Читать книгу A Royal Marriage - Cara Colter - Страница 6

Chapter Two

“This reminds me of the cottage in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” the prince commented as he pulled into her driveway, and his headlights glanced off the white stucco, paned windows and heavy wooden door of her tiny home.

More fairy tales, she thought, and then smiled. “You are about to meet the head dwarf,” she murmured.

Rachel loved the little house she had found to rent, at such a reasonable price, just hours after arriving in Thortonburg. At one time it must have been a gardener’s cottage. It was in a wonderful neighborhood of regal old mansions, large yards and towering trees. Prince Damon was right. It did look like the cozy little cottage Snow White found refuge in.

It surprised her that a man who looked so pragmatic, so in charge, so all male, would make such a whimsical reference. Surprised her, and pleased her. Carly’s father, Bryan, probably would have thought Snow White was laundry detergent. Or worse, an illegal drug.

She reached for her car door handle, and then blushed when he stayed her with a hand on her sleeve, got out, came around and opened the door for her.

The gesture should have made her feel like a queen, but it didn’t. It made her feel as if she was out of her league entirely.

She went up the curving, cobblestone walk in front of him, and fumbled in her purse for her key. With gentle firmness he removed the key from her grasp and inserted it in the door. Again, the old world courtesy was not something she was accustomed to.

She remembered when she had dated Bryan, he hadn’t even come to the door for her. He’d sit out on his polished motor bike revving the engine and honking until she came out.

Which, of course, should have told her something.

“I’ll take the car key off now, if you want,” he said. “That way I can have someone return your car to you right away.”

“That’s really not necessary. I’ll go back for it tomorrow.”

“No, you won’t. I persuaded you to leave it there, and I’ll have it returned to you.”

“Thank you then. It’s the red Volkswagen Bug just across the street from where you were parked.”

“I’ll look after it.”

She thought, wistfully, that a person could really get used to this. Being looked after. Having life unfold at the snap of fingers.

Prince Damon gave the door a slight push, and the sound of Carly’s robust laughter burst out the open door. The sound never failed to make happiness curl around Rachel. She was determined that, despite the bad start of being born illegitimate, of being abandoned by her father, her child was going to have a better upbringing than her own had been. Full of laughter, and warmth, and love.

Not the kind of childhood Rachel had, that made her so ripe for someone like Bryan. Looking for something she had never had, and yet had believed with her whole heart and soul must exist. Rachel had made the age-old error of mistaking the impostor passion for love.

Did she believe in romance anymore? Did she long for the love that seemed so genuine that others seemed to find but not her? She no longer knew.

Once burned, after all.

Besides, who had the time? The emotional energy? Carly deserved more than that. She deserved not to have daddy candidates trotted in and out of her life. The two of them could take on the world all by themselves.

She beckoned the prince into her tiny entryway, but he did not follow immediately, instead looked beyond her with something like wariness.

“You have a child?” he asked.

She thought he must have known. To her, it had sounded like Crenshaw’s crude remark about her waistline had gone out over a loudspeaker.

A number of times since Carly was born, this had happened to her. A man showed unmistakable interest, until he found out she had a baby. It had made her pretty much lose interest in men, in dating. In some part of herself she realized she had decided, secretly and quietly, that she would never marry if it seemed it might take away from what she could give to Carly.

Of course, her own taste in men, if Bryan was any example, had thrown a scare into Rachel, too.

“A baby girl. She’s twenty months old.”

She reminded herself that Prince Damon of Roxbury’s interest in her was quite different, anyway. Rescuing a damsel in distress, he had called it. She would be foolish to read any more into his interest than that. Theirs were worlds apart.

She was not a sleeping princess about to be kissed.

She was a single mom trying to do the best for her baby.

And then Carly bumped, on her padded rump, sleeper-encased feet first, down the narrow staircase, her blond curls scattered around cheeks flushed from the exertion and delight she attacked life with.

Rachel went down on one knee, and threw open wide her arms.

“Mommeee!”

