by Cara Colter
“Will you be able to make more in time for the banquet?”
“Banquet, schmanquet,” Meg said. “Obviously people there need my DCE right now. You now how mood-elevating it is. We can have Jell-O for the banquet if we have to.”
Smiling that her aunt sincerely believed food—and particularly her food—was the answer in any crisis, Jordan went and talked to the pilot. The helicopter left readily when she put in her request, and she went back to the makeshift kitchen.
As the minutes ticked by into hours, she became aware that she felt like she was holding her breath, waiting for Owen to reemerge from the black mouth of the mine. It was evident he wasn’t just putting in an appearance underground. He was staying until they found what they had gone down there for.
She would not allow the panic she felt at the thought of that mine collapsing, with him down there, surface. Nor would she allow the emotion behind such panic to come forward so that she could identify it.
The Dancing Chocolate Ecstasy arrived at about the same time as good news from the tunnel. Rescuers had now made a small hole in the wall of rock that blocked the tunnel. They were able to communicate with the children on the other side, and all were alive. One girl was injured, it was not known how severely. She could speak, and was coherent, which lightened the mood of the gathering immeasurably. Also, with being able to communicate with the children the rescue was now going to progress far more rapidly.
Jordan dispensed the chocolate concoction to the crews, and delivered it personally to the families. Her aunt would have loved seeing how it put smiles on faces. Hope was taking a strong hold, and Dancing Chocolate Ecstasy made a wonderful underscore to that.
As darkness fell, people linked hands and began to sing softly.
Jordan had never heard the folk songs of Penwyck. They told stories of generations of people who had faced hardship and won, of people who were strong and hardy and courageous. She felt Owen in the sung tales of great heroism and courage that littered Penwyck’s history.
Candles came out, the singing faded, but the growing crowds quietly prayed and kept vigil. Huge electric lights came on.
She kept the coffee and food flowing, fighting off weariness. And then she heard a cheer swelling from the crowd. Jordan raced from the kitchen and made her way forward.
A stretcher came first, being carried by two men. One of them was Owen, almost unrecognizable for the layer of dark coal dust that lay over his features. Several men rushed forward to take his end of the stretcher.
The little girl on the stretcher was conscious, and medics rushed forward. Owen scanned the crowd and waved over to one of the service men. He gave him an order that sent the man running.
Owen returned to the child’s side. He knelt beside the stretcher, kissed her on the cheek, with great and abiding tenderness. The secret service man returned, and unobtrusively passed Owen something. It was a small tiara, and he carefully placed it on her head. The child smiled with pleasure so great it appeared to erase her pain and dry her tears. Then the crowd roared, the night went white with the flash of cameras.
The other children, ragged and dirty, tear-stained and exhausted emerged from the mine in a tight little group.
Owen shook each of their hands, had a few words for each of them, accepted sloppy kisses and wiped tears from cheeks. And then as parents and families swarmed forward, he stepped back, and scanned the crowd.
And with her heart in her throat, she knew, this time, he was looking for her. She smiled, suddenly shy, when his eyes found her. He waved her forward, but she shrank back.
One thing she had never been comfortable with was the limelight. She went back to the kitchen, and put on fresh coffee for the exhausted rescue workers. They came and filled the tables, gulping down soup and sandwiches, polishing off Meg’s favorite dessert.
It wasn’t until a long time later, when the crowds were dispersed and the rescue workers had moved on to pack up gear, that she felt his presence behind her.
“Hi.”
She turned and looked at him. He was so handsome, his hair dirty, a smudge of dirt remaining across his cheek, a large rip in the coverall he was wearing revealing the sinewy strength of his forearm.
“The helicopter has taken Alicia to the hospital. And two other children. They want to observe them for the night. A car’s being sent for us.”
“It ended happily,” she said, not at all sure she wanted to contemplate happy endings in such close proximity to him.
“Yes, it did.”
“An emergency tiara in your pocket. Incredible.”
He laughed.
“Why did you go down in there? When you didn’t have to?”
“Why did you come to work in the kitchen? When you didn’t have to?”
“I had to do something.”
“So did I.”
“What I did wasn’t dangerous.”
“Were you worried about me?”
“No!” She dropped her eyes from his. “Maybe a little.”
“Thank you for caring about me, even a little.”
But looking at him, she knew it was more than that. She took a deep breath and crossed the distance between them. She put her arms around him.
And was astonished when he did not return her embrace. Though he did not back away from it, his arms did not close around her, either.
She stumbled back from him, hurt. Maybe it wasn’t proper protocol to hug princes publicly.
He was watching her closely, and she saw a muscle twitch in his jaw.
“Please don’t be like the rest of them,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Anybody can love a prince, Jordan,” he said quietly. “But underneath is just a man, like any other. A man who is flawed. Vulnerable. I don’t need anyone else who can love me as a prince.”
Her jaw dropped open.
“I need,” he said, “one woman who knows who I really am, and who can love that.”
He was inviting her to love him. The real him.
“The car is here, Your Royal Highness.”
