Darcy, his sister Clementine, and brother Edouardo had been taking turns alongside his mother, Lady Charlotte, holding vigil as the family patriarch slowly made his exit from this world. Darcy’s father, Hubert, was a remarkable man who balanced managing his impressive estate with being a very involved and quite down-to-earth father. Some of Darcy’s best times were spent in the company of his father—hunting, fishing, even traveling to exotic locales like the African continent. His father lived life to the fullest, so it was with at least a small amount of gratitude Darcy acknowledged he’d had plenty of time to fulfill his dreams. And at some point dreams must come to a close. Something Darcy was realizing all too clearly now, made worse by the unexpected nature of it all.
During some of the late nights in the contemplative dark of his father’s hospital room, Darcy marveled that, only a few months earlier, he had been truly footloose and fancy-free, feeling none of the burden of the family patriarchy that he’d known, deep in his heart, would someday be something with which he’d have to grapple. Wasn’t it only Christmastime when he was traipsing across the States on the heels of Adrian, his runaway charge? It seemed his only care—other than ensuring Adrian’s safe return—had been his burgeoning friendship (if he could call it that) with that cute redheaded friend of Adrian’s now-fiancée, Emma. And, so quickly, that was about the last thing he could even dream about dreaming about, even if maybe he did find himself occasionally mentally revisiting some of the high points of his time with her. Including that little encounter on the beach, despite the frigid weather, and yeah, the after-party in their cheap hotel room that night.
But now he had the family sandbag weighing down his shoulders, the knowledge that it was up to him to ensure that the family name and tradition continue on, to upkeep the property and holdings of his father’s financial empire to last long past even his own heirs.
Heirs. Now that was a funny one. Darcy hadn’t given a fair thought to a serious relationship in, well, ever. He didn’t need to. He wasn’t in charge of a country, or even really anything. He was Adrian’s best friend and thus had evolved into his equerry after a shared boyhood at boarding school and years together at university. He was Adrian’s right-hand man, he knew him like a brother, and he loved being there for his friend. Who knew what twist their relationship would take now that Adrian was settling down?
Of course, Adrian would still be traveling, though likely less so, but now, more often than not, Emma would join him. Emma would, undoubtedly, take over many of the roles Darcy had played. Which was fine. It made sense. Adrian was moving on. And, like it or not, Darcy would have to move on as well, to adopt the more serious role of running his family estate. Which would leave little time for travel with Adrian, anyhow, and less still for personal indulgences like flings with feisty American firebombs named Caroline.
Chapter Three
CAROLINE was finishing up a workout on the elliptical machine—okay, actually, she was catching up on the Real Housewives of New Jersey while barely breaking a sweat—when her phone rang.
“It’s me,” Emma said.
“Princess! To what do I owe this honor?”
“Stop with the princess. It isn’t even an accurate term for me yet.”
“Fine. How about princess-in-waiting?”
“Why are you breathing so heavily? Am I interrupting something? What’s his name? Oh, God, sorry—I’ll call back when you’re not, um, indisposed. At least you’ve gotten over Darcy.”
“Oh stop it,” Caroline said. “I’m at the gym. And no, I haven’t gotten over he-who-shall-not-be-named.”
“Wait a minute. You,” Emma said, pausing, “are working out? The woman who said she’d rather die fat and happy than set foot on a treadmill?”
Caroline shrugged. “Yeah, well, this is what happens when my best friend moves away and I’m superbored and my job is gone and the guy I was just getting to know has evaporated from my life,” she said. “I think I’m sporting biceps.”
“Biceps are good. Better than soloceps.”
“I don’t even know what that is. Sounds like a dinosaur name.”
“I think you’re thinking triceratops.”
“Well, I definitely am not sporting any triceratops, thank goodness,” Caroline said, glancing at her arms to be sure. “To what do I owe this pleasure, Your Highness?”
“Seriously, don’t call me that. I don’t know if I’ll even eventually be referred to in that way, but I’d be totally embarrassed if you called me all the wrong things in front of Adrian’s family.”
