Her Royal Husband (Crown & Glory Book 4)

by Cara Colter

  He looked up through the canopy of trees at the sky. Content with the progress he had made, he closed his eyes.

  He heard her coming, and was careful not to move, not to scare her away.

  The water stirred beside him. Her shoulder touched his lightly through the liquid warmth of the water.

  “Owen, this is the most beautiful place in the world.”

  “I know. Even in the winter the air stays so humid and warm around the banks that the ferns grow and the flowers bloom.” He pressed his shoulder a little harder into hers. She moved away slightly, but didn’t break contact.

  “Thank you for bringing me here. For today. I won’t ever forget it.”

  He heard the underlying goodbye, the underlying I won’t ever be here in the winter. He wanted to hold on to her, to keep her forever.

  Could she walk away from him? Was she that strong? That much stronger than him? He never wanted her to leave his side again. He wanted them to be together now, forever.

  How could he let her go?

  And how could he make her stay, if she sincerely didn’t want to?

  For the first time, he made himself look at the remote possibility that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men were not going to be able to put this thing together again.

  It occurred to him he needed to know everything about her. To put on the strongest offensive he could, but also in case he had to bow to defeat. He would then need to have little pieces of her soul that he could mull over during the lonely nights when she was not with him.

  He took a deep breath. “Tell me everything. Why you aren’t mayor of Wintergreen by now, and what it was like when our daughter took her first step and if you ever thought of me.”

  He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. The physical exertion had relaxed her. He wanted to remember her like this: with her short hair curling around her ears, and moisture beading on her face. She looked like a little woodland pixie, beautiful, mysterious, enchanted.

  For a long time she was silent. Just when he thought she was not going to say anything, she said, “I wasn’t sure what I wanted when I got home from California. My whole world seemed to be turned on end. Before I met you, I was the smart girl, uptight, master of the cutting remark. I was ambitious and intelligent.

  “And then you showed me this whole other side of myself. You weren’t threatened by me and because you seemed to love me exactly as I was I became what I had never been before—this girl full of light and love and laughter. When you walked away from that, I just didn’t know who I was or what I wanted to be.

  “And then I found out I was pregnant.”

  “Did you think about an abortion?” he asked her.

  “Of course! But in the end, I simply couldn’t. The child was the part of you I got to keep.

  “After Whitney was born, my Aunt Meg offered me the job with Botanical Bliss. It seemed like such a godsend because I was so mixed up, felt so much older and wiser in some ways and so much younger and more confused in others. I didn’t feel so sure I wanted to take the world by storm, anymore. I didn’t feel so sure about anything as I once had.

  “You know what? Whitney’s made it all worth it. She’s worth every sacrifice, and if some dreams were left by the wayside, she replaced them with new ones. Being a good mom is making just as much of a contribution to the world as being a good mayor. Maybe more. She showed me that.

  “I work with unwed mothers, too. I run a little support group for them. It’s the same tragic story over and over again. My story over and over again. Women who are too young giving away too much to men who use them and discard them all too willingly.”

  He drew a deep breath. So this was how she had managed to keep the flame of anger alive so long, kept it burning so brightly. She dealt in men betraying women on a regular basis.

  “I didn’t know you were pregnant, Jordan. Surely that’s a difference in the story. It’s not as if we didn’t take precautions.”

  “To regret it all would be to regret Whitney.”

  “Tell me more about Whitney,” he said, after she’d been silent too long.

  “I hoped her first word would be Mommy, of course,” Jordan said, and smiled with soft remembrance, “but it wasn’t.”

  “What was it?”

  “It’s awful. You don’t want to know.”

  “It can’t be that awful. And even if it is, I do want to know.”

  “Her first word was poop.”

  “No!” He laughed. “Poop?”

  “Um-hmm. An unfortunate incident with her crawling in the backyard and almost touching some. I yelled, ‘poop, don’t touch,’ and apparently my emphasis on that word had a huge impression on her. She began to yell poop and didn’t stop for a week. She yelled it in church, in the grocery store, out of her stroller as we walked down the street.”

  He laughed, tickled that his daughter was such an original. “And then Mommy was her second word, surely?”

  “Oh, no, not my daughter. I think tuna was her second word.”

  “Tuna?” he said, incredulous.

  “Oh, you know how it is with first-time mothers.”

  He didn’t but he didn’t want to say that.

  “I named everything we touched, everything she pointed at, everything in the cupboards, everything in her world. That was the extent of my conversations for a full year. Chair. Table. Dog. Cat. Rug. Blankie. Tuna.”

  “I’m sorry I missed it,” Owen said, and meant it. And he was sorry he had not been there to make her world wider, to give her reprieve from those one-word conversations, to make her feel grown-up and sexy and beautiful and interesting on those days when she felt anything but.

  “Oh,” she said, waving her hand around the grove, “compared to all this, you would have found it very boring, I’m sure.”

  “No. All this pales in comparison to the miracle you are telling me about.”

  She gave him a quick, hard look and he felt her relax slightly, the pressure against his shoulder increase just a bit.

