He flashed her an impish grin and rose off the bed. “My point exactly. But let’s put aside such philosophical debates until we’re safely out of Nice. Barrington will be expecting us to head east for Marseilles, so I propose we go instead to Lake Como.”
“Oh! Elma, of course.” She was on her feet the next second. Twinges registered in various delicious and very useful spots throughout her body, bringing a blush to her face. “Only give me ten minutes,” she said, “and I’ll be ready to leave.”
It was her fault, of course, that forty-five minutes later, as they lingered at the edge of the train station in wait for the southbound train, she stood wound around Alex like a vine. He had only offered his elbow; it was she who had threaded both her arms around it and hugged it to her like a rare treasure.
And this was the pose in which she was discovered.
“Why—Miss Maudlsey! Is that you?”
The greeting fell over Gwen like the shadow of an axe. She looked down the platform into the rapidly fading smile of Lady Milton. Her sister, Lady Fanshawe, was looking between Gwen and Alex. As recognition set in, she darted a quick, shocked glance to her sister, whose jaw dropped.
“Hello there,” Alex said pleasantly. “How’s Reginald?”
Lady Milton made a strangled noise and drew herself perfectly straight. She was a painfully thin woman, and she was wearing a triangular, flat-topped hat; as she turned on Gwen, she gave the impression of a quivering exclamation point. “Miss Maudsley,” she hissed. “Where is the rest of your company? Where is Mrs. Beecham?”
So, Gwen thought. Here it was: total and utter ruin.
Her spirits remained strangely buoyant. She looked the woman squarely in the eye. “I cannot say where she is, for I no longer travel with an escort.”
“And why should she?” Alex added smoothly. His hand covered Gwen’s and closed, lifting her fingers to her lips as he stared down the ladies’ glowers. “Mrs. Ramsey hardly needs an escort,” he said into her fingers, “when traveling with her husband.”
As a child, Alex had learned all the usual fairy tales about evil witches and beautiful princesses lost and trapped and cast a-slumber. Princesses pricked by maleficent needles; princesses stranded behind hedges of thorns; princesses poisoned on sweet apple slices. It had never occurred to him until this morning that so many of these princesses were notable chiefly for the way in which they passed out, and woke up. Had this pattern been pointed out to him, no doubt he would have noted that these women were invariably awakened by the hands or lips of some sickeningly humble but aggressively competent prince—and that the awakening itself was a sanitized metaphor for the good rogering the prince had probably delivered. Indeed, which he did deliver, in the less treacly versions that circulated in old French manuscripts.
But after this morning, Alex would never be able to view such tales so cynically. This morning, he had watched Gwen Maudsley wake from sleep, and there had, indeed, been something magical about it. He’d sat beside her, his thoughts strangely quiescent, and watched consciousness steal over her, spreading first as a faint blush across her pale cheeks, and then in the twitch of her lashes, and the soft sigh that stirred her dark red hair. She came to life like a character from a place far sweeter and less cruel than anywhere he’d ever traveled. The half-conscious brush of her knuckles over her mouth had reddened her lips. When she’d shifted, the scent of her had perfumed the air around him.
He might have mocked himself if he hadn’t been tired of always mocking at what others took seriously. It was easier to mock, of course, but other people refrained, and not always because they lacked the imagination or sense of humor required to mock. Sometimes they refrained because they dared to long for something that was not easily grasped, something that might slip away if one did not pay it the proper respect—prayerful respect, the sort that moved one to remove one’s hat by the side of a grave, or to bow one’s head to soldiers marching off to war, even while damning the fat MPs that sent them to die. Life was not all for mockery. Nor was laughter. But it was harder to spot the prayerful moments when they called for laughter instead of tears. Tears spelled an end.
Laughter could spell a beginning.
He had watched her wake, and he’d thought to himself that he had no idea what sort of beginning he might offer her. But he’d seen, in her face, which he’d touched lightly with one hand as she’d rolled toward him, that he had certainly reached an end when he’d met her again in London.
On the platform, when the sneering crone and her assistant harpy had popped up to peck at them, he’d thought he had found the answer. What a sleeping princess required was a heroic rescue.