Читать книгу Tempted By The Royal - Michelle Celmer - Страница 14

Molly knew Eric would show up at her door the next morning. She only hoped to have a cup of coffee in her system before she had to face him again—a hope that was obliterated when the knock sounded just as she was measuring grinds into the filter. She set the basket into place, pressed the button and went to respond to his knock.

He was dressed casually in a pair of jeans and a collared T-shirt, much as he’d been the first night he walked into the bar. And though he looked better than any man had a right to look, there certainly wasn’t anything about his appearance or his attire that warned he was a prince. And even now, even knowing all the details she’d learned from the Internet, she found it difficult to think of him as royalty. She could only remember that he was a man—a man she’d taken to her bed and with whom she’d shared intimacies and pleasures she’d never before imagined.

“Good morning,” he said.

To which she responded with a barely civil, “Come in.”

“A little out of sorts this morning?”

“I work nights,” she reminded him. “The hours before noon aren’t my best time.”

“Should I come back?”

She shook her head. “We might as well just get this over with.”

His lips quirked. “What, exactly, are we getting over?”

“The awkward morning-after conversation that we managed to avoid the morning after.” She reached into the cupboard for two mugs, filled both with coffee, then slid one across the table to him.

He’d drank black coffee at the bar that night, she remembered, which was good because she didn’t have any cream. She dumped a generous spoonful of sugar into her own cup and stirred. She planned to make the switch to decaf soon, but the doctor had assured her a couple of cups a day wouldn’t hurt the baby and she needed the caffeine right now.

“Well, you could explain why you didn’t want Scott and Fiona to know we’d met before.”

“Because they would have had questions about how and when, and I wasn’t sure how to answer.” She sipped her coffee, felt it churn uneasily in her stomach.

“How about the truth?”

“The whole truth?”

“I’m not ashamed of what happened between us. We’re both adults, we were attracted to one another, we acted upon that attraction.”

“I don’t do one night stands with strangers,” she told him.

“I seem to recall you telling me that already—right before you invited me back to your apartment.”

She felt her cheeks flush at the reminder—or maybe it was the heat in his gaze that was causing her own body temperature to rise. She wasn’t in the habit of having sex with men she barely knew, and she’d never had sex with a man she’d met only a few hours earlier. But she’d let herself give in to the yearning because she never expected to see him again.

It was supposed to be a crazy, once-in-a-lifetime impulse, a chance to prove to herself that she could be wild and spontaneous and not tie herself up in knots about it forever after. Except that it turned out to be a crazy, once-in-a-lifetime impulse that was going to have some major, long-term repercussions.

Repercussions Prince Eric still didn’t know about.

“Just because I slept with you once doesn’t mean I’ll do so again just because circumstances have thrown us together and it’s convenient.”

He smiled at her across the table—a smile that made all of her bones turn to jelly and made her grateful she was sitting down.

“I wasn’t thinking about the convenience factor so much as the it-was-really-great-sex factor.”

“The only reason I made an exception to my rule was because I didn’t expect to ever see you again.”

“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again, either,” he admitted. “And yet, you’ve been on my mind almost constantly over the past few weeks, and it was always my plan upon returning to Texas to find you.”

“That wasn’t our agreement,” she reminded him.

“So let’s make a new agreement.”

“What do you propose—lots of hot sex in the few weeks leading up to Scott and Fiona’s wedding, after which I go back to serving drinks and you go back to doing whatever it is a royal does?”

Something in her tone must have given her away, because his brows lifted. “You’re annoyed that I didn’t tell you I’m a prince,” he guessed.

“Do you think?”

“Why don’t I remember your affinity for sarcasm?”

“Maybe because we really didn’t know one another at all before we fell into bed together.”

“Are you saying your decision to sleep with me would have been different if you’d know I was a prince?”

“Yes,” she asserted vehemently.

“Why?”

“Because then I would have known that I meant nothing more to you than another conquest in another town.”

Even as she spoke the words, she realized how hypocritical they sounded. After all, she was the one who’d insisted that a one night stand was all she wanted.

But he didn’t point out this fact. Instead he said, “You were never a conquest. You were a beautiful woman who intrigued me as no woman has done in a very long time.”

She wanted to believe him, but she couldn’t get past the fact that he was a prince and she’d been rejected by too many average guys to believe that she could have captured the attention of someone so extraordinary.

“I’m not going to sleep with you again.”

He lifted his cup to his lips, drank. “I got the impression, when Fiona asked you about coming to Tesoro del Mar, that you wanted to refuse.”

“It’s not that I wanted to,” she denied. “It’s just not a great time for me to be leaving the country.”