Carly barreled across the floor, arms flung wide, balance precarious. She slid on the oval rag rug, tilted and then fell into Rachel’s arms with such force that Rachel was nearly knocked over. Laughing, forgetting her dignified visitor, losing herself to the exuberance of her daughter’s greeting, Rachel hugged Carly to her, buried her nose in the child’s silky hair, rose and swung the baby around until she shrieked with delight.

She froze mid-swing. He was too still. She tucked Carly in tight and looked at him. Prince Damon Montague was ashen.

It reminded her of that moment in the car, when he had so definitely gone away, and the place where he had gone had caused him terrible sadness. “What is it?” she asked.

He shook himself, as a man coming out of a dream. Carly leaned toward him, her arms widespread, nearly wriggling out of Rachel’s arms.

It was an invitation to be held that only the hardest heart would have been able to refuse. Damon hesitated, looked amazingly as though he was going to bolt. Instead, he smiled, though it looked as if it cost him.

“The head dwarf, I presume?” he said with complete composure. He did not take Carly, but leaned instead and touched her cheek with his hand. “Hello. Which one are you? Surely not Grumpy? Definitely not Sleepy. Or Doc. Or Dopey. You must be Happy.”

Carly chortled at this, caught his hand and chomped on one of his fingers. He extricated his finger from her mouth with good grace. “Jaws wasn’t one of the seven, was he?”

“No biting,” Rachel admonished sternly. “Your Highness, my daughter, Carly.”

“I really do want you to call me Damon,” he said, and then he bowed, deep at the waist, which charmed Carly completely. Not to mention her mother. “The pleasure is all mine,” he said.

Rachel realized that in her mind he was already Damon, that there was a feeling of having always known him that made formality between them seem stiff and ridiculous.

When he straightened, Carly regarded him solemnly for a minute, ran her plump fingers over the planes of his face, tugged his nose experimentally. Then she nodded her approval, and ordered loudly, “Down.”

Rachel set her down, and Carly plummeted across the floor, arms out like a tightrope walker, always teetering on the very edge of a spill. She made it without hazard, however, to her overflowing toy basket, the contents of which she dumped unceremoniously on the floor. With a sigh, she plopped down on the floor beside her heap of treasures.

“Do you find yourself holding your breath a lot?” Damon asked.

“I think it’s called motherhood. I’ll be holding my breath until her eighteenth birthday.” She thought of her missing sister, who was twenty-seven, and her recent worries, and added woefully, “And probably beyond.”

“She’s an unusually beautiful child,” Damon said, watching with a small smile at the energy with which Carly’s possessions were now being thrust back in the basket.

Of course he would know all the right things to say. They probably taught him that at prince training school, or wherever young royals went to learn to be gracious and courteous and sophisticated.

“Thank you.”

He hesitated. “Her father?”

“The last I heard, running a ski lift in Canada.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not. We’re both better off without him.” She said this with a trace of defiance. She did not want his pity. His gaze had drifted from the baby, and he was scanning her small living room with casual interest.

Though he kept his expression deliberately blank, no doubt he parked his car in a larger space.

And she knew the furnishings of the cottage were humble; most of them had come with it. But she had delighted at the cozy atmosphere she had created with a few plaid throws, jugs of dried flowers, bright paintings, small wicker baskets containing books and apples and papers, and the larger basket, the only one Carly could reach, which held her toys.

In one corner was the only thing in the room that qualified as state of the art, the computer that she did her writing on.

The sitter, the elderly lady who lived in the manor house on the property, came down the steps. A few strands of her gray hair had fallen out of her tidy bun, her glasses were askew, her sweater was tugged out of shape at the hem, and she was not looking nearly as sprightly as when she had come in the door several hours ago.

“My goodness,” Mrs. Brumble said with weary graciousness, “she has so much energy. I’ve never seen a baby that age quite so energetic.”

“Mrs. Brumble, was she awful?” Rachel asked, wide-eyed at her dignified landlady’s disheveled appearance.

“Not awful. No, no. Demanding. Inquisitive. Into everything.” The old lady paused, sighed and smiled. “Awful,” she said. “But I meant it. I adore children, and I’ll look after her whenever you have to be away.”

