Free Linda Needham by A Scandal to Remember Page A

spring Gora’s nefarious trap. You have to stop trusting so blindly.”
    Great heavens, she was enjoying this too much! “I’m sure he wasn’t planning any kind of trap.”
    “How the bloody hell did he contact you?” Wexford set the match to the lamp then stalked back to her, never taking his eyes from her. “Was it through one of your servants?”
    “Nobody contacted me.” Perhaps she’d let this go on too long, too far. “I’d heard a rumor where I’d find him, so when the opportunity presented itself at the ball tonight, I took advantage and went out to the garden to see him for myself.”
    “Without telling anyone what you were doing?”
    “I didn’t want anyone to know, because they usually don’t understand.” Secrecy was her greatest ally.“And I wasn’t even sure he was the right one. He’s very old, very fragile.”
    “Old?” Wexford eyed her sharply.
    “Very old. He was last seen in the chapel of my father’s chateau in Boratania more than twenty years ago.”
    The earl shook his head as though trying to clear it of cobwebs. “Are you saying that Nicholas Gora was a friend of your father’s?”
    “Not a friend.” It was long past time to confess. “Gora died nearly twelve hundred years ago.”
    “Twelve hundred years?” His jaw squared off, became stony. “What the hell are you trying to tell me?”
    Feeling just a little guilty for leading him along, Caro stood up. “Simply that I was in the garden tonight, hoping to find the marble statue of Nicholai Gora.”
    He blinked at her from beneath a dark brow. “You were looking for a statue?”
    “Saint Nicholai Gora. He was a Benedictine martyr killed in the year 632 in a battle with barbarians from the north. He’s mine, Wexford. Boratania’s. He was our greatest hero and I want him back where he belongs.”
    He hadn’t moved a muscle. “A statue , Princess?”
    Perhaps she had taken this ruse a bit far, too much like taunting a bear with a very short stick. Twice in one night. “It’s not just any statue, after all.”
    “Bloody hell, madam!”
    Drew stopped himself from launching into a longer, darker curse, wanting nothing more than to turn the foolish woman over his knee and…damnation! Not that he’d ever lay a hand on her oranyone weaker than himself. Violence only begat more violence.
    No, but he did want to make her understand, to make her see the danger, the precariousness of her situation.
    And, by God, to find out if those luscious, rosy lips that glistened so sweetly in the lamplight really tasted like pink sugar.
    God knew his hands had already tasted the perfect roundness of her hips, was bewitched by the know-it-all shape of her pose near the fireplace. Her head tilted, her hip slung against the flat of her hand.
    “Is this your plan to thwart me, Princess?” He started toward her, unsure of his own intentions, not sure he cared.
    “I don’t know what you mean, Wexford. Nicholai Gora is the patron saint of Boratania. And stay right where you are.” She pointed into the narrowing breach between them.
    “Riddles and rhymes, Your Highness? Is that what I’m to expect from you?” And still he advanced on her, ever so slowly, so that he could watch her squirm as he had. “Dancing around the truth, spinning wildly dangerous tales and wasting precious time when your life is hanging in the balance?”
    “I did nothing of the sort. I only meant to impress upon you my concern for the past and the future of my lost kingdom. I can’t allow it to fade into history and be forgotten.”
    “How can you help to insure Boratania’s future if you’re dead?”
    She opened her mouth to speak but chewed onher lower lip. “You don’t understand what I’m trying to do.”
    “And you still don’t believe that nothing stands between you and a bullet but me.”
    She had sobered in the last few moments. “I do believe you, Wexford. It’s just…difficult to take in all at once. I’ve never been stalked by an