Page 89 of Misadventures with a Duke

The bad news? I’m not the only one experiencing this.

It’s real.

And it’s frightening.

This cabinet is a lot bigger than the one Allie had shipped over from France.

So what does that mean? Is this thing another time travel machine? If so, who’s in it? Or what? Have the Jacobins found a way to follow Maximillian and Bastien here? Is there an entire battalion of them braced inside? If so, what are we going to do about it? Fight back with barware and expensive bottles of booze?

Already, the answer flares in my mind.

Yes. If we damn well have to.

The light show doesn’t go on for too long. As it fizzles and dims, Max stomps forward. Bastien joins him. The looks they shoot back at Allie, Drue, and me aren’t to be brooked. This definitely isn’t the time for reckless one-liners.

“Halt! Whomever you are, inside the closet, you are commanded to show yourself. Keep it slow with your hands where I can see them!”

Though as reckless zingers go, Bastien does know how to fling them.

Until one of the cabinet doors swings open.

And then one more.

Two people appear. Only…two.

As the pair cautiously emerges into the light, I watch the soldier-commando-alpha drain right out of my Desperado’s spine. Maximilian’s too.

The man and woman look like they’ve stepped from a production of Les Miz, with slightly better costumes. The woman’s bodice is demurely pinned, with a faded crimson fichu that matches the kerchief around her head. The man’s long vest is the same regal color, with gold buttons that match the closures at the bottom of his breeches. They look older, causing astonished bells to chime in all my instincts—did the guys’ parents find a way to escape too?—but that’s before I notice the sun damage to their skin and the work calluses on their hands.

They’re not nobility. But they’re also not strangers. Not to the two men between us and them—the secret prince of France and his newly ennobled brother—who now rush the pair of arrivals like they are the heralded royalty in the room.

But once they are before the man and woman, the brothers do not bow or kneel. Bastien and Max wrap the pair in impassioned hugs, as if determined to wipe away their dazed stares with the force of the embraces.

But I’m damn glad they do. I look over to Allie, seeing that she is too.

The guys’ gestures are what make us both certain of what we’re watching. A reunion that’s a little less shocking now.

But only a little.

All right, maybe not even that.

As Max growls out one name and Bastien the next—both coated in layers of total shock and joy.

“Carl.”

“Kavia.”

BASTIEN

“By the saints! It worked!”

While Kavia’s happy gasp is a warm bloom on my shoulder, her grip on my neck is nearly the opposite. I groan from the brutal clench but manage to end with a laugh.

“I think it certainly did,” I say. “And left you no worse for the two-hundred-year wear either.”

The woman, as equally precious as precarious to see here, bats at my sternum. “You are an impossible spade, sir.”

If she only knew the half of it now. How I could truly let fly with the flattery if I so chose, courtesy of the wild and random streets of this place. New York, for all its hard and strange edges, has also taught me about lighter wonders. Juice boosts, falafel, day spas, night basketball, hot yoga, cold sodas…and so many hundreds more. Thousands, perhaps.