Prince's Babies: A Royal Baby Romance Boxed Set

by Ella Brooke

  “Van?”

  Then, Vanessa looked, and she would have sworn she was hallucinating. James stood there, like no time had passed, tall and proud as the tree itself. It was as though she had gone back in time to find herself meeting him here, only a little bit late.

  “Who’s that, Mommy?” Jonah asked, tugging on her sleeve.

  She had been quiet too long, and things were progressing without her input. James looked down at Jonah and raised one prominent brow.

  “Who’s this?” he asked.

  Vanessa looked between them, faltering for an answer, and said, “You’re a little late, Jamie.”

  Chapter Two

  James

  James could feel his cheeks and ears burning at the name “Jamie.” No one had called him that in years. When he’d gotten into town, he had never imagined he might run into Vanessa again, but of course, he had placed himself under their tree. Maybe he had been hoping she would find him there.

  He cleared his throat. “I am James Agosti,” he said with a slight bow to the small boy. “It is good to meet you.”

  The boy looked to his mother for permission. Her lips drew into a thin line, and she placed a hand on his shoulder.

  “This is my son, Jonah.” Her voice came from a tightly wound coil inside of her. My son.

  Their son, perhaps? They had used protection… most of the time. Maybe not enough of the time, it seemed.

  “Good evening, then, Jonah. I was a friend of your mother’s a few years ago.”

  “You aren’t friends now?” the boy asked.

  “I’d like to think so.” James assessed the stern expression on Vanessa’s face. It was so terribly out of place. When he’d known her, she had been barely twenty, full of spirit and nervousness and smiles.

  Truthfully, when he’d had to leave, he’d thought she might do better without his baggage weighing her down.

  “Do you like spaghetti?” Jonah asked.

  James blinked. “Er, yes. I do like pasta.”

  “What’s paast-a? We’re having spaghetti tonight.”

  “That’s his accent, Jonah. Some people say vowel sounds a bit differently,” Vanessa explained.

  “Do you want to come eat paast-a with us? Mommy is an amazing cook. She went to school for it and everything and owns a bakery so she makes the best cookies in the world!”

  “I would love to.” James checked Vanessa’s expression. “But I think we have to ask your mom first.”

  Oh, that only made her more cross. “I’m sure James has somewhere very important to be.”

  “On the contrary. There is no place I would rather be.”

  James could see the muscle in Vanessa’s jaw twitching.

  “Come along, then.” She turned with Jonah and continued on the path the two of them had been on before James had interrupted.

  When James had met Vanessa, she was living in the cramped, one-bedroom apartment she had shared with her mother. Now she was living in a cramped, one-bedroom apartment with her son. How depressing.

  It was, however, fairly well organized, when you got past the piles of clutter. In one corner, a small flat screen hung on the wall in front of a loveseat. In another, stood a desk covered in papers and a closed, battered old laptop. There were toys rounded up into an open basket against the wall. This was a work hard/play hard apartment. One that Vanessa had put effort into. James couldn’t look down on it. It was how Vanessa had been raised, that lack of space. It felt claustrophobic to him, but he’d spent enough time traveling, both in his home country and the world at large, to not judge how people chose to live.

  “Nice place,” James said, closing the door and locking it behind him.

  Vanessa set her bag down by the desk and came back to the door. Apparently, she had been about to lock it herself.

  “I remembered.” James put his hands on his hips as he surveyed the rest of the apartment. There were plenty of cookbooks lined up alongside a smattering of other volumes in wooden crates she had probably salvaged, and then sanded down and stained herself. “I can’t imagine how long it took to get all of this set up.”

  “Roughly five years.” Vanessa shrugged and headed into a narrow kitchen. “I traded down my apartment after you left and moved in with a friend and her boyfriend. They eventually moved to Seattle, and they let me keep the place, and some of their things. The TV was theirs.”

  “That’s nice of them.”

  “They didn’t want to move it. Going across the country is a challenge.” Vanessa pulled out a pot. “Jonah, make sure your toys are put up in the hallway, okay? I don’t want James tripping on anything.”