“Considering I’m about, oh, an eight-hour flight away from his family, I think we’re safe from any awkward royal gaffes from moi.”
“Au contraire, my friend.”
“Huh?” Caroline’s interest was piqued with that comment, enough so she turned off the volume on the show just as someone’s hair was about to be pulled hard. And she hated to miss the good stuff.
“See, I just can’t plan a wedding without my best friend. I need some input. Plus, the queen is giving us a home. More like a sprawling estate. That’s in addition to an entire wing of the palace—the royal apartments, they call them. And I’m going to have to decorate and staff it all. Staff. Can you imagine? Here I always thought of staff as an infection you get from dirty razor blades.”
“Pretty sure that’s spelled differently.”
“Whatever. Don’t you see? Now staff is my friend! As in people, working for me! And they’ll work in my home. I keep pinching myself—I can hardly believe this is real. But I need some help. And sound advice. And someone who knows me and my tastes. And someone who will call it like they see it, and the only person I know who fits that description is—”
“Yours truly?” Caroline said, treading as slowly as humanly possible on the elliptical, hoping someone wasn’t about to kick her off since her hour time limit was finished. “Shucks, Ems, I’m honored and all, but there’s that little bit about the cash flow and all—”
“About that cash flow,” her friend said. “There is no flow issue anymore. See, I spoke with Ariana—”
“The queen,” Caroline interrupted. “Please. I need to have ‘Her Royal Highness’ drummed into my head or I’ll start calling her Ariana at your wedding. And I’m pretty sure one of those guys with the big furry hats and the epaulets and brass buttons and really shiny shoes and super long rifles and swords will come at me for calling the queen by her first name.”
Emma laughed. “Tell me about it. I’ve always thought it would be superweird addressing any in-laws by their first name. Which I figured wasn’t going to be a problem since I wasn’t planning to get hitched anyhow. But now here I am marrying into royalty and—awkward!—I can’t begin to tell you how to address half these people, all of whom have a slew of names and titles. I go around feeling like a complete doofus for not knowing what to call any of them.”
“Yeah, you’re like, um, hey there, uh, sir, er, um...”
“Practically. Thank goodness I’m being coached on protocol.”
“Seriously? You have a protocol coach?” Caroline said. “So that ‘the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain’ rolls off your tongue in a most pleasing way?” She added that last bit with a Continental accent.
“More like so I don’t stab someone with the seafood fork when I’ve realized I have no idea what a seafood fork even looks like.”
“Violence is not the answer, Emma.”
“Joking. It can be a little bit daunting, trying to get up to speed on all this information that took Adrian a lifetime to absorb.”
“So don’t rush it. All in good time. Rome wasn’t built in a day. For that matter, I’m sure Porto Castello wasn’t built in a day.”
“You’ve got a point there. This nation’s capital has been here for hundreds and hundreds of years. I suppose I need to build up my knowledge base one brick at a time,” Emma said. “But in the meantime, I could use your help. Which brings me to what I was going to surprise you with before we got off o
n a tangent. Pack your bags, sistah.”
Caroline was silent. In front of her on the tiny screen, one of the housewives was throwing a full glass of red wine against a fireplace.
“Caro? You still there?”
Caroline took a deep breath. “I thought you just said something about packing my bags. And I’m terrified to get my hopes up in case it doesn’t mean what I hope like hell it means. Because if it means I just won a weekend at a timeshare in the Ozarks, I’m totally going to cry. But if it means I might be en route to see my BFF, well, oh, crap, I am so not going to get choked up—”
“Wow. You’ve gone soft in my absence. Since when have you cried over anything other than spilled wine?”
“Point in fact, I just witnessed spilled wine on the little television screen I’m looking at. So there.”
“Your spilled wine.”
“Okay, so I’m not really weepy. Well, maybe just a bit. I need more information before a full-out bawl.”
“So you remember that amazing, amazing, incredible jet that flew us to Monaforte at Christmastime?”
