“And not touching you—” he traced a fingertip lightly over the line of her collarbone, above the low neckline of her T-shirt “—just for the pleasure of feeling the silky texture of your skin?”
Her eyes drifted shut and her throat moved as she swallowed.
He dipped his head, whispering close to her ear. “And not easing you down onto the middle of your bed to strip those scraps of lace from your body? Tell me, did you think about that one?”
He eased away from her and smiled. The verbal seduction had aroused him unbearably, but he got a little bit of satisfaction from realizing that she was just as aroused as he was.
She blew out a long, slow breath. “I am sooo out of my league with you.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you knew how twisted up inside I am with wanting you.”
Her lips curved. “Really?”
“I promise you, Marissa, my reasons for not doing any or all of those things has absolutely nothing to do with a lack of desire.”
“Then…why?”
“Because I don’t just want you in my bed—I want you in my life. And I’ve realized it’s not fair to use the attraction between us to put pressure you. So I’m backing off until you decide to give me an answer to my proposal.”
“Are you actually refusing to have sex with me until I agree to marry you?”
“Let’s just say I’m giving you time.”
“What if I don’t want time?”
“What do you want?”
She tipped her head back to meet his gaze. “For starters, I want a proper proposal.”
His heart actually missed a beat. “Are you going to say yes?”
“It’s not a proper proposal if you’re not sweating the answer to the question,” she informed him.
So he reached into his pocket and then, right there in the middle of the parking lot, he got down on one knee—and watched the princess’s jaw drop. He took her hand, felt her fingers tremble in his.
“Marissa Leandres, will you do me the honor of becoming my wife and the queen of Ardena?”
“You have a ring.” She said it in the same slightly terrified tone of voice that she might have used to say “you have a gun” if she’d found one was pointed at her.
“Of course I have a ring,” he told her. “It’s a little difficult to propose without one.”
“I can’t believe you had a ring. In your pocket. The whole time we were hiking the gorge.”
“Actually, I’ve been carrying it around with me for about a week now, trusting that you would eventually come to your senses.”
Her brows lifted. “I wouldn’t make any assumptions about my senses, considering that I haven’t yet answered your question.”
“Well, maybe you could get around to that,” he prompted. “These stones are tough on the knees.”
She reached for his other hand and drew him to his feet. “Yes, Dante Romero, king of Ardena, I will marry you.”
He slid the ring on her finger.
She slid her arms around his neck and lifted her mouth to his. “Now take me home and take me to bed.”
He grinned. “Your wish is my command, Your Highness.”
Chapter Twelve
Unfortunately, their plans hit a snag when they got back to the palace and found the driveway was crowded with vehicles and the parlor filled with people.
“You told me the party was tomorrow.” Marissa’s voice was a frantic whisper.
“Because my mother told me the party was tomorrow.” Dante also kept his voice low as they hurried through the foyer, hoping to avoid being seen by any of the guests.
But they didn’t avoid his mother.
“There you are.” Arianna caught them at the foot of the stairs. “I thought I might have to call to summon you home.”
If she was surprised by the princess’s casual—and borrowed—attire, she didn’t show it. She only smiled at Marissa. “The guest of honor shouldn’t be late for her own party.”
“You said the party was tomorrow,” Dante reminded her.
“Because I wanted to surprise you both,” the queen said, unaffected by the reproach in his tone. Because while he might be the king of Ardena, he was still her son.
“Well, as it turns out, I have a surprise, too.”
“Oh?” Arianna’s gaze automatically dropped to Marissa’s left hand, but Dante held it in his own so that the ring on her finger remained out of sight—at least for the moment.
“But we’re both sweaty and dusty after a trek through the gorge, so we’d like some time to freshen up.”
“Of course,” his mother agreed. “But don’t take too long. Hors d’oeuvres will be served in less than an hour.”
Dante and Marissa started up the stairs as Arianna went back to the party.
“So much for my plan to ignore the crowd and sneak you up to my room,” he lamented.
She wasn’t entirely sure if he was joking. “Would you really have taken me up to your room with all these people here?”
He paused at the top of the landing and slid his arm around her waist to draw her close. “Princess, I would have taken you in the backseat of that beat-up old car if I’d known we’d be coming back to a full house.” His lips twisted in a wry smile. “My own fault, I guess, for wanting something more memorable and comfortable than cracked vinyl upholstery.”
“It would have been memorable for me,” she said. “I’ve never done it in the back of a car.”
“Neither have I,” he admitted. “But it wasn’t how I envisioned celebrating our engagement.”
“Well—” she slid her palms up his chest and over his shoulders to link them behind his neck “—your mom did give us almost an hour.”
“Trust me, Princess, the first time I make love with you, it’s going to take a lot more time than that.”
“You keep making these promises and I have yet to see any evidence of follow-through.”
The glint in his eyes was sexy, determined and just a little bit dangerous, and it sent shivers of anticipation dancing down her spine.
“Screw the party,” he decided, reaching for the handle of her door.
