Finally Joseph emerged. “Safe and clear.”
He came out and they went in.
Rhia headed straight for the cheap, scratched-up desk in the corner. “Same desk, remember?”
He did remember. In his mind’s eye, he could still see her, sitting in the hard-seated chair, wearing cutoff jeans and a snug little shirt, one foot tucked under her, an art history book open on the table in front of her.
She wandered into the bedroom alcove, where the deep purple-red bougainvillea blazed on the far wall outside the window, just as it had eight years before. The worn-out box springs made squeaky sounds as she sat on the end of the bed. “I was imagining we might make wild, crazy love here, for old times’ sake....”
He went and sat beside her. She’d pinned up her hair before they left the hotel, but a dark curl had already escaped and trailed along the side of her neck. He coiled it around his index finger. “Wild and crazy love sounds good to me. But why do I get the feeling you’re not really in the mood?”
She sighed then. “It all looks a little...forlorn, somehow.”
“It’s just more proof that we can never go back.”
Her slim shoulders slumped. “Ugh. More sadness. This was not my plan.”
The curl of hair kept a corkscrew shape when he pulled his finger free. He wrapped an arm around her. “It’s all right.” She looked up at him and he kissed the tip of her aristocratic nose. “I have always wondered what became of the place.”
She was studying him again. “Yes, well. There is that.”
“Now we know.” He wanted to kiss her, to say, Marry me. He’d bought a ring on Tuesday, before leaving for Italy with Prince Damien, and he was carrying it with him everywhere, waiting for the right moment.
Unfortunately, he had to admit that now probably wasn’t it.
And then she asked, “Did you ever plan to marry and have a family, Marcus—I mean, marry someone else, before Montana and the baby?”
He didn’t want to tell her. So he hedged. “Does it matter?”
She stood up and went to the window. For a moment, she stared out at the bougainvillea across the way. When she turned to face him, her eyes were stormy again, the way they’d been back at the hotel. “It matters. Yes.”
Why? She didn’t need to hear about the life he wasn’t going to have now. “I don’t agree. What matters is you and me. The baby...”
She made a circuit of the room, ending back at the window again. For a moment, she stared out. Then she faced him. “I keep waiting for you to see, to understand that I need to know...all about you. You keep telling me how you’re going to be more open with me. And then, well, every time I ask you something about your life, about the past, about your dreams for yourself, you brush me off like I’m lint on your sleeve.”
That was unfair. He stood. “That’s not so.”
“Yes. Yes, it is so.” She wrapped her arms around herself in a protective sort of way. “I want...more than just a husband, Marcus. I want you. I want you in the deepest, truest way. I wish you could see that.”
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
She blew out an impatient breath. “I can take a little hurting now and then. A little pain is worth it. Sometimes it’s more important to know the truth than to be protected from the things that I might not especially enjoy hearing.”
“But it doesn’t even matter.”
“How many times do I have to say it? Yes. It does matter. It matters to me.”
By then, Marcus ardently wished he had just answered her question in the first place. He’d made way too much of it and now she was watching him with real anxiety, expecting some horrible revelation that would change everything.
So he went ahead and admitted, “I did plan to marry, yes. Eventually.”
She gasped. “Oh, no.” Her voice was much too soft, her eyes wide now, and worried. “I can’t believe I was so selfish. I can’t believe that I never even bothered to ask.”
“Ask what?” He felt like a blind man plunked down in an unknown room, groping madly to gain some familiarity with the alien space.
“That night, I... Oh, Marcus, it was just all about me, you know? All about what I needed to get through what was happening. It never even occurred to me that you might have... Oh, God. I just feel terrible about this.”
He dared to reveal his complete ignorance. “Do you know that I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about?”
She came and dropped down beside him again. “That night in Montana...”
“Er, what about it?”
“Marcus, was there someone you were seeing then, someone you had to end it with because of what happened with us?”
Chapter Thirteen
It was something of a relief to hear the question at last, because the answer was easy. “No, of course not. I wasn’t seeing anyone.”
She put a hand to her chest and blew out a breath. “Oh, thank God.”
“Why would you imagine such a thing? Yes, it’s true that I haven’t been as forthcoming as I should have been...”
She actually rolled her eyes. “Understatement of the decade. I mean, given that we’re here in America right now to settle the estate of the father you never mentioned that you had.”
“But you must see. Roland is one thing.”
“Roland is a very big thing.”
“Rhia. If there was another woman, you can be sure I would have told you. I would have told you that night, under the blankets in the backseat of that SUV before things went too far. I would have told you and that would have stopped it. Not only because I would not betray someone who trusted me, but also because you would never have made love with me if you thought I had someone else.”
“You make me sound like a model of integrity when I just admitted that I wasn’t thinking about anyone but myself.”
He hooked an arm across her shoulders. “You couldn’t do that to another woman. It’s just not in you.”
Reaching up, she brushed soft fingers against his cheek. “But you did plan to get married?”
