The Prince's Cinderella Bride

“Turt,” she said, beaming proudly, and held it out to him as Syd chuckled and texted.

Trev gave Ellie his usual so-patient big-brother look, took the toy from her and set it down on his other side. Ellie frowned and toddled carefully around to reach the turtle again. She bent with great concentration and picked it up. “Tev,” she said.

Trevor went on building his tower.

Sydney put her phone down. “So you’re not going to tell me?”

Resigned to continued denials, Lani dished out yet another lame evasion. “Syd, I promise you, there’s nothing to tell.” Were her pants on fire? They ought to be.

And right then, before Sydney could say anything else, Ellie cheerfully bopped Trev on the head with the rubber turtle—not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to get his full attention.

Trev scowled. “No hitting,” he said, and gave her a light shove.

She let out a cry as her baby legs collapsed and she landed, plop, on her butt. The impact caused Trevor’s shaky tower to collapse to the playroom floor.

Trev protested, “Lani! Mom! Ellie is being rude!”

Ellie promptly burst into tears.

Both women got up and went over to sort out the conflict. There were hugs and kisses for Ellie and a reminder to Trev that his sister was only one year old and he should be gentle with her.

Trev apologized. “I’m sorry, Ellie.”

And Ellie sniffed. “Tev. Sor-sor.” She sighed and laid her bright head on Sydney’s shoulder.

Then Sydney’s phone rang. She passed Ellie to Lani and took the call, after which she had to go and attend a meeting of one of her international legal aid groups. Lani was left to put the kids down for their nap.

She felt guilty and grateful simultaneously. Once again, she’d escaped having to tell Sydney that she’d had sex with Max on New Year’s Eve.

At the muffled creak of one of the tall, carved library doors, Lani glanced up from her laptop.

Max.

He wore a soft white crewneck sweater and gray slacks, and his wonderfully unruly hair shone chestnut brown in the glow from the milk-glass chandeliers above. His iron-blue eyes were on her, and her heart was galloping so fast she could hardly catch her breath.

He’d said he wanted them to be as they used to be.

Impossible. Who did he think he was kidding? There was no going back to the way it had been before. And the more she thought about it—which was all the time since their conversation in the gardener’s cottage—the more she was certain he knew that they couldn’t go back.

And she would bet that was fine with him. Because he didn’t want to go back. He wanted to be her lover, wanted more of the heat and wonder of New Year’s Eve.

And okay, she wanted that, too. And she knew it would be fabulous, perfect, beautiful. For as long as it lasted. Until things went wrong.

Because, as she’d tried so very hard to get him to see, love affairs ended. And there were too many ways it all could go bad, too large of a likelihood she’d be put on a plane back to Texas. Yes, all right. It might end amicably. But it also might not. And she wasn’t willing to risk finding out which of the two it would be.

She stared in those beautiful eyes of his and thought that she ought to confront him for being a big, fat liar, for saying how he missed her friendship when he really only wanted to get back in bed with her.

But then, who was she to get all up in anyone’s face about lying? She’d yet to tell Syd the truth. And she wanted to be Max’s lover as much as he wanted to be hers.

However, she wanted the life she had planned for herself more. Risking all of her dreams on a love affair? She’d tried that once. It hadn’t ended well.

He gave her a slow nod. “Lani.” A shiver went through her—just from the sound of her name in his mouth.

“Hi, Max,” she chirped way too brightly.

“Go on, do your work. I’m not here to distract you.”

Liar. “Great.” She flashed him a smile as bright and fake as her tone and turned her gaze back to her laptop.

He walked by her table on his way to the stairs that led to the upper level. She stared a hole in her laptop screen and saw him pass as a blur of movement, his footfalls hushed on the inlaid floor. He mounted the stairs, his back to her. The temptation was too great. She watched him go up.

At the top, he disappeared from sight and she heard another door open, no doubt to one of the locked rooms, the vaults where the rarest books and documents were kept. She wasn’t allowed into any of those special rooms without the watchful company of the ancient scholar who acted as palace librarian or one of his two dedicated assistants.

