by Cindy Gerard
“I think I can scare some up.” Brushing her hair back from her face, she headed for the kitchen.
He’d congratulated himself a hundred times for deploying Harriet Sherman—“Tank” to those who had worked with her before she’d retired from the military—next door to Anna in the role of watchdog in the guise of nosy neighbor, motherly confidante and baby-sitter. With Harriet nearby the past four months, he’d slept a little easier knowing Striksky had very quietly launched a worldwide search for Anna. In this last dark week since Striksky, faced with international humiliation when his underhanded scheme had failed, had committed suicide not five miles from Royal, he’d been doubly glad to have Harriet in place to help Anna through that ugly mess.
It was obvious to him now, however, that she was still struggling with the backlash. Standing in the arched doorway of her small kitchen, he set his jaw, told himself he’d stay long enough to make sure she was steady again. Then he’d get the hell out of the combat zone.
In the meantime, he had to work hard at snuffing out a hundred intimate details that made up the immediate moment: Like the fact that he was alone with her—something he’d managed to avoid until now. Like the fact that it was the middle of the night, the hour of shared beds, shared warmth and shared bodies. Like the damnable itch on the palms he clenched as tight as his jaw to keep from reaching out to touch her milk-white shoulder. A shoulder that was bare beneath the thin silk strap of her short, clingy nightgown. Skin that radiated a honey scent, which beckoned, enticed and clung to the midnight air like fragrance on a rose.
He knew what that skin felt like beneath his fingers, against his tongue. He knew how she tasted. What it felt like to lose himself deep inside her—like drowning in heated silk, like sinking into sweet, tight oblivion. And every night since she’d been in Royal—her safely tucked away in her apartment, and him wherever his nocturnal wanderings took him—he’d remembered every intimate detail of the love they had made.
He bit back a low growl of frustration at the turn of his thoughts. Yet when he saw that her hands were still trembling violently in the aftermath of her nightmare, he took two stalking strides toward her.
“Sit,” he demanded and made himself grip her shoulders at arm’s length. In a no-nonsense motion, he guided her to a chair and sat her down. “How often does this happen?”
She sat as still as a block of wood, her hands clutched tightly in her lap. “Just...not often.”
Not often, my ass, he thought with a dark scowl. He’d bet his portfolio this was a nightly occurrence. Swearing as much at the clench of sympathy he felt in his chest as at his body’s reaction to the way her deep breath stretched the pale-blue silk tight over the softness of her breasts, he turned back to the counter and slammed around filling the teakettle.
When he’d set it on to boil and settled himself, he turned back to her. Leaning his hips against the counter, he crossed his arms over his chest and tucked his hands under his armpits, where they wouldn’t lead him into trouble.
“You don’t lie worth a damn, Your Highness.”
Immediately regretting the angry edge he’d let creep into his voice, he worked at gentling his tone. “You want to talk about it?”
Eyes downcast, she gave a small, tight shake of her head.
Fighting a crushing awareness of her vulnerability, he stared at that tumble of blond hair a long time before he was able to speak again. “You’ve been through a lot, Anna. Maybe you ought to consider seeing someone...a doctor or someone to help you through this.”
“I don’t need a doctor,” she bristled, lifting her chin and gracing him with a valiant, aristocratic smile. “Besides, how would it look? A von Oberland in therapy? It wouldn’t do. Appearances at all costs you know. Wouldn’t want the world to get wind that the royal blood was anything but true blue.”
He narrowed his eyes, studied her long and hard. A little starch looked good on her. It was a sign she was still fighting. Suddenly he didn’t feel so bad about baiting her with the “Your Highness” crack, even though anger had provoked it. The fact was, like it or not, he had a lot of anger built up inside where Princess Anna was concerned. He’d held it in check for four years, but ever since he’d brought her here, he’d felt it escalating.
