Taming the Prince

Who would be calling him at work? he wondered anxiously. Most of his friends were co-workers on this very site, and those who weren’t knew better than to disturb him during the workday. His mother was currently honeymooning with husband number five in Tahiti—not that Shane thought the marriage would last much beyond the honeymoon, because they rarely did for her—so she was sure to have other things on her mind at the moment.

And his brother, Marcus, lived in Chicago and had way too much going on in his workaholic life to call Shane more than once or twice a month, and Shane had just spoken to him about a week ago. Not that Shane held it against his fraternal twin to be relatively incommunicado. Hell, his own life was plenty full these days, with work, if nothing else. He and Marcus had a solid, close relationship, one that transcended a need for constant communication. And that was no easy feat considering the fact that the two of them had been separated by divorce at nine years of age, when Shane went to live with their mother and Marcus went to live with their father. But the two boys had spent a month together every summer while they were growing up, and even in that limited amount of time, they’d managed to forge the kind of bond that few brothers—hell, few twins, for that matter—forged when they were raised in the same household.

Shane’s father was someone he rarely saw or heard from these days, so long ago had the two of them lost touch, and he doubted the elder Cordello would be calling him for any reason, at work or at home. So since Shane’s friends were all here on the site, and his relations were all hundreds of miles away with other things on their minds, then there was no reason for anyone to be calling him at work. Not unless…

Not unless it was an emergency.

Leaving the kielbasa sitting on the lunch wagon window where Amy had placed it, Shane sprinted toward the foreman’s trailer with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. That sickness grew more resolute with each stride he completed, until it had coalesced into a cold, greasy lump when he saw the grim expression on his employer’s face. Oh, no…

“What is it, Mr. Mendoza?” he asked breathlessly as he took the trailer’s metal stairs two at a time.

His boss’s expression turned malevolent. “I’ve told all of you that personal phone calls to or from this site are prohibited.”

Shane relaxed at the censure. If Mr. Mendoza was this ticked off, the call couldn’t be much of an emergency. “I’m sorry,” Shane apologized, even though he’d had little control over who might have picked up a telephone and dialed this particular number. “Who is it?”

“A woman,” his boss said with distaste, making clear his opinion of that half of the world’s population.

Shane’s earlier concern changed immediately to confusion. “A woman?” he repeated. “I’ve never given this number to any women.” In fact, he hadn’t given it to anyone but Marcus. With strict instructions that his brother only dial it in case of emergency, Shane couldn’t help recalling, his anxiety rising to the fore once again. “What woman? What does she want?” he asked.

“How the hell should I know what woman?” Mr. Mendoza snapped. “She says it’s personal,” he added, his voice dripping with even more repugnance than before on that final word. Obviously the man disliked personal matters even more than he disliked women. “And she sounds like a woman who’s old enough to be your mother. Frankly, Cordello, I do not want to go there. It’s just too—” He punctuated the statement by giving his entire body a shudder of disgust.

Ignoring the other man, Shane’s confusion turning again to concern, he snatched up the phone. “Mother?” he said without preamble. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

There was a slight pause from the other end of the line, then a woman’s voice—indeed old enough to belong to his mother, but not his mother’s voice—replied, “Mr. Cordello?”

Even with only two words to go by, Shane detected an accent, vaguely British, in the woman’s voice, a clue that helped him not at all in discerning her identity. He didn’t know anyone from Great Britain. He only recognized the accent because he was a faithful viewer of Benny Hill reruns on cable.

“Yes, this is Shane Cordello,” he said, his fear rising to the fore again as his confusion compounded. “Who is this? What’s happened?”

There was another pause, then the woman said, “Please hold, Mr. Cordello, for Her Majesty Queen Marissa of Penwyck.”

“For who?” he said, certain he must have misunderstood.

“For Her Majesty Queen Marissa of Penwyck,” the woman repeated. “Please hold.”

Shane balked at the cool command in both the woman’s instructions and her voice, and he almost hung up the phone on principle alone. Who did this woman think she was, calling him—at work, no less—then telling him to hold? And for the queen of Penwyck? What the hell was that all about? Why hadn’t they asked him if he had Prince Albert in a can, too? he wondered, so certain was he that this must be a practical joke.

