New Year Wedding For The Crown Prince

He’d found plates and soon delivered a pile of perfectly browned toast to the table.

Toast done, she set him to buttering it—although that meant he was standing close to her, and the discomfort that caused had to be because he was a stranger...

Surely!

She was slicing gherkins when her belly tightened.

Braxton-Hicks! Her body’s practice contractions. She moved a little, knowing that usually stopped them, and kept grating. Charles was now piling grated cheese on the toast he’d buttered.

‘I’ve done two slices each, will that be enough?’ he said.

Jo turned to face him, saw a smile lurking in his dark-enough-to-drown-in eyes, and hesitated, her mouth suddenly so dry she couldn’t speak.

She had to be imagining whatever it was that was zapping between them.

Had to be!

‘You might want more than two slices,’ she finally managed, ‘and I have sliced pickles under my cheese.’

‘Like father, like daughter,’ he teased, and she blessed the distraction of another twinge in her belly.

She would hate to think she was anything like her father...

Although maybe that was unfair. He’d been a good and loving father up until her mother had died and it probably hadn’t been his fault he’d gone to pieces then...

Charles had turned away to put more bread in the toaster, apparently deciding he might need more than two slices, and Jo used the respite from his presence to slide the cheese-laden slices under the grill.

The extra hormones that pregnancy had sent spinning through her body—they must surely be the cause of her...

Her what?

Distraction, she decided, and said it firmly enough in her head to pretend she meant it.

Well, it could hardly be anything more than that, now, could it? She’d seen tall, dark and handsome men before and had never felt the slightest attraction, and so what if his broad shoulders curved in to a neat waist, and his jeans clung to neat buttocks?

She heated milk on the stove for Dottie’s cocoa, vowing for the fiftieth time she’d buy a microwave for the house next time she was in town. She put on the kettle for tea and turned to Charles.

‘Would you like tea or coffee?’

He smiled—she wished he wouldn’t—and said, ‘Could I please have cocoa? This has taken me back to student days and it seems right I should be drinking cocoa.’

Jo tore her eyes away from his face. What had she been waiting for, another smile? She poured more milk into the pot on the stove, told the visitor to watch the toast under the grill while she found mugs for the three of them. Even Dottie, to whom tea must be served in fine china cups, drank her cocoa from a mug, and a mug of tea was far more satisfying as far as Jo was concerned.

Charles, who was proving quite proficient in the kitchen, had found more plates and was cutting a couple of bubbling, lightly browned cheese toasts into fingers.

‘Two for Dottie, two with pickles for the pregnant lady, and I’ll look like a pig eating four, but it seems a very long time since breakfast.’

‘You haven’t eaten since breakfast?’ Jo said in disbelief, but the milk was close to boiling, and she had cocoa to make, so she could hardly pursue the conversation.

Not that Charles—the name was coming more easily into her head—had replied. Instead, he was moving around the kitchen, poking into nooks and crannies, finally finding the trays, hiding in the space beside the ancient refrigerator.

‘I’m assuming Dottie has the silver one,’ he said, smiling so broadly Jo had to smile back.

‘Yes, and slightly better china than you’ve found there.’

She opened a high kitchen cupboard and produced a fine china plate, bedecked with flowers and edged with gold.

‘Just because she’s old, she says, she doesn’t have to lower her standards,’ Jo quoted in explanation.

‘Bless her heart!’ Charles said, and the phrase must have startled him for he added, very quickly, ‘As my nanny would have said.’

Bless her heart indeed!

And a nanny?

No wonder he spoke like an English toff.

Only it wasn’t really like that—just beautifully pronounced words that seemed to fill the air with music.

What would it have been like to have been raised like that?

Or even in a normal household.

Another twinge reminded Jo she shouldn’t be thinking about the past and definitely not about a man she’d barely met, no matter how pleasant his voice might be.

And weren’t Braxton-Hicks contractions supposed to be irregular?

Still, she couldn’t think about that now. She’d get the tray up to Dottie, and then...

She didn’t know what.

She usually took her tray up and ate in Dottie’s bedroom, but would Dottie want the stranger in her bedroom, related though he might be?

And could she, Jo, leave him alone in the kitchen no matter how inhospitable that would seem?

She’d take Dottie’s tray up and see what transpired.

Dottie was sitting, propped up on pillows, in the middle of the big bed, the ornately carved bedhead a spectacular backdrop to the minute occupant. Resplendent in her colourful Chinese robe, she was every inch an empress, ready to receive her subjects.

As Jo settled the tray on the small table over Dottie’s legs, she said, ‘You can bring that man up here to eat his supper. You’ll come, of course, so he might as well. We’ll grill him, find out what he’s up to!’

The last sentence would have startled Jo if she hadn’t known Dottie’s passion for mystery and detective fiction. Perhaps she’d always nurtured a secret desire to grill someone.

Possibly literally!

‘We’ve been summoned,’ she told Charles when she returned to the kitchen, where she found him cutting his extra toast into fingers. He’d also made a pot of tea, though where he’d found the pot she didn’t know. ‘Do you want sugar in your cocoa?’

‘I’ve already helped myself, but left it to you to pour your own tea how you like it.’