Midwife's Longed-for Baby & the Prince's Cinderella Bride & Bride for the Single Dad (9781488022142)

by Anderson, Caroline; Berlin, Amalie; Taylor, Jennifer

  He wanted to talk, so Quinn would listen even if the words made no sense. And when his energy had depleted, Quinn would go home and read those damned papers and maybe call Ben, see what had been going on at the center today, as the press went into full-blown attack mode.

  * * *

  By the end of her workday, between watching the gathering throng of reporters forced to stay outside the Almsford gates, and the many worried calls from Mom to hear about the same at home, Anais had worked up a head filled with lightning.

  They followed her from the castle to Quinn’s penthouse, but knew enough to stop in the lobby while she stormed on through the shining white marble of her former home, past the familiar gray-haired guard at the reception desk, and straight for the elevator.

  “Miss?”

  When she pressed the button and the doors slid open, only then did she look back and saw the shock of recognition on his weathered face. “Haven’t you heard, Alvin? Quinton and I are still married.”

  Before he could say anything else, she stepped inside and pressed the button for the top floor, sending the box rushing toward the heavens. Or, more probably, elevated Hell.

  One of the world’s fastest, finest elevators rocketed her straight to some kind of elevated perdition framed in gleaming marble and modern lines.

  Contemporary in every way, the building had always driven home just how badly she fit there. She’d been a long-term visitor there, nothing more. It had never been her home any more than the place where she’d grown up had been. She hadn’t missed it for a second when she’d gone, even when she’d missed Quinn so badly she could only go through the motions of everyday life—excelling where she was supposed to excel, but it had all been a way of getting her from her morning bed to her bed at night, and the blessed oblivion of sleep.

  When she’d done her rotations in the psychiatric wards during medical school, she’d understood how people ended up addicted to drugs, or addicted to anything that took them out of their lives. She’d felt addicted to sleep, though came to realize it was depression muted to the world by an over-achieving personality.

  Reaching Quinn’s door, she pounded without stopping until, wild-eyed, he swung it open. “Please, do come add to my terrible day. If you’re here to yell at me too, stow it. I don’t know what’s going on any more than you do.”

  “You didn’t call your army of lawyers?”

  “Not yet.” He left her at the door and went back to digging in one of three massive crates taking up the largest part of the living room—at least the parts not covered by furniture or clutter. “I thought I’d start by digging up the divorce papers.”

  “And they’re in those crates?”

  “I saw a marked envelope in one of them the other night while self-medicating with rum,” he practically sneered. “But these things are full of junk and I can’t remember what I did with the packet.”

  He dove back in, snatched up a packet of something, examined it, then chucked it over his shoulder before diving back in.

  “What did the papers say?” Since she was there, she’d darned well help. The sooner the papers were found, the sooner the press would lose interest in her. She tossed her bag onto the counter and dumped another onto the floor, then sat in the middle to start sorting. The one good thing about being super angry while being around him? There wasn’t anything endearing about the man right now. Or sexy. All she felt was alternating waves of anger and terror, back and forth like a pendulum. None of that was sexy, which was the one part of it she could be thankful for.

  “I didn’t open it. Why on earth would anyone open divorce documents to read them? They weren’t written by John Grisham.” He copied her method and resumed sorting. “Wait, you’re annoyingly organized. Where are your copies of the papers?”

  Her copies! She could almost laugh, “That’s adorable. You think I was included in things. No. I went to the States, and no one bothered to look up my address, I guess. I signed the papers before I left. I don’t even know what happens after a royal divorce, but I signed the bloody papers.”

  “Yeah, I—” His pause bid her look at him again.

  Uneasiness crept up her spine. “You what?”

  “I don’t really remember any of that.” He looked genuinely confused—not a trace of sarcasm there, just befuddlement.

  “You don’t remember signing your divorce papers?”

  He shook his head, brows pinched above eyes tracked to the side, as if searching his memory.

  “Didn’t that strike you as odd?”

  That question earned her all his attention.

  “Odd? What struck me as odd was that my wife had just left me. That I was suddenly enlisted in the military. That medical school was permanently off the table. Those things struck me as odd. Shocking and odd.”

  Anais had been biting her tongue since she’d arrived, mostly trying to be more civil than the crackling in her ears demanded, but this quintessential Quinn manner of conflict resolution had her working not to shout at him.

  “You want to do this now?”

  “No, I wanted to do this seven years ago. I’m through waiting.”

  She could tell by his tone that he had worked up a lungful. And she’d be damned if she cowered behind his rage.

  “Fine. Now it is. But back then? If you’d been paying any attention, you would’ve seen it coming. I didn’t leave you spontaneously. It happened over months. I needed your help—I needed more than your arrogant certainty that things would just work out, and you shut me down every time I reached out to you.” Anais climbed to her feet. At least she could run if she needed to; sitting on the floor made her feel even more vulnerable than this conversation.

  He snorted, “When did I shut you down?”

  Before answering, and because she wanted to scream, Anais looked around the room for the envelope while taking deep, slow breaths.

