Marie had thought having sex with Leo Ricci was going to be fun. It turned out that not having sex with Leo Ricci was also remarkably delightful.
“Will you pass the butter, please?” He nodded at the dish that was sitting between them. Though it was slightly closer to Marie than to him, it was well within his reach.
He did something with his face as she passed it. It was a smirk, but that wasn’t, on its own, a sufficient descriptor. It was a smoldering smirk, though such a combination should have been impossible.
“Thank you,” he rasped, as he let his fingers slide down her inner wrist before closing them around the crystal dish.
She started to worry that everyone could see the pulse in her throat. She felt like she’d swallowed a bomb. There was a ticking bomb lodged in her throat, pulsating shamelessly, a billboard advertising her desire.
Miraculously, no one seemed to notice. Well, no one besides Leo. He kept dropping his gaze to that exact spot. Which created a bit of a spiral in that his attention on that spot made that spot . . . more of a spot.
She was doing it, too, though. She couldn’t stop looking at his lips. Which was silly. It wasn’t like she hadn’t seen them before. They were so . . . pillowy. Thick and lush, like a supermodel’s. Lips that vain women the world over paid good money for. Especially the bottom one. She wanted to lick it. She wanted to—
She jumped when he licked it.
Probably because the soup—a beef consommé—was thin and therefore a little dribbly.
She sighed and forced herself to tune into the conversation. It was going remarkably well, which was good given that she was utterly failing in her attempts to stay on top of it. It almost seemed like her father was trying to be civil.
“I was so surprised when she came back home to find her mother gone, too,” Gabby said. She was chattering about a book she’d found in the library, Liesl, a classic Eldovian novel from the nineteenth century about a girl who, through a series of unlikely plot twists, is forced to survive on her own in a remote part of the mountains for a summer. It was a beloved story that all Eldovians grew up on. Even her father had a soft spot for it, judging by the fact that he seemed to be giving Gabby’s observation serious consideration.
“But in retrospect, don’t you think there were hints?” he said. “The way her mother gathered so many eggs that morning, for example.”
Gabby nodded sagely. “I think you might be right.”
Well, my goodness. A détente?
Marie darted a glance at Leo. He wasn’t paying attention at all. To her father and Gabby, anyway. He was, however, paying attention to Marie.
He licked his lower lip again, did his smirky smoldering, and said, “Pass the salt, please.”
So. Many. Fucking. Courses.
Soup. Salad. Fish.
And here Leo had thought the fish was it. Was the “main” course. But after that had come a plate of prime rib.
And cheese.
Some kind of apple strudel–type thing.
And, of course, chocolate.
He’d been worried he was going to end up catatonically full. That when it came time to get it up, instead of delivering the “Do me like I’m not a princess” goods, he was going to pass out.
Luckily—kind of—it was taking a hundred years to get Gabby settled.
She was yammering a mile a minute about the Cocoa Fest preparations she’d been allowed to help with and the book she and the king had talked about over dinner. Tomorrow, she was going skiing. Marie had arranged for Mr. Benz to take her to a gentle hill for lessons.
Which Leo was pretty sure meant Marie intended for them to spend a good portion of the day in bed.
“That Mr. Benz guy is kind of funny, actually,” Gabby said.
“He is?” Leo didn’t see it.
“Yeah, he seems so stuffy, but he brought me one of those marble things like we saw at Kai’s. Oh, and there was this time when I was in the kitchen with Frau Lehman, and he came in, and . . .”
He zoned out. He tried not to. It was funny. Gabby used to talk all the time, when she was younger. But lately, at home, there were days where Gabby barely said two words to him. Days when he bent over backward to extract the merest morsels of information about her inner life.
Here, he couldn’t get her to shut up. It was like Eldovia had unleashed her repressed inner chatterbox.
