by Maisey Yates
Then she got into bed at night and wept again.
Because she wasn’t out of tears for Lazarus. She feared she never would be. Behold, she was Agnes, unto herself. Free and unable to be anything more than a puddle of tears.
She sat in front of the tower and pulled a chunk of bread from a wax paper bag and stared straight ahead. At least she had bread now, and weeping to look forward to later.
Then, down in front of her, she saw a pair of black, shiny shoes. And there was no reason at all that shiny black shoes should trigger anything in her, except everything went still.
Then she looked up. And up yet still.
And it was him.
Lazarus.
Here.
In Paris.
At the tower.
“A girl once told me,” he said, coming to sit on the cement curb beside her, “that she came here and dreamed of finding someone to love her.”
Agnes’s heart was beating hard in her head. “Did she? A foolish girl.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “Because I had hoped to sit here. And dream awhile.”
Her heart twisted painfully. “You don’t need to dream. You had someone who loved you.”
He sighed, the sound heavy. Deep and from his soul, and not part of this game he was playing at all. “I was afraid of that.” He looked at her. “Agnes, I am so sorry. I was afraid. As you accused me of being, I was a coward. I thought...the grief that I feel over realizing I put my trust in the wrong person is... I wasn’t prepared for that. My life is a lie and in that moment I decided everything must be, but Agnes, that was me being foolish. You have never been a lie. You have always been all that is true and just and faithful. And you showed me in a hundred ways what love was, what loyalty was. And I... Everything in my chest was this great and terrible sharpness and I thought that could not be love. But a wise man told me that love is very painful when it is knocking down the walls you’ve built around your heart.”
“Oh... Lazarus.” Tears pushed against her eyes. “It is that.”
“I am here, even if I am late. I am here in Paris to say that I love you. That whatever the truth about Agamemnon, my path led me to you. And that was not a mistake. It was not a lie. We are true. This is true.”
She threw her arms around his neck and started to weep, and he held her. This softness, this closeness, so different to where they had started. And so deeply, wonderfully true.
“I want you to marry me. Not for show. Not because I need a wife.” They parted and he wiped the tears from her cheeks. “Because I need you.”
And in that moment she thought about the past, the present and the future all at once, and feared none of it.
She was that girl that had sat here and dreamed. She was the woman in his arms, now and forever.
Then he took her hand and drew her up so they were standing.
And he turned and began to walk away.
“Where are you going?”
He paused and looked at her. “We are going home.”
She laughed, the echo of that first day they’d met, when he’d saved her life, clear. “And where is that?”
He took two steps back to her, then cupped her chin in his hands. “For me? Home is wherever you are. It can be here while you do school, or back in Liri. Either way, all will be well. I trust Alexius.”
“You would let me stay here?”
“If you wanted.”
She laughed. “You know, I think we should go back to the Dark Wood.”
“You just like the bathtub.”
“That is true.”
He leaned in and kissed her mouth. “Wherever we go, Agnes of My Heart, one thing is true. You have saved my life. And I swear my fealty to you. For all of my days.”
* * *
If you were captivated by A Bride for the Lost King why not read the first installment in The Heirs of Liri duet?
His Majesty’s Forbidden Temptation
And don’t forget to check out these other Maisey Yates stories!
The Spaniard’s Stolen Bride
His Forbidden Pregnant Princess
The Queen’s Baby Scandal
Crowning His Convenient Princess
Crowned for My Royal Baby
Available now!
Keep reading for an excerpt from Claiming His Cinderella Secretary by Cathy Williams.
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Claiming His Cinderella Secretary
by Cathy Williams
CHAPTER ONE
WHERE IN GOD’S name was she?
James pushed his chair back, swivelled it at an angle so that he could relax back, feet up on his desk, folded his hands behind his head and scowled darkly at his office door, which had been slammed shut just a few minutes ago.
Actually, slammed risked being an understatement. He was surprised the thing was still on its hinges. Naomi, his now ex-girlfriend, had stormed out of his office, blazingly angry, only just managing to resist the temptation to hurl one of her designer Jimmy Choos at his head.
Her raised voice had been loud enough to shatter glass. Certainly, his entire office must have stopped dead in their tracks. He suspected they might well have downed tools completely so that they could huddle and dissect what they had heard, and doubtless he would be peppered with questions the second he stepped foot out of his office.
There were distinct disadvantages to being a boss with an ‘open door, feel free to speak your mind’ policy, he decided. A hub filled with young computer geniuses who thrived on the encouragement he gave them to enjoy the informality of his state-of-the-art workspace in order to nurture their creativity had spawned, he glumly thought now, a team of outspoken employees who wouldn’t think twice about a formal inquisition into Naomi’s noisy departure. Who could resist a full-blown gossip-fest about a woman whose parting shot had been that ‘he hadn’t heard the last of this’?
Right now, he needed his cool, level-headed secretary to return some semblance of normality to what remained of the day, but where the heck was she in his hour of need?
