The Ordinary Princess

‘I don’t want to go back into the house!’

What was she saying!

Hadn’t she been standing on the pavement trying to come up with some plan to get herself invited inside? Her whole career depended upon it. Possibly. But right now Princess Katerina’s disappearance took precedence.

‘I want you to call the police—or Special Branch—or the Diplomatic Protection Squad. Right now!’ she demanded, when he didn’t leap to her command.

‘And how do you suggest I do that?’ he enquired, apparently unperturbed by the crisis.

The ‘serene’ bit of his title wasn’t just for show, apparently. But this wasn’t a time for serenity. It was a time for panic.

‘Shout?’ he offered, when she didn’t help him out.

The air left her lungs with a little whoosh, deflating along with the rest of her. ‘No, sorry—of course not,’ she muttered. Then she laughed. Well, it was more of a giggle, really, but even so quite unforgivable under the circumstances. ‘I don’t appear to be thinking very clearly.’ Which had to be the understatement of the year. ‘I’m not used to this kind of thing.’

‘You’ve had a shock, Miss Varndell, one for which my niece will, in due course, apologise. In the meantime I really do think you should come inside. Take a moment to recover.’

It was hysterics, of course. The desperate urge to giggle. In some small rational part of her brain she recognised that. This man’s niece had been kidnapped and all he was concerned about was that a total stranger might have suffered a little shock.

Noblesse oblige was safe in the hands of His Serene Highness Prince Alexander Michael George Orsino.

And why would she be complaining, exactly?

She’d got her wish. The Prince was inviting her into his home and handing her a scoop on a plate. The inside story on a royal kidnapping was just what she needed to get back into Trevor McCarthy’s good books. The very least she could do was to say ‘thank you’ very nicely and let His Serene Highness take her inside so that she could do her research in comfort.

While she was recovering.

Slowly.

So that she could watch the story unfold around her.

‘Thank you,’ she said, as nicely—if somewhat breathlessly—as she knew how. ‘I do seem to be feeling a little bit shaky.’

One moment it was an act, the next it was nothing but the truth as the Prince took her elbow in his palm and directed her firmly towards his front door. His manner suggested that, thoughtful though his invitation had appeared, he’d had no intention of letting her go anywhere until he’d grilled her about her involvement in his niece’s disappearance.

She swallowed.

It would make great copy, she reminded herself.

Once she’d got bail.

He paused as they reached the lights of the elegant porticoed entrance, glancing down at her, his devilish eyebrows drawn down in the slightest frown and, for just a moment, she thought those dark eyes could see right through her. Read her mind.

‘You’ve grazed your cheek, Miss Varndell,’ he said. She instinctively lifted her hand to check, but he caught her wrist, stopping her. ‘And your knuckles.’

‘It’s nothing,’ she said automatically, her expensive boarding-school having instilled the stern lesson that ladies did not make a fuss.

Fortunately, Alexander Orsino ignored her stoicism.

‘I’ll get someone to see to them,’ he said, every inch the autocrat.

He paused to speak briefly to the footman in a language that wasn’t quite Italian, or French, but a Montorinan dialect that her brain wasn’t quite up to unscrambling at such speed. It was already fully occupied.

The man bowed in acknowledgement and backed away while Prince Alexander, his hand still welded firmly to her elbow, led her towards a wide curving staircase without another word.

She should be looking around, she thought, as she attempted to keep a grip on reality. She should be taking mental notes. But she was having trouble enough just catching her breath.

The man was right. She had to be in shock. That would explain why she had the oddest feeling that she’d stepped into the set of an operetta, with its sweeping staircase, crystal chandeliers and very superior footman wearing black tails.

Add to the mix a cold-hearted prince, a peasant girl and a missing princess—there were all the ingredients for a fairy tale frivolity.

The clothes were all wrong, of course. Peasant girls wore dirndl skirts and embroidered blouses—at least in operetta—while she was wearing a pair of extremely functional cargo pants and a sweatshirt of such antiquity that whatever words had originally been splashed across her bosom had long since faded to illegibility.

Not that the Prince, with his open-necked shirt and cashmere sweater, was getting more than three out of ten for effort. Didn’t he dress for dinner, for heaven’s sake?

Where were his standards?

She dragged herself back from the beckoning arms of hysteria as he opened a door and ushered her into a book-lined room that clearly doubled as sitting room and study.

Here, the baroque evaporated and they were back in the twenty-first century. Computers, a couple of large sofas, a functional desk and enough paperwork to keep an average-sized business going for a month. But running a small country presumably entailed a vast amount of paperwork, and for just a moment she felt a twinge of sympathy for the man. No time to put his feet up with the television, or a pretty girl for this prince.

‘Brandy?’ he offered.

‘What?’ Distracted, she turned back to the Prince. ‘I think the princess’s welfare is more important right now. What are you going to do about finding her?’ she asked. But politely. She suspected that she’d already stretched her luck to breaking point.

‘Nothing. I know where she is. Please make yourself comfortable, Miss Varndell,’ he continued, indicating one of the sofas.

‘You know?’

‘More accurately, I know where she’s going. My niece wished to go to a club with some friends. I refused to give permission. She is, after all, under age.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ve despatched her security officer to bring her home.’

She stared at him. ‘Are you crazy? Weren’t you listening? She had a broken ankle!’

‘Are you absolutely sure about that?’ he replied as he took her hand and placed an exquisite crystal glass in it, closing his long fingers around hers until he was certain she had it safely. Long, slender fingers, one of them bearing a heavy gold signet ring embossed with his personal coat of arms. ‘Did you see it for yourself?’

She blinked, looked up. ‘See what?’

‘Princess Katerina’s ankle?’ he prompted.

‘Oh. Well, no, she was wearing boots, but she said—’

She’d said it was broken—had groaned convincingly. Laura subsided on to the sofa as she realised that, once again, she’d been played for a fool.

‘Oh, I see. You’re suggesting that she was just pretending. Playing hurt to get rid of me while she made good her escape.’

‘I would say it’s more likely than a chance kidnapping, wouldn’t you?’

It would certainly explain why she’d insisted on being left where she was rather than attempting, with help, to make it inside, which would have been her own choice under the circumstances, no matter how painful. She took a sip of the brandy, felt the steadying warmth as it slipped down.