  “There was your answer for everything: sex. Or telling me my concerns weren’t important and that I should forget about them. Don’t worry, don’t worry, don’t worry. Everything will be fine.” She flipped open the next crate, somehow doing all the talking. “Except that’s not how life works. Things weren’t fine. The people hated the idea that I was married to you, and every day it got worse. And guess what? They still hate it! I’m not allowed to go back to work until we get this sorted out, so help me find the papers. What color was the envelope?”

  “Yellow. Large. Big black type on a white sticker. Divorce of Prince Quinton Corlow and Princess Anais Corlow née Hayes.” He answered that first, then looked back. “And why would you get fired? Anais Hayes doesn’t even work at the clinic. Dr. Anna Kincaid works there. She might have a passing resemblance to Anais, but there’s little else of Anais there.”

  “You’re right. Anais died seven years ago.” The words ripped out of her before she had a chance to consider them, hot on the edge of tears. She continued working through the things in the second crate, picking up every item only long enough to verify it wasn’t a yellow envelope.

  “You started this insane self-coloring program then? But Philip only changed your name this year.”

  She ignored the question, pushing back where she felt least exposed. “Please, let’s talk about how, in order to come home, I had to engage the help of the Crown Prince to change my name without the public finding out. Having to rely on royal favors to live a life that those same royals wanted nowhere near them? Made my life perfect.”

  Quinn pushed a full crate out of the way. “Because it was so perfect after you left? Great. Good to know you didn’t suffer for a second after going. I always wondered. You went to Shangri-La. I went to a war zone.”

  Another shot that sailed straight and struck her right in the subgenual cingulate cortex—aka Guiltville, Her Brain.

  “Don’t even pull that with me.” She grabbed
a stuffed animal and winged it at his head. “I didn’t say that at all. And you didn’t care the whole time we were married. I needed you and you didn’t give a damn, so why would you care after I left? You wouldn’t. You didn’t. I will concede that you went somewhere awful afterward. I went to a shoddy walk-up in a shoddier neighborhood in the Rust Belt—which might as well have been a war zone.”

  “So, you felt right at home?”

  Right where she belonged. She couldn’t even argue with that, but he’d share his load of the blame.

  “I guess. But, since we’re on the subject, I know all this bluster was just you not wanting to admit that my leaving was not all me. It was you. And you don’t want to talk to me about something that hurt and scared me. Still. It’s easier to hurl blame.” She gave up on the second crate and headed to the one he’d already searched, and turned it over again.

  She needed this to be done before Wayne came back out of the woodwork with a barrel of shame and denigration in tow.

  * * *

  Quinn couldn’t do this, not with her refusing to look at him. The papers could wait, but he was through waiting. He prowled over to her, took her elbow, and turned her to face him.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You mean I didn’t want to spend all our time together fixating on the media? Yes. That’s right. It did no good for anyone; it just made you more upset. That doesn’t mean I didn’t care. I cared. I cared about you more than anyone.”

  “I was looking for solutions!” She jerked away. “You remember those. That’s what you’re looking for with Ben. Who, by the way, I love that you’re helping. Talking to him and seeing him through this. But it only goes to show how little you did that with me—to show that you were never mine, not really. We had chemistry. We had wild chemistry, and that was all you needed or wanted.”

  She spun away, her arms folding over her head in a cage, her fingers fisting in her own hair. The hopelessness of her action silenced him.

  Her version of the downfall of their marriage didn’t at all match his. Their problem was…well, he still didn’t know, but it wasn’t stupid rumors and paparazzi. Although anger that she couldn’t see past that problem when it had become so present today wouldn’t help him understand what had really happened back then.

  What had she said? She’d needed him and she’d been scared.

  The word sucked the anger out of him. “What were you scared of?”

  “Does it suddenly matter?” She returned to the crate, back to sorting through the stuffed animals and cards, back to not cooperating. A few minutes ago she’d wanted to talk; now she didn’t?

  He needed a freaking compass to keep up.

  “You said you were scared and that I was avoiding talking to you about it. So, what were you scared of?”

  She pushed back from the last crate and gestured around the room, “Where were you when you last saw the envelope?”

  Still not answering. Not looking at him. Not hearing him?

  This whole conversation had been too heated, too angry, not something to inspire sharing of confidences. With a sigh, he dragged a chair over, gesturing for her to take it, and asked more gently, “What were you scared of?”

  Anais sat in the chair and leaned forward, putting her elbows on her knees—the way he often sat when angry or stressed—and then systemically turned her head and scanned every inch of the room, still not answering him.

  Something inside him didn’t want to accept that she’d been scared. The word rankled.

  He understood fear now, really understood it. He hadn’t then; nothing in his life had ever been so bad that he couldn’t face it before his first tour. But Anais had grown up differently than he had. She’d come from a poor urban area, she’d worked hard to get scholarships and the best grades she could, but her life before university—and anytime she’d gone home on holidays—was anything but safe and comforting. She’d been acquainted with real fear long before he had. And the idea that he’d left her alone with that fear curdled his stomach.