Next to him, his mobile phone buzzed. He looked at it, saw it was Naomi, and decided that any further conversations would be futile—although he knew she wasn’t the type to take things lying down. He had no interest in picking up where they had left off. What more could there be to shout about? And neither was he interested in any kind of reconciliation. The relationship was dead in the water and he had to acknowledge that he had sleepwalked his way into that one.
He’d thought what they had was fun. He’d assumed she was on the same page as him. She’d talked about her career as a catwalk model and how it would be the perfect springboard for her to branch out into fashion design. She’d claimed to be a career woman with no time for anything permanent. She had shown him drawings she had done for a collection of casual wear, and hadn’t batted an eyelid when he had accidentally held up the first sketch the wrong way. She’d been the epitome of easy going, so who could have blamed him when he’d casually asked her if she would like to accompany him to his brother’s wedding in Hawaii?
They were to spend a few days in the Caribbean, because he’d wanted to seal a deal with a promising start-up company in Barbados. She had been given free rein to choose whatever five-star hotel she wanted, no expense spared. There would be luxury on tap, she would be able to do as she pleased during the day while he worked and they would have the nights to themselves. Of course, he would only get through the preliminaries. Pinning down the final deal would require his trusty PA, so he would have to conclude business in London, but h
e would have been able to kick-start the process. Then they were to have a leisurely tour of the various Hawaiian islands before the wedding.
It had all made perfect sense and would have spared him the headache of going to Max’s wedding on his own. Personally, he had nothing against people getting married, even though he’d only just recovered from the shock of his die-hard bachelor brother waxing lyrical about the joys of tying the knot.
As a result of his own experiences, however—and from the experiences of some of his friends, who had flung themselves headlong into wedlock at way too young and tender an age, only to regret the impulse a couple of years down the road—commitment and everything it entailed was a game he had no intention of playing any time soon. Hence the prospect of being the best man and bachelor-in-residence at his brother’s wedding had filled him with a certain amount of dread. He had been to five weddings in the past six years. And, was it his imagination or were all the unattached females at weddings sprinkled with some kind of weird fairy dust that suddenly made them want to fall in love and rush down the aisle? Having Naomi on his arm, he had concluded, would be the speediest route to making sure he wasn’t targeted by anyone with stars in their eyes. Naomi, like him, knew just what relationships were all about. Fun. No strings attached. Just two adults enjoying one another.
Except he’d been wrong.
James snorted at his own idiocy in thinking that she had been as casual about their affair as he had, but was spared the frustration of dwelling further on the hissy fit to which he had just been subjected by one firm knock followed by the soft push of his office door opening.
‘About time.’ He swept his feet off the desk and briskly sat forward as Ellie leaned round to hand him a mug of coffee—strong, sugarless and black. Just the thing he needed. The woman was a mind reader.
* * *
‘About time?’
Ellie looked at her charismatic, wildly sexy boss and suppressed the usual shiver of unwelcome awareness that rippled through her every time she saw him.
She’d been working for James Stowe for three years and he still managed to have an annoying effect on her, although she had always been adept at concealing it under a calm, professional exterior. She wasn’t a fool. She knew that an inconvenient attraction was just an annoying blip, easily swatted away, and it was easy enough to swat away because Ellie was sensible enough to conclude that what attracted her was the pull of the opposite. Her stupidly sexy boss was brilliant, utterly unafraid of taking risks and enjoyed the sort of sybaritic, revolving door love life that privately made her shudder. Never mind the more prosaic fact that she’d seen some of the women he dated, and the possibility of him being attracted to her was as far-fetched as a lion being drawn to a mouse.
It was an environment where the dress code was ‘anything goes’, and the excess energy of the young, talented thirty-strong staff was burnt off at the ping pong table, the darts board or in one of the ‘debating rooms’, where they could exchange their ideas as forcefully as they wanted. But Ellie always dressed in a uniform of sober suits and flats and, whatever energy she wanted to burn off, she did it at the local swimming pool once a week.
Where her boss was stupidly clever and outspoken in a way that sometimes made her feel faint, Ellie was just the opposite, and she privately maintained that that was the reason why they worked so harmoniously together.
‘Where have you been?’
Ellie calmly swerved to sit at the leather chair in front of his desk. She glanced down at her tablet, which she had brought in as she always did, to make notes about whatever mountain of urgent emails he needed her to deal with. When she looked at him, it was to find him glaring at her.
‘To the dentist,’ she said briskly. Disgruntled blue eyes met her calm grey ones and she fought not to flush.
He was so beautiful, it was almost a sin. His hair was chestnut-brown, thick and straight. His features were chiselled to perfection, his nose straight, his mouth full of sensuous, wicked promise. Sometimes in the early hours of the morning, when her thoughts were prone to drifting, an image of him would pop into her head and she would savour the taboo pleasure of thinking about the six-foot-two alpha male with the kind of loose limbed, careless grace that made heads turn.
