The Reluctant Princess

by Christine Rimmer

  Stone-faced as usual, he lifted the suitcase off the bed and carried it over to set it against the wall. She smelled toothpaste as he went past. Sometime during her too-short, not-at-all-relaxing bath, he must have brushed his teeth.

  What a truly odd image: the Viking in her guest bath, with a toothbrush in his mouth, scrubbing away. Somehow, when she thought of Vikings, she never imagined them brushing their teeth. Did he floss, as well? She supposed he must. Everything about him shouted physical fitness. He had to be proactive when it came to his health. Proper dental hygiene would be part of the package.

  He marched by her again and returned to stand at attention near his pallet of blankets. “Do you wish to sleep now?”

  As if. “In a minute. First, I need to lock up.”

  Before she could turn for the door, he said, “I’ve already done that.”

  “Surprise, surprise.” She went to the bed and slid under the covers. Doodles and Diablo, with that radar cats seem to have for the moment when their human has settled into a soft, inviting place, appeared in the doorway to the hall. “Well, come on,” she told them, and reached for the remote, which waited on her nightstand.

  The cats settled in. She turned on the TV in the corner—okay, Feng Shui, it wasn’t. But Elli didn’t care. She loved to watch TV in bed with her cats cuddled close around her.

  And a favorite program was in progress. Law and Order: Criminal Intent. Vincent D’Onofrio had the perp in the interrogation room and was psyching him out with skill and subtlety.

  And the Viking was still standing there—awaiting orders, she supposed.

  “Hauk. Go to bed.”

  He nodded and dropped to his blankets. A minute later, he was stretched out beneath the top blanket, his boots and belt a foot or two away. She wondered briefly where he kept that black switchblade knife when he slept—but then she told herself that where Hauk FitzWyborn kept his knife was no concern of hers. She watched the rest of her program, and after that turned to an old movie on TCM.

  At the foot of the bed, Hauk lay utterly still. She could swear he hadn’t moved since he crawled beneath the blanket over an hour ago.

  When the movie ended, Elli switched off the television. The room seemed so very quiet. She could hear Doodles purring—and nothing else.

  Could the Viking have died?

  Hah. No such luck.

  Had he fallen asleep? It certainly seemed that way.

  What a thrilling development. Hauk. Dead to the world. Dreaming whatever a Viking warrior dreamed, and for once—since the moment she’d walked in her door that afternoon—not guarding her.

  Why, she might do anything. She might get up and go in the kitchen all by herself. Might walk out on the balcony and look up at the stars. Might go down the steps and along the walk and get in her car and…go for a drive.

  And not to run away, not to break her word. Oh, no. Simply because she could.

  She’d return later, after he woke and found her gone. He would be frantic. Old stone face. Freaking out.

  Ah, yes. How lovely…

  Elli rearranged the cats a little, pushing them gently to the side so they wouldn’t be disturbed when she slid from the bed. Then she switched off the lamp and lay back to wait awhile. She could see the glowing numerals on her bedside digital alarm clock. She’d wait half an hour. And if she still heard nothing, she was out of here.

  Okay, maybe it was pointless and a little bit childish. But this whole situation deeply offended her. To show that she could leave if she wanted to would be something of an object lesson—to Hauk, and by extension, to her father. And maybe, if she left and came back of her own accord, Hauk would realize it wasn’t necessary to take the orders of his king so literally. Maybe, by tomorrow night, she’d have her bedroom to herself.

  The time passed slowly. She used it to consider her next move. Should she creep to the foot of the bed and have a look at him, see if he truly was in lullaby land?

  Uh-uh. No point in tempting fate—not to mention squeaky bedsprings. Better just to ease out from under the covers and tiptoe to the door. If it turned out he’d been lying there for hours, stone still and awake, she’d find out soon enough.

  The minutes crawled by. There was nothing but silence from the man at the foot of her bed.

  At last, that endless half hour was behind her.

