Page 7 of Lord Fournier’s Shameless Princess (Scarlett Affairs #4)

“I ’m not going to bed right now, Hilda. I need to stretch my legs. It has been so long since I’ve been home, I must see it.” Liesel regarded the young maid who had helped her with her clothes and a bath. “Go to bed. You must be tired.”

The girl smiled in sympathy. “Allow me to get your mother’s heavier robe for you.” The girl had taken a night rail and summer stoll from Liesel’s mother’s chest. But parts of the palace could be cool, even in a warm spring. A robe was in order.

Minutes later, with candle in hand, Liesel strolled down the family wing of the third-floor suites. As she passed Katrin’s room, she could not help opening the door and peeking in. Katrin was a younger princess and not assigned a sitting room, only a bedroom.

From the open door, Liesel could see her thirteen-year-old sister fast asleep in her mounds of pillows. Two of the palace cats, which Liesel would bet were really Katrin’s, slept upon the eiderdown at Katrin’s foot. One was a huge mouser, a tiger cat, who peered at Katrin with green-eyed snobbery. The other was a white-maned beauty that dismissed Liesel with a yawn.

Smiling, she closed the door and took the few steps to Nikky’s room. Inside, a scraping at the door alerted Liesel to what creature stood behind this portal.

Grinning, she slowly opened the door and suddenly had an armful of furry dog who would have licked her to submission. “Stop, Rolf! Stop! I just had a bath,” she whispered. “I don’t need another!”

She took hold of his chain collar and urged him to his feet. Then she went to her knees to hug him. When she’d been twelve, Papa had given her Rolf as her own. As a puppy, he had been a fuzzy bundle with a sharp bark. She’d given him the name to signify the sound of his voice.

“Rolf, old man,” she whispered as, now alone with him, she fought tears to see him not only alive but also very gray in his muzzle, “I am thrilled you are still with us. Protecting Nikky now, too.”

He burrowed into her bosom.

She caught her breath. He had missed her. He had no idea how she had mourned his lack in her life. But her father had refused to send him with her to England.

“Rolf is too big to travel so far,” Papa had told her. “He will be a nuisance to your retainers. No, he remains here.”

Liesel swallowed hard on the memory of how she had felt so alone, so betrayed by her parents’ sending her so far with no one who loved her and no one to love her in return. Not even my dog.

She sniffed and stood, craning her neck to spy Nikky, his little mouth open as he turned in his sleep and coughed. Her little brother looked safe in his massive bed. She frowned at the fact that she would soon take him from it. Life or death, Nikky. This is an unfair choice .

She bent to the dog and, with a hand up, commanded him to come with her. “You and I will take a walk. Show me the way if I forget, will you?”

Show me how to reclaim the joyous spirit of the fifteen-year-old girl who left her parents, her siblings, and all in her home to go so far away where no one loved her. No one.

They made the central landing, and she noticed that four wall sconces in the guest wing were ablaze. Hartenburg would have been assigned the first guest suite there, Dirk the next down. Perhaps servants were still attending one or both. She’d leave them to it.

Catching her mother’s robe up around her knees, she scrambled down the stairs with Rolf trotting behind her.

At the next landing, she stood deciding where to go. She’d seen the far family dining room when she and Dirk had arrived.

The family’s salon was another she did not need to see. She remembered so well the happy gatherings of all of them there. Papa with his books and his snifter of schnapps. Mama at the pianoforte. Rainer and her, each determined to beat the other at chess. The other three were so young. Katrin and Nikky pretending to be knights. Mara with her two favorite dolls.

No, she’d not do that room. Not yet. She padded toward the formal reception rooms. The long gallery was where her parents would greet diplomats, electors, and other royal families. She put two hands to the heavy gold handles and pushed the double doors wide.

The aged splendor of it took her breath away. The walls were hung in bright red silk; the chairs stood as gilded counterpoints to the framed portraits of more ancestors who looked down upon everyone. When she’d been a child, she had often come here alone to memorize the names of those she, in her childish imagination, thought might know her.

There was Elizabeth, the first princess of the House of Rittenburg. At fourteen, she had been betrothed to the newly minted Prince von Rittenburg. The year was 1254, and Elizabeth came only with retainers to meet the man she would marry. She brought with her ten horses and four prize hunting dogs—and rights from the Holy Roman Emperor to deliver imperial mail in German cities.

She had demanded equality in her marriage, control over her household, and equal ability to rule the realm. She had refused to marry her princely fiancé until she turned eighteen, saying that only then would she decide if he were worthy of her. But at that age, so said the family records, Elizabeth had fallen in love with her dashing lord—and nine months later, she had given birth to the first of six children.

