by Cara Colter
“Don’t call me that.” Obviously she had now realized old endearments would move them toward the dangerous ground of sweet memory. “And what do you mean, she traded me for nasturtiums? There are no nasturtiums on Penwyck. There are no nasturtiums in the whole universe as far as I can tell. And how did you know that you were going to need to make a trade? That I wasn’t coming to your little party willingly?”
He thought her use of the word willingly was unfortunate in light of the context he had been using it in only moments before. It made him want to skip all this—the anger and the awkwardness—and just get to the part where his lips met hers, and her resistance melted completely.
“Palaces are funny places, Jordan. Your plot not to join me reached me before you had fully formed it.”
“Oh for God’s sake, Owen, you sound like some medieval despot. I was not plotting. I have responsibilities. And pleasing you is not one of them. You have a staff of a hundred and ten fawning, adoring, loyal servants to do that for you.”
“I don’t refer to my staff as servants.”
“Fiefs? Serfs?”
“Make fun of me if you must, but don’t make fun of the people who are so loyal to me.”
“Misguided as that may be,” she murmured edgily. “You didn’t really find nasturtiums, did you?”
“That was her price. Aunt Meg wanted nasturtiums.”
Reluctantly, stiffly, her arms folded in front of her, Jordan took a seat. She watched her daughter gushing over the pony.
“It’s not nice to trick little old ladies. You won’t be able to find nasturtiums. Not anywhere, not for any price.”
He smiled. “I already did. Fifty dozen orange and a dozen yellow from the hothouse of a friend of mine in England.”
“I hate you,” she said in a low voice. “And you may have bought my presence for an afternoon, but you can’t make me like it, and you can’t make me like you.”
It occurred to him this wasn’t going well, not at all according to his script, not producing any of the enjoyment a well-matched chess game gave him.
“Jordan, all I want is a chance. To tell you what happened. That’s all. One chance.”
“All right,” she said. “One chance. And that’s it, Owen. No more vulgar displays of power and wealth—buying the affection of my aunt and my daughter.”
He supposed that meant now would not be a really good time to present Whitney with the tiara.
Jordan was looking around, but rather than looking enchanted as he and Ralph had hoped, she looked decidedly cynical. “The garden doesn’t usually look like this does it?”
“I wanted it to look special,” he admitted.
“You wanted to manipulate my impressions of you.”
“You know, you are beginning to make me feel angry.” The statement astonished him. The last time he’d felt angry he’d been able to smash his captor in the mouth. This was a different kind of opponent altogether.
And yet he felt more helpless than he had when he was in chains.
“Angry?” Jordan laughed without humor. “That’s how I’ve felt for five years. I think it’s your turn.”
It was absolutely the wrong time for the platter of scones and the clown cupcakes to arrive, but they did anyway. The girl who delivered them, insensitive to the mood at the table, fawned over him terribly, while Jordan looked on, disgusted. He didn’t think the fact that his staff liked him should be held against him.
Whitney would not get off the pony to try them and Jordan would not touch the delectable offerings set on the table before them.
He ate the entire plate of scones in an atmosphere of tense silence. The girl raced out with another platter of them, and fawned some more.
When she was gone, he cast around in his mind for a way to repair this. For the first time, he entertained the thought it might be beyond repair.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry I caused you so much pain.”
There. He had humbled himself before her. It was a task that, as a prince, he had not had to perform often.
He waited for her face to light up with gentle understanding. Instead, she shoved her pert little nose a few centimeters higher in the air, and then regarded him down the length of it.
“You know, Owen, I might find that a whole lot easier to believe if you had sought me out, instead of fate dropping me in your lap. You told me yesterday you knew nothing about me coming here.”
“I didn’t,” he admitted, wishing he could take back yesterday and adjust that statement so it looked like he had brought her here.
“It’s been five years since I woke up one morning to find you gone. Did you just figure out now that you’re sorry about it?”
It occurred to him that she had matured into the most puzzling creature on the face of the earth—a woman. And not even being a prince was going to help him out of this mess.
“I was always sorry about it, Jordan. It wasn’t until I had a few days in a dark cell to review the events of my life that I realized how sorry.”
He saw sympathy flash in her eyes, and curiosity. But only briefly, and then she quelled both. He pushed on.
“It seemed, in that cell, I had to look at my own mortality. And I had only one regret, Jordan. That I turned my back on love.”
He could tell she was listening. He hoped it was a good sign that she picked up a scone and began nibbling.
“When I was only eighteen, Jordan, it was becoming apparent to me I was probably going to be chosen as king one day. I was able to bargain for a summer of freedom. One summer. I swore two oaths to win that period of freedom. The first was that under no circumstances would I reveal my true identity to anyone. And the second, I gave my oath I would return here, to this island, to my life, to my duties.