Caroline shook her head. “No. I totally forgot about it. I had to purge it from my memory because I’m so far removed from that luxury now.”
“In that case, good. Because you’re not going to fly on that,” Emma said. “Sorry, but Prince Enrico is off somewhere with that plane. But we’re going to fly you commercial. Hope you don’t mind.”
“Business class, maybe?” Caro asked with a hint of hope in her voice.
“Better still. I’ve got you a one-way first-class ticket with the first-class cabin instructed to treat you like royalty,” Emma said. “Will that suffice?”
Caroline thought for a second about how she’d eaten stale Rice Krispies for breakfast and how she knew the milk was on the verge of turning but she didn’t want to waste a drop because it costs a fortune these days and who can afford to throw that down the drain? And she contrasted that with the notion of her flying as if near-royalty back to Monaforte. And her breath hitched as she tried to speak.
“I don’t think I even know what to say,” she said. “It’s too amazing to believe. Here I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with myself, and now you’re handing me a project on a silver platter.” Caroline stared at the mess the housewife had made of the place, broken glass everywhere and blood-red stains all over the taupe-colored walls. And she imagined what it would be like to be able to toss your dishes away like that, not to mention expensive wine. Well, it was a fake show, maybe it was dyed water. But even then, staff was going to clean it up. And staff—wow, Emma has staff. And now Caro was going to sort of be staff.
“Am I going to be one of your staff?” Caroline asked. “I mean not like I don’t want to be, but I’m not sure how I feel about being a minion.”
Emma laughed. “You are the weirdest person I know. No, you are not staff. Consider yourself my advisor. My royal advisor, if you’d like to add that to the title. Do we have a deal then?”
“As long as you promise I can be on the first plane out of here.”
“Well, the first one has left already. Will the next work for you?”
“Today?”
“No time like the present.”
Caroline looked down at her sweaty shirt. “Oh, man. I’ve got some serious work to do to get myself into a presentable state.”
“You won’t be alone then,” Emma said. “We can work on that together.”
“I am so going to pilfer your new wardrobe.”
Chapter Four
CAROLINE had just polished off her second breakfast mimosa—with the really good champagne—when the pilot announced they’d be landing.
She could hardly believe how quickly the flight had gone by. Two movies, a first-class supper, hot-towel service, and a lovely snooze in her super comfy reclining chair with no one kicking her seat back, and she was already there.
She glanced out the window to a dawn sky of soft melon pink blanketing the capital of Monaforte. Four majestic spires rose in the distance, no doubt from the Cathedral of Santo Giacomo il Maggiore—likely where the royal wedding would take place. Royal wedding. Caroline still could barely wrap her head around the idea of her best friend going from lowly nobody to princess. A fairy tale in the truest sense of the term. And no one deserved it more than Emma, after blazing through the largest collection of dumbass boyfriends imaginable. It was high time she landed a good one.
Which was what Caroline thought she’d stumbled upon with Darcy. Of course, it started out a game to Caroline, as it always did. Usually boy-crazy, she liked nothing more than the sport of landing the latest, greatest guy she could find. It was sort of tantalizing, that stage of hot pursuit. Followed by that stage of hot, well, hot. But she didn’t “do” relationships normally. She really couldn’t be bothered. So usually hot turned cold pretty quickly. Which was curious, since it hadn’t with Darcy. She was hoping it wasn’t because he’d been the one to pull the plug, not her. That would mean she might want to do a little soul-searching about control issues, at the very least.
Caroline had watched throughout her childhood as her mother tried on men like one bad pair of slacks after another. Only she clung to those miserable, ill-fitting relationships until the bitter end, and Caroline had paid the price for that. By the time she was twelve, her mother had brought home permanently—well, permanently might have been a stretch—three different men. Those were in addition to the father who left before Caroline ever even made her grand entrance into the world in the back of the taxicab her mother had hailed when she thought she’d eaten some bad guacamole and wanted to get home pronto.
