A Royal Marriage

Just recently Damon had found Prince Roland Thorton in a most compromising position with his sister, Lillian. Roland had given him some story about his own sister, an illegitimate daughter of Victor the Grand Duke of Thortonburg, having been kidnapped. Roland had come to Roxbury to investigate, to see if the Thortons’ arch enemies, the Montagues, were behind the kidnapping.

Even through his fury about Roland’s behavior with Lillian, and even through the insult of being seen as a suspect, Damon had sensed the truth in Roland’s story.

What kind of coincidence was it that Rachel’s sister, a young woman from Thortonburg, had gone missing in the very same time frame? This small group of islands in the North Atlantic were known the world over for their lack of violent crime.

Of course, the Thortons’ dilemma was top secret, and so Damon felt he couldn’t come right out and ask Rachel the questions he wanted to ask her.

“Did you know that man back there?” she asked him quietly. “The one in the police station waiting room? I thought you were a lawyer at first.”

A harder question than she knew. Damon did not know the man, but he had recognized his pain. If something good had come out of the terrible tragedy of his wife’s death, it was this: he had become a man of compassion. He recognized pain in others, and could not walk away from it.

It made him ashamed that once he had been so full of himself that he didn’t even recognize when others were hurting, let alone would have taken any steps to stop it.

“No,” he said, “I didn’t know him.”

“He seemed very lost,” she ventured.

“His son had been arrested. He didn’t know what to do. He was a simple man. A coal miner.”

“Oh, dear.”

He didn’t tell her that he had used his cell phone right there in the police station, and that his own lawyer was on his way from Roxbury to help the man. He just said, “I think it’s going to be all right.”

She smiled at him, and he liked her smile, and felt he wanted to make her do it often.

There it was again. That urge to help people in pain. Maybe because he was so helpless in the face of his own.

And yet Damon knew he must help, if it was within his power. He’d learned that life was too short to spend it engaged in ridiculous feuds. The whole world looked at, and up to the Thortons and the Montagues. Maybe they could use the prestige they had been born to, to do something really noble. Maybe they could become models of how to make the world a better place. Maybe they could actually earn some of that adoration and awe that was heaped on them at every turn.

Love one another.

He shook his head slightly, smiled wryly at himself.

A little more than a year ago he had been a man whose life was full—he managed the family’s business interests, golfed, played polo and squash, swam. He attended elaborate dinners and balls and galas with his beautiful wife, went on glorious jaunts on their yacht to places in the sun.

What in that was about making the world a better place?

An old monk, Brother Raymond, whom Damon had begun to visit regularly since his wife and son’s deaths kept telling him to look for the miracle. Kept claiming eventually there would be good coming out of this tragedy. Told him, so emphatically, with such enviable faith, that nothing, nothing, in God’s world ever happened by accident.

Damon had not believed it.

And yet tonight, sitting with this quiet woman he did not know, he felt it for the first time. Not quite a premonition. More like a glimmer. Yes, a glimmer of his becoming a man bigger and deeper than the man he was before. And even more oddly, a glimmer that the future held promise. And hope. And that somehow both would be connected to this beautiful and shy stranger who sat with such quiet composure beside him as his car pierced the night.

Chapter Two (#ulink_4fb5bbc1-edf4-5811-8beb-f53b59bdb8cd)

“This reminds me of the cottage in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” the prince commented as he pulled into her driveway, and his headlights glanced off the white stucco, paned windows and heavy wooden door of her tiny home.

More fairy tales, she thought, and then smiled. “You are about to meet the head dwarf,” she murmured.

Rachel loved the little house she had found to rent, at such a reasonable price, just hours after arriving in Thortonburg. At one time it must have been a gardener’s cottage. It was in a wonderful neighborhood of regal old mansions, large yards and towering trees. Prince Damon was right. It did look like the cozy little cottage Snow White found refuge in.

It surprised her that a man who looked so pragmatic, so in charge, so all male, would make such a whimsical reference. Surprised her, and pleased her. Carly’s father, Bryan, probably would have thought Snow White was laundry detergent. Or worse, an illegal drug.

She reached for her car door handle, and then blushed when he stayed her with a hand on her sleeve, got out, came around and opened the door for her.

The gesture should have made her feel like a queen, but it didn’t. It made her feel as if she was out of her league entirely.

She went up the curving, cobblestone walk in front of him, and fumbled in her purse for her key. With gentle firmness he removed the key from her grasp and inserted it in the door. Again, the old world courtesy was not something she was accustomed to.

She remembered when she had dated Bryan, he hadn’t even come to the door for her. He’d sit out on his polished motor bike revving the engine and honking until she came out.

Which, of course, should have told her something.

“I’ll take the car key off now, if you want,” he said. “That way I can have someone return your car to you right away.”

“That’s really not necessary. I’ll go back for it tomorrow.”

“No, you won’t. I persuaded you to leave it there, and I’ll have it returned to you.”

“Thank you then. It’s the red Volkswagen Bug just across the street from where you were parked.”

“I’ll look after it.”

She thought, wistfully, that a person could really get used to this. Being looked after. Having life unfold at the snap of fingers.

Prince Damon gave the door a slight push, and the sound of Carly’s robust laughter burst out the open door. The sound never failed to make happiness curl around Rachel. She was determined that, despite the bad start of being born illegitimate, of being abandoned by her father, her child was going to have a better upbringing than her own had been. Full of laughter, and warmth, and love.

Not the kind of childhood Rachel had, that made her so ripe for someone like Bryan. Looking for something she had never had, and yet had believed with her whole heart and soul must exist. Rachel had made the age-old error of mistaking the impostor passion for love.

Did she believe in romance anymore? Did she long for the love that seemed so genuine that others seemed to find but not her? She no longer knew.

Once burned, after all.

Besides, who had the time? The emotional energy? Carly deserved more than that. She deserved not to have daddy candidates trotted in and out of her life. The two of them could take on the world all by themselves.

She beckoned the prince into her tiny entryway, but he did not follow immediately, instead looked beyond her with something like wariness.

“You have a child?” he asked.

She thought he must have known. To her, it had sounded like Crenshaw’s crude remark about her waistline had gone out over a loudspeaker.

A number of times since Carly was born, this had happened to her. A man showed unmistakable interest, until he found out she had a baby. It had made her pretty much lose interest in men, in dating. In some part of herself she realized she had decided, secretly and quietly, that she would never marry if it seemed it might take away from what she could give to Carly.

Of course, her own taste in men, if Bryan was any example, had thrown a scare into Rachel, too.

“A baby girl. She’s twenty months old.”

She reminded herself that Prince Damon of Roxbury’s interest in her was quite different, anyway. Rescuing a damsel in distress, he had called it. She would be foolish to read any more into his interest than that. Theirs were worlds apart.