“She has?” Fran frowned swiveling her head. “But isn’t she going back to school to finish her violin studies?”
Lauren shrugged. “Eventually. Northwestern was gracious enough to extend her deferment, given the publicity she’s already brought them. Nothing like royalty in America. We can’t get enough of it.”
A gruff voice interrupted them. “And do you regret that you chose not to fall in love with a prince, but a humble public servant?”
They turned, Fran’s breath catching at seeing Dimitri Korba dressed in his formal military uniform. The material stretched over his powerful body like a glove, a row of medals gleaming at his chest.
Lauren stepped toward him, linking her arm with his. The smile she sent his way was radiant. “Who said anything about falling in love?” she teased, and his expression darkened slightly, though it remained fiercely possessive.
“Perhaps I was mistaken,” he rumbled, and with the barest of nods, he steered her away into the crowds.
Nicki giggled. “I swear to God, I never thought I’d see Lauren look so happy to be carted off like that. She’s totally doomed.”
“And what about you?” Fran scanned the room until she spotted Stefan, standing with a cluster of expensively dressed men and women she’d never seen before. “Are you and Stefan going to continue to…I guess, date? Are you staying here?”
“He’s…” Nicki blushed, and Fran glanced at her more sharply. “He wants to get a villa. For me to stay in when I visit. And he’s talking about traveling with me, you know, when he can break away. But I think that’s crazy—it’s not like he’s ever not going to be needed here.”
Her expression softened as she watched him across the room. “And I couldn’t imagine not being with him, not anytime soon. So…well, so I think I’m going to take him up on the offer to let me couch surf here for a while. Because I’ve traveled a lot in the last few years.” She gave Fran a small smile. “I think maybe I’ll try staying put, see how I like it.”
“You should,” Fran said, reaching out to squeeze Nicki’s arm. Once again, her mascaraphobia was the only thing keeping her from brimming over with happy tears. “You should make his life hell for as long as you can. No one deserves it more.”
Nicki’s laugh drew Ari’s attention, and he reassured himself that she was still with Francesca, the two of them enjoying themselves as the last of the guests flowed in through the upper entry to the Visitors’ Palace ballroom. It was a perfect night for a dance in the solarium-style room, and musicians responded to the queen’s nod by striking up the first strains of music—a burst of interweaving violins.
He frowned, looking over at the collection. The violinists were exceptionally skilled, but he hadn’t remembered violins featuring so prominently in the musical selections for these events. Something else he’d need to follow up on. So much had changed in the last year.
Edeena strolled over to him as he paused to liberate a glass of champagne from the tray of a passing server. She already had her own glass, half drunk. “Sorry about Silas,” she said with a grimace. “He refuses to give up.”
Ari couldn’t wait any longer to have at least one question answered. “Both my father and Kristos mentioned a curse,” Ari said. “What’s that about?”
If Edeena was startled by his abrupt statement she didn’t show it—other than by draining the rest of her glass. Ari handed her his and she took it without hesitation.
“The family legend—I’m surprised I never told you about it,” she said, and Ari masked his own grimace. Fortunately, Edeena’s gaze shifted to the far wall, as if remembering something told to her a long time ago. When she spoke again, her tone was resigned.
“According to family lore, if the Saleri family has three girls or more in a single generation, one of us is destined to marry a prince. If we manage to pull that off, then all the sisters will achieve wedded bliss, and the family’s fortunes will be secured for generations. If we miss our prince, no one marries. The family’s fortunes will be ruined, all the sisters will die spinsters, and…” she frowned, tilting her head. “It’s possible we’ll catch the plague. I’m not sure.”
“The plague!” Ari’s brows went up. “That’s a pretty dire threat when there’s technically only one or two princes in Garronia at any given time.”