“That’s so kind,” Rachel said, and meant it. Life since Carly seemed to have gotten somewhat harder. Bryan had made it clear he wanted no part of her life, and nothing to do with his child. And then her mother had died. And now her sister was missing.

And yet it almost seemed the harder life got, the more kind people were put in her path, as if to help her through it. Gifts from heaven.

Mrs. Brumble was squinting at Damon with interest. “My, my. Aren’t you that Montague boy?”

Rachel did not think this was a very suitable way to address a prince, but he didn’t seem to mind at all.

He grinned. “That would be me, all right. That Montague boy.”

Mrs. Brumble offered her hand, and he took it in his, covered it with his other one for a brief moment, a gesture that Rachel could tell pleased Mrs. Brumble to no end. “I’m Eileen Brumble. I’ve had tea with your mother, Princess Nora, several times when I’ve been over to Roxbury. We have the Cancer Society in common. I met your lovely wife on one occasion, as well. I was so distressed by her death. Such a tragedy.”

Rachel thought Damon’s smile had become somewhat fixed, but he said pleasantly enough, “I’ll remember you to my mother.”

Rachel realized her little old landlady moved in the same circles as him, among dukes and duchesses, marquises and earls. Perhaps the huge manor house that shared the same property as this humble cottage should have given her a clue. Imagine asking someone of that stature to baby-sit!

“Thank you! That would be a darling thing for you to do.”

The entryway was too small for all of them, so Damon slipped into the living room while Mrs. Brumble got organized, and Rachel shed her jacket. Underneath, she was wearing a white sweater that matched her skirt, an outfit that had failed her at the police station, and which she felt failed her now because it was decidedly “blah,” a selection an old-maid librarian might have made to wear to the church tea.

Maybe she did know life was not a fairy tale, maybe she had taken a vow of celibacy until Carly was safely grown-up, but she also knew there was not a woman alive who could be alone with an attractive man and not want to look her absolute best.

When the door finally closed behind the unlikely nanny, Rachel turned to find Damon studying a painting on her wall that suddenly struck her as tacky and cheap, not fun and bright.

Mrs. Brumble popped her head back in the door and called in a whisper that must have carried nearly to the Thorton estate, “This one’s a keeper, child. Don’t let him get away.”

It was an embarrassing remark, but a kind one, too. It made Rachel feel as though the social barriers between them were not so important these days as they once had been—probably far larger in her mind than they were in either Damon’s or Mrs. Brumble’s.

The door closed again.

Since Rachel had expected Damon would drop her off and go, she stared at his big back with some vexation, and then said, “Would you like tea?”

Of course he wasn’t going to want tea. He was waiting for an opportunity to say goodbye, and take his leave.

And they’d never see each other again.

Which was not a good ending for a fairy tale, but a far more realistic one for the way life really was, something she should be well-versed in by now.

Still, the thought of never seeing him again filled Rachel with an ache that felt oddly like sadness. Regardless of his station, he seemed like the rarest of finds.

A nice guy.

“I’d love some tea.” He turned and looked at her, and the light in his green-gold eyes confirmed that. A nice guy. Not at all above sharing tea with a distressed woman in her humble hovel, despite the fact he must be used to grander things, and grander company.

“I’ll take your coat then.” He shrugged out of it, and for a moment she just stared at him with the coat suspended in the air between them.

The coat had really hidden a great deal of his masculine potency. She wasn’t so sure about the nice guy definition anymore. Didn’t nice guys generally have freckles and eyeglasses and arms the size of toothpicks?

But Damon Montague exuded an almost electrical sensuality. He had on a white shirt, pristine, definitely silk, but at sometime during the evening he had abandoned both the tie and jacket that must have gone with it. Now it was unbuttoned at the throat, showing enticing whorls of dark hair, and rolled up at the cuff, revealing forearms that looked powerful and sinewy.