  Jonah swayed back and forth for a moment, then drifted toward the hall as instructed.

  “You have a good handle on him,” James said quietly when he approached her in the kitchen.

  “I’m a single mom. I have to. There’s no one else around to discipline him.” Vanessa put the water on the stove and took out some ground beef, which ended up in a separate pan. “He’s a pretty good kid, overall. He mostly listens. Makes it easy on me.”

  “I’m glad.” James leaned against the opening of the kitchen, where a door had clearly been taken off its hinges. “You’re looking well. So, you’re the best baker in the whole world, hm?”

  “Apparently. I co-own a bakery with my friend Anisa— it’s called Vanisa’s Sweet Spot— and we do pretty well. It’s hard to turn a profit in the first few years of a venture, but we bought out our bosses who had a diner there. Built in customer base, since most of their clientele came for breakfast and to buy bread à la carte.”

  James watched her hands moving fluidly and confidently. Chopping vegetables, stirring hamburger, dropping pasta into the pot. She was a flurry of multi-tasking. Her thick, black hair was pinned behind her head, probably a leftover from work. It was chopped shorter than he remembered, coming just to her shoulders, and pieces of it had escaped to curve around her face. She was even more beautiful than he remembered. The slinky, uncertain girl who had always come to his door with a question in her eye and an itch needing to be scratched was no match for this woman. Even wearing a pair of high-waisted pants and a navy-blue sweater with a bit of flour still clinging to her sleeve.

  It was really quite adorable. Lord, how he’d missed her. Those gorgeous cheekbones, her carnelian brown eyes with thick lashes, and of course, every tender curve. He wanted to wrap his arms around her from behind and distract her from her cooking, slipping one hand up that sweater and the other down the high waist…

  “I cleaned it!” Jonah yelled.

  “Inside voice, sweetie-face,” Vanessa said. She wiped her hands on a towel hanging from a dowel rod over the sink and turned to him. “Do you wanna pick out which movie you want to watch?”

  “Yes!”

  Jonah hopped over to the tall stack of DVDs on the little cabinet under the flat screen.

  “Is there anything I can do to help?” James asked. “Cut up some bread? Prepare some salads?”

  “I don’t have any bowls clean.” Vanessa pointed behind her. “If you could reach into the dishwasher and pick out three? And three plates? And some silverware… I haven’t had time to wash the dishes in um, a while.”

  James smirked.

  “What, is doing dishes below you?”

  He shook his head and inched around her until he was able to reach the dishwasher. If only his brother could see him now. Doing the washing up in a tiny Brooklyn apartment. At home they’d never touched a dish in their lives, let alone made their own meals. He was grateful for the time he’d spent abroad, expanding his skills in self-sufficiency.

  As he set himself to scrubbing and rinsing a few bowls and plates, his eyes kept drifting over to Vanessa as she browned the meat and stirred the sauce. The third time he looked up, he caught her doing the same, and they both turned quickly back to their tasks.

  James smiled.

  A moment later, Vanessa shooed him aside so she could drain the pasta, and he was inched out of
the kitchen while she set about plating everything up. He waited in the living room area until she needed a set of extra hands to carry the food. They had to settle in a clear spot on the floor, picnic style, since she had no kitchen table.

  “Yum!” Jonah declared, grabbing his fork.

  “Hold on!” Vanessa knelt by him and tucked a paper napkin into his collar to protect his shirt.

  “I might need one of those,” James said.

  Vanessa fought a smile and tossed him a napkin.

  “I think you’re right, Jonah. Your mom is definitely the best cook in the world.” James winked at him and twirled some spaghetti onto his fork. “And I’ve been to plenty of places in the world. I’d know.”

  “Like where?”

  “Well, Italy, for starters. It’s right next to my home.”

  “Where do you live? New Jersey?”

  James laughed. “Oh, no. I’ve never lived in Jersey. Just in Southern Europe.”