“Thank you.” He held out his arm to her, and as he did so, a photographer leaped forward and took a picture of them.
He suddenly looked grim and tired.
“Not now,” he snapped, but she noticed the photographer just smirked.
He looked at her as he handed her into the car, and he looked sad. “It’s no life to wish on anyone, is it?”
He climbed in the car beside her, and almost instantly was asleep. His head fell against her shoulder, and she touched his hair, stroked a cheek now rough with stubble.
A real man, who used all his energy, who could not go on endlessly. Who was flawed and vulnerable.
And as she looked at the sweep of his lashes against his cheek, she felt that familiar and frightening unfurling in her stomach.
Was she woman enough to love the man behind the prince?
The press decided to answer that question before she had even contemplated it fully. The next morning there was a knock on her door, and Owen came into her bedroom.
“I’m sorry to wake you so early. I wanted to be with you when you saw these.”
That picture of Owen kissing the little girl and putting the tiara on her head was in full color on the front page of a dozen different international papers.
But many of the papers also carried a second picture: a dreadful picture of a girl in kitchen clothes, with her hair sticking straight up riding in a carriage, smiling and waving goofily. In some pictures of the rescue scene, Jordan had been picked out of the crowd, pulled from the rest of the photo with a circle of light. And they all seemed to have that picture of him putting his arm around her.
One of the headlines read Beauty and the Beast, and she realized exactly who they thought the beauty was, and it wasn’t her.
She scanned the papers. “Prince’s Mystery Girl,” “Prince’s Secret Love?” The articles were full of speculation about who she was and what her relationship t
o the prince was. They universally decried her as dowdy and unsuitable, and some of them used very unkind language.
One of the more trashy papers called her a scritch.
He had perched himself on the end of her bed, and studied the papers, but she could tell he was really studying her, wanting her reaction. What did he think? That she was going to burst into tears like some soap opera heroine?
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know better. I shouldn’t have allowed you to be seen in such an unflattering light.”
“You tried to protect me,” she reminded him. “I wouldn’t listen. What else is new? Is this an embarrassment to you? That you were seen with me looking like this?”
“An embarrassment to me? I’m worried these vipers have hurt your feelings!”
She looked at him perched on the end of her bed, worried, and she tossed down the papers. She was tired of fighting it. She didn’t care what the papers said about her. She had learned, being an unwed mother in a small, conservative town, that she had a place within herself where her dignity could not be touched. What annoyed her about the papers was the fact that they were asking the very questions she was asking herself.
Was she his mystery woman? Was she his secret love? Where was all this going? Where did she want it to go?
She was so tired of fighting her feelings. She closed her eyes, and tried to sort it out. How was she ever going to know what she truly felt?
And then it came to her, how to know. A method she would have disapproved of for any of her girls in the unwed mothers support group.
“Owen,” she said sternly, “shut the door. And then come over here and kiss me, the way you used to do.”
Chapter Seven
Owen was not sure he had heard correctly. He stared at her. She looked lovely, white sheets tangled around her, her hair standing straight on end, her cheeks faintly flushed, her pajamas askew.
Pajamas. Nice flannel pajamas, styled like a man’s shirt and buttoned up the front. If he was not mistaken those were puppies frolicking across the front. They were not the pajamas of a woman who was enjoying a wild life back in Connecticut.
Nor were they the kind of pajamas worn by the kind of woman who suggested he shut the door, and come kiss her.
Still, he saw the light in her eyes, recognized it, knew exactly what it meant. He went and shut the door, came back and swept the offensive newspapers on the floor. He flung himself on the bed next to her.
It felt like coming home to be lying next to her once more. He reached for her, wholeheartedly planning to ravage her mouth, just the way he used to do.
But as he reached for her, he noticed her eyes were wide and somber, and he realized she had frightened herself with her suggestion.
With superhuman effort he looked away from the plump invitation of her lips, and took her hand instead, ran his thumb over the slender ridges of her knuckles, tried to pull the future out of her palm with his fingertips.
“This room even reminds me of the room in the dorm,” he said, “and that one you had in the basement suite.”
“Horrible, weren’t they?” She leaned over and nuzzled his shoulder where it was nearly touching hers.
Slowly, he warned himself. That was part of the problem before. Everything too fast, too urgent, too much about need instead of desire.
“I didn’t think those rooms were horrible,” he said. “They taught me something I have never forgotten. The magic is not put in rooms by paint and wallpaper and rugs and furniture and a tasteful collection of paintings. The people who share the space are the ones that can make a plain room with small windows and terrible furniture into heaven.”
“Take me to heaven,” she murmured, her voice husky. “I’ve missed it so.”
So, he didn’t have to worry about the shadowy fiancé in that arena. The relief he felt was enormous. Unfair of him to still regard her as his, and yet the heart did not always speak in the language of what was fair and reasonable.
All those years ago when he had first glimpsed heaven, he had never once allowed himself to think in terms of the future, of living a reality of joy-filled days and passion-filled nights forever.