In fact, she wouldn’t be allowed into the library at all at eight o’clock at night if it wasn’t for Max.

A year ago, he’d presented her with her own key to the ornate, book-lined, two-story main room. To her, it was a gift beyond price. Now, whenever she wanted to go there, anytime of day or night, she could let herself in and be surrounded by beautiful old books, by a stunning array of original materials for her research.

Library hours were limited and pretty much coincided with the hours when she needed to be with Trev and Ellie. However, most days from about 5:00 p.m. on, Rule and Sydney enjoyed time alone with each other and their children—usually at their villa. They welcomed Lani as part of the family if she wanted to stay on in the evening, but they had no problem if she took most nights off to work on her latest book.

With the key, she could spend as many evening hours as she pleased at the library. And later, at bedtime, her room in the family’s palace apartment was right there waiting. Then, early in the morning, it was only a brisk walk along landscaped garden paths down Cap Royale, the rocky hill on which the palace stood, to Fontebleu and the villa.

Pure heaven: the laws, culture and history of Montedoro at her fingertips in the lovely, silent library with its enormous mahogany reading tables and carved, velvet-upholstered chairs. Yes, there were some language issues for her. Much of the original material was in French or Spanish. The French, she managed all right with the aid of her rusty college French and a couple of French/English dictionaries. She knew a little Spanish, but not as much as she probably should, given her Latino heritage. Max, however, spoke and read Spanish fluently and was always happy to translate for her, so the Spanish texts were completely accessible to her, too. Until New Year’s, anyway.

It had worked out so perfectly. Lani stayed at the palace several nights a week. She took her laptop and worked for hours. No one disturbed her in the library, not in the evening.

No one but Max—though he didn’t really disturb her. He came to the library at night to work, too. An internationally respected scholar and expert on all things Montedoran, he’d written a book about the special, centuries-long relationship between Montedoro and her “big sister,” France. He’d also penned any number of articles on various points of Montedoran law and history. And he traveled several times a year to speak at colleges, events and consortia around the world.

Before New Year’s, when he would join her in the library, they would sit in companionable silence as she wrote and he checked his sources or typed notes for an upcoming paper or speech. He’d always shown respect for her writing time, and she appreciated his thoughtfulness.

Sometimes, alone together in the quiet, they would put their work aside and talk. And not only in the library. Often when they met in the gardens or at some event or other, they might talk for hours. They had the same interests—writing and history and anything to do with Montedoro.

They’d shared a special kind of friendship.

Until New Year’s. Until she finally had to admit that she’d done it again: gotten in too deep with the wrong guy when she needed to be concentrating on the goals she’d set for herself, the goals that she never quite seemed to reach, no matter how hard she worked.

Right now, she should get up and leave—and she would, if only she hadn’t foolishly agreed that they could go back to the way they were before.

Right. As if that was even possible.

But still. She’d said she would try. And the hopeless romantic idiot within her wanted at the very least to remain friendly with him, to be his friend, which she had been before New Year’s, in spite of her denials the other day.

So she stayed in her seat, laptop open in front of her.

A full ten minutes passed before he reappeared on the stairs—ten minutes during which she did nothing but stare at the cursor on her screen and listen for the sound of his footsteps above and call herself five thousand kinds of stupid. When he finally did come down, he was carrying a stack of folders and books.

She waited for him to engage her in some way, her teeth hurting she was clenching them so hard. But he only took a chair across and down from her, gave her another perfectly easy, friendly nod and bent his gorgeous head over the old books and papers.

Well, okay. Apparently, he was just there to work.

Which was great. Fabulous. She put her hands on her keyboard and her focus on the screen.

Nothing happened. Her mind was a sloppy soup, a hot mess of annoyance, frustration and forbidden longing. She yearned to jump up and get out of there.

But something—her pride or her promise to him yesterday, maybe—kept her sitting there, staring blankly at her own words, which right then might have been hieroglyphics for all the sense they made to her.

