The Virgin's Proposition

by Anne McAllister

  Now he couldn’t help it.

  It was hard not to with Anny embracing it every time he looked at her.

  And he did look at her. A lot.

  From the first day he’d met her, she had stirred something in him that he thought Lissa had killed. Not just his desire for sex—though admittedly Lissa had done a number on him there, too.

  But Anny’s whole outlook on life was so different.

  Of course it would be, he could hear Lissa scoff in his mind. Princess Adriana had never had the disadvantage of growing up illegitimate in tiny, dusty Reach, North Dakota. Princess Adriana had always had everything her little heart desired. Why shouldn’t she embrace life? It gave her everything she wanted.

  Yes, he had known Lissa well enough to know exactly what she would have said about Anny. It was what she said about everyone. No one had ever had things as tough as Lissa. No one had overcome as much, had suffered more.

  Admittedly his late wife had overcome her fair share of obstacles. But some of them, Demetrios knew, were of her own making. Some of them were the product of the chip on her shoulder she could never quite shake off.

  “Why should I?” she’d said to him once. “It’s made me who I am.”

  For better or worse, yes, it had. And what he knew above all was that it had never made her happy. She’d never felt joy like Anny had expressed tonight. She’d never opened her arms and embraced life.

  “You’re very pensive,” Anny said to him now.

  They were eating dinner on deck. She’d brought their salads, meat and cheese up to the cockpit because, as she’d said, “Why be down below when it’s so glorious up here?”

  They’d enjoyed the sunset while they’d eaten, and his mind had drifted back to the miserable nights he’d spent sailing to Cabo with Lissa, and how different it had been from this.

  “Is something wrong?” Anny asked him. “They don’t look like good thoughts.”

  He flexed his shoulders. “Just thinking how much better this is than the last time I went sailing.”

  “I thought you went with your brother and Franck,” she said, frowning.

  “I meant the last time I went a few years ago.” But he smiled as he remembered the very last time. “When we went with Franck it was good.”

  “He thought so,” she agreed. “I wish he could do more of it. Mostly he won’t leave his room.” She paused thoughtfully. “It’s easier not to, I think.”

  “Yes.” It was definitely easier not to risk. Safer, as well not to want what you couldn’t have.

  Demetrios drained his beer and stood up. “You cooked. I’ll clean up.”

  “You worked hard all day,” Anny said, standing, too. “I’ll help.” And carrying her plate, she followed him down into the galley.

  She was no help. Not to his peace of mind, anyway. Oh, she washed plates and put away food. But the galley was small—too small for them not to bump into each other. Too small for him to avoid the whiff of flowery shampoo, the occasional brush of her hair as she dodged past him to get to the refrigerator, and—once—the outright collision that brought his chest and her breasts firmly against each other.

  He remembered her softness. Wanted to feel it again.

  The more time he spent with her, the more he wanted to spend. And, let’s face it, the closer he wanted to spend it. He wanted to touch her fresh, soft skin. He wanted to thread his fingers through her hair. Wanted to carry her off to his bunk and know her even more thoroughly than he’d known her the one time he’d made love with her.

  But it wasn’t going to happen.

  She’d said so. Had explained why. He understood. He just wished his hormones did.

  He stepped back out of the galley and said abruptly, “Not going to work.”

  Anny blinked at him. “What’s not?”

  “This.” He jerked his head toward her in the galley. “You can clean up or I will. Not both of us.”

  “But—”

  If she were Lissa, all this brushing and bumping would have been a deliberate tease. Not with Anny. Now he just looked at her and waited for the penny to drop.

  He could tell the moment that it did. Instead of looking at him coquettishly and giving him an impish smile as Lissa would have done, Anny looked mortified.

  “You think I—” Her face flamed. She shook her head. “I never—! I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—Oh God!”

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I can control myself. But I’d rather do the cleaning up myself.”