Now he wondered if his future could be like this, waking up beside her, holding hands in bed with her, laughing with her, looking into her eyes until the world around him faded into nothingness.
If he was an ordinary man, he could just say it.
Jordan, marry me. Spend the rest of your life with me.
She kissed his ears. Her tongue slid into one. “Why is it taking you so long to ravage me? Is it because the Sterling Times called me frumpy? Or because the Penwyck News called me a fashion disaster?”
Despite the fact that his temperature was rising rapidly because of the tongue inserted in his ear, he said, “Careful, or I’ll call in on the pajamas.”
“These are nice pajamas! Practical. Cute! Are you saying my pajamas are keeping you from the task at hand?”
He realized what he thought the task at hand was, and what she did were totally separate things.
He wanted it totally different than before. He wanted commitment, he wanted forever, he wanted more than a quick tumble, as glorious as that might be.
And if he was to have those things in the future, he could not give into the temptations of the present. He could not promise her forever without clearing it through the proper channels. What if he asked her to marry him, and he was refused permission to marry her?
Plus, there was the little issue of her planning to marry someone else.
She hit him with a pillow, hard. “You are doing a terrible job of wooing me,” she said.
He picked one up and hit her back. They didn’t stop until they were both weak with laughter.
“Foam pillows,” she said with disgust. “Do you remember the one we broke open that night in your room?”
He remembered and apparently her memory of how that play fight had ended was very close to his memory of how it had ended.
“How about that kiss?” she said huskily.
But when she leaned toward him, her mouth parted and her eyes closing, he realized, he had matured. Everything had happened much too quickly last time. He wanted her to know he was no longer a callow boy. He was no longer capable of using her, without giving her something in return. His ring. His name.
He peeled the bedclothes off of her. The rest of her was clothed in flannel, too. He decided flannel on some people was what Victoria’s Secret was to others. He lay upside down. “I’ll start here,” he said, wiggling her little bare toe, “and work my way up.”
“That will take three days!” she protested.
“That’s the idea,” he agreed. Three days. Plenty of time to talk, to communicate, to resolve, to humble himself before the powers that be and beg to be allowed to marry whom he wished.
Meanwhile, he kissed her baby toe. Thoroughly. She gasped and tried to wriggle away. He snagged her ankle in his hand, planted his lips on that arch of her foot that was so ticklish.
She squealed and tried to wriggle away. He wondered if he was going to end up with a black eye and decided it would be worth it.
“Just surrender,” he suggested, finding her second toe. He kissed it tenderly.
“I have a prince kissing my feet,” she said, dazed.
“Just don’t let the tabloids get hold of that one,” he suggested. He felt her whole body shiver as he took her third toe in his mouth and gave it a little pull. He had a feeling it was going to be a great day.
Unfortunately, the door swung open, no knock. Since the kidnapping he had been on alert, and he rolled from the bed, came up on his feet ready to take on the enemy.
Whitney stood in the doorway, adorable in one-piece pink pajamas with feet attached. Her blond hair was tousled. She had a stuffed elephant, ragged from much handling, under one arm, and her thumb in her mouth.
She regarded the two of them thoughtfully, tugged her thumb from her mouth. “What you doing, Pwince Owen?”
; “Um, I was playing ‘this little piggie’ with your mommy.”
She accepted that and wandered over to the bed. He slipped his hands under her arms and lifted her up, put her between the two of them. Her weight was slight and sweet, and she snuggled into him, trusting, accepting.
“Jay-Jay bites my mommy’s toes, too.”
He felt his whole body go rigid. If Jay-Jay would have walked in the room at the moment his nose would not have fared any better than Westbury’s.
“It’s not what you think,” Jordan said, laughing.
Laughing. Apparently not understanding at all that her toes belonged to him. That a five year separation mattered not one whit. That even though it was not rational, he was insanely jealous that her toes—
“Mommy doesn’t like it. She says you never know where his mouth has been.”
This was worse than he thought. Jordan was doubled over with laughter.
“Do you like Jay-Jay?” he managed to ask the child.
Whitney considered. “Not as much as Peaknuckle.”
Peaknuckle. Well, did he think Jordan would have been a nun over the past five years? Just because she had spoiled him for all time for all other women, did he think she had been celibate? Did he have a right to expect that? If he didn’t, why did he feel so betrayed?
Whitney held out the shapeless stuffed elephant she had. “This is Peaknuckle.”
It felt like the light was going back on in his world.
“Jay-Jay made this wip in him,” Whitney informed him solemnly, showing him a tear in the worn fabric. “Mommy said he didn’t mean to, but I’m still mad.”
Me, too. Just tell me where he is, and I’ll make a rip in him. Limb from limb. Kissing my true love’s toes, wrecking my daughter’s toys, I’ll—
“Mommy says he’s just a baby, he’ll be better when he grows up. He won’t pee under my bed anymore.”
“Are we talking about Justin Jason, Jason Justin?” he asked uncertainly.
Whitney nodded solemnly. “Our cat.”
The man in her life was a cat! The one she had said she was going to marry. He met Jordan’s eyes.