How to Love a Princess

by Claire Robyns

  He wasn’t crazy. He wasn’t inexperienced. And he knew when a woman melted beneath his touch and Catherine was every inch that woman.

  Why did she continue to deny it? To deny him? Why had she given up on them easily? She wasn’t the type of woman to lust without deeper emotions.

  As she turned back to face him, her auburn hair pressed flat beneath the hard hat to make her eyes seem even rounder and larger, flashing blue in defiance of what had just happened. That stubborn chin notched up defensively and the answers came to him like a bucket of frigid water dumped over his head. Answers she’d already given him, answers he apparently had difficulty remembering.

  He wasn’t the stuff royalty was made of and Catherine would deny herself a million times over in favour of duty.

  He wasn’t the kind of man Ophella would accept as the husband of their future queen.

  God help him for false pride and immodesty, but Geoffrey was?

  The reasoning eluded Nicolas, but he had no option other than to accept the ending she seemed hell bent on. Catherine put Ophella above all else and she’d decided that he wasn’t the man to make her a better queen.

  That man was Geoffrey. Her choice sucked, but there it was.

  “Lead the way,” he told her grimly, bringing tomorrow a little closer in light of his latest discovery. “Duty before pleasure, right?”

  Catherine’s cheeks burned at the reference to what they’d just done. If she continued to allow herself to be kissed senseless, she’d be leading them both down a path of hope that had to come to a dead end. “We can’t do that again.”

  “It’s just a saying, Catherine,” he cut in. “Besides, your duty will never be done, will it?”

  She opened her mouth to protest, but he was already marching across the parking lot and away from the buildings. Not that she had any idea of what she might have said. Scowling into his back, she stomped after. He paused at the wooden signpost at the edge of the gravel, then started down one of the three roads leading out.

  “Nicolas,” she called out. “That road will take you to the main entrance of shaft 3B. We can drive down there later, but the dogs entered a subsidiary tunnel that opens onto a footpath.” She waited as he retraced his steps, then she pushed through a dense bush and onto a path not visible from the parking lot. The track was overgrown and narrow, forcing them to walk in single file.

  “They must have been chasing a hare, or maybe a fox,” Catherine explained, her voice loud enough to travel to him behind. “The subsidiary tunnel was dug eighteen years ago during the initial exploration stage of this mine, then abandoned to another opening about a mile to the east.”

  They walked in silence for the further fifteen minutes it took to reach the opening. Catherine stared at the hardwood planks bordering up the entrance and groaned. “I’m sorry. I forgot that I asked Harry to take care of this. All the other mine entrances are guarded and I was afraid a child or another animal might find this opening.”

  Nicolas propped his case against a tree, dropped the torch on top of it and came to stand beside her. “You seem to forget with remarkable ease.”

  She glared up at him. But he was studying the blocked entrance and not her.

  “Was that another stab at me?” she blurted angrily. He glanced at her with a frown and she threw her hands up. “Come on, take your best shot. Let’s get this out of the way. I’m tired of all the accusations and not so subtle innuendos, Nicolas. I did what I had to do, all right?” Tears of frustration and anger, tears of her own loss renewed a thousand times by the careless kisses he threw at her, threatened to spill. She wiped at her eyes furiously. “I’m sorry that I hurt you.”

  I’m sorry that you still love me. She couldn’t say that, but it was what drove the stake deeper. “Hate me. Despise me.” In that moment, she honestly wished he would. It would make all this so much easier. “You have every right. But stop playing this game of cat and mouse.”

  A tremble started in her shoulders, then worked its way through her entire body. “You can’t just kiss me whenever the fancy takes you.”

  Four years of emotion shuddered through her veins. Now that it was finally coming out, she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t bear it anymore. She couldn’t bear loving him. She couldn’t bear the thought of not loving him. For one sweet moment in time, she’d had the world at her feet and it had been ripped from under her with one cruel blast.

