her shoulders, trying to reel her around into a more typically upright position. She swung too far; Javier caught her and set her on her feet. Beyond his shoulder Belinda could see Eliza, drunk enough to verge on belligerence, and leaned around the prince to blink wide-eyed at the other woman.
“Not before ten,” she pleaded. “I pray you, we mustn’t go out before ten. The very thought of sunlight makes my insides crawl.” She shoved away from Javier, trusting the drink to be apology enough, and lurched the few steps toward Eliza, so they propped each other up. The bells continued to ring, banging out numbers that went far beyond any hour of the clock. Belinda rolled until her shoulders were pressed against Eliza’s, and flung her head back to stare accusingly in the direction of the cathedral. “What the bloody hell time is it?” She let herself forget Gallic, her question slurred thick with a Lanyarchan burr and too much wine. “Why won’t the fucking bells stop?”
It was Javier who answered, in Aulunian, as she expected. “It’s the half hour. They go on for five minutes. You’ve heard them during the day, haven’t you?”
“But they weren’t so ear-bleeding loud,” Belinda protested, then said, “Shite,” with overwhelming enthusiasm. “I’ve forgotten my tongue.”
“Let me find it for you, lady.” Marius wrapped his arm around Belinda’s waist and pulled her into him. Eliza staggered and swore. Belinda heard her mutter a thanks to Javier an instant later as he rescued her from her own tangled feet, but her own attention was taken by Marius’s kiss: sensual and soft, his mouth hungry and tasting of wine but curtailed with just enough reserve as to make it a promise rather than a demand for more. It went on until the bells stopped; until Belinda heard Asselin’s staccato applause and sharp whistling.
“Bring her home already, Marius, and stop teasing the rest of us. Jav, your carriage, please be to God we’re not walking home.”
“I ought to make you,” Javier threatened idly. “It’d be best for all our heads. Marius, you’ve your own carriage tonight?”
Marius looked up from Belinda’s upturned face, his eyes heavy in the rain-streaked torchlight outside the club. “Carriage,” he repeated as if it were a foreign word, then chuckled and tossed his hair back. “Yes, yes of course, we’ll be fine. Come. Come, Beatrice, let me take you home.”
Belinda hung back a moment, even as Marius captured her hand and tried to draw her away. “Ten, Lady Eliza? No earlier? We could breakfast together—?”
Eliza flipped her fingers out, the same gesture Javier used to still his friends, but in her it was acknowledgment and dismissal both. “I’ll wake Marius at dawn for your address,” she threatened. Marius groaned dramatically. “Tomorrow,” Eliza said. “At ten.” She nodded, and Belinda let herself be drawn away into the rain-speckled street.
* * * *
“You didn’t tell me,” she said to Marius, minutes later. They huddled together more than necessary, the coach protecting them from the rain well enough, but drink and laughter and the lingering effects of the kiss held them close. Marius sighed with a dozen kinds of exasperation, and settled on “Would you have believed me?” as the one to voice. Belinda cackled and leaned against him more heavily.
“No. Forgive me, but no. You’re not royalty.” She blinked, overexaggerated in the darkness. “Are you?”
Marius flung himself back into the cushions, making the whole coach lurch with the force of it. “Not at all. Sacha and I were friends first, and his family is better-placed than mine.”
“Ah,” Belinda said lightly, teasing, “then it’s he I ought to set my cap for.”
Marius gave her such a distraught look that she laughed, taking pity, and nestled against his side. “Lord Asselin is too short for me,” she assured him. “A lady likes a little length in her men.”
She said it without wickedness, trusting Marius to take it places he oughtn’t, and from the brief shocked silence she knew she’d succeeded. She grinned broadly against his chest, letting fabric and the night conceal not only the expression, but the amused memory that what the stocky lord lacked in length was made up in breadth. That Marius Poulin had friends in high places she’d known when she’d sought him out as the first step in pursuing Javier, prince of Gallin. Asselin had been named one of those friends, but not even rumour had breathed hints of his cheapside whoring and rabblerousing. She wondered if Marius—if Javier—knew of his revolutionary