Page 48 of The Princess and the Rogue

“Do you live here in the Tricorn Club?”

“No,” he said easily. “I don’t liveherein the Tricorn Club,in the gaming room. I live next door, in my own apartments.Your turn, Miss Brown.” The corner of his mouth curled upward. “Do you want me to kiss you?”

Anya’s breath caught. Oh, he was wicked. “You think you know the answer to that?”

“We’ll see. Tell me the truth or a lie. Your choice.”

“In that case, no,” she lied evenly, maintaining eye contact with him even though her pulse beat a reckless tattoo in her throat. “I don’t want you to kiss me.”Not more than fifty times a day,she added silently.

His smile widened. “That was excellent. I really can’t tell if you’re lying or not.”

He looked as if he would say more, but a disturbance from the card room broke the spell. He gave a deep sigh of irritation. “Let’s see what that’s about.”

He ushered her across the floor and growled deep in his throat when he spied a pair of young men slumped atone of the tables. Both were clearly well on the way to inebriation, judging by their loud, slurred conversation and heightened color.

“Here’s another life skill,” he growled. “How about I show you how we get rid of troublemakers here at the Tricorn?”

“Doesn’t Mickey just pick them up by their collars and throw them out into the street?”

“It’s tempting, but no. I have a more subtle method.”

He beckoned to one of the hovering staff members. “Evening, Tom. I see Alvanley and Stoke are already in their cups and starting to get annoying. I think it’s time for them to leave.”

The thin man smiled. “Very good, sir.”

Anya sent Wolff a confused glance as the servant slipped out of the room and returned moments later with two glasses filled with what looked like more liquor. He delivered them to the troublemakers’ table with a polite bow.

“What’s this?” The red-faced man with a disordered neckcloth peered upward, angry at the interruption to his card game. “I never ordered these.”

“On the ’ouse, gents,” Tom said calmly. “Compliments of the establishment.”

Stoke, or Alvanley, whichever one it was, softened visibly. “Oh. Well. Mighty kind of you.”

Both gamblers accepted their drinks and downed them in a drunken toast.

Wolff smiled. “Watch this. In five minutes, they’ll be asleep.”

Anya gasped. “You’ve drugged them?”

“Just a few drops of mandrake tincture in their brandy. Not enough to cause any lasting harm, just temporary insensibility. Lagrasse has the recipe.”

Sure enough, not five minutes later, both men began to yawn. Stoke—or Alvanley—sagged in his chair, whilethe other one slowly slumped forward until his forehead came to rest on the card table. He let out a snore. Tom leapt forward and caught the glass from the man’s limp hand before it could fall to the floor.

“That was particularly quick because both of them were already six sheets to the wind. It takes a bit longer on someone who’s sober,” Wolff explained.

“Amazing!” Anya murmured. “That’s far better than using force.”

Just imagine if she’d had something like that when dealing with Vasili. Obviously, as a means of defense, it still relied on getting the target to ingest it, but she would have felt far safer, knowing she had the ability to render him—or any other threat, for that matter—unconscious in a matter of minutes.

“Do you think I could have some of that stuff?”

Wolff sent her a skeptical look. “And have you use it on me? I think not.”

She frowned. “I promise on my life I will never use it on you, nor on any of your staff. Youdidagree to provide me with means to defend myself without weapons, remember?”

“In exchange for you listening in to your countrymen. Which you have yet to do.”

He led her back into the main room and indicated a group of four men dicing at a table with Lord Naseby. “That’s Prince Trubetskoi, one of the Russian envoys. Go and see if you can hear anything useful.”

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