Vienna Waltz (The Imperial Season Book 1) by Mary Lancaster Page B

you more comfortable.”
    The confused eyes scanned hers and then Johnnie’s.
    Johnnie said, “You’re still at the inn. I took the ball out of your shoulder, but you lost a lot of blood. You should rest. Is there anyone you want us to inform of this?”
    The man’s eyes didn’t waver. He shook his head.
    A smile flickered over Johnnie’s face. “Stubborn, aren’t you? She didn’t mean to shoot you, you know. It was an accident. We shouldn’t have waved weapons in her presence. It upsets her.”
    A frown tugged at the man’s brow. Lizzie held the cup to his lips again and he drank. At last, Johnnie laid him back on the pillows. The man’s eyes began to close.
    “Sleep,” Johnnie advised him. “It’s the best healer.”
    Lizzie set the nearly empty cup back down on the table and sank slowly into her chair. “At least he woke up,” she said in an effort to encourage optimism.
    Johnnie sprawled once more across the vacant part of the bed, watching her. “Why did you say, ‘Oh no’ ?”
    “My father,” she said in a small voice. “He opened his eyes at the moment of death. I thought our man had died, too.”
    “How did your father die?”
    And she found herself telling him about her father’s fall from his horse in the late summer rain and how his initial recovery had quickly relapsed into fever, pneumonia and, finally, death.
    “We’d barely buried him when Ivan the Terrible’s people arrived to expel us,” she finished.
    Johnnie frowned. “How did they know so quickly?
    “Oh, my father had spent some time looking for him, probably to extract some kind of promise from him concerning us. He’d traced him to Russia a few months before the accident, but Ivan never wrote back to him. After the accident, he wrote again, so I suppose by the time he actually died, the wheels were in motion, as it were, to replace him. My aunt took us in, although she was already packing to come to Vienna.”
    She shook off the memories, refocusing her gaze on Johnnie. “I don’t think you’re a very normal thief,” she observed, not for the first time. “Thank you for helping us so discreetly.”
    For the first time in their acquaintance, she thought he actually flushed, although it may have been a trick of the candle light. “You’re paying me,” he reminded her gruffly.
    “Yes, and talking of which, I haven’t had time to count the money. How much is it?”
    “About the equivalent of three thousand pounds.”
    “ Three ?” Lizzie sat up. “Oh, how wonderful. That’s more than I dared to hope. Well done, Johnnie!”
    He shifted. “Well, look after it. What are you going to do with it? Do you have someone who would bank it for you?”
    “No one who wouldn’t ask awkward questions,” she said ruefully. “I think I’ll have to hide it until we get home… Although I suppose we could live here. I rather like Vienna.”
    “Well, there’s no hurry to decide. It doesn’t look as if the Congress is going to open very soon, never mind end before Christmas as everyone used to prophesy.”
    Lizzie was silent, mulling over a few ideas and calculations.
    She drew in her breath. “I don’t think you should thieve anymore. Wouldn’t you like to do some honest trade, instead? Maybe marry and have children?”
    “One day,” he said vaguely. “Only I’m not very good at anything except soldiering. And there’s not much call for that now we’ve finally beaten Bonaparte.”
    “But with a little money behind you, you could train to do something else,” Lizzie insisted. “Think about it. I’ll pay you twice what we agreed if you promise to use it to set yourself up with an honest living.”
    Head in his hand, he gazed up at her unwaveringly. “You really mean it, don’t you?”
    “Of course I do.”
    “It’s very kind, but… I think you might find Henrietta’s coming out will cost you rather more than you imagine.”
    “She has a very wealthy godmother I mean to approach to sponsor her,” Lizzie