Once a Princess by Johanna Lindsey Read Free Book Online Page A

on them, and the floor was still damp in spots from being scrubbed. The tavern was as clean as it was ever likely to be. Vasili’s finding it distasteful was merely a reflection of his mood, primed for ridicule after their unexpected reception.
    Up a narrow flight of stairs and down an even narrower hallway, Wilbert Dobbs’ voice, raised in complaint about the tardiness of his breakfast, drew them directly to him. He did not sound like a sick man. He sounded like an irate, hungry man.
    Lazar was still finding this part of their quest very entertaining, likely because Vasili was not. Close to laughter again, he wondered aloud, “Do you suppose that green-eyed dragon below is the lazy slut he’s calling for?”
    â€œSlut maybe, but lazy?” Serge replied. “She’s working herself into the grave, if you ask me. She looks about two steps from it.”
    Serge could be even more blunt than Vasili in speaking the obvious, and having the obvious pointed out so blaringly stirred Stefan’s guilt for his sharpness with the girl just now. She did look overworked, cruelly so, and that could be the cause of her bad temper, rather than what had happened last night. At any rate, he shouldn’t have let her prod his own temper.
    â€œWhat is this?” Vasili demanded impatiently. “That impudent bitch isn’t worth our curiosity, particularly when the whereabouts of the princess couldbe revealed in a matter of moments.”
    â€œOr not,” Serge pointed out, though he reached for the door handle. “And I would just as soon have delayed another ‘not.’”
    â€œDamn you, Tanya!” they were greeted before the door finished its inward swing. “What excuse…”
    The words died off as the four men filed into the small room, crowding it with their size. Wilbert Dobbs jerked up in his bed, no easy feat with his bloated body.
    â€œHere, now, how’d you get in here?” he blustered, though there was a marked improvement in his tone of voice, a deference for his betters, which they personified in the richness of their dress as well as their bearing. “Tanya knows I don’t want no visitors.”
    â€œIf you refer to the wench below, then you may absolve her, for she did her best to turn us away,” Lazar volunteered.
    â€œNot good enough,” Dobbs snorted. “All right, then, let’s hear it. What do the likes of you fine gentlemen want with me?”
    â€œWe are here on a matter concerning your deceased wife,” Lazar answered.
    â€œIris? What, has she been bequeathed something by that fine family that disowned her for marrying me?”
    Dobbs laughed at the thought that something might finally have come out of that mistake. Iris had married him in desperation because her rich lover wouldn’t have her after she got with child. Dobbs had thoughtshe’d add a little class to the tavern he’d just opened in Natchez, so he’d jumped at the chance to offer his name. But she’d lost the brat and got slovenly after that, so they’d both lost out on the bargain.
    His hope of a belated inheritance was quickly dashed, however. “We know nothing of your wife’s family, Mr. Dobbs,” he was told by the same man. “Our interest is in the woman with whom she departed New Orleans nearly twenty years ago.”
    â€œThe crazy foreigner?”
    â€œYour wife mentioned her to you, then?” Lazar asked.
    â€œI met her myself when I caught up with Iris.”
    He didn’t like being reminded of that time his wife had run away from him, going home to New Orleans to beg her folks to take her back, futilely as it turned out. He’d had every intention of beating her senseless, despite the fact that she was returning to him. But she’d had that foreign woman with her who’d died of the fever within hours of his finding them, and the woman’s baby. It had galled him to forgo beating