by Sophia Lynn
He glanced at her as he drove. There was something curious about his gaze, but guarded, as if he wasn’t sure what he wanted to tell her. That look made her mood dip even further. She wasn’t a journalist anymore, and apparently, if her subject could pull back into his shell so quickly, she might not be a very good ghostwriter either.
“I had wondered about that,” he admitted. “But I reminded myself that your life is your own. You are certainly not compelled to spend your time with me, regardless of what we might have done together before.”
She flinched a little at his neutral tone.
“Oh god, I did want to, though, I really did—” Marianna cut herself off before she could start babbling, sounding even more pathetic than she felt. “Anyway, I am sorry. What did you end up doing this weekend? As I recall, you didn’t have anything pressing on your schedule.”
He shifted a little, looking straight ahead. There was something about his motion that made her frown. She had always been an observant woman, and right now, she could tell there was something strange happening.
“Not much,” he admitted. “An old friend ended up coming to town. We spent some time at the club and then we ended up taking a boat to an island resort that my family owns. It was spur of the moment, a good way to get my mind off things.”
Marianna found herself smiling. She was happy he had at least not spent his time as frustrated and upset as she had been.
“I’m glad your friend showed up,” she said. “It sounds like the two of you had a good time.”
“We did,” he said with a faint smile.
She thought nothing more of it until she was waiting for Nikolos to finish the social rounds after the luncheon. The food was mediocre, and the topic not one that interested her. She had ended up in the atrium of the admittedly gorgeous building. She was sorting through the pile of newspapers and flyers for something interesting to read when a picture of a very familiar face caught her eye. It was a tabloid, and front and center was Nikolos and a gorgeous blonde woman.
She checked the date, startled to see it was current for that day, and she looked at the picture again
Possible Royal Wedding? Insiders Think So!
Biting her lip, she held the paper uneasily. A part of her knew there was nothing to be gained from reading it. The other part of her remembered Nikolos’s answers regarding his weekend, how little he had actually told her. In the end, the temptation was too great. She opened up the paper and started to read.
Prince Nikolos has often been featured on our pages as Greece’s hottest bachelor, but will he have to give up his crown? Insider sources clued us in to the prince’s discreet fun with Duchess Grace Bard of the United Kingdom. Now, it is well known that the two have been an on-again, off-again couple in the past, but this time, have the sparks turned into something more?
This past weekend, with no notice at all, the prince and his blonde duchess jetted off to one of the many private resorts off the coast. Given that Prince Nikolos is currently being shadowed for a publicity piece, could it be that this once hedonistic wild man is settling down? Could the attempts to clean up his image be all about getting responsible for his new married life?
Of course Marianna knew the way the tabloids worked. They asked questions that lead to very specific answers, and then they were free of the onus of proving a single blessed bit of proof. Perhaps another day she would have dismissed it outright, but then she remembered how he had acted in the car. Nikolos might not have lied to her, but he had definitely misled her.
She tried to hang on to her shreds of objectivity, but it was too much. After they had spent that time together, he had run off to be with a gorgeous duchess, someone he was perhaps feeling serious enough about to clean up his image. Despite the nature of her work, she felt a trickle of fury go down her spine. By the time that Nikolos finally freed himself from all of the people who wanted to speak with him, that trickle was a river, broad and strong.
She greeted him politely enough, but by the time they got back to his car, he was looking at her quizzically.
“You look like there’s something on your mind,” he said, turning to her without starting the car.
“You know what I’m supposed to do with you this month, right?” she asked. Mystified, he nodded.
“You’re meant to be painting a literary picture of me, basically,” he offered, and she nodded.
“That’s exactly right,” she said. “But what happens when I can’t do my job because you refuse to turn around and let me see all of you?”
A ghost of a smile whisked across his lips.
“I think you have managed to see more of me than most,” he offered, but it only made her angry.
“I’m not talking about that,” she spat. “What I needed to know and didn’t is that you are apparently involved with Duchess Grace Bard, and that you were seeing her this weekend. How can I do my job correctly if you keep things like this from me?”
He sat in silence for a moment.
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the fact that when I asked you where you went for the weekend, you let me believe that it was some kind of platonic friendly excursion. I thought you went out to have some fun, not that…that you were courting another royal! If I had know that… Well, that might have changed a few things.”
She was too proud to say the rest. She couldn’t bring herself to tell him if she had known he was apparently close to engaged with a duchess that she never would have allowed herself to tumble into bed with him.
“And you think that I am in looking to climb into bed with Grace Bard, why, exactly?”
To her surprise, his response wasn’t angry or even defensive. Instead, it was only curious, as if she had somehow mistaken the capital of the United States for New York instead of Washington, DC.
There was nothing she could do to keep the slightly hysterical note out of her voice. At this point, she almost didn’t care. All of the pain and grief she had gone through over the weekend overwhelmed her, and she found her voice rising without her thinking about it at all.