Eventually, she managed to type a sentence. And then another. The writing felt stiff and unnatural. But sometimes you had to write through a distraction. Even a really big distraction, like a certain six-foot-plus hunk of regal manliness sitting across and down from you.

For two full hours, she sat there. So did he, tapping away on a tablet computer, poring over the materials he’d brought down from upstairs. She sat there and she wrote. It was all just garbage she’d end up deleting, but so what? They were being as they used to be, sitting in silence, working in the library.

Except that it was nothing like it used to be. Not to her, anyway. To her, the air felt electrically charged. Her tummy was one big knot, and the words she was writing made no sense at all.

At ten after ten, she decided she’d sat there writing meaningless drivel and pretending there was nothing wrong for long enough. She closed her laptop, gathered up her stuff and rose.

He glanced up then. “Leaving?”

She hit him with another big, fake smile. “Yeah.” She hooked her purse on her shoulder and picked up her laptop. “Good night.”

“Good night, Lani.” He bent his head to his notes again.

And somehow, she couldn’t move. She stood there like a complete fool, staring at his shining, thick hair, at his impossibly broad shoulders to which his soft white sweater clung so lovingly. She wanted to drop back into her chair and ask him about his day, to tell him the real truth—that she missed him in the deepest, most elemental part of herself. That she wished things were different, but she was not a good choice for him as a friend or a lover or anything else, and he ought to know that….

He glanced up a second time. “What is it?” he asked. Gently. Coaxingly.

“Nothing,” she lied yet again.

He began closing books and stacking papers. “I need to take everything back upstairs. Only a minute, and I’ll walk you out.”

“No, really. It’s fine, I—”

He stopped and pinned her with a look. “Wait. Please.”

The problem was, in spite of everything—all she could lose, all the ways it wasn’t going to work—she wanted to wait for him. She wanted to be his friend again.

And more. So much more…

“Fine,” she said tightly.

He tipped his head sideways. “You won’t run out on me?”

She pressed her lips together and shook her head while a frantic voice in her mind screamed, You idiot, what’s wrong with you? Get out and get out now. “I’ll be right here.”

He gathered the materials into his big arms and turned for the stairs. She stood rooted to the spot as he went up, knowing she ought to just duck out while he wasn’t looking—but somehow unable to budge.

He came back down again and picked up his tablet. “All right. Let’s go.”

A few minutes later, along a wide, marble-floored corridor on the way to Rule and Sydney’s apartment, he stopped at a gilt-trimmed blue door.

She frowned at him. “What’s this?”

He clasped the ornate gold latch and pushed the door inward. On the other side, dimly, she saw a sitting room. “An empty suite,” he said. “Come inside with me.”

She moved back a step. “Bad idea.”

He held her gaze, levelly. “A few private minutes together in a neutral setting. We’ll talk, that’s all.”

“Talk.” She said the word with complete disbelief.

“And only talk,” he insisted. He sounded sincere.

And she was tired of resisting, fighting not only him, but also herself. She wanted to go in that room with him. It was hopeless. Every minute she was near him only made her want to steal one minute more.

She let him usher her in.

He turned on a lamp. She sat on a velvet sofa and he took a floral-patterned armchair.

“All right,” she said. “Talk about what?”

“Why making love with me on New Year’s Eve has upset you so much. To me, it was exactly right, a natural step. The next step for us. I don’t understand why you can’t see that.”

She stared at him and said nothing. The truth was too dangerous.

He watched her face as though memorizing it. “I miss those black-rimmed glasses you used to wear. They made you look so serious and studious.”

She’d had laser surgery six months before. “Life is easier without them in a whole lot of ways.”

“Still, they were charming.”

She almost messed up and gave him a real smile. But not quite. “You dragged me in here to talk about how you miss my glasses?”

He set his tablet on the low table between them. “Put down your laptop.”

She had it clutched to her chest with both hands. It was comforting, actually. Like a shield against doing what she really wanted and getting too close to him. But fine. She set it down—and felt suddenly naked. “This is ridiculous.”

“I’ve been thinking it over,” he said as though she hadn’t spoken, a thoughtful frown carving twin lines between his straight, thick brows.