  Her cheeks were still bright red. “Of course,” she mumbled, and she practically bolted up the companionway steps without a backward glance.

  Demetrios watched her go. It was a tempting view.

  He didn’t need the temptation, God knew, but there were some things a man simply couldn’t resist.

  As the days went on it wasn’t only the physical Anny that Demetrios found hard to resist. She was as appealing as ever physically.

  But it was something more that attracted him. She was cheerful, bright, thoughtful, fun. And he never knew what she was going to do next.

  One afternoon she decided she’d fish for their dinner. He scoffed at the notion. “You fish?”

  “What? You think princesses can’t fish?”

  “Not in my experience.”

  “Known a lot of princesses, have you?”

  “One or two,” he told her. That one had been five and the other ninety-five didn’t seem worth mentioning.

  “Well, live and learn,” she told him, putting the rod together and settling down on the deck. “We used to go fishing on Lake Isar in Mont Chamion. We had our own little hideaway there, a little rustic cabin my great-grandfather built.”

  “No castle?” he teased.

  She shook her head, smiling, but her expression softened and she got a faraway look in her eyes. “About as far from a palace as you can get and still have indoor plumbing. Grandfather had that put in,” she told him. “We loved it there—Mama, Papa and I—because we could be ourselves there. Not royal, you know?”

  He didn’t, of course. Not about the “royal” bit. But Demetrios nodded anyway because since he’d become famous he’d learned all about the need to get away.

  “It was the perfect place,” Anny went on. “Quiet. Solitary. Calm. I felt real there. Myself. My family. No distractions.”

  “Except the fish.”

  She grinned. “Except the fish.”

  “I presume you brought bait for the fish there—which is going to be something of a problem here.” He nodded at the bare hook on the end of her line.

  “Sometimes we did,” she agreed. “Sometimes, though,” she added saucily, “we used whatever was handy. Like now.” And she dug into her pocket and pulled out a tin of sardines she’d found below.

  Demetrios laughed. “If you catch a fish with that, princess, I’ll cook it.”

  She laughed, too. Then she baited her hook and cast the line over the side. It was less than half an hour later that he heard her say, “I got one!”

  It was a sea bass, Demetrios told her. Spignola. “Good eating,” he said, taking if off the hook and heading down to the galley.

  “I can cook it,” Anny protested.

  But he insisted. Once they moored the boat for the evening, she stayed on deck and kept fishing, he baked it with a bit of olive oil, lemon, tomatoes, and basil.

  “Nothing fancy. Just something I learned at my mother’s knee,” he said when he brought the plates up on deck. He’d torn up greens for a salad and had two beer bottles tucked under his arm.

  “Did you cook a lot?”

  “No. But she made sure we all knew our way around a kitchen.”

  Anny thought she’d like to meet Demetrios’s mother. She didn’t say so. But she did ask about his mother and father and what it had been like growing up in a family of seven.

  “A madhouse,” he said. But the expression on his face told her the memories were good ones. “We were wild. Crazy. We rode bikes off roofs. We
fell out of trees. We climbed up the sides of public buildings because we could. My mother said we’d all end up dead or in jail.”

  “Surely not!” Anny couldn’t keep the shock out of her voice even as she envisioned a horde of obstreperous little boys.

  Demetrios grinned. “She’s given to hyperbole, my mother.”

  “Ah. Well, I think it must have been nice having all those builtin playmates.”

  He took a swallow of the beer and smiled wryly. “Sometimes. When we weren’t trying to kill each other.”

  “You were lucky,” she decided, even after he regaled her with half a dozen more stories that ended with either him or one of his brothers, usually George, in the emergency room.

  “We pounded on each other quite a bit,” he said with considerable relish.

  “Like I said, you’re lucky.”

  Then, for contrast, she told him about growing up in Mont Chamion, about what it was like to be “royal.” There was no pounding. No emergency room visits—except once when she had an ingrown toenail. What there were were expectations.

