A Princess for Christmas

by Shirley Jump

Suddenly, she felt naked, exposed, as if she’d gotten on a stage and started reading from her diary. She wanted to rush over to the artwork and throw a cloth over the paintings, hide them from his inquisitive view.

  “May I?” Jake asked, gesturing toward the art stacked against the far wall.

  If letting him into her home was like giving him access to her identity, letting him see her art was like giving him access to her soul. She shouldn’t. She hadn’t let anyone see her art, except for Carmen, who’d merely had a glimpse when she’d stopped by one time.

  And yet, even as everything within her said no, she found her mouth saying “yes.”

  It had to be the flowers. In the palace, there’d been fresh flowers every week, sometimes every day for special occasions. But none of them had been chosen especially for her. None of them had been hand-delivered by a man with an apology. And a smile like that.

  “First, tell me something.”

  He cocked his head and studied her. “Okay. What?”

  “Why did you bring me a bouquet?”

  “Uh…because women like flowers.” He rubbed his temple. “Is this a trick question?”

  “Why one bouquet? You are a wealthy man and…” She searched for the right words, ones that wouldn’t offend him, and yet would say what she needed to say.

  “A man who could buy an entire flower shop, if I needed to?”

  She nodded.

  “I thought of that,” he admitted. “But then I realized you weren’t that kind of woman.”

  “What made you realize that?”

  He took a step closer to her, and her heart began to race. She drew in the scent of his cologne, and with it, the sense of danger that came with getting any closer to this man. To getting closer to anyone. “Back at the inn, I saw another side of you.”

  He had listened after all. Of all the people who had known her, all the people in her life, this man, this near stranger, had paid attention. Even her mother, who loved her, didn’t know her heart the same way. Finally, a man who saw her as a woman, a person, not a princess.

  Too bad he was too late.

  “What did you see?” she asked, knowing she shouldn’t wrap herself in him anymore, but unable to resist.

  He caught a tendril of her hair, and let the silky tress slide through his grasp. Her breath lodged in her throat, every ounce of her stilled, waiting. “I saw a woman who has watched the world from a tower, and never got to live in it until she moved here.”

  Mariabella nodded. “And you, did you ever get to live in the world you watched?”

  He shifted away from her, and crossed to the artwork. The conversation had ended as quickly as it had started. One door opened, another slammed shut. “What technique is that?” he asked, bending down to study the work closer. “It looks three-dimensional.”

  She should be happy. After all, didn’t she want to keep things on an impersonal level? Maintain that distance from a relationship, especially for the limited time she had left in America?

  Curiosity nudged at her, pushing her closer to him, even as her better judgment told her to back away. “You have asked me a lot of questions. And have told me almost nothing about you,” she said. “Who are you, Jake Lattimore?”

  “There’s not much to know. I work.” He grinned. “And I work.”

  “And watch the world go by instead of getting involved with someone?”

  He looked away. She waited, refusing to fill the silence. Time ticked by, seconds marked by the crashing of the waves outside the tiny cottage. Jake crossed to the mantel and fiddled with a ceramic Santa. “There was someone. Once,” he said finally.

  “What happened?”

  He swallowed. The firelight danced across his face, casting the depths of his face into shadows. “She died a month before our wedding. Car accident.”

  “Oh, Jake, I am so sorry.” She went to him, her hands lighting on his back, but he didn’t turn around. He held the grief inside him, in a deep place she couldn’t reach, couldn’t ease for him.

  “I never thought—” He heaved a breath. “I never thought I’d get over it.”

  She leaned her head against the soft fabric of his shirt. The fireplace warmed him from the front, she from the back, but Mariabella knew there was still an ice inside of Jake Lattimore that had yet to thaw.

  “And so I worked. It was easier to do that than to live.”

  “You have been in a prison,” she said softly, understanding him so much better now, a man who was a kindred spirit to hers, but for different reasons, “for all these years.”

