Beauty and the Reclusive Prince / Executive: Expecting Tiny Twins

“All you want to do is run this restaurant and make your father happy. You’ll never have children. You’ll be content to be an old maid, clucking like an old hen over your aging chicks, those worthless brothers and your old, sick father.”

She could dismiss Gino with no effort at all, but his words didn’t fade away quite so easily. The things he’d said echoed in her mind all the time lately. Was it true? Was she really so wrapped up in her little family that she’d lost the knack of feeling like a desirable woman? Would she never have room for a man in her life? What if he was right? What if there was something wrong with her?

But the things she’d been through tonight were relieving some of those doubts. She was all right. She could relate to men, on the level of friendship at the very least. Marcello obviously liked her and they got along famously.

And Max…He’d kissed her, hadn’t he? It had been a light, gentle gesture of healing, but still…A kiss was a kiss. Even in her ugly, bruised condition, he’d felt a pull in her direction. And she’d felt it too.

And that was just the problem. She couldn’t remember when she’d felt such a thrill at a man’s touch. It had been years. But was there any promise there? Of course not.

Come on, Isabella, she chided herself a bit sadly. He’s a prince. You work in a restaurant. So what if there seems to be a sensual connection that flares between the two of you every time your eyes meet? He may find you amusing for the moment—though evidence of that is pretty skimpy—but there is no way anything real can happen between the two of you. So you might as well forget it.

Marcello finished up giving her stitches and began to pack his equipment away in his little black doctor bag. He and Max talked back and forth for a moment, and then the prince said something that chilled her.

“We’re going to have to beef up security around here,” he was saying, not even looking her way. “I don’t want anyone near the river.”

She turned to look at him. Whenever the river was brought up, there was some undercurrent of emotion that she couldn’t quite pin down. What was it about the river that had so spooked this family?

“The dogs don’t do the trick?” Marcello said.

Max shrugged. “The dogs can’t be everywhere all the time. And they have to sleep. They’re dogs.”

Marcello grinned. “That they are. Have you thought of hiring guards?”

“No.” He flashed a warning look at his cousin. “You know I can’t do that.”

Marcello shrugged with resignation. “Of course.”

“We’ll put in an alarm service, with cameras. We’ll get state-of-the-art security going around here. No one will be able to slip through the cracks again.” He shrugged. “We should have done it long ago.”

Isabella sighed. That meant she wouldn’t get a second chance. What was she going to do? Hire James Bond? It didn’t seem likely.

Marcello headed back to his room to get some sleep. Isabella felt a flutter of nerves at being alone with Max again, but he treated her with distant politeness, making her sit closer to the fire to dry her hair while he dispatched poor Renzo off to get her car and bring it up for her. And then he began to pace the room again, staying as far away from her as he could manage.

Her conversational gambits seemed to have dried up with Marcello out of the room. She fluffed her hair in the warmth of the fire and racked her brain for a subject as the silence between the two of them got louder.

“I like your cousin,” she said at last, risking a quick look his way. “And I appreciate the medical attention.” She threw him a quick smile and made an attempt at a light joke. “You treat trespassers well around here.”

He gave her a piercing look, then turned back to stare into the fire. She noted he was getting less and less protective of the right side of his face. Did that mean he was getting less self-conscious? Or that he cared less what she thought?

“Yes,” he said at last, speaking slowly. “Marcello is my friend as well as my cousin.” He glanced her way. “He and I once looked very much alike,” he added softly, almost as though musing to himself. “People took us for brothers.”

She nodded. She could tell that, despite the scar. “He’s very handsome,” she said before she thought, then colored slightly as she realized how he might take that.

He glanced at her, eyebrow raised, but didn’t say anything. She didn’t speak again right away. She wanted to. She wanted to tell him his own face was so much more interesting than his cousin’s. It had all the beauty Marcello had, but it had something more—character, history, a hard and cruel story to tell. Just what that story was, she didn’t know, but there was passion there, and mystery, and heartbreak. It was a face for the ages, a map of human tragedy, a work of art.