“Max. Why are we doing this? There’s just no point.”

He shrugged. “Of course there’s a point. You. Me. That something special between us.”

“You still love your wife,” she accused. And yeah, it was a cheap shot, the kind of thing a jealous girlfriend looking for promises of forever might be worried about. Lani was not looking for promises of any kind, no way.

He answered without heat. “My wife is gone. It’s almost four years now. This is about you and me.”

“See?” she taunted, childishly. Jealously. “You’re not denying that you’re still in love with her. She’s still the one who’s in your heart.”

Something happened in his wonderful face then. Some kind of withdrawal. But then, in an instant, he was fully engaged again. “This is not about Sophia. And we both know that. You’re just blowing smoke.”

Busted. “Can’t you just…? I mean, there have to be any number of women you could have sex with, be friends with, any number of women who would jump at the chance to get something going with you.”

His mouth twitched. What? He thought this was funny? “Any number of women simply won’t do. I want only one, Lani. I want only you.”

Okay. Crap. That sounded good. Really, really good. She made herself glare at him. “You’re working me. I know what you’re doing.”

He sat there so calmly, looking every inch the prince he was, all square-jawed and achingly handsome and good-hearted and pulled-together. And sincere and fair. And way, way too hot. “If working you is telling you the truth, then yes. I am shamelessly working you. I waited five endless weeks for you to come to me again, to tell me whatever it is that’s keeping you away from me. It was too long. So I took action. I’m not giving up. I’m not. And if you could only be honest, I think you would admit that you don’t want me to give up.”

Why did he have to know that? It wasn’t fair. And she needed, desperately, to get out of there. She grabbed her laptop and popped to her feet. “I need to go.”

He shifted, but he didn’t rise. He stared up the length of her and straight into her eyes. “No, Lani. You need to stay. You need to talk to me.”

Talk to him. Oh, no. Talking to him seemed only to get her in deeper, which was not what she wanted.

Except for when it was exactly what she wanted.

He arched a brow and asked so calmly, “Won’t you please sit back down?”

She shut her eyes tight, drew in a slow, painful breath—and sat. “I’m not…ready for any of this with you, Max.”

He reached out and took her laptop from her and carefully set it back on the low table. “Not ready, how?”

Her arms felt too empty. She wrapped them around herself. “It’s all too much, too…consuming, you know? Too overwhelming. And what about the children?” she demanded.

He only asked, “What about them?”

“They have a right to a nanny who isn’t doing their daddy.”

“And they have just such a nanny. Her name is Gerta—and in any case, you’re not doing me, not anymore.”

She let out a hard, frustrated breath. “I’m just saying it’s impossible. It’s too much.”

He kept right on pushing her. “What you feel for me, you mean?”

She nodded, frantically. “Yes. That. Exactly that.”

“So…I’m too much?” His voice poured through her, deep and sweet and way too tempting. It wasn’t fair, that he should be able to do this to her. It made keeping her distance from him way too hard.

She bobbed her head some more and babbled, “Yes. That’s right. Too much.”

“I’m too much and Michael Cort wasn’t enough?”

Michael. Oh, why had she told him about Michael? She’d dated the software designer until she saw Sydney with Rule and realized that what she had with Michael was…exactly what Max had just said it was: not enough. “You and Michael are two different things,” she insisted, and hated how wimpy and weak she sounded.

“But we’re the same in the sense that Michael Cort and I are both men you decided not to see anymore.”

“Uh-uh. No. I was with Michael for over a year—and yes, I then decided to break it off. But you and me? We’re friends who slept together. Once.”

His eyes gleamed. “So then, we are friends?”

She threw up both hands. “All right. Have it your way. We’re friends.”

“Thank you, I will—and about Michael Cort…”

“There is nothing more to say about Michael.”

“Except that I’m not in the same league with him vis-à-vis you, correct?” He waited for her to answer. When she didn’t, he mildly remarked, “Ouch.”

God. Did he have to be so calm and reasonable on top of all the hotness and being so easy to talk to and having the same interests as she did? He was a quadruple threat. At least. “Can we just not talk about Michael?”

