A Princess for Christmas

by Jenny Holiday

  “Is that your mother?” he asked quietly, pointing toward a large painting of a woman with Marie’s dark hair.

  “Yes, but it doesn’t really look like her. She was . . .” She stopped and contemplated the painting. “Happier than that.”

  It was true that the woman in the painting didn’t look like a devotee of Beverly Hills, 90210.

  Marie, however—and in contrast to earlier in the evening—did seem happy. She pushed open the huge, oaken front door, took a big breath in, and skipped down the stairs. It was like the outside air suddenly brought her to life. He followed suit—with the deep breath, not the skipping. The air was clean and bracing. It smelled like pine. “So you can just stroll out of the palace by yourself? What happened to that bodyguard guy?”

  “Torkel’s gone home for Christmas. We have other security staff, but to answer your question, yes, I can just stroll out of the palace by myself. It’s not like New York where they feel they have to babysit me. The entire hill is fenced in—the gate we went through is the only way in or out by car. When we get to the village at the bottom, there’s another gate, a smaller one for pedestrians. It’s manned, but I’ve told them to let you and your sister pass freely.”

  “And what about the village itself?” he asked.

  “Everyone knows me,” she said, as if that was an answer that had anything to do with how safe she was there. But hey, if she wasn’t going to sweat it, he certainly wasn’t.

  As they crossed the snowy grounds, Marie tilted her head back. Leo followed her gaze and had to swallow a gasp. He didn’t think he’d ever seen this many stars. He’d headed off the audible gasp, but his astonishment must still have been apparent, because she said, softly, “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. It sounds stupid to say that you don’t see stars like this in New York City, because of course you don’t. But . . . you don’t see stars like this in New York City.” Or anywhere he’d ever been—no boat ride with Dani’s dad out on Long Island Sound, no Boy Scouts camping trip.

  “You know that rhyme, ‘Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight’?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “My mother used to say that all the time—we used to spend a lot of time outside.”

  “What did you wish for?”

  She didn’t answer, just started walking. He followed. She pulled out a flashlight and aimed it at the road—they were walking down the same road they’d driven up.

  “When I was younger, I used to wish for a sibling.”

  “I used to wish for a sibling, too, when I was younger—Gabby’s fourteen years younger than I am.” He’d forgotten about that. But some of his earliest Christmas-stocking wishes had been for a little brother or sister—though by the time Gabby finally arrived, his teenage self had moved on to Islanders-related wishes. “She was a bit of a surprise to my parents, I think.” He was happy when they’d announced their news, and even happier now to have Gab. Life could be a lonely business, and having someone who shared your experiences and your blood made it a little less so. He suspected that growing up royal, despite its perks, was a lonelier road than average. The cage was gilded, but it was still a cage.

  It occurred to him suddenly that despite the huge economic and social gulf between them, he had more freedom than Marie did. Or at least a different kind of freedom.

  “My parents had trouble conceiving, then never managed to get pregnant again after me,” Marie said. “Once I got old enough to understand that, I’d wish for frivolous stuff. A crush to like me back. A good grade on a test.” She paused. “Now I wish my mother was here.”

  Her voice was so small. Leo wanted to grab Marie’s hand but checked the impulse, saying instead, “What was she like?” A fan of 90210, but he wanted to know more.

  He could hear the smile in her voice when she answered. “She was a force of nature.” Marie paused, trying, he sensed, to put words to complicated emotions. “She was like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She was fun and charming and always bursting with plans for some grand adventure. She’d throw an impromptu dance party and invite everyone from the village, or she’d take me to L.A. for the weekend and we’d go on star tours in disguise. She loved L.A., because of the American TV obsession.”

  “They say we live in the golden age of TV,” Leo said. He didn’t watch any himself—no time—beyond Thursday-night K-drama.

  “Oh, but it wasn’t good TV that she liked. No HBO for her. No, she was into the old, cheesy 1990s stuff of her youth. Programs you couldn’t get on satellite or via streaming. She was always ordering DVDs. So that combined with the L.A. trips meant my vision of America was all these beautiful people with puffy, shiny hair hanging around by pools and having affairs with each other.”