It seemed like forever instead of mere months that he’d been fighting feelings he didn’t want to admit to and blaming her for being the cause. He’d done his duty. He’d gotten her out of Obersbourg, then watched from afar, made sure she was safe. Just like he’d made sure she was set up in this apartment in his own building, that she was absorbed into the small community of Royal as Annie Grace, a distant cousin of some city father too far removed for anyone to question in any depth. He’d seen her dressed in her hot-pink waitress uniform, with her hair pulled back into a nondescript pony tail, waiting tables at the local greasy spoon—a job he’d set up for her. A job he’d secretly hoped she would find appalling and so far beneath her she would have stomped her regal foot and thrown a royal tantrum.
In retrospect, he wasn’t too proud of himself for stooping so low as to want to humiliate her. Not that his plan had worked, anyway. She hadn’t done one damn thing he’d expected.
What she’d done was adjust. Without comment. Without complaint—and he’d been the one left feeling devalued.
She’d taken to the waitress role as if she’d been born with an order pad in her hand instead of a gilded rattle. She’d waited tables, laughed with the locals and looked and acted like she’d enjoyed every minute of it.
Act is the key word here, he told himself, working hard to reinforce his cynicism where she was concerned. He didn’t dare forget that she was a consummate actress—had played the role of her life when she’d made him fall in love with her.
He rolled a shoulder, shook it off. That was then. This was now. And love—whatever the hell that was—didn’t have anything to do with what he was feeling for her now. What he was feeling for her now, he told himself, was a grudging tolerance that had gotten tangled up in a misplaced sense of responsibility. And a leftover sexual obsession that he had no intention of indulging.
Stone-faced, he turned toward the whistle of the kettle, set it off the heat and snagged a pair of mugs from her cupboard. As he held the chunky stoneware in his hand, he worked hard to convince himself that the princess was no doubt missing the delicacy and the elegance of her seventeenth century fine bone china and the servants who all but drank her tea for her. Yet when he set the mug in front of her, she cupped it gratefully between her small hands, absorbed the welcome warmth, first through her fingertips then with her mouth, as she touched the mug to her lips.
A knot of tension that was becoming all too familiar when he was around her coiled tight in his gut.
“I’m fine now.” She made a forced attempt to sound more steady, more centered. “You don’t have to babysit me. People have bad dreams. It’s not a big deal.”
A muscle in his jaw worked involuntarily and he stated the facts as he saw them. “And you don’t have to put on some brave front. This has been hard on you. There’s no shame in admitting it.”
The stunned look in her eyes as she reacted to his unexpected empathy momentarily silenced them both.
“Right,” she said finally. “No shame.”
Her voice so full of the shame she was trying to deny, it made his chest hurt.
She sat so still. Her slender fingers were wrapped around that mug like it was her only anchor. Her gaze was focused on something much further away than the clock on the far kitchen wall. And her voice, when she finally spoke, sounded as weary as time.
“I wanted Ivan out of my life,” she all but whispered into a silence that had grown heavy and thick. “I’d prayed he would be made to pay for whatever part he played in Sara’s death, for holding Sara’s babies hostage.” She lifted eyes glittering with unshed tears, stared at a time and place far away from Royal, Texas. “God help me, I wanted him dead.”
The guilt etched on her face clogged h
is throat with emotion. He swallowed it back. Waited.
Haunted eyes flicked to his then quickly away. “I’m glad he’s dead. For everything he’d done, everything he tried to do. I’m glad he’s dead,” she repeated and once again, met his eyes. Once again, she looked away as if she was ashamed. “What does that make me? What kind of monster does that make me?”
Everything she wouldn’t let him see in her eyes was manifested in those self-indicting words, in the thready hopelessness of her voice. He wanted to drag her into his arms and hold her so she wouldn’t splinter in a million pieces. Yet he sensed that if he touched her now, she would shatter. Like a beautiful spun glass swan. Like a priceless crystal vase.
Since he didn’t think that both of them together could gather all the pieces if she fell apart, he made his voice as gentle as he knew how.
“What it makes you is human, Anna. It makes you human—nothing more. Nothing less. The prince was an opportunist. He was a murderer. And he was a coward—he proved it when he jumped off the bridge south of town. You had no part in that. You had no part in anything he did.”