Which, normally, he’d be thrilled about. Normally, he would try to settle in and try to steer the conversation toward how she was doing. To find out how much and in which areas he was falling short. But not tonight. He kept looking at his watch. Initially, anyway. But then he checked himself. It was a real dick move to ditch your sister so you could go bang a princess.
A princess you were going to bang like she wasn’t a princess.
Whatever.
Finally, though, Gabby went to sleep.
Leo detoured back to his room to take a shower. Which probably wasn’t necessary as he had showered before dinner. He just . . .
Aww, fuck. He felt so much pressure.
Which wasn’t like him. Leo wasn’t a guy who got his undies in a bunch over sex. Sex was fun. Sometimes it was great. He generally took care to make sure his partner had a good time. But he didn’t give it too much thought beyond that.
He would never admit it to Marie, because clearly to do so would be a royal mood killer of the first degree, but he was kind of worked up about doing it with her. Not because she was a princess. He didn’t think so anyway—though he’d be the first to admit that he wasn’t naturally talented at examining his emotions. But because of this whole thing where he was her last hurrah before she had to get married to some royal dickwad or other.
So, yeah, pressure.
He didn’t like it. They needed to get this over with.
And when was the last time he’d thought that about sex? He was in the upside-down. But, of course, he already knew that. That had been true since they’d driven up the hill the first time and he’d spied the palace with its maddeningly asymmetrical turrets.
Leo paused in front of Marie’s door, took a deep breath, and tried to find another emotion, something beneath his jitters. He closed his eyes and felt again her breath on his cheek as she moved over him in the woods. A shiver ripped through him as if he were back there, but he wasn’t cold. It was excitement. Of the sexual variety but also just . . . the regular kind. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d looked forward to something so much.
He rapped on her door, and she answered almost immediately, as if she’d been standing just on the other side of it.
She was wearing a white nightgown. Of course she was. He swallowed a laugh as he assessed it. It went to her ankles, though it was sleeveless. It looked like something Anne of Green Gables would wear, or Laura Ingalls.
Or, you know, the princess of a small Alpine country he’d never heard of a week ago.
“What?” she asked urgently. “What’s wrong?”
Leo forced his face into submission. “Nothing.” Even he knew it wasn’t a good idea to laugh in a situation like this. And he wasn’t really laughing at her. She was just so . . . herself. As much as he didn’t want to be, he was charmed. Really fucking charmed.
What the hell had he gotten himself into?
Marie smiled shyly and gestured him inside. The gown, which he was still examining, laced up the front like a giant shoelace, which suddenly brought to mind her other white lace-up dress, the one she’d been wearing the day they met. An expanse of bare back. Creamy skin damp with sweat and painted with goose bumps.
A coil of desire twisted inside him, sudden and sharp.
Okay, this wasn’t going to be so hard, after all.
She led him toward a seating area near a roaring fire. “We need to do some paperwork, I’m afraid.”
Huh?
She sat on the sofa and picked up a sheaf of papers that had been lying on the coffee table. “I need you to sign an NDA.”
Oh, hell, no. “What?
” Also: there went the coil of desire.
“A nondisclosure agreement.”
“I know what it is,” he said peevishly.
“It’s merely a formality. We have to do them in all sorts of situations.”
“No.” Fuck that.
“I beg your pardon?”
“We do them in all sorts of situations? Who is ‘we’?”
That seemed to trip her up. She opened her mouth and closed it again.
“Well, I’m not signing it.” Something was spiraling inside him again, but it wasn’t lust this time.
Marie looked at him for a long moment. The fire had turned the light in the room a warm orange. She was glowing. She was gorgeous.
And he was pissed. Did she know him at all?
“There’s no reason to take it personally.”
“A nondisclosure agreement starts from the principle that I’m going to sell you out in some way. How do I not take that personally?” He didn’t have a lot in this world, but he did have his pride. And he wasn’t giving it up so easily. Even for a princess. Especially for a princess.
She followed. “You’re too honorable, Leo.”