“Why do you think Silas has been so obnoxious?” Edeena grimaced, glancing around the room until she located her father. “He wasn’t so bad when mom was alive. She didn’t believe in those old stories. There’s also one about three Saleri brothers being forced to marry princesses—and a trio of boys was born to the Saleris, two generations back. Strangely enough, they didn’t transform into frogs when my grandfather decided to marry my grandmother instead of yours. Although,” she frowned, fixing her father with a glare over the rim of her glass, “their son is kind of a toad.”
Ari slanted her a glance. “He’s been unkind to you?”
He expected her to disavow the question, but she merely shrugged. “He won’t go too far. And he’s remarried, if you didn’t know. His new wife is expecting so—perhaps his fortunes will increase tenfold. There’s an old tale about four daughters too.”
Ari stared at her. “How did I miss that he’d remarried?”
“Happened after you left. He was pretty distraught about your death, as you might imagine. All his dreams went poof the same day you did.” She grimaced at her unintentionally cold language. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Ari shook his head, and another thought struck him. “Kristos?”
“Tried it. Silas had Caroline all lined up for a run at the poor boy, right up until he fell for Emmaline. And frankly, thank God. We’ve had our fill of princes, as you might imagine.” She nodded to the side of the room, where he knew without looking that Francesca stood with Nicki. “Speaking of, are we about to lose our second royal son to an American? Because that’s got to be some kind of magic spell all on its own.”
He tried to be angry with her for her directness, but he couldn’t. Instead he shrugged. “It’s a little too early to tell.”
“You think so?” Edeena granted him a condescending look, appearing suddenly as wise as his mother, for all that she was his age. “I think it’s pretty clear to anyone with eyeballs.”
“I’ll take it under advisement.”
“You do that,” she grinned. “And you better invite me to the wedding, since my failure made your happiness possible.” She tilted her head. “Besides, if you end up having a little boy right out of the gate, maybe all of Silas’s dreams will come true the next time around.”
“Stop!” Ari begged, determined to bring the conversation back around to less explosive topics. “So—what’s next for you then? Surely you’re not going to keep letting Silas boss you around.”
“No,” she shook her head. “But we had to be smart about it. We’re all educated and capable, for all that he doesn’t let us move without his say so. He holds onto our purse strings because Marguerite isn’t twenty-five yet. But that’s happening in a few months, then—we’re gone.”
“Gone?”
“We’re traveling. Our mother dabbled in real estate and owned properties all over the world—including one on the southeastern coast of the US. Silas has sold most of her holdings, but that property, something’s wrong with it. We’ll start there. We’re fluent in English and we could more or less fit in, I think. Anything to get away from here for a while.”
Ari sighed. “I’m sorry you have to go through this.”
“I’m sorrier for my sisters. You and I had been friends for so long, they sort of assumed something would work out between us.” She took another sip of champagne. “Now I tease them mercilessly that I’m depending on them to save me from spinsterhood. All because I couldn’t bag my own prince.”
“Well, to be fair. If you’d really wanted to bag me you wouldn’t have filled my wetsuit full of sand when we were scuba diving,” Ari said.
Edeena grinned at him. “Except you tot
ally had that coming. And sometimes there are more important considerations than a family curse. Like being able to laugh my ass off.”
He accepted a glass of champagne from another server, and clinked her glass. “It’s good to have a sense of perspective.”
“I thrive on it,” she said. Her gaze shifted behind him, and her eyes danced. “You may need to move a little more quickly, though. Francesca’s attracting her own legion of admirers.”
Ari pivoted so quickly that Edeena coughed out a startled laugh, and he handed his champagne to her. She accepted it readily enough, then nodded to Francesca. “Go get her. If anyone ever looked at me the way she looks at you, I’d hold onto him with both hands.”
It wasn’t so easy, of course, to get across the ballroom floor. Ari was stopped no less than three times by well-wishers, glad-handers and distant family cousins. By the time he reached the far end of the floor, the music had struck up in earnest, easing into a traditional Garronois ballad.