  He turned around in her arms. “Yeah, I guess I have.”

  How she wanted to tell him that she would be here, if he ever decided he was ready to have another life. To move forward. But how could she make that promise? How could she give him a gift she didn’t even have?

  Across the room, the plane ticket waited. And across the world, her father waited.

  “Someday, you will find someone—” the words hurt her mouth as she said them “—and I am sure you will be very happy.”

  Something flickered in his gaze, something that turned the warmth in his blue eyes cold. “Yeah. Someday.”

  She broke away from him. She wanted to comfort him more, but she couldn’t touch Jake for one more second and fool herself into thinking she didn’t care about him.

  Because she did.

  And forgetting him was already going to be a Herculean task.

  He seemed to be thinking the same thing, because he returned to the stack of paintings. “How do you make these 3-D?” His voice had gone distant.

  He’d already drawn away from her, too.

  She should have been relieved by the change in subject, but a part of her felt disappointment. She brushed off the feeling and focused on her art. “It is called relief painting. I use industrial resin on wood fiber board, to shape the figures, and then I paint the details with oil paints.” There. Talk about techniques on canvas.

  “They look so real. This one…” He paused. “Incredible.”

  The one he’d chosen had been one of Mariabella’s personal favorites. Two pelicans, diving into the ocean, racing to catch a fish both had spied from the air.

  “It was a moment I saw one day, back in the summer, and I wanted to capture that competition, that air war.”

  “You brought them to life,” he said. “The three dimensions make them seem vibrant, so real, and the colors you chose…wow. The way you painted the sun breaking on the horizon behind the birds, it’s as if I’m there, standing on the beach.”

  Heat filled her cheeks. She’d had her work critiqued in college, of course, but never had she had such overt praise heaped on one of her paintings. “Thank you.”

  “You’re incredible, Mariabella.” He took her hand, then tugged her over to him, into his arms. She fit perfectly, as if she’d always been made for that space against his chest. Oh, this was trouble. Big trouble.

  She was falling for Jake Lattimore. And falling hard. No matter how hard she tried not to, to remind herself she was leaving, that she had to put him in the past now, before it got too hard later, she fell even more.

  He looked down at her and smiled, and everything about his face softened, drew her in, captivated her even more. “I lied to you.”

  “Lied?”

  He traced the outline of her jaw, and Mariabella nearly came undone with desire. “When I arrived at the gallery, I lied. I said I wasn’t looking for anything for my office. But now I realize I am.”

  His gaze drifted toward the painting of the pelicans, and she connected the dots. “Oh, no, that is not for sale. It is not ready, I cannot…no.”

  “If you don’t want to sell that one, I’m sure I can find another one I like just as well.” Jake released her to flip that painting forward, revealing one with a trio of geese in flight, their wings spread broad, the horizon ahead of them—their new destination blurred—and a rocky, barren landscape to the rear. “Like this.”

  “I cannot
sell that one, either. Or any of my work.”

  “Why not?”

  “I…I just cannot.”

  “Surely you didn’t paint all these just to leave them against the wall?”

  “I am just not comfortable with having my work out in the public eye.”

  “What about my eye? Just mine?”

  What was he saying? Did he want something more, something just between them?

  Oh, how she did.

  But she couldn’t have that. Jake Lattimore was like the toy in the window a child wanted for Christmas and the mother couldn’t afford. He would always be behind the glass of another world. She had a duty to fulfill, and no matter how much she wished otherwise, he wasn’t part of that duty. An ache spread through her chest, her veins. “I cannot let it go,” she said, meaning everything but her art. “I am…I am sorry.”

  I cannot let you go.

  I cannot leave.

  His gaze met hers, and held for a long moment. “Me, too,” he said. “I would have loved to have this.”

  Did he mean the painting? Or her? Better not to know. Easier.

  She didn’t answer him. He went back to flipping through the paintings. “Why birds?”