Maybe so. If “too honorable” was even a thing. Regardless, a man had to hang on to what he had, and Leo didn’t have a hell of a lot. “You want me to fuck you like you’re a normal woman. Let me give you a little tip, Princess. I don’t normally sign NDAs before I hook up.”
She blinked. For a moment he felt bad, because she looked hurt.
But he was hurt, too.
He made an effort to gentle his tone, said, “Good night, Marie,” and left.
Leo set out while it was still dark the next morning, thankful that Gabby was occupied for the day.
He had spent a largely sleepless night contemplating his life. Because that, apparently, was what he did now.
He continued to ruminate as he hiked down the hill. Had he been wrong to refuse to sign that damn NDA? What harm would it have done? He wasn’t planning on selling Marie out in any way, shape, or form. He would never do that. So why wouldn’t he sign a piece of paper saying he would never do that?
He just . . . couldn’t. After all his mental wrangling, that had been his big conclusion. He couldn’t even articulate why.
Which only served to ratify his second conclusion: he didn’t belong here. He didn’t know how to waltz. He didn’t know anything about refugee policy. He still had trouble figuring out which fork to use. Those things—and NDAs—were part of a rarified world he was only visiting. He needed to not lose sight of that.
He was a guy who could build a log cabin, though.
So, apparently, was Kai. As Leo emerged into the clearing, Kai looked over from where he was standing, hands on hips, contemplating the cabin.
More importantly, next to Kai was a pile of perfectly straight, debarked logs.
“How did you get these here?” Leo had pondered the problem. The pathway that led to the clearing wasn’t big enough for a truck. And he’d been sure he would beat Kai here this morning—it was only six a.m. Yet here was Kai and a bunch of giant logs.
“Christmas magic,” Kai muttered grumpily.
“Well, thanks, man. I appreciate it.”
Kai didn’t say anything except, “Coffee?” He nodded at a large thermos.
“God, yes.” Leo’s early-morning departure from the palace—like Cinderella fleeing the ball, except instead of a ball it was a royal booty call gone bad—had not involved coffee.
Kai, who was drinking out of an enamel mug, poured some coffee into the lid of the thermos and handed it to Leo. “I have an appointment at two this afternoon, so I have to be done by one. I thought I’d get an early start.”
“You think we can finish the structure today?” There wasn’t much time before Leo and Gabby went home. And, before everything had gone to shit last night with Marie, he’d imagined the unveiling of the cabin as a sort of Christmas present.
“Yes. I’ve already got half the logs notched. We just need to do the rest and build a tripod hoist. The actual raising of the logs will be fast.”
Soon Leo was following Kai around as he did some kind of Grizzly Adams thing to decide which trees to cut for the hoist, which would help them lever the logs up to where they needed to be. He would walk right up to a tree, tilt his head back, and stare at it silently. Then, keeping his head in that position, he would walk a slow circle around the tree to examine it from every angle.
Leo had been unapologetically leaning into his modest city-guy persona in Eldovia. His pride demanded it. When the king made a martini “stirred, not shaken, with a twist of lemon,” Leo drank his beer directly from the bottle, like he had at the Plaza. When Mr. Benz asked if he skied, Leo said, “I live in the Bronx in an apartment and don’t own a car, so what do you think?” When presented with a goddamn NDA, he refused to sign it. It was a reflex, to show these people that he wasn’t ashamed of his humble origins.
“This one,” Kai said suddenly, tapping the trunk of a . . . tree. Leo had no idea what kind it was.
“What do you look for?” He hustled over to try to see what Kai saw. Though in the palace someone would have had to pry his pride from his cold dead hands, Leo didn’t see any reason to cling to it here when there was something useful to be learned. He’d done a lot of time on construction crews, but he’d never really thought about the actual sourcing of the materials. That had always been someone else’s problem.
