Princess in the Making

Looking a little nervous, the girl stepped inside. “Shall I take Mia so you can rest?”

She still wasn’t sure about leaving Mia in a stranger’s care, but she was exhausted, and she would have a hard time relaxing with Mia in bed with her. If Vanessa fell too deeply asleep, Mia could roll off and hurt herself. And the last thing she needed was Marcus thinking that not only was she a money-grubbing con artist, but a terrible mother as well.

“I really could use a nap,” she told Karin, “but if she wakes up crying, I’d like you to bring her right to me. She’s bound to be disoriented waking up in a strange place with someone she doesn’t know.”

“Of course, ma’am.”

“Please, call me Vanessa.”

Karin nodded, but looked uncomfortable with the idea.

“Mia is asleep on the bed. Why don’t I carry her, so I can see where the nursery is, and you can bring her bag?”

Karin nodded again.

Not very talkative, was she?

Vanessa scooped up Mia, who was still sleeping deeply, and rolled her suitcase out to Karin, who led her two doors down and across the hall to the nursery. It was smaller than her own suite, with a play area and a sleeping area, and it was decorated gender-neutral. The walls were pale green, the furniture white and expensive-looking, and in the play area rows of shelves were packed with toys for children of every age. It was clearly a nursery designed for guests, and she supposed that if she did decide to stay, Mia would get her own nursery closer to Gabriel’s bedroom.

The idea of sharing a bedroom with Gabriel, and a bed, made her stomach do a nervous little flip-flop.

Everything will work out.

She laid Mia in the crib and covered her with a light blanket, and the baby didn’t even stir. The poor little thing was exhausted.

“Maybe I should unpack her things,” she told Karin.

“I’ll do it, ma’am.”

Vanessa sighed. So it was still “ma’am”? That was something they would just have to work on. “Thank you.”

She kissed the tips of her fingers, then gently pressed them to Mia’s forehead. “Sleep well, sweet baby.”

After reiterating that Karin was to come get her when Mia woke, she walked back to her suite. She pulled her cell phone out of her bag and checked for calls, but there were none. She dialed Gabriel’s cell number, but it went straight to voice mail.

She glanced over at the sofa, thinking she would sleep there for an hour or so, but the bed, with its creamy silk comforter and big, fluffy pillows, called to her. Setting her phone on the bedside table, she lay back against the pillows, sinking into the softness of the comforter. She let her eyes drift closed, and when she opened them again, the room was dark.

Three

After leaving Miss Reynolds’s suite, Marcus stopped by his office, where his assistant Cleo, short for Cleopatra—her parents were Egyptian and very eccentric—sat at her computer playing her afternoon game of solitaire.

“Any word from my father?” he asked.

Attention on the screen, she shook her head.

“I’m glad to see that you’re using your time productively,” he teased, as he often did when he caught her playing games.

And obviously she didn’t take him seriously, because she didn’t even blink, or look away from the cards on the screen. “Keeps the brain sharp.”

She may have been pushing seventy, but no one could argue that she wasn’t still sharp as a pin. She’d been with the royal family since the 1970s, and used to be his mother’s secretary. Everyone expected she would retire after the queen’s death, and enjoy what would be a very generous pension, but she hadn’t been ready to stop working. She claimed it kept her young. And since her husband passed away two years ago, Marcus suspected she was lonely.

She finished the game and quit out of the software, a group photo of her eight grandchildren flashing on to her computer screen. She turned to Marcus and caught him in the middle of a yawn and frowned. “Tired?”

After a month-long battle with insomnia, he was always tired. And he wasn’t in the mood for another lecture. “I’m sure I’ll sleep like a baby when she is gone.”

“She’s that bad?”

He sat on the edge of her desk. “She’s awful.”

“And you know this after what, thirty minutes with her?”

“I knew after five. I knew the second she stepped off the plane.”

She leaned forward in her chair, elbows on her desk, her white hair draped around a face that was young for her years, and with no help at all from a surgeon’s knife. “Based on what?”

“She only wants his money.”

Her brows rose. “She told you that?”

“She didn’t have to. She’s young, and beautiful, and a single mother. What else would she want from a man my father’s age?”

“For the record, your highness, fifty-six is not that old.”

“For her it is.”

“Your father is an attractive and charming man. Who’s to say that she didn’t fall head over heels in love with him.”

“In a few weeks?”

“I fell in love with my husband after our first date. Never underestimate the powers of physical attraction.”

He cringed. The idea of his father and that woman … he didn’t even want to think about it. Though he didn’t doubt she had seduced him. That was the way her kind operated. He knew from experience, having been burned before. And his father, despite his staunch moral integrity, was vulnerable enough to fall under her spell.

“So, she’s really that attractive?” Cleo asked.

Much as he wished he could say otherwise, there was no denying her beauty. “She is. But she had a child out of wedlock.”

She gasped and slapped a hand to her chest. “Off with her head!”

He glared at her.

“You do remember what century this is? Women’s rights and equality and all that.”

“Yes, but my father? A man who lives by tradition. It’s beneath him. He’s lonely, missing my mother and not thinking straight.”

“You don’t give him much credit, do you? The king is a very intelligent man.”

Yes, he was, and clearly not thinking with his brain. No one could convince Marcus that this situation was anything but temporary. And until she left, he would simply stay out of her way.