“Right,” he interrupted again. “If you’re the queen of Penwyck, then I’m the prince of darkness. Tell me another one.”
“Actually, Mr. Cordello, you’re not far from the truth,” the woman said, sounding a bit less imperious than she had before.
Shane opened his mouth to mutter another disdainful quip, but what came out instead was “Huh?”
“I said you’re not far from the truth,” the woman repeated. “Though you’re not—quite—the prince of darkness.”
Once again, Shane tried to summons a haughty retort. And once again, what came out was “Huh?”
“Perhaps it would be better if I let you speak to your brother, Marcus, first,” the woman said.
“Marcus?” Shane echoed, growing even more confused now.
But instead of hearing the woman’s voice in reply again, Shane was treated to his brother’s. “Hello, Shane. It’s Marcus.”
The confusion that had been wheeling around in Shane’s head for the last several minutes came to a crashing halt, crumbling now into a vast heap of bewilderment. “Marcus?” he said, recognizing his brother’s voice immediately. “Where are you? Who was that woman? What the hell is going on?”
“Answering those questions in order,” Marcus said, “as to the first one, I, uh, I’m in Penwyck. You know Penwyck, Shane, surely. Small island nation? Near other island nations of Ireland and Great Britain? It’s been in the news lately because they’re forming a military alliance with the United States. You’ve heard about that, right?”
“Uh…”
“And I think our mother honeymooned here with husband number three, if memory serves,” Marcus continued blithely. “It’s really a beautiful place. Nice people. I mean really nice people. Food could be a little spicier. Not that I’m complaining.”
Marcus Cordello, Shane knew, was not the kind of man to fool around. His brother hadn’t become a millionaire at the age of nineteen by making prank phone calls, and he didn’t maintain a multimillion-dollar real-estate empire in one of the nation’s largest cities by asking people if they had Prince Albert in a can. No way would Marcus jerk Shane around. If he said he was in Penwyck, then, by God, the man was in Penwyck. And if Marcus was in Penwyck, then that meant that the woman who’d called herself the queen of Penwyck could, by God, very well be—
Uh-oh.
“You’re in Penwyck?” Shane echoed miserably.
“I’m in Penwyck,” Marcus confirmed.
“The Penwyck that has a Queen Marissa?”
“So you have been watching the news,” his brother said, clearly holding back a chuckle.
“Um, Marcus?”
“Yes, Shane?”
“Was that really the queen of Penwyck I was talking to on the phone a minute ago?”
“It was indeed.”
“The woman I just blew off so royally was really a queen?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“So you’re standing beside the queen of Penwyck?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Is she, um, really, really mad?”
“Define ‘really, really,”’ Marcus said.
“Like, off-with-his-head mad?”
There was a moment of silence, as if Marcus were contemplating the mood of the woman beside him, a full continent and ocean away from where Shane was standing himself.
“Nah,” Marcus said finally.
Shane expelled a soft sigh of relief.
Then, “She’ll probably just want to take off your hand when you get here,” Marcus added.
“What?” Shane said.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t the take-off-your-hand part of Marcus’s statement that got to Shane most deeply. It was the when-you-get-here part that made him take notice.
Then again, Shane thought, why was he surprised by this surprise? Marcus was beginning to make a habit out of dropping bombshells whenever he called. Hell, the last time they’d spoken, his brother had told him there was a possibility that the two of them had been adopted as infants, not that Shane had believed that for a moment. Now Marcus was suddenly in Penwyck, visiting the queen. What next? Would he announce his candidacy for president of the United States? Shane wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
“Actually, Her Majesty is a very pleasant woman,” Marcus continued, dispelling Shane’s troubling thoughts—sort of. “So she might only want a couple of fingers from you, really.”
Okay, troubling thoughts were back now.
Shane closed his eyes and lifted a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose, in an effort—a totally futile effort, he soon learned—to ward off a massive headache that seemed to erupt out of nowhere.