The more she thought about it, the more she realized she preferred it. In fact, she found it beautiful in a rare and special way. But she couldn’t say those things—could she? He would think she was flattering him, perhaps even trying to get something from him.

“You are both very handsome,” she said at last, feeling a bit brave to say that much.

He shrugged, looking away. “My face is what it is. It is what I made it. My burden to bear.”

She sat back, biting her tongue and wondering if she dared say any of the things she was thinking. He was wonderful to look at. Didn’t he realize that?

Or was it her? Was she strange?

That was a loaded question and she didn’t want to answer it. But she had to say something.

“You know what I think?” she began. “I think you should come to my restaurant. You need to get out and…”

He swore softly but it was enough to stop the words in her throat. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he told her roughly. “You don’t have a clue.”

Of course she didn’t. She knew that. But he didn’t have to be so rude. She was only trying to help.

She bit her lip, considering the situation. For some reason, when he ordered her about, she often found herself wanting to do what he said. It was time to nip that in the bud. He was beginning to think of her as a pushover, wasn’t he? Sure, he was a prince and she was a nobody—but that didn’t matter. She’d never been the amenable one in any relationship. Why let it get started now? She had to fight this drift toward subservience. Rising from her seat on the couch, she faced him with her hands on her hips, her head cocked at a challenging angle.

“I thought I should let you know that I don’t really think you’re a vampire,” she said as an opening.

He nodded, looking at her coolly. “I was pretty sure about that all along.”

“But you do have cruel tendencies,” she said, looking at him earnestly. “Listen, about the herbs I need from your hillside—”

“No.” He said it with utter finality.

She pulled her head back, startled by his vehemence. “But…”

He held a hand up to stop her in her tracks. “If keeping you off a dangerous hillside is cruel, I’m a monster. Sorry, but that is the way it is.”

“But—”

“No. You’re to stay away. And that’s final.”

He rose as if to add emphasis to his words. She looked up at him and swallowed hard. He looked tall and stern and unyielding, and his shoulders were wide as the horizon. There was no humor in his face, no softness at all. His scars were vivid and his hard eyes made the breath catch in her throat and her heart beat just a little faster. Just that quickly she was back to being a timid petitioner, and he was once again a prince. His gaze met hers and held. She couldn’t say a thing.

And then, breaking the spell, Renzo appeared.

“The young lady’s car is here, sir.”

The prince turned and nodded.

“Thank you, Renzo.”

It was very late. The grandfather clock in the hallway was chiming the hour. A part of him wanted to accompany her down to her home. Gallantry would suggest it. But practicalities, as well as common sense, forbade it. Not to mention the fact that he just plain couldn’t do it. So he merely nodded to her, staying back away so that he wouldn’t be tempted to repeat anything as silly as a kiss.

“Renzo will show you to your car,” he said shortly. “Goodnight.” She opened her mouth to say something, but there was no time. Turning on his heel, he went back into his dark and lonely palazzo, leaving her behind as though that was the main purpose. She sighed, feeling suddenly cold and lonely. Renzo showed her to her car and she drove off toward her home and restaurant in the village with a sense of frustration. But she knew very well that her life had been changed…changed forever, even if she never saw him again.

CHAPTER FOUR

“WELL,” Susa said the next morning as she began to mix the dough for the large cake pans that sat waiting. “How’s the prince?”

Isabella turned bright red and had to pretend to be looking for something in the huge wall refrigerator in order to hide that fact until things cooled.

“What prince?” she chirped, biding her time.

Susa’s laugh sounded more like a cackle. “The one who punched you in the eye,” she said, elbowdeep in flour. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Isabella whirled and faced the older woman, wondering why she’d never noticed before how annoying she could be. “No one punched me. I…I fell.”

“Ah.” Susa nodded wisely, a mischievous gleam in her gray eyes. “So he pushed you, did he?”

“No!”