“People not born to this lifestyle do not always understand the power of an oath. Giving my oath means swearing my total allegiance, with every fiber of my being, my soul. If I were to break an oath, how could people who must rely on me to guide our country ever trust me? And how could I ever trust myself? I admit, in the beginning, I enjoyed that you didn’t know who I was. I enjoyed feeling normal. I enjoyed being loved for who I was, and not for what I was. But as I came to know you, Jordan, I would have told you, if I could have. I would have trusted you with my very life, had that decision been mine to make.”
“And those words, Owen, that you said to me, that you whispered against my hair, and into my breast, they meant nothing?”
“They meant everything. I have never said those words to another, Jordan. Nor will I ever.”
“And is that your oath?” she said, scornfully.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “It is.”
“Owen, it’s too late. You broke my heart too thoroughly, you abandoned me too completely. I have spent too many agonizing nights remembering the sweetness of our time together. I thought,” she looked swiftly away from him, but he was dismayed to see the tears forming in her eyes.
“I thought,” she said, her voice trembling, “that you must be dead. I thought the only way you could not come back to what we had, was if you were dead. How could you not even say goodbye? How could you?”
If he’d thought the tears made her vulnerable, he saw he was mistaken. She was very, very angry.
“I wanted to. Jordan, I’d only been granted permission to stay for five weeks, the length of the course. I asked, and was granted permission to stay two weeks after that. When I asked for another extension, I was summoned home. I ignored the summons.
“That last morning, I woke up beside you, and kissed your cheek and ran my fingers through your hair. I got up and got dressed. I was going to go to that little coffee shop and get you the cappuccino you like, and a croissant.
“I had become too predictable in my habits. Several members of the Royal Elite Team were waiting for me. It was their duty to escort me home. And it was my duty to go. To not make their lives, or yours, more difficult by making a scene, by demanding to see you one last time.
I had always told you it might end swiftly.”
“Yes, that was a great comfort to me,” she said. She was regaining her composure now, hiding behind sarcasm. “How could that have made it more difficult for me had you had the courtesy to say goodbye?”
“I thought no one knew about you. I didn’t want them to know about you, start investigating you, dissecting your life. I wanted to keep you, the memory of you, all to myself forever. I wanted to have one thing in my life that was private to me. One thing about me that was not public and would never be public.
“Of course, I was being naive. I realize now I was not allowed to go to the United States unescorted. Someone has known about you all along. I don’t know if they knew about our daughter or not.”
“Our daughter?” she echoed. “I never told you Whitney was your daughter.” Now he could see there was fear added to her anger. It reminded him of a wild kitten that he wanted to pet, hissing and spitting, getting ready to defend to the death against his affection.
“I can do math.”
“You never asked how old she was yesterday. How can you do math when you don’t even know the equation?”
He said nothing.
“You had it checked, didn’t you? Never mind just waiting for me to answer! How much easier to sic a secret service team on us! What else did you find out? That I live in a house that’s no bigger than this whole garden?”
“I didn’t ask anything else.”
She regarded him suspiciously, then put down the scone with only one little nibble gone from it. “Well, don’t. Because my life is none of your business. For what it’s worth, I accept your apology, and even your explanation. We were both very young. I’m sure we both did things we regret and that we would like to change. But it doesn’t matter. It’s over and done with. Don’t make the mistake of thinking we are going to pick up where we left off, because we aren’t.
“Owen,” she leaned toward him, and knocked the meaning out of his world. “I’m marrying someone else.”
Chapter Four
Jordan wanted to slap her hands over her mouth like a child who had accidentally blurted out a swear word. She had lied. She, who took such pride in her integrity, had looked Owen in the face and informed him she was getting married. She, whose closest male relationship was with a cat!
It was a measure of her desperation.
Because, despite all her resolve, all her righteous indignation, Owen was making her feel things that she did not want to feel. It had started when she had entered the garden underneath that unbelievable canopy of leaves, yellows and reds and golds and oranges dancing in the faint breeze, beckoning her forward, softening her.
What woman could resist walking into a dream? And then the garden was so quaint, ivy-covered stone walls surrounding it, cobblestones with thick moss growing between them, artfully placed tubs of mums, flower borders abundant with late bloomers, the table set with exquisite china and a silver service—it was all a romantic fantasy almost too intense to handle.
Owen, probably with a snap of his fingers, had set the stage. He had created an inviting space of warmth and beauty that could make even the most hardened cynic decide that maybe fairy tales weren’t so bad.
It frightened Jordan that he could manipulate her feelings so completely without speaking a word.
Then the pony. Wasn’t that part of her dream for Whitney? If Jordan was really honest about it wouldn’t she rather have bought a little farm than a little house? Of course, it was way out of her price range, but how she would have loved for Whitney to have a dog, and kittens and yes, a pony. What mother didn’t want to see her daughter glowing with joy the way Whitney was now with her arms wrapped around that pony’s solid little neck?
And now, sitting across the beautifully laid table, and just looking at Owen, the handsome familiar lines of his face, the deep blue of his eyes, the quirk of his mouth, the way that lick of hair fell so endearingly over his eye, she felt that treacherous stirring of desire.