“Marcus,” he tried again, struggling very hard to maintain his feeble grip on reality. Maybe if he spoke a little more slowly, this conversation would make sense.
And maybe, too, he told himself further, Jennifer Lopez would give him a call this weekend and ask him to go skinny-dipping with her in Puerto Vallarta.
“Marcus,” he said once more. “What. Are. You. Talking. About.”
Marcus expelled a long, weary sigh from the other end of the line. “What I’m talking about, Shane,” he said, “is something you’re probably not going to believe. Are you sitting down?”
Shane dropped into his boss’s big, comfy chair without even asking permission, and somehow didn’t even care when Mr. Mendoza began to glare at him as if this were Shane’s last day on earth. Or, at the very least, his last day on the Wellman Towers construction site.
Whatever.
“I’m sitting down,” Shane said. “Now tell me what’s going on.”
“Well,” Marcus began, “once upon a time, in a kingdom far away, there lived a beautiful queen and a handsome king who were blessed with a pair of royal twin sons….”
Sara Wallington pushed back the sleeve of her pink cashmere sweater and checked the slim gold watch on her wrist for the sixth time in ten minutes, then sighed heavily with impatience. My, how time crawled when one was having woe, she thought morosely. For there could certainly be nothing fun in acting as a glorified nanny for the next twenty-four hours. A nanny for what might potentially be the heir to a throne, granted, but a nanny nonetheless. However, the heir apparently was nowhere to be seen just yet, and they were due to leave L.A. at precisely 11:00 p.m. Right now, it was nearly ten o’clock. Even if they were flying on a private jet, there was a strict departure time they must meet. If the man were any later, they were going to have trouble keeping to their schedule. And she did so loathe not being punctual.
She sighed heavily again, fidgeted with her pearl necklace, twisted the matching pearl stud in one ear and tucked an errant wisp of pale red hair back into her chignon. Then she scanned the hoards of people scampering through LAX like rabid animals and wondered how in the queen’s name she was going to find Shane Cordello among them. Of course, it had been Queen Marissa herself who’d gotten Sara into this. A favor, Her Majesty had told Sara’s mother in Penwyck when she’d called to see if Sara was available to aid Shane in his travels. Never mind that Sara had finals next month to study for and a term paper to write. She’d escort Mr. Cordello to her native country because her queen commanded it. Favor equaled duty when it came to Her Majesty.
Nevertheless, locating the man was going to be a bit of a task since Sara had been given only a sketchy description of him to go by: brown hair, blue eyes, six-foot-two, one hundred eighty pounds. So she had been able to deduce that he was a largish man, though certainly that wasn’t so unique for this vast country of America. Most men here seemed to be big and boisterous and very nearly overwhelming, she had noticed during her four-plus-year stay. Oh, and Shane Cordello was supposed to be rather good-looking, too—according to his brother, at any rate—which ought to make him oh so easy to spot here in Los Angeles where everyone seemed to be beautiful.
Not much to go on, Sara thought, not for the first time since receiving the queen’s phone call this morning. This morning, she marveled again, thinking about how muc
h her circumstances had changed in scarcely twelve hours’ time. Sara had barely had time to explain the situation to her professors, assuring them she’d return to her classes five days hence, bright and early Monday morning, and would they be so kind as to give her her assignments in advance so that she wouldn’t lose too much time.
Now, armed with both her homework and what few belongings she would need for a long weekend in her homeland, Sara waited patiently to meet her destiny. Or, at the very least, to meet Shane Cordello. She was also armed with a handy visual aid, a big white sign, hand-lettered with the word Cordello, to help her in finding that destiny. Or, at the very least, in finding that man. At present, she held the sign waist-high before her, obscuring the simple, camel-colored straight skirt she had coupled with her white blouse and pink cardigan. She boosted the sign a bit higher, at chest height now, hoping that Mr. Cordello wasn’t one of those handsome, but not-too-bright males whom one met so frequently in this city.