Then muttered a curse when the sound of a throat being cleared, deliberately and loudly, came from down the hall.
Marissa had to laugh, though she really wanted to scream in expression of her own frustration. “Does it feel as if the world is conspiring against us?”
“Not the world, just my family,” he grumbled as Francesca drew nearer.
“Mother sent me up on the pretext of checking to see if Marissa needed any help getting ready.”
“And the real reason?” Dante asked.
His sister grinned. “I think she’s afraid that the king will try to sneak some alone time with the princess.” Her eyes went wide as she caught sight of the ring. “Or should I say his bride-to-be?”
“Oh. Um.” Marissa looked at Dante, not quite sure what to say and afraid she’d broken some sort of protocol by letting his sister see the ring before he’d told his parents of their engagement.
“It’s great-grandmother’s ring,” Francesca murmured, then looked to her brother for confirmation.
Dante only gave a brief nod.
“But you said—”
“That I couldn’t take great-grandmother’s ring until I’d found the right woman to give it to,” he concluded for her.
His sister turned her attention back to Marissa. “Has my mother seen it?”
“We haven’t told anyone yet,” she said.
“I won’t let on that I was the first to know,” Francesca promised. Then she kissed both of Marissa’s cheeks before turning to kiss her brother’s cheeks, too. “I’m so happy for both of you.”
“We’d be happy, too, if you’d get lost for a while,” Dante told her.
His sister shook her head, almost regretfully. “If I go back downstairs, she’ll just send Leticia or maybe even come up herself.”
“You’re right,” he acknowledged. Then he
turned his back on her and kissed Marissa softly, deeply. “Later.”
Later seemed to be a very long time in coming.
What Arianna had promised would be a simple dinner party to introduce Marissa to the rest of the family turned into an impromptu celebration of their engagement, and it seemed as if none of the guests ever intended to go home.
And then, to the collective surprise of everyone gathered, the butler entered the room to announce the arrival of another guest.
“Her Royal Highness, the Princess Royal Elena Leandres of Tesoro del Mar.”
Three hours later, Marissa still wasn’t sure what had precipitated her mother’s impromptu trip to Ardena. But at least the Princess Royal seemed to be behaving herself—sipping brandy and chatting amiably with the other guests.
“It’s my fault,” Dante admitted when she confessed she was at a complete loss to explain her mother’s sudden and unexpected arrival.
“What did you do?”
“I called and told her that we were engaged because I didn’t want her to read about it in the paper.”
Which was both a sweet and thoughtful gesture, but she had to ask, “Couldn’t you have at least waited until morning?”
“I could and should have,” he agreed. “And I would have if I’d known she had some weird kind of maternal radar that made her show up before you could sacrifice your virtue outside of wedlock.”
She laughed at the thought. “My mother doesn’t have a motherly bone—never mind anything else maternal—in her body.”
“But maybe she’s right,” he said.
The quiet resignation in his tone made her wary. “About what?”
“Wanting you to wait.”
“She wants me to wait because she thinks I’m a virgin,” Marissa reminded him.
“And you’re not,” he acknowledged.
“Right, so there’s no reason for us to wait.”
“Except that you’ve only ever been with one man.”
She was completely baffled by his response. “So?”
“So he must have been someone you really cared about.”
He was wrong. In fact, he was so far off base she might have laughed if she didn’t feel so much like crying. Hannah was right—Marissa never should have given her virginity to a stranger. She should have waited, not necessarily to fall in love but at least to be with someone she liked, someone she truly cared about. Someone like Dante.
She could tell him the truth—that her lover had been a stranger, a man whose name—and face—she didn’t even know, a one-night stand. But if she told him that, would he look at her with censure instead of respect? Would he decide that a woman who could give her virginity away so easily wasn’t a suitable bride, after all?
“First you didn’t want to sleep with me until I’d made a decision about your proposal, now you want to wait until we’re married?”
“I just can’t see it happening with your mother looking over my shoulder—figuratively speaking.”
“I’ll make sure she’s on a plane back to Tesoro del Mar by tomorrow.”
“But just in case she isn’t that easy to get rid of, let’s set a date.”
“For sex?”
“And I thought I had a one-track mind,” he said, shaking his head. “No, I meant for the wedding.”
“June,” she said, because she’d always imagined that she would one day be a June bride.
“I was thinking December.”
She stared at him. “As in two months from now?”
“Sure. Two months from today,” he agreed.
“Are you kidding? We can’t possibly plan a wedding in two months.”
“Probably not,” he agreed. “Which is why we’ll delegate.”
And so their wedding date was set for December twenty-first, because Dante thought their wedding would be a perfect way to start the holiday celebrations.
Arianna and Benedicto weren’t surprised that Dante and Marissa wanted a short engagement, but they were surprised by how very short it would be. Elena, on the other hand, didn’t seem at all bothered by the narrow time frame. No doubt she knew that the wedding, and consequently all of the planning, would take place in Ardena, so all that would be expected of her was to greet the guests as the mother of the bride.
