by Dani Collins
He pivoted back to face her across the pool, utterly, completely, gloriously naked. A shadow of hair accented the intriguing contours that sectioned his chest and abdomen, streaking out to dark nipples and arrowing down his eight-pack abs to—
He dived into the water, shallow and knife sharp, barely making a ripple.
She pushed her face into the stack of towels she held, no longer breathing as she tried to suppress her shock and abject mortification. She fought to push back a rising blush of hot embarrassment and something she didn’t even recognize.
Because she had not only seen their special guest, the prince of Verina, in a private moment. She’d seen the crown jewels.
And of course she was standing on the far side of the pool where the spare caddy of clean towels was tucked beneath an overhang, next to the bar that operated in the summer months.
To escape, she would have to circle the deck, walk over the little bridge that separated the main pool from the portion that jutted out from the cliff and move past the robe he’d thrown over the rail near the glass doors into the building.
There was a small splash of water breaking as he surfaced near her feet.
“Good morning.” His voice was surprised and carried the gravel of early morning.
Oh God. She made herself lift her face and briefly—very briefly—glanced his way.
Okay. Only his head and shoulders were visible. That ought to have made breathing possible, but dear Lord, he was good-looking. His cheekbones were carved marble above his sleek beard. Was he deliberately using the short, dark stubble to accentuate how beautiful his mouth was? Because it framed lips that managed to be both well defined and masculine, swirling wicked thoughts into her mind just looking at them. His hair was slicked back, his eyes laser blue and lazily curious.
“En français?” he tried.
“What? I mean, pardon? I mean, no. I speak English. Good morning,” she managed very belatedly and clumsily.
At least he didn’t know who she was. She had put on her one decent dress last night, planning to form part of the greeting party with Maude and her stepsisters. A last-minute mix-up with a delivery had had her changing into jeans and boots to drive two hours each way so she could fetch high-grade coffee beans and other groceries that Maude had ordered specifically for the prince’s menu.
“I’m restocking towels.” Not staring or tongue-tied or anything. She hurried to shove the stack into the caddy, snatching one back. “I’ll leave this one with your robe. Our...um...European hour is actually...um...ten o’clock. At night.”
“Euro...? Oh.” The corner of his mouth dug in on one side. “Am I supposed to wear a swimsuit?”
“Most of our guests do.” All of them. “Aside from the few who prefer to sauna au naturel. At night,” she repeated.
“The sun hasn’t come up. Technically, it’s still night.” He lifted a dark winged brow at the gleam of bright steel along the seam where pearly peaks met charcoal sky.
“Point taken.” She drummed her fingers against her thigh, debated a moment, then decided to tease him right back. “But technically the pool isn’t open yet. You’re breaking our rules either way.”
“What’s the penalty? Because I don’t expect anyone here packed a bikini top. Only a few will bother with bottoms. We don’t wear them at the health spas at home. I expect that’s where your ‘European hour’ label came from.”
Pressed against the wall of the pool, he looked exactly like every other guest who might fold his arms against the edge and gaze at the view or strike up a friendly conversation with passing staff.
Except she knew he was naked, and his banter was flipping her heart and fanning the nervous excitement in her stomach. She hugged the single towel to her middle, trying to still those butterflies.
“At least I understand why Maude didn’t want children running around this week. Apparently, we’re hosting a nudist convention.”
He smiled, the light in his eyes so warm she curled her toes in her sandals, unable to stem the shy smile that pulled at her own lips.
“You Americans are so adorably prudish.”
Oh no, he didn’t. She narrowed her eyes. “And you French are so—oh, I’m sorry. Are you not French?” She batted her lashes as his good humor blanked to affront.
Since Maude’s announcement that he was coming here, she’d taken the time to learn that Verina was a small kingdom in the Alps between Switzerland, Germany and France. Verinians spoke all of those countries’ languages and, having overcome an uprising twenty years ago that had had their neighbors sniffing and circling, trying to extend their borders to encompass Verina for the next fifteen years, were fiercely patriotic to the flag they still flew.
“I find people from North America to have very conservative views about sex and nudity,” he clarified.
She nodded her forgiveness of his faux pas and explained, “We’re not that prudish in Canada. We keep our clothes on because we’re cold.” She pointed at the lazy drift of tiny flakes hitting the steam off the pool and dissolving. Strangely, she wasn’t feeling the chill nearly as much as she usually would, standing out here in the predawn frost. Heat radiated from her middle. Her joints were melting and growing loose.
“You must be in this pool often, though. You’ve never swum naked in it?”
“Never.” She couldn’t recall when she had last had a chance to swim at all. She vacuumed and scoured and restocked and never enjoyed the luxury she provided to everyone else.
If I can just get Maude and the girls out of here was her mantra. If she could take control of the books and balance them, quit financing trips and clothing for women who brought no value to the spa, only drama, she could relax instead of burning out.
“It’s very freeing. You should try it.”
“I’m sure it is.” He had no idea of the constraints she was under, though.
“No time like the present.”
As she met his gaze with a rueful smile, certain he was mocking her for her modesty, something in his gaze made her heart judder to a stop in her chest then kick into a different rhythm.