  Slowly, so quietly, Elli eased back the covers. In one careful, unbroken move, she swung her feet out and over the edge of the bed. She slid her weight onto them without a single spring creaking. Doodles, sound asleep by then, didn’t even open an eye. Diablo lifted his sleek head, blinked at her, then laid his head down again.

  Good. Perfect. Wonderful.

  Elli turned and started for the door to the hall. She was utterly silent. She wasn’t even breathing. She made it into the open doorway.

  “Where are you going?”

  Elli gasped and whirled to face him. He was standing beside his blankets, watching her. She could have sworn he had never moved, never so much as stirred.

  She gulped. “Uh, well…ice water! You know, I really want some ice water.”

  The big golden head dipped once—in permission, in acknowledgment, in who the heck knew what? Elli yanked her shoulders back and headed for the kitchen. She heard nothing behind her. But she didn’t have to turn and look to know that he had followed.

  Eventually, very late in the night, she finally dropped off to sleep. She woke after daylight to the sound of birds twittering in the forest: her alarm clock. Brit had given it to her a couple of Christmases ago. It made nature sounds instead of beeping or buzzing. Elli reached over and punched the off button. The cats were already off the bed and racing down the hall.

  And the Viking…

  All she could see from the head of the bed was the edge of his blankets. “Uh, Hauk?”

  No answer.

  He’d proven last night that he could hear her even if she didn’t make a sound. So he must be up, or he would have answered. She pushed back the covers and scrambled to the bottom of the bed, where she found his blankets neatly folded, his pillow on top of the stack.

  Boots, belt and man were gone.

  Could it be? Had he really left—due to second thoughts on her father’s part, maybe? Had Osrik beeped him late in the night, told Hauk to back off, that his daughter had given her word and the king had decided to trust her to find her way to Gullandria on her own?

  The idea warmed her heart. Her father had faced a basic truth, apparently. He’d seen that in order to begin healing the awful breach in their family, he must trust, first and foremost, he must—

  “You called for me?”

  Hauk stood in the doorway to the hall, bare-chested, a half beard of shaving cream frothed over one sculpted cheek. She couldn’t help gaping at his shoulders and arms, so big and hard, the muscles bulging and taut, the skin so tan and perfect, except for the occasional white ridge of scar tissue.

  And his chest…

  It was covered with beautiful, savage tattoos.

  A lightning bolt like the one in his right palm, only much bigger, zigzagged across his bulging pectorals. Dragons and vines twisted and twined around it—and around the sword and dagger tattooed above and below it. The tail of the largest dragon trailed down his solar plexus to his navel.

  His belly took her breath away. She’d never seen one like it—at least not outside of ab-machine infomercials and superhero video games.

  Elli gulped and dragged her gaze up to meet those watching eyes. “Uh. Yes.” Carefully, tugging on her sleep shirt that had ridden up much too high, she rocked back so she sat on her knees. She tipped her chin to a proud angle and tried to look dignified, though she knew her cheeks were tomato-red. “I…didn’t see you,” she stuttered lamely. “I was wondering where you’d gone.”

  He lifted an eyebrow and held up a thoroughly modern cartridge-type razor. She stared at it for a moment, thinking that it looked toylike and strange in his big hand. But what had she expected, t
hat he’d shave with his black-handled knife?

  “As you see, I am here. Anything else?”

  “No. That’s all.” She gave him a backhanded wave of dismissal. “Go on and, uh, finish up.”

  Elli dressed and made breakfast for both of them. Once they’d cleared off the table, she returned to the bedroom, Hauk close behind. He sat in the corner chair as she unpacked her suitcase.

  When she was finished, she set it, empty, back against the wall.

  “When will you pack?”

  She looked at him, surprised to hear his voice. He’d said hardly a word since she’d called him, half-shaved, from the bathroom earlier. “I’ll get to it. I have plenty of time.”

  He didn’t say anything more, but she knew he didn’t like it, that it bugged him, big-time, to think she might insist on hanging around in Sacramento till the last possible minute on Thursday. Baby-sitting a princess was not his idea of a good time and he wanted to get it over and done with, ASAP.