As Edeena had warned, Francesca was surrounded by a half-dozen young men, each of them plying her with questions, their English at various levels of disaster. Ari didn’t recognize any of them, but that was just as well. Fewer people for him to kill later.
“Sir!” The furthest man from Francesca saw Ari approach, and had the good sense to stand back. “Welcome home, Your Highness.”
“Thank you,” Ari said gravely as the other men fell away from Francesca like leaves drifting from a tree. Apparently there were greater benefits to being crown prince than he realized. He held out his hand to Francesca.
“If I could claim you for this dance?”
Chapter Twenty
Fran didn’t know how to waltz, but she figured no one would be able to see her feet anyway, and she was so grateful for Ari’s rescue that she would have agreed to do the Chicken Dance at this point.
He folded her hand into his arm and they moved toward the dance floor. She didn’t miss the way heads turned as they walked.
“Is this your first dance of the night?” she asked suddenly. “And is that significant? Everyone is staring at us.”
“It is, it is and they are,” Ari said, facing her as they stepped onto the ballroom floor. “I expect you’ll have to get used to it.”
“Have you gotten used to it?” Fran suspected that Ari knew she was redirecting, but she didn’t care. She felt like she was having an out of body experience, dancing with him on the smooth hardwood floors, the music flowing around them like something out of a fairytale. The way Ari held her, and the decisive way he moved, allowed her to step naturally back and forth, then to the side, as if she’d been waltzing for years. Maybe there was something to these dresses, she thought. They carried a superpower all their own.
To her surprise, Ari answered the question seriously. “I got used to it, as you say, at a very young age,” he said. “When you grow up with the scrutiny of others on you, it becomes second nature.” He lifted one shoulder. “You learn very quickly not to search for yourself online or on TV. You’ll find things you won’t be happy about, but the thing that’s out there—it’s not you, not really. It’s the perceptions of others as they see you through their own filters.”
“Perception becomes reality,” Fran murmured.
“In their minds, yes, but not in your mind. It doesn’t have to be that way. Can’t be, truly, if you plan on maintaining your sanity. You have to accept that there are two versions of you. The one that you are, and the one that someone else thinks you are.” He shook his head. “More than two, of course. A hundred thousand versions of you that live in the minds of people you’ve never met, will never meet.”
Fran smiled wryly. “You sure you don’t want to take a run at psychology? Because they’d be all over this.”
“I think I’ll have my hands full with my own occupation,” Ari said. When she lifted her brows, he nodded. “The doctors believe it’s going to cause no damage for me to take on more responsibility. More importantly, the council is meeting this week, and they’re expected to vote to reverse the accession so that Kristos can return to his military commission. They see the value of the increased attention Garronia has received. We’ll be welcomed on international tour in the wake of my return, even if it’s mainly out of curiosity. That entrée will give my father plenty of opportunity to discuss the issues that are hampering Garronia’s growth. It’s a win-win.”
“You don’t mind?”
“Mind?” he glanced down at her, startled. “No. I don’t care how we get in the door of other world leaders. If I could do it wearing a clown costume, I probably would. What’s important isn’t how you get across the threshold, but what is worked out on the other side. That’s how it’s always been.”
She nodded. “Your parents are so happy to have you back,” she said. “Beyond the obvious, I can see why. You’ll make a good king one day.”
He tightened his grip on her hands, but he didn’t say anything more, and Francesca allowed herself to be swept along with the music of the dance. It ended far too soon and she caught sight of the queen moving forward, another impossibly beautiful Garronois girl by her side. “I think your dance card is about to get full,” she said, and Ari looked up as well. His smile was automatic, gracious and appeared authentically warm. “Do you know her?”
“Haven’t a clue,” he admitted, then he glanced down at her. “I wish I could kiss you right now.”
“No!” she blurted as he chuckled. “That would cause an international incident and we’ve already had enough of those.”