The passionate part of her that had raised its ugly head so swiftly and powerfully in her past made its presence known again. Just when she thought she had successfully laid it to rest, there it was, that sensation of a fist tightening in her tummy, that sensation of wanting that made her mouth go dry, and her hands curl into the rich fabric of his coat. She yanked it out of his grasp, and spun away from him. She could feel the heat in her cheeks. She took a great deal of time arranging the coat on its hanger. Even when that was done she stayed behind the open door of her coat closet for a moment, afraid to come back out, afraid everything she was feeling would show in her face.

“This painting is quite good. Where did you get it?”

“At the thrift store,” she said bluntly, shutting the closet door with a snap. There. A nice reminder of the chasms between their worlds.

“A good find,” he said and then turned and regarded her solemnly. “Tell me if I’m being too personal, but is it very difficult? Being a single mother?”

“At least it’s anonymous,” she said.

He looked startled and then he grinned. It erased years from his face, and made him look roguish and even more handsome than before.

The fist did that thing in her stomach again.

“You’re right. It’s not as much fun as one might think being recognized everywhere you go, having your family’s private affairs brought up for discussion by every Sergeant Crenshaw and Mrs. Brumble you meet.”

His smile reappeared, boyish and charming. “On the other hand, if being royal is my biggest problem, you should come over and give me a slap for complaining.”

“I don’t think my life’s as difficult as you imagine,” she said with dignity. “I’ve enjoyed some success as a technical writer. And I’ve written a children’s book that I have currently submitted. If that were published, it would mean a great deal of freedom for me.” She found herself blushing wildly. Why on earth had she told him about the book? She hadn’t told another soul in the whole world—except for Carly. She hurried on, “Of course, parts of bringing up a baby alone are hard. But parts of it are absolutely heavenly, and they far outweigh any challenges I face.”

He looked at the baby, busy once again dumping the basket she had just refilled. “I don’t have to ask about the heavenly part, do I?” he asked. “And the hard parts?”

“Really, I think they’re the same difficulties anyone has. Never enough time or money.” She realized everyone but him would have those kinds of problems. He was still looking at Carly, a look on his face she could not quite decipher.

“Do you have children?” she asked.

He looked at her shrewdly. “My wife, Sharon, was pregnant with our first child. A boy. They both died.”

“Oh, Damon!” His name came off her lips as though she had always spoken it, always known him so familiarly. “I’m so terribly sorry.” Still emotionally vulnerable from her visit at the police station, her eyes filled with tears again. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

“Quite frankly, it’s refreshing when someone genuinely doesn’t know. As I said, the world seems to know everything about me. Sometimes I catch a line in one of the trash papers that announces to the world something I didn’t even know about myself.”

“I don’t read them. I don’t have a television, either. I don’t know one single thing about you that you don’t know about yourself.”

He laughed at that. “Go make tea. And then I want to ask you some questions about your sister.”

She left the room and he took his cell phone out of his pocket and called Phillip to see what had become of him after he had dropped off Lady Beatrice Sheffield. He told Phillip where he was and asked him to come and get the key for Rachel’s car.

When he lowered the antenna and folded up the phone, he turned back into the room and nearly fell over the plump pink-clad baby.

“You shouldn’t sneak up on people,” he admonished her.

She cooed at him, batted thick eyelashes over eyes the exact shade of green as her mother’s. The little outfit she was wearing was fuzzy and made her look like a teddy bear.

“Quit trying to charm me,” he told her. “It won’t work. Some of the greatest in the world have given it their best shot.”

She gurgled at this, tilted her head at him, and said, “Uppie.”

“Yuppie? I think they call them something else now. And since I was born where most people want to be, I don’t qualify as upwardly mobile. A few notches down would suit me most days.”

“Uppie,” she said again, and something dangerous was happening to her mouth. It was turning down. And the brows over her eyes were furrowing downward, too.

“Puppy?” he said. He scanned the room, saw a plush purple dog sticking out of the toy box, and strode over to it, snagged it and brought it back to her. “Puppy,” he said, handing it to her.

She grabbed the dog by his long floppy ear and threw it across the room with astonishing force. “Uppie,” she shrieked.