  “It’s a little country just northeast of Italy,” Vanessa explained. “That’s the one shaped like a boot, remember?”

  “Oh, yeah!”

  James glanced at her, but Vanessa was no longer looking. When they’d dated, he’d hardly explained half of his background. Had she figured it out by now? Had she decided after his family had made him impossible to contact for months, that it was best just to forget him?

  “My country is called Rusteria,” James said.

  “Rooost—” Jonah sounded out, “air-ee-aaa.”

  “That’s it.” James smiled. Without thinking, he reached over to wipe a bit of sauce from the boy’s mouth, but Vanessa, on Jonah’s other side, shot him a look and did it herself.

  Apart from a few tense moments here or there, the dinner (despite being held on the floor) was rather pleasant. Afterward, James insisted on taking care of the plates while Vanessa got Jonah cleaned up and bathed for the night. He took it upon himself to finish washing the dishes by hand and clean the counters with the discount spray bottle by the sink.

  When Vanessa returned, with Jonah in a pair of Spiderman pajamas, she looked surprised at how clean the kitchen was.

  “It’s only fair. You did make me dinner,” he said.

  “Can we watch the movie now?” Jonah pleaded.

  “Oh, right. Yeah, we have to get started so he can get to bed on time.” Vanessa seemed to hesitate. “Do you want to stay?”

  “Why not? What’s up tonight?”

  “Coco,” Vanessa said, almost apologetically.

  “That’s fine. I’ve never even heard of it.”

  “We’ve watched it maybe 700 times.”

  “You said I could pick!” Jonah protested.

  “I did, baby.” Vanessa leaned over and kissed his hair. “Now get on the couch.”

  James accepted a cushion and leaned back against the loveseat, while Vanessa and Jonah lounged above him.

  “Isn’t this movie a bit scary for him?” James asked once.

  Both mother and child shushed him.

  Halfway through the movie, Vanessa poked his shoulder. She held a finger up to her lips and pointed to the boy fast asleep on her lap before gesturing for him to get up next to them. James took the offered seat and sat next to her.

  “He likes this, hm?” James said quietly.

  “I don’t know what it is. Kids like to see the same things. It’s comforting, having a kind of structure in his life. Also, I think he loves the little neon-glow spirit guides.”

  James nodded, waiting just a bit longer to lean in closer to her.

  After Vanessa had put Jonah into bed, she returned to the loveseat where James was waiting.

  “I guess you have nothing going on right now. If you can waste your time hanging out with us here,” she said, casually resting her head on her arm behind her.

  “On the contrary. My bodyguard has been texting me nonstop for hours.” James chuckled. “I don’t think Lorenzo will let me forget it for a while.”

  Vanessa frowned. “Wait, is this the same Lorenzo?”

  “Yes, the very same.”

  “I guess he’s been in your life longer than anyone.”

  “Well, no. He only works with me when I’m abroad.”

  “Ah.” Vanessa paused, her lips twisting bitterly. “Well, we can’t have the prince of Rusteria putting himself at risk.”

  “You know.” James leaned back into the cushions.

  “I’m smarter than I seem. Also, you made the tabloids a few years ago with some Italian socialite.”

  “I’m sorry you had to see that.”

  “Jamie, that is most definitely not the thing I want to hear an apology for.”

  Vanessa moved to leave the loveseat, but James caught her hand.

  “Please.”

  “Please, what? We dated for months. You told me that you loved me. I thought what we had was real, but it wasn’t.” Vanessa stared at their hands, furrowing her brow and shaking her head slightly. “I didn’t even know who you were.”

  “You knew me,” James chided.

  “I knew your name. Your favorite foods, and preferred brands, and what gets you off. Superficial things. That you’re second in line to the throne of some small European country…” Vanessa slipped her hand out of his. “For most people, that’s the kind of thing you share around the fifth or sixth sleepover. I can imagine some might use that as an icebreaker, but you never told me.”

  “And there aren’t things you haven’t told me?”

  Vanessa’s cheeks reddened. “If there are, it’s because I couldn’t contact you after you disappeared off the face of the Earth.”

