaded her bones. Born in August in the tiny town of Leghorn Italy, she preferred heat. Any kind of heat.

Tonight, she’d give a blast of it to the man she called upon. She cared not for his reputation. Rather, his reputations, plural. An English baron, he was by blood a German prince as well, though through too many delineations of the Bergenhaven line to have any claim to land or power. Only influence. Which he had frittered away in Britain in his youth, gambling and carousing. Though he rarely seduced females, young or widowed, he had departed London one dark night because of a scandal with one.

He had taken up other, subtler pursuits. Some said they were dissolute. Most said they were clandestine. Whatever his pleasure, he had traveled everywhere from Jaffa to Naples to Berlin and back.

Finally, after many years of wandering among princes and sheiks, he had settled here in Karlsruhe, the capital of Baden, this last year. Supposedly, his purpose was to enjoy the camaraderie of his maternal extended family. London gossips said he devoted his days and nights to dining, dancing, and gambling.

Yet rumor declared he had learned his lesson with women and engaged in no affairs. Some said a man so attractive, so virile, must have a mistress. None was known. Debutantes, wives, widows, and even the notorious bemoaned the prudence of Diedrich Werner Maxim Fournier, eighteenth Baron Fournier of Fournier Park, Kent. He was, after all, irresistible.

He was said to merit that approbation by his shocking good looks. His height, six feet and more. His stark white-blond hair, silken, it was said, to the touch. His iridescent hazel eyes, hotly savage, an inherited trait from his warlike Norman ancestors, no doubt. His strength of body, built by long hours of wrestling and swordplay in his raucous years at Heidelberg. His strength of spirit, demanded of him by his illustrious half-German mother and inculcated within him by his devil-may-care English father.

Diedrich—Dirk to his friends—was the scion of his large, prestigious clan. Beloved by all in his family and praised endlessly by those in continental court circles for his breeding, his intimate relationships with European royalty, and British politics, Der Baron Diedrich Fournier was the ideal diplomat.

Except he wasn’t. His reputation had forbidden those in the Foreign Office to offer him any role. They were too rigid. He was too impulsive, too nonchalant for their strict standards. Too ruined.

Liesel had heard those in the London declare it. They had reports that Fournier did more than play in his mother’s childhood home. Word was he had done honorable work. He had arranged and escorted aristocrats dispossessed of their titles and lands to escape the long arm of the greedy French first consul, Napoleon Bonaparte. Fournier had done so not only secretly, but at his own expense.

Yet to serve one valuable noble, one man very close to the toppled French throne, Fournier had failed. Repeatedly. Miserably. So Liesel now must step in to point out the error of his ways and advance herself to the job he should have accomplished long ago.

“ Prinzessin. ” Her groom opened her carriage door and pulled his brim in deference.

They had arrived at Fournier’s house? She had not noticed. She’d been so exasperated, so determined to get her way with him.

She alighted. Handing her wool blanket to her man, she did not bother to button her pelisse or don her little toque. She hated hats. They always fell off her head anyway. Only her mother’s lovely amethyst tiara had ever stayed on her heavy hair. The last she had heard, her older brother Rainer was not keeping it for any potential fiancée. No, he was selling it to fund his travels, persuading other German princes and dukes to fight Bonaparte’s intrusion into their lives and lands. Rainer had achieved success keeping their own little principality free of the control of Paris.

Our family is safe and our subjects too. Not like the man I just left, who refuses to see reason.

Enough! She knew what to do here.

“I will remain only a few minutes,” she told the groom auf Deutsch. Here in Baden, along the border with France, most spoke French as well as German. But each household chose its primary language. Rainer, despite his French and English education, had always kept to his homeland German, so Liesel kept to it as well.

On an exhale, she took the steps of the wide porch of the very fine-looking house. Four stories of pure white stucco with wooden trim of window casements, the house was a city mansion with a welcoming front door of a delightful chocolate. Fournier’s residence, said to have been built by his great-grandfather when summoned to visit the Baden margrave and his family, stood on the corner of a wide, cobbled street. Gaslight flickered in the well-appointed street lamps. No dark, ugly corners offered thugs holes in which to hide. This little territory of the traitorous margrave was prosperous, filled with money given by Bonaparte and soldiers conscripted by him. No wonder no one walked the street. Nor did carriages idle here, either. People were home, wondering what their erstwhile margrave might decide to supply the French upstart with tomorrow.