Better, he saw now, just to tell her straight out. “Yes. I thought I would find a kind, even-tempered woman of my own class, someone who would look up to me, a woman who would be thoroughly impressed with my success and proud of my accomplishments, someone who wanted to raise a family.”
Her mouth trembled a little. She asked, “So you thought you would marry some stranger just because she would look up to you?”
“Well, my hope was that she wouldn’t be a stranger by the time that I asked her to be my wife.”
She chuckled then. “Oh, Marcus.” He pulled her closer and she settled companionably into the crook of his arm. “I always hoped you would be happy, I truly did. I just never wanted to imagine the particulars.”
“Yet you asked...”
“Because I really did want to know.”
Actually, he understood her conflicting emotions on this subject. It had been the same for him. “Both of those times you were engaged?”
She put a hand over her eyes. “Do you have to remind me?”
“I told myself how I should be happy for you—and then I went and took on all comers in the training yard.”
She blinked. “Fighting, you mean?”
“A soldier has to keep in shape. And proficiency at hand-to-hand combat is part of the necessary skill set. Plus, well, hand-to-hand in the ring is the one place where rank doesn’t matter. We’re all equal there. As we are a small force, we have to practice on each other. Challenges are open to everyone in the guard and the CCU, so I had a good number of opponents to spar with and no end of opportunities to pound some heads.”
“You’re telling me that when I became engaged, you beat up your comrades in arms.”
“All in the interest of peak fitness and battle-readiness, of course.”
“Oh, yes. Of course.” She slanted him a knowing look. “Did you take on those two we met on the Promenade last week, Denis and Rene?”
He hesit
ated to answer. He’d never carried tales. He’d taken his knocks and kept his mouth shut. But now, after finally telling her about Roland, after making himself admit that he had always planned to marry someone else, he was beginning to see why she asked for his secrets.
It was a way to bind them, each to the other. She should be the one in the world he could trust with the things he would never tell anyone else.
So he confessed, “As a matter of fact, Denis and Rene were first in line.”
“Did you win your bouts with them?”
“I did, yes. I wish I could say I found those victories satisfying. But thrashing an old nemesis or two didn’t change anything that mattered. You were still about to become another man’s wife.”
She made a small, throaty sound. “And then I didn’t marry either of my fiancés, after all. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Both times I ended up having to admit that it wasn’t going to work.”
“And I was glad,” he said low and rough.
She turned those shining eyes to him then. “I’ll bet you hated yourself for that.”
“I did. It was wrong. I had given you up twice. I had no right to be glad when you didn’t find the happiness I kept telling myself I wanted for you. And I did want it. I wanted you to be happy—I just didn’t want to think of you with anyone else.”
Tenderly, she said, “We are ludicrous.” They were the exact words she’d used the day she told him about the baby. Only now, somehow, the meaning was altogether different. Fond. And also gentle. Like the touch of Sister Lucilla’s hand at St. Stephen’s, when he was small. The sister would clasp his shoulder and smile benignly down at him and he would feel...blessed somehow. Reassured that in the end, though his birth parents had abandoned him and his adoptive parents had sent him back, though he had nobody to call his own, everything would come out right in the end.
Rhia suggested softly, “You know I want to know more about those two men you grew up with, about St. Stephen’s, about your childhood there....”
He reconciled himself to giving her what she needed from him: another large dose of sharing. “It wasn’t a bad childhood, really. In spite of what you hear about nuns at Catholic orphanages, the nuns who raised me were mostly kind. Then again, I was one of the good boys. I had no one and the only way I could see to make anyone care for me or pay attention to me was to be very, very good. The nuns approved of me.”
“And Denis and Rene?”
“They got attention by making trouble and they were always suffering the consequences, forever being punished for some transgression or other. And they hated me. They were constantly engineering opportunities to make me pay for being a kiss-up.”
“What ways?”
“Just the usual things that bad boys do to good ones.”
“Such as?”
“Once they nearly drowned me in a toilet. They also lured me into the catacomb of cellars beneath St. Stephen’s and then locked me down there in the dark. They stole my schoolbooks and my finished assignments and then destroyed them. And they beat me up every chance they got.”
She made a low, outraged sound, as women tend to do when hearing stories of boys’ inhumanity to boys. “That’s terrible. You didn’t fight back?”
“At first, yes. But I quickly learned that fighting back was an exercise in futility. They only beat me harder. So I would run away as fast as I could whenever I saw them coming. If I wasn’t fast enough to escape, I would curl into a ball and bear whatever punishments they meted out. It went on like that for several years until I was strong enough to win my fights with them.”
“Did you tell the nuns what they were doing to you?”
He gave her a patient look. “No.”
“Well, you should have.”
“Rhia, I survived. And I grew stronger. I started working out, studying up on martial arts and boxing. I was fifteen when I first took them both on and won. After that, they mostly left me alone.”
“But they resent you to this day.”
“How would I know? It’s nothing I would ever discuss with them. And I have no way of knowing what goes on in their heads.”
“Oh, of course you do. We all have instincts about such things.”