  “Duties,” she said. “Responsibilities. Selflessness. Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” she added quickly. “But being a doctoral candidate is a lot easier. The hopes of a country don’t ride on my dissertation.”

  “But they do when you’re a princess.” It wasn’t a question.

  But she pulled up her knees and wrapped her arms around them and answered it anyway. “Sometimes it seems like that.”

  “Like marrying Gerard.”

  “Yes.” She nodded slowly, trying to find words to explain. “It’s tricky, doing the right thing—for yourself and for your country. You have to learn to walk a very careful line. I’m still learning.”

  Demetrios was silent then in the face of her confession, and Anny didn’t know what he was thinking. When she’d first tacked his poster up on her wall all those years ago, she’d imagined she knew him perfectly. She’d dared to believe, based on his acting roles and the few interviews she’d read, that she knew and understood him. She’d dreamed of a relationship with him.

  Now she realized how little she had known him, how much better she knew him now. How much more she still wanted to know. “What about you?”

  He flexed his shoulders. “What about me?” He sounded as if he didn’t want to talk any more about himself, but she persisted.

  “You got to choose your work. Is being a director what you always wanted to do?”

  “You mean besides being a fireman or a cowboy?” The answer was pat—every little boy’s dream—and so was the grin on his face. It was the grin from the poster boy.

  Anny widened her eyes, considering him with mock seriousness. “I think you still could be,” she told him gravely, “if you really want to.”

  He blinked, looking briefly nonplussed, then realized she was joking and laughed.

  She laughed, too, but asked again, “No, really, Demetrios. What did you want?”

  She thought he wasn’t going to answer her he was so quiet again, and for a very long time. But then he let out a breath and said slowly, “I don’t know. I guess I just sort of thought I’d do what they did—my grandfather and my dad. You know, grow up, get married, have kids.” His tone changed, grew harder, and his expression turned suddenly bleak. He shrugged. “Nothing major,” he ended gruffly.

  Nothing major. Except everything he wanted had been ripped away with the death of his wife. Instinctively Anny reached out a hand to touch his.

  But before she could, Demetrios stood up. “Good fish. If you’re finished, I’ll do the washing up.”

  Anny scrambled to her feet as well. “It’s my turn,” she protested. “You cooked.” We could do it together, she wanted to say. Wanted to believe things had changed.

  Their gazes met, locked.

  Then Demetrios shrugged. “Fine. You do it.”

  It had been easier when he felt dead—when nothing mattered, when he didn’t care.

  Now as he sat on the deck and stared into the darkness, all the while aware of the sounds of dish washing going on below, Demetrios wished he could tap into that zombie-like indifference again.

  He didn’t want to think about how much he enjoyed Anny’s company. Didn’t want to experience the gnawing need to learn more about her, to know about her life when she was growing up or, damn it, what her hopes and dreams were now.

  And he didn’t want to want more. But he did.

  When the sounds in the galley ceased and the light below flicked off, he breathed a sigh of relief, grateful that she’d decided an early night was a good idea.

  It wasn’t that he couldn’t control his hormones when he was around her. He was attracted—no denying that—but could cope. It was that somehow she made him feel human again, made him care again.

  He didn’t want that, either. Not at all.

  “What do you know about stars?”

  He jerked, turning to see Anny’s silhouette as she emerged from the companionway. She handed him a glass and poured each of them a glass of wine before asking again, “What do you know about stars?”

  “Most of ’em are a pain in the butt.” His fingers were strangling the stem of the glass. What the hell was she doing here now?

  She laughed. “Not those kinds of stars. The ones in the sky.”

  His mind went briefly blank. And then he shrugged. “Nothing. I don’t know anything. Just a few constellations, the North Star, a few basics I learned as a boy for navigating in the way of Greek fishermen, without instruments. Why?”