Plus, it was late. Past dinner. Past time for schnapps and intimate conversations. The moon and stars above shone like sugared candies in the black velvet sky. Only a few lights flickered in the first- and second-floor windows of Fournier’s house. Good. He was alone.

She’d lifted her hand to raise the huge brass lion knocker when the door fell open to her. She arched one brow. Her royal glare of intimidation worked well on everyone.

This butler, however, took a long, cool look at her, which included her lack of hat, gloves, and smile. He took his sweet, rude time. At the conclusion of his perusal, he smiled with tight efficiency.

“ Guten Abend, Fr?ulein, ” the butler said, and stepped aside to welcome her into the pristine, high-ceiled Baroque foyer. “ Warum sind Sie heir? ”

“I am Princess Elizabeth von Rittenburg.” She kept to the German, since she had no knowledge of Fournier’s house staff and their practices. “I am here to see Baron Fournier.”

The butler’s white bushy brows shot up. “ Mein Prinz ist nicht— ”

Fournier was going by his German princely title, was he? Big of him. Humility had never been his hallmark. She took a breath. “Bitte, inform your master I am here and I will speak with him immediately.”

“As I began to tell you, princess, my master is not receiving at this hour.”

“But I am here now and I will see him. Now, sir.”

“Princess—”

“Where is he, sir?” She glanced up the main staircase. A light streamed from a room down the corridor. “At dinner?”

“No!”

She cocked an ear for the rhythms of the house. Footsteps sounded not on the next floor up, but higher. People spoke. Servants at their nightly duties? Yes.

She hoisted her skirts and took the grand staircase. Her fingers slid along the ornate mahogany balustrade, and she could not hide her appreciation. Though Fournier’s house was in town, it resembled many larger, grand palaces with its intricate chandeliers and sconces and lavish gold trim upon the moldings. She was impressed—and distracted by the quiet air of serenity here. She increased her speed.

“Princess!” The man nipped at her heels. “You cannot go up!”

But I am, sir. I am. She rounded the landing and kept going. No lights, no sounds emanated from the rooms along the hall. So then. The man she sought was in his bedroom suite.

She hurried up the next flight, her pursuer not able to keep pace. At the landing of the second-floor stairs, she was rewarded with the bass notes of more voices. Louder. Men. Two of them. One bade his master good evening, and the next moment, she heard no sounds at all. Then came a splash of water.

Ah. Fournier was bathing? At this hour?

Fine. She rejoiced that he had such poor timing as to allow her knowledge of his whereabouts.

She found the suite, the old, handsome, carved door ajar. She sailed past a footman whose mouth dropped open. Then she pushed wide a boudoir door to find the man she wanted.

And oh my. Her heart stopped. Her mouth watered. From white-blond head past massive shoulders, rippled arms and sculpted trunk, admirable hips and very impressive masculine assets, Baron Diedrich Fournier was a delicious sight every woman should behold.

*

Dirk lifted one leg to sink into his tub, let out a breath, and…

A strange woman barged into his bathroom.

She halted at the door—and stared.

He gaped.

She blushed.

He scowled. Who the hell is she that she—

“Baron Fournier!”

She knew his name. Knew of him.

He spread one hand out in question. Of course he was Fournier. This was his house. His boudoir. His tub. “ Und Sie? ” he asked, as blasé as a naked man might when confronted by a woman he did not know.

She squeezed shut her blinking eyes. Her hair—a mass of gold rich as a Spanish conquistador’s—fell in long waves over her slim shoulders.

He blinked. Came to his senses, enough to reach for the nearest thing. That, sadly, was the white serviette thrown over his dinner tray. A scrap of cloth. But he plastered it over his accoutrements and hoped that sufficed.

“Remove to my bedroom, Fr?ulein , and I will find more suitable means to—”

She glared at him. Fluttering her lashes, she fought to focus her eyes not on his genitals, covered— weren’t they? —by his napkin, but on his eyes. She failed. Then she whirled around—and for half a second, he thought she would run out as fast as she’d rushed in.

