Finn took his place next to Natalia on the sofa, sitting a polite distance away from her. If someone were to come into the room unexpectedly they would see nothing untoward.
Hell, Natalia’s experience with men seemed so limited he wondered if the King and Queen posted surveillance on her dates. He shifted a few inches farther away from her, just to be sure, then angled his body towards her in an entirely acceptable conversational manner.
‘Talking of Gemma—what is it about her and Amelie both wanting to go to bed so early?’ he said. ‘Don’t they ever want to party? Is that a Montovian thing?’
‘I suspect it’s a woman in the early stages of pregnancy thing. Didn’t you see Amelie’s horror at the prospect of something harmful in the pudding?’
‘A mere male wouldn’t notice such a thing.’
‘Women are attuned to notice such things in their friends. But we also respect the fact that women usually don’t want to make any announcement until the pregnancy is safely established.’
‘You think Gemma might be pregnant?’
‘I suspect so—though we’re such good friends I’m surprised she hasn’t shared the news with me. I can’t help but be concerned that something might be wrong, but I suspect she’s simply being cautious.’
‘If she and Tristan had a baby wouldn’t it kick you down the line of succession? Perhaps she’s worried that might upset you?’
‘Upset me? I would be glad to be demoted in such a way. It would make my life so much easier.’
Hanna entered the room and Natalie had a quick exchange in Montovian with her. Then she turned to him. ‘Hanna wants to know if you would like anything further. A camomile tea, perhaps?’
Finn shook his head. ‘Nothing for me, thanks.’ He looked up at Hanna and thanked her in Montovian. The older woman beamed at him before she turned to leave the room.
‘Finn! You spoke in Montovian. When did you learn that?’
‘Don’t get too excited. I asked Tristan to teach me how to say “please” and “thank you” before we went into our meetings in St Pierre. Just to be polite. I think I’ve mastered it.’
‘Your accent was perfect. Well done.’
He was glad she was pleased. Montovian would not be an easy language to master. But, as his mother often said, the first new language was the most difficult. The more languages you learned, the easier it became.
He watched as Hanna’s back view faded from sight. As if by mutual agreement, he and Natalia both stayed very still and listened for sounds from the next room.
‘When Hanna finishes in the kitchen will she go to bed too?’ Finn asked.
‘House servants in the royal households are obligated to be on call until the family and their guests have retired.’
‘So if we stayed up all night, until sunrise, she and Bernard would have to stay up all night too?’
‘That’s how it works,’ she said.
He frowned.
‘You’re aching to say something, aren’t you?’ she said.
‘No. These are your ways and I’m not one to criticise. Where do they live?’
‘Their home is a large, comfortable apartment beyond the kitchen.’
‘What if we want to contact them for camomile tea?’
‘There’s a buzzer connected to their apartment. But I can’t remember how long since it has been used. It might even need a new battery.’
‘What do they do while they’re waiting for the battery-less buzzer?’
‘I have no idea. Perhaps watch television in bed?’
He smiled. ‘And that’s how you work around “how it works”.’
‘Tristan and I have our methods of getting around the old ways.’
‘Which brings us back to us.’ He looked around. ‘Can we talk privately here?’
‘As long as we keep our voices down.’
‘I have no intention of shouting. But I would like to kiss you.’ He kissed her on the cheek—a sweet, simple kiss. ‘That’s for being kind to your old nanny.’
She kissed him on the mouth. Just as quick, just as sweet. ‘That’s for you being you.’
He caught her hand, clasped it with his. ‘Why do we have to skulk around? If I was here longer, couldn’t we date? Your family want you to marry someone they consider suitable, but now there’s no law against you choosing who you want to have in your life. This is such an artificial, pressure cooker situation.’
‘As I told you, you’re the first man I’ve been seriously attracted to. I guess I’m not sure how to handle it. I could scream and yell and defy my family—insist I want to be with you. Then you’d go back to Sydney, I’d never see you again and I’d have a lot of bridge-building to face with my family.’
‘I want you. I like you. And I’d like to get to know you—not as a princess, with all the complications that comes with, but as a woman. Like we did at the wedding. I asked you on a date in Sydney. Have you ever wondered what might have happened if you’d spent that day with me on my yacht?’
‘Many times...over three miserable months.’
‘I searched for you for weeks, you know?’
‘You must have been furious with me. Yet you searched for me?’
‘Furious, yes—but worried, too, that you might have come to some harm. My male ego wouldn’t let me accept that you could just walk away from the magic we’d shared simply because you didn’t like me.’
She gasped. ‘You know it wasn’t that.’
‘I know now. Back then I wanted an explanation for how you could just disappear. I thought you might have been kidnapped. Bundled into a boat. Thrown overboard from a ferry. I had all sorts of insane ideas. Anything but face up to the fact you’d played me. That for some reason you’d got me enchanted with you—got me believing you might be just a bit enchanted with me—and then callously dumped me.’
‘I was actually very taken with you. That’s the thing with enchantments. They entice and snare both ways.’