He was looking at her with consideration, as though he’d suddenly noticed something about her that had snagged one hundred percent of his attention. As though he was serious about wanting her to strip naked and jump in the pool with him.
More insistent tugs and pulls accosted her midsection. A flush of sensual heat streaked up from her tense stomach, warming her chest and throat and cheeks. Her breasts grew heavy and tight.
She never reacted to men—not like this, all receptive and intrigued. Her last date had been in high school and ended with a wet kiss that hadn’t affected her nearly as strongly as this man’s steady gaze. The dating pool in Lonely Lake was very small unless she wanted to get together with guests, and she didn’t do that because they didn’t stick around.
That’s what this is, she realized, clunking back from a brief, floaty fantasy of a prince taking an interest in a nobody like her. This wasn’t real flirty banter. He wasn’t genuinely interested in her. He was only inviting her to join him in the way male guests occasionally did because she was here, not because he found her particularly attractive. How could he? She looked especially hellish this morning. She was frazzled and exhausted, no makeup, clothes rumpled as though she’d slept in them. Joke was on him. She hadn’t slept.
Maybe this wasn’t even happening. Maybe she would wake after being dragged from the igloo room and defrosted from a hypothermia-induced delirium.
“I’m sure you’ll have plenty of company soon enough,” she said in a strangled voice. She nodded upward at the windows lighting behind curtains as guests began to stir. “I’ll check the saunas. They’re banked at night, but I’ll make sure they’re up to temperature for you.”
As the owner, Sopi could have asked that he wear a towel around the resort, but she didn’t want to
introduce herself. She was too embarrassed at thinking, even for a second, that he might genuinely be interested in her.
Besides, if he climbed out to shake her hand, buck naked, she would die.
* * *
Rhys watched her walk away with a surprising clench of dismay, even though he knew better than to flirt with the help.
He hadn’t even realized anyone had been on the pool deck until he’d surfaced after swimming the length underwater. But there she was, face buried in a stack of towels like an ostrich, her dark hair gathered into a fraying knot, her uniform mostly shapeless except where it clung lovingly to a really nice ass.
Arrogant as he innately was, he didn’t expect servants to turn their face to the wall as his father had once told him his great-grandmother had demanded of palace staff.
This young woman had obviously recognized him. Nearly every woman of any age reacted to him—which he made a habit of ignoring. His reputation as a playboy was greatly exaggerated. Affairs complicated an already complex life. When he did entangle himself, he stuck with a long-term arrangement with a sophisticated partner, one who had a busy life herself. He kept ties loose until the woman in question began to suggest marriage would improve their relationship, invariably claiming it would “give us more time together” or “draw us closer”—two assumptions he knew would prove false.
Sometimes they brought up a desire for children, and he had had good reasons for putting that off, too. Until recently.
But until very recently, Rhys hadn’t believed he’d have to marry at all. Staying single had been his greatest luxury and one of the few genuine freedoms available to him. Occasionally, he had thought a wife might be the best way to stave off the fortune hunters who constantly stalked him, but marriage and family were yet more responsibilities on top of an already heavy mantle. He had thought to indefinitely postpone both.
Besides, he didn’t deserve the sort of happily-ever-after his brother was striving for.
A shrieking giggle from a balcony above had him glancing up to see a pair of women in negligees exhibiting all the excitement of children spotting a monkey at the zoo. Their bare legs and cleavage flashed as they posed against the rail and waved.
And so it starts, he thought tiredly.
He looked for the young woman who had seemed so charmingly real, planning to ask her to lock out the masses for another thirty minutes.
He couldn’t see her, and his irritation ratcheted up several notches. It had little to do with the looming interruption of his peaceful swim. She was gone, and he was uncomfortable with how annoyed that made him. He hadn’t even asked her name.
She worked here, he reminded himself. He would see her again, but the knowledge did nothing to ease his impatience.
He shouldn’t want to see her again. He wouldn’t be able to approach her when he did. A guest coming on to an employee was a hard limit. There was an entire hotel brimming with beautiful, available, appropriate women if he wanted to get laid.
His nether regions weren’t twitching for the silk-draped knockouts hurrying to throw on robes and rush down here, though. He was recollecting a face clean of makeup and eyes like melted chocolate framed in thick lashes. She’d had a tiny beauty spot below one corner of her mouth and what had looked like a man’s wedding band on a thin chain in the hollow of her throat. Whose? A father, he imagined. She was too young to be a widow.
She could be married, though. She was very pretty, neither voluptuous nor catwalk slender, but pert with small, firm breasts, narrow shoulders and that valentine of a derriere. He had wondered how tall she would be if he stood beside her. He might get a crick in his neck when he leaned down to taste her pillowy lips—
No.
With a muttered curse, he caught his breath and dived to the bottom of the pool, using the pressure and exertion to work out his animal urges.
It didn’t work. She stayed on his mind all day.
* * *
Sopi remained emotionally wired until she heard the prince had left the building. She watched the helicopter veer across the valley, climb above the tree line and wheel to the far side of a peak.