  James crossed his arms and watched her profile. Something had hardened in her. And he’d been the one to take that vulnerability and turn it into a shield.

  “I think you should go, Jamie,” she said. “It’s been good seeing you, but I expect that at some point, you have to head back overseas.”

  “I do, but not immediately.”

  James leaned over and cupped her chin. Vanessa almost looked angry. But there was an undercurrent to her irritation that still seemed like hope, and she didn’t pull away. Emboldened, James pressed a soft kiss to her lips and stroked her hair with one hand. She shuddered under his touch, and, eyes closed, leaned into the kiss. She smelled like faded lavender perfume and vanilla frosting.

  His hand touched her leg, and she stood up quickly. James held his hands up and rose from the loveseat himself.

  “I’ve missed you, Vanessa. Truly, and deeply, I have. Please understand that much, and I can explain the rest to you.”

  She crossed her arms over herself. “I’m not sure there’s anything you could say.”

  “Maybe not. But it’s getting late. For you, anyway, if you open that shop of yours.”

  “I do.” She ran her eyes over him curiously. “So, you should…”

  “I should.” James took her hand once more, then lifted it to his lips. “Sleep well, Van.”

  She stood there in icy silence as he let himself out.

  Chapter Three

  Vanessa

  Vanessa took a long swig of her coffee and looked over at the clock. Wiping her face with the back of her hand, she tried to focus on the pile of doughnuts in front of her instead of that night with James two days ago. She had been doing a good job of keeping him from her thoughts, but every so often, he seemed to just pop up, as though their time together, five years ago, had made him an indelible part of her. She just couldn’t seem to get rid of him.

  “Taste that,” Vanessa said, when she heard someone come into the back room. She pushed a bowl of the chocolate, pistachio, and raspberry mixture she’d created to the edge of the counter and continued piping the vanilla bourbon cream into each fluffy doughnut in her pile.

  Anisa came up to the counter and dipped a small spoon into the bowl. “Hm. Well, it’s chocolate, and that’s always good for me. Which order is this for?”

  “Gary Smith’s ‘birthday’ order. They wanted a doughnut tower. I�
�m going to use the chocolate mixture to create a strong cone base for all the doughnuts to stick to.”

  “God, I want to eat every one of those.” Anisa looked over the different piles of doughnuts.

  “Back, vile woman. I’ve been piping for forty minutes. If my count is off when they come to pick this up, I’m going to be deeply, deeply angry.”

  “You don’t have to Mom Voice me. I’m just checking on you. Also, there’s a guy here who wants to talk to you. Not order, just talk. I told him you were busy filling special orders, but he said he’d wait, and he’s been sitting in the café area for an hour drinking coffee.”

  Vanessa hesitated, then continued piping. It could be someone else, but she had a feeling that it was James out there, sipping coffee after coffee. He’d always been persistent. These days, she understood that he probably had very little experience of being told no. He’d seemed to understand her feelings the other night, but… she hadn’t actually said “no.” It had seemed to end with a “not now”, partially because she had known Jonah would be woken up by the two of them fighting. James was here now, though. To “talk.” Couldn’t he just leave his new number like a normal person?

  “Give him my card and tell him I’ll be finished in another hour or two, and if he doesn’t want to wait, he can call,” Vanessa answered finally.

  Anisa shrugged and headed back out to the front of the shop. Just as Vanessa was getting into her groove again, Anisa popped her head back in.

  “He said he’d wait.”

  “Ugh. Great. Fine then. He’ll wait.”

  Vanessa set herself to finishing up the piping, which included the rest of the vanilla bourbon and yuzu curd cream, and then went to put the chocolate mixture into the cone-shaped form. She had the glazes ready to go for when she began to assemble. The chocolate base could set while she did something else.

  After checking herself in the mirror to be sure she didn’t have chocolate or any other ingredients smeared on her face (she did, and she wiped them off), and taking off her apron, Vanessa headed out into the front of the shop.