A Princess for Christmas

by Jenny Holiday

  “Imagine the love triangles that could ensue!” Dani said.

  Gabby and Dani high-fived. The two of them were romantics, though Dani, whose horrific divorce-in-progress had inspired her to swear off love, would never admit it.

  “Leo’s going to hate that!” Gabby said gleefully.

  Whatever had made Leo add that weird, extra thank-you to Dani squeezed on his chest again, making it hard to take a full, deep breath. He lived for Thursday nights—for this. For unstructured time with his sister and their neighbor. Leo could make good money if he’d wanted to drive Thursday nights. And Gabby and Dani didn’t need him for their soap operas. But these nights had come to mean everything to him. On Thursday nights, they kicked back, joked, and ate ice cream. On Thursday nights, he stopped worrying—temporarily.

  He even liked the shows they watched, though he pretended not to because it amused the other two. Their current was called I Am Not a Robot. It was ridiculous. But he was sucked right in to the tale of the boy who was allergic to skin contact and the girl who was pretending to be a robot, or . . . something. He needed to start paying attention to this episode, or he was going to get left behind.

  “Tell me again about the princess!” Dani commanded when the episode was over, and that was all it took to set Gabby off. She gestured wildly as she retold the tale of their afternoon adventure.

  Leo’s chest was still doing that squeezing thing. This was not how he had ever foreseen his life turning out. For so long after his parents died, he had been focused on what he had lost—his parents, college, his carefree youth. His existence had become about stanching the bleeding the accident had caused in their lives. About surviving and making sure Gabby not only survived, but thrived. Dani had been part of that first aid kit, initially. She still was. But now she was a true friend, too. A best friend, though they didn’t talk about their relationship in those terms. They didn’t talk about their relationship at all, which Leo frankly appreciated.

  The point was, as hard as the past two years had been, he and Gabby were lucky. They had each other. They had Dani.

  They had their ridiculous Korean soap operas and objectionably elaborate ice cream.

  He remained uncharacteristically sentimental as the evening wound down. It wasn’t until after he’d tucked Gabby in that Leo remembered they’d forgotten to stop for her . . . supplies.

  Dammit. Just when he was feeling like he had things moderately under control.

  “Kiddo,” he whispered. He’d been sitting on a chair next to her bed. On nights he wasn’t driving, she liked him to sit with her while she fell asleep. Though she was probably too old for that, he indulged her. She’d had nightmares after the accident, and this was such an easy thing to give her. It didn’t cost anything. And it was good for him to sit there after she fell asleep and listen to her steady, strong breathing, surrounded by her girlish clutter. It reminded him what was important.

  She wasn’t quite asleep yet tonight, which was the only reason he’d spoken to her.

  “Hmm?” She sighed. She was so sleepy.

  “We forgot to stop for maxi pads.” He congratulated himself on getting the words out without his voice doing something weird.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered. “I wadded up some Kleenexes. I’ll be okay until the morning.”

  Jesus Christ on a cracker. She wadded up some Kleenexes? Why hadn’t she reminded him?

  Probably because despite her casual delivery of the news, it had taken a lot for her to tell him in the first place. And then, with the ball in his court, he’d done nothing.

  He debated getting up and asking Dani to come over while he ran to a bodega. Or maybe Dani herself had some supplies she could donate to the cause. But Gabby was almost asleep. So he stroked her hair and said, “Okay,” even as he beat himself up for forgetting something so important. He would get up before she did tomorrow and get some from Dani or from the store.

  Hours later, Leo was nodding off over one of his mom’s old mystery novels—like her, he preferred his fiction with a side of murder rather than the romance Gabby favored—when his phone buzzed.

  Well, eff him. It was Her Majesty, the cake topper. Hello. This is Marie. You collected me earlier and drove me to the marina?

  As if he could forget. As if he picked up princesses every day and delivered them to yachts. Also, collected? He typed a reply. Everything okay, Your Royalness?