  “I like birds.” There was more to the answer than that. But telling him the rest involved telling him where she came from, about her quest for freedom, about the constant itch to be anywhere but back in Uccelli.

  About the fight in her heart between duty and her own life, as if she were a wild bird caught in a manmade cage.

  “Me, too.” Jake got to his feet and met her gaze with his own. The quiet of her house, which seemed so peaceful when it was just her, seemed to boil up with tension. “Especially yours.”

  “Thank you.” Heat rose in her cheeks, and she dipped her gaze. When he stared at her like that, the intensity took her to places she hadn’t visited before. Opened doors she had always kept shut. Asked her questions she’d never answered.

  Could she fall in love? Could she have a life with a commoner?

  She didn’t ask those questions because she knew the answers. A commoner, particularly an American businessman, would never be acceptable to her father. To the kingdom.

  “Why aren’t these in your gallery?” Jake asked.

  “I am hosting another artist right now.” Not a lie, entirely.

  “You should host you.” His gaze swept over her face. “But if you do, there would be publicity and that would let people know you are…?” He arched a brow.

  “I better put those flowers into water before they die.” Damn. That’s what she got for inviting him in. He circled back around to the one subject she wanted to avoid.

  Who she was.

  Mariabella hurried into the kitchen. She looked for a vase, then realized she didn’t have one. She’d never had a need for one before. She pulled a pitcher out of the cabinet, filled it with water and arranged the bouquet in the glass container, using the ribbon from the package to accent the handle.

  “Darcy has this crazy idea,” Jake said.

  At some point, he had followed her into the kitchen and was leaning against the wall. Mariabella froze at the words. Darcy. That woman who had almost recognized her. Did she know? Had she figured it out after Mariabella left the restaurant?

  Impossible. Wasn’t it?

  “Oh…yeah?” She fiddled with the flowers.

  “She thinks you might be a princess.”

  Mariabella swallowed hard. She plucked out a daisy from the center and shoved into a space on the side, then moved a rose from the right to the left. “Huh. Really?”

  “Are you?”

  The two words hung in her kitchen, heavy, fat with anticipation. Destructive.

  Are you her?

  Mariabella planted her hands on either side of the counter. What should she do? Lie and hope he didn’t uncover the truth? Or tell him yes, and sit back, wait for the media onslaught that would destroy everything she had worked so hard to build?

  Jake Lattimore was a man of means. And those means would lead to the answers he sought, one way or another.

  It was over. Her life here. Her fantasy that she could be loved by a man like him, as an ordinary woman. Once she told him who she was, he would never look at her the same way again.

  Mariabella closed her eyes and in her mind, said goodbye to a relationship that had never really had a chance to begin. She straightened her back and turned to face him. When she did, her body naturally rose into its perfect alignment, the balance-a-book-on-your-head posture she had learned so long ago. She drew in a deep breath, then released it. “I am, indeed, Princess Mariabella Santaro of Uccelli.” She paused, then met his gaze. “But if you tell anyone, I will make sure you never build another hotel in this country or any other.”

  He had been so sure Darcy was wrong.

  But no, here he was, standing in the middle of a tiny cottage in Harborside, Massachusetts, with the heir to the throne of Uccelli. A woman who seemed as ordinary as any other, who could have just come home from buying groceries—and maybe had.

  The admission explained everything. Her accent, the way she carried herself, her reluctance to tell him anything about herself. And most of all, the nagging sense he’d had that she was different.

  He’d never expected this kind of different, though.

  A princess.

  A future queen?

  “You are staring at me,” she said. “I hate that.” Mariabella turned away and crossed to the kitchen cabinets and opened one of the wooden doors, exposing a neatly stacked set of white dishes. She stood there, as if she didn’t know what she wanted or why she’d opened the door.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve just never met a princess before.”

  “I was a princess when you met me.”

  “I didn’t know you were a princess then.”

  She pivoted back. “So this makes things different? You see me now as someone else? Someone you should bow to or some such ridiculous thing? Or maybe a curiosity? Like a monkey in a zoo?”

