Playing Dirty(137)

My eyes widened. “Why?”

“In sex,” Princess Alexandra explained, with the air of an expert giving a lecture. “Men’s eyes are bigger than their…you know. They always want more, right up until their…you know, drops off. For that reason, a wife cannot compete with a mistress. No matter how available she is and how much better in bed she is than the mistress, the husband will still want the mistress because men always want more. But if your relationship with Andrew is deeper, if you and he have ‘feelings’ for each other, then I have nothing to worry about. For while a man always wants more sex, he will only love one woman—and why on earth would he choose you over me?” She laughed heartily again. “I have been worrying over nothing. He may love you now—in a small way—but in a day or so he will be so infatuated with me that he will not even remember your name.”

“Is that so?” I spoke through gritted teeth. Literally nothing she’d just said had made any sense whatsoever, and I was starting to get the sense that Alexandra was seriously mentally unstable.

“You will never be able to steal my man from me,” Princess Alexandra finished.

I’d finally had enough of her crap, and I steeled my nerve. “Surely you’d be the one doing the stealing?” I said.

“What?” The Princess drew herself up. “How dare you speak to me in such a fashion?”

“I’m not saying that there is anything between me and Prince Andrew,” I went on. “But if there was, then he would be mine, and you’d be the one coming in and trying to steal him. And if that were the case…then I’d like to see you try.”

“You impudent little slut.” The psychotic gleam re-entered Princess Alexandra’s eyes, and I was forced to wonder if deliberately provoking someone as clearly unbalanced as Princess Alexandra might not have been the smartest thing that I could have done.

“You’ll regret those words,” she continued. Her tone was edged in steel. “You’ll pay for them.”

I wasn’t what I expected the Princess to do at that point, but I absolutely didn’t expect her to draw a knife, pilfered from the dining table…and yet that was exactly what she did.

“Where are your jokes now, maid?”

Princess Alexandra advanced, and I backed away, trying not to trip over my own feet in my nervous haste. My heart seemed to be pounding in my throat, my mouth was dry, and I could hear the blood rushing in my ears. Alexandra turned away from me and rushed at one of the paintings, and I winced as I heard the knife plunge into the fragile canvas, tearing down through it.

For a moment, I felt only relief, firstly that Alexandra was slashing up a painting rather than me, and secondly that she hadn’t chosen one of the old masters but a more recent family portrait of the royal family, painted by the same hand as the one the Queen had shown me back in the Long Gallery at Richmond. But, while the painting might not have been anything special, I couldn’t just wait around to let her come at me next, and I had a feeling she wouldn’t simply let me rush out of the room in an attempt to escape her craziness. I had to take charge and defend myself before she seriously hurt me.

I rushed at her, grabbing her knife arm before it could descend for a fifth time. She snarled, and we struggled, Alexandra lashing out like a woman crazed, while I was just trying to keep the knife away from anything, especially myself. Finally, with a mighty tug, I managed to grab the knife from her just as the Wellington guards rushed into the room, alerted by the silent alarm that protected all the paintings. They froze at the sight—I guess their training had never really covered this particular scene.

“What’s going on here?”

At that point, the only person I wanted to see coming through the doors was Andrew, who would comfort me and protect me and, above all, believe me. I would have even settled for Queen Constance, because despite our differences, I knew the Queen to be fair and just.

What I got was Prince Michael.

“What’s going…?” Michael began to repeat himself but then stared aghast as he took in the scene. “What have you done?”

He addressed me directly, speaking with blank horror, and it was only as he said those words that I realized that the knife was still in my hand. To anyone coming in without knowledge of what had happened before, there was only one conclusion.

“She attacked me! She’s crazy!” squealed Princess Alexandra, suddenly springing to life again.

You’re one to talk, I thought.

Alexandra rushed across the room to hide behind Michael. “I was having a look at the pictures before going to bed when she stormed in with a knife and starting yelling things about me stealing her man!”