The Prince's Cinderella Bride

No one but Max—though he didn’t really disturb her. He came to the library at night to work, too. An internationally respected scholar and expert on all things Montedoran, he’d written a book about the special, centuries-long relationship between Montedoro and her “big sister,” France. He’d also penned any number of articles on various points of Montedoran law and history. And he traveled several times a year to speak at colleges, events and consortia around the world.

Before New Year’s, when he would join her in the library, they would sit in companionable silence as she wrote and he checked his sources or typed notes for an upcoming paper or speech. He’d always shown respect for her writing time, and she appreciated his thoughtfulness.

Sometimes, alone together in the quiet, they would put their work aside and talk. And not only in the library. Often when they met in the gardens or at some event or other, they might talk for hours. They had the same interests—writing and history and anything to do with Montedoro.

They’d shared a special kind of friendship.

Until New Year’s. Until she finally had to admit that she’d done it again: gotten in too deep with the wrong guy when she needed to be concentrating on the goals she’d set for herself, the goals that she never quite seemed to reach, no matter how hard she worked.

Right now, she should get up and leave—and she would, if only she hadn’t foolishly agreed that they could go back to the way they were before.

Right. As if that was even possible.

But still. She’d said she would try. And the hopeless romantic idiot within her wanted at the very least to remain friendly with him, to be his friend, which she had been before New Year’s, in spite of her denials the other day.

So she stayed in her seat, laptop open in front of her.

A full ten minutes passed before he reappeared on the stairs—ten minutes during which she did nothing but stare at the cursor on her screen and listen for the sound of his footsteps above and call herself five thousand kinds of stupid. When he finally did come down, he was carrying a stack of folders and books.

She waited for him to engage her in some way, her teeth hurting she was clenching them so hard. But he only took a chair across and down from her, gave her another perfectly easy, friendly nod and bent his gorgeous head over the old books and papers.

Well, okay. Apparently, he was just there to work.

Which was great. Fabulous. She put her hands on her keyboard and her focus on the screen.

Nothing happened. Her mind was a sloppy soup, a hot mess of annoyance, frustration and forbidden longing. She yearned to jump up and get out of there.

But something—her pride or her promise to him yesterday, maybe—kept her sitting there, staring blankly at her own words, which right then might have been hieroglyphics for all the sense they made to her.

Eventually, she managed to type a sentence. And then another. The writing felt stiff and unnatural. But sometimes you had to write through a distraction. Even a really big distraction, like a certain six-foot-plus hunk of regal manliness sitting across and down from you.

For two full hours, she sat there. So did he, tapping away on a tablet computer, poring over the materials he’d brought down from upstairs. She sat there and she wrote. It was all just garbage she’d end up deleting, but so what? They were being as they used to be, sitting in silence, working in the library.

Except that it was nothing like it used to be. Not to her, anyway. To her, the air felt electrically charged. Her tummy was one big knot, and the words she was writing made no sense at all.

At ten after ten, she decided she’d sat there writing meaningless drivel and pretending there was nothing wrong for long enough. She closed her laptop, gathered up her stuff and rose.

He glanced up then. “Leaving?”

She hit him with another big, fake smile. “Yeah.” She hooked her purse on her shoulder and picked up her laptop. “Good night.”

“Good night, Lani.” He bent his head to his notes again.

And somehow, she couldn’t move. She stood there like a complete fool, staring at his shining, thick hair, at his impossibly broad shoulders to which his soft white sweater clung so lovingly. She wanted to drop back into her chair and ask him about his day, to tell him the real truth—that she missed him in the deepest, most elemental part of herself. That she wished things were different, but she was not a good choice for him as a friend or a lover or anything else, and he ought to know that....

He glanced up a second time. “What is it?” he asked. Gently. Coaxingly.

“Nothing,” she lied yet again.

He began closing books and stacking papers. “I need to take everything back upstairs. Only a minute, and I’ll walk you out.”

“No, really. It’s fine, I—”

He stopped and pinned her with a look. “Wait. Please.”

The problem was, in spite of everything—all she could lose, all the ways it wasn’t going to work—she wanted to wait for him. She wanted to be his friend again.

And more. So much more...

“Fine,” she said tightly.

He tipped his head sideways. “You won’t run out on me?”

She pressed her lips together and shook her head while a frantic voice in her mind screamed, You idiot, what’s wrong with you? Get out and get out now. “I’ll be right here.”

He gathered the materials into his big arms and turned for the stairs. She stood rooted to the spot as he went up, knowing she ought to just duck out while he wasn’t looking—but somehow unable to budge.

He came back down again and picked up his tablet. “All right. Let’s go.”

* * *

A few minutes later, along a wide, marble-floored corridor on the way to Rule and Sydney’s apartment, he stopped at a gilt-trimmed blue door.

She frowned at him. “What’s this?”

He clasped the ornate gold latch and pushed the door inward. On the other side, dimly, she saw a sitting room. “An empty suite,” he said. “Come inside with me.”

She moved back a step. “Bad idea.”

He held her gaze, levelly. “A few private minutes together in a neutral setting. We’ll talk, that’s all.”

“Talk.” She said the word with complete disbelief.

“And only talk,” he insisted. He sounded sincere.

And she was tired of resisting, fighting not only him, but also herself. She wanted to go in that room with him. It was hopeless. Every minute she was near him only made her want to steal one minute more.

She let him usher her in.

He turned on a lamp. She sat on a velvet sofa and he took a floral-patterned armchair.

“All right,” she said. “Talk about what?”

“Why making love with me on New Year’s Eve has upset you so much. To me, it was exactly right, a natural step. The next step for us. I don’t understand why you can’t see that.”

She stared at him and said nothing. The truth was too dangerous.

He watched her face as though memorizing it. “I miss those black-rimmed glasses you used to wear. They made you look so serious and studious.”