He kissed her again. So what if they were seen? He almost wanted them to be seen so they could be open about what was happening between them. But he suspected Natalia would suffer the consequences. Would she always be under the thumb of her parents because they were also her King and Queen?
‘My next thought was it had to have been a scam. I checked my credit cards—perhaps when I’d gone to the bathroom you could have scanned them—but, no. My bank balance remained intact. My identity hadn’t been stolen.’
She smiled. ‘I don’t exactly need the money.’
He smiled back. He’d appreciated her sense of humour from the get-go. ‘Finally, when my desire to know more about you overcame my reluctance to admit my humiliation, I asked Eliza. The first person on her doorstep after she returned from her honeymoon was me, begging for details about Natalie Gerard.’
‘Eliza? But she—’
‘She kept your secret. She’s loyal.’
‘Good,’ she said, with visible relief.
‘I can still see my friend, standing there with her hands on her hips. “I told you Natalie might not be who she said she was.” Her pity, and her righteous indignation that I hadn’t listened to her, rubbed salt into my already stinging humiliation.’
‘Poor Finn,’ said Natalia.
‘Poor Finn?’ He snorted. ‘I didn’t get any information or sympathy from Eliza. “I tried to warn you”—that was all she said. Not one more word could I get out of her. Except yet another offer to fix me up with the world’s most boring woman—Prue, whose place card we switched at the wedding.’
‘Eliza called me at about that time,’ Natalia said thoughtfully. ‘Asked me if I remembered you. Of course I stuck to the script and said I’d danced with you at the wedding and we’d had coffee afterwards, but that was as far as it had gone. Mind you, while you were trying to find me I was frantically looking you up on
the internet. Of course I found everything you’d told me about yourself was the truth. While all I had done was lie. I was a mess—couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep...just torn apart by regret.’
‘I had some crazy ideas about what had happened to you. But none nearly as crazy as what turned out to be the truth.’
‘And yet you’ve forgiven me?’
‘Because I’ve never met a woman who attracts me like you do—first as Natalie, now as Natalia. The more I know you the more attracted I am, and the more I find to admire in you.’
He was rewarded by her lovely smile, which lit up her eyes. ‘I feel the same about you. I’ve really enjoyed our time working together.’
He leaned over to kiss her.
Natalia put up her hand to stop him. ‘You know we really can’t be caught kissing in here... We can’t risk Bernard coming in to check if the fire needs another log, or to stoke it, or whatever one does with fires. Or Hanna coming in just wanting to keep an eye on me.’
He pulled back from her. ‘Why? These constrictions seem unnecessary. We’re both single. We’re not hurting anyone by getting to know each other. Or kissing each other. And this fire is kinda romantic. Guy-type romantic, I mean. Forget the flowers and the girly frills. This is what does it for me. A warm rug, the flickering flames, cosy dark corners...and you and I snuggled on that rug needing nothing more than each other to warm us—’
‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘That scenario does it for me, too. I want you Finn. It’s torture sitting next to you on this sofa not being able to kiss you, touch you, explore you.’
He shifted in his seat, groaned. ‘I can’t believe you don’t know what that kind of talk does to me.’
‘I might have an idea, because I’m feeling the same way.’
She took a deep breath, which only succeeded in focusing his gaze on the swell of her curves in her snug-fitting top.
‘Best then, I guess, that we’re not distracted,’ she said. ‘No kissing...no touching.’
‘But only because we’ve decided we don’t want the distraction. Not because someone else has put strictures on us.’
‘Agreed,’ she said.
She turned to face him, their knees nudged and she didn’t move back. Again he had the feeling that he’d fallen into a fantasy. It was as if she had conjured up this room—the blaze of the fire, the fresh smell of pine, and his beautiful dark-haired virgin Princess wrapped in her flowing long skirt like a woman in a medieval manuscript...or a movie...or a game.
He wanted the fantasy to be real.
He shifted away from the distracting contact, determined to move things along before Bernard appeared to tend to the fire, or the ancient metallic clock on the wall struck midnight and he was left on his own with only smouldering ashes, longing for one of the most unattainable women in the world.
‘In my world, where we could date and get to know each other, and see if what we feel is infatuation or something deeper, I wouldn’t be mentioning marriage so soon. But it seems your family want you on a fast track to marriage. No time for feelings to develop. No time for compatibility to be established. No time to be sure it’s going to work.’
Her mouth turned down and her eyes clouded. ‘We are a family who lost our heir—a beloved son, brother, husband, father—and his son.’
Finn wondered, not for the first time, why both heirs had been travelling together in one helicopter.
‘Perhaps, as a result, my parents have become a little obsessive about ensuring the line of succession. Their great fear is the throne going to my uncle’s branch of the family—who are dissolute, to say the least. That’s not Marco’s father, by the way, it’s a different uncle. They want my children to be in line as back-up, I suppose.’
‘Even though they would come after Tristan, and after his children and then after you? It’s not likely they’d ever inherit the throne.’
‘Not likely—but possible.’
