that I’d never find a good woman to marry in a Covent Garden brothel. Take it back.”
“I stand corrected,” Ben shouted down. “I’m delighted to have been proved wrong.”
Seb nodded. “Any more questions?”
Elizaveta shook her head and stepped aside. “You may proceed.”
Seb arrived at the first landing to discover Georgie standing next to her husband.
“Did you know,” she said by way of opening, “that it’s about seventeen hundred miles from London to St. Petersburg?”
Seb blinked. “Is that my question?”
“No, it’s not your question, I just wondered if you knew. Benedict says you’re planning to take Anya there on your wedding trip. So if you sail at an average of five knots, it will take you around two weeks to get there by sea.”
Seb sent Benedict a confused glance, but his friend simply shrugged. He was, apparently, used to receiving this kind of unwanted nautical information from his better half.
“That’s, um, good to know,” Seb said. “I’ll bear it in mind. But if that’s not my question, what is?”
Georgie sent him a no-nonsense look. “My test is a mental one. A riddle. We need to make sure you’re clever enough to keep up with your wife. She’s very intelligent.”
“I know that.”
“Apart from the inexplicable lack of common sense she’s exhibited in choosing you as a life partner,” Alex heckled from the landing above.
Seb sent him a poisonous glance. “Go on, then,” he prompted Georgie. “Let’s hear it.”
“What flies when it’s born, lies when it’s alive, and runs when it’s dead?”
Seb frowned. What flew? Birds? Musket balls? What lied? Men did, all the time. At least in his experience. And what ran when it was dead? Impossible. He scowled at a grinning Benedict.
“I’ll give you a hint,” Georgie whispered. “It’s cold. And there’s plenty of it in Russia.”
Seb’s brow cleared as the answer came to him. “Snow!”
“Yes! Well done.”
Benedict stepped forward. “Right. My turn. My test is one of strength. To make sure you’re strong enough to protect your future wife.” He braced his legs apart and crossed his arms over his chest. “You have to lift me out of the way.”
Seb groaned. Benedict weighed at least the same as himself. He was all muscle. Still, it could have been worse; they could have made him wrestle Mickey.
He stepped forward, bent his knees, and wrapped his arms around Benedict’s waist. The fabric of his jacket stretched alarmingly across his back, and he heard an ominous ripping sound as the seams strained beneath his arms.
Bloody hell. He wasn’t dressed for picking up grown men. He was dressed to marry the woman he loved. But what was a new jacket compared to a lifetime spent with Anya? Nothing at all. He’d burn every item in his wardrobe if necessary.
Still, it was a damn fine coat.
“Wait.”
He let go of Benedict, stripped off his jacket, and folded it over the banister. Then he turned back, caught Benedict’s wrist in one hand, ducked, and shouldered him in the stomach so he folded forward over his shoulder. He braced his thighs and picked him up with a low grunt of exertion.
“Damn it, Wylde,” he wheezed. “You never weighed this much when I dragged your scrawny arse out of that ditch near Badajoz.”
A flash of recollection hit him, and for a moment, Seb wasn’t on the dowager’s landing in Mayfair, but chocking on the hot, swirling dust of a Spanish plain. He’d carried his friend in exactly this way when Ben had been wounded during the storming of the citadel. Seb had pulled him out from under a shattered cart and carried him back to the safety of the British lines, with French musket fire shredding the air all around them.
Thank God they’d both survived.
“Don’t break anything!” Dorothea’s panicked voice echoed up the stairs, interrupting his reverie. “Mind the china!”
Seb staggered a few paces to the side, narrowly avoiding a side table perilously cluttered with Meissen figurines, and deposited Benedict back on his feet with a grateful gasp.
He hoped he hadn’t strained anything. He intended to be in full working order for his wedding night. The thought brought an invigorating rush of blood to his head. And lower down.
He straightened and used the wall mirror to smooth his hair back into some semblance of order, then shrugged back into his jacket. “Right, what next?”
“Up here,” Alex called, and Seb mounted the stairs to the second floor. Emmy, Alex’s wife, was waiting for him with a mischievous smile on her elfin face.
“Stand and deliver,” she said, with mock fierceness. “You