“I read about it in the newspaper,” she said, holding back tears with only the greatest of difficulty. “There was a picture of you…and her…and oh, god, I feel like such a fool.”
When he tried to reach for her hand, she pulled it away violently. She had to sit with her hands over her face for a few moments, trying to compose herself. When at last she looked up, she was startled to see they were driving down the street.
“This…isn’t the way back to the hotel,” she said in surprise.
“No, it’s not,” he agreed. “I think that regardless of what I might have believed or felt, you had a hard weekend. Mine was much better, but not in the way that you seem to think it was. So, let’s get you to a place where you can start to feel a little better and where I can start to explain, yes?”
She knew she should take a hard line with him. Marianna knew that right now, she had to set limits and boundaries that would stick. If she didn’t do it now, it would only be harder later. The problem was she was exhausted, both physically and emotionally. There was nothing left to her but hope and fear. The two warred within each other briefly. For a moment, it could have gone either way. Then the pressures and the stress of the previous two days was too much, and she only nodded mutely.
“All right. Just relax, and let me take care of things.”
It was simply too much of a temptation to allow him to drive, to let him make the decisions for a little bit longer. If there came a time when she needed to strike out, to confront him over the information that Satya had given her, that could come later. Right now, she only sank back into the bucket seat and let her eyes drift closed.
In a matter of seconds, her breathing evened out, and she felt into a light and mercifully dreamless sleep.
* * *
He’d had a plan for the day, after they were done with the luncheon. He was going to sit down and talk with Marianna. He
wanted to know if he had imagined the chill between them, if she truly intended their night of passion to be something that was light and forgettable. He needed to know for sure. That was the plan, anyway. Over the course of the weekend with Grace, he had considered a few different plans, some brutally simple, others grandiose and unlikely.
This plan, which was one that actually had Grace’s approval, was the best one of the lot, but Marianna had derailed it utterly.
He didn’t know what to think. When he had seen her at the steps in front of her hotel, his first instinct had been to order her back to bed and to call for some sturdy, nourishing food for her. She was on the slender side, but somehow over the past seven days, she had become almost gaunt. Her eyes seemed to have lost some of their luster, and her movements were wooden, as if she had been tacked together with bad nails.
Her explosion after the luncheon was strange as well. If any other woman had spoken to him in that way, he would have quickly dismissed her and left. However, there was something desperate to her anger, something that made his heart ache. All he had wanted to do was to make it better for her in the only way that he knew how.
He supposed that men who were more steady and stable than he was had plans for what happened when the women they cared about seemed to be on the verge of collapse. He, however, was making it up as he went along.
At a red light, he put on his blue-tooth headset and called Philip Lagana.
“Good evening,” Nikolos said. “You’re not going to like what I have to say to you.”
“That’s…remarkably foreboding,” his mother’s assistant responded. “What’s happened now?”
“I’m going to be unavailable for the next two days or so, I think. I don’t want to be called, I don’t want to be brought in unless there’s some kind of emergency.”
“Thank you, I’ll make a note of it.”
Nikolos frowned.
“That’s it? You’ll make a note of this? Philip, you are making this shockingly easy.”
He could imagine the older man shrugging.
“I don’t think you realize the extent to which you have changed over the course of the past week or so,” he said. “Having some notice ahead of time before we look up and see that you have disappeared is simply exotic.”
Philip hung up, and with a half-rueful smile, Nikolos did the same.
He glanced at Marianna sleeping in the seat next to him. Relaxation had smoothed out the worry and the exhaustion a bit, but her mouth was still turned downward in an unhappy curve. It took everything he had not to lean over and to try to kiss that frown away.
He sighed. Despite the inauspicious start to the day, he still had hopes it was going to go well.
He had driven for a little while when he felt a soft touch against his hand. Startled, he looked at the sleeping woman in the seat next to him. In her sleep, she had reached out to touch his hand. He noted that her frown had disappeared to be replaced by a gentle, almost tentative smile.
“All right,” he said softly. “This’ll be good. It’ll be fine, I promise.”
* * *
In Marianna’s dream, she was wandering through a jungle, chopping down the undergrowth with a rusty machete. She knew Nikolos was somewhere ahead. If she could just get to him, she would be safe. She just needed to find him. She knew he was in there somewhere.
The more she chopped at the undergrowth, however, the more tangled she became. They twisted up to grab at her legs, her arms, to wind around her waist.
She started to panic. If she didn’t get to Nikolos, he would leave without her. She knew he would. She had to get to him.
To her dismay, she heard the whine of the airplane engine rising up out of the ambient noise of the jungle around her. The whirring sound started low then became higher and louder. She struggled forward, so tired, but determined.
She stumbled into the clearing, looking up into a clear night sky. The plane hung in the darkness like a steel bird. She couldn’t stop a cry of sadness from escaping her lips. Her eyes followed the plane, as if her entreating gaze would make it come back.