Gazing at the portrait now, Liesel saw her own resemblance to Elizabeth, with her golden hair and eyes like royal purple fire. The first Elizabeth had exquisite features—fair skin, broad forehead, long fingers, and the piercing gaze of a woman who knew what she was about.

Like I once thought I did.

Liesel shook it off. “What do you think of her, Rolf?”

The dog groaned and settled down, his face to his paws on the thick blue carpet.

“Still don’t like her, eh?”

He never had, but as always, he was a silent critic.

She turned around to the other woman who had once fascinated her. “Fredericka of Bavaria,” Liesel whispered to the red-headed creature who in 1570 had brought to her betrothed and her new home a fortune in gold—and her lover. “You still stand here, a legend to all women who must have love in their lives. And a torment to all my ancestors who wonder if we are descendants of your favorite, William of Ansbach, or your husband.”

Fredericka was so well known throughout the German states that when Liesel had arrived in England and the Hanover courtiers took a look at her, they sought to find any hint she might be unworthy of their cousin and merit rumors of her tainted blood.

“But it was I who found fault. I who named my intended unworthy,” she said to the portrait. “And I paid a price for that. Did you pay any for your choices? We do not know, do we?”

The family records had a gap in the years during which Fredericka bore her husband eight children. When her eldest son took the crown of prince, he was in his fifties and his mother had died the year before. Old tales told rumors that the new prince had killed his mother and taken the crown, rejoicing she was gone.

“Let’s go, Rolf.” Liesel slapped her hand to her thigh. “Enough of these people and their legends.”

The dog loped along beside her as she opened the adjoining room doors. The throne room walls were hung in watered white satin. The carpet was red. The huge throne and standing scepter were in gold so bright that even in the dim flames of her candle, they shone like the sun in her eyes.

“Rainer should be sitting there,” she said, once more angry that her brother visited others, attempting to persuade them to stand for Vienna and fight Bonaparte’s rising influence.

The dog groaned once more and sank to the floor to wait for her.

“No need to grumble, Rolf. We’ll return to this room before I go.” She’d need an infusion of the power and hegemony that had prevailed here before she shepherded her family away from their home.

She whirled away, the dog beside her as she shut the doors and skirted past the ancestors who had abided here…and had rarely been threatened with attack or assassination. She felt the frisson of those new threats as she fled toward the stairs, the back wing, and the cellars.

“Come on, Rolf. To the best place of all!”

He gave a yelp as he raced ahead of her down the back stairs, carpeted for the servants who carried trays and furniture and baubles.

Down one flight, they fled past the smells of the kitchens. Down one more, where the biggest, finest room in the palace exuded the true spirit of Rittenburg.

The roughly carved oaken door she pushed against was at least twenty feet tall and one foot thick. It was so heavy that a hinge on a spring aided any one person who wished to enter. The room held the lifeblood of Rittenburg.

On one side stood eight rows of wooden barrels stacked sideways on ancient slats. Each barrel had a tap and a spigot. These were the wines of Rittenburg’s vineyards, aging to perfection in handmade oak caskets.

To her right stood the other product of her land in a famous keg of oak, thirty-five feet tall, majestic in its domination of the cellar. Full of beer, the barrel had been fashioned by the first Elizabeth and her husband, to provide enough beer to feed everyone in the principality for two weeks if they were under siege.

In the air was the aroma of hops and grapes. She paused, closing her eyes, inhaling the scents of the huge cellar that made her head swim. She leaned back against the open door…as Rolf yelped and took off.

Alarmed, she watched him run, then sagged as she saw him wagging his whole body to greet none other than Dirk Fournier. He walked toward her around the other side of the giant barrel. His presence wiped away sour thoughts, and cheer swept into her heart.

“You can’t sleep either?” He sank his fingers into Rolf’s scraggly mane as the two of them approached her. He was in shirt sleeves and breeches, a tight fit for him, but his own were most likely being cleaned, as were hers. Informal as he was, the lines of his strong throat and muscular shoulders set off a stirring in the pit of her stomach. The breeches must have been uncomfortable, but oh my, did they show outlines of his assets that left nothing to her imagination. Why did he have to be so appealing at any hour of the day or night?

She straightened her tangled thinking and smiled at him.

Another thought washed through her, that she was pleased he had found her here and not amid the portraits or the throne and scepter. Away from them, she was simply Liesel. “I needed to remember so much,” she said. “And you?”

“Yes,” he said with a fondness in his voice. “I had many happy times here with Rainer and my friends. It is a glorious palace, standing the test of time. Your parents welcomed all of us regardless of country or religion.”

“They were agreeable people, well ahead of their time.” In some things.

Her bitterness over being sent away filled her once more. She dashed it away and walked toward the giant beer barrel.

