Page 9 of A Touch of Charm
“Wait? My turn? To do what exactly? Watch the hand of the clock until one day, the Habsburg prince finally decides that his mistresses and adventures bored him enough to claim me as a consolation prize. Or worse…” She held her eyes wide open and leaned toward her brother. “Should I wait for you to solve the problem and make my marriage to him superfluous?”
“What do you mean?” Stan asked.
Thea cradled Mary gently, her gaze drifting through the carriage window to the pinpricks of light twinkling in the distance—a small town, a promise of something other than what she fled. The memories of Bran Castle’s imposing walls clung to her like a shadow, a reminder of the life she had left but not its burdens. As the carriage rolled on, she pondered the path ahead, wondering if perhaps she had to reshape her fate rather than run from it.
“Think about it! I won’t be a bargaining chip if you solve the political crisis. I’ll go from the coveted princess to a shelved spare part.”
“Well, if I do solve it—which I haven’t—perhaps. But it’s not as easy as I thought. And you’re not safe.”
“I wouldn’t know; you didn’t address any letters to me, and Alex, nor any of our brothers, ever shared your news with me.”
“Because you’re a girl!”
“But I’m not stupid, you know! And I missed you. I worried about what you were doing in England.”
“So, you came to find me?”
Not exactly.
“It was stupid to run away!” Stan raised his voice, and Thea gave him a stern high-chinned look.
“How dare you?”
“Thea.” Stan rubbed his forehead and gave Andre a cursory glance before he addressed her again. As the family’s representative in England, her older brother had the demeanor he typically assumed before formulating some verdict that would decide her future. And even though Thea bristled against the thought, she’d have to obey lest he send her back to Bran Castle, where her betrothed might await her. Thea shuddered at the thought. “Have you considered what might happen if I don’t defeat the Prussian baron?”
“No.” There was no doubt that her older brother would succeed until this moment. There had always been one of her brothers ready to come to her rescue, whether she’d climbed a cherry tree and didn’t know how to get down, rescued a puppy that turned out to be a wolf cub, or accidentally locked herself in the western turret at Bran Castle where a nest of bees had been lodged. “So this Prussian is really that dangerous?”
Andre let out a groan and buried his face in his hands. “Baron Wolfgang von List,” he said in a perfect German accent.
“How does he know the baron?” Thea asked Stan, who only gave her a faint nod.
“I can hear you.” Andre raised his brows and then dropped them when he dropped his hands loosely over his knees.
“You know our enemy. You speak Italian, English, French, and German?” Thea asked. “Wait, and Latin because you’re a doctor?”
“And a little Hindi. I picked it up when I was in India,” Andre said. He had a lovely deep voice, resonant and youthful with a typical Italian smoothness, Thea thought.
“As a soldier? Or missionary?” How was that possible, a man that young, having lived so much?
“As an apprentice. After I graduated from Vienna.”
“Goodness,” Thea managed. His curriculum vitae was impressive indeed. And there was that cocky smirk that made her chest flutter most uncomfortably.
“I came to find you.” Thea wrung her hands now and turned back to Stan.
“You came all the way to England and didn’t tell our parents? And we are on the way to London and the only reason you’re here is because you’ve been abducted,” Stan said sternly.
She cringed. “Yes.”
“Where the seat of the English monarch is, the one with a dozen Habsburg cousins, being one of the most influential royal houses in Europe.”
“I hadn’t considered that.”I just wanted to get away and find you.
“So have you any plans for how I am supposed to protect you from a nest of bees this time?” The bees being the Habsburgs, Thea didn’t want to get stung.
Stan started again. “If I don’t stop List in time, and mind you, he’s behind all this, perhaps even the highwaymen, then what will become of you? You’d be safer at one of the Habsburg seats than ours. They are connected to the Prussians.”
“That doesn’t mean they’ll protect me. What if they want to use me as a sacrificial lamb?” Thea laid back in the seat. Mary was still nestled with her upper body on her lap, and she smacked her lips in her sleep.
