by Leslie North
Score.
Katie and Armin crept from the room, Armin pulling the door closed behind him. He’d looked happily worn out while they were putting the girls to bed, but now…
…now there was a gleam in his eye that made Katie feel like she was heating up from the inside out. The blushing warmth spread from the center of her hips outward.
“Come with me.” The grin curling at the corner of Armin’s mouth set the cut of his chin in sharp relief. Katie’s heart pounded as she followed him back down the hall.
Her heart beat faster when he stopped outside the door to his suite and beckoned her inside.
The suite itself was lush but understated, done in shades of cream and dark blue befitting a prince. The color scheme was similar to her own room. Katie barely noticed it as Armin led the way through the room and out to the balcony.
Two lounge chairs sat on either side of a small round table. On the table was a wine bucket. Armin retrieved the bottle and presented it to her with a flourish.
Katie didn’t know what she was looking at, but Armin radiated a quiet pride.
“This is one of the best vintages from the vineyard,” he explained, his voice rich and even. “The bottles are very…limited in number. I only open one about every five years. To celebrate. It’s only been four years, but we have plenty to celebrate.” The words he spoke made her feel as if she’d already downed the bottle.
He poured them each a glass, then offered her a seat on one of the lounge chairs. It reminded her of the last time they’d spoken on two lounge chairs back at Whitestone—only Armin was even more open this time, even more relaxed.
And the wine was delicious.
The timbre of his voice as he began to speak, the sound of it on the air, almost made up for the fact that they were separated by the tiny table and not on the same lounge chair.
“I was a boy when my father opened the first of the bottles.” Armin looked out over the gardens, lit at intervals with round globes that cast a gentle light. “It was a big deal.” He laughed gently. “I was too young to appreciate the wine, but I wanted a sip. They gave one to me. And I hated it.”
Katie laughed. She knew how that was—to want something so badly and then to be disappointed when it finally arrived.
“It was the first time I had any wine. I didn’t understand how good it could be until I was twenty.”
She basked in the warmth of his memory, but in the back of her mind, the obligation she had to Papazyan nagged at her. Katie pressed her lips together. It was this kind of moment that he wanted her to report back about—private. Unguarded.
But she pushed the thought of the editor away, letting herself enjoy these stolen moments with Prince Armin.
“I’d like to propose a toast.” He lifted his glass. She lifted hers, already blushing.
“A toast to what?” The sun had set, leaving the sky a heartbreaking shade of navy, but Katie felt like she was in the center of a spotlight.
“A toast to you.” Armin cleared his throat. “To all the good you’ve done for the girls. And for me.”
Katie could hardly breathe, much less speak.
“I’ll admit…” His voice was full of emotion. “I’ll admit that I didn’t feel I was quite suited for fatherhood. And maybe I’ll never feel like I’m doing the best job. But with you here, I feel like I have a fighting chance.”
Armin stood up and came over to her lounge chair. It was a sturdy thing—sturdy enough to hold his weight when he sat on the side of it, looking down at her with enough heat to warm the whole villa.
“Armin—” It would never work, this…thing. This tension between them. They’d always be under scrutiny. She’d always be under scrutiny. And Papazyan would never let up. Not as long as she stayed. Her pulse pounded in her ears.
“Katie.”
Her name on his lips—Katie, and not Ms. Crestley, not anything else—chased away all her worries.
He reached forward and plucked her glass from her hand, putting them both on the little table.
And then it wasn’t just her name on his lips.
It was his lips on hers, and this time, it wasn’t a stolen, fleeting moment. It was still illicit—so wrong and so right that Katie shivered at the feel of him—but out here in the dark, there was nobody to interrupt them.
Armin kissed her like a man drowning, as if exploring her tongue with his was the only thing that could save him. He leaned over her, pushing himself up higher on the lounge chair, and Katie felt herself arcing toward the hard lines of his body. His hands were on her face, then stroking along her collarbone, and lower, and a moan escaped her throat.
It was an invitation, permission, and Armin responded like he knew what she wanted.
And he did know what she wanted.
He sat up long enough to strip off his shirt, then his pants, and by the time he kissed her again Katie had dropped her skirt to the balcony next to the chair. Armin tugged her lip between his teeth as his hands dipped low again, finding the waistband of her panties, then delving further. When he discovered how wet she was he let out a hungry groan into her mouth.
He was a deliberate man. He did not allow himself to lose control. But by the time he put on a condom, he clearly couldn’t wait any longer. Katie raised her hips for him to take off her panties and then she was exposed to him, to the cool, clean air of the night.
Armin’s body was solid and muscled between her legs as he positioned himself, electric heat dancing over her skin.
He was still for one moment.
“Please,” she whispered into his ear.
“Gladly.”
He took her with one thrust, and when he hit home, Katie felt…unleashed.
She rocked her hips up into him, pressing her mouth against the curve of his neck.
Armin wasn’t deliberate anymore.
He took her hard and fast, his strokes powerful, and Katie gasped for breath. Her need pulsed through her from her fingertips to her toes, radiating out from a supernova at her core that was pushed along by Armin’s body. She was melting around it, exploding, and Armin caught her cries on his tongue.