“Is that the truth? Or is it that you didn’t want to be with me?”

“You weren’t a factor in my decision,” she lied.

“No?” he challenged softly and, reaching across the table, brushed his knuckles down her cheek.

The gentle caress sent tingles down her spine, and when she responded with another no, it sounded almost like a sigh.

He smiled. “Well, I’m glad you are coming. Tesoro del Mar is a beautiful country, and I will look forward to showing it to you.”

“I’m going for Fiona, not for a vacation.”

“There’s no reason you can’t do both.”

She shook her head. “I really can’t be away from my business for too long.”

“You don’t have a manager?”

“I’m the manager.”

“But you don’t work every single shift,” he guessed.

“No,” she admitted. Karen had shared the managerial duties for a few years now, usually covering the dinner shift so that Molly had a break between lunch and evening duties and could take the occasional day off. “But I’m never too far away if there’s a problem.”

“Is it that you don’t trust your manager to take care of things in your absence?” he wondered. “Or that you don’t trust yourself to be alone with me?”

“There’s nothing wrong with your ego, is there?”

He only grinned. “I don’t recall you having complaints about my ego—or any of my other parts—when we were together.”

No—there had definitely been no reason to complain and no ability to do so when she was writhing and moaning with pleasure.

“Are we finished here?” she asked, deliberately ignoring his comment. “Because I have to be downstairs for a delivery in about ten minutes.”

He pushed his chair away from the table. “Fiona will let you know the travel arrangements.”

“Thanks.” She followed him to the door.

He stepped out onto the landing, then pivoted back to face her again. “And the answer to your question is no—we’re not even close to being finished here.”

Molly was in a mood when she went down to the bar and she knew it. She was tired and she was cranky and it was all Eric’s fault. As if it wasn’t enough to find out that the man she’d picked up in her own bar was a prince, now he’d suddenly reappeared in her life, wanting to pick up right where they left off.

Of course, he didn’t know that the last time they’d gotten naked and horizontal together, they’d made a baby. She was certain that little bit of information would make him reconsider his pursuit of her, but she definitely wasn’t ready to share.

You have to tell him.

She sighed even as she cursed the nagging voice of her conscience. She knew she had to tell him. She would tell him. Just not yet. Not until she was feeling a little less flustered and emotional about everything.

Okay—that might take a little longer than the seven months remaining before her due date, so maybe that wasn’t a reasonable guideline.

After the wedding, she decided. She would be close to the end of the first trimester by then and there wouldn’t be any reason for them to remain in contact afterward if he didn’t want to.

She nodded, satisfied with that reasoning. “After the wedding.”

“What wedding?”

She hadn’t realized she’d spoken the thought out loud until Dave, the delivery man from the local liquor store responded with the question.

She scrawled her name on the bill he presented to her and shook her head. “I’m babbling to myself. Obviously I’ve got too much on my mind.”

“My brother talks to himself all the time,” Dave told her. “My mother thinks he’s a genius. My dad just thinks he’s nuts.”

“There’s probably a fine line there,” Molly said.

“Which side do you fall on?” he asked curiously.

“Nuts,” she said. “Definitely certifiably insane.”

She had to be if she was still attracted to a man who’d messed up every single aspect of her life.

“Admitting a problem is the first step toward getting help,” he said, and winked at her.

She restocked the shelf behind the bar, then carried the extra inventory to the storage room. The boxes were heavy, and though the weight wasn’t anything she couldn’t handle right now, she knew there would come a time when she would have to stop that kind of lifting. She wouldn’t do anything that would jeopardize the well-being of her child.

But, as she stifled another yawn, she found herself worrying that she might already be jeopardizing her baby’s well-being. She was tired—physically and mentally exhausted. Was that normal in the first few months of pregnancy? Or were the erratic hours at the restaurant taking an additional toll on her body?

She’d had to drag herself out of bed this morning, and she’d turned the shower spray to cool to jolt herself awake. What she’d told Eric was true—she’d never been at her best in the mornings, but she wasn’t usually so grumpy.

Even when she’d been in high school and had to get up for classes in the morning, she often worked late to help her dad. When she was a teen, he’d been strict about keeping her away from the bar, but when the last customer was gone and the door was locked at the end of the night, she would come out of the kitchen to help him with the clean-up of the restaurant and the close-out of the register and anything else that needed to be done.

She’d loved that time of night, the quiet camaraderie they’d shared. Just thinking about it now, she felt an aching emptiness inside. Her father had been gone for almost ten years now, but there still wasn’t a day that went by that she didn’t think about him and how much she missed him.