But no. She went to slam the door shut in his butler’s face. Then she twisted the key in the lock. And pocketed the damn thing.

Wonderful. I am to be ravished?

Then she swished her skirts as she rounded on him once more.

Gad. What a hellion! What had he done to rile this desperate beauty?

“ Fr?ulein, bitte —”

“I am Elizabeth von Rittenburg.”

What? Rittenburg? His mind bounced along in her German, his English. Rainer’s sister? What in the hell was she doing here? In my house? At this hour of the night? “Pardon me, princess, I—”

She extended an arm, pointed a finger at his…

Hmm. Yes. He got the point. But he had few choices to protect his modesty, didn’t he?

“You have failed.”

To cover myself? He did not bother to look. This was most likely true. He glanced around for something bigger than the napkin he currently wore.

“Failed, baron! And I am here—”

“Uninvited, Fr?ulein . Go to the other room while I—”

“No.”

He rolled his eyes. “It is an ungodly hour, Fr?ulein . And I am rather indisposed.”

She stamped her foot.

Three years old, was she?

“You failed!” she accused him, her cheeks pink, her fists curled.

“At…?”

“The Duke of Enghien. You were to get him out of Baden. Hide him away. Make it impossible for Bonaparte to harass him.”

He stiffened. Who was she? How did she know that? Was she a French agent?

He knew them all in this territory. It was his business to know and keep track. But of Enghien, the Bourbon heir to the French throne, he knew much. He had visited with the fellow, often in fact, but it was all done under cover of frivolity. “ Fr?ulein —”

“You will address me as ‘princess’ or ‘Your Highness,’” she scolded him, and in good English, too. Elizabeth, the famous, the infamous lady who was engaged to a decrepit Hanoverian and had refused to marry him because of his body odor and drunken stupors. Elizabeth—Liesel—Rainer’s younger sister, whom the man adored. What in hell was she doing in Baden? Wasn’t she pouring tea in London, outraging the ton and looking to catch a good husband Rainer would approve of?

“Very well. Princess.” He flexed his shoulders. He had to get his foot out of this tub and his jolly roger suitably protected from this harpy. “Please, if you will turn your back.”

She blanched. But she also refused to look away. Her gaze kept dropping to the important items on his body. I guess curiosity killed all the good in those girls’ etiquette classes, eh?

He pointed toward towels piled atop a nearby footstool. “If you will please move, princess, I can avail myself of cover and we can discuss this like civilized—”

“Discuss?” She sashayed forward. “Is that all you do, baron? Discuss? I will not fall to your tactics. You do not know how to discuss . You fail to persuade . You fail to move him and—”

“Princess,” Dirk sighed. He’d had this conversation with Enghien himself. Too often. Dirk had no idea how she considered herself the designated person to save the Bourbon heir to the French throne. But God bless her. She would find the fellow as immovable as he had. “Enghien is a man in love.”

She frowned. “What?”

“In love.” Dirk had a few facts to impart. “He wishes to marry a lady. That woman flirts and parries. He lives for her smiles.”

“He will die for them, too, if he does not flee!”

“I quite agree.”

“And still, you have not persuaded him.”

“Princess, I beg you—”

She took a step forward. And another. Her nearness nearly sent him to his knees. Her eyes were a royal shade of purple. Her lips were supple and pink, her complexion perfect cream. She was a rainbow of color that defined her exquisite face and led him to note the elegant arc of her shoulders and the heaving swell of her décolleté. Hell hath no fury like a woman angered, but he’d rarely met one. None so bold as to barge into his bath. Nor so wild as to insult him, and hold him at her mercy, in his bare skin.

A laugh of delight and outrage burst from him. He was smitten.

She ground her teeth and came closer. “Listen to me, Fournier.”

Oh, you do have me.

“I am now in charge of Enghien.”

“Absurd.” How very beautiful you are. Rainer never told me.

“Not so, sir.”

He had the patience of Job. That was one characteristic that suited him well in his work. This gorgeous creature might charm him to his core, but she had scorched his tolerance with her fire. “First, princess, you assume I was in charge. Secondly, whatever authority gave you such a mission—”

“Do not trifle with me!”