  Leo laughed. It was so incongruous to imagine a European queen watching that stuff.

  “Movies, too, though she preferred the serial format of TV.” Marie was gathering speed, clearly happy to be talking about her mother. “But when my father would start getting cranky or stressed by work, she’d declare it family movie night. He would grumble, but he knew better than to refuse family movie night. We always watched in a small private parlor in their suite—you would call it a den, I think. She would order up a feast of all our favorite food, make everyone put on their pajamas, and we’d watch whatever silly movie she’d selected. My father always started off annoyed, and he’d sit at the far end of the couch. But by the end of the movie, they’d be all cuddled up. He was like a horse she had to break every few months. She’d get him back into a good mood. It was like she was . . .”

  Marie’s mother sounded lovely. Like a woman who cared for her family in little ways. Not that different from Leo’s mom, really, except that she’d mostly done it with pasta. The princess had trailed off on her last thought, left off the final adjective she’d been going to use to describe her mother. He wanted, suddenly, to know what she’d been going to say. “It was like she was what?” he prompted softly.

  “Magic. It was like she was magic.” She waved a mittened hand in front of her face like she was erasing a chalkboard. “That sounds silly. She wasn’t magic. She just knew how to handle my father. No one else could—no one else can.”

  “He loved her enough that he let himself be handled, maybe,” Leo ventured.

  “I think that’s right,” Marie said quietly. “Of course she also took after Audrey Hepburn in that she was lithe and graceful and beautiful and refined.” She snorted. It seemed like a snort that was tinged with self-disgust.

  “What?” Leo asked, genuinely confused.

  “Nothing. It’s just that life as a female royal is a lot easier if you’re beautiful. My life would be so much simpler if I took after her in that regard.”

  “Hang on, now.” He supposed what she meant was she didn’t look like Audrey Hepburn—and she didn’t. But Audrey Hepburn, or at least the Breakfast at Tiffany’s version of her that he knew from watching the movie with Gabby, was not the be-all and end-all of female beauty.

  “Oh, I’m not fishing for compliments. I know I’m not beautiful, and for the most part, I genuinely don’t care. I don’t have a long, graceful neck—fine. It’s not a character flaw. But it’s absolutely true that if you look the part, people treat you a certain way.”

  She didn’t have a long, graceful neck? Huh? A long neck would look stupid on her. It didn’t fit her proportions. “But you’re—”

  “Remember when I was hiding in that bathroom on that yacht?” Marie didn’t wait for him to answer—she was on a roll. “I overheard Lucrecia and her friends talking about what a shame it was that I didn’t take after my mother in terms of looks and grace. It’s not enough for them to comment on what a professional disaster that party was? I have to be ugly, too?”

  “Hey. None of that.” That was objectively wrong.

  She didn’t seem to hear him. It was like she was talking to herself, now, rather than to him. “And it’s almost like they see a causal relationship
between the two things, you know? The Philip Gregory disaster order has nothing to do with what I look like, or at least I’d like to think it doesn’t, but you’d never know it to hear them talk.”

  There were angry embers inside Leo, and her words were stoking them. “My point is, when you’re a princess, beautiful is the baseline. If you’re beautiful, people can look past that and judge the rest of your merits. If you’re not, well, good luck.”

  He stopped walking. It took her a few steps to realize she’d gotten ahead of him. She shined the flashlight between them at chest height, its ambient light enough to allow him to see her face.

  “Are you done?”

  “Am I done what?”

  “Comparing yourself to Audrey Fucking Hepburn?” Leo didn’t bother tempering the annoyance in his tone.

  Marie’s eyebrows shot up.

  “Look. I know I’m only here for a week, but I swear to God, if I hear you call yourself ugly again, I’m not going to be responsible for my actions. In addition to being possibly the prettiest human I have ever laid eyes on in the flesh, you’re smart, so don’t tell yourself things that objectively aren’t true.”