  “Do you like tuna?” she asked him.

  “Yes.”

  “You see I couldn’t understand that. I hate it. So it seemed impossible my daughter acted toward tuna the same way most kids act toward ice cream.”

  “Genetically predisposed to tuna, poor kid. What else does she like?”

  “Um, let’s see. Raffi. That’s a children’s singer. Elephants. Her whole room is decorated with elephants. Her grandmother painted them all over the walls for her. Blue ones and purple ones and green ones and red ones.”

  Her grandmother. He felt again the ache of loss. Jordan had a whole world he knew nothing about. He wondered if her mother looked like her, had supported her through this. He hoped the opportunity to know Jordan’s world as thoroughly as he wanted her to know his was not gone.

  “Whitney likes water, and sand and chocolate pudding. She likes painting with her fingers, and eating with them. She likes funny hats and overalls and red shoes.” She laughed self-consciously. “I’m boring you.”

  “No, you aren’t. What doesn’t she like?”

  “Um, let’s see. She doesn’t like small babies—I think they attract far too much attention and make too much noise. She dislikes classical music. Sitting still in church. Naps. Rain.”

  “Jay-Jay?”

  Jordan glared at him, and he retreated hastily. “When did she walk?”

  Again, he noticed that smile of pure love. “One week after she turned one year old. She’d been scooting around holding on to furniture. And all of a sudden she just let go and walked across the room. No faltering, no falling. But the look on her face! She was astonished with herself. In awe of herself. And really, she still seems that way.”

  “What did you do for her first birthday?” He wanted to keep her talking forever. He loved the look on her face when she talked about Whitney, he loved how her voice flowed, even and rhythmic like a river.

  “Oh, I made her a cake and iced it with pudding and she ate
it with her hands and got it in her hair and wrecked her dress. And I took three million pictures of it.”

  “Can I see them some day?”

  “I guess.”

  She was still uncomfortable contemplating the future with him playing an active part in it, he could see that.

  “What about her second birthday?”

  “I don’t remember.” That was said very quickly.

  “Yes, you do,” he prodded gently.

  “Okay. My parents wanted to go to Disneyland for her birthday. I thought it was ridiculous. She would never remember it. She does, though. Especially the Dumbo ride. A real hit.”

  “Why didn’t you want to tell me that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said grouchily.

  “Did something happen when you went back to California that was painful for you?”

  She gave him a look that told him she resented his perception—and maybe appreciated it just a little, too.

  She sighed, and then in a rush said, “I took her to that beach where you and I used to go, and I cried, and it made her sad and it wrecked her birthday. She was touching my cheeks, saying in this desperate little voice, ‘mommee, no cwy, mommee no cwy.”’

  He felt as if Jordan had placed a knife to his breast, slid it in to cut his heart to ribbons.

  He was beginning to understand just how hard it was going to be to repair the hurt he had caused. For the second time, he entertained the smallest of doubts. He wondered if it was even possible to repair a failure this colossal.

  He didn’t want to say he was sorry again. The word seemed so stupid in the face of such a huge pain.

  “If I had known about her, I would have been there.”

  He could tell by the look on Jordan’s face, that somehow he had managed to say exactly the wrong thing.

  “Thanks. You couldn’t be there for me, but if you had known you had a daughter, you could have been there?”

  He was crossing a minefield. A minefield of his own making, mines of hurt and pain and betrayal. He knew, left to his own devices, he would never be able to navigate it safely. It had to be something else that guided him; intuition, heart, soul.

  God, maybe.

  He turned to her, looked at the barrier in her eyes, sighed, and leaned his forehead against her shoulder. He felt her stiffen, then slowly relax.

  He thought of her alone, finding out she was pregnant. He thought of her finding out that the man she knew as Ben Prince had never existed. He thought of her going through fear and uncertainty about her future. He thought about her pain bringing that baby into the world. He thought about her dreams going up in smoke. He thought about her on a beach in California crying.

  “Owen?”

  He did not lift his head, but he felt her fingertip on his wet cheek.

  “Owen, don’t,” she said. “Please, don’t.”

  It was the moment he admitted what had come to him partially on that cell floor in the villa on Majorca. Prince Owen Michael Penwyck was a failure. In the one area in his life where it really mattered he had failed utterly and completely.

  She was lifting his head from her shoulder, holding his face between both her hands, looking at him.

  For a dizzy moment he knew she was going to kiss him, and he leaned toward her. Her lips brushed his, feather soft.

  He wanted to wrap his hand in the hair at the back of her head, pull her closer, tempt her lips open with his own.

  But he knew something she did not.

  That they were surrounded by security people in this quiet grove, watching their every move.

  He reeled back from her, and saw the hurt register in her face. “We’re not alone,” he told her.

  “What?”

  “Since the kidnapping, security is very tight.”

  She sank up to her chin in her perfectly modest bathing suit. “There are people watching us right now?”

  “Watching out for us might be a better way of saying it.”

  “Were they watching us all that time in California?”

  “I suspect so, yes.”

  “That night on the beach?”

  “Possibly.”