He’d been in her thoughts even more than usual recently, and she wondered if that was because she so desperately wanted to tell someone about the baby she carried. She knew her father would have been disappointed about the circumstances of her pregnancy, but he would have been thrilled about the child. Family had always been the most important part of life to James Shea, with even the bar running a distance second.

When his wife bailed on him after fifteen years of marriage, he’d raised his daughters alone, and he’d raised them with love and compassion. If he’d had one regret, it was that Maureen had cut all ties when she’d walked out. He felt it was important for children to have the love of both parents, and he always lamented the fact that he couldn’t give that to his daughters.

He wouldn’t approve of Molly’s decision not to tell Eric about her pregnancy, of that she had no doubt. Not that she wasn’t ever going to tell him, she reminded that nagging voice in the back of her mind, just that she needed some more time to assimilate what she’d learned about her baby’s father before she told him he was going to be a father.

She thought about how her dad would react to that bit of information.

“You always were my princess,” he would have said with a smile. “And now you’ll have the title to prove it.”

Because he would also assume that, being pregnant with Eric’s baby, she would marry him—whether or not it was what either of them wanted. Yes, family was important to James Shea, and so was responsibility, as he’d proven when he married Molly’s mother after learning that she was carrying his child.

But that was thirty-one years ago, and even if Eric offered marriage as a solution, she knew it wasn’t one she could accept. It certainly wasn’t a solution that had worked for her parents. Not that they hadn’t tried—at least for a while. But in the end, Maureen Shea had woke up one morning and, looking around, decided she didn’t like what her life had become and walked away from everything.

Molly didn’t think she would ever understand how a woman could walk away from her child like that—cutting all ties and never looking back. Instinctively, her hand went to her still-flat tummy. Though her baby was just starting to be, she was already overwhelmed with love for her child and she vowed silently but vehemently to always be there for her baby.

Which meant that she had to start giving serious consideration to the day-to-day practicalities of parenthood. In particular, she needed to consider what was she going to do when she had a child of her own—could she continue to serve customers with a playpen behind the bar? And even if that worked for the first several months, she couldn’t keep a toddler confined to a mesh-cage for a six-hour shift any more than she could allow him free rein to crawl around the restaurant.

But what other option did she have?

Sell.

The answer popped into her head from nowhere—or maybe it had been lurking in the back of her mind since Abbey had first spoken of the possibility after their father died.

Her sister had broached the subject a few more times since then, but Molly had always balked. Shea’s was their legacy, the only thing they had left that was their father’s.

And even if they sold the bar, even if they found a buyer, what would she do after? Who would hire her? She had no real skills, no experience, and now she had a baby on the way.

You could write.

This time the voice in head sounded suspiciously like her grandmother’s, and the words were a familiar refrain.

Even as a child, she’d had stories in her head. Her father had enjoyed the fanciful tales she’d spun and appreciated that her narratives entertained his customers; her grandmother had always insisted that Molly was a born storyteller. Molly only knew that there were characters and scenes constantly spinning around in her mind and she had a drawerful of notebooks in which she’d jotted down those ideas in an attempt to clear them from her mind.

But while she might occasionally fantasize about being a writer, she didn’t have any illusions that she could simply decide to make that kind of career change and expect to pay the bills. So what could she do?

She felt the sting of tears in her eyes as the questions came at her from all directions. Questions without apparent answers. Problems without any solutions.

She sat on a stool and pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes and wished again that her father was here. Since he’d passed away, she’d been the mature and responsible one—the one everyone else turned to for help, the shoulder that others cried on. For once—just once—she wanted a shoulder to cry on, strong arms to wrap around her, someone she could count on and believe in and—

She shook her head, furiously pushing aside the image of Eric Santiago that managed to steal into her mind. How could she even think about leaning on him when he was the one who’d started her world spinning out of control? She couldn’t. No way, no how.

Molly would handle this current predicament as she’d handled everything else in her life since her father died—on her own.

Eric managed to stay away from the restaurant and the temptation of Molly for three days. On day four, he decided he wanted to go out for lunch, and found himself driving toward Shea’s. She was right in saying that they didn’t know one another very well, but what he found more interesting than this assertion was her determination to keep him at a distance so that she wouldn’t get to know him.

This time when he entered the restaurant, he saw Molly not standing behind the bar but seated at it, talking to another woman beside her. He wasn’t going to interrupt, but it was almost as if she was as attuned to his presence as he was to hers, because she looked up and her eyes met his.

He smiled, and she smiled back, albeit tentatively.

