Chloe huffed to see her sister thespians all over her royal protector. She slid her feather boa off her creamy shoulders and pushed her way into their midst, catching Rafe around the neck with it. He glanced up with an unrepentant half-smile. Chloe gave him a disapproving look, but didn’t dare reproach him.
Instead, she fluffed the feather boa on him. “Darling, how avant-garde.”
“Ooo, it looks so pretty on him!” one of the girls exclaimed, fixing the pink feather boa over his shoulder like a scarf.
“Everything does,” another sighed.
He stared dully at the chit, wondering if he had ever been that young and easily impressed.
“Look at this, Prince Rafie!” a buxom brunette said eagerly, climbing off his lap. Daringly, she lifted the hem of her chemise and bared the left cheek of her pretty, rounded bottom for him.
He lifted his eyebrows, admiring the
R
tattooed there. He traced the monogrammed letter with his fingertip lightly over the curve of tender flesh. “How sweet of you, my pet. What was your name again?”
“Begone, you little tramps, or I’ll speak to the house manager and you’ll all be out of a job!” Chloe snapped, shooing them off.
Rafe chuckled at his mistress’s pique, saying nothing as the girls sadly drifted away, curls drooping. He smiled to himself, watching his friends intercept them, flirting, billfolds at the ready.
“Lovely, lovely little tarts.” He glanced up at the haughty blond with a wicked gleam in his eyes. “And then there’s you, madam witch.”
She leaned over him, grasped both ends of the feather boa, and tugged. “That’s right,” she whispered, holding him in a sultry stare, “and you, my devil, are coming with me. I must punish you for sleeping through my aria. Don’t think I didn’t see you.”
“I was awake…but you can punish me as you see fit,” he murmured softly as he stood, towering over her. As she laughed and led him by the gaudy feather boa, Chloe’s hungry gaze teased him with pleasures yet to come. He pretended not to notice the sheer worship in her eyes, looking away to nod at his companions. “See you around two at the club,” he said, holding the door for Chloe, who slid the feather boa off his shoulders.
“Ciao,”
said Adriano with a toss of his black forelock.
“Enjoy,” Niccolo drawled with a smirk.
Just then, Rafe heard someone calling him.
“Your Highness! Your Highness! Sir!”
Halfway out the door, he turned around and saw a courier in royal livery bustling through the dressing room. Instantly every muscle in his body tensed with checked hostility.
A message from the king.
As the courier hurried toward him, Rafe drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, for he was not a man who lost his temper. His father was the blustery hothead in the family; he prided himself on remaining coolly graceful at all times. He lifted both brows expectantly as the courier bowed.
“How
does
my good father this night?” he asked, his tone soft but edged with the barest hint of irony.
The courier bowed apologetically. “His Majesty summons you, Your Highness.”
Rafe stared at him for a long moment, his slight, urbane smile pasted in place, his marble-green eyes snapping with anger. “Tell him I will call on him tomorrow around noon. After I have had my breakfast.”
“Pardon, Your Highness,” the man said with a gulp, bowing again, “the king insists you come anon.”
“Is it an emergency?”
“I know not, sir,” the man stammered. “His Majesty sent the carriage—”
“I have my own carriage,” Rafe said pleasantly through gritted teeth, realizing that Father must have sent the gaudy state coach because, hang it all, he had probably heard about his drunken race, roaring across the countryside in the dead of night last Wednesday.
No doubt the reason for the summons was that his father wished to scald his ears again as usual with another recounting of his many failings as a future king, how the responsibility was going to crush him because he was just a dreamer, and how the courtiers were going to eat him alive, et cetera, et cetera.
He was really in no mood to hear it.
Meanwhile, his friends, his mistress, and his charming young devotees were all watching the exchange with worried looks, as though they expected him to explode any day now, any moment.
He saw he had a choice—the same choice as always. Either he could make a scene like a churl and stand on his pride, or, as usual, swallow the humiliation of having to jump whenever his father snapped his fingers and exit like the prince he was down to his fingertips.
His voice was velvet, his slight, cold smile angelic. “I will be pleased to attend His Majesty at once, but rest assured, I will take my own carriage.”