He changed angles so that his hips brushed against her clit with every thrust, and Katie’s orgasm rolled over into another one, a wave that kept lapping and lapping at the shore. Armin growled into her neck with his own release. The storm that was his body broke over her and she was swept up in it, the wind howling in her ears.
It took several minutes for her to come down.
Armin broke apart from her at last, catching his breath faster than should have been humanly possible. He saw to the condom, then stretched his arms over his head before bending gracefully to pick up his boxers from the ground and tug them back up to his perfect hips. He stalked to the edge of the balcony, then turned back to look at her, bathed in the gentle light from the lamps.
Katie struggled to catch her own breath.
Armin sat on the edge of the lounge chair once again and reached for the puddle of her clothes on the ground next to them. He lifted one of her ankles in his hands and began to slide her panties back onto her legs. “How is it,” he said, his tone idle and warm, “that you came to be a nanny when you should be working as a journalist?”
Katie was instantly on alert. The question seemed to have come from nowhere, but it couldn’t have. It must have been on Armin’s mind for some reason or another. “My last job didn’t work out,” she said, before the silence stretched on too long. She lifted her hips again to let Armin tug her panties the rest of the way up. Then he started on her skirt.
“I want to know.” His eyes met hers in that glowing creamy light. “I want to know more about you. How did you come to be in my life, when you could have been in a very different life, somewhere far away?” He pressed a kiss to the inside of her knee before offering his hand so she could stand up on shaky legs and rearrange her skirt. Then she sat down again, her limbs heavy and loose. “I want to know who you are, Katie Crestley.”
Katie let out a deep breath. “If you really want to know…”
“I really do.”
Armin picked up his glass of wine, returning hers to her.
“My first big job was at…a tabloid. There’s no sugarcoating it. We dealt in celebrity gossip, things like that.” She took a sip of the wine. It was incredible. “And I was miserable.”
“Miserable?”
“It wasn’t what I wanted to be doing, reporting rumors like that. But it paid the bills while I searched for my big break. I wanted a story big enough to make a name for myself. A story so big that papers would fight over me.” She smiled ruefully at the memory of her former, more naive self.
“What happened?” Armin sipped his own wine, considering her.
“I found the story.” Katie shifted on the chair, remembering. “I thought I did, anyway. It was about a pair of American celebrities who’d been married for a decade. They were ending their marriage, and I learned that it was because of infidelity.”
“How sordid.”
“Very sordid. It was supposed to be very hush-hush, but my source was reliable.” Katie’s cheeks went hot at how stupid she’d been. “It was my job to get that kind of story, so I did. But at the last minute, my source got squirrelly. She didn’t want to confirm her quotes.” She shook her head. “I started to get spooked and wanted to pull the story.”
“That had to have been simple enough to do.”
“It should have been.” A spike of anger and shame stabbed through her heart. “But my editor ran the story anyway. The day it was printed—and posted online—the source recanted everything. It turned out, she had a grudge against the couple and she’d made the story up before getting cold feet—not that she’d admit that. She claimed that I took quotes out of context and invented most of the story.”
Armin cocked his head to the side. “But you’d tried to have it pulled. There’s no way you could have been held responsible.”
“Oh, but I was.” Katie loosened her grip on the glass of wine so she wouldn’t break the glass. “Everyone was willing to believe the worst of me. My editor let me face the criticism instead of taking responsibility. The celebrity couple was furious, and sent lawyers after the tabloid. And the higher-ups at the company were even worse. For the owners of a tabloid, they were…well, they were very upset. They fired me the next day. Not only was I out of the job, I was out of any credibility I might have been able to scrape together.”
“I’m sorry, Katie.” Armin sounded utterly sincere. “But…I’m not altogether sorry if it’s what sent you my way.”
“It didn’t at first.” She gave him a sheepish smile. “I tried my best to find another job in journalism. I came all the way across the ocean to do it. But nobody…nobody would have me. And while I might have been able to sell some pieces as a freelancer, I found myself completely blocked on writing. So I was a little desperate when I came here. I never thought I’d have to take a job as a nanny again, but…”
“But what?”
“It’s been…nice to take a moment to rethink who I am. To separate what happened from who I am as a person.”
“I can understand that.” He held his glass easily in his hand. “We all need to know how to separate our jobs from our souls.” Armin leaned forward and kissed her again, so gently she thought she’d cry. “If you figure out how to do that, I’d like very much to know.”
9
It had been a week since they’d returned from the villa.
To Armin, it felt more like a month. A year, even. A decade.
He thought of Katie every waking moment, and most of the moments he spent asleep. She had intoxicated him. And their little interlude on the balcony, far from slaking his thirst for her, had only made it worse.
Armin was not the kind of man who crossed lines like this. He had been meticulous in his professional life to keep his business dealings separate from his personal feeling, except when it came to things like the orphanage—he was personally invested in that, but he’d determined through careful review that it was also the responsibility of the royal family to care for those who needed most in Stolvenia.
