by Cathie Linz
The trouble with that was that she got to him. As a woman not as a princess.
Dressed as she was in casual clothing, Mark could almost imagine that Vanessa was a tourist out to see New York City. But then she’d tilt her head a certain way, as if she was more accustomed to wearing a tiara than a baseball cap. Which was no doubt true. That knowledge didn’t stop him from wanting to kiss her again, however.
Which went beyond foolish and fell into the downright-stupid arena.
Vanessa hated her disguise. The jeans were extremely tight now that she’d eaten, and they made her feel fat. And the sweatshirt may have been washed, but it still smelled like Mark, which kept reminding her of being held close in his arms.
Salvation was across the street. A large well-known discount department store. What she needed was a makeover. She’d already gone from princess to bum, now she needed to go from bum to regular American woman.
“Hey, where are you going?” Mark demanded as she made a beeline toward the street.
“Shopping.”
His stomach turned. “Now?”
“Yes, now.”
“We can’t cross here,” he stated, taking her by the arm as if fearing she’d make a dash for it. “We have to go to the corner. We don’t need you getting a jay-walking ticket.”
“We certainly don’t,” Vanessa agreed, casting a cautious look at a fierce-looking policewoman who was checking parking meters and giving out tickets.
“Okay, here’s the plan for shopping,” Mark began as they joined a group of pedestrians waiting for the light to turn green.
He was interrupted by Vanessa, who said, “I don’t want to hear about any more plans. I just want to go shopping and have fun.”
“You tell him, girlfriend,” a young woman with an elaborate cornrow hairdo said from beside them.
A man on the other side of them said, “Yo, man, you got a right to be the boss.”
Luckily the light turned green before any further debate could ensue.
Once the group had gone on to cross the street, Vanessa turned to him and said, “See what you started?”
“Me? You’re the one.”
“Come on—” she tugged on his arm “—before the light turns red.”
He was seeing red. How could one woman be so much trouble?
Blithely unaware of his thoughts, Vanessa hurried to the store like a kid racing to see what Santa had left her under the tree Christmas morning. He’d expected more of a stiff-upper-lip attitude from her, not this show of excitement and enjoyment. When she’d closed her eyes and moaned over a French fry, he’d almost moaned himself. She’d looked like a woman in the throes of passion. And she’d kissed that way, too. Totally immersed in the moment.
He needed to remind himself that she got just as excited about fries or shopping. He was nothing special here.
But Vanessa, well, she was something else. And she was heading for the door without waiting for him. He had to hurry to catch up with her, the strap of his duffel bag digging into his shoulder.
“I’ve always wanted to come to a place like this,” she confessed as he held the door open for her. “Thank you.” She paused inside to simply gaze around and soak everything in.
Whenever she went into a store, everyone else was locked out. The only people around were those intended to serve her every need. Did she want a drink? Was this chair comfortable enough? Models would parade a designer’s latest couture outfits for her perusal.
She’d never been surrounded by other shoppers before. They all seemed to know where they were going. The teenage boy in black leather with a nose ring, his girlfriend in matching attire and nose ring, the woman pushing a stroller with a toddler crying—they all moved with utter confidence like ants in an anthill, scurrying about with a definite purpose in mind.
How nice it must be to be so sure of yourself, of your life, to know where you were going rather than just following orders. How rewarding it must be to have goals of your own rather than living your life to please others.
“Seen enough?” Mark asked. “Ready to leave now?”
“We just got here.”
“Funny,” he muttered. “It already feels like we’ve been here for ages.”
“Surely a big bad Marine like you isn’t afraid of a little shopping,” she teased him.
“It wasn’t exactly part of my officer training,” he retorted.
“A pity. I guess we’ll just have to learn as we go along.”
“Hold on.” Grabbing her arm, he stopped her from taking off down the main aisle. “We have to stay together.”
“Fine.” She paused in front of a sign listing various department locations. “I’m going up to the women’s department.”
“You want more clothes? You don’t have enough already?”
Vanessa sighed. “You don’t have any sisters, do you.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“If you had sisters, you’d be more accustomed to a female’s point of view.”
“Hey, I’ve had plenty of experience with females,” Mark retorted.
“Really.” She gave him a doubtful look. “I find that hard to believe. Now your brother Joe, he’s the charmer in your family.”
“All the Wilder men have a way with women.”
“And so modest, too,” she noted dryly. “Come on, the women’s department is upstairs.” As they rode the escalator side by side, she confessed, “I’ve never actually bought anything on sale before. I’m looking forward to it.”
She had that little-girl-at-Christmas look again, the one that Mark found so endearing. How did she manage to do that, go from regal to adorable in the blink of an eye? Was that part of being a princess or was it simply part of her personality?
Placing his duffel bag on the floor at his feet, he watched her as she headed for the nearby sale racks. Her green eyes were shining but the overhead fluorescent lighting leached some of the gold from her hair. She wasn’t looking her best, if he was perfectly honest here, in that baseball cap and his bulky sweatshirt.