The courier bobbed as though he might collapse with relief. “As Your Highness wishes.” He backed away from Rafe, still bowing.
Rafe turned to his mistress, lifted her hand and kissed it in taut gallantry, his angry thoughts a million miles away. “Apologies, my sugar-sweet.”
“It’s all right, darling,” she soothed, caressing his arm, then looked meaningfully into his eyes. “As long as I can still give you your birthday present tomorrow.”
“I cannot wait to see what it is,” he murmured with a knowing half-smile.
Then he walked out alone, still shaking his head to himself at the thought of his father’s high handedness, though the same routine ought to come as no surprise by now.
Outside, the ornate gilded state coach which the king had insultingly sent to collect him was just pulling away. Waiting for him in front of the theater crouched the smart, new, exceedingly expensive landau with mahogany panels and elliptical springs that had been lent to him, gratis, by the city’s finest carriage-maker, who was fixing his phaeton’s broken axle.
The generous gesture had been a prudent move on the wheelwright’s part, Rafe thought cynically, for now that model of equipage was selling like mad. Strange how the world at large disparaged him for his wild ways, yet their slavish mimicry of his every passing whim had made him the kingdom’s arbiter of fashion. He could not boast of a stainless conscience, but at least he had excellent taste.
The street was crowded in front of the lavish theater, people still thronging the area since the opera had just let out. Vendors were selling them flavored ices. Since the grand opera hall in Belfort was being renovated, the ton had flocked to this smaller theater in the quaint coastal town a few miles down the hill. The cafés along the beach had become all the rage.
Walking out to his waiting coach, Rafe breathed the flowery, salt-laden air of his homeland and paused to stare up the hill at the great crooked bulk of the Italian island where his family had ruled for seven hundred years.
Under the moon, the port town before him was narrow and long, hugging the steep terraced hillside. The lampposts, frugally spaced along the quay to his right, cast a dim glow upon stout palm trees blowing in the night wind. He turned, the breeze caressing his clean-shaved cheeks as he stared at the lush purple mounds of oleander waving amid the dark boulders that abutted the beach.
He looked at the row of narrow shops with painted hanging signs. On the upper stories, small wrought-iron balconies overlooked the harbor and the rocky strand. Every doorway slumbered under thick cascades of white jasmine, whose sweet perfume softened the stink from the fish markets farther down the docks.
Ascencion,
he whispered in his mind, as if savoring a lover’s name. Fairer even than the isle of Capri,
she
was his sacred heritage. For Ascencion, he would endure his cage and take whatever humiliations his father dealt him. Somehow, he would hold on, though he knew he was dying on the vine. The one thing that kept despair at bay was the promise that one day he would truly rule this peerless gem of the Mediterranean. The one desire he had not yet fulfilled was his longing to be a good king.
Everyone thought he would be a disaster, he knew. He would show them. One day.
Sighing, he stepped up into the coach. A groom briskly shut the door. He rapped boredly on the inside and his unmarked vehicle slid into motion, passing quickly through the little port town to turn onto the King’s Road, which wound up the hillside to the great capital, Belfort.
He suddenly remembered he’d forgotten to let the royal bodyguards know he was leaving.
Ah well, they’ll figure it out and catch up soon enough.
He didn’t need them anyway. Being trailed constantly by six hulking thugs in uniform was just one more reminder that until he came to power, he was naught but a coddled, glorified prisoner.
In the dark cab of the coach, he rested his elbow on the edge of the window and leaned his cheek on his hand. He stared out pensively at the landscape. Silver and indigo in the moonlight, his kingdom rolled out along the road, like his life passing him by.
Devil take birthdays, he thought. When he was king, he would outlaw them.
The King’s Road was a blue ribbon in the moonlight. They watched in tense silence from the woods, wondering if their night’s vigil was done. A short while ago, they had watched the gilded royal state coach pass. Now a sleek vehicle of gleaming black and mahogany was barreling up the road, pulled by a team of four galloping matched bays.
“Looks promising,” Mateo whispered, even as his youngest brother signaled the owl’s hoot from the distance, calling them to alert.
The Masked Rider nodded and gestured the others into position.