  “I can’t ever live like this, Owen,” she said fiercely.

  “Maybe that’s why I never asked you to.”

  “People watching you all the time. And all the rest of it. I mean it’s lovely, but it’s so impossible, like a fairy tale. The carriage, the ponies, the horses, the fake gardens. It’s Hollywood. It’s not real life. I don’t know who you really are.”

  “Yes, you do,” he said. “For a moment just then, you did.”

  Doubt showed in her face.

  And then that moment, too, was spoiled. A man broke from the trees. As soon as he saw it was Cole Everson, Owen bit back his irritation.

  If possible, Jordan sank even deeper in the water, only her nose and eyes showing.

  Cole dropped down on one knee beside the water. “Your Royal Highness,” he said apologetically, “I’m so sorry, but this is urgent. An abandoned coal shaft has collapsed outside of Marlestone. There were children playing in it.”

  Owen’s annoyance evaporated. “Will Broderick go?”

  Cole’s expression said how effective Broderick’s presence would be at the site. “The helicopter’s on the way here to get you, sir.”

  Owen nodded. “See if one of the security people is wearing a suit that will fit me.” He could hardly go as the highway man. He took a deep breath, accepting the weight of responsibility. Despite his youth, because he had given of himself so completely in the past five years, the people of Penwyck counted on him. They turned to him to guide them, to comfort them, to lead them, in good times and in bad.

  Cole left, and Owen opened his eyes and turned to Jordan. Her eyes were wide on his face.

  “You were right. I have misled you,” he said quietly. “I wanted you to have fun. I wanted you to feel like a princess. But my life really isn’t about having fun. Today was as much a novelty for me, as for you. My life is about duty. I have to go.”

  Maybe, she was the one who had been realistic from the start. Maybe he should have just wished her well with her ordinary life, and her man.

  An exterminator, for God’s sake. How could he wish her well with that?

  Maybe by putting her needs ahead of his own. But he knew he did not have the luxury of dealing with this now. He turned and pulled himself from the pool. There were people everywhere now. Someone handed him a towel.

  “I want to go with you.”

  He took a towel and held it out to her, folded it around her, as she stepped from the pool.

  He thought it was the first positive sign between them. But then he thought of what they might find there. Distraught parents, hurt children, maybe even dead children. The press would be there in droves. His urge was to protect her. “Jordan, it’s not a good idea.”

  “You want me to know who you really are. Let me see you. Let me come. Maybe I’ll be able to help. I’m not afraid.”

  And he could see that she wasn’t.

  He knew it was foolish to mingle affairs of the state with affairs of the heart. Dylan would probably never do it.

  But the loneliness caught him off guard, the ache to have someone beside him, someone who he could turn to.

  Owen, he told himself, you’re a selfish boor. “You can’t come,” he said, sternly.

  She folded her arms over her chest and the towel. “You don’t see me as your equal in any way, do you? You don’t see anybody as your equal.”

  “I’m just trying to protect you.”

  “I’m a grown woman. I can protect myself, thank you. I don’t need any man to decide what’s good for me and what isn’t.”

  “Any reporter foolish enough to get near you would probably be impaled on your tongue,” he said.

  “Does that mean I can come?”

  “Yes.” She actually smiled at him as if she meant it. Surprisingly the decision felt right. And he wondered why it felt so much more right
to take her with him on this official duty than it had to send a carriage to pick her up this morning.

  He had no more time to think about it. He could hear the helicopter in the distance.

  Chapter Six

  “Your Royal Highness, we’ll just brief you with the details we have.”

  Both Jordan and Owen were once again dressed, he in a gray double-breasted suit he had borrowed. Amongst all these well-dressed men, she was decidedly out of place in her old kitchen whites with the chocolate dribble down the front. Still, perhaps it was the outfit that helped make her invisible. She was able to observe without anyone paying the least attention to her.

  Jordan had known Owen only as a carefree and somewhat reckless boy. And no matter what he said about duty, she did not understand precisely what that meant to Owen until the exact moment that man—Owen had called him Cole—had come and dropped down onto one knee beside Owen at the pool.

  She had watched Owen transform before her eyes, from a young man into a prince. Not a prince in the way she had ever thought of that position: rich, pampered, catered to, out of touch with the real world.

  And not a prince as Owen had demonstrated it since she had arrived on Penwyck: a man who could command carriages and conjure ponies and provide scrumptious picnic lunches with the snap of fingers.

  No, a prince in a different way.

  A prince among men. She had watched his face change, as the news of the mine disaster was relayed to him. His features became grave, somber. She had seen a light flicker to life deep in his eyes and had recognized it as courage, pure and undiluted. She had seen a firmness in the set of his mouth that she had not noticed before. She had watched him draw a deep breath as if he drew strength into the broadness of his chest. He had set his shoulders with resolve, as though he were ready to take on the weight of the world.

  What Jordan saw was not just emerging maturity, but something greater, a kind of agelessness. She knew, in that moment, why people wanted Owen to be king.

  He had an indefinable quality that the word charisma didn’t quite encompass. It was presence, a way of being.