He took a step forward, and two more. The napkin drifted to the floor. She stood her ground, but he’d expected that. He’d have her no other way. Ripe with righteousness and rigor, she was a woman few would want and few others would dare to rival. He was one of those few, on both counts. She did not know it. He’d never tell her. But she challenged him, as few women could. Or did.

More, she set his body burning…and he grinned like the rogue he was reputed to be. “I invite you to amuse me, princess. Since you assume my role in the poor duke’s reluctance to leave Baden, I will likewise assume you have some ripe hold over him that I cannot claim, eh? What could that be, hmm?”

The implication of scandalous behavior on her part fell like stones on her. “How dare you, sir! I have been put in charge of him by the Foreign Office.”

Those twits. “How good of them.”

“They want him gone to London.”

“Really?” Dirk would have crossed his arms, but, of course, he liked facing her in as raw a manner as she did him. So he stood in his natural state, his height affording him the ability to hover over his intruder.

She did not cower.

But if she glanced down, she could note evidence of his growing interest. He was certain she wanted him to recoil or at least agree, anything but argue—or find her desirable. “They can want all they want, my dear princess, but Enghien will not leave.”

“I will do it.”

He scoffed. “Then you are a better man than I.”

He did cross his arms then, even though he knew he provoked her. But damn! She barged in on me! Let her look, by God. Her price to pay, not mine.

Elizabeth of Rittenburg shook her head, and in the move, her gaze swept his biceps, his hips, and more. She gulped, then blushed from her slender throat to her cheeks. His male interest in her, despite her outrageous behavior, was there for her to see.

He was flattered at her reaction. But also done with this contretemps. Silently cursing, he bent to grab a towel.

She took one step back, but squared her shoulders. “I have come to notify you that you are not to see the duke any longer. You have failed, sir. Failed terribly. The duke’s life is in danger now. I am in charge and I will see this thing done.”

At that, she spun away. In a flounce of apple-green silken skirts and midnight-blue wool coat, she tossed her golden, unbound tresses—and left him where he stood.

But fie on him! She would not have the last word.

He slung the towel around his waist, knotted the thing, and strode after her. His bare feet met bedroom rug and hall carpet, but the slick marble stairs had him slipping. He flapped along, clinging to the railings like a weakling.

“Wait!” he yelled after her.

But she kept going.

He picked up his pace but slid as if he were skating. It will serve her right if I fall at her feet!

“Wait!” By God!

He rounded the last landing, spied his man Bartel at the door and a man and woman staring up at him—plus the princess, who waved a dismissive hand at him.

He yelled at her anyway. “You cannot go! You must tell me the details!”

She whirled. Her smile was one of triumph. “You failed! Go home!”

Then she flew off into the dark night, taking all her shimmering fireworks with her.

Dirk halted. The explosions the woman created had swept through his house and his life and left him…undone.

He had failed. That was true. But how had she known? Had one of his runners to Scarlett Hawthorne been caught? Had one of his messages been decoded? Or had Scarlett and the Foreign Office shared intelligence? Bloody hell, none of that seemed probable. He now had to pick apart any cracks in his network back to London. Not a happy job, but necessary. Meanwhile, his lovely Princess of the Night took over as Enghien’s nursemaid.

Well, heaven had better help her. The duke was not inclined to agree. Another example of how love destroyed people’s good common sense. Dirk dared hope that Enghien’s love for his lady was not to be the destruction of more than that.

But all that was for tomorrow to fix.

Here now, below him in his foyer, were two people who had witnessed this altercation. Visitors. One he knew—a dear old friend, Tate Cantrell, Earl of Appleby—and some lovely, petite blonde, whom he did not know.

“Appleby,” he hailed his friend of many years with affection. The earl and his lady friend looked as if they needed a meal, a bath, a good bed…and rest.

Dirk would give them all of it. Tate would not be here at such an hour with his friend if circumstances did not demand it. He needed help, and Dirk could provide it. Was that not his sole occupation in this world?

He grimaced at his condition. “If you will excuse me a few minutes, I will have my man Bartel welcome you properly. I will join you both soon. Now, if you please…” And he spun one hand in a circle, hoping they would turn away from his extraordinary display.

*

It was not until two or three in the morning that he managed to fall asleep. He had obsessed about the shocking appearance of the beguiling Princess of Rittenburg.