Stealthily, they maneuvered their horses among the trees, assuming their posts on the high embankments over the road. They waited….
The coach hit a rut in the road and bounced violently on its newfangled springs. Rafe winced in annoyance and drew breath to shout an imperious rebuke at the driver to have a care—he didn’t want to have to buy the damned thing—when suddenly he heard shouts outside.
A horse whinnied frantically and the coach began to slow. A gunshot ripped through the night.
His eyes narrowed in the gloom. Instantly alert, he crept forward and stole a glance from behind the window’s shade and stared, feeling a rush in his thrill-seeker’s soul.
Well, I’ll be damned. The Masked Rider.
His expression broke into an extremely devilish grin.
At last we meet.
He saw he was considerably outnumbered, but according to the reports, none of the famed highwayman’s robberies had been accompanied by bloodshed, so he was more intrigued than alarmed. Nevertheless, his own safety was a national priority. Leaning down, he opened the compartment beneath the opposite seat, reached into the little storage space, and smoothly took out the pair of pistols that he kept there, ready and loaded. Tucking one into his waistcoat, he cocked the other and thought with a narrow smile,
Impudent little bastard, you’re in for a surprise
.
He had been following the bold lad’s career with some interest, as tales of the so-called Masked Rider appeared side by side in the same gazettes that recounted his own wicked deeds. He had laughed every time the young highwayman robbed yet another of his friends—though they hadn’t found it amusing.
Not even his father’s authorities could catch the Masked Rider and his gang. The common folk of Ascencion adored the young highwayman, whose identity remained a mystery, and who, it seemed, truly robbed from the rich and gave to the poor.
Rafe rather thought the kid had style. Still, it would not do to have this mysterious Robin Hood out there somewhere bragging about robbing
him,
making a mock of his name. He had problems enough with the public’s disapproval of his occasional, admittedly wild excesses. His people merely didn’t know that a bit of hell-raising was merely his one solution to avoid going mad.
Well aware that his half-dozen Royal Guardsmen would not be far behind, a narrow, crafty smile curved his lips. He raised his gun and laid hold of the door latch, gathering himself for his counterattack.
Meanwhile, out on the road, the Masked Rider was shouting at the coachman, “Halt! Halt!”
Astride a leggy gelding whose true color was obscured by the cinders rubbed into its coat, the Masked Rider urged the horse alongside the galloping team and reached out a black-gauntleted hand for the leader’s traces. The coachman was waving a pistol, but the Masked Rider ignored him—such men never used their weapons. The thought was barely finished when the moving coach’s door swung open and a large male figure leaned out from the inside, firing a pistol into the air.
“Stand down!” a commanding voice bellowed.
The Masked Rider ignored the warning shot, riding low over the horse’s neck, trying again unsteadily to grab the leather strap—
A thunderous crack rent the air with a flash of orange.
The Masked Rider gasped out a cry and was jolted forward over the horse’s neck.
“Dan!”
Mateo shouted, aghast.
The gelding veered away from the coach’s team with a scream, rearing at the smell of the blood spattered on his sooty coat.
“Turn back! Turn back!” Alvi shouted at the others.
“Don’t you dare turn back! Never mind me! Get the loot!” the Masked Rider roared back at him in boyish tones, fighting the horse.
Then the gelding bolted.
“Stop, whoa! You miserable nag!” A stream of oaths she had never learned in convent school followed from Lady Daniela Chiaramonte’s lips as her horse careened through the brake.
All the while her shoulder and arm burned as though they were on fire.
He shot me!
she thought, her astonishment equal to her pain. She couldn’t believe it. Certainly in all her adventures she had never been shot before.
She felt hot blood streaming down her right arm as her panicked horse crashed up over the wooded embankment. Heart pounding, she brought the animal under control, reeling him around in small circles.
When at last the horse stood heaving for breath, she suppressed the angry urge to punch the animal for his skittishness, and peered down anxiously at her wounded right arm. It was bleeding and it hurt like hell. She felt light-headed at the horrid sight of her own torn flesh, but when she carefully probed her bleeding arm with her fingers, she concluded in relief that it was only a flesh wound.