  Her mouth fell open. Then she closed it. Then opened it again. He’d flustered her. Good. Maybe it would be enough to knock some sense into her. “Okay, point taken. I’m not ugly. On my best days I achieve cute. It’s . . . It’s hard to explain.”

  She was cute, with her rosebud mouth and those goddamn dimples, but apparently that was a bad thing? He would never understand this world of hers. “It’s hard to explain because you’re not making sense.”

  She huffed a frustrated little sigh. “There’s a certain quality that the most popular female royals possess. Think of Princess Diana. Grace Kelly. Meghan Markle. There’s a grace there that’s hard to define except I can say I don’t have it. Part of it is height. I’m five two.” She chuckled. “But it’s more than that. It’s more just . . . ease. I’m awkward. I’m always worried about what I’m going to say next.” She laughed again, but it had turned bitter. “And you should see me try to dance.” She cut off the laugh with a small snort. “Which you will, if you come to the Cocoa Ball.”

  “I’m not going to the ball,” he said reflexively. But he sort of understood what she was saying about ease and awkwardness. His first impression of Marie had been that she was snooty and formal. But he’d come to realize that it was a cover, a way of keeping people at bay. He did it, too, but with different qualities. Her snootiness functioned the same way his grumpiness did.

  But it wasn’t a crime to feel awkward in social situations. And he wasn’t about to start agreeing with her because she’d muddled up all kinds of traits in her mind into some paragon she thought she had to aspire to.

  So instead he baited her. “Dancing is not hard. Anyone can dance.” He started walking again as he spoke, and she fell into step beside him. “Even me.”

  She took the bait. “Really? I don’t know. I’m not picturing it. You all dressed up in a suit, cutting a rug? I bet you can’t keep the steps straight any better than I can.”

  “Steps?” He laughed, suddenly seeing what the problem was, at least as it related to dancing. “Nah. You’re overthinking.” Before he could do the same, he grabbed the flashlight from her, turned it off, and stuck it into his pocket. He took her hand, spun around, and pulled her into his arms. Into a classic slow dance stance. “No need for steps. Just sway.”

  He started moving, willing her to move with him.

  She did. It felt like a small miracle.

  All that was audible was the crunching of the snow under their feet. His breath, heated from the fire stoked inside him by both her ridiculous take on royal beauty and the nearness of so much royal beauty, came harder than usual, made visible puffs of steam in the chilled air. She shivered, and he pulled her closer. “See? Easy as pie.”

  “This isn’t the kind of dancing we do at the Cocoa Ball.” She was a head and a half shorter than he was, and she was nestled so close to his chest that her voice came out muffled.

  “No?” His came out all raspy. He would like to think it was due to the cold, but he feared not.

  He felt her shake her head no against his chest. They kept swaying in the dark, and even though it was cold and they were swathed in layers of clothing, his body was lit up. Those angry embers inside him had diffused, sending heat to every inch of him. “Well, you must be dancing with the wrong people then.”

  That must have been the wrong thing to say, because she pulled away instantly.

  “I am,” she said. “I am dancing with the wrong people.” She sounded sad. Resigned.

  He didn’t know what to do other than follow her down the hill. He thought about making a speech about how not-ugly she was, just to make sure she’d gotten that through her head, but the moment had passed.

  Marie hadn’t been to the Owl and Spruce since before her mother died, but it was the same as always. The red fabric banquettes and dark wood walls of the village pub were comforting in their sameness.

  She felt a little guilty that it had been so long since she’d seen Imogen, the proprietor and someone Marie had once considered a friend. After Marie left for university, they’d grown apart. And when she’d come back, it had been to a different life. A grieving father lashing out in anger even as he let his responsibilities—and the economy—slide. She had tried to take over as much as he would allow her. The new workload meant a lot of Marie’s old connections—at least the ones that didn’t directly benefit the crown—had been left to founder.