  She sat down across from him. Her profile was backlit by the sprinkling of lights from the small seaside village behind her. As he watched, she took a sip of the wine, then tipped her head back and stared up into the darkness.

  “When I was little,” she said, “I used to wish on them.”

  “Lots of little kids do,” he said, aware that his voice sounded rusty. He set the glass down. He did not need wine to muddy his brain tonight.

  “Did you?” she asked, her voice light. “Wish on stars?”

  “No. I was a tough little kid. Tough little kids don’t do sissy stuff like that.”

  She laughed. “Right. You were very fierce.”

  “I was. Had to be.”

  “I suppose.” She spoke the words quietly. She lowered her head so that she wasn’t staring at the stars anymore. It felt as if she was looking at him. Assessing him.

  Demetrios shrugged his shoulders against the cockpit wall and stared back, though he couldn’t make out her features at all. “You have a problem with that?”

  He saw her shake her head. “No. I’m just trying to know you better.”

  He didn’t like the sound of that. “Why?”

  “I thought I knew you when all I had was your poster. I was wrong. Obviously. I’m trying to remedy my ignorance.” It sounded almost logical.

  He grunted, which was marginally more polite than saying, “Don’t bother,” which would have been wiser.

  “I thought if you wished on stars, maybe you’d tell me what you’d wished for. And then I could tell you what I wished for. Conversation starters, you know? It was a whole section of Swiss finishing school 101—getting to know you,” she said lightly.

  Demetrios chewed on the inside of his cheek. He cracked his knuckles. He rolled his shoulders. He wasn’t about to talk about what he’d wished for. But he didn’t mind if she did. “What did you wish for?” he asked gruffly at last.

  “A brother. I hated being an only child.”

  “You can have any of mine,” he said promptly.

  He heard her laugh softly. “Thanks, but I’m not wishing for them anymore. I’ve got them.”

  “And you’re okay with that?” he asked, because wanting a sibling when you were five or eight wasn’t the same as getting them when you were nearly twenty. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d resented these little interlopers who were now closer to the throne than she was.

  But she just said, “It’
s wonderful.”

  “So you’re fond of them?”

  “I love them,” she said with quiet ferocity. “I hope I have kids just like them someday.” She paused and glanced up to the heavens. “I wish for them.”

  Demetrios felt an unwelcome twinge at the thought of Anny as the mother of someone’s children. Whose? he wondered, then deliberately shook the thought off.

  “Yeah, well, I hope you get ’em then,” he said.

  They sat silently after that, the boat rocking beneath them. A minute passed. Two. Then Anny said wryly, “So much for conversation starters. Your turn.”

  “I didn’t go to Swiss finishing school,” he protested.

  “You only need a bit of polite curiosity. Isn’t there anything you want to know?”

  There were a thousand things he wanted to know—none of which he was going to ask. So he asked the one thing that had occurred to him more than once ever since they’d set sail.

  “Every day it’s hotter than hell. Why do you keep wearing those damn jeans?”

  “Because they’re all I’ve got.”

  He straightened and stared at her through the black of the night. “What?”

  She shrugged. “Everything else is city clothes—what I thought I’d be wearing. Blazers, linen trousers, silk blouses.”

  “And you didn’t think to mention it?”

  “I didn’t want to go ashore. We were near Cannes. You’re too well-known everywhere. People would notice. Papa would find out.”

  “You don’t think Papa will find out if you die of heatstroke?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake! I wouldn’t have let it come to that. I didn’t realize it was bothering you.”

  “It wasn’t bothering—”

  “I’ll cut the trousers into shorts tomorrow.”

  “You can go shopping tomorrow. We’ll moor some place bigger and you can go ashore without me,” he said firmly.

  “I don’t know—”

  “Don’t be an idiot, princess.” He hauled himself up, stalked past her and clattered down the companionway steps. Moments later he came back and threw a T-shirt and a pair of his shorts at her. “In the meantime, wear those. You can use some rope to hold them up.”