He could hear the kettle whistling in the kitchen. Was that why Rachel wasn’t coming to his rescue? How could this huge voice be coming from such a small scrap of humanity?

“Uppie!”

Maybe it was a good thing Rachel couldn’t hear. She would think he was killing her daughter!

“Suppie?” he asked frantically. “You’re hungry, right? Your mother can fix that for you.” He began to edge his way toward the closed kitchen door. “I’ll just get her.”

A small fist tangled in his trouser leg.

He shook his leg a little, but the fist remained firm. As did the voice.

He bent over and tried to undo the little fingers, surprisingly powerful, one finger at a time.

Sweat was beginning to bead on his brow. He undid the fist, but it reattached itself to his shirt collar. Now he was caught in a most undignified position, anchored bent over, to a squalling baby.

Then, using his shirt collar, the baby pulled herself to standing. For a moment she looked gleeful, and then her arms began to windmill, and she staggered back a step. She pitched forward and wound surprisingly strong arms around his neck.

“Uppie.”

“I’m not your uppie. Or your auntie,” he told her. And then a light went on in his head. He got it, and it was so simple, he had to smile at himself for not getting it sooner. “Oh, up. Up.”

The squalling stopped, but the pause was expectant.

So he had to choose. Pick her up or run to her mother for help.

He picked her up, rather than admit there was nothing in twenty-nine years of preparing to take command of a small kingdom that had prepared him, even remotely, for a few minutes alone with twenty-five or so pounds of baby.

Somehow, when picturing his own impending fatherhood, he had only pictured magical moments. Reading baby a story while Sharon held him. Having the baby lie across his chest in front of a warm fire. Kissing him in his cradle. Teaching him to ride a pony. It had not even occurred to him how much later that step came.

Of course, with a large staff, neither he nor Sharon would have ever had to deal with shrieking.

Never mind that rather pungent odor he now noticed was coming from Miss Adorable Pink Fluff.

It occurred to him that he and Sharon, considered golden and blessed, might have missed something very, very important.

He picked the baby up, gingerly, expecting the grief inside him would shatter like glass. Expecting he would feel the bottomless sadness that he would never hold the lively weight of his own little child in his arms.

But that was not what he felt.

Instead, he took strange comfort from the solid weight of the baby, the warmth of her—even the smell of her seemed to be making his heart feel. Not broken. Whole.

She leaned her head into his shoulder, thrust her thumb in her mouth. She pulled it out, pronounced him a good boy, and her eyes fluttered closed. In seconds, she was sleeping.

Just like that. From shrieking instructions to sleeping in the blink of an eye.

He stood there like stone, not quite sure what to do, not sure what he had done to deserve such exquisite trust, and not quite sure about the great ball of tenderness that seemed to be unfurling in the center of his chest.

He glanced down at the shining gold of her curls, at the sweep of her lashes, at the roundness of her cheeks.

She was like her mother. He guessed her hair would eventually darken to that exact shade of auburn.

She nestled into him, sighed, and blew a few little bubbles out parted lips, and he found himself relaxing. When he was positive that neither he nor she was going to break, he dared look around again, and was again amazed by how compact this space was.

How did two people live in a space so tiny?

He marveled, too, at how Rachel had managed to make it look so lovely with nothing more than her own sense of style. Nothing in the room was expensive—there was no crystal, no beautiful carpets, no priceless paintings. And yet the room seemed more warm and inviting than any he had ever been in.

With the exception of the yellow nursery at home.

A thought came into his head, so preposterous that he dismissed it.

But the kettle had stopped wailing, and the child had stopped wailing and now he could hear Rachel humming in the other room, and the thought would not be chased away.

Marry her.

It was, of course, a ridiculous notion. A spell being cast on him by the little minx who was now drooling down the front of his silk shirt.

And yet, was it so ridiculous?

His parents were putting unbelievable pressure on him to find a new partner.

He liked this woman as much as any they had shoved his way. In a very short time she had earned his respect. She seemed to him to be courageous, capable and kind.

And it was a chance for him to do someone a good turn. Who would be more deserving than Rachel to be given a brand-new life? One where she could have all the time and money she needed, where she could pamper this little girl to her heart’s delight?

