The Leopard Prince (Princes #2)(27)

Harry returned to his whittling. Women.

“They must’ve been enchanted, too.” Lady Georgina waved away the problem of faulty equipment. “So he went and got the Golden Horse—”

“What? Just like that?” He stared at her, an odd sense of frustration filling his chest.

“What do you mean?”

“Wasn’t there a grand fight, then?” He gestured with the wood. “A struggle to the death between this Leopard Prince and the evil ogre? The ogre must’ve been a tough bird, others would’ve tried to take his prize before. What made our fellow so special that he could defeat him?”

“The armor and—”

“And the silly glass sword. Yes, all right, but others would’ve had magical weapons—”

“He’s an enchanted leopard prince!” Lady Georgina was angry now. “He’s better, stronger, than all the others. He could’ve defeated the evil ogre with a single blow, I’m sure.”

Harry felt his face heat, and his words came too fast. “If he’s as powerful as all that, my lady, then why doesn’t he free himself?”

“I—”

“Why doesn’t he just walk away from spoiled kings and ridiculous chores? Why is he enslaved at all?” He threw down his whittling. The knife skittered across the table and slid to the floor.

Lady Georgina bent to pick it up. “I don’t know, Harry.” She offered the knife to him on the palm of her outstretched hand. “I don’t know.”

He ignored her hand. “It’s late. I think you’d better go back to your manor now, my lady.”

She placed the knife on the table. “If your father didn’t give you this, then who did?”

She asked all the wrong questions. All the questions he wouldn’t—couldn’t—answer, either for himself or for her, and she never stopped. Why was she playing this game with him?

Silently he picked up her cloak and held it out for her. She looked into his face, and then turned so he could drape it about her shoulders. The perfume in her hair reached his nostrils. He closed his eyes in something very like agony.

“Will you kiss me again?” she whispered. Her back was still toward him.

He snatched his hands away. “No.”

He strode past her and opened the door. He had to occupy his hands so that he wouldn’t grab her and pull her body into his and kiss her until there was no tomorrow.

Her gaze met his, and her eyes were deep pools of blue. A man could dive in there and never care when he drowned. “Not even if I want you to kiss me?”

“Not even then.”

“Very well.” She moved past him and out into the night. “Good night, Harry Pye.”

“Good night, my lady.” He shut the door and leaned against it, breathing in the lingering traces of her perfume.

Then he straightened and walked away. Long ago he had railed against the order of things that deemed him inferior to men who had neither brains nor morals. It hadn’t mattered.

He railed against fate no more.

Chapter Seven

“Tiggle, why do you think gentlemen kiss ladies?” George adjusted the gauze fichu tucked into the neckline of her dress.

Today she wore a lemon-colored gown patterned with turquoise and scarlet birds. Miniscule scarlet ruffles lined the square neck, and cascades of lace fell from the elbows. The whole thing was simply delicious, if she did say so herself.

“There’s only one reason a man kisses a woman, my lady.” Tiggle had several hairpins stuck between her lips as she arranged George’s hair, and her words were a bit indistinct. “He wants to bed her.”

“Always?” George wrinkled her nose at herself in the mirror. “I mean, might he kiss a woman just to show, I don’t know, friendship or something?”

The lady’s maid snorted and placed a hairpin in George’s coiffure. “Not likely. Not unless he thinks bedsport a part of friendship. No, mark my words, my lady, the better half of a man’s mind is taken up with how to get a woman into bed. And the rest”—Tiggle stepped back to look critically at her creation—“is probably spent on gambling and horses and such.”

“Really?” George was diverted by the thought of all the men she knew, butlers and coachmen and her brothers and vicars and tinkers and all manner of men, going about thinking primarily of bedsport. “But what about philosophers and men of letters? Obviously they’re spending quite a lot of time thinking of something else?”

Tiggle shook her head sagely. “Any man not thinking about bedsport has something the matter with him, my lady, philosopher or no.”

“Oh.” She began arranging the hairpins on the vanity top into a zigzag pattern. “But what if a man kisses a woman and then refuses to do so again? Even when encouraged?”

There was silence behind her. She glanced up to meet Tiggle’s gaze in the mirror.

The lady’s maid had two lines between her brows that hadn’t been there before. “Then he must have a very good reason not to kiss her, my lady.”

George’s shoulders slumped.

“ ’Course, in my experience,” Tiggle spoke carefully, “men can be persuaded into kissing and the like awful easy.”

George’s eyes widened. “Truly? Even if he’s… reluctant?”