Isabella groaned with exasperation and escaped into the pantry to assemble the ingredients for the basic tomato sauce that was the foundation of all the Casali family cuisine. Let Susa cackle if she felt like it. Isabella wasn’t going to tell her anything at all about what had happened. Pressing her lips together firmly, she set about making the sauce and pretended she didn’t know what the older woman was talking about.

She couldn’t discuss it yet. Not with anyone. She wasn’t even sure herself what exactly had happened. Looking back, it seemed like a dream. When she tried to remember what she’d said or what he’d done, it didn’t seem real. So she washed the clothes the prince’s sister had loaned her, sent them back to the palazzo, and heard nothing in return. She had to put it behind her.

Besides, she had other problems, big problems, to deal with. She’d been putting off thinking about them because she’d assumed she would go to collect the Monta Rosa Basil and all would be well—or at least in abeyance. Without the basil, she was finally facing the fact that the restaurant was in big trouble.

Luca, her father and founder of Rosa, had gone into a panic when she had told him a sketchy version of what had happened and then tentatively speculated what life—and the menu—might be like without the herb.

“What are you talking about?” he demanded, looking a bit wild. A tall, rather elegant-looking man, in Isabella’s eyes, he radiated integrity. Despite the demands he tended to put on her, she loved him to pieces.

“The old prince said I could come any time.”

That was news to Isabella. She’d had no idea there was any sort of permission granted, and she had to wonder if it wasn’t just a convenient memory her father had embellished a bit.

“Well, the new prince says ‘no’.”

“The new prince?” He stared at her. “You’ve talked to him?”

“Yes. A little.”

He frowned. “No, Isabella. Stay away from the royalty. It’s no good to mix with them. They think they can walk all over us and they do it every time.”

“But, Papa, if I’m going to try to get permission to—”

“You don’t need permission.”

She sighed. There was no way she was going to make him understand that the circumstances had changed.

“I’ll go myself,” he muttered. He tried to rise from his chair and she hurried to coax him back down.

“Father, you will not go anywhere,” she said fretfully.

“Don’t you understand how important this is? The Basil is our family’s trademark, our sign of distinction. Without it we are just like all the others, not special at all. It’s who we are, the heart and soul of our cuisine and of our identity. We have to have it.”

She was feeling even worse about this than before. “But, Papa, if I can’t get it any longer…”

He shook his head, unable to understand what the difficulty was. “But you can get it. Of course you can.” His tired blue eyes searched hers. “I’ve never had any trouble. I go in right at sunrise. I go quietly, squeezing through the chink in the wall, right where I’ve entered the grounds since I was a young man. A short hike past the river and up the hill, and there it is, green leaves waving in the breeze, reaching up to kiss the morning sun.” He kissed his fingertips in a salute to the wonderful plants that were the making of his reputation.

Then he frowned at her fiercely. “If you can’t manage to do such a simple thing, I’ll do it myself, even if I have to crawl up that hill. I’ve never failed yet.”

That was it. She was a failure. She sighed. “The dogs never came after you?” she asked him, feeling almost wistful about it.

“The dogs are only out at night.”

“Not anymore,” she said sadly.

She left him pounding his walking stick on the tile floor and grumbling about incompetence, knowing she couldn’t let him attempt the task. The climb up the hill would kill him in his current condition. She had to find a way.

Everyone knew there was a problem. The situation was getting desperate. Her father had let things go too long. They were losing customers and had been bleeding money even before this latest problem. To make matters worse, there was some nonsense about a permit her father had never bothered to get. Fredo Cavelli, an old friend of her father’s and now on the local planning commission, had come by a few times, threatening dire consequences if the paperwork for a permit wasn’t cleared up. The trouble was, she wasn’t sure what Fredo was talking about and her father tended to do nothing but foam at the mouth and accuse Fredo of jealousy and double-dealing instead of taking care of the problem as he should.

It seemed to Isabella that control was slipping away. Without the special ingredient that set their sauce apart, there would be very little reason for anyone to choose their restaurant, Rosa, over the others operating nearby. She was desperate to get a handle on all these problems and get things back on an even keel.