  His hand landed on her shoulder and she jumped back, pushing him away. “Stop taking digs at me, Nicolas. Trust me, I know exactly what I did. What I destroyed. But it’s gone now. Leave it alone. I’m not strong enough.”

  “Strong enough for what, Catherine?”

  To reject you over and over again.

  To give up on us anew every day.

  “To fight this,” she said, her voice unsteady and barely audible. His gaze was dark and piercing. She took a deep breath and appealed to the inner core that made the man. “Please, Nicolas, stop making me fight this.”

  Their eyes held for a long minute. It took that full minute for her to realise that she’d made a dangerous mistake. Not even Nicolas was that noble.

  “What exactly are you fighting, dolce cuore,” he asked softly.

  She shook her head, closing her eyes, afraid to answer truthfully, afraid to lie.

  “What, Catherine?” His voice hardened, edged in grit. “Answer me. What are you fighting?”

  Her eyes snapped open. “You. Me. Us.”

  “Then don’t.”

  “I have to.”

  “Why? For Geoffrey?” He uttered a curse that steeled his eyes and thinned his lips. But the contempt blackening his face didn’t last long. His manner changed as he reached out to her, tipping her chin to him, the pad of his thumb stroking her lips. “I’m sorry, Catherine. I have no right.” He dropped his hand, taking the instant warmth with it as he turned away from her. “Stand back.”

  “What?” But she did as he asked. Her breath caught as she watched him charge the bordered up entrance, ramming into the planks with a shoulder.

  “Nicolas!” she cried out, too late. He went crashing straight through the splintered wood and tumbled into the darkness beyond.

  Heart hammering, she ran after, through the forced opening, and immediately tripped. She put her hands out to break the fall and they found Nicolas. His arms came around her automatically as she landed on top of him, her head striking his chest with a loud ‘oomph’ that could have come from either of them. Probably both. Stunned, they lay like that for a moment, gasping for air.

  “That wasn’t very clever,” he panted.

  “Me? Or you?”

  His ragged chuckle rumbled at her chest. “Take your pick.”

  As her breathing evened, Catherine became intensely aware of the heart beating against hers, of the arms tightening ever so slightly around her. At once she was battling to breathe again, struggling in his arms, wriggling over his hard body.

  More calmly, Nicolas rolled onto his side, moving a hand to cradle her head just before she was tipped onto the ground beside him. He went on to his knees, leaning over her. “Are you hurt?”

  Catherine pushed him off and sat up. “I had a soft fall.”

  He gave an exaggerated groan. “Tell me about it.”

  She tucked her chin in and fiddled blindly on the front of her hat, found the lamp switch and clicked it on. The concentrated beam pooled onto her lap.

  “I’m going to fetch my things,” Nicolas said, leaving her alone with her small circle of light for company.

  Catherine shivered in the damp darkness, feeling a chill that hadn’t been there a second ago. But the chill didn’t come from the tunnel alone, she knew. It came from the sure knowledge that one day soon Nicolas would leave and not return, and she’d never be warm again.

  Outside, Nicolas took his time, recovering from the shock of holding Catherine in his arms, trying to plan a strategy that was nowhere near to coming together.

  He’d apologised to Cathe
rine. He’d admitted that he had no right to accuse her, cross-question her, doubt her decisions.

  The apology was sincere.

  He probably had no right.

  And he didn’t give a damn. Back there, she’d allowed him a glimpse inside her heart and it wasn’t dead, it wasn’t made of stone. It was bleeding. She could choose duty over tender feelings, but she’d have to get through him if she tried that on with love. She’s still in love with me. He was struck with both elation and anger. Both would have to wait for later.

  Who was rejecting him? Catherine, or a team of Ophella advisors? And why? He had a pretty clean rap sheet, so to speak. What did Geoffrey have that made him the better choice? But not the better man.

  The more his mind probed their every conversation, their every encounter, the more convinced Nicolas became that he could win Catherine back. All he had to find was that one missing piece of the puzzle. Why was Geoffrey a better choice?

