Page 11 of The Royal Curse

That might’ve been partly the wine, of course.

I shoved off the wall and down the corridor, detouring at the foot of the stairs to avoid a pair of footmen carrying a large chair down, and going around toward the garden. The fresh air wouldn’t do me any harm.

Of course, the fresh air hit me like a slap in the face when I opened the side door, icy cold and bearing a hint of the snow that idiot Gennaro had predicted. The thin linen shirt and light coat Benetto had chosen for me didn’t quite cut it, but it didn’t matter. I turned my face up to the watery sunlight and smiled, the skin of my face stretching almost painfully.

Coffee.

A quick jaunt around the corner of the east wing of the palace brought me to a small gate that led to the royal family’s private gardens, and the guard there murmured a greeting and bowed me through. A few more steps took me to my own terrace stairs.

By the time I got to the top my vision had gone a little sparkly, the exertion of walking up making me lightheaded. I so rarely drank that much wine, and I’d forgotten how miserable the mornings after could be, especially when I didn’t have any breakfast.

At the top, I stopped and leaned one hand against the wall, head hanging down. I used the other hand to shield my eyes from the glaring reflection of the sun off of the pale terracotta floor tiles. Who’d glazed and polished them to that ungodly sheen? Fuck.

“Wine gives me a hell of a headache the next day, too,” said a deep voice. Andreas’s voice.

My brain and spine did their damnedest to leap sideways out of my skin, and I yelped and rocked on my heels and blinked my eyes against the sun—and one of my feet met empty air, and my arms windmilled—

“Fuck,” Andreas said, and then an arm like an iron bar clamped around my midsection and yanked me back.

Instead of pinwheeling down the stairs, I slammed into a hard chest and stopped moving, my face mashed into his shoulder. It knocked the wind out of me for a second, and I sucked in a deep breath—of Andreas, richly spicy and faintly like coffee and leather and metal, soothing and warm. My eyes rolled back in my head as all my muscles relaxed. Gods, I needed to lay off the wine next time if it left me this weak.

Andreas turned us, moving me a few stumbling steps until my back met the wall. He didn’t let me go, though his fingers flexed against my waist. Damn it, I’d found the perfect spot on his shoulder, that bit of a divot between the bone and a ridge of muscle. It fit my throbbing forehead so nicely.

With great regret, I lifted my head and let it lean back against the much less comfortable wall, looking up into Andreas’s tight-lipped face. That jaw muscle of his stuck out again. Apparently I had that effect on him. I resisted the urge to reach up and rub at it. Why hadn’t he taken his arm from around me? Did he think I’d tumble right down the stairs again, and then my mother would have him hanged? She wouldn’t. Probably.

His face was only inches from mine. At this distance his eyes weren’t muddy at all, and they weren’t really as dark as I’d thought, either. More of a brandy color shot with copper. Tawny, like his hair and his tanned skin. Stubble gleamed reddish against the column of his throat and the angular line of his jaw.

“Where,” I gasped, and cleared my throat. “Where the hell did you come from?”

“The stairs,” he said, his voice rumbling through my torso where it pressed against his. “Your Highness.”

The vein in the side of my neck pulsed.

“Would it kill you,” I ground out, “to answer the question you damn well know I’m actually asking you rather than taking everything so literally?”

His slow, innocent-looking blink, and the way he’d pressed his lips together to keep from smiling, didn’t fool me in the slightest.

I quickly tore my eyes away from his lips and met his again.

“Forgive me, Your Highness. I’m a simple soldier. Literal is my specialty.”

“Only someone who didn’t take anything literally would be able to pretend to as much as you do.”

All at once, I couldn’t take his nearness, his touch, for one more gods-damned instant, the constriction of being surrounded and hemmed in by Andreas’s bigger body making me break out in prickles of sweat down my shoulder blades and a hot flush from my hairline to my chest.

He opened his mouth to reply, but I cut him off with, “Move, will you? I’m not going to fall. I need to sit down.”

Slightly contradictory statements, but after a moment’s hesitation he slid his arm out from behind me and took a step back, waving his hand out in invitation. I glanced up at his face as I squeezed by. How had he learned to hide his thoughts so well? Especially when he had a very expressive face when he let his feelings show. I couldn’t read anything from those steady eyes.

I staggered past him and stopped dead, swallowing hard.

My chaise, where I’d planned to collapse and rest for a bit, looked as inviting as ever: soft, out of the sun, with a table for the coffee Benetto would bring me at my elbow.

Except that I could practically see myself sprawled out across those blue silk cushions, all drunk and sloppy, with Andreas’s lean, powerful body bent over me and holding me down.

Right after I asked him if he could get it up.

Heat pooled in my belly, the fiery burn of complete, utter mortification.

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