Since returning to England, he’d actually enjoyed his encounters with her and had found her impertinence strangely tantalizing. Refreshing, even. He had come to adore the spark in her and the way she went about her life in the most outrageous manner she could possibly get away with. And it went without saying that the rather constant thought of kissing her was popping up far too frequently, creeping in beside his more urgent thoughts of how to free the Weslorian women. Those two things made for uncomfortable bedfellows, but he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t deny his attraction.

Tonight, however, she was not quite as vivacious as he was accustomed to finding her, and that intrigued him. She was somber. Fatigued, perhaps? He noticed that she scarcely said a thing over supper. But then again, neither had he, as Beck and Henry were ridiculously absorbed in all this talk about horses and summer races.

It wasn’t until they had decided to have a go at the card game Commerce that Caroline finally perked up. Particularly when she began to win. That was when her eyes began to sparkle again in the low light of the candles. She delighted in winning, and when she delighted in anything, she was especially beautiful. When she laughed, the blond ringlets danced around her face, as if they were delighted, too. And when she crowed with victory and dragged her winnings across the table, she was entirely alluring.

She won three hands in a row and cackled each time. She said they were all “typically male” in being surprised by her win, and that she had “cocked their hats,” and had “catawamptiously chewed them up.”

“What does that even mean?” Beck had complained. “It’s gibberish, Caro.”

“It means I beat you, and I beat you soundly,” she said gaily.

Beck snorted. “You’ve been calling on your American friends, again, haven’t you?”

“Yes!” Caroline cried triumphantly. “They are very interesting women. You should make their acquaintance, Beck.” She stood up from the table, sweeping the coins she’d won into her hands. “This ought to purchase a new bonnet. Thank you, gentlemen.” She curtsied.

“Wait, where are you going?” Beck complained. “That is my winning, too, Caro. I gave you the money to start.”

“How right you are. How terribly thoughtless of me.” She carefully counted out two pounds and dropped them like pebbles onto the table before Hawke. “There is your investment returned, sir. The rest belongs to me. Good night, gentlemen!”

Leo rose, too. “I think it time I bid you all adieu, as well. I leave at dawn’s light and it is well past the time I should be abed.”

“What, so soon?” Henry asked. “But you’ve only just arrived, Highness! I thought we might ride down to the village tomorrow.”

His old friend was keen to have him stay, but Leo also suspected Henry would likewise be relieved when he left, given his wife’s feelings. “I’ve some Alucian state business to attend to.” Oh, but that wasn’t true at all. He had no official business that he knew of, but he had some very pressing unofficial business and he was running out of time.

Beck and Henry said their good-nights, then Henry signaled for a footman to refill their whisky glasses as Leo followed Caroline out of the salon. She paused in the hallway and glanced back at him.

“If you like, I’ll carry your coin for you,” he offered.

“Do you take me for a fool, sir? A lady learns very early never to hand her winnings to a gentleman. The next thing you know, he’ll want to invest it for you.”

“Very astute of you.”

They began to stroll along as if at their leisure, his hands clasped at his back, her hands cupping her coins. “I didn’t take you for a gambler,” he remarked.

“Really? I’m very much in favor of it. How boring life would be if one never gambled on anything.” She cast a quick smile at him, her eyes shining with amusement. “I sincerely hope, however, that you don’t sit at the gaming tables often. You played so terribly I shudder to think what the cost is to your royal coffers.”

“I beg your pardon, I was dealt very bad hands,” he said with a grin.

“Ah, the standard cry of the vanquished.” She laughed again and the warm sound of it slid down to his groin.

They started up the grand staircase, moving to one side when a footman went barreling past them in the opposite direction.

“You’re leaving on the morrow?” she asked, as she tried to maneuver up the stairs holding her skirt and her coins.

“Je. For heaven’s sake, Caroline, please allow me to carry your winnings. You may count every coin when we reach the next floor and flog me if any go missing. But you’ll never make it up these stairs without the very real danger of falling and cracking your head if you don’t have use of your hands.”

“You’re right.” She turned to him, reluctantly pouring her coins into his palm, then carefully closing his fingers around them. Her hand lingered on his. “Don’t drop them.”

