“I don’t care if your name is Louis XIV, remove my trunk and things to my bedchamber. Imogen, cease fussing this instant and do as I ordered. Frau Leiven, if you continue to drivel in that annoying fashion, I really will cast you from the house.”
“Aaargh!” The governess clutched her sausage rolls and wailed. Imogen fluttered around her, offering reassurances that no harm would befall her.
Nikola hoisted the unknown woman higher up on his chest, annoyed that no one did as he commanded. He was lord and master of his home, by the saints, as he had long been telling his servants and children. The fact that they all disregarded that point was more than any sane man could bear. Not that his actions the last half hour had been particularly fraught with sanity, he thought as he looked down at the warm body that pressed so solidly against him. Men of intellect did not, as a rule, bring home stray women who insisted on flinging themselves on horses.
Then again, perhaps they did, and he just hadn’t been in such a situation before. He was in the middle of wondering whom of his acquaintance he could consult upon the matter when it struck him that he was once again arguing with himself.
“Imogen!” he said loudly as he strode up the stairs and into the great hall.
“Yes, Papa?”
“Do you debate various subjects with yourself?”
“Debate?”
“Yes, debate. Argue. Discuss.”
“With…myself?”
“Yes, with yourself.”
“Do you mean actually speak out loud?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes it’s just an argument carried on in your head.”
Imogen appeared at his side as he headed for the staircase in the center of the hall, her brows pulled together in puzzlement. “No, Papa, I don’t.”
“Ah.” Perhaps it was something that came down the male line of the family. Or it could be the curse after all. That would imply Benedikt was stricken with it, as well, then. “I will write to Benedikt and ask him,” he said, nodding his head as he mounted the stairs, all five members of his household on his heels.
“Gone barmy the master ’as,” Young Ted the stableboy said in a voice filled with dark portent.
A smacking sound answered that statement, immediately followed by a howl of pain.
“Mind yer tongue, lad. Master Nick isn’t barmy; he’s just eccentric. All them lords are,” Old Ted said, then turned back to the door, shoving his son in front of him. “Ye come help me get the harness off of Heinrich. Ye know how testy he gets when he’s not groomed right away….”
Their voices trailed off when Nikola marched up two flights of stairs and turned down the wing that housed the family rooms. He passed first the lord’s bedchamber, then the one belonging to his late wife, pausing at the door just beyond it.
“Open it,” he commanded.
A small figure with red hair straggling out of her mobcap dashed toward the door, only to be stopped and pushed to the side. “I am the footman most extraordinaire. You are only the maidservant,” Robert told the redheaded maid, scowling at her as he wiped off the hand he had used to stop her. “It is my duty to open doors. Begone you and your so bent arm.”
“I can open a door if I wish to,” the maid named Elizabet answered, squaring her thin shoulders, one arm, smaller and more emaciated than the other, clutched just under her nearly nonexistent bosom. “The master said I can do anything anyone else can do. He said my arm is nothing to be ashamed of, and that in some foreign places I’d be revered as a god because I’m different.”
“You’re just a woman,” Robert said with another of his superior sniffs. “You cannot be the god. Only a man like me can be a god.”
“That’s not what Master says. He says I could be a footman if I really wanted to be one.”
“You would not be a footman, then,” Robert argued. “You would be a footwoman. And no one wishes to have a footwoman. It is not done. Let go of the doorknob!”
“I will not! Master says—”
“Master says that if you think it’s easy hauling a deadweight upstairs and all around the house,” Nikola interrupted loudly, “you’re bloody wrong. I don’t care which of you opens the damned door just so it’s opened before my arms break off from the strain, leaving me with the need to learn how to feed myself with my feet. And given the fact that I have never been able to do so much as pick up a quill with my toes, learning to eat with them is not going to end well. Open. The. Door.”
“Papa, I still want to know who this woman is—”
Luckily for Nikola’s sanity Robert managed to wrest Elizabet’s hand away from the door, and flung it open with a glower at the little maid, saying as he did so, “The monseigneur rescued me from the so lecherous Count d’Orville when he attempted to do wicked things to me with parts of his person that I will not mention in front of Mademoiselle Imogen. Me, and not you. Therefore, it is I who will open his doors when he has upon his hands the dead women.”