Of course in the cold light of day such thoughts never intruded, and if they did it was easy to dampen them because any woman in the presence of a guy like him could be excused for feeling a bit tingly now and again.
‘Did you tell me that you weren’t going to be in until...’ he made a show of consulting his Rolex ‘...two-thirty in the afternoon?’
‘Of course I did. I also emailed you to remind you a couple of days ago. If you’d like, I can have the email printed off—’
‘Not necessary,’ James growled, waving down the suggestion dismissively. ‘I suppose you’ve heard what’s happened?’ He didn’t wait for her to answer. ‘This office is a hotbed of gossip. It’s impossible to have any kind of private life here! I expect you were grabbed the second you came through that door? Treated to every tiresome detail of the drama that unfolded in your absence? Which, incidentally, would not have happened if you’d been at your desk instead of in a dentist’s chair! How’s the tooth, anyway?’
‘The tooth is fine. Thank you for asking.’
‘So...?’
‘Trish did mention that there was something of...er...an incident with...your girlfriend,’ Ellie admitted.
‘An incident?’
‘It’s none of my business,’ Ellie said diplomatically in an attempt to divert her boss from the looming onslaught of thunderous rage.
Darling of the gossip pages as he was, and photographed on practically a weekly basis with one of his women glued to his side, he was fiercely protective of his space in the office. Girlfriends were not allowed within the hallowed walls of the converted factory in Shoreditch which housed some of the sharpest computer brains in the country, and their counterparts with business acumen.
Ellie shuddered to think of the reception Naomi would have had, and knew the ensuing drama would have made his blood boil.
His staff all knew that he was a guy who didn’t believe in longevity when it came to relationships with women. Although nearly every member of staff felt free to quiz him about whatever latest hot model happened to be gracing his bed, he was actually remarkably tight-lipped when it came to discussing his private life. He threw out just enough by way of answers to satisfy curiosity, but who really knew what motivated a man who seemed so averse to settling down?
Ellie, who never asked questions, wondered whether she was the only one to notice that reticence—the way he never really shared anything meaningful about himself.
Did he do so with anyone?
She realised that she was bursting with curiosity about the blow-up with Naomi but she impatiently put a lid on it. Curiosity about her boss would end up being ruinous for their working relationship, and way too challenging for her peace of mind.
‘The whole thing could have been avoided,’ he growled, ignoring her lack of input with the sweeping nonchalance of someone accustomed to a rapt audience. ‘Naomi should have known better than to show up where I work. I’ve always made it very clear to the women I date that play is one thing, but work is quite another, and the two don’t overlap. Stop staring at that tablet as though it’s going to rescue you from sitting here.’
Ellie looked up. ‘I thought you wanted the business with Neco Systems sorted at the speed of light in case someone else came along and snapped them up. I spent the morning compiling the contract. I thought we could run through it before I emailed it to you.’
‘If you’d been at your desk, you could have escorted her out. Tactfully.’
‘It’s not my job to deal with your girlfriends, and why would I have escorted her out?’
‘Because you know I don’t indulge women here unless they work for me.’
/> Ellie gave up on any prospect of her tablet rescuing her from a conversation she both did and didn’t want to have. Somehow indulging in any kind of personal conversation with her boss felt all wrong. It almost felt threatening. But what really scared her was the element of excitement that went hand in hand with that. He was so clever, so restless, so intrinsically edge-of-seat, addictively commanding.
Part of her wondered what would happen if she allowed herself to be sucked into the vortex of his overpowering personality but somewhere deep inside she had always known that nothing good would come of it.
She didn’t want to talk about his women. She wanted to keep things strictly on a polite, harmonious surface level. She didn’t want anything confusing to disrupt the calm surface of her life. She’d spent far too many years dealing with chaos and confusion in her own personal life to court yet more of it from another source. She knew that, when it came to James, it would be very easy for the lines between boss and secretary to blur at the edges. He wouldn’t notice, but she would.
She enjoyed and needed this job. She certainly needed the money and she wasn’t about to jeopardise any of that by crossing her own self-imposed boundaries.
‘Perhaps you didn’t make that clear enough,’ Ellie said vaguely.
Naomi had been on the scene for nearly five months, which was something of a record for him. Maybe the poor woman thought that that had constituted the sort of commitment most women sought in a relationship, and therefore that showing up at his workplace wouldn’t have resulted in the Spanish Inquisition.
‘Of course I made it crystal-clear.’ He looked at her with incredulity, as though she’d suddenly started speaking a foreign language, and she returned his gaze coolly, as always. ‘Say what you’re thinking, Ellie. I can see the cogs whirring, so why don’t you spit it out instead of sitting there in fulminating silence?’
Ellie gave up. He could be volatile...energetic in a way that left most people feeling that they were stuck in the slow lane even though they were going as fast as they could. And there were times when she’d had to fade into the background when he had blown a fuse at some hapless person’s incompetence.