  She sent an eye-rolling emoji. Apparently even though her vocabulary was that of an octogenarian, she knew emojis. It was quickly followed by a question. Did you mean it when you offered to pick me up?

  Well, shit. He’d meant it at the time, when he was face-to-face with her fear. Or face-to-face with her unnaturally soft, goose-bumpy back. Or maybe both.

  Did he mean it at eleven thirty after a strangely emotional day he just wanted to be over?

  He sighed. He wasn’t the kind of guy who made false promises.

  Leo: Sure. It will take me a while to get there, though.

  Marie: That’s fine. I’m still on the boat, but we’re headed back to shore.

  Leo: Enjoy your champagne. It will probably take me forty minutes, maybe a little longer.

  Marie: No champagne for me. I was working, and now I’m hiding in the bathroom.

  Hiding in the bathroom? Huh? Another text arrived before he could think what to say in response. Thank you, Mr. Ricci. You are a good man. I will meet you where you dropped me off.

  Luckily, Dani would still be up and would come over and sit with Gabby. Dani was an English professor who, as far as Leo could tell, worked pretty much all the time including into the wee hours of the morning. So he heaved himself out of bed, got dressed, and went across the hall to knock on her door.

  He had a princess to rescue.

  Again.

  Marie was hiding in the bushes.

  Hiding. In. The. Bushes. The way Americans sometimes wrote sentences with a period after each word in order to convey the gravity of a situation used to seem excessive to her. She was beginning to understand.

  She tried to tell herself that hiding in the bushes was better than hiding in the bathroom. In the bushes, you could cry without anyone seeing.

  She’d cried in the bathroom on the boat, after Philip Gregory informed her, in no uncertain terms, that Gregory Inc., the largest independent watch retailer in North America, would not be reconsidering its decision to drop the Morneau brand from its inventory. And that, moreover, if she and her people didn’t leave him alone, he was going to have to pursue legal action. He’d had too much to drink, even though the boat had just departed, and he’d started ranting about restraining orders. She had watched enough American legal shows with her mother to know that she had done nothing to warrant a restraining order—a restraining order, for heaven’s sake—but his vitriol had stung nevertheless.

  And of course Lucrecia had heard everything. Witnessed Marie’s humiliation.

  And said some choice things to her friends while freshening her makeup in the same bathroom Marie was hiding in. She’d known Marie was in there—Lucrecia didn’t miss anything.

  It’s a pity her mother is dead. She was a lot more at ease at these sorts of things.

  That one barely stung. It was true, after all.

  But then they’d moved on to how no one would have her except poor Maximillian, who had to have her.

  Can you imagine? Someone like him marrying someone like her?

  You’re forgetting that she’ll be queen one day, Lu.

  Of that ridiculous little country. Honestly. At least Max looks the part.

  Marie was stuck in her stall, feet pulled up so they wouldn’t recognize her pink pumps. She’d selected them to match the pink ribbons in her dress, but on the ground here in America they seemed girlish and unsophisticated. Like the kind of shoes someone who was pretending to be a princess would wear.

  At least here in the bushes, she didn’t have to listen to any of that. There was only the ambient noise of the city, soo
thing in its anonymity.

  And the sound of a car pulling up, an engine being cut, a door slamming.

  Was it her knight in a yellow taxi?

  She rose from her hiding place—and he was right there. A foot from her.

  “What’s wrong?” he said urgently.

  “Nothing. I was merely . . . hiding.” She tried to laugh. It didn’t work.

  “You’ve been crying.”

  “No, no.” But why lie? This man didn’t know her. And she had already, bizarrely, told him about the sad king. “Yes.”

  He didn’t press her, just led her to the cab, opened the back door, and gestured for her to climb in.

  “May I . . . sit up front with you?” She didn’t want to be a passenger, or at least not the anonymous, sit-in-the-back kind. She wanted to sit next to him and notice things about him, like how he wasn’t wearing a ring and how deftly he navigated the city streets that were, to her, an endless maze of urbanization. That was part of why she had called him instead of Torkel.