The strange thing was that he found her incredibly sexy anyway as she held a dress up to her body, wrapping an arm around the waist as she stared at herself in the mirror. The dress was light blue with little flowers on it, and it was short, well above the knee.
“What do you think?” she asked, turning for his opinion. “Would this look good on me?”
“Anything would look good on you,” he replied without thinking.
She appeared surprised by his answer.
She wasn’t the only one. What was he doing, talking like that? He couldn’t afford to be flirting with her. “Go try it on,” he ordered her. “There’s a fitting room over there.”
“I thought you said we had to stay together,” she reminded him.
Right. Jeez, he wasn’t thinking straight here. “Just buy it. If it doesn’t fit you, too bad.”
“Is that what American shoppers do?”
“If it doesn’t fit they return it, but we’re not going through that process.” Shopping was bad enough, returning stuff was out of the question. He’d drawn his line in the shopping sand, and he wasn’t crossing it.
“Okay,” she said, so agreeable that he was immediately suspicious.
“Okay?” he repeated.
“Yes, okay. I think I’ll get this dress too.” She plucked a simple black cotton dress from the rack. “I can’t believe the prices here.” She moved to another sale rack and picked out a pair of jeans and a skirt. All the while Mark stood guard impatiently.
“Look, the point of this exercise is for me to enjoy shopping the way a regular American woman would. You’re not making this a pleasant experience by breathing down my neck the way you are,” she told him in exasperation.
“I can assure you that American women have to deal with impatient men all the time when they’re shopping together.”
“I bet most women leave the men at home,” she said.
“Well, that
’s not possible in your case, so don’t even think about it.”
“Then stop sighing and glaring at your watch every second.”
“Marines do not sigh.”
“Grunt then. Whatever you call that noise, it’s distracting me.”
“Heaven forbid I distract you,” he drawled, folding his arms over his chest.
Oh, he was distracting her all right. He was doing it now, his biceps straining against the sleeves of his black cotton T-shirt.
She looked away, but that didn’t end things. He still had the power to make her heart skip. The truth was that even wearing his sweatshirt and baseball cap was getting to her.
Vanessa needed a new outfit—not princess attire, not borrowed garments, but something of her own. Something that had nothing to do with her position.
She wanted to shed that persona along with the mismatched clothes and let the new Vanessa appear, like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. And that’s how she felt, as if she’d been locked in a cocoon. Only, Vanessa’s cocoon was made of glass and had all the world looking in as she went through her changes.
From the time she’d been a small child, the paparazzi had watched her every move and commented on everything from her hair and her gangly height to her clothes and her weight. That kind of constant critical inspection had turned her into an approval-seeking machine from a very young age. But she’d never quite learned how to gain that approval.
Sometimes she thought she began disappointing her father the second she was born. He’d wanted a son. He’d gotten her instead.
Things had gotten worse since her mother’s death. Her mother had acted as a buffer. Vanessa had barely turned sixteen when her mother died in a car crash.
There never is a good time to lose a parent, but Vanessa had been particularly vulnerable as a late-blooming gawky teenager who lacked her mother’s grace and style. Whenever her father had criticized her, her mother had always managed to say something to soothe the hurt. Vanessa still missed her intensely.
Since then she felt as if her every move was being dissected under a microscope, and she was constantly found lacking by her father.
Vanessa shook off the melancholy such thoughts always brought her. She was here, in a department store in the middle of New York, free to do as she chose for the first time in her life. She needed to enjoy this moment.
“Are you done yet?” Mark demanded in an aggravated voice.
Suddenly Mark represented the male dominance she’d had to suffer through because of her father. She was tired of pleasing. She was tired of a man telling her what to do, of a man trying to drain her pleasure by laying on guilt.
“No, I’m not done yet.” She deliberately walked through the neighboring intimate apparel section, hoping to make Mark even more uncomfortable. He grabbed his duffel bag and came after her.
Glancing over her shoulder, she noticed that Mark’s eyes were shifting from side to side and his jaw was clenching rather like a man forced to do girl stuff against his will. He bumped into her before realizing she’d paused in front of a display of lilac-colored bras and matching panties. He stared at the lacy bras and then at her.
To her surprise, his frazzled look was replaced with a heated gaze in her direction. “You’d look good in that color,” Mark noted huskily.
Instead of him being the one discomfited, now she was the one blushing. He watched her with those impressive blue eyes of his, the slide of his eyes down her face and body like the brush of fingertips—tangible in their visual touch.
Her breath caught in her throat, and she was overcome with the awareness of the man standing so close beside her that she could almost hear his heartbeat. Twice today she’d been held in his arms and kissed until she could no longer tell up from down.
“Shoes,” she muttered, trying to hang on to her composure. Breaking off eye contact, she noted, “I need a pair of sandals.”
“We’re not buying you a whole new wardrobe here,” he warned her.
“I can’t keep wearing these heavy walking shoes.” She held out her foot and moved her ankle to show him what she meant. “It won’t take me long.”
“Yeah, right. Where have I heard that before?”