Liesel, as she was fondly known by her family and friends, was the second eldest of five children of the recently deceased Prince Gerhard von Rittenburg. She was known throughout the Continent as a firebrand, the beauty of the family, and the one sent to London seven years ago, at age fifteen, to marry a cousin of King George III. She never had. The reasons were described in detail in every gossip rag from London to St. Petersburg. In fact, the sheets gleefully hit upon each refusal, each slight that pretty Liesel had given for her failure to post at any church.

Dirk shook his head. The Princess of Rittenburg, it was rumored, had taken one look three years ago at the dyspeptic, overweight Charles Edward Stuart—the third Duke of Isenhurst, cousin to King George of Britain—tossed her mane of glorious hair, and marched away. Court gossip had it that she had gone straight from her engagement ceremony to her aged nurse in London and told that lady to return home to Gerhard. Liesel had then written to her father, demanded he hand over her allowance, and taken over the house he leased for her in Hanover Square. She joined the fashionable leadership of the haute ton , went about her shopping and dancing with a lady’s companion only two years older than her. She was also said to have told her father she would marry if and when she found a man worthy of her.

Last autumn, she’d disappeared. Rumor had it she had sailed to the new United States. Others said she’d run off with her butler. But Dirk now knew what she’d done. She’d volunteered her services to those fools in the Foreign Office, who obviously believed she might help them pry Enghien from his little house in Ettenheim, a tiring ride of sixty miles to the south of Karlsruhe.

Clearly, Elizabeth von Rittenburg had her talents. The lovely princess spoke English, French, German, and Italian. She had been educated in the finest Geneva school for ladies of royal class, then polished off by the dry standards of the British in a dreary little young ladies’ academy in Kent. Dirk knew of Liesel’s arrival there because his own mother had met the poor girl.

“Bedeviled,” his mama had described the princess. “Imagine, being made to marry that hideous old Stuart. She is quite pretty and spirited—and she will shrivel to dust closeted with him.”

That last, Dirk knew, would never be true. The lady did not shrivel, nor shrink, nor would she ever closet herself with any soul whom she did not grace with all her favors. He closed his eyes, remembering her fire and her virginal reaction to the scene she had precipitated. Liesel of Rittenburg was a prize for any man of standing and wealth. She was a princess, meant to wed a prince. Few of those might still have the means or the prestige to be her equal. Bonaparte had destroyed so many nobles on the Continent. But her looks, her wit, and her pedigree made her a woman any man would want on his arm as his wife.

Still, few would take her. Not now that she’d defied the Hanovers and her father. She was known as a hellion, and if anyone learned she worked for the Foreign Office, she would be an outcast. Women did not do such work. Not even princesses with bloodlines, wealth, and pluck.

But what a woman Elizabeth of Rittenburg was. She was wise to have refused to marry the royal cousin. Being chained to another for life and having no say in the choice was a travail from which Dirk himself had rebelled. It was the very reason he spent his life mostly abroad. Away from the mother he adored. Even now that his father lay in his grave in the family mausoleum, Dirk remained apart from whom and what he loved. Instead, he performed the work so necessary to the independence of Britain.

“And now we have this,” he said to himself.

A lady on a mission. Sent to supplant him.

But why now? What did she know that he did not? And what was he to do now…except learn if she had the ability to persuade the young Bourbon heir to the defunct throne of France to leave his home five miles from the Rhine and the French border?

“And she’d better hurry, too,” he murmured to himself.

Because Bonaparte had put out a new diplomatic attempt to persuade more German princes to come to his side and part with Vienna. The Holy Roman Emperor, Francis, was in a fit.

Did daring Liesel know that? Because if Bonaparte succeeded and persuaded those princes whose territories surrounded her brother Rainer’s to accede to his hegemony, then he would order all who did not agree to abdicate. Or perhaps do away with them altogether.

Dirk punched his pillows and lay down in his bed. As he stared up at the canopy over his head, he saw her regal spirit, her incomparable fire—and wished her well.

But Liesel, lovely woman. You might be charged with saving the Bourbon Duke of Enghien, but you should instead apply yourself to saving your siblings—and your own flawless skin.