It would be a marriage in name only.

His heart was not into anything else. But his parents wouldn’t know that. Or his countrymen. They would just see what they wanted to see. If he provided the beautiful bride, they would provide the fairy tale.

Rachel came back into the room with tea things on a lovely, rustic tray. She looked at him holding the sleeping baby, and shook her head wryly.

“She couldn’t do that for poor Mrs. Brumble, could she?”

She set down the tea things, and took the baby from him. Her nose wrinkled. “Don’t you know how to make a great first impression?” she scolded the sleeping baby. Sending a wry look his way, she disappeared through another door.

His arms felt strangely empty when Carly was gone, his chest suddenly cold where her warmth had puddled against him. Rachel came back a few minutes later, the baby still sleeping, the wonderful aroma of baby powder coming into the room with them. She set her daughter gently in a playpen on one side of the room, tucked a little blanket around her.

He wondered if that was the baby’s bed, and thought of the empty crib at home, a beautiful piece of furniture not being used.

“Sit down,” she said. He sat on the sofa. She eyed the spot beside him for a moment and then, to his regret, took the chair at right angles from it. She poured tea in lovely, if mismatched, teacups. Probably from the thrift store, too.

He glanced at the sleeping baby, and was shocked to find that having just met her, he wanted things for her. No, more accurately, did not want certain things for her. Did not want her to grow up wearing hand-me-downs and thrift store clothes, did not want her sleeping in a playpen instead of a crib.

And there were certain things he did not want for Rachel, either. Crenshaw’s offer of a job bothered him. Despite what she had said about writing, she would obviously need to get reestablished here. He did not want her to be getting up early in the morning, kissing her baby goodbye to go spend a day doing God knew what. Being at someone like Crenshaw’s beck and call.

It blasted through his mind again. Marry Rachel.

Though, of course, there were all kinds of other things he could do if he wanted to help Rachel and Carly. He could have the crib packed up and sent to them, anonymously, along with a nice check.

Yes, that was what he would do. Very sensible.

He reminded himself sternly, when he found his eyes fastened on the fullness of Rachel’s bottom lip, why he had come here.

He wondered how he could ask her delicately if she and her sister were full sisters. If they were, naturally the missing girl could not be the Grand Duke of Thortonburg’s illegitimate daughter.

How to probe?

“Tell me about your sister,” he suggested. “What makes you think she’s missing?”

Rachel sighed, and tucked her feet under her. The floor was cold. He tried not to think of the baby playing on a cold floor. He tried not to think of Rachel opening her heating bill with dread.

“We aren’t as close as we once were,” she admitted. “Victoria didn’t like Bryan, Carly’s father, and it drove a wedge between us. Maybe even more so, when she was proved right. Still, we have always exchanged letters and calls, though maybe not as regularly as we once did. I guess I understand why the police are skeptical. It really is only a feeling I have. A feeling that something is wrong and my sister is in trouble. We’ve always been like that—very in tune with each other.”

He listened carefully as she talked about her sister. Nothing she said indicated they were anything other than full sisters. Was it possible she might not know the truth? Because he heard unspoken threads that struck him as odd. Subtle hints in her conversation told him her father favored Rachel over Victoria, and her mother Victoria over Rachel. Why?

He asked, on a hunch, to see a picture of Victoria, and Rachel went and plucked one off the top of a bookshelf. She looked at it with a tender smile, wiped a fleck of dust off it with her sleeve before she passed it to him.

He struggled to keep his face impassive. Victoria was fire compared to Rachel’s earth. She was beautiful, with cascading dark hair, and vibrant blue eyes that danced and sparkled. Her smile held a certain devilment.

Because he had just had close contact with Roland Thorton, he saw immediately the similarity. It wasn’t just her coloring, either. It was the way her lips slanted upward, the way she cocked her eyebrow, the way she tilted her head. It was in the straight line of her nose and the angle of her cheekbones. Her resemblance to this island’s most famous family was so striking, he wondered that people had not stopped in the streets to stare at her.