Linda Needham by A Scandal to Remember Page A

my cousins will support me.”
    For the first time Drew felt the pinch of carrying the secret he held against her, that she had a lot more than a few cousins to worry about.
    “We’ll discuss that later, Princess.” Drew picked up her cloak from the back of the chair. “Come, my carriage is just outside. I’ll take you home.”
    “That won’t be necessary, Lord Wexford,” she said with a sniff and a regal toss of her bejeweled head as Drew reached out with her cloak in his hands. “Palmerston’s carriage is waiting for me.”
    With a twinkle of triumph in her eyes, the princess turned her long, straight back to him and proffered her lovely, white shoulders for him to drape with her cloak.
    Which he would have done but the perfect slope of her neck and nape struck the breath from him, itched at his fingers, tempted him to slide them along her skin, to taste the forbidden.
    All night she had smelled of rosewater; though he’d thought at first it was merely the scent of the duke’s prized gardens. But the scent had followed her and now lapped at his chin, found purchase in his nostrils.
    And now threatened to addle his wits.
    “Not to disappoint you, Princess, but Palmerston’scarriage is no longer here.” He quickly draped the opulent black velvet cloak across her shoulders, inadvertently skiffing his fingers through the escaping curls above her ear, doing his best to ignore the bolt of lightning that leaped along his arm and roared down his breastbone, right into his groin.
    She turned and glared at him, chewing on the inside of her cheek. “Why?”
    “Because you’ll be using my carriage from now on, wherever you go, whatever you do.” Which will be exactly nowhere, if he had anything to say in the matter.
    “I’ve got my own chauffeur, thank you.” She dismissed him with a shake of her head and started toward the door.
    “Yes, but yours isn’t armed, is he?”
    She turned. “Of course not!”
    “Nor is your carriage built to withstand a barrage of bullets.”
    Her eyes went wide with horror. “You can’t mean that someone might really take the trouble to shoot at me in my carriage?”
    “Like a sitting duck, Princess. I don’t mind taking a bullet for you, but I plan to make it as difficult for the assassin as possible.”
    “Good heavens!” She held his gaze from under a fretted brow, took hold of his linen shirt cuff. “You’d take a bullet for me? Why?”
    “As I’ve tried to tell you for the last hour, madam. That’s my job.”
    She caught her lower lip with her teeth. “I don’t think I like the idea.”
    “Then do as you’re told and we’ll both live long enough to see you crowned empress. You’re to speakto no one of the threat against you. No one, do you understand? Not unless you clear it with me first.”
    “But why?”
    “My investigation must remain an absolute secret.”
    “What will I tell my friends? With you driving me around in your carriage?”
    He would have said, You’re not going anywhere for the next three weeks, madam, so no one will see us together , but she probably wasn’t quite ready to hear that yet.
    “You’ll tell your friends nothing, Princess.”
    “What about Lord Peverel? Shouldn’t he and my other ministers know something about your theory?”
    “Not until I’ve had time to vet them all.”
    “But the queen herself appointed him and the others as my privy council—”
    He took hold of her upper arms, trying to make her understand. “Tell them nothing, Your Highness. Nothing. Not until I give the word. Promise me, Princess. Your life and the lives of so many others may depend on it.”
    “Is this really—”
    He raised her chin with his fingertip. “Promise me.”
    She danced her blue gaze across his brow as he held her fast, finally settling on his eyes with a stubborn, but utterly reliable, “I promise.”
    “Good.” Drew nodded and then released her.
    “I keep my promises, by the way.” That lovely chin was in the air