  “No. I just…” He took a step closer. “I wonder why you lied to me.”

  She threw up her hands. “Is it not obvious? I am trying to live my life here as a person, not as a princess. I do not want the media glued to my back, taking a photograph of everything I do, being there when I go into the coffee shop and order an espresso, or go to the grocery and pick up basil. I want to be like everyone else.”

  “You can do that and still be honest with the people around you.” No hurt invaded him, simply a need to understand. He could see how the whole princess thing might have been hard to bring up in a conversation, but still wondered why she had chosen this life of anonymity when she held so much more sway as Princess Mariabella.

  She let out a gust. “You think it is so easy? You think I can just say, good morning, I am a princess, but treat me like I am just like you, and that easily—” she snapped her fingers “—it will happen?”

  He winnowed the gap even more. “How do you know if you don’t give people a chance?”

  “People…like you?”

  He could easily say no. Mention anyone in town. Cletus. Zeke. The caterer, Savannah, or even Mariabella’s assistant, Carmen. Those people had known Mariabella the longest, known her as Mariabella Romano, and never had an inkling that all this time they’d had a real-life princess living among them.

  But he’d be lying if he did. From the minute he’d met her, and they’d tangled over the property, over this town, Jake had been intrigued. His senses had been awakened, in a way he’d never thought possible again. For so long, he’d thought his life would never again have that spark, that need for another person.

  Until now. Until Mariabella.

  “Yeah, people like me,” he said quietly, and reached up, to cup her jaw. He lowered his head, his mouth hovering over hers.

  She inhaled, and her eyes widened, the light crimson color in her cheeks rising. As tempting as the fabled apple.

  The tension between them coi
led tighter. Jake gripped her waist, and brought her torso to his. Desire thundered in his head, pulsed through his veins. He didn’t see a princess. He didn’t see a gallery owner. He saw Mariabella, a woman who made him feel alive for the first time in years.

  A woman he had begun to care about. A lot.

  And that was the woman he kissed.

  When his lips met hers, sensations exploded at every place they touched. She was sweet in his arms, then hot, as she curved against him, and her hands ranged up his back to draw him even closer. His hands tangled in her long, thick dark curls.

  Outside, the winter storm kicked up, wind battering the little house, shaking the timbers and whistling under the roof, but it was nothing compared to the storm brewing between Jake and Mariabella. This kiss wasn’t like their first one. It wasn’t short, it wasn’t sweet, it was a storm, like the one outside.

  The tumult in their kiss reached a feverish pitch, and they each took a step back, until she was pressed against the counter, and his length was pressed against hers, bodies molding into one, their tongues dancing together, mimicking what their bodies could do. Fire roared through his veins, blinding his thoughts to everything but this. His hands snaked up and ranged over her waist, then her breasts, cupping the generous fullness through the soft fabric of her sweater. Mariabella arched against him, and let out a soft moan. Jake nearly fell apart, and the fire in him reached a level that would not be easily quieted.

  Suddenly, she broke away, and stepped over to the sink, her back to him. “What…what are you doing?”

  His breath came in heaves, his mind a jumble. “I thought I was kissing you.” And he’d thought she’d been responding. Had he misread everything? The invitation in her eyes? The answer in her lips to the question posed by his own?

  “Kissing me?” she asked, still not facing him, her voice quiet. “Or kissing a princess?”

  “Is that what you think this was? I find out who you are, rush right over and grab you, so I can run out and tell the tabloids I kissed a princess?”

  She wheeled around. “Is it?”

  He wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her back, the roar of desire she’d awakened in him still sounding so loud in his head, still pounding so hard in his veins, that he wondered whether it would be ever be quieted again. She let out a little yelp of surprise. Jake leaned down. “I don’t want to kiss a princess,” he said, his voice nearly a growl. “I want to kiss you, Mariabella. Only you.”