That poor cabby never even saw a tip for all his troubles—or the mess—that night. Her mother hadn’t even had enough to pay the cab fare; the kind EMS team pooled their money out of the goodness of their hearts. But by then, a wailing baby with a downy head of red fairy floss had announced her presence to her fly-by-night mother, and she would soon learn that her mom wasn’t going to let a little thing like a squalling newborn get in the way of her own failed efforts at happily-ever-after. If Caroline had to lay money on it, she’d have bet her mother hit up the EMTs, the emergency room doctor, maybe even the cops who were lingering at the door to the emergency department by night’s end. It was how she rolled.
So, yeah, Caroline had zero interest in commitment. She’d seen firsthand that commitment was an elusive concept that wasn’t much rooted in reality. By the time “dad” number four had showed up and moved in when Caro was a senior in high school—her mother’s bed having barely grown cold from the last occupant—she knew she was going to commit herself to a lifetime of no commitment. And that was commitment enough.
Which brought her thoughts back to that dastardly Darcy, speaking of dumbasses. Not that he was a dumbass, but if he truly was dumping her like she suspected he was, well, maybe he was one after all. Or maybe he was simply the male version of Caroline, in which case, could she fault him? After all, it seemed to be in her wheelhouse to keep it light and loose, so how fair would it be if she faulted him for doing the very same thing she’d practically made a profession of?
Ack. This mental meandering was going nowhere fast. Her brain was stumbling from thought to thought like a drunkard at a New Year’s Eve party.
She balled up her lovely linen napkin, handed it to the flight attendant along with the dregs of her last mimosa, placed her seat back in an upright position, and closed her eyes, preparing herself for landing in a foreign land and reentry into not-so-foreign territory.
~*~
A livery driver greeted Caroline as soon as she debarked the plane and whisked her away to a butter-colored Rolls-Royce Phantom on the nearby tarmac. There was enough room for a small cocktail party in the thing, so she took advantage of the lack of company and spread out across two seats for the half-hour drive into Porto Castello, her head propped up against her purse, feet dangling across the far side of the seat. She popped on the wireless headphones and tuned out for
a while, repeatedly resisting temptation to pester the driver with a smart-ass comment along the lines of “Say, Jeeves, you wouldn’t happen to have a spot of Grey Poupon?” She felt the need to maintain some element of decorum under the circumstances.
As she watched the landscape roll past through the window, Caroline reflected back to her time with the now missing-in-action Darcy Squires-Thornton. She knew the minute she laid eyes on him at the event at which Emma was photographing Prince Adrian that she’d not toss him out of bed for eating crackers. Then again, there weren’t a whole lot of guys who’d ever truly be guilty of that transgression. After all, what guy would eat crackers in bed unless he was getting over a stomach bug? Maybe Chinese carryout, but by then if you’re noshing on moo goo gai pan with the guy, well, you’re in over your head. Caroline made it a practice not to delve too far in and usually slipped out before it got that complicated. Too much potential gut-spilling over pan-fried dumplings for her taste.
But Darcy, it seemed, was just begging to fail categorization under Caroline’s strict standards of detachability. Oh, sure, he started out like he was the smart boy in class. Throwing his influence around as if it would work on someone like Caroline. She just took that as an even greater challenge, overcoming his lofty notions of princely superiority or whatever it was he was thinking, suggesting that her best friend Emma would be up to no good with his best friend, the prince. As if. If anything, Caroline figured Emma would have the guy hog-tied and stuffed in a closet until she could figure out what to do with him, thoroughly pissed that he’d tried to kidnap her in order to help him get away. That would be more like it, rather than Emma trying to get the guy to pony up an heirloom marquis diamond or something.
But then when she saw Darcy again, ouch. She remembered he was so damned handsome, those brown eyes reminding her of something she might see on an orphaned seal pup in need of a new home. Actually not really. More like just very honest brown eyes. Honest and earnest. The kind of eyes you’d see on someone you’d lend money to and know it would be paid off in due time. The kind of eyes you’d expect on your big brother, whom you knew had your back. Trusting eyes.
Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow Page 2