  Too bad. Let him be bugged. Let him wait and wonder when she would end their constant togetherness and agree to get on the plane for Gullandria. It might be petty—really, really small of her, to torture him when he was only following orders.

  But he ought to know better than to follow such orders as the ones her father had given him. He ought to stand up and say, My lord, I’m taking a pass on playing watchdog to your daughter. It’s beneath me and beneath her and I’m not going to do it.

  He hadn’t said that, or anything like it. So let him sleep at the foot of her bed and stand by the bathroom door whenever she went in there and march along beside her if she dared to go outside. Served him right, as far as she was concerned.

  Elli called a girlfriend, Barb Ferris, at the insurance office where Barb worked. She made that call on speakerphone, at Hauk’s insistence that he be able to hear both sides of her conversation.

  Barb agreed to water Elli’s plants, to bring in her mail and newspapers and keep an eye on her apartment. Barb even offered to feed Doodles and Diablo, but Elli said she’d get back to her on that. She was hoping to get her mother to take the cats. Barb said sure, she’d tell the other girls that Elli was taking off for a few weeks and would miss their girls’ night out on Friday. When Barb asked her what was up, Elli said it was a family issue.

  “Honest, Barb. It’s nothing too serious. I’ll be back in three weeks. Thanks a bunch for helping me out.”

  Next, Elli called Ned Handly, her date for Saturday night. Ned was a doctor, in family practice. They’d met through a mutual friend and Saturday would have been their second date. Hauk stood a couple of feet away, wearing his usual carved-granite expression, as she told Ned she was going away for a while.

  Ned said, with real regret, “I was looking forward to this weekend.”

  Elli glared at Hauk. You’d think he’d have the courtesy to let her break her date in peace. But no. He had to loom right beside her, listening to every word, every disappointed sigh.

  “I was, too,” Elli told Ned. “I hope you’ll give me a rain check.”

  “I thought you’d never ask. A family trip, huh?” Elli had given him no details—and not because the stone-faced Viking standing next to her might not approve. News like this would travel fast, and she wanted to be the one to break it to her mother.

  Her friends often used her title teasingly, calling her “the princess,” and “Your Highness.” They all thought she was so wonderfully unusual, one of three triplet princesses, her estranged father a king in some faraway northern land. As soon as one of them heard she was off for a visit to Gullandria, they’d burn up the phone lines sharing the scoop. Her mother might get wind of it before tonight. Someone might even let something drop to the tabloids.

  Then the stinky stuff would really hit the fan.

  So she was keeping the details to herself. “Yes, a family thing. But I’ll give you a call as soon as I get back.”

  “Elli?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You take care.”

  “I will.” She disconnected the call and wrinkled her nose at the big guy in black. “Well, now, wasn’t that innocuous and aren’t you glad you heard every word?”

  Hauk said nothing. He just stood there, waiting for her to make her next move.

  She realized she didn’t have a move. No one had called from the school or the district, so presumably the sub had been contacted and was, at that moment, teaching Elli’s morning class, managing just fine with the lesson plans Elli had left open on her desk.

  Except for packing and dealing with her mother, Elli was ready to go.

  And it was only ten in the morning—ten in the morning on Tuesday. She looked at Hauk, who gazed steadily back at her.

  Elli sighed. “Oh, Hauk. What in the world am I going to do with you?”

  “Pack your belongings,” he suggested softly. “His Majesty’s jet awaits you. As soon as you’ve spoken with your mother, we can be on our way.”

  Chapter Five

  Elli didn’t pack. Her father had agreed to give her till Thursday and, for the time being anyway, she was keeping that option open. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was simply because, with Hauk shadowing her every move, it felt like the only option she had.

  She went to the spare room, where she kept her computer. Hauk sat at attention on her futon while she surfed the Net for a while and fiddled with e-mail. Then, for an hour or so, she made a valiant effort to get a little reading done.