“Just one that’s long enough and fairly straight. So this one will work, and then we need another, similar one.” Kai paused. “If you’re looking for actual logs to use for a cabin, though, you want them to be about eighteen inches in diameter, and they need to be really straight.”
“Good to know.” It was. Not that he’d be building any log cabins back in New York. It was too bad. This was actually really interesting.
After they’d located their trees, Kai produced a chainsaw and they got to work felling them and building their hoist.
Soon, they were measuring and notching the rest of the logs. Leo was learning a lot. He’d read up on log cabin construction before approaching Kai, but there was theory and there was practice. To his surprise, Kai was tolerant of his questions, and even went so far as to start preemptively offering observations about what he was doing. As Kai had predicted, the actual raising and placing of the logs went quickly.
“Shall we call it for the day?” Kai asked when the last log was slotted into place. “We should be able to get the roof framed tomorrow if that suits.”
Leo, whose stomach was growling audibly, was glad to agree on both points. “Rafters tomorrow, and underlayment?” Kai nodded. “And then what?”
“If we were purists, we’d make bark shingles.”
“We’re not purists. We’re hurry-up-ists.”
Kai did something with his mouth that wasn’t a smile but was maybe less of a frown than his default expression. “Which is why I took the liberty of ordering shingles. If we can get the trusses done tomorrow, we should be able to do the shingles the day after. We just need to decide on pitch.” He extracted a piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to Leo. “This is a 5:12. It’ll make it easier on us—we’ll be able to walk on it.”
“This looks great.” Leo glanced at Kai. He didn’t want Kai to think that he was stomping all over his original plan. “A steeper pitch would look better, I know.” They would need special equipment for a steeper roof, though. “And the saltbox idea was a good one. It’s just that—”
“No. You’re right. It was one thing when I was doing this before. But now that it has to be done in secret, I agree that we need to cut corners to hurry it up. You and Marie can make changes later, if you want. See how it ages.”
“I won’t be here. I’m leaving in a few days.”
Kai looked at him silently for an uncomfortably long time before saying, “Right,” and turning for the trees.
They trudged along the path in silence. Leo was exhausted, but in a good way
. There was nothing like a day of physical work to get a man out of his own head, make him feel like he was doing more in the world than just taking up space.
When they reached the main road where they would part ways—Leo to go up to the palace and Kai down to the village his house lay on the far side of—Leo turned to Kai. “Thank you. I didn’t expect so much help.”
Kai shrugged, said, “Well, when we get drawn up on charges, you’re taking the fall,” and started ambling away.
Had that been . . . a joke? From Mr. Scrooge?
Chapter Fifteen
Leo hadn’t been walking more than a minute along the main road before Marie appeared in the distance. She was wearing a bright red coat, and she looked like a beacon.
No, he corrected as she came close enough for him to see that the coat featured a fur-trimmed hood and that she was also carrying a basket, she looked exactly like Little Red Riding Hood.
Did that make him the big bad wolf?
As she strode up to him, with her cold-pinkened cheeks and her bright blue eyes, he very much wanted to eat her up. She had an ease about her out here, in the woods. She looked happy and free, and it was pretty fucking irresistible.
“Good afternoon,” she said, smiling at him. “I thought I might find you here.”
He eyed her, trying to find within himself some of the anger from yesterday. Some of what she called his honor, maybe.
He couldn’t seem to locate any. All that physical labor must have wrung it out of him. He almost wanted to . . . smile at her, this woman who, just last night, had wounded his pride in a way that had felt mortal. He pressed his lips together.
“I’m done working for the day.” She lifted her basket. “I brought lunch.”
He smiled.
Dammit.
She glanced down the road behind him. “I thought we could eat lunch in the clearing.”
“What’s Gabby doing?” he asked. “Still on the ski trip?”
She looked at her watch. “They’re probably done skiing by now.” She smiled a cat-that-ate-the-canary smile. “But I asked Mr. Benz to take her horseback riding after lunch.”
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