“All right. Tell me why you find this thing between us…how did you put it? ‘Overwhelming’ and ‘consuming’ and ‘too much.’”

“Isn’t that self-evident?”

“Tell me anyway.”

Against her better judgment, she went ahead and tried. “Well, I just…I don’t have time to be consumed with, er, passion, now. There are only so many hours in a day and I…” Dear Lord. Not enough time to be consumed with passion? Had she really said that?

“Tell me the rest,” he prompted evenly.

She groaned. “It’s only that, well, my dad’s a wonderful teacher, the head of the English department at Beaufort State College in Beaufort, Texas, which is west of Fort Worth…” He was frowning, no doubt wondering what any of that had to do with the subject at hand—and why wouldn’t he wonder? For a person who hoped someday to write for a living, she was doing a terrible job of keeping to the point and making herself understood.

“You told me months ago that your father’s a teacher,” he reminded her patiently.

“My father is successful. He’s head of his department. My mother’s a pediatrician. And my big brother, Carlos, owns five restaurants. Carlos got married last year to a gorgeous, brilliant woman who runs her own dancing school. In my family, we figure out what we want to do and we get out there and do it. Okay, we don’t rule principalities or anything. But we contribute to our community. We find work we love and we excel at it.”

“You have no problem then. You have work you love and you’re very good at it.”

“Yes, I’m good with children, and I love taking care of Trev and Ellie.”

“You’re an excellent nanny, I know. But that isn’t the work you love, really, is it?”

She folded her hands in her lap and stared down at them—and wandered off topic some more. “My dad wanted me to follow in his footsteps and be a teacher. From the first, I knew I wanted to write. He said I could do both. Of course, he was right. But I didn’t want to do it his way, didn’t want to teach. We argued a lot. And the truth is I wasn’t dedicated to my writing, not at first. I had some…difficulties. And I took my sweet time getting through college.”

“Difficulties?”

Why had she even hinted at any of that? “Just difficulties, that’s all.”

“You’re not going to tell me, are you?”

She shook her head tightly and went on with her story. “My parents would have paid for my education, even though they weren’t happy with my choices. But I was proud. I wanted to make it on my own.”

“You were proud?” he teased.

She felt her cheeks grow warm. “Okay, yeah. I am proud. I met Syd and we were like sisters from the first. I went to work for her, became her live-in housekeeper before she had Trev, to help put myself through school. And then once I got my degree, I stayed on with her, working for her, but with plenty of time to write. I worked hard at the writing, but it never took off for me. I lacked focus. Until I came here, until I knew the stories I wanted to write. And now I do know, Max. Now I’ve got the focus and the drive that I need, plus the stories I want to tell.”

Max was sitting forward in the chair, his gray-blue gaze intense. “Have I somehow given you the idea that I think you should stop writing and spend every spare moment in bed with me?”

“Uh, no. No, of course you haven’t. It’s just that I have goals and I need to meet them. I need, you know, to make something of myself. I really do, Max.”

He went on leaning forward in the chair, watching her. And she had that feeling she sometimes got around him, the feeling that used to make her all warm and fuzzy inside, because he knew her, he understood her. Too bad that lately, since New Year’s, that feeling made her worry that he knew too much about her, and that he would use what he knew to push her to do things his way. He said, “You want your parents to be proud of you—and you don’t feel that they are right now.”

Her mouth went dry. She licked her lips. “I didn’t say that.”

He went further. “You’re embarrassed that it bothers you, what your parents think. Because you’re twenty-nine years old and you believe you should be beyond trying to live up to their ideals. But you’re not beyond it, Lani. You’re afraid that it will somehow get out that we’ve been lovers and that your mother and father will read about it in the tabloids, tacky stories of the nanny shagging the prince. You’re afraid they’ll judge you in all the ways you’re judging yourself. You’re afraid they’ll think less of you, and you already feel they look down on you as it is.”

“No. Really, they’re good people. They don’t look down on me, and I love them very much.”