“What bothers you?” He kept up with her.

“Nothing.”

“Something,” he remarked. “Something that hurts. What?”

She shook back her hair and lifted her face to him. She inhaled him, all lime soap and sandalwood. All virile man. He had become her saving grace, so surely she could share her trust in him. Yet years of living in the cold atmosphere of the Georgian court had left her wary of such intimacy. If she allowed him too much, would she be vulnerable to him? She had to be cautious. She had always protected her wounded heart by rigid decorum and a bit of bravura. If she shed it, would she know who she was? “Are we revealing secrets of our past?”

“I will give you one for one.” He arched a blond brow, looking boyish. As if what she revealed to him would not be a minor trespass on her integrity. “Why not?” he continued, more serious now. “We have been together for days. Soon, many weeks to come.”

He made no mention of her announcement that they were now betrothed. Why not? Was he saving it…for what? His disavowal? God, she hoped not. She could not be shown to be weak to her family and Hartenburg.

She strolled toward the barrel, the symbol of what her family was and what they had espoused. Power, honor, trust. She must give this man his due. “Even if I did not value what you tried to do for Enghien, I know enough about you now to trust you in your work for me and mine.”

“I am at your service because of friendship.”

He did not say his friendship with her. But she smiled, nonetheless, and took the inference. “And when we return to London, many will learn what you have done for me and my family. They will change their minds about you.”

He pursed his handsome lips. “You are an optimist, aren’t you?”

Despite the hollow in my heart from the way I was abandoned? “I must have hope to pin my future upon.”

He reached over, caught a tendril of her hair, and pushed it behind her ear. “Dear Liesel. Would that I could say the same.”

She caught his hand and held it to her cheek. It was beneath her to grab for another’s tenderness. Still, it felt right to reassure him. “So many value you here along the Rhine. That news must travel.”

“It may. But it is not enough to change what has been my reputation for more than five years.”

His tone burned her. Her determination to save him grew greater. “The gossips hang on to a juicy story for too long.”

He strode to the huge spigot pipe of the beer barrel. “And the lady whom I reputedly ruined was destined for a viscount. What I did do was unforgivable.”

She stared at him. “ Did you?”

He was innocent. He seemed so rational, so agreeable. He’d proven it from the moment she met him, as he stood in his skin only and she accosted him with insults and accusations. At every step of the way, he’d been a gentleman, a protector—and now, more than her friend. How could he be the animal who had brutally ravished a young lady in a garden and be unrepentant? Even fought a duel to uphold his name, win—and yet still deny he did the deed?

He riveted her with his gaze. “No.” He picked up another ceramic stein and filled it. The sound of sparkling pilsner tinkling into the mug reverberated in the cool, cavernous hall. “Will you take it?” he asked, offering her the beer and his denial.

“Yes.” She drank, filling herself with the fact that he told her the truth.

He poured another for himself. “I will not tell you all the sordid details.”

“I do not need to hear any of them.”

His bright gaze took her in with gratitude that flared into a wild triumph she’d not seen in his nature before that moment. He stepped toward her, so close she could tilt up her head and admire the sculpted beauty of his lips. “It was not I who ravished her.”

She lowered her lashes in acknowledgment. The past days with him had told her that truth.

“What I did do was leave her and refuse to marry her. I did fight a duel. Her brother, you must know, was a bad shot. His head full of whisky, he missed me. I did not miss him. I left the country. He still threatens to take me on whenever we may meet again, and this time, he vows his shot will hit home.”

She raised her stein to him and pressed it to his.

“ Liesel. ” He said her name like a prayer. “I would never hurt you or your family, whom I love as well as my own.”

Did he love her ? She considered what that would be like. His life was demanding, exciting…and dangerous. He was not a man to stay at home and live the life of the country gentleman with a wife who adored him.

“Drink up,” he said with a hint of smile. “We must seek our beds to rest for the journey ahead.”

She took a few sips of the good brew and left her stein on the counter for the maids to clear. She took a few steps, Rolf on her heels. But she turned when Dirk did not follow.

He stood in the shadows, the candlelight flickering over his platinum hair and dour expression. “Know this. Once I have seen all of you safely settled in London or wherever you prefer, I will return here. My work, you must realize, is never done.”

He took her breath away. She forced herself to stand tall and take his declaration like a woman of consequence. He was a man cast out, but striving with all his being to save others. That left no room for the quietude she wished for herself. He would not have a wife, children, or serenity on his estate. She was not thinking clearly to imagine him a country gentleman, hailed by his neighbors, loved by his family, his offspring…his wife.

She would not be so foolish as to imagine him as anything other than a man devoted to the art of chance and survival for himself and those endangered by the French tyrant who frightened them all.