“I certainly have no need for a stray woman, let alone one of such dubious background,” Nikola agreed, and strode over to the carriage, gently placing her on the seat. He pulled down a small footstool and placed it next to the coachman’s box. “Let us go home quickly, Ted, before Heinrich is forced to suffer any more indignities.”
Ted sighed as he limped over to the carriage, but said nothing when Nikola held out an arm, instead grasping the carriage rail with one hand while stepping up onto the footstool, then more or less pulling himself into the coachman’s seat.
Nikola tucked the footstool away again, and swung himself lightly into the carriage. As he closed the door, he heard a muttered, “So it’s going to be like that, is it?”
“I can do without the jaded comments. I’m quite likely to find myself no longer in need of your services should they continue,” Nikola called loudly, tucking the carriage blanket around the still-unconscious woman.
“And just what will the young lady say about you bringin’ home a hoor? That’s what I’d like to know,” Ted yelled back, clucking to the horses to get them started.
Nikola was careful to brace the woman as the carriage lurched forward again, finally leaning back against the cushions when he was sure she would not roll off the seat. “I am master in my own house, and none would dare gainsay me. Imogen does what I tell her.”
He could have sworn that a disbelieving snort was the answer to that statement, but it could well have been Heinrich, so he let it pass without comment. Instead, he spent the rest of the ride home alternately fighting the need to slide down the blanket so he could stroke that luminous, soft skin, and worrying about just how he was going to explain the strange woman to his daughter.
“Papa!”
Imogen was at the entrance to the large dwelling he called home when the carriage finally rolled to a stop outside the massive oak double doors. It might be a run-down, ramshackle sort of castle, but it was still his, and he loved every crumbling stone, every rotted board, every grimy window of it. Wrapped in a large woolen shawl, Imogen stood alongside a small group of servants, several of whom held torches. The smile on his daughter’s face warmed something cold and tight inside him. His little Imogen, now a woman grown, but still his, and in the very likeness of her mother with soft blue eyes, and golden hair so bright it all but glowed.
Odd how he used to think that blondes were the epitome of beauty in a woman. He realized with a start that now he had a preference for brunettes, ones with freckled skin that seemed to beckon to him.
“I was worried that you had an accident,” Imogen said, coming forward when the footman opened the carriage door with powdery flourish. “I thought you would be home three days ago.”
Nikola held out his arms for her, suffering her to hug him, giving her a squeeze and kiss on the forehead in return. Like her mother, Imogen was an emotional sort of woman, not at all the clearheaded, logical beings that he and Benedikt were. Odd how families worked that way. “I was delayed by the rains. You look peaked. Are you unwell? Have you been eating enough? Frau Leiven! Why is my daughter as pale as the moon?”
Imogen laughed as he bellowed at the short woman who was as round as she was tall, her spherical self topped with a huge mound of fat sausage curls. The woman toddled forward, her hands twisting around themselves. She made a bobbing gesture that passed for a curtsy. “The Fräulein is very well, Baron, very well indeed. I have seen to it that she has eaten plentiful meals, and she has slept without interruption, and has indeed been most studious during your absence.”
“She is as pale as a ghost!” he said sternly, waving a hand toward Imogen, now giggling in a most inane fashion. “I did not employ you to ignore my daughter when I am away from home, madame. If you wish to keep your position, you will see to it that my orders are carried out to the fullest extent.”
“You would not…you could not be so cruel as to cast me from your very fireside?” Frau Leiven clutched at her throat, her eyes huge with horror. “Please, my lord, I am but a poor widow with no family who will take me in!”
Imogen rolled her eyes and put an arm around the rotund woman. “Papa, you’re scaring poor Anna. Pay him no heed, my dear.”
“I shall perish in the cold!” the woman wailed.
Nikola sighed to himself.
“I am too old to start again with a young child! Oh, please, please, Fräulein Imogen, do not let your father do this terrible thing and cast me out to the wolves!”
“He’s not going to do anything of the sort, Anna. He doesn’t mean a word of it. You know as well as I do that Papa is never so happy as when he is stomping around pretending he’s a tyrant.”