  “Anais?” He said her name softly as he dropped into a crouch before her, eye-to-eye with her where she leaned in his favorite position. She bolted back, ramrod straight, wariness darkening her unnaturally brown eyes.

  “Can we take out the contacts for good now? The cat is out of the bag, Princess. Brown contacts aren’t going to hide you anymore.”

  Reflexively, she rubbed the base of her throat, then twisted her hands in her lap. “I guess they weren’t as effective as I’d hoped.”

  “Didn’t work on me.” He smiled, tired but willing to let go of his anger to get through to her.

  It worked. She reached up and plucked the contacts from her eyes, and when she focused on him again those blue-green eyes warmed him like a hand reaching out from the past to pull him back to her. As if the past seven years had never happened. But then he remembered it had. And he remembered why he’d crouched before her.

  “Thank you.” He tried again, “What scared you? Please tell me.”

  “Something happened that I didn’t want anyone to know about. It would’ve ruined…everything.” She gestured helplessly, and looked back toward the kitchen. “I need to throw these away.”

  When she looked back at him, she squinted over his shoulder and leaned forward slightly, staring across the room. “I think it’s under the sofa.”

  A secret. She’d tried to share a secret with him, to ask for his help, and he’d not listened to her? The idea was so unthinkable that when her digression came he was thankful to turn his attention to the sofa.

  He’d thrown it. The memory swam back through the rum-soaked haze that had separated him from it, and he rose to go fetch the documents.

  A moment later he had the envelope. Anais joined him, sitting a seat away on the other side of the sofa, and leaning toward him just enough to see the documents he withdrew. There was a note inside stating that the documents would be filed as soon as he signed, and several places flagged throughout where he’d need to put his name.

  “Damn,” she muttered and then scrubbed both hands over her face. “Is there an expiration time on those kinds of documents? If you sign now can they still be filed or do we have to have solicitors redraft the whole business and start over?”

  Start over.

  He had no idea what the answer to her question was, but he knew the answer he wanted. Start over. With her. They weren’t divorced. They weren’t the same people. Things could be different this time…

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “WHAT HAPPENED IN your past that you didn’t want people to find out about?”

  “Quinn, focus on the papers.”

  “I am.”

  “No, you’re focusing on things that only mattered when we had a marriage to save. And you said you didn’t want to get married again.” She went to finally toss the contacts, but he’d swear it was to shut down the conversation.

  And that was too bad. He wasn’t ready; he’d waited years so she could give him more than a few minutes. “I don’t. I married you. Yeah, you left, and we both thought we were divorced…”

  “We are divorced.”

  “Until I put my name on these documents, we’re still married.” Quinn dropped them onto the coffee table and turned to face her, ignoring the hitch in his chest that came from her words. “Marrying you wasn’t the wrong decision. Maybe I failed at being a husband in every regard, but marrying you wasn’t wrong. You feel it too, or you and I would not have ended up on the floor together within seconds of being alone in a room. You still want me.”

  “Chemistry. As I said. And you said that was a goodbye or did you forget that too?”

  “We have chemistry and a legally binding marriage. Unless you want to take it to court and let them decide.” He couldn’t focus on the goodbye bit. He’d said it at the time mo
re from anger than because he’d thought it through.

  “What could you possibly say in court to make people believe this is a real marriage? You and I haven’t had a scrap of communication in years. You didn’t know where I worked, you didn’t know about my name change, you didn’t even know I was back in the country.” She flung her hands up, as if those sad facts won the argument and he was too simple to see it.

  So quiet he could barely hear himself over his own pounding heart, Quinn answered, “I’d say I still love you.”

  For a second, he thought she was going to slug him. His words hung there in the air as those blue-green eyes narrowed and her nostrils flared.

  Definitely going to do something to him.

  Quinn waited, holding her gaze…

  “Well, that’s just perfect!” she finally shouted, throwing her arms toward the ceiling, her voice rising with every word. “You still love me. Great. That’s great. Because it worked out so well last time. Not that I believe you. You’ve tarted your way across at least four continents on your leave over the last few years. Because it gets around, you know. News. Playboy Prince back at it, once unsaddled from his horrible bride. Of course, I’m sure you were thinking of me the whole time!”

  “I’m not making excuses for seven years of perceived bachelorhood. You don’t need to explain how you’ve spent that time either—and, for both our sakes, I beg you not to. It doesn’t matter now.” He said the words quietly enough that she had to stop her tirade to hear him. “You should know better than to believe everything you read in the gossip rags.”

  “So those pictures were just faked? No cover models?”

  Words he’d said just to upset her on that first day had apparently hit their target. He gritted his teeth. Stay on track. What good could come from making her believe the worst of him when it wasn’t true? “There’s never been anyone else. Not in any way that counted. Not in any way that couldn’t happen in public.”

  Her head fell back, eyes swiveled to the ceiling as she breathed out. It only lasted long enough to name it: relief. Long enough for her too, by the tension rocketing through her.