  Frustrated, Nicolas kicked the dust with the point of his boot and headed back inside the tunnel. In the meantime, he had work to do. He clicked the torch on and the powerful beam lit up a good twenty feet either way.

  Catherine hurried over. “Right. What are we looking for?”

  “Anything and everything.” He set his case on the ground and snapped it open to remove two pincers, two pens and a couple of vials. “We need to sweep the tunnel from one end to the other. Take a soil sample every couple feet, from the walls and the ground. Chips of rocks. Any vegetation you come across. Mark the vials as clearly as possible. Number the soil samples starting at one, to give us an idea of how deep in the tunnel they were taken.”

  Catherine laughed dryly at the immense task ahead. “Isn’t this where we call in the team of experts?”

  “To contaminate the scene?” he shot back.

  “Ha.” She went down on her knees to start collecting samples in a corner opposite to the one he’d chosen. “Someone’s watched one too many episodes of CSI.”

  “Do you even get that here?”

  “We’re not exactly archaic.”

  Nicolas paused to glance her way. “Maybe not, but you are off the map.”

  “Not off it,” she quipped, then conceded with a small laugh, “A little hard to find, maybe.”

  He turned back to the job at hand and she followed his example, only to pause again when he asked, “What exactly is this kingdom?”

  “Originally Ophella was a Norman baronage in the twelfth century. I guess when the world restructured into its current countries, we were forgotten in the past.”

  “You guess?”

  “We weren’t a terribly civilised baronage.” She plucked a shoot of greenery growing out of a rock crevice close to the tunnel floor. “Our history wasn’t written down until midway through the seventeen hundreds and, by then, much was lost or tangled up in the weeds of word of mouth. Our first king was crowned in 1756. Our first and only king.”

  Nicolas grunted a chuckle. “Apparently you weren’t a very productive baronage as far as male heirs go, either.”

  “I intend to change that,” she murmured softly.

  The echo in the tunnel, however, carried her words to Nicolas. It was his turn to lean back on his knees and look up. “Do you honestly think Geoffrey would make a better father…” than me? He didn’t finish. What the hell was he doing? He wanted information. He didn’t want to put Catherine on the spot. The last thing he needed was to give her another angle from which to choose Geoffrey over him.

  “Actually, he won’t make much of a father at all. The de’Ariggo women are accustomed to raising our children on our own.”

  He stared at her bent head for a while, watching as she labelled a vial and slipped it into her pocket.

  “That sounds sad,” he said at last and he wasn’t thinking only of Geoffrey’s poor parental qualifications. Catherine sounded so strong, so alone, so convinced that she could take on a country and a family single-handedly. She probably could, but it didn’t have to be that way. It shouldn’t be that way. But, for some reason, and he was increasingly determined to find out what that reason was, she believed it was the only way.

  “Very sad,” she agreed, her tone matter-of-fact. Fait accompli. Without looking up, she filled another vial with soil.

  Shuffling ahead of her on his knees, deeper into the tunnel, Nicolas kept his hands busy collecting samples and his mind on the problem. Maybe he should approach this from the other end. “Where did you meet Geoffrey?”

  “I don’t think I ever really met him.”

  “That’s it!” Nicolas exploded, his patience and good intentions suddenly ripped to shreds. The next moment, he was on his feet and towering over her. One straight answer! That was all he wanted. “You must have met him somewhere, sometime.”

  Catherine rocked onto her backside and glared up at him. “You’re doing it again.”

  “Doing what? Asking a simple question and expecting an even simpler answer? Starbucks in Addison Street. Pre-school in Switzerland. A fly-by around the planet Mars. Think hard. I’m sure the answer will come to you. You must have met him somewhere.”

  “You don’t ask simple questions,” she snapped. “You accuse and then wait to see if I can prove myself innocent.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I asked where you and Geoffrey met.”