He covered her hand with his free one and squeezed. “I would rather die,” he said gravely, and with a soft smile let her hand go.

She gathered her skirts, and they resumed walking up the stairs. “When will you return to Alucia?” she asked as she looked up at a portrait of an ancestor glaring at them from above.

“I can’t say for certain, but I’d wager sometime after I’ve been catatumpously chewed up by England.”

“Oh!” she crowed with delight. “Catawamptiously, Your Highness.”

“Leo.”

“Pardon?”

He smiled at her. “I like when you use my given name. My close friends call me Leo.”

“Then I shall call you Leopold.”

He shook his head. “For the sake of quenching my curiosity...are you the most obstinate woman in this land?”

She giggled. “Thank you for your confidence in me, Your Highness, but I think not.” She leaned toward him and whispered, “I think Lady Norfolk can be rather obstinate when she’s of a mind.”

One of his brows rose above the other. “I had that feeling.”

She laughed.

“Why do you ask about my return to Alucia? Are you so eager for me to be gone?”

“Oh, in the worst way,” she said with a winsome smile. “And I feel it is my duty to warn Eliza when the time comes. I write her every week without fail. I tell her everything.”

“I certainly hope not everything.” He winked. And then delighted at her blush. “Why bother writing? Her sister can send her gazette, in which, I may vouch, no stone of gossip is left unturned.”

“You are wrong about that. There are always certain details left out of the gazette,” she said as they reached the next floor. “Details the three of us keep to ourselves.” She paused. “Would you like to know what they are?”

“I would.”

“I thought you might! But I can’t tell you.” She laughed and turned into a wide corridor.

“Can’t you? I might have to employ my technique of teasing information from the most reluctant beings,” he warned her.

“It won’t work. My lips are sealed.” She mimed locking her lips with a key and throwing it away.

A maid hurried by them, also in the opposite direction. They both paused in their walk and watched her practically jog down the hall. They looked at each other; Caroline shrugged.

They carried on.

“What sort of things do you write to Eliza?”

“Everything! I wrote her about my illness and how my funeral had all but been arranged, and that no one had thought to ask me what I should like to wear to my own burial.”

Leo laughed.

“I write her about you,” Caroline said with a saucy little glance at him.

“About what? Are you spying on me?”

She clucked her tongue at him. “Spying is hardly necessary. Everyone knows your news.”

“This may come as a shock, madam, but much of what you think you know of me is not true. Most of it, I’d wager.”

“Ha,” she said with a roll of her eyes.

“For example,” he said as they turned another corner into the wing where the guest rooms were situated. “I am not having an affair with your chambermaid, as you so ardently believed.”

“You brought her flowers,” Caroline pointed out.

“I brought those for you, Caroline. I thought you might like something to brighten your room.”

Her gaze narrowed skeptically.

“All right, I brought them to Beck to give to you, and he suggested that they would brighten your room. But as they were all occupied in the making of your soup, I took them up myself, because I wanted to look in on you and assure myself that my worthy opponent was not going to desert me.”

Caroline paused in front of a door to one of the guest suites. She turned her back to it and faced him. “What a lovely thing to say. I like the idea of being a worthy opponent. And I would almost believe your concern, but then you disappeared with Ann.”

She hadn’t missed a thing, even as ill as she was. “Je, I did. Only because Ann was acquainted with a Weslorian woman for whom I had a message. I needed to know where to find her. That’s all I ever asked of her.”

“And is that all you asked of her at Leadenhall?”

“That’s all, on my word. It required more than one meeting as she was disconcertingly reluctant to trust me.”

Caroline’s lips curved into a smile. She studied him a moment, then shrugged and tapped his hand. “My winnings.” She held up both palms.

Leo poured the coins into her hands. “There is something else you have wrong about me, if you’d like to know.”

“Oh, I highly doubt that, but please do try to convince me.”

He waited until she looked up from her hands and into his eyes. “I am intrigued by you, Caroline.”

She laughed. “Yes, I am well aware I have that effect on gentlemen.”

“I’m not talking about your looks, as fine as they are. I’m talking about you. There is something about you that...” He tried to think of the right English word to describe his esteem for her.