A Royal Marriage

“No,” she said. Even Cinderella had the good sense to run.

“I really can’t allow you to drive in the condition you’re in.”

“I’m not in bad condition!”

He laced his fingers through hers, briefly, and they both felt the trembling. Only one of them knew that she was no longer trembling out of shock and fear, but from the awakening of a heart, long left sleeping, now shaking off its slumber.

As if she’d been kissed by a prince.

You are mixing your fairy tales, Rachel, she told herself sternly.

“Do you have any authority in Thortonburg?” she asked, hiding in her teasing note the quaking of her heart, ordering herself fiercely not to overreact to a random act of kindness from a stranger.

He laughed, and the sound of it was rich and warm, and made her very aware that her life, aside from the pure joy of Carly, had become bleak and worry-filled. At times the drudgery of working and caring for a baby, trying to stretch limited funds and even more limited time, made her feel strung as tight as a bow string about to launch an arrow.

“I don’t think so. I just want to play knight to your damsel in distress. What do you say?”

No wonder this encounter was catching her so off guard. She was vulnerable. Still, she could not say no again. It had taken too much to do it the first time, used every ounce of her will power. She surrendered. “I’d like a ride home very much, Prince Montague.”

“My friends call me Damon.”

“I don’t think we qualify as friends.”

“Maybe not yet. But we will.”

He said this so easily that she felt the warmth rush up her cheeks. Really, she was just a common girl. She was not spectacular to look at, nor wildly witty and outgoing. There was nothing about her that was going to interest royalty, to make him want to be her friend, even casually. She needed to remember that.

She went ahead of him. As they passed the man who still sat slumped in the chair, Prince Montague reached out a hand and squeezed that defeated shoulder for an instant. The man sat up straighter, managed a smile. Then the prince placed one hand on her shoulder. The fabric of her coat was light, and she could feel the heat from his hand, the utter strength of the man reflected in the sureness of his grip. He guided her down the steps and to the sleek black Jaguar parked at the meters right outside the police station. A white notice was tucked under the windshield wipers.

“What do you want to bet our friend lost no time in running right out here to give this to me?” he asked, slipping it into his pocket without looking at it.

She shot a worried look across the street at her little red Volkswagen. How much was a parking ticket these days? Her budget was already stretched to breaking with the move back here to Thortonburg, and the fact she had not yet found a contract. But there was no telltale white slip on her windshield.

“I should just go put some change in my meter,” she said. “I—”

“Never mind,” he said. “I’ll look after it.”

Rachel took fierce pride in her independence. In the fact she had never asked anyone for help since Carly was born. Why did it feel so good to have someone say that? They would look after it?

For once, she would swallow her foolish pride and accept. Just for tonight, she would let herself believe in the fairy tale.

“Thank you,” she said. There. Three times. Now she owed him her life.

She wondered what it was like to be born into a family that had more money than several generations of them could spend. She wondered, as he held the door open for her and she slid into the deep leather luxury of the seats, what it felt like never to worry about money, to have as much to spend on a car as it would take to buy the small cottage that she dreamed of for herself and Carly. She had been squirreling away tiny amounts of cash toward that end since Carly had been born. But it suddenly occurred to her Carly could be a mother of three herself before she could save enough on her tight budget.

The car started with a rich purr that became a throaty growl as he put it in gear and pulled smoothly into traffic.

* * *

He found her utterly beautiful, the woman who sat beside him. Her hair, shoulder length, cut perfectly to frame the loveliness of her face, was a rich blend of colors that he did not think the term auburn did justice. Her eyes were the spectacular color of the purest jade. Her nose was small and neat and her mouth was sweet and vulnerable. There was a hint of stubbornness in the tilt of her chin.

She wore hardly a trace of makeup and the scent that wafted his way was clean and pure—soap, rather than perfume.

Her clothing, a navy blue trench coat over a white skirt and matching pumps, was plain and yet tasteful. Her hair was tucked behind her ears, and there were little white drops that matched the skirt attached to tiny earlobes.

Earlobes that begged a man’s lips to nuzzle them.

The thought shocked Damon Montague. Sergeant Crenshaw might not have been delicate about it, but he was right. Since the death of Damon’s wife just over a year ago, he’d been walking in a fog, held in the grip of a grief so deep, he was convinced it would never heal. Of course, it wasn’t just the loss of his wife.

Sharon had died bearing their first child, a son. The infant, perfectly formed, a tiny, angelic replica of Sharon, had died, too.

He knew that people thought he had everything. And once that might have been true. But the fact was, tragedy had made him long to be the most ordinary of men. Because money, position, prestige—none of it could buy him out of this place he was in. A place of feelings so raw and overwhelming, he did not know what to do with them. All his position had done was put his grief in a harsh spotlight, for viewing by the likes of Crenshaw. And now his position was making demands on him to get better. Get over it. Get on with life. Do his duty.