  Her lips turned down. “We didn’t meet! Our families have been friends forever. I didn’t lie to you when I said I was born in New York. My parents were over there on a visit when my mother went into labour. Geoffrey was a toddler at the time. Apparently he walked into the room a few days after I was born, came right up to my cradle and kissed me on the cheek. Our mothers instantly agreed that it was fated, we’d be the generation to join our families, and made a point of throwing us at each other every chance they got. Very well, since you ask, I suppose that was where and when we met. Satisfied?”

  Nicolas dropped beside her with a whoosh of air that deflated his lungs. He pulled up his knees, meeting her angry eyes with resigned soberness. “No, not really.”

  She shrugged. “I was hardly old enough at the time to recall the details. All I know is that he’s always just been around and that is all I’ve got for you.”

  “So, it’s an arranged marriage then,” he said bluntly.

  That didn’t help him at all. There was nothing special about Geoffrey that he could aspire to. Maybe not even anything damning about himself that he could fix. It was just something that had been arranged at birth. That is how these royal families worked, wasn’t it? Still, there had to be a way.

  “Of course not,” she huffed. “Look, are we here to collect samples or to play twenty questions?”

  He ignored her outburst. “Not an arranged marriage? The papers weren’t signed and sealed and locked in a safe until you came of age?”

  She rolled her eyes at his sarcasm. “Ophella might be a little lost in time, but we haven’t just popped up from the middle ages. The only person that gets a say in whom I marry is me.”

  Now he was getting somewhere. So, it wasn’t a team of advisors rejecting him. He wasn’t sure if he should feel better or worse about that. “And you say Geoffrey.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I really don’t want to think about this right now.”

  Nicolas couldn’t let it go. He got to his feet, hauling her up with him and took them both outside into the sunlight. He put his back to the rock face, crossed his arms and locked her gaze with serious intent.

  This time, neither of them were going anywhere until he had his answers. “What does Geoffrey have on me? What makes him a better choice?”

  “It isn’t like that,” Catherine protested, unable to dislodge his stare. She desperately wanted to look away; found she couldn’t.

  “Then tell me what it’s like.”

  “You won’t understand.”

  “I’ve an IQ of over a hundred and forty,” he scoffed. “Try me. You might just be surprised at how much I’m capable of understanding.”
<
br />   Well aware of his outstanding IQ, Catherine still knew he wouldn’t understand.

  He’d be hurt by what she had to say. It would be the first blow. And maybe that was what it would take to make him back down. “You have arrogance, pride and a firm commitment to improving the world we live in. Geoffrey doesn’t give a fig. As long as nothing interferes with his amusements, he’s perfectly happy in his own little world.”

  His brow arched high and hers went up to match as she continued, “Geoffrey is so used to taking, he’s forgotten to ask where it comes from. He’s never had to stand up for himself, let alone anyone else, and would never spare the energy that could be better used for partying. You, on the other hand, are dedicated, caring, and your integrity will push you to fight for what you believe in.”

  He stared at her, his expression blanking, his tone dulled when he finally said, “You’re right. I don’t understand.”

  Catherine reached out to touch him, then thought better of it. “I’m the one you’ll be fighting, Nicolas.”

  “All couples fight and survive.”

  “Not when one half of that couple is a queen.”

  “I can’t imagine you’d ever use that over me in matters private to our relationship.”

  “Imagine it,” she said. It’s been known to happen.

  “Are you seriously telling me that you dumped me to avoid a lover’s tiff somewhere down the line?”

  “In our relationship, that inconsequential tiff could very easily be taken to a whole new level. World politics. The running of a country.”

  “You think I want to take your precious kingdom away from you?” Nicolas fumed. “Is that was this is about? You’re afraid that I want your power while Geoffrey is too lazy to string two thoughts together, let alone try and take over your country?”

  “You might not want power, but you have it regardless. You’re a man used to wielding authority. What I’m afraid of, Nicolas, is stripping you of that power. I am the final word in Ophella. When our opinions clash, mine will be honoured over yours. When I want something done that you disagree with, I’ll have the Queen’s guard to back me up. Can you handle that?”