Still, Marissa thought she would want to be involved in making the arrangements, and when she went to her mother’s room Monday morning, she didn’t expect to see the Princess Royal’s suitcases packed and ready to go. “You’re leaving already?”
“There’s really no reason for me to stay any longer,” Elena said. “You’re going to be busy deciding on flowers and menus and cakes—all the kind of details that you always handle so well—and I’ve got appointments and meetings to attend to at home.”
Marissa wasn’t disappointed that her mother wasn’t staying, but she was disappointed that Elena didn’t seem more interested in her only daughter’s wedding. And then she recognized a truth that had been nudging at the back of her mind since the Princess Royal had shown up the night of her engagement to Dante.
“You didn’t really come here for me,” she said to her mother. “You just used the engagement as an excuse to see Benedicto.”
For a moment—maybe just half a second—Marissa thought she caught a glimpse of genuine emotion flicker in her mother’s eyes. But it was just a glimpse, and it was gone before she could begin to decipher what it might have been.
“I was…curious,” Elena admitted. “I hadn’t seen him in a very long time.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me that you knew him?”
“It didn’t seem relevant.”
“The father of my fiancé was almost your fiancé, and you didn’t think that piece of information was relevant?”
“As I said, it was a long time ago.”
“He said that he was going to marry you.”
“No formal arrangements had been made.”
The confirmation wasn’t unexpected, and still Marissa couldn’t seem to put all of the pieces together. At least not in any way that made sense to her.
“You could have been the queen of Ardena.”
And she couldn’t imagine anything that would have made her mother happier. She’d had a chance to step into the spotlight—to marry the man who would be king, to stand beside him as his queen—and she’d turned it down.
“Yes, I could have been,” Elena agreed, but offered no further information or explanation.
Marissa found herself thinking of Arianna, the woman who had married Benedicto, become his wife and his queen and the mother of his children. A woman who loved her family and enjoyed spending time with them, who smiled frequently and laughed easily, who was not just content but truly happy with her life. A woman who was undoubtedly aware of the history between her husband and her future daughter-in-law’s mother and had still graciously opened up her home to the other woman.
Elena, by contrast, never seemed content. No matter what she had, it was never what she wanted; no matter how much she had, it was never enough. Marissa had never stopped hoping that her mother would find happiness somewhere, but she was beginning to despair of that ever happening.
“Did you love him?” she asked her mother now.
Elena considered her answer for a moment before replying, “I loved the idea of marrying a man who would someday be king.”
Which was, Marissa realized with a combination of acceptance and disappointment, exactly the response she should have expected from her mother. And yet, it didn’t explain why Elena had refused a marriage that would have given her everything she wanted.
“But even more than I wanted to be queen,” she continued, “I wanted my father to know that I could make my own choices.”
“And yet, you had no reservation about making mine for me,” Marissa noted.
“Because I wanted you to make a better choice than the one I had made.”
“How did you end up with my father?”
“A chance meeting, a p
hysical attraction.” Elena’s lips curved, just a little, in response to the memory. “He was big and strong and so incredibly, ruggedly handsome. Just looking at him made my heart pound and my knees weak.
“But reality has a way of dulling the brilliant shine of a new romance, and when I discovered I was pregnant with Michael and he insisted that we should get married, I panicked.”
“You were pregnant before you got married?” Marissa had never been privy to that little detail, and she was shocked that Elena would reveal it now.
“Disgraceful, isn’t it?” Her mother actually smiled, as if pleased to have been involved in such a scandal. “But as thrilling as it was to have a passionate affair with a farmer, I knew it wouldn’t be nearly as exciting to be the wife of a commoner. So I planned to seduce Benedicto and tell him that the baby was his.”
Marissa couldn’t hold back her shocked gasp.
“But before I could put my plan into action, Gaetan showed up at the palace,” Elena continued. “He told my father that I was pregnant and that he wanted to marry me. Prince Emmanuel was furious.”
Elena blinked and Marissa thought she caught a glimpse of moisture in her eyes, but when the Princess Royal looked at her daughter again, her face was composed.
“He kicked me out,” she said matter-of-factly. “And he told me that if I married the father of my baby, I would keep my title and my inheritance. But if I refused, he would disown me.”
Marissa winced, imagining how those cruel words would have stabbed through Elena’s fragile heart. Maybe she’d been impulsive and reckless, but she’d been young and desperately seeking her father’s attention, and Marissa couldn’t help but think that the seeds of her mother’s present unhappiness might have been sown by her father’s rejection on that long-ago day.
“So I married Gaetan,” Elena concluded. “And the country priest was persuaded, by a sizable donation to the church coffers, to backdate the certificate so that no one would raise an eyebrow when a child was born less than eight months after our wedding.
“And then Cameron was born two years after that and, as far as I was concerned, I’d fulfilled my wifely obligations to my husband,” Elena said. “I’d borne him two sons and had no intention of going through pregnancy and childbirth again.
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