The only thing she had never liked about Owen, way back when, was that awful blond hair. Now, even that was gone, and his hair was glossy, nearly black and beautiful. It made some traitorous part of her long desperately for things she knew were lost.
It didn’t help knowing underneath those well-tailored clothes was her Ben, his flawless skin stretched taut over muscles that she had brailled with her fingers, imprinted forever on her brain.
Trying to think of something else, she looked squarely in his face. She saw the bruises beginning to fade, the swelling going from his lip, and it made her think of him in captivity, at the mercy of someone with a brutal agenda. It made her ache, made her want to cross the distance between them and touch his swollen lip and bruised cheek with her fingers. Or maybe even her lips.
It felt as if her survival depended on him not knowing that, never suspecting how weak he made her, how flimsy seemed the wall of her resolve.
“That’s right,” she said brightly. “I’m getting married. He’s a—” mouse catcher? “Exterminator. Justin Jason.” Her voice faltered at the look on his face.
She was not sure she had ever seen such pain in a human being, and she had certainly never caused anyone else such pain. On purpose. To protect herself.
The blood had drained from his face, his eyes darkened to a color of blue she had never seen before, a white line appeared around the lower edge of his lip. But then, almost so quickly she was not sure she had seen it, the pain was gone, and his face looked as if it had been carved from cold, hard stone.
“Over my dead body,” he said quietly.
Had he expressed the sadness, the torment, she had seen so briefly cross his face, she had the awful feeling she would have been lost, like a weak ninny.
But this autocratic response brought her the tool she most needed—her fighting spirit surfaced.
“You have gotten far too used to ordering people’s lives,” she told him. “You have no authority over me, and you will not tell me how to live my life. You had your chance. But I wasn’t good enough to be a bride for a prince, was I? Tell me, what’s changed, Owen?”
“I have,” he said firmly. “And it’s unfair to say you weren’t good enough to be my bride. We were eighteen, Jordan. Neither of us were thinking in terms of forever. Not then.”
“But now you are?” she said sweetly.
“Yes.”
“Me, too. And his name is Jason Justin.”
“I thought you said it was Justin Jason.”
“I didn’t,” she said with certainty, though of course she was not certain at all.
“I hope he’s not as ridiculous as his name. I can’t believe you’d want to go through the rest of your life as Jordan Jason.”
“That’s because you’re shallow enough to think something so superficial as a name would matter to everyone, just because it matters to you. I bet your bridal candidates all have only the best of names and the best of pedigrees, don’t they?”
He said nothing, confirming her ugly suspicion there was, somewhere, an approved list of young women he would be allowed to marry. It was a list she was certain she was not on, and never would be.
“Tell me, is virginity still a prerequisite to marrying someone like you?”
He actually choked on the scone he was eating, and she was glad she had shocked him. He looked so supremely confidant, every inch a prince. It would be easy to allow herself to be intimidated by him, or worse, swept away by him.
“Thanks to you I don’t even qualify to be a bride to a prince, so why wouldn’t you wish me happily ever after, since you can never provide it?”
“Things are changing in royal families,” he said stiffly, “becoming far less rigid and rule-bound.”
“Is that right? You have an older sister, don’t you?”
“Three,” he said warily.
“Well, if the system is changing so much, why are you and your brother the candidates to take over the throne? I understand, from talk in the kitchen, it will a
lmost certainly be you. But why wouldn’t it be one of your sisters? The oldest one, perhaps? Why can’t she become the reigning monarch?”
Whatever slight advantage she had gained by knocking him off balance, by shocking him was gone, he was looking at her with growing amusement.
Amusement!
“I remember you like this,” he said, smiling suddenly. “So smart. You scared all the boys away always playing devil’s advocate. Did you know that?”
“Unfortunately, I didn’t scare away the boy whom I should have been most afraid of.”
His smile disappeared, and again she registered the pain in his face, and instead of feeling good about it, felt terrible.
She rushed on, searching for safe ground. Far easier to discuss politics, philosophies, than mistakes made, regrets harbored. “As for being a devil’s advocate, I find myself on an island that has an archaic political system. A patriarchal monarchy, a system that assumes and entrenches the superiority of men. I’m a devil’s advocate for mentioning it? Do you see why we can’t have a future?”
“Actually, it only makes me think a future with you would be more interesting.”
He said that as if he was really and truly contemplating a future with her. She could not give in to the feeling that caused within her: weakness. A feeling of wanting to melt toward him, erase the hurts of the past with their lips and their hands.
It was a war for her soul, and she wanted to surrender? One day in and she was going to wave the white flag? She needed to be building her battlements, not crawling over the walls! It was good that she had said she was getting married! Even if it was a lie, it was a necessary one, one that should keep Owen at a distance.
“You and I have no future, Owen,” she said, forcing her tone to be uncompromising. “I know that. Why can’t you see it?”
The problem was he didn’t look like he was going to give up and just wish her a nice life. His face had a stubborn cast to it.
“I find myself asking why you’ve been brought here to Penwyck. Someone with a great deal of power has a piece of this puzzle that I don’t have.”