  She wanted him to spirit her to the hotel, to make her white lie to Mr. Benz—He’s driving me back to the hotel after the boat docks—be true. Mr. Benz had no doubt assumed she meant Philip Gregory, but she hadn’t technically lied.

  Because he was here. Mr. Leonardo Ricci was here.

  He shrugged, slammed the back door, and moved to open the front one.

  She slid in as gracefully as she, not her mother’s daughter in this regard—Lucrecia had been right about that—could, given the volume of her dress. It took some wrestling with the thing for her to get settled in.

  He pulled away from the curb. “Where to?”

  “The Plaza.” She braced for more of his disdain but none came.

  He simply said, “Rough night?”

  “You could say that.”

  He nodded, seeming to accept her vague answer as evidence that she didn’t want to talk about it.

  This was also why she had called him. She had known, somehow, that he would be silent. Let her be silent. He would not pepper her with questions or crush her with his unarticulated disappointment. No, that would come later.

  He was wearing a red-and-gray flannel shirt, and the sleeves were rolled up to his elbows. Even though the car was an automatic, he rested his right hand on the shifter. He had a very nice forearm. It was muscular and lightly dusted with hair the same rich dark-brown shade as on his head. And it was very . . . veiny. Which was an odd thing to find appealing, but she did.

  Soon she began recognizing landmarks that suggested they were almost back at the hotel. “Would you mind stopping so I can get something to eat? I . . . wasn’t able to eat at the party.” On account of all the crying in the bathroom. “There’s a sandwich shop that’s open all night on the next block. The concierge recommended their pastrami on rye, and I have never tried pastrami on rye.”

  “Can’t stop there,” Leo said gruffly.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t do Fifth and Fifty-Eighth.”

  “You don’t do Fifth and Fifty-Eighth?” She laughed incredulously. What a curious man.

  “I can drop you off a block up, and you can walk back down.”

  He was in earnest. “Isn’t that rather hard in your line of work? To boycott a major intersection?”

  Leo’s face remained utterly unchanged as he said, “My parents died in a car accident on that intersection two Christmases ago.”

  He might as well have slapped her. Tears—they were still so close to the surface after the evening she’d had—gathered in her throat. She opened her mouth, and closed it.

  But why not just tell him? She had told him a great deal already today, including that her mother had died, just not when or how. “My mother died three Christmases ago. On December twenty-second. Breast cancer.”

  That got his attention. He looked at her sharply. “That’s why your father’s sad.”

  She nodded. “Though it doesn’t look like sadness from the outside. I’m not sure why I called it that before.”

  “What does it look like?”

  “Anger.” Paralysis.

  He nodded like her answer made sense to him. “Is he going to be angry at you about what happened tonight?”

  “Probably. Or disappointed, which is actually worse.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  She started to say no, she didn’t want to talk about it. But to her shock, that wasn’t exactly true. So she found herself telling him about the meeting gone bad. About how much Eldovia needed the Gregory account.

  He listened and asked nonsnarky questions. “So this Philip Gregory guy owns a big watch store chain?”

  “He owns twenty shops nationwide, which perhaps doesn’t sound big, but the luxury watch industry isn’t like others. It’s so expensive to produce these watches that we rely on orders from retailers to fund production runs.”

  “So you download the risk onto the little guy.”

  His grin showed he was jesting, but he wasn’t wrong. “You could say that, except Philip Gregory is not a little guy. When we had his account, it was seventeen percent of our GDP. We’ll lose a thousand jobs without it. And that’s out of a population of two hundred and twelve thousand.”

  Leo whistled.

  “Indeed. He didn’t want to meet to discuss his decision, so I was supposed to . . . ambush him, if you will. He was not pleased about it. Not only did I not get to talk to him, he made a bit of a scene.”

  “How did you know he’d even be at the party?”

