A Royal Marriage

“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.

Chapter Two

“This reminds me of the cottage in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” the prince commented as he pulled into her driveway, and his headlights glanced off the white stucco, paned windows and heavy wooden door of her tiny home.

More fairy tales, she thought, and then smiled. “You are about to meet the head dwarf,” she murmured.

Rachel loved the little house she had found to rent, at such a reasonable price, just hours after arriving in Thortonburg. At one time it must have been a gardener’s cottage. It was in a wonderful neighborhood of regal old mansions, large yards and towering trees. Prince Damon was right. It did look like the cozy little cottage Snow White found refuge in.

It surprised her that a man who looked so pragmatic, so in charge, so all male, would make such a whimsical reference. Surprised her, and pleased her. Carly’s father, Bryan, probably would have thought Snow White was laundry detergent. Or worse, an illegal drug.

She reached for her car door handle, and then blushed when he stayed her with a hand on her sleeve, got out, came around and opened the door for her.

The gesture should have made her feel like a queen, but it didn’t. It made her feel as if she was out of her league entirely.

She went up the curving, cobblestone walk in front of him, and fumbled in her purse for her key. With gentle firmness he removed the key from her grasp and inserted it in the door. Again, the old world courtesy was not something she was accustomed to.

She remembered when she had dated Bryan, he hadn’t even come to the door for her. He’d sit out on his polished motor bike revving the engine and honking until she came out.

Which, of course, should have told her something.

“I’ll take the car key off now, if you want,” he said. “That way I can have someone return your car to you right away.”

“That’s really not necessary. I’ll go back for it tomorrow.”

“No, you won’t. I persuaded you to leave it there, and I’ll have it returned to you.”

“Thank you then. It’s the red Volkswagen Bug just across the street from where you were parked.”

“I’ll look after it.”

She thought, wistfully, that a person could really get used to this. Being looked after. Having life unfold at the snap of fingers.

Prince Damon gave the door a slight push, and the sound of Carly’s robust laughter burst out the open door. The sound never failed to make happiness curl around Rachel. She was determined that, despite the bad start of being born illegitimate, of being abandoned by her father, her child was going to have a better upbringing than her own had been. Full of laughter, and warmth, and love.

Not the kind of childhood Rachel had, that made her so ripe for someone like Bryan. Looking for something she had never had, and yet had believed with her whole heart and soul must exist. Rachel had made the age-old error of mistaking the impostor passion for love.

Did she believe in romance anymore? Did she long for the love that seemed so genuine that others seemed to find but not her? She no longer knew.

Once burned, after all.

Besides, who had the time? The emotional energy? Carly deserved more than that. She deserved not to have daddy candidates trotted in and out of her life. The two of them could take on the world all by themselves.

She beckoned the prince into her tiny entryway, but he did not follow immediately, instead looked beyond her with something like wariness.

“You have a child?” he asked.

She thought he must have known. To her, it had sounded like Crenshaw’s crude remark about her waistline had gone out over a loudspeaker.

A number of times since Carly was born, this had happened to her. A man showed unmistakable interest, until he found out she had a baby. It had made her pretty much lose interest in men, in dating. In some part of herself she realized she had decided, secretly and quietly, that she would never marry if it seemed it might take away from what she could give to Carly.

Of course, her own taste in men, if Bryan was any example, had thrown a scare into Rachel, too.

“A baby girl. She’s twenty months old.”

She reminded herself that Prince Damon of Roxbury’s interest in her was quite different, anyway. Rescuing a damsel in distress, he had called it. She would be foolish to read any more into his interest than that. Theirs were worlds apart.

She was not a sleeping princess about to be kissed.

She was a single mom trying to do the best for her baby.

And then Carly bumped, on her padded rump, sleeper-encased feet first, down the narrow staircase, her blond curls scattered around cheeks flushed from the exertion and delight she attacked life with.

Rachel went down on one knee, and threw open wide her arms.

“Mommeee!”

Carly barreled across the floor, arms flung wide, balance precarious. She slid on the oval rag rug, tilted and then fell into Rachel’s arms with such force that Rachel was nearly knocked over. Laughing, forgetting her dignified visitor, losing herself to the exuberance of her daughter’s greeting, Rachel hugged Carly to her, buried her nose in the child’s silky hair, rose and swung the baby around until she shrieked with delight.

She froze mid-swing. He was too still. She tucked Carly in tight and looked at him. Prince Damon Montague was ashen.

It reminded her of that moment in the car, when he had so definitely gone away, and the place where he had gone had caused him terrible sadness. “What is it?” she asked.

He shook himself, as a man coming out of a dream. Carly leaned toward him, her arms widespread, nearly wriggling out of Rachel’s arms.

It was an invitation to be held that only the hardest heart would have been able to refuse. Damon hesitated, looked amazingly as though he was going to bolt. Instead, he smiled, though it looked as if it cost him.

“The head dwarf, I presume?” he said with complete composure. He did not take Carly, but leaned instead and touched her cheek with his hand. “Hello. Which one are you? Surely not Grumpy? Definitely not Sleepy. Or Doc. Or Dopey. You must be Happy.”

Carly chortled at this, caught his hand and chomped on one of his fingers. He extricated his finger from her mouth with good grace. “Jaws wasn’t one of the seven, was he?”

“No biting,” Rachel admonished sternly. “Your Highness, my daughter, Carly.”