“Yes, but now that I’m a grown man and not the least afraid of either of them anymore, I’m not especially interested in knowing what Denis and Rene are thinking.”
She gave that some thought. And then she slid out from under his arm and stood.
He caught her hand before she could completely escape him. “Stay here.”
She stepped up nice and close and he spread his thighs a little so she could ease in between them. Bracing her hands on his shoulders, tipping her head to the side, she studied him the way she often did. “I think that you are tired of sharing.”
“You could say that, yes.”
She leaned down to him. He breathed in the scent of her and thought about how fine she looked naked, how swiftly he’d become accustomed to being naked with her on a regular basis.
How he really would like to be naked with her right now.
But the room had a faint smell of mildew and the bedsprings creaked. He couldn’t help wondering how clean the bedding was. They had some fine memories in Room 112.
Making a new one right now?
He didn’t think so.
She kissed the space between his eyebrows. “I’m ready to go if you are.”
* * *
They continued their trip down memory lane. Visiting the places where they had been together before seemed to please her and he wanted very much to please her.
It also helped to keep his mind off the father who had deserted his mother and him.
The father he would never see again.
Not that he wanted to see Roland again. He didn’t. Of course not.
They went to the bookstore at UCLA, the one where they’d met. And then for lunch, they tried the hamburger stand where they used to eat all the time way back when. They had cheeseburgers and fries and vanilla milkshakes and agreed that the greasy, heavy food was every bit as good as it had been eight years ago.
“When it comes to cheeseburgers,” Rhia said, “you can relive the past.”
They returned to the hotel for their swimsuits and went to Seal Beach, where they spent the afternoon slathered in sunscreen, basking on beach towels and wading in the surf, with the silent Joseph keeping watch.
That evening, they visited the Bravos at their estate, Angel’s Crest, in Bel Air. Emma and Jonas had four children—two boys and two girls. They were also raising Jonas’s adopted sister, Amanda, who was sixteen, something of a musical prodigy and stunningly beautiful, with enormous dark eyes and curly black hair.
Emma was a blonde charmer from a small town in Texas and Jonas doted on her. Their sons were three and seven and their daughters ten and five and Emma clearly believed that children should be both seen and heard. The children came to the table for dinner and laughter and happy chatter filled the elegant formal dining room.
The three-year-old, Grady, was an especially enthusiastic talker. He sat right up at the table in a booster chair. Marcus ended up seated on his right. Grady told him all about his plastic dinosaur collection and explained in great and nearly incomprehensible detail what levels he had reached playing Angry Birds.
Later that night, when they were alone together in the hotel suite, Marcus told Rhia, “I liked them—Jonas and his wife, the children, Amanda, all of them.”
They’d kicked off their shoes and stood barefoot on the balcony, admiring the lights of the city that spread out like a blanket of stars all the way to the Santa Monica Mountains. “I think you had a good time tonight,” she said. “Though you didn’t expect to.”
“I assumed it would be four adults at a candlelit table making polite conversation. I had no idea there would be all those children, everyone talking over everyone else. It was all so energetic. And there was so much laughter, wasn’t there?”
“Yes, there was.”
>
“Was it like that when you were small?” Somehow, he’d never pictured the princely family being rambunctious at dinner.
“Often it was, yes. We would argue sometimes, and we would all grow excited. Except for Max. Maybe it was because he was the oldest. He always stayed in control and would try to calm us down. Damien was the biggest troublemaker. Once he grabbed the bread basket and began firing dinner rolls at Alexander, who then jumped up, ran around the table and punched Damien in the nose.”
“Was there blood?”
“A river of it. Genevra, always so tenderhearted, became very upset and started crying.” Genevra was eighth-born of the nine Bravo-Calabretti siblings.
Marcus laughed. “You will destroy all my illusions of the way young royals behave.”
“I told you all this, didn’t I, years ago?”
He took her by the shoulders, pulled her in front of him and wrapped his arms around her waist. “No.”
She leaned back into him, resting her hands on his forearms. “We didn’t talk enough, then—although, when I think back, I remember that I did feel close to you, closer than I ever have to anyone else, really.”
“We were so young.”
“And you were so incommunicative.”
“Rhia, it was only eight weeks. And we spent a lot of the time we had together in that creaky bed at La Casa de la Luna.”
“We always did communicate well with our clothes off, didn’t we?”
He pressed his lips to her hair. “Yes, we did.”
She stared dreamily out toward the mountains. “It was all just so heart-stoppingly romantic, that time. And I did talk about my family then, didn’t I?”
“A bit. I seem to recall your telling me about the plays that you and your sisters and Princess Liliana used to put on.”
“Yes. The plays were glorious—or at least, we thought so. Belle wrote most of them. They were full of princesses and knights and fire-breathing dragons. We made our own costumes. Our brothers and our parents and any available servants were called upon to be the audience. It was great fun. Oh, and we all enjoyed board games, too. We were quite competitive, especially the boys and Allie. In a horse race or a game of Risk, you will never beat Allie.”
37 Her Highness and the Bodyguard Page 16