“I suppose for one night, I’ll bow to your wishes,” he said, and he did bow to her, the movement so graceful and aristocratic that she found herself inclining her head back to him. “You’ll be okay while I take care of these dances?”
She nodded. “Of course I will.”
“Good.” And then he leaned forward. Catching up her hand, he raised it to his lips, kissing it soundly as his gaze bored into hers. “Because when it is done, I’m coming for you.”
Ari stepped back from Fran as his mother and the girl she was tugging along burst onto the dance floor, and the music started up with another trill of violins. Fran’s heart was thundering in her ears, her breath fitful, and she whirled around. Her mascara was about to give up the ghost, she knew. She needed to find a bathroom!
She pushed through the crowd as slowly as she could manage, but her mind was whirling. Ari didn’t look at her with the gaze of a young man infatuated with his caretaker, he looked at her like he was truly in love. She may not have had extensive experience with boyfriends, but she had seen that expression before. Granted, not on such an impossibly perfect face, and never while she was wearing a gown that cost more than a flight around the world…
She burst into the hallway, scanning right and left. She was almost certain that there was a bathroom down this hallway. As she walked, she dabbed her eyes with her fingertips, grimacing as she brushed across the tips of her lashes. Waterproof mascara wasn’t supposed to streak, but her tears were going to be industrial strength.
She rounded a corner and noticed the plant stand, perfectly centered down the long hallway. She headed toward it. There was water in that plant stand. Surely that meant a bathroom was nearby. And there were two doors beyond the stand, so maybe through there?
And why did she feel so much like crying, anyway? So what if Ari was falling for her. He’d been through a lot; he was probably still reeling. He couldn’t be held accountable for his emotions. She certainly didn’t hold him accountable. She also didn’t expect him to act on them. Not in the cold light of day, not when—
“Francesca Simmons?”
Fran stopped and turned back, but the tough-looking man in the black suit was no one she’d ever seen before. His accent was thick, his face hard, and she nodded quickly with embarrassment. Clearly she’d stumbled down the wrong corridor of the castle, and was breaching some restricted zone.
“Yes!” she said. “Sorry, I must have gotten lost.”
/> The man didn’t respond verbally, though. He lifted his hand and jerked his fingers upright, and then two other men entered the hallway from the doors facing the corridor. To Fran’s absolute shock, both of them were carrying guns.
“What?” She stepped back automatically. “What’re you doing—hey!”
Before she could draw a breath deep enough to scream, a bag dropped over her head, surrounding her in darkness.
“No—no!” she barked, but this wasn’t an ordinary bag. She smelled the harsh chemicals that lined the heavy burlap, and immediately grew lightheaded. Wrenching her hands to her ears, she clawed off her earrings, her hairpins—anything she could drop, that might be found. She kicked and screamed as best she could, and she thought she connected with something hard and solid-sounding. Then her limbs grew heavy and her body went slack with alarming speed, and the men carrying her started moving faster.
Doors slammed, and she could tell by the coolness of the breeze on her stockinged feet that they’d reached the outside, but though panic battered against her fading awareness, her greatest fear wasn’t realized—yet. She wasn’t immediately thrown into a vehicle. If that happened, she knew that far worse would follow.
“No,” she moaned again, her voice dying in her throat. Panic surged through her but she was tired—so tired.
The coolness continued, but there was still no vehicle. No car! No trunk! They weren’t going far. Instead, after a short walk, a second door opened and she returned to air-conditioned comfort. Within another dozen steps, she was dumped heavily onto the floor, her fall broken by her heavy skirts but only scarcely, as her elbows and knees connected with the hard floor. Then the bag was whisked off her head.
The flashlight pointed into her face almost blinded her. She slapped her hands to her face to block the glare, her heart raging so loudly she could barely hear the man’s next words.
“No sound or I will tape your mouth shut,” he said gruffly. He backed up from her, then slammed the door behind him.
Crowned: Gowns & Crowns, Book 4 Page 18