Despite the sense of his argument, her silence told him she felt she had played a very huge part in it. The next words out of her mouth confirmed it.
“If I had married him he’d be alive, though, wouldn’t he? Sara might even be alive—”
It galled him to hell and back that she would take even an ounce of blame on her slim shoulders. He drew a deep breath, laid a hand on her arm. “Look—”
She jumped as if she’d been burned. “It’s all right,” she insisted abruptly. So abruptly he could only stare as she shook off his touch and rose. “I’m sorry...I’m sorry the alarm bothered you. I’m sorry I laid all this on you. But it’s all right now. I’m all right now.”
She was out of the kitchen and racing for her front door so quickly he was left standing flat-footed in his anaconda boots and a scowl. He glanced at his raised hand, curled his fingers slowly into a loose fist.
Fine, he decided, accepting that his touch had set her off. Obviously, she didn’t want him here any more than he wanted to be here. And as sure as hell was fire, he didn’t want to get all tangled up in caring about her again.
“Call Harriet if you need anything,” he said gruffly and headed for the door. Shouldering past her, he swung it wide.
He wouldn’t have thought anything could have kept him from barreling out of her apartment. Not her tears. Not her guilt.
He hadn’t counted on her touch.
It stopped him cold. It stopped his heart.
Very slowly, he turned his head, looked down at the small hand that lay so tentatively on his arm, then into the eyes of the one woman who could turn hard muscle to yearning flesh, turn simple heat to complex need.
Through all of this, if there had been contact—as minimal and necessary as it had been—he’d been the one to initiate it. He hadn’t initiated this. Just like he hadn’t initiated the explosion of memories her singular act had stirred. Slender hands trailing down the arch of his bare spine, delicate fingers tracing the point of his hip, tangling in his hair, caressing him, urging him closer, demanding him deeper.
He closed his eyes, clenched his jaw so tight he heard a dull pop. Then her whispered, “I’m sorry, Gregory. I’m so sorry for everything,” as her fingers drifted slowly away.
For a long moment he stood there. Struggling for something to say. Reaching for something to do. The better part of wisdom, however, overrode either instinct.
“Lock the door behind me,” he ordered in a rusty voice and strode into the hall without a backward glance. He hit the apartment stairs at a jog and bounded down them and into the night. The urgency of his need to get away from her was suddenly more powerful than the one that had had him shooting across town to get to her.
When he reached his truck, he settled his hat lower on his head and ducked into the cab. Then he cranked the key, slammed into gear and hit the gas with a squeal of tires and a need for speed.
Heading across town, he refused to acknowledge that the rapid drum of his heart had to do with anything but anger for the job he was letting her do on his head. It had nothing to do with wanting to hold her. Nothing to do with needing her. Nothing, absolutely nothing to do with wishing she wasn’t who she was—unreachable, untouchable, unattainable.
Like an automaton, Anna went through the motions of locking up behind Gregory. With her hand still clutching the knob, she turned and leaned back against the door. Dropping her head against its solid weight, she closed her eyes and tried to pull herself together.
The nightmare may have unsettled her, but Gregory’s dark, brooding presence in her kitchen had all but undone her. His touch, so unexpected, had been the final blow. She’d had to get some distance from him.
It was hard, so hard to see him like this—controlled, distant, remote—when once they had been in love.
Well, he didn’t love her now. The true irony was that four years ago she’d seen to it that he never would.
She’d known then, as she knew now, that the rebellious spirit she loved so much about him would have been broken if he had become engulfed in the circus that was her life. The stiff, orderly world of royal protocol that was too rigid, too stifling, too constricting would have emasculated him.
Her greatest gift—and her greatest sacrifice—had been to convince him that what they’d shared had been little more than a lark. That he would never fit in, in her world. To make him believe, for his sake, that there was no love binding them when, in truth, she’d ached with it since the day she’d turned and walked away.
So no. She’d seen to it that he didn’t love her.