“Oh Nikolos,” she whispered.
“Yes, sweetheart?”
She spun around, and there he was, an inquiring look on his handsome face, and she was so happy he hadn’t left that she woke up.
Marianna blinked. Nikolos was indeed looking at her with that curious grin, but they weren’t in the jungle. Instead, they were in a small but luxurious plane. She was leaned back in a reclined seat, and he sat next to her, checking the news on his phone.
“Where…what’s happening?”
His half smile was sweet and slightly rueful.
“Before we go any further, I want to remind you that you gave me permission for this. You agreed to let me drive, and I took it a little further to arrange for us to fly instead.”
“But where are we going?”
“We’re going to Ojo Azul.”
Marianna shook her head. “I don’t understand…”
“It’s one of my family’s vacation homes. It’s lovely, and it has always been my favorite. I grew up on Ojo Azul as much as I did anywhere else, and I wanted to show it to you…”
She bit her lip, remembering the argument that had come before this with a wince. “I don’t… It doesn’t matter what you did with the duchess. I was completely out of line to be so angry, and I’m sorry.”
He nodded.
“Thank you for your apology, but I can see where I was wrong as well. I don’t know why I didn’t tell you about Grace and what we did before, except perhaps that I was afraid. I am not used to being afraid. I don’t want to lose what we have…or are you going to tell me that we don’t have anything at all?”
She was shaking her head before the words were even out of his mouth.
“No, it’s not nothing to me,” she whispered. “It’s…it’s just complicated.”
He nodded. “Many things are, but perhaps for the next two days, it does not need to be?”
“The next two days? I thought we had our schedule set for us.”
His grin was sweetly boyish. “I decided to change it up a little. We’re staying at Ojo Azul for the next two days. When we return, things can be complicated. Right now, though, we’re just going to be ourselves.”
The idea struck her with the force of a lightning bolt. They could stop. They could simply be themselves, and leave the world behind. The idea was so simple and so attractive that she nearly burst into tears.
Instead, she smiled, and she took his hand. It was warm, and she clung to it as the little plane began its descent.
Chapter Eight
Ojo Azul was a large Spanish-style hacienda built right on the beach of one of the smaller islands off the coast of Greece. Nikolos told her there was a very small village on the other side, but half the island belonged to the royal family.
“It’s quite safe. My siblings and I ran all over this place when we were young. We played at all sorts of adventures as my mother hunted seashells on the beach and my father napped in the sun.”
She could imagine it. She could see Nikolos and his siblings, browned from the sun and wild. She could see his elegant mother in the surf, and his lordly father drowsing in the shade. Just a normal family that loved each other very much.
Her writer’s brain reminded her it would make an excellent addition to her piece. The rest of her only admired the fact that Nikolos had such a lovely memory.
The rear of the house butted up to a sparkling white beach. When she looked out the wide French doors, she could see the waves, still so blue but darkening as the sun set.
Nikolos came down the stairs carrying an armful of fabric.
“One of these dresses should fit you, and before you start to get suspicious, they’re dresses that my sisters have left here. They’ll be a little more comfortable than what you’re wearing, I think.”
She felt startlingly shy when she ventured down the stairs wearing a floating white dress. It was delicately
embroidered, and the light, lovely skirt floated around her as she walked. When he saw her, Nikolos’s eyes widened. He held out his hand to her, and when she took it, he led her out to the dark beach.
“I want to tell you about my weekend,” he said.
Marianne tried to keep her voice completely even. “It would help my article, I’m sure.”
He laughed, and she realized she had been completely obvious.
“Grace is an old friend of mine. We’ve been linked in the tabloids for years, but for some reason, we’ve never gone that way. I could never go and live in the UK, and she would never leave. That alone would stop us. She called me right after we had our conversation on Saturday, and it sounded like the best thing in the world to simply sit and talk. We went to a resort that my family owns because it’s an excellent place to relax, hit the spa, and simply eat good food. It was a good weekend, but the whole time I wanted to be with you.”
Marianna drew in a soft breath, nodding. There was nothing in his speech that told her he was lying.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
She bit her lip against what she had been about to say. She wasn’t ready to talk with him about what Satya had accused him of…not yet.
“You’re still holding something back,” he observed. She wasn’t even surprised he had noticed.
“I won’t, not forever, just for now.”
He nodded, and his expression was not sad, merely wistful.
“Take your time, then. Only for my sake, perhaps make it sooner rather than later?”
She nodded, because she owed him that much at least.
They walked along the beach, their bare feet shuffling softly on the sand. Darkness had fallen with remarkable speed. Though the water gleamed from what light was left in the sky, the cliffs and forest to the landward side already looked dark and menacing.
“Sometime, I should come back here and build a large fire on the shore, just as my brother and I did when we were young. It grew so high and so hot, but it was beautiful…so beautiful.”
“I would like to see it,” Marianna stated before she thought about what she was saying, but he only smiled.