“I am a tyrant, woman, and I will thank you to remember that,” Nikola growled, setting the footstool in place before turning back to the carriage interior. “Be so good as to have a fire lit in the Chinese room.”
“Why?” Imogen asked, releasing her former governess, and now companion, to peer over Nikola’s shoulder. “Are we having a guest? Papa! Who is that woman?”
“Sainted Mary,” the round little Anna gasped, crossing herself as Nikola turned with the unknown woman of obviously ill repute in his arms. “She’s dead! And that is exactly what will happen to me should the baron order me from your side, my dearest Fräulein Imogen!”
“She is
not
dead,” Nikola corrected. “She merely knocked herself insensible by running into Heinrich on the road below. Imogen, see to the room. You, Robbie—”
“But who
is
she, Papa?”
“Rob
EHR
, monseigneur,” the slim young footman said in a heavy French accent. He wore a powdered pale salmon wig, white satin breeches that Nikola felt were entirely too tight for viewing by innocent damsels like Imogen, and a navy blue jacket, part of the livery of his former employer. Copious rings bearing large jewels of dubious authenticity glittered on his fingers, while in one hand he held a lacy handkerchief that waggled when he spoke, leaving faint clouds of powder that drifted gently to the ground with each gesture. “My name, she is Robert, not the so mundane Robbie of the English.”
Imogen tugged at Nikola’s arm. “Is she a friend of yours? How did she run into Heinrich? Have you known her long?”
“My father, he was named Robert, as well,” Robert said with a haughty sniff and a curl of his lip as he eyed the unconscious woman. “It is a family name, monseigneur. A
French
family name.”
“I shall die, die, I tell you, if you make me leave Andras Castle! It will be nothing short of murder!” Frau Leiven danced around him, her hands clutched together.
“I don’t care if your name is Louis XIV, remove my trunk and things to my bedchamber. Imogen, cease fussing this instant and do as I ordered. Frau Leiven, if you continue to drivel in that annoying fashion, I really will cast you from the house.”
“Aaargh!” The governess clutched her sausage rolls and wailed. Imogen fluttered around her, offering reassurances that no harm would befall her.
Nikola hoisted the unknown woman higher up on his chest, annoyed that no one did as he commanded. He was lord and master of his home, by the saints, as he had long been telling his servants and children. The fact that they all disregarded that point was more than any sane man could bear. Not that his actions the last half hour had been particularly fraught with sanity, he thought as he looked down at the warm body that pressed so solidly against him. Men of intellect did not, as a rule, bring home stray women who insisted on flinging themselves on horses.
Then again, perhaps they did, and he just hadn’t been in such a situation before. He was in the middle of wondering whom of his acquaintance he could consult upon the matter when it struck him that he was once again arguing with himself.
“Imogen!” he said loudly as he strode up the stairs and into the great hall.
“Yes, Papa?”
“Do you debate various subjects with yourself?”
“Debate?”
“Yes, debate. Argue. Discuss.”
“With…
myself
?”
“Yes, with yourself.”
“Do you mean actually speak out loud?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes it’s just an argument carried on in your head.”
Imogen appeared at his side as he headed for the staircase in the center of the hall, her brows pulled together in puzzlement. “No, Papa, I don’t.”
“Ah.” Perhaps it was something that came down the male line of the family. Or it could be the curse after all. That would imply Benedikt was stricken with it, as well, then. “I will write to Benedikt and ask him,” he said, nodding his head as he mounted the stairs, all five members of his household on his heels.
“Gone barmy the master ’as,” Young Ted the stableboy said in a voice filled with dark portent.
A smacking sound answered that statement, immediately followed by a howl of pain.
“Mind yer tongue, lad. Master Nick isn’t barmy; he’s just eccentric. All them lords are,” Old Ted said, then turned back to the door, shoving his son in front of him. “Ye come help me get the harness off of Heinrich. Ye know how testy he gets when he’s not groomed right away….”
Their voices trailed off when Nikola marched up two flights of stairs and turned down the wing that housed the family rooms. He passed first the lord’s bedchamber, then the one belonging to his late wife, pausing at the door just beyond it.
“Open it,” he commanded.
