“You are quite the disappointment to me, Miss Betham,” Maximilian sighed with an eye roll. “But, as usual, you are quite correct. Miss Deryn, I apologize for my crude behavior. I came to see how you are faring, Miss Betham.”
“I am sore in places I did not know I had. Now, are you going to tell me what happened to you? Did you get into a fight?”
“Yes, indeed,” he replied easily. “With a flight of stairs. I fear the stairs won the round.”
“Max – er, Your Grace,” Eugenia said, trying to be stern while still blushing furiously. “Please tell me.”
“It is true, Miss Betham,” he said. “I went up the stairs, quite drunk, I might add, and someone pushed me back down.”
Eugenia’s eyes bulged, her mouth dropped. “Someone tried to kill you?”
“Again.”
A curse word rose unbidden to her lips, and she forced it back, unsaid. “Yes, that would be the third time. What are you going to do?”
“It is past time for a bodyguard.”
Nodding, Eugenia breathed a sigh of relief. “But a guard watching your back will not prevent something like the shafts of your carriage being cut, Your Grace.”
Maximilian’s brows rose. “Oh, the bodyguard is not for me,” he said, his voice bland. “It is for you.”
“Me?”
“Whoever wants my head on a platter,” Maximilian said, sitting back in his chair, “wants yours alongside it.”
Unable to speak, Eugenia gaped at him, her mouth opening and closing. He nodded, his deep-sea eyes concerned, then went on.
“Someone set that stallion loose in the stable yesterday,” he said, “for no other purpose than to kill or do you great bodily injury.”
Eugenia closed her eyes. “Oh, God.”
“Or,” he said, his voice low. “I can ask the Whitingtons to send you back to London.”
She snapped her eyes open. “Never.”
“It is for your own safe –”
“I will not leave you, Max,” she snarled, not caring that she did not use his title in front of Deryn. “You may force me to leave, but I will walk the entire way back here if I must. Do not try to send me away.”
Maximilian merely nodded, and she could not read his expression. She tried to study his face, to look past the mild neutrality and wondered what he was thinking. Or planning. She opened her mouth to ask when the door burst open. Lady Helena strode in, her face a mask of fear and worry. She halted at the sight of Maximilian, her eyes flickered between the two of them. Then she curtseyed and hurried forward.
“Eugenia,” she said, tears sparkling in her blue eyes. “His Grace told me that someone tried to – to hurt you.”
“I just discovered that myself,” Eugenia tried to smile. “I thought it was simply a loose horse. It happens.”
While she outwardly remained calm and smiling, inwardly, Eugenia trembled. Maximilian’s presence in her sick room meant only one thing – he liked her far more than he let Lady Helena know. And now she knew it. Guilt squeezed her around her middle, made her heart beat faster. Her mouth tasted as though she tried to swallow ash. “Lady Helena,” she began. “I am so sorry.”
Taking a chair on the far side of the bed, Lady Helena sat down and took her hand. “For what?”
“I should have told you, I should have said something.”
Lady Helena smiled and blushed. “I know it was hard, Eugenia. Yes, I was a little hurt, at first, when I found out His Grace was interested in you, and not me. But if I am to lose the chance of marrying the prized catch of the country, I would rather lose him to my best friend.”
For the second time, Eugenia gaped, words failed her. She finally forced out three words. “You mean that?”
Lady Helena glanced at Maximilian, nodding. “I do. I think you two were meant for each other.”
“That is very gracious of you, Lady Helena,” Maximilian said. “Thank you.”