‘But even before your brother’s death, you resisted an arranged marriage?’
‘I believe in love and only love as a basis for marriage. Don’t you?’
‘Of course I do. A love that grows based on compatibility and shared interests and proves to be real. A partnership. After a long engagement. That’s how it works in my family. My grandparents and my parents are happily married. Each anniversary is a big deal to be celebrated.’
‘It’s the total opposite in my family. I’ve told you about my parents and my grandparents. But it was my brother’s marriage that really made me wary. Carl was introduced to Sylvie as a potential bride. She was beautiful and vivacious and he fell for her as she seemed to fall for him. But she didn’t love Carl. She loved the idea of being Crown Princess, with all the wealth and status that came with it. She was demanding and capricious and she made his life hell. Once she’d had Rudi I don’t think they even shared a bed. Poor Carl was so unhappy. Seeing that, I decided I’d rather stay single than marry a nobleman I didn’t love. And then Carl died.’
He had to ask. ‘Why were they all travelling in the same helicopter?’
‘Because Sylvie insisted she didn’t want to fly with Rudi behind Carl, in what she saw as a lesser helicopter not befitting her status. And, as he did so many times, he gave in to her to avoid a tantrum.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘Such a tragedy.’
He pulled her to him in a hug and she did not resist. He wanted to protect her, this woman who was usually protected by two bodyguards, to wrap her in warmth and security and take away her pain. To make her laugh every day.
‘When Tristan changed the rules more choices opened to me. But my parents can still withhold permission for me to marry someone of whom they disapprove.’
He considered her statement. ‘They could make your life uncomfortable if they withheld their permission?’
‘Very uncomfortable,’ she said.
‘Would dungeons be involved?’
‘Who knows?’ She laughed. ‘Seriously? Not likely at all. And, apart from needing palace-sanctioned permission, I love my parents and want them to approve of my choice of husband and father for my children. And there can be no other option for me than marriage. Living with a man would never be sanctioned.’
‘No doubt I’m not high on the approved list?’
‘They believe a royal marriage has a better chance of working if both husband and wife come from the same social strata.’
‘Yet that didn’t work for Carl,’ he said. ‘And Tristan chose his own wife—breaking more than one tradition in the way he did it.’
‘I could, as a citizen of Montovia, marry without the King and Queen’s permission. It’s me as a princess who needs it.’
He groaned. ‘There’s another obstacle around every corner. But I don’t want to walk away from you, Natalia. I felt lost without you in St Pierre today.’
‘And the palace seemed empty without you while you were away. I was counting the minutes until you returned. I’ll really miss you when you leave tomorrow. I wish I could stow away in your luggage.’
‘I like that idea. But you live in Montovia, with all the responsibilities entailed in your position as Princess and second in line to the throne.’
‘And you live in far-away Australia, where your family is and your successful business.’
The logs in the fire shifted and moved in a shower of sparks. The huge, old-fashioned pendulum on the metallic clock on the wall tick-tocked the seconds away. Finn was conscious of their time together dwindling away.
He slowly shook his head. ‘It’s never going to be a simple boy-meets-girl scenario for us.’
‘No. The stakes are so much higher when it’s a princess and a millionaire tycoon.’
‘But so are the potential gains,’ he said, tracing his finger down her cheek and across the outline of her mouth so she trembled. He didn’t care if someone barged into
the room and saw them.
‘I’m beginning to understand that,’ she said, her voice unsteady.
‘So we have to think about ways we can make long-distance dating viable.’
‘We could just run away—be together somewhere we can just be ourselves, away from expectations,’ she said.
‘You know that’s not an option.’
‘I so want there to be a chance for us,’ she said. ‘To see if this is more than infatuation.’
‘Me too,’ he said.
Every minute he spent with her moved him further away from infatuation into something he couldn’t yet put a name to.
‘So what do you think are the possible options for us?’
Finn put up his hand to count off the options available to them finger by finger. It was a thing he did. ‘Option one—we have a secret no-strings affair. I see you whenever I come to Europe. You sneak down to Sydney when you can.’
‘I don’t like the idea of sneaky and secretive,’ she said. ‘And I doubt it would make either of us happy.’
‘I would rather be open about our intentions,’ he said.
‘So let’s forget that option,’ she said.
‘So, option two, we date each other openly as best we can, considering we live on the other side of the world from each other.’
‘Which would give you the getting-to-know-each-other period you believe is so important,’ she said.
‘But it would mean we spend a lot of time apart and we lose our privacy.’
‘The media would have a field-day once they got on to it,’ she said glumly.
He shuddered ‘Horrible. But it would be you they’d be after. I’d get off lightly.’
She shook her head. ‘Uh-uh. Once they realise how incredibly handsome you are you’d become a target of the long-distance lens. You’ve already featured in an Australian Bachelor Millionaires article.’
‘How did—?’
‘I pretty much stalked you for a month after I got back from Sydney. After that... I... It became too heartbreaking.’
‘I would have stalked you if I’d known who you were,’ he said.
Falling for the Secret Princess Page 14