Yet he had come to her, some small corner of her heart argued as she pushed away from the door and walked slowly back to the kitchen. When he thought she was in danger, he had come to her.
Out of duty, her sense of reality was quick to point out.
She poured more hot water into her mug to rewarm her tea. He felt responsible. Nothing more. When he looked at her, his hard blue eyes relayed nothing but anger sullied by pity. When he spoke to her, his words expressed nothing but annoyance cloaked in an innate sense of kindness.
He didn’t care. He wouldn’t care. She’d seen to it that he couldn’t afford to.
She brought the mug to her lips, sipped absently. Nothing had changed for them. Nothing could change for them. She’d understood that when she’d called him to come to her in Obersbourg. And yet she’d called him. And he had come. He had protected her.
Well, she was out of danger now. And where did that leave her?
She walked into the living room and curled up in the corner of the overstuffed sofa. Ivan was no longer a threat. She had kept her promise to Sara—the twins were happy with Blake and Josie. It was time to get on with her life. Obersbourg needed her. She was the only remaining hope. Somehow, she had to find a way to save her country.
As she’d told Josie at the adoption reception after hearing the new about Ivan’s death, there was nothing keeping her here in Texas.
Nothing but Gregory.
It all came back to Gregory. When it came time to leave, she would like to go without looking back, but there was unfinished business between them. She owed him her life. For that, she owed him the truth. And it was the truth, when she finally worked up the courage to tell him, that would ensure he would be lost to her forever.
She stared across the empty room, as even in the face of that sobering knowledge, one recurrent thought wouldn’t let go—something Gregory had said kept replaying through her mind.
“You got any of the sissy mint tea you managed to get Harriet hooked on?”
She cupped the mug fully between her palms, rubbed its warmth along her cheek. He knew what kind of tea she drank. It was a small, inconsequential detail of her life. Yet, the significance of that tiny bit of knowledge seemed, somehow, monumental. Seemed, somehow, to warm her. How could he have known what kind of tea she drank if he hadn’t asked some
one? And why would he ask about her, if he didn’t care?
Sipping deeply, she made herself admit that she was grasping at straws. Even if he did have a small pocket of feelings for her, he would hate her when she finally told him about William.
William—who she had been forced to deny the opportunity to know his own father. Just as she had been forced to deny Gregory the right to know his own son.
A sobering dose of shame swamped her. After all that had happened—Sara’s death, giving up the twins, Ivan’s suicide, the burden of the secret she carried—the hurt that remained most raw was the pain of losing Gregory, both then and now.
Rising slowly, she walked back to her empty bed. She felt very alone, suddenly. Weighted with guilt, burdened by responsibility. And ready to deal with neither.
To think that once she’d believed in fairy tales. To think that once she had believed in happily ever after.
Life had shown her, however, that without qualification, no one lives happily ever after.
Not even a princess.
Three
It was well past 2:00 a.m. when Greg pocketed his pass key and shut the door to the private entrance of the Cattleman’s Club behind him. The Club, and the privileges his membership afforded him, had always been a refuge. In the past few months, it had been truly a godsend. These days he couldn’t ever seem to shake a restlessness that kept him up late and casting about for some peace of mind—and the Club had become his favorite haunt.
Seeing Anna so shaken a little while ago hadn’t helped the cause. Leaving her, with images of how they had once been so good together sizzling through his blood, had added to the mix. That’s why he’d ended up back here.
It wasn’t that he didn’t have enough work to keep him busy. Hunt Industries, founded by his granddaddy and expanded by his father, had grown to include land development and shopping malls. Under Greg’s leadership, it had also become a major player in the aviation industry. As head attorney for the entire operation, he never lacked for work. As heir apparent to a billion-dollar fortune he’d helped create, he never lacked for motivation. He had never been and would never be content to swing from his daddy’s shirttails. He’d worked hard to earn his position, his reputation as a shrewd corporate counsel, as successor to the throne of the Hunt dynasty. Sometimes he thought it had come to mean too much to him. Sometimes he wished he could be more like his brother, Blake, who didn’t give a damn about the business.