Something had to be done.

She knew what it was. She had to go back there.

Just thinking about it made her shiver. She couldn’t go back. The prince had explicitly ordered her to stay away. And for once in her life, she was not really ready to challenge that.

Odd as it seemed, he was so different, so separate from her way of life, that he threw her off balance in a way no other man had ever done. She was used to being the feisty one, the girl who didn’t accept any nonsense from men, the one who could take it, deal with it, and serve it right back. A handsome face didn’t bowl her over. Charm made her suspicious. The toughguy act completely turned her off.

Isabella was a hard sell on every level. Life had made her that way. Though she looked happy and carefree to most who knew her casually, there was a thread of dread and unease in her soul that she’d come by naturally.

Her mother had died when she was three years old, leaving her the only female in the family. Her father and her two brothers immediately turned to her for everything. At the age of five she was already taking care of everyone else, in the family home, in the play yard, and even in the restaurant. People in the village called her “little Mama” as she scurried past on one errand or another. She was always in such a hurry to make things right for her little brothers, it seemed she never had time to have a childhood of her own.

But her unease and wistfulness were born of more than just too many responsibilities too early. There were uncertainties in her family background, half-remembered scenes from childhood, secrets and lies. Her mother’s death, her father’s sometimes mysterious background, the reason her baby brother Valentino carried his daredevil act too far, the reason her brother Cristiano felt he had to jump off cliffs to save lives—all these things and more created a shaky foundation for a calm, peaceful life.

Isabella had a recurring nightmare where her family restaurant began to sag, first on one side, then the other. Going outside, she would realize the building had been sitting on a sand dune and the sand was beginning to drain away. Frantically, she tried to shore it up with her hands, pushing the sand back, working faster and faster. But it was no use. The building sank into the sand as though it were water. Inside she could see her father and her brothers trying to get out. She tried to call for help, but she couldn’t make a sound. Helpless, she watched them disappear beneath the surface. And that was when she woke.

“You’ve obviously got a savior complex,” Susa told her the one time she’d confided in the older woman. “Get over it. You can’t save these people. We are each our own worst enemy.”

Susa’s words weren’t very comforting. In fact, they weren’t even very helpful. So she never told anyone about her dreams again. But she thought of them now as she tried to analyze what had happened last night.

As much as the dream unnerved her, misty memories of her night at the castle unsettled her even more. Had he really kissed her forehead or had she just wished so hard that she’d dreamed it? Had she really told him she’d thought he was a vampire for a few shattering seconds? Had she really reached out and stroked his scar as though she had a right to touch him? It didn’t seem credible and it made her blush all over again.

She hadn’t been herself last night. And that was one reason she hesitated to try to go back. What would he cause her to act like if she actually got in to see him again?

Meanwhile she had to deal with losing customers, losing money, and Fredo Cavelli coming by to threaten that he would have Rosa’s closed down for good if her father didn’t come up with some obscure piece of paper.

“He thinks he can order me around because he bribed the mayor to put him on the planning commission,” Luca would scoff whenever she tried to talk to him about it. “I’m in compliance in every way. He can’t run me out of town. He’s just jealous because the little ice cream store he tried to run fell apart in a month. I won’t give in to his rubbish.”

She shook her head and walked away, unsure of how threatening this business really was. She had more problems than she had time for, so she let it go. Meanwhile, several times a day, her gaze wandered toward the hills, searching out the mist-shrouded tower of the castle, just barely visible toward evening, and she wondered what Max was doing in his lonely sanctuary. Was he out riding again? Did he ever think of her? Or had he been so glad to be rid of her, he’d erased her from his mind?

Max was on horseback, surveying the river in the twilight magic that hovered over his land, just after sunset. His sister had gone home, his cousin was about to leave for Milan, and his life was about to get back to normal. Boring, monotonous normal. Still, it was a relief.