Deflated and depleted, she slipped away to her cabin for a nap. Of the half dozen tiny A-frame guest cottages, this one was farthest from the main building. At some point, probably when the stove conked out, it had become a storage unit for spare mattresses and mini refrigerators. Sopi kept one plugged in for her own use, and the heat still worked, so it was quite livable.
The tiny loft above the storage area was hardly on a par with the rest of the accommodation at Cassiopeia’s, though. Even the employees had proper flats in the staff lodge tucked into the trees. That building was boxy and utilitarian, but they each had their own bedroom, bathroom and kitchenette. It was well tended and cozy.
Until her father had died very suddenly when she was fifteen, Sopi had lived in the manager’s suite across from the kitchen. Somehow that had been given to the manager Maude had hired to run the spa that first year. Maude had taken over the suite when she came back to run things herself, except her version of managing was to delegate everything to Sopi.
Sopi had meanwhile bounced through guest and staff units as they became available. Eventually, she had wound up on the fringe of the property while Maude’s daughters had appropriated the top suite when they returned to complain about having to live here instead of gadding about Europe.
Sopi didn’t love tramping through the snow in the dark, but she did love having her own space. She had managed to warm it up with a few cherished items of her mother’s—a blue velvet reading chair and a faded silk area rug. Her bed, purchased from the buy-and-sell ads, was a child’s bunk bed with a desk beneath. Cartoon princesses adorned it, but they inspired her to dream, so she hadn’t painted over them.
A long time ago, a guest had started the silly rumor that the owner of this hotel was descended from royalty. He had thought Sopi’s mother had been the daughter of an ousted king or something.
Sopi’s mother had already been gone by that point. Her father had only chuckled and shaken his head. It was a nice legend that might bring curiosity seekers to the spa, he’d said, but nothing more.
Sopi sighed and climbed into her bed without eating. The stacked milk crates that formed her pantry were empty. She hadn’t had time to buy a box of cereal or replenish the instant soup she kept on hand to make with the kettle that was her most reliable friend.
Her head hit the pillow, and she plunged into a sleep so deep she wouldn’t have heard a bomb go off.
Yet when the distant rat-a-tat of helicopter blades began to sound in the distance, her eyes snapped open.
Dang. She’d been dreaming something sexy about hot pool waters sliding silkily across her skin while a pair of blue eyes—
Ugh. She was so pathetic.
And wide-awake now that a mixture of self-contempt and guilt had hold of her. She glanced at her phone. It was full of text messages from staff. Some made her laugh. They all got on really well, but it was work, too. She had a quick shower, dressed and hurried back.
After putting out three proverbial fires, she was in the mani-pedi salon listening to a nail technician complain about an order of decals shaped like high-heeled shoes.
“They were supposed to be more bedazzled, but instead they’re this plain black, and when you put clear polish on them, they curl up and fall off.”
Sopi frowned and took the polish and decals to a bench at the back of the salon. All the mani-pedi chairs were full of buzzing women hoping to meet the prince later.
From the time she was twelve, Sopi had apprenticed in all the treatments under a multitude of formally trained staff. She didn’t have any certificates on the wall, but she could pinch-hit with nearly any service from foiled streaks to Swedish massage. If there’d been a chair free, she would have pitched in to help with the roster of guests begging for polish, but
she had too much to do elsewhere anyway.
At least she’d taken the time last week to give her own toenails a fresh, if unremarkable, coat of pale pink polish. She stuck the decals of high-heeled shoes on each of her big toes and shellacked them in place with clear polish. She bedazzled one with a couple of glinting sequins to see if that would help hold it in place and make it look prettier.
She was curled over, blowing on her toes, distantly listening to a pair of women speculate on what time the prince would appear for dinner and whether he would invite anyone to join his table, when she picked up a call that had her frowning and hurrying barefoot down the hall to the massage therapy rooms.
Karl, their beefy Norwegian masseur, wasn’t on the schedule this week, but Sopi spotted him about to enter a closed door.
“Karl!” she whispered. They strongly discouraged any conversation above a whisper in the spa area to ensure the guests enjoyed a relaxing stay. “It’s your wife.” She offered her phone.
Face blanking with panicked excitement, Karl took the phone and spoke rapidly in Norwegian.
“I have to go,” he said, ending the call and trying to pocket Sopi’s phone. “The midwife is on her way. It’s time.”
“Finally! Hurry home, then.” Sopi couldn’t help grinning as she stole back her phone. “I hope everything goes well.”
“Thank you.” He started away, turned back, clearly in a flummoxed state of mind. “My phone is still in there. He’s on the table!”
“Karl.” Sopi took his arm and spoke calmly and firmly. “Don’t worry about your client. I’ll cover your massage. Get your phone and go home to your wife.”
He nodded, knocked gently and led Sopi into the room.
“Sir, I’m very sorry,” he said as he entered. “My wife has gone into labor, but I’m leaving you in good hands. Literally. Ah, there it is.” Karl retrieved his phone from the small shelf above the essential oils. He turned to Sopi. “And she did text me, but I missed it because I silence it out of habit when I’m consulting with a client. The prince felt a twist in his lower back while skiing. He wants to be sure it doesn’t turn into anything serious.”