“I really do want you to call me Damon,” he said, and then he bowed, deep at the waist, which charmed Carly completely. Not to mention her mother. “The pleasure is all mine,” he said.

Rachel realized that in her mind he was already Damon, that there was a feeling of having always known him that made formality between them seem stiff and ridiculous.

When he straightened, Carly regarded him solemnly for a minute, ran her plump fingers over the planes of his face, tugged his nose experimentally. Then she nodded her approval, and ordered loudly, “Down.”

Rachel set her down, and Carly plummeted across the floor, arms out like a tightrope walker, always teetering on the very edge of a spill. She made it without hazard, however, to her overflowing toy basket, the contents of which she dumped unceremoniously on the floor. With a sigh, she plopped down on the floor beside her heap of treasures.

“Do you find yourself holding your breath a lot?” Damon asked.

“I think it’s called motherhood. I’ll be holding my breath until her eighteenth birthday.” She thought of her missing sister, who was twenty-seven, and her recent worries, and added woefully, “And probably beyond.”

“She’s an unusually beautiful child,” Damon said, watching with a small smile at the energy with which Carly’s possessions were now being thrust back in the basket.

Of course he would know all the right things to say. They probably taught him that at prince training school, or wherever young royals went to learn to be gracious and courteous and sophisticated.

“Thank you.”

He hesitated. “Her father?”

“The last I heard, running a ski lift in Canada.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not. We’re both better off without him.” She said this with a trace of defiance. She did not want his pity. His gaze had drifted from the baby, and he was scanning her small living room with casual interest.

Though he kept his expression deliberately blank, no doubt he parked his car in a larger space.

And she knew the furnishings of the cottage were humble; most of them had come with it. But she had delighted at the cozy atmosphere she had created with a few plaid throws, jugs of dried flowers, bright paintings, small wicker baskets containing books and apples and papers, and the larger basket, the only one Carly could reach, which held her toys.

In one corner was the only thing in the room that qualified as state of the art, the computer that she did her writing on.

The sitter, the elderly lady who lived in the manor house on the property, came down the steps. A few strands of her gray hair had fallen out of her tidy bun, her glasses were askew, her sweater was tugged out of shape at the hem, and she was not looking nearly as sprightly as when she had come in the door several hours ago.

“My goodness,” Mrs. Brumble said with weary graciousness, “she has so much energy. I’ve never seen a baby that age quite so energetic.”

“Mrs. Brumble, was she awful?” Rachel asked, wide-eyed at her dignified landlady’s disheveled appearance.

“Not awful. No, no. Demanding. Inquisitive. Into everything.” The old lady paused, sighed and smiled. “Awful,” she said. “But I meant it. I adore children, and I’ll look after her whenever you have to be away.”

“That’s so kind,” Rachel said, and meant it. Life since Carly seemed to have gotten somewhat harder. Bryan had made it clear he wanted no part of her life, and nothing to do with his child. And then her mother had died. And now her sister was missing.

And yet it almost seemed the harder life got, the more kind people were put in her path, as if to help her through it. Gifts from heaven.

Mrs. Brumble was squinting at Damon with interest. “My, my. Aren’t you that Montague boy?”

Rachel did not think this was a very suitable way to address a prince, but he didn’t seem to mind at all.

He grinned. “That would be me, all right. That Montague boy.”

Mrs. Brumble offered her hand, and he took it in his, covered it with his other one for a brief moment, a gesture that Rachel could tell pleased Mrs. Brumble to no end. “I’m Eileen Brumble. I’ve had tea with your mother, Princess Nora, several times when I’ve been over to Roxbury. We have the Cancer Society in common. I met your lovely wife on one occasion, as well. I was so distressed by her death. Such a tragedy.”

Rachel thought Damon’s smile had become somewhat fixed, but he said pleasantly enough, “I’ll remember you to my mother.”

Rachel realized her little old landlady moved in the same circles as him, among dukes and duchesses, marquises and earls. Perhaps the huge manor house that shared the same property as this humble cottage should have given her a clue. Imagine asking someone of that stature to baby-sit!

“Thank you! That would be a darling thing for you to do.”

The entryway was too small for all of them, so Damon slipped into the living room while Mrs. Brumble got organized, and Rachel shed her jacket. Underneath, she was wearing a white sweater that matched her skirt, an outfit that had failed her at the police station, and which she felt failed her now because it was decidedly “blah,” a selection an old-maid librarian might have made to wear to the church tea.

Maybe she did know life was not a fairy tale, maybe she had taken a vow of celibacy until Carly was safely grown-up, but she also knew there was not a woman alive who could be alone with an attractive man and not want to look her absolute best.

When the door finally closed behind the unlikely nanny, Rachel turned to find Damon studying a painting on her wall that suddenly struck her as tacky and cheap, not fun and bright.

Mrs. Brumble popped her head back in the door and called in a whisper that must have carried nearly to the Thorton estate, “This one’s a keeper, child. Don’t let him get away.”

It was an embarrassing remark, but a kind one, too. It made Rachel feel as though the social barriers between them were not so important these days as they once had been—probably far larger in her mind than they were in either Damon’s or Mrs. Brumble’s.

The door closed again.

Since Rachel had expected Damon would drop her off and go, she stared at his big back with some vexation, and then said, “Would you like tea?”

Of course he wasn’t going to want tea. He was waiting for an opportunity to say goodbye, and take his leave.