  Imogen greeted her with genuine warmness, though, and somehow managed to clear out a snug for them. Imogen’s father had been Irish, and he’d built the pub in the traditional style, including with a row of snugs—private booths with doors.

  “Do you have time to join us for a drink?” Marie asked after she’d introduced Leo and they’d placed their orders.

  Imogen smiled her cat-that-ate-the-canary smile—she always looked like she was up to something. “I most certainly do. I’ll be back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

  Some of that awkwardness Marie had been referencing earlier settled on them once she and Leo were alone. The snug was big, and the large wooden table between them suddenly seemed an impossible gulf to bridge. She was tempted to make another speech about how she couldn’t get caught up in anything with him as she had so awkwardly done when they’d kissed in New York. Even if Max managed to buy them some time, she was eventually going to have to get married. And even if Max managed to get himself entirely off the hook when it came to marrying her, whoever else her father might have in mind to take his place would be . . . not Mr. Leonardo Ricci of the Bronx. But as she’d learned last time, any speech she might be tempted to give on this topic was irrelevant. As Leo had told her himself, there was “no universe” in which he wanted to marry her.

  Of course there wasn’t. Her face still burned thinking about the rebuke. She’d only meant that she couldn’t get involved with him in any capacity. She couldn’t kiss him in the snow. She couldn’t do anything that would put her in danger of losing her heart to him. But of course it had come out all wrong.

  And then, completely disregarding her own advice, she’d let herself dance with him. If you could even characterize that hugging-with-minimal-moving as dancing. That would never be tolerated at a palace event, both because it wasn’t dancing to begin with, and because it was too intimate. Eldovians didn’t flaunt their emotions the way Americans did.

  “These are cool.”

  Marie forced her attention back to the present, the present where she was having a friendly, platonic drink with Leo and not dwelling on their private forest dance. He was looking at some of Kai Keller’s snow globes. Each of the snugs had an inset, glass-walled cabinet that displayed a selection of them.

  “There’s a carpenter in the village who’s really talented. He mostly does residential work, but he started making snow globes a few years ago, as a lark. Imogen—she’s the owne
r here—has been trying to convince him for years to start selling them.”

  “He should. The workmanship is amazing.”

  “Who should what?” Imogen slipped into the booth bearing a tray of drinks and sat next to Leo.

  “Kai should sell his snow globes.”

  “Don’t I know it.” She shook her head. “Stubborn, stubborn man.” She passed out drinks. “I took the liberty of bringing a few flights of our beer. We brew it here.” Imogen gave a quick rundown of the four different varieties served in small glasses on a little board.

  “I was surprised to hear you’d started brewing,” Marie said as she sipped the seasonal offering, which was, of course, a cocoa porter.

  “Yes, well, as my dad always says, ‘Change or die.’”

  Marie was about to ask a follow-up question—it seemed like there was a story there—but before she could get it out, Imogen turned to Leo and said, “So. Leo. How do you know our princess?”

  “I was in New York last week, and he was my driver.” Marie, trying to rescue Leo from a signature Imogen O’Connor interrogation, realized that her explanation was going to fall short. People didn’t bring their drivers thousands of miles home with them for Christmas. “We struck up a friendship,” she added, which, of course, didn’t go terribly far toward clarifying things. People didn’t bring their new friends thousands of miles home with them for Christmas, either.

  “My little sister developed a massive crush on her,” Leo said. “She’s a little bit princess obsessed, so meeting a real one blew her mind. And we’re on our own, so . . . Her Royal Highness was nice enough to invite us to the Christmas extravaganza here.”

  Leo’s use of her proper title sounded . . . wrong. Like he was speaking the wrong language.

  “Was she now?” She looked at Marie. Then back at Leo. Then at Marie again.

  Marie sighed. She should have known better than to invite Imogen to join them. She’d forgotten how astute her old friend was. Probably all her years behind the bar—she’d tended it since she was a teenager, back when her father was still in charge—had sensitized her to unarticulated emotions. She had an abundance of what the Americans called emotional intelligence.