  But it was no good. She kept feeling those cool, careful eyes on her. She couldn’t concentrate on a book.

  They had lunch at one. By then she was aching for a little ordinary conversation. Over BLTs she tried to engage him in a nice, friendly chat.

  He was the master of the one-line reply. He’d get it down to a single word if he could, or better still, a low, unpromising sound in his throat. She got a number of curt noes, a lonely little yes or two and a whole lot of gruff grunts.

  Finally, she asked him about his family. “Do you have brothers—or sisters?”

  “No.”

  “And your mother and father?”

  He just looked at her.

  “Your parents, are they still alive?”

  “No.”

  “Both gone?”

  “That’s correct.”

  Well, she couldn’t say she was surprised. It seemed hard to picture that he’d ever even had a father or a mother. With his huge, hard, smooth chest and his infomercial abs, his deadpan expression and his lightning-bolt tattoos, Hauk FitzWyborn seemed someone not quite mortal—someone who had never been something so vulnerable as a little boy with parents who loved him. He seemed more like a creature sprung from the Norse myths, like Odin, Vili and Ve, brought into being out of ice.

  “Um, your father? Tell me about him.”

  He gave her the lifted-eyebrow routine.

  She tried again. “What was your father like, Hauk?”

  “I told you. My father is dead.” He’d finished his sandwich. He stood, carried his plate and empty glass to the sink, rinsed them both and put them in the dishwasher.

  She refused to give up. “I’m sorry, Hauk—that he’s gone. Do you…miss him?”

  He reached for the towel, dried those big hands. “He’s been dead for almost a decade.”

  “But do you miss him?”

  He hung the towel on its little hook beneath the cabinets. “You behave like an American.” He made it sound like some crushing insult.

  She sat up straighter in her chair. “I am an American.”

  His sculpted mouth curved. Too bad it was more a sneer than a smile. “In Gullandria, the lowliest of the low will know which questions should never be asked. In Gullandria, we do not presume to ask after the dead loved ones of people we hardly know.”

  Wow. Two whole sentences. The man was a chatterbox, no doubt about it. And he also had a truckload and a half of nerve, to imply that she was presumptuous, when he wouldn’t let her make a call without listening in on her speakerphon
e.

  She kept after him. “So. You’re sensitive on the subject of your father. Why is that?”

  He stood there by the sink, big and broad and silent, looking at her. But she was becoming accustomed to his eagle-eyed stare. She stared right back. And she waited.

  At last, he shrugged. “My father was a Wyborn. My mother was not.”

  She was getting the picture. “They weren’t married when you were born?”

  “That’s right. They were never married. I am a fitz. For future reference, during your stay in Gullandria, when you hear that a man’s name begins with Fitz, you will know that man is a bastard. You might think twice before asking after his family.”

  “Thank you.” She gave him the most regal of nods. “I’ll remember that.”

  “The prefix Fitz,” he informed her in scholarly tones, “is one known to many lands. A child of King Henry the Eighth comes to mind. You’ve heard of Henry the Eighth, second of the Tudor kings of England?”

  “Yes, Hauk,” she said dryly. “Even rude Americans take history in school.”

  “A barmaid gave King Henry a son. The barmaid named the child for his father. Henry FitzRoy. The literal translation of Fitz is son of. Thus, Henry, son of—”

  “—the king,” she finished for him. Her mother had told her many things about her homeland. But not this painful little detail. “Is there some reason, now, in the twenty-first century, to…label a person that way?”

  “In Gullandria, we treasure the family. Life can be hard and short—not so much in recent decades, since we discovered we are rich in oil and have a valuable commodity to trade for the comforts of the modern world. But it was not always so.

  “Over the generations, we have learned to count on one another. Loyalty and honor always come first. Marriage is a sacred trust. Once his wife has given him children, a man cannot divorce. With so much value on the family, it is seen as an offense against the continued survival of our people to bring children into the world without the sacrament of marriage. Certain doors are always closed to bastard children.”