Page 161 of Dukes Are Forever
And if he played his cards right, Balfour would never get close enough to realize the mistake.
"Your wife?" The queen's eyebrows almost hit the roof. "Are you insane?"
"Adele volunteered," he replied.
Insisted, despite his best arguments, if he was being honest.
"Then where am I to go?" the queen demanded. "What am I to do?"
Sir Gideon Scott leaned back in his chair. "That is where I come in. I have a small country estate very few people know about. You and I are going to slip out of the tower via one of Malloryn's secret passages and vanish to the country until Balfour is brought to heel. I have a carriage awaiting you as we speak."
"You planned this?" she gasped.
Scott scrubbed at his jaw. "I happen to agree with Malloryn on this matter. Balfour needs to be dealt with, and Malloryn has proof confirming the Ivory Tower is a target. The Coldrush Guards are compromised. The Echelon is full of Rising Sons. So we either remove the lot of them while we try to ascertain which of them are Balfour's, or we tempt them to make their play."
The queen looked at all of her councilors in turn, but Malloryn had spent half the night in secret meetings. They needed to present a united front.
"How intriguing," the queen drawled. "Not a one of you is protesting this idiot scheme. Do I even bother calling for a council vote? Or have you already had one?"
"It's for your own protection, my dear," said Mina, the Duchess of Casavian, as she circled the table and took her dearest friend's hand. "Think of it as a holiday. Youwerethe one who was saying how you wish you'd been born a commoner just the other day. Well, now you get to be one."
"Mina and Barrons will be staying here," he told the queen. "Nobody would believe the Duchess of Casavian would abandon you. Sir Gideon will accompany you and play the gracious host; and Lynch and his wife, Rosalind, will be in your retinue for protection. We don't expect the ruse to be discovered, but we cannot be too certain. The fewer people outside this room who know you're gone, the better."
"I see," she said. "I'm leaving my country in your hands, Malloryn."
"I will protect it as if it were my own."
She sighed. "Don't destroy my city. Don't ruin my tower. And for God's sake, don't get yourself killed. You and I haven't had the last word on this subject."
He winked slowly at her. "As my queen commands."
* * *
The queen slipped awayin the middle of the night with her small retinue of trusted guards.
Malloryn smuggled Adele into Alexandra's chambers, where he checked all the wardrobes and under the bed with a small mechanical apparatus that sensed listening devices before pronouncing the room clear. The rest of the Company of Rogues was interspersed among the guest chambers on the floor below them, and he'd requested a handful of Coldrush Guards he knew to be loyal to take guard duty.
Now it was just a matter of waiting.
"Well," Adele murmured, easing the queen's crown from her head and holding it reverently. "Life at your side is certainly entertaining. And touching this is better than holding an entire case filled with diamonds." She closed her eyes for a moment. "I am touching the queen's crown. I waswearingit on my head."
"Do you need a moment alone with the crown?"
"I think I'm going to sleep with it on," she whispered, sharing a conspiratorial smile with him.
"I've been replaced, have I?"
"Who said you'd ever earned your place in my bed?"
Her husband shook his head. "It's the diamonds, isn't it? If I glue one to my forehead, will I have your entire focus?"
"If you glue one somewhere else, you might."
He gave her a swat on the bottom. "I've created a monster."
Adele burst into laughter, and he shook his head at her. Opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it with what could only be described as a flash of chagrin darting across his expression.
"You have something to say," she interpreted.