The only thing that kept him from slamming the receiver back into its cradle was that his curiosity was a more potent force than his pride. Not that he believed for a moment that the queen of Penwyck was about to pick up the phone at the other end of the line, mind you, but clearly this wasn’t any run-of-the-mill crank call. No, this was a pretty sophisticated crank call, and Shane wanted to get to the bottom of it. Mainly so he could put an end to it. No sense having the woman call back and rile Mr. Mendoza any further than his employer was already riled. Because the words employer and riled were two words Shane never wanted to see appearing close together in the same sentence.

After a moment of staccato static and erratic popping—giving him the impression of a genuine long-distance phone call, by golly—a quick click signified that someone had picked up another line. Then a different woman’s voice, still old enough to belong to his mother, still not his mother’s voice, came over the line.

“Mr. Cordello?” the second woman said. She, too, had an accent, also vaguely British, and a bit more cultivated than the first woman’s, if such a thing were possible.

“Yeah, I’m Shane Cordello,” he replied with less courtesy than before. “Who the hell are you? And don’t bother telling me you’re the friggin’ queen of Penwyck, lady, ’cause I ain’t buyin’ it.”

There was a stretch of silence from the other end of the line, followed by a single, hasty chuckle. “I have no intention of telling you such a thing, Mr. Cordello.”

“Good.”

“Because I am not the, ah, friggin’…queen of Penwyck.”

“I knew it.”

“I am, in fact, the royal queen of Penwyck.”

Shane rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on, lady, what do you take me for? I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.”

There was another brief silence, then, “No, I realize that. You were born twenty-three years ago. On April fourteenth. Am I correct?”

Slowly Shane pulled the receiver from his ear and gazed at it with narrowed eyes, as if in doing so, he might force the phone to offer up more information than it was giving him about the woman at the other end of the line. Then, when he realized how ridiculous he must look to his employer, he put the receiver back where it was. “Yeah,” he told the woman. “That’s my birthday. A matter of public record, too,” he added meaningfully. “It still doesn’t tell me who you are or what you want.”

Instead of a lengthy silence this time, the response from the other end of the line was a weary sigh. “Oh, dear,” the woman said, not quite under her breath. “This is going to be a bit more difficult than I thought.” Then, “I understand why you might be skeptical, Mr. Cordello,” she added. “But I assure you that I am indeed Her Majesty Queen Marissa of Penwyck. And it is very important that I speak with you about a very urgent mat—”

“Right,” he interrupted again. “If you’re the queen of Penwyck, then I’m the prince of darkness. Tell me another one.”

“Actually, Mr. Cordello, you’re not far from the truth,” the woman said, sounding a bit less imperious than she had before.

Shane opened his mouth to mutter another disdainful quip, but what came out instead was “Huh?”

“I said you’re not far from the truth,” the woman repeated. “Though you’re not—quite—the prince of darkness.”

Once again, Shane tried to summons a haughty retort. And once again, what came out was “Huh?”

“Perhaps it would be better if I let you speak to your brother, Marcus, first,” the woman said.

“Marcus?” Shane echoed, growing even more confused now.

But instead of hearing the woman’s voice in reply again, Shane was treated to his brother’s. “Hello, Shane. It’s Marcus.”

The confusion that had been wheeling around in Shane’s head for the last several minutes came to a crashing halt, crumbling now into a vast heap of bewilderment. “Marcus?” he said, recognizing his brother’s voice immediately. “Where are you? Who was that woman? What the hell is going on?”

“Answering those questions in order,” Marcus said, “as to the first one, I, uh, I’m in Penwyck. You know Penwyck, Shane, surely. Small island nation? Near other island nations of Ireland and Great Britain? It’s been in the news lately because they’re forming a military alliance with the United States. You’ve heard about that, right?”

“Uh…”

“And I think our mother honeymooned here with husband number three, if memory serves,” Marcus continued blithely. “It’s really a beautiful place. Nice people. I mean really nice people. Food could be a little spicier. Not that I’m complaining.”

Marcus Cordello, Shane knew, was not the kind of man to fool around. His brother hadn’t become a millionaire at the age of nineteen by making prank phone calls, and he didn’t maintain a multimillion-dollar real-estate empire in one of the nation’s largest cities by asking people if they had Prince Albert in a can. No way would Marcus jerk Shane around. If he said he was in Penwyck, then, by God, the man was in Penwyck. And if Marcus was in Penwyck, then that meant that the woman who’d called herself the queen of Penwyck could, by God, very well be—

Uh-oh.

“You’re in Penwyck?” Shane echoed miserably.

“I’m in Penwyck,” Marcus confirmed.

“The Penwyck that has a Queen Marissa?”

“So you have been watching the news,” his brother said, clearly holding back a chuckle.