Free Linda Needham by A Scandal to Remember Page B

assassin before.”
    Hell, now he felt like a loutish barbarian. “Yes, well, then I suppose we can defer this until the morning.”
    “Till the morning, then.” She hooked the candlestick off the mantel, then brushed past him.
    “One more question, Princess.”
    “Yes?” She stopped at the opened panel and turned.
    “Do you always use secret passages for your errands?”
    She smiled sideways. “Sometimes I even use the hallway. Good night, Wexford.”
    Drew held the panel open for his royal charge as she slipped past him into her chamber.
    “Sleep well, Princess,” he said, stealing a breath of her warm, trailing scent as he shut the door between them.
    Drew leaned against the panel for a long time and listened for suspicious sounds from beyond: heard the padding of her footsteps from her bedside to just on the other side of the wall, and then the thump of her fist. Then across the room to the wardrobe and finally back to the bed.
    Until he was hearing—possibly merely imagining—the dip of her weight against the mattress, the shuffle of silk and linen as she slipped between the sheets, a muffled sigh as she lay back against the…
    Bloody hell, the woman had a damnably distracting effect on him. Sent his thoughts wandering where they shouldn’t, filled him with a longing for the kind of contented bliss he had never imagined possible until Jared had wed Kate.
    Now he’d found himself judging every woman he met against his hopes. Clear eyes, a willing soul, softly ringing laughter, delight and determination.
    Not Jared’s life, but his own, with all the trappings. Children and noise and someone to share it all with.
    He hadn’t meant to notice the clarity of the princess’s eyes, or the willingness of her soul, but he had. Not that it mattered in the least.
    She was someone else’s happily ever after.
    And it was his responsibility to see that she survived, whether she approved or not.
    Expecting more of her tomfoolery at any moment, he changed out of his formal clothes into a shirt and a suitable pair of trousers, then pulled up an upholstered chair in front of the panel, sat down and propped his feet onto a stool.
    He slept with one ear open to the sounds from the next room and woke to the banging of a fist on the secret door at his back.
    “My lord! She’s missing, my lord!”
    The princess! Damnation!
    Drew was already pulling on his boots when he opened the panel to Mrs. Tweeg’s frenetic pounding and her head poking through.
    “She’s vanished, my lord! Into thin air.”
    “I doubt that, Tweeg.” Drew shrugged into his coat and buttoned it as he followed the woman back through the passage into the princess’s chamber.
    “See for yourself, sir. Gone like a vapor.”
    “She’s an ordinary flesh-and-blood woman.” Ruled by a mind rife with royal mischief.
    “She didn’t pass by me, sir, and Gerald saw no one come down the trellis, or over the top of the roof.” Mrs. Tweeg must have already drawn open the shutters and drapes and she was now gesturing out into the blazing sunlight.
    Drew walked along the opposite wall. “And I checked when we were here last evening after she left for the ball: There’s no secret door in the east wall as there is in the west. She escaped some other way.”
    The little fool. Drew scrubbed his fingers through his hair, the action causing him to study the pale green panels in the ceiling.
    “Look there, Mrs. Tweeg.” Each of the gilt-framed panels was identical to the others but for one, just to the left above the wardrobe, where a fine-lined shadow sharpened one edge.
    “I’ll be jigged, sir. So your princess disappeared through a trap door in the ceiling. Just like a regular mountebank!”
    An exit he hadn’t discovered among the many others on his earlier inspection.
    “Doubtless a bloody drop-down stairs from the room above.” Damn the woman and her antics. “You stay here and look for more, Tweeg. I’m going after her.”
    Hoping the woman hadn’t