Not that Sara had spent much time with any men, bright or dim, during her four-and-a-half-year sojourn in this country. College courses did rather limit one’s social life, after all, particularly when one was pursuing her master’s degree… At least they did if one was serious.
She checked her watch again. Heavens, five minutes had passed this time between glances. She must be vastly enjoying herself now.
“Miss Wallington?”
Sara glanced up at the summons—rather a long way up, too, she couldn’t help noticing, which, she supposed, shouldn’t surprise her, since she scarcely topped five-foot-two herself—into the face of the man who had just petitioned her. And she immediately realized that brown hair and blue eyes and rather good-looking was a description that didn’t do the man justice. His hair was, in fact, the color of rich, velvety espresso, and his eyes were an incisive cobalt-blue, reminding her of the darkest depths of the ocean. As for good-looking… Oh, my. That phrase did more than a mere injustice to a man who was, in fact, quite extraordinarily, splendidly, unspeakably, dazzlingly, breathtakingly… She sighed deeply in spite of herself.
Magnificent. That was what Shane Cordello was. In his snug blue jeans and white V-neck T-shirt beneath a faded denim jacket, his low-heeled books scraping over the floor as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, the man made every system Sara had—and some she hadn’t been aware of possessing until this very moment—go on absolute red alert. Never in her life had she encountered a man who made her mouth water. But as she watched his mouth hook into a crooked, wicked little smile, parts of her now—and not just her mouth, either—were feeling very…ah, liquid, indeed.
And when Sara noticed all those changes—in both her body and her very psyche—and when she understood how Mr. Cordello’s mere physical presence in her general vicinity had turned her so readily and thoroughly into a volcano about to burst, the relief she had felt initially upon his arrival suddenly evaporated into… Well, into something else entirely. Something damp and steamy and hot, and altogether inappropriate for a woman who had been asked to perform a favor for her queen. And it simply would not do to experience a cumbersome sort of lust for the man one had been instructed to return to the queen unharassed. Lust, after all, was the one thing that prospective members of the Royal Intelligence Institute did not feel for their charges. It could only—would only—lead to trouble.
“Mr. Cordello,” Sara greeted him with as much courtesy—and as little lust—as she could manage. “How delightful to finally make your acquaintance. Queen Marissa has told me much about you.”
His expression, which had been rather open and affable before, suddenly changed then, to one of obvious wariness. “She told you about me, huh?” he asked.
Sara nodded. “She said you were quite charming.”
Actually, what Her Majesty had said was that Shane Cordello was a man who didn’t suffer fools lightly, but one might certainly translate that into charming—if one were frightfully generous about such things, and Sara did pride herself on being a generous person.
“She said that?” Shane Cordello replied dubiously.
“She did indeed,” Sara assured him, trying to quell the hot shudder that wound through her whenever he spoke in that rich, rhythmical baritone that very nearly hypnotized her into a narcotic stupor. American accents were so, ah, delightful.
Oh, dear. She really must put a stop to these strange goings-on inside her this instant. “Now, then,” she continued in as stalwart a fashion as she could manage. Stalwart, she had always told herself, was a very good thing to be. Even if stalwartness wasn’t exactly the most potent boy-magnet in the world, it was still quite the virtue. One should never underestimate the power of a stalwart woman. Ever.
“The jet has been made ready for our takeoff,” she said. “Shall we board? Queen Marissa couldn’t spare the official royal jet, of course, but she has sent one of the smaller jets. Our sixteen-hour flight to Penwyck will be ever so much more comfortable this way.”
Of course, had Her Majesty sent the much larger royal jet, that flight time would have been cut nearly in half, and it would only be approximately ten hours that Sara would be forced to spend with Mr. Very Handsome, Very Interesting Cordello. Providing the larger vessel would have also made it possible for them to arrive in Penwyck at a decent hour, local time. But no. Sixteen hours it would be then, and local arrival time would be approximately… Oh, let her think for a moment… Add eight hours’ time difference…plus sixteen…carry the one… Eleven p.m. tomorrow, she finally calculated. Which wouldn’t be too frightfully indecent an hour, she supposed, if it weren’t for the fact that they were both bound to be exhausted from their sixteen-hour flight and wanting desperately to fall into bed.