He hadn’t anticipated hiring a nanny like Katie.
He hadn’t anticipated even meeting anyone like Katie.
Thankfully, she seemed to understand the stakes as well as he did. She was completely professional whenever they were in sight of other staff members or the girls.
But they weren’t always being watched.
And in those instances…
Armin had pulled her inside a closet once while the girls were finishing up their piano lessons, kissing her hard and hot up against the walls. He’d slipped his hand underneath her dress, pressing her back against his office doors, when they’d been attending a dance lesson with Stolvenia’s premier ballerina.
He couldn’t help himself. And Katie was always beautifully responsive. “Yes, yes,” she’d breathe in a voice that drove him wild. Her eyes shone whenever they were together…right up until she closed them, stifling her own little noises of pleasure with the back of her hand. Or the palm of his.
Those moments were the first things that Armin felt belonged to him. His relationship was the one thing in his life that felt truly private. It didn’t belong to anyone else. Not anyone in his family, not anyone on his staff, not any of his security team…not even to the people of Stolvenia. The unending burden of his responsibility weighed heavily on his shoulders, except when he was with Katie. Then it was as light as feather. There was nothing he couldn’t handle.
Of course, it was still dangerous. He did feel a flicker of guilt around the scandal that would break if they were ever found out.
And yet, with her body pressed up against his, he felt…like a man. Not Prince Armin of Stolvenia, who had to be ready to step in and lead the country at a moment’s notice. Just Armin, a man who was in love with a woman. He was, after all, a human. He was not immune to love.
Plus, that love was improving his relationship with the girls as well. His openness with Katie had shown him the way to give more of himself to the girls, too.
The only cloud on the horizon was his publicist, Valentina. She’d come to his office looking displeased the day they came back from their trip. “Not a single picture for the press, Prince Armin?”
He’d looked up at her, frowning. “I took the girls on holiday. Surely the press doesn’t need to see photos of that.”
“But it’s another happy memory,” she insisted. “Perhaps you could stage some, out on the grounds, to show the country—”
If there was one thing Armin knew, it was that the public did not need a deluge of holiday pictures from the royal family. Not at this particular moment, when things were so unstable. They would only look indulgent.
“No,” he’d said sharply.
She’d been ramping up the pressure to recreate the photos of the girls at the park, to see Armin out shopping with them, to see them dining at a local restaurant, and it all seemed…off. Like she wanted to give the country fodder for gossip.
Or maybe he just wished he was still on holiday.
The door of his office closed with a soft click, and he looked up to see a blushing Katie rushing toward him across the room.
“I only have a minute,” she breathed. “The girls are in their painting lesson.”
He pulled her into his lap without hesitating, her lithe body straddling his as if they were meant to be this way.
“Take it, then.”
Katie threaded her hands through his hair and kissed him, rocking her body against his.
“You awful little tease,” he groaned. “We can’t…”
“I know,” she breathed. “I can’t…I just wanted to touch you.”
“You’re playing a dangerous game.” He pushed her back, her face in his hands, to look into her eyes. “We both are. My brother Artur has been teasing me that he’s hearing rumors of an impending marriage proposal.”
Katie’s eyes flashed. “Where
would he get that idea?” She bent forward and kissed the line of his jaw.
“Apparently, someone saw me looking happy.”
She raised one eyebrow. “Aren’t you happy?”
“I’m a desperate man.” He kissed her again, feeling the little shivers of pleasure that rose through her. “And Artur is jealous. Clearly…clearly there’s nothing untoward going on. He needs his own wife.”
“Maybe he should get a nanny,” Katie said. He laughed until someone knocked on the door and she hopped up, going to answer it as if nothing had happened.
The next morning, he brought her an updated schedule with a new rotation of lessons. He found Katie in the corner of the dance studio, a notepad in her hand, her head bent over her notes. The girls pirouetted across the studio, their teacher looking on approvingly. They took no notice of Armin, other than a few quick glances in the mirror.
Katie didn’t notice him coming until he was right next to her. He glanced at her notepad and with a little jolt of surprise, saw his brother’s name there.
She must have sensed him standing there, because she looked up at him with a quick smile, flipping the tablet shut. “Prince Armin.” She straightened her back. “What can I do for you?”
“Taking notes? And not about the dance lesson.” He could have been a little less blunt, but there it was.
Katie blushed. “It’s how I keep things organized. I…take notes for myself.”
“About my brother?”
“About…most things. It’s how I remember your habits, what the girls want, what we spoke about in case it comes up again.” She bit her lip. “The truth is, my memory isn’t very good without a little help.”
This was new. “I thought you were especially observant.”
Katie looked to both sides of them, as if seeking out listening devices. “Well…I guess I’m a bit of a fraud, then. And now you know my secret. Don’t tell the girls.”
“I won’t.” He resisted the urge to kiss her cheek. “I brought you this.” He handed her the new daily itinerary for the girls. “No more violin. They didn’t like the instructor or the classical music.” He surveyed the dance lesson. The girls were absorbed in it, working hard. “Do you…have a free moment?”