Nikola, for what seemed like the hundredth time, wondered why he put up with the odd group of servants that seemed always to find him. “I could have normal servants, you know, ones who knew their places and acted accordingly. At one point in my life, I did have normal servants. I wonder what happened to them, and whether they’d be willing to return.”
“But they would be so boring,” Imogen said, following him into the room.
He laid the woman gently on the bed, staring down at her for a few moments. In the lamplight, she seemed to be sleeping, nothing more, and the logical jump in thoughts from a sleeping woman to a woman in his bed giving him more pleasure than he could humanly conceive had him aware that his breeches were growing tighter by the second.
His gaze played along the length of her, lingering on the highlights of her attractions—small but perfectly shaped breasts, rounded hips, and supple-looking legs. Just the thought of those legs wrapped around his hips while he buried himself in her left him in a state that might have been best described as “full to bursting.”
It was not a pleasant experience.
“Wake up,” he told the woman, tired of her just lying there demanding that he ogle her. He hated being bossed around, and if this woman of ill repute thought she was going to twist him around her long, sensitive fingers—fingers that he suddenly could imagine doing so many things to him—she should start thinking again.
To his surprise, her eyelashes fluttered a few times, then squeezed tightly shut for the count of three before they parted to reveal eyes the color of the stormy North Sea.
“Hrn?” she asked, her gaze on him, her expression filled with confusion. “What…uh…who are you?”
She spoke English with an accent that he couldn’t place for a moment before realizing it was one that he had heard from a colonist. How on earth had a colonial prostitute traveled to Austria? And why would she go to all that trouble? Were there no customers in the colonies with whom she could ply her wares? He allowed his gaze to wander over her again. If he were at all the sort of man who had to resort to a courtesan, she would most definitely fit his needs.
“Hello? Eyes up here, buster.”
Nikola straightened up when the woman snapped at him, giving him an annoyed look. No one had ever snapped at him before. He did not care for the experience, and said with frosty dignity, “I beg your pardon?”
“You were staring at my boobs,” the woman answered, a defiant tilt to her chin that seemed to warm him despite his irritation with all the untoward snapping. “That’s seriously over the line, and even if I didn’t just turn in my boss for sexual harassment, and thus have become very familiar with what does and does not constitute inappropriate ogling, then I still would have an issue with you eyeing me like I’m a slab of meat and you’re a hungry wolf.”
“Sexual harassment?” Was she mad as well as heedless? “I am not a wolf. I am a Moravian.”
“What you are is a damned ogler.”
Imogen and the others in the room gasped in surprise at her use of profanity.
He flared his nostrils at her in a manner that had, in the past, never failed to intimidate those who had the audacity to irritate him, although now that he thought about it, there weren’t very many people who deliberately attempted to try his temper in the manner of this annoying, delectable woman. “Madame—”
“Io.”
He stared at her for a few seconds. “What did you say?”
“Io. My name is Io.” She pronounced the name “eye-oh,” as if that were perfectly ordinary. Which was ridiculous, because no one he knew bore a name with only vowels. It had to be something indigenous to the colonies. “It’s actually Iolanthe, but no one calls me that but my tax accountant. Who are you?”
He took a deep breath, determined to take charge of the situation. “My name is Nikola Czerny.”
“Nicole? I thought that was a girl’s name.”
Imogen gasped again. Frau Leiven clutched her throat and staggered over to a chair. Robert studied himself in a mirror that hung on a wall, and adjusted his wig to a rakish angle.
“It’s Nikola, and it is not a female name,” Nikola answered in an even tone, despite the sudden and almost overwhelming urge to throttle the woman. Or kiss her. He wouldn’t mind doing both, to be honest. “It is my name, and I am a man. It is nothing uncommon, not like a name that contains nary a single consonant.”
“My name has consonants!”
“I-O,” he said with much portent.
“Well, that part is just vowels.” She looked grumpy now, as if she did not like having the flaws in her reasoning pointed out. “But there’s more to my full name than that. Just don’t call me Yolanda. I hate that.”
“Very well, Iolanthe.”
“Dammit, I just said don’t call me that!” She sat up, frowning and rubbing her head.
“No, you said not to call you Yolanda. I called you Iolanthe, which is a name that has proper syllables and consonants.”