This was his favorite time of day, and the only time he found he could come to the river without feeling unbearably sick inside. And he had to come to the river, if only as an homage to Laura. For the first few years after her death, he hadn’t been able to come here without tears flowing freely.

“I’m sorry,” he would cry into the wind, brokenhearted and in agony. “I’m so sorry.”

And he was convinced that Laura had been here then. She’d heard him. Later, he would often talk to her for hours, and she responded with a breeze, or a leaf that might sail over his head. He could hear her laughter in the river as the water bubbled over the rocks. She’d felt so close, he could almost touch her.

As the years went by the talking began to fade away, but he still came. And now, he didn’t talk anymore. He didn’t feel her here as he had before. Maybe she’d lost interest. Maybe she’d forgotten him. Or maybe his emotions just weren’t strong enough to break through the barriers any longer. He didn’t know what it was that had silenced their conversation. He only knew it felt stilted and awkward to try to talk to her now. But he came anyway. She deserved that much, at the very least.

Tonight he was here in part out of a guilty conscience. His head had been full of the Casali girl for days and he couldn’t seem to shake the thoughts away. He needed to fill his soul with his wife’s image again.

He looked into the swirling water of the river, very near where that water had taken her from him.

“Laura,” he said aloud, passion behind every word. “I miss you so.”

He listened hard. He tried to let himself join the flow of the evening breeze. He tried to feel whatever was in the atmosphere and draw it in. But it was all a failure. She wasn’t there. Heartsick, he turned his horse and headed back home.

Isabella had tried to figure out somehow to handle the declining basil supply problem in other ways, but the harder she tried, the more the answer seemed to elude her. As far as she knew, the prince’s estate was the only site where the herb could be found. If she wasn’t allowed to enter his gates, how was she going to get the supply she needed?

She spent hours poring over the Internet, trying to find where else the herb might grow, and, when that didn’t yield fruit, trying to find a substitution. She tried a few candidates in a couple of dishes. People noticed.

“There’s something different about this Fruta di Mare,” an old friend of the family asked right away, frowning as though she’d found a bug in her meal. “Have you changed your recipe?”

“What are you doing that’s different?” another asked, face twisted with displeasure.

And then she overheard a pair of regular customers whispering to each other. The phrases she caught included, “This place used to be so good, it’s really gone downhill lately,” and she knew she was in big trouble.

There was no choice. She had to go back.

But how?

She was still agonizing over that a day later when a surprise visitor came through the doors of the café. The late afternoon sun made a radiating halo around him and for just a moment she was sure it was the prince himself. Her heart began to pound in her chest. She’d never felt such a lurch to her system before. The room tilted and for a beat or two she was sure she would pass out. But in those same seconds she realized it wasn’t the prince at all, but his cousin, Marcello, and the pounding began to fade.

It took a minute for her to catch her breath. Even as she greeted him warmly she was clutching her heart and wondering what on earth was the matter with her. She really couldn’t imagine. The prince was just a man. Nothing special. Particularly. She’d known men before and even liked a few of them. Not many, but a few. She quickly steadied herself and managed to smile at Marcello.

“Welcome. I’m so glad you decided to come try us. Please sit right here and let me bring you some wine.”

She pulled out a chair at the table best situated with a view of the square in one direction and the distant mountains in the other.

“Order whatever you like,” she said cheerfully. “It will be our pleasure to—”

“Whoa, slow down,” he said with a laugh, raising both hands as though to defend himself from the onslaught. “I didn’t come for free food. I’m on my way home to Milan, but I wanted to come by to see how my patient is doing.”

“Patient?” And then she realized he meant her. “Oh, I’m fine. As you can see, I still have a black eye, but I’ve been told I look better this way, so it’s not a problem.”

He made a face at her lame joke, but went on. “And your stitches?”

“Oh.”

“I’d like to take a look and see how they are healing.”

She glanced around the restaurant. It wasn’t packed by any means but half the tables were filled with people she’d known all her life. Every one of them was watching with rapt attention.