Even tonight, he’d come by private ferry from his island home of Roxbury to this neighboring island of Thortonburg to squire one of the many beautiful young women his well-meaning mother kept putting in his path. An unusually tall, if attractive girl, well-educated, from the best of families. Eligible, in other words.

When he’d come out of the opera to find his antenna broken, he’d felt relief, not anger. It was the perfect excuse to put the blond titan on his arm in a cab with his assistant, Phillip, and bid her adieu on the Opera Hall steps. No awkward moment when he had to try and escape kisses he had no heart for, conversation he could not stir interest in.

Other men’s stations would not demand that they remarry before their hearts had fully healed. Other men would not have to endure such pressure to put their feelings aside and produce an heir.

An heir. No, he did not think so. He spent many quiet hours locked in a nursery that would never have a baby in it now, no matter what his station demanded.

A nursery where Sharon was, still. In that silent room, sunshine-yellow, white lace at the windows, teddy bears everywhere, he could see his wife, her head thrown back in laughter, her eyes bright with the excitement of the coming baby, of the future. She could have had a staff of a dozen in there painting and decorating, but there she would be, alone, in a paint smock that stretched ever tighter over the beautiful mound of her belly, paintbrush in hand, her tongue caught between her teeth as she painted the bumblebee on the end of Pooh’s nose.

“Is something wrong?” the woman beside him asked softly.

He came back to the present with a jolt. “No,” he lied, and then realized he had wasted an opportunity. His offer to drive her home was motivated not just by a sense of wanting to help her, but a desire to know more about her missing sister.

Just recently Damon had found Prince Roland Thorton in a most compromising position with his sister, Lillian. Roland had given him some story about his own sister, an illegitimate daughter of Victor the Grand Duke of Thortonburg, having been kidnapped. Roland had come to Roxbury to investigate, to see if the Thortons’ arch enemies, the Montagues, were behind the kidnapping.

Even through his fury about Roland’s behavior with Lillian, and even through the insult of being seen as a suspect, Damon had sensed the truth in Roland’s story.

What kind of coincidence was it that Rachel’s sister, a young woman from Thortonburg, had gone missing in the very same time frame? This small group of islands in the North Atlantic were known the world over for their lack of violent crime.

Of course, the Thortons’ dilemma was top secret, and so Damon felt he couldn’t come right out and ask Rachel the questions he wanted to ask her.

“Did you know that man back there?” she asked him quietly. “The one in the police station waiting room? I thought you were a lawyer at first.”

A harder question than she knew. Damon did not know the man, but he had recognized his pain. If something good had come out of the terrible tragedy of his wife’s death, it was this: he had become a man of compassion. He recognized pain in others, and could not walk away from it.

It made him ashamed that once he had been so full of himself that he didn’t even recognize when others were hurting, let alone would have taken any steps to stop it.

“No,” he said, “I didn’t know him.”

“He seemed very lost,” she ventured.

“His son had been arrested. He didn’t know what to do. He was a simple man. A coal miner.”

“Oh, dear.”

He didn’t tell her that he had used his cell phone right there in the police station, and that his own lawyer was on his way from Roxbury to help the man. He just said, “I think it’s going to be all right.”

She smiled at him, and he liked her smile, and felt he wanted to make her do it often.

There it was again. That urge to help people in pain. Maybe because he was so helpless in the face of his own.

And yet Damon knew he must help, if it was within his power. He’d learned that life was too short to spend it engaged in ridiculous feuds. The whole world looked at, and up to the Thortons and the Montagues. Maybe they could use the prestige they had been born to, to do something really noble. Maybe they could become models of how to make the world a better place. Maybe they could actually earn some of that adoration and awe that was heaped on them at every turn.

Love one another.

He shook his head slightly, smiled wryly at himself.

A little more than a year ago he had been a man whose life was full—he managed the family’s business interests, golfed, played polo and squash, swam. He attended elaborate dinners and balls and galas with his beautiful wife, went on glorious jaunts on their yacht to places in the sun.

What in that was about making the world a better place?

An old monk, Brother Raymond, whom Damon had begun to visit regularly since his wife and son’s deaths kept telling him to look for the miracle. Kept claiming eventually there would be good coming out of this tragedy. Told him, so emphatically, with such enviable faith, that nothing, nothing, in God’s world ever happened by accident.

Damon had not believed it.

And yet tonight, sitting with this quiet woman he did not know, he felt it for the first time. Not quite a premonition. More like a glimmer. Yes, a glimmer of his becoming a man bigger and deeper than the man he was before. And even more oddly, a glimmer that the future held promise. And hope. And that somehow both would be connected to this beautiful and shy stranger who sat with such quiet composure beside him as his car pierced the night.

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