Tempted By The Royal

“We met at Harcourt,” Scott explained to Eric.

“And he took me back there to ask me to marry him,” Fiona said, suddenly sobbing harder.

Yeah, Eric was definitely out of his element, and desperately wracked his brain for a solution—any solution—to stop the tears.

“Okay, so we’ll postpone the wedding for a few months,” Scott suggested.

“We’ve already sent out the invitations, ordered the cake, the flowers and—”

“I said postpone,” her fiancé interjected, “not cancel.”

She sighed. “It seems like we’ve been waiting so long already, and I just want to be married to you.”

“Then let’s do it,” Scott said impulsively. “Let’s forget all the chaos and crises, hop onto a plane to Vegas and get married.”

Fiona’s nose wrinkled. “Vegas?”

“I know it’s not what we’d planned, but we can have a big, blowout reception back here in a few months, when Harcourt Castle is reopened.”

His fiancée still hesitated.

Eric had never been to Vegas, but he’d seen enough movies to form an impression of the city and he could understand Fiona’s reluctance. She wanted ambience and elegance, and what Scott was offering was loud and garish. Okay, maybe that wasn’t an entirely fair assessment considering that he’d never stepped foot in the town, but he thought he’d gotten to know his friend’s fiancée well enough during his last visit to be certain it wasn’t what she’d envisioned.

“Vegas,” she said again, more contemplative than critical this time.

He figured it was a testament to how much Fiona loved Scott that she was even considering it.

“Or you could hop on a plane to a picturesque island in the Mediterranean and have a quiet ceremony on the beach and an intimate reception at the royal palace,” Eric offered as an alternative.

The future bride and groom swiveled their heads in his direction.

“Could we?” Scott asked.

“You said it was a small wedding?”

“Fifty-two guests,” his friend confirmed.

“We’d need to charter a plane but otherwise, there shouldn’t be any problem. So long as there’s nothing going on at the palace on that date, we could fly everyone in a few days early for a brief vacation on the island, then have the wedding as planned on Saturday.”

Fiona glanced from Eric to Scott and back again. “That sounds awfully expensive,” she said, but the sparkle was back in her eyes, revealing her enthusiasm.

“It would be my wedding gift to you,” Eric told her.

“A Crock-Pot is a wedding gift,” she said. “What you’re offering is…a dream.”

He shrugged. “You make my best friend happy. If this makes you happy, it’s a fair trade.”

Her smile was radiant. “Then I’ll say ‘thank you.’ But we’ll stick with Scott’s plan to hold a formal reception back here in a few months and just have immediate family for the ceremony in Tesoro del Mar. And Molly, my maid of honor, of course.”

When Molly arrived at the ranch, she was both surprised and immensely relieved to learn that the crisis had already been diverted.

“I didn’t think anything could be more romantic than being married at Harcourt House,” Fiona gushed, all smiles instead of tears now. “But a wedding at a royal palace might just top everything else.”

Molly sank down onto the arm of a chair. “A royal palace?”

“Scott’s in the other room with Eric now, confirming the arrangements.”

The butterflies were swarming again.

Eric. The best man. The friend of Scott’s that Fiona had been talking about for months who somehow had access to a royal palace. Could it be—

No. It wasn’t possible. She’d just been so unnerved by the realization that her baby’s father was a prince that she was jumping to conclusions. Because as much as her cousin had talked about the best man, Fiona had never mentioned that he was royalty. Molly definitely would have remembered that.

She managed to smile. “So where is this royal palace?”

“It’s on an island in the Mediterranean called Tesoro del Mar. I’d never even heard of it before I met Eric, and I didn’t even know he was a prince until a few days ago. Scott said they’ve been friends for so long he doesn’t think about the fact that Eric is in line for the throne, but I nearly fainted when I found out. Can you believe the best man at my wedding is a prince?”

“Unbelievable,” Molly agreed, as thoughts and questions whipped around in her mind like dry leaves in a hurricane. And before she could grasp hold of even one of them, he was there.

He was standing in front of her—okay, across the room, but the distance did nothing to dilute the effect of his presence. His legs were as long as she remembered, his shoulders as broad, his jaw as strong, his eyes as dark.

Yes, she remembered all of the details—the thickness of his hair, the curve of his lips, the skill of his hands. But she hadn’t quite remembered—maybe hadn’t let herself remember—how completely fascinating he was as a whole.

He smiled at Fiona. “Everything’s confirmed.”

She threw her arms around his neck. “Oh, thank you, Eric. You’re the best.”

“That’s why he’s the best man,” Scott said, unconcerned by the fact that his fiancée was embracing another man. Eric chuckled.

The sound of that laugh, warm and rich and familiar, sent shivers down her spine, tingles to her center.

It was Scott who spotted Molly first, and he smiled. “Hey, Molly.”

Eric’s head turned. His gaze locked on hers, and widened in shock.

Molly thought she had some idea just how he felt.

“Eric—” Scott turned to his friend “—you haven’t met Molly yet, have you?”

“No, we haven’t,” Molly answered before he could, rising to her feet and praying that her wobbly legs would support her.

“But I’ve certainly heard a lot about her,” Eric said, his eyes never leaving Molly’s face.

She definitely hadn’t remembered everything—like how one look could make her pulse race and her knees quiver, as her pulse was racing and her knees were quivering now.

“And here she is,” Scott said. And to Molly, “This is His Royal Highness, Prince Eric Santiago of Tesoro del Mar.”

“Should I curtsy?” she asked lightly.

“No need,” he said.

She didn’t actually remember offering her hand, but she found it engulfed in his, cradled in his warmth. It was a simple handshake—there was nothing at all inappropriate about it. And yet she felt her cheeks heat, her skin burn, as memories of his hands on her body assaulted her mind from every direction.

The heat in his eyes told her that he was also remembering, and though her mind warned her to back away, her body yearned to shift close, closer.

“It’s a pleasure to see you, Molly,” he said in that low, sexy voice that had whispered much more intimately and explicitly in her ear as they’d rolled around on her bed together.

“Oh, we’re going to have so much fun together in Tesoro del Mar,” Fiona said, then to Molly, “You will come, won’t you?”

A wedding on a Mediterranean island sounded romantic enough, throw in a royal palace, and Molly could understand why her cousin was glowing with excitement and anticipation. And no matter how much Molly’s brain warned that going to Tesoro del Mar was a very bad idea—that going anywhere with Eric Santiago was a very bad idea—she couldn’t refuse something that meant so much to Fiona.

So she ignored the knots in her stomach and forced a bright smile. “Of course I’ll be there. You can hardly get married without your maid of honor.”

Fiona threw her arms around Molly, just as she’d done with Eric, and hugged her tight. “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you.”

Molly hugged her back. “I just want your wedding to be perfect for you.”

“It will be now,” her cousin said confidently.

Molly was pleased that Fiona’s problems were solved, but couldn’t help but think her own had just multiplied.

It had been unsettling enough to accept that she was pregnant with a stranger’s baby, but learning that the stranger was her cousin’s fiancé’s best friend added a whole other layer of complications. And she couldn’t help but wonder how differently everything might have played out if she’d known two months ago what she knew now about Prince Eric Santiago.

“Okay, now that the crisis has been resolved, I should get back to work,” Molly said, eager to make her escape.

But she felt the heat of Eric’s gaze on her as she made her way to the door, and acknowledged that this new information might not have changed anything. Because even now, she wanted him as much as she’d wanted him then.

This time, however, she was determined to prove stronger than the desire he stirred inside of her.

At least, she hoped she would.

Chapter Four

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.