As if cluing in to the silent exchange, the woman seated beside Molly looked up. The two women looked enough alike that he would have guessed they were sisters, though he hadn’t known that she had a sister, which again proved her point that there was a lot they didn’t know about one another.

Molly was wearing slim-fitting jeans and a sleeveless blouse with tiny little flowers embroidered on the collar. Practical yet feminine, he thought, and so perfectly suited to Molly. Her sister was wearing a dress with a criss-cross tie down the back that drew attention to her curves and strappy sandals with pencil-thin heels. Her hair wasn’t as long or as dark as Molly’s and was streaked with lighter strands.

His gaze moved back to Molly, noting the hair that was pulled away from her face in a ponytail, the deep blue eyes surrounded by thick dark lashes, full lips that were slicked with clear gloss, and he felt the now-familiar stir of desire low in his belly.

“Just in the neighborhood?” Molly asked.

“Just hungry,” he said. “And I heard they serve a pretty good lunch in here.”

“You heard right,” Molly said. Then, at the nudge from her sister, she made the introductions.

“This is my sister, Abbey,” she told him. Then to Abbey, “Meet Prince Eric Santiago.”

“Prince Eric?”

“Scott’s best friend,” Molly explained to her sister.

“The best man,” Abbey said, and lifted a brow. “And are you? The best, I mean.”

Eric looked at Molly, who rolled her eyes.

“You’re married,” she reminded her sister.

“Separated,” Abbey said.

“And Eric came in for a meal, not an interrogation.” Molly stood and, grabbing a menu from the counter, led him to a booth in the corner.

“I wouldn’t mind some company,” he said, sliding into the booth.

“You want me to send my sister over?”

“I meant your company,” he clarified.

“Sorry, I have to finish up next week’s schedule.”

He hadn’t really expected that she would accept his invitation.

For reasons he couldn’t even begin to fathom, she was edgy around him, almost antagonistic. Instead of dissuading him, her attitude only made him all the more determined to break through her barriers and rediscover the warm, wonderful woman he knew was inside.

“You could do that here—unless you think I’m too much of a distraction.”

“You’re just too much.”

He grinned. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“You would.” She dropped the menu on the table, then with a sigh, she slid into the seat across from him. “You have a way of irritating me so that I forget I’m trying to be nice.”

“Why does it take such an effort?”

“Because you rub me the wrong way.”

He let his eyes rake over her, in a slow and very hot perusal, before he said, “That’s not how I remember it.”

She huffed out a breath. “You see? That’s exactly what I’m talking about. I’m attempting to have a normal conversation and you keep throwing out these little references to a night I’m trying to forget.”

“Why are you trying to forget?”

“Because it’s over and done and it’s not going to happen again.”

“It seems to me that if forgetting is such an effort, it’s not nearly as over and done as you want to believe.”

She drew in a deep breath, expelled it slowly, deliberately.

“I wanted to say that hosting the wedding in Tesoro del Mar is an incredibly kind and generous thing to do.”

“And you’re surprised that I can be kind and generous?” he couldn’t resist teasing.

“No,” she said. “I’m just trying to thank you for turning what could have been a disaster into a celebration.”

“My motives aren’t entirely noble.”

“No?”

“I want to spend time with you, Molly, and you’ll have a lot fewer excuses to avoid me when we’re in Tesoro del Mar.”

“You made the offer before you even knew I was Fiona’s maid of honor,” she pointed out.

“Guilty,” he admitted. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not willing to take advantage of the fact.”

“I’m flattered by your interest, Eric, really. But I’m not looking for a relationship right now.”

“Why not?”

“My reasons aside, I can’t believe you’re looking to get involved with a bartender.”

“I’m not a snob, Molly.”

“But you’re a prince, and I can’t imagine a foreigner with neither a title nor a fortune would ever be a suitable companion—even temporarily—for a royal.”

He couldn’t help but smile at that. “Both of my sisters-in-law used to think the same way. Lara was an Irish nanny. Jewel was an American horse trainer.”

“And your point?”

“Well, I’m not asking you to marry me.”

She responded to his assurance with a small smile, and he felt another tug inside. It was warmer and softer than desire, but somehow stronger, too. And he realized he would do almost anything to earn another one of those smiles, for more quiet moments like this one.

“But when we get to the island,” he continued, “I might ask to show you around.”

She studied him for a moment, those deep blue eyes considering, before she said, “And if you ask nicely, I just might say yes.” Then she slid out of the booth. “Enjoy your lunch.”

As Eric watched her walk away, appreciating the way worn denim molded to a nicely toned derriere, he was pleased with her response. It was a small step forward, but after so many in retreat, at least it was progress.