“I have no idea,” she replied in a lofty tone. “You certainly haven’t heard it from me.”
“I certainly have. Several times. Back at the hotel when you were changing clothes.”
“That delay was entirely your fault. You’re the one who was unhappy with my attire.”
“Are you going to buy the stuff you’re holding in your arms?”
She had the items she’d collected all squashed against her body, as if they could provide some kind of protection from this powerful attraction between them.
“Yes, of course I am. I have some cash.”
She had just enough left after making those purchases to buy sandals. Mark’s long-suffering sighs seemed to arise every two seconds despite her best efforts to hurry.
Because of her borrowed tight-fitting jeans, she was having a hard time bending over to fasten the straps on the sandals she was trying on. She was wondering if perhaps she should stick with a slide style instead when Mark took matters into his own hands, literally. Bending on one knee, he took her foot in a firm but gentle hold as he slid the sandal into place and fastened it. His fingers were warm on her skin as they brushed against her ankle, creating a surge of awareness that zipped through her entire body.
“Look, Mommy, that man on his knees is proposing!” a little girl exclaimed.
Mark and Vanessa both froze in place. Their eyes met and held. Vanessa barely realized that the girl had come over to put her sticky hands on her knee. All she could think of was the concept of Mark proposing to her.
The girl’s harried mother quickly joined them, breaking the moment. “Don’t touch!” she scolded her daughter. “Sorry about that,” she told Vanessa. “Ever since she saw my brother on his knees proposing to his sweetheart a few weeks ago, she thinks any man on bended knee is proposing.”
Mark quickly leaped to his feet as Vanessa said, “That’s all right. No harm done. Right, Mark?”
“Affirmative.” He still looked a little shaken to her eyes, however.
She quickly decided to get the shoes she was wearing and made her purchase in the shoe department. They placed the shoes she had been wearing in a bag for her. Accustomed as she was to others doing her carrying for her, she left that bag and the larger one with the clothing she’d bought earlier at the cashier’s desk as she turned away to pocket her meager change. Sure enough, Mark picked the paper bags up for her. He carried them over to where she stood and then dumped them at her feet. “These are yours.”
“I know that.” Placing the smaller shoe bag into the larger one, she gamely picked it up.
The store had gotten much more crowded while she’d been searching for the perfect sandal.
Mark noticed the increasing crowd as well. “Stay close to me,” he ordered her.
Easy for him to say. He was powerfully built and carrying a huge duffel bag. While Vanessa was taller than many of the women around her, many of them had Olga’s hefty build and looked as though they could have taken on the entire East German fencing team themselves.
It happened in the blink of an eye. The crowd spilled out from the aisles and suddenly Vanessa was swept up in it as the rush of humanity surged forward. Carried along by the crowd, she became separated from Mark as she struggled to maintain possession of her large shopping bag.
Shrieks from excited shoppers made her ears ring as the stampede continued. It wasn’t until Vanessa almost knocked over a mannequin wearing a wedding dress that she realized she was in the bridal department. Huge banners hung from the walls, proclaiming, Bridal Bonanza Sale: One Hour Only!
Vanessa tried to work her way toward the outer walls, but she was hemmed in by women determined to find a bargain. Fear welled up inside her. She’d never experienced anything like this.
Then out of the blue, she wa
s plucked from the crowd, the comforting safety of Mark’s arm guiding her through the chaos. It seemed to take forever to get out of the melee. But held tucked against him, her earlier fear was gone.
It wasn’t until they were on the escalator heading back downstairs and away from the marital mayhem that Mark spoke. “I told you I hated shopping,” he growled.
“Are stores like this all the time?”
“Like I’d know,” he retorted, keeping his arm around her as they descended to the main floor.
“The shops are closed for me when I go shopping.”
“A princess perk, huh?”
She nodded.
“Sounds like one you should keep,” Mark noted dryly before holding the door open for her.
Out on the street, he wasted no time in hailing a cab.
“Where are we going now?” she asked as he hustled her inside so fast she almost lost her baseball cap.
“This time I’m calling the shots.” Mark gave an address to the cabbie before continuing to speak to her. “I think we’ve had enough excitement for one day, don’t you?”
Vanessa nodded. Being a regular person was more work than she’d expected.
Chapter Five
“Where are we?” Vanessa asked as the cab pulled up in front of a brownstone in a quiet neighborhood.
“Home,” Mark replied, opening the cab door and helping her out.
She tried to ignore the feel of his warm hand holding hers, but it was impossible. Each time he touched her she experienced an increasingly powerful jolt of awareness. This wasn’t something she’d experienced before. In the course of her work, she met a number of men, shook their hands, or even had her hand kissed. None of them had ever had this effect on her.
Certainly Sebastian had never had this effect on her. He was like a brother to her, which is why the thought of marrying him made her stomach clench. Over the past year, she’d tried to talk to her father about her feelings, tried to prevent him from insisting that Sebastian be her husband. But her words fell on deaf ears. Her father already knew what he thought, he didn’t care what she thought. He was the king and her father, and he knew what was best.