A small figure with red hair straggling out of her mobcap dashed toward the door, only to be stopped and pushed to the side. “I am the footman most extraordinaire. You are only the maidservant,” Robert told the redheaded maid, scowling at her as he wiped off the hand he had used to stop her. “It is
my
duty to open doors. Begone you and your so bent arm.”
“I can open a door if I wish to,” the maid named Elizabet answered, squaring her thin shoulders, one arm, smaller and more emaciated than the other, clutched just under her nearly nonexistent bosom. “The master said I can do anything anyone else can do. He said my arm is nothing to be ashamed of, and that in some foreign places I’d be revered as a god because I’m different.”
“You’re just a woman,” Robert said with another of his superior sniffs. “You cannot be the god. Only a man like me can be a god.”
“That’s not what Master says. He says I could be a footman if I really wanted to be one.”
“You would not be a footman, then,” Robert argued. “You would be a footwoman. And no one wishes to have a footwoman. It is not done. Let go of the doorknob!”
“I will not! Master says—”
“Master says that if you think it’s easy hauling a deadweight upstairs and all around the house,” Nikola interrupted loudly, “you’re bloody wrong. I don’t care which of you opens the damned door just so it’s opened before my arms break off from the strain, leaving me with the need to learn how to feed myself with my feet. And given the fact that I have never been able to do so much as pick up a quill with my toes, learning to eat with them is not going to end well. Open. The. Door.”
“Papa, I still want to know who this woman is—”
Luckily for Nikola’s sanity Robert managed to wrest Elizabet’s hand away from the door, and flung it open with a glower at the little maid, saying as he did so, “The monseigneur rescued
me
from the so lecherous Count d’Orville when he attempted to do wicked things to me with parts of his person that I will not mention in front of Mademoiselle Imogen. Me, and not you. Therefore, it is
I
who will open his doors when he has upon his hands the dead women.”
Nikola, for what seemed like the hundredth time, wondered why he put up with the odd group of servants that seemed always to find him. “I could have normal servants, you know, ones who knew their places and acted accordingly. At one point in my life, I did have normal servants. I wonder what happened to them, and whether they’d be willing to return.”
“But they would be so boring,” Imogen said, following him into the room.
He laid the woman gently on the bed, staring down at her for a few moments. In the lamplight, she seemed to be sleeping, nothing more, and the logical jump in thoughts from a sleeping woman to a woman in his bed giving him more pleasure than he could humanly conceive had him aware that his breeches were growing tighter by the second.
His gaze played along the length of her, lingering on the highlights of her attractions—small but perfectly shaped breasts, rounded hips, and supple-looking legs. Just the thought of those legs wrapped around his hips while he buried himself in her left him in a state that might have been best described as “full to bursting.”
It was not a pleasant experience.
“Wake up,” he told the woman, tired of her just lying there demanding that he ogle her. He hated being bossed around, and if this woman of ill repute thought she was going to twist him around her long, sensitive fingers—fingers that he suddenly could imagine doing so many things to him—she should start thinking again.
To his surprise, her eyelashes fluttered a few times, then squeezed tightly shut for the count of three before they parted to reveal eyes the color of the stormy North Sea.
“Hrn?” she asked, her gaze on him, her expression filled with confusion. “What…uh…who are you?”
She spoke English with an accent that he couldn’t place for a moment before realizing it was one that he had heard from a colonist. How on earth had a colonial prostitute traveled to Austria? And why would she go to all that trouble? Were there no customers in the colonies with whom she could ply her wares? He allowed his gaze to wander over her again. If he were at all the sort of man who had to resort to a courtesan, she would most definitely fit his needs.
“Hello? Eyes up here, buster.”
Nikola straightened up when the woman snapped at him, giving him an annoyed look. No one had ever snapped at him before. He did not care for the experience, and said with frosty dignity, “I beg your pardon?”
“You were staring at my boobs,” the woman answered, a defiant tilt to her chin that seemed to warm him despite his irritation with all the untoward snapping. “That’s seriously over the line, and even if I didn’t just turn in my boss for sexual harassment, and thus have become very familiar with what does and does not constitute inappropriate ogling, then I still would have an issue with you eyeing me like I’m a slab of meat and you’re a hungry wolf.”