  “There’s a Euros-in-New-York crowd. Everyone knows one another. He’s not European, but he’s Euro-adjacent, and the hostess of the party—that would be the Lucrecia the boat was named after—is a major society figure within the New York scene.”

  “Lucrecia. That’s not a name you hear much on this side of the pond.”

  “Lucrecia von Bachenheim. Her father is a cousin to the Austrian archduke. Also, she’s a total bitch.”

  Marie almost laughed with glee. A day ago, she would never have uttered those words in front of another human being. She wouldn’t even have allowed herself to think them. But there was something about being with Mr. Leonardo Ricci in a taxi in the middle of the night that inspired boldness.

  “Lucrecia von Bachenheim?” he echoed. “Does she have one hundred and one Dalmatians?”

  “Excuse me?” That must be a pop culture reference she wasn’t getting.

  He shook his head. “So this Gregory guy snubbed you, Lucrecia von Bachenheim is a bitch, and you were stuck on a boat where everyone was being horrible to you.”

  She laughed. “Yes, that about sums it up.”

  Marie didn’t feel so bad about it all anymore, though. Talking to Leo, an outsider who wasn’t tied up in either her mission or what was or wasn’t proper for her to be doing or saying, had been therapeutic.

  When the hotel was in sight, he slowed down. “This pizza place is good. Let me get you a slice.”

  “Let me get you a slice. It’s the least I can do.”

  He pulled over and parked the car—the street was relatively empty this time of night. New York City had given her the impression that it was always wall-to-wall with people and vehicles, but that wasn’t the case right now.

  “Actually . . .” He was leaning over the center console and peering out her window, staring rather intently at something called “CVS.” It seemed to be some sort of pharmacy, albeit an absurdly large one. He was close enough that she could smell him. He smelled like . . . oranges. She always associated oranges with America. The California trips of her youth.

  He pulled back abruptly. She missed the oranges, suddenly and sharply.

  “Can you do me a huge favor?” he asked.

  “Yes.” She was startled by the immediacy of her answer. Normally, she didn’t trust easily. She did her duty but hesitated over giving more than that.

  An even more startling realization?

  She would do pretty much anything Mr. Leonardo Ricci asked her
to.

  And so Leo found himself perusing the feminine hygiene aisle in a Midtown CVS at one in the morning with the princess of Eldovia.

  “Gabby got her first period this week,” he said as they slowed to a stop in front of a bewildering display of products. “She needs, uh, supplies. I should really take some home for her. I tried to google earlier to figure out what to buy, but there was so much . . . choice.”

  Marie’s dimples came out, and they were just so fucking cute.

  She scanned the shelf. “There are so many different products, it can be confusing even for those of us who’ve been doing this awhile.” The skin between her eyebrows wrinkled and she started walking, seeming to dismiss the area immediately in front of him. “I’m going to say she probably doesn’t want tampons yet.”

  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Could everyone just stop saying tampons in front of him?

  “I think the best thing to do is to purchase an assortment of pads and liners, and she can see what she likes. There is a lot of choice.” She pulled a box off the shelf and turned it over. “More than at home. And I don’t know all these brands—we have some different ones in Europe.” She was concentrating like he’d asked her to diffuse a bomb. He couldn’t help but appreciate the seriousness with which she was approaching her assignment, even as it amused him.

  After a minute or two of silent perusal, Marie picked a few items off the shelf, some in boxes and some in plastic bags sort of shaped like boxes. “This should be good to start.”

  She led him to the checkout, plunked her booty on the counter, and when he got out his wallet, said, “Let me buy them.”

  “You don’t have any money,” he reminded her.

  She expelled a little breath of frustration. The dimples came back out, but they were fake dimples this time. Not the same ones she’d flashed at him earlier. He didn’t know how he knew the difference—he just did.

  “Good evening,” Marie said to the clerk. “I don’t suppose if I told you that I am a member of the Eldovian royal family and am staying a block up—at the Plaza—and pledged to return tomorrow to pay for these items that you would extend me credit this evening?”