Fall into separate beds, she hastily qualified. Alone. Naturally, part of their flight time would be spent on the ground refueling and such, but she and Mr. Cordello would be confined to the very small jet even then. She didn’t want to risk losing him now that she had him by allowing him to wander around an airport for any length of time.
Not that she had him, Sara quickly corrected herself. Not like…that. Not the way a woman traditionally thought of having a man. It wasn’t as if the man belonged to her, after all. Nor did she want him, she quickly reminded herself. Or any other man for that matter. But she did so want to keep Mr. Cordello within eyeshot, because if she lost the man who might be king, it would most definitely look bad on any potential résumé she might want to put together. And it went without saying that she would have to put together a résumé should she lose Mr. Cordello. Because there was no way the Royal Intelligence Institute would take her on if she bungled an assignment as simple as this.
Sixteen hours, she marveled again, unable to look away from his—oh dear…very interested, she could tell—gaze. Sixteen hours on a nonstop—save brief stops for refueling—course across a continent and an ocean, when each of them clearly found the other…interesting. She was going to be trapped in extremely close confines with this extremely interesting man for sixteen hours.
Of course, they wouldn’t be alone during that time, she reminded herself. There would be two pilots and two flight attendants aboard, as well. And the crew’s presence would go a long way toward keeping her in line and preventing her from doing anything rash. Something like, oh, say…leaping across the aisle and straddling Mr. Cordello’s waist and covering his mouth with her own and kissing him and kissing him and kissing him and…
Where was she? Oh, yes. Sixteen hours. Right. It was a rather long time to be saddling—or rather, saddled with, she hastily corrected herself—the man.
Best to think of something else, Sara, she told herself.
She glanced down to see that Mr. Cordello held only one small canvas bag. “Is that all you’ve brought? Don’t you have another bag?”
He, too, glanced down at his burden—unburdensome though it may have been—then back up at Sara. His expression now indicated that he found her question unusual. “Will I need anything more?” he asked. “I
didn’t get the impression I’d be staying in Penwyck very long. Just long enough to get this ridiculous story straightened out.”
During her phone call this morning, the queen had explained to Sara all the particulars of the ridiculous story, as Mr. Cordello had referred to it. But Her Majesty wasn’t as ready to dismiss the situation as such. Not yet. There was, at present, compelling evidence to suggest that twenty-three years ago, the newborn sons of Queen Marissa and King Morgan of Penwyck were switched at birth with a pair of different twins.
The way it had been explained to Sara, King Morgan’s resentful brother, Broderick, jealous of Morgan because he ascended to the throne when Broderick thought the position should be his, was claiming that he had arranged twenty-three years ago to have the king’s rightful heirs kidnapped and placed by adoption with a wealthy family in America immediately after their birth. In their place, he said, he’d had a different set of newborn twins passed off as the king and queen’s sons, knowing that neither would be qualified to take control of Penwyck because they weren’t descended from royal blood. And that would be the day that Broderick saw his revenge on his brother fulfilled. In the meantime, he’d relished the knowledge that the boys Queen Marissa and King Morgan had raised as their own weren’t, in fact, their own sons at all.
Now the queen was beside herself with worry over whether or not Broderick was telling the truth, and whether or not he had been successful in carrying out his plan, and she wouldn’t rest until the mystery was solved. The allegedly switched twins had been traced to the Cordello brothers in America, and Her Majesty was adamant that they join her in Penwyck until all was made clear. Marcus Cordello was already in Penwyck, having been accompanied there by Lady Amira Corbin, who had been sent on an errand similar to Sara’s. Now it was up to Sara to bring the other Cordello home.
Taming The Prince (Crown & Glory Book 8) Page 2
