Falling for the Secret Princess

by Kandy Shepherd

  He hoped so too.

  ‘We’ll start by finishing the place card swap. Why don’t you do it? Your first “living dangerously” challenge.’

  It would be a step towards others infinitely more interesting.

  ‘That’s not so dangerous,’ she said, with a dismissive sweep of her perfectly manicured hand.

  There was a touch of arrogance to her gesture that surprised and intrigued him. ‘You think so? The sun is setting and I think I can hear people coming up the steps to the veranda. You’ll have to be quick if you don’t want to be caught in the act and bring down the wrath of the bride on your head.’

  Any hint of haughtiness gone, Natalie made a sound somewhere between a squeal and a giggle that he found delightful. Without another word he held out Prue’s place card.

  Natalie snatched it from him. ‘Mission accepted,’ she said.

  He watched as she quickly click-clacked on her high heels—hips swaying—to the table where she’d originally been seated and slid the card into place. When she returned she gave him a triumphant high five.

  ‘Mission accomplished.’

  ‘Well done. Now I won’t have to find excuses all evening to visit you at your table.’

  ‘And I won’t need to take any opportunity to seek you out at yours.’

  She coloured, high on her cheekbones, in a blush that seemed at odds with her provocative words.

  ‘Would you have done that?’ he asked. ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘You are by far the most attractive man here.’

  She seemed such an accomplished flirt, and yet her blush deepened and her eyelashes fluttered as she voiced the compliment.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  Considering the men of the bridal party were all good-looking billionaires—one a prince—Finn could only be flattered. And gratified that the instant attraction wasn’t only on his side. He wasn’t a fanciful man, but insinuating itself into his mind was a thought, wispy and insubstantial but growing in vigour, that this—she—was somehow meant to be.

  ‘You know I intend to monopolise you all evening?’

  ‘Monopolise me all you want,’ she said slowly.

  She was looking up at him with what he could only read as invitation, although there was an endearing uncertainty there too.

  ‘You won’t be able to escape me.’

  ‘Do you see me running?’ she murmured.

  Her gaze met his for a long moment, and he wasn’t sure of the message in those extraordinary blue eyes.

  Then she smiled. ‘Talking of escape—thank you for rescuing me from the table of people I don’t know at all but who I suspect are Eliza’s elderly relatives.’

  ‘Don’t speak too soon. We don’t know who we’ve got sitting at my table.’

  ‘Yes, we do,’ she said.

  He frowned. ‘How did you—?’

  She spoke over him. ‘Each other. And that’s all that counts.’

  The words hung between them, seemingly escalating their flirtation to a higher and more exciting level of connection. Finn felt a buzz of excitement and anticipation.

  ‘Quite right. Your first exercise in living dangerously has paid off. I don’t care who else is on the table so long as your place card is still next to mine.’

  Attending this wedding solo was more duty than pleasure, fond as he was of Eliza, and keen as he was to keep up his contact with Party Queens. But he wasn’t one for wasting time on social chit-chat with strangers he might never see again.

  An evening spent in the enchanting Natalie’s company was a different matter altogether. Enjoying the pleasure of her company was now at the forefront of his mind.

  Finn was about to tell her so, but there was a sudden burst of chatter from outside on the veranda. ‘The other guests are starting to arrive. We shouldn’t be seen in here.’

  Natalia’s eyes widened in alarm. ‘We’ve got time to get out through that connecting door.’

  He reached out his hand and pulled her towards him. ‘Let’s go before they realise we’ve been up to no good. Then we’ll march back in with the other guests and take our places at the table.’

  ‘Innocent of any crime of swapping seats,’ she said.

  Not so innocent were his thoughts of where he hoped the evening might lead.

  * * *

  Natalie couldn’t have borne it if she had been forced to sit on the other side of the room from Finn. She didn’t want to waste a minute of this wedding away from him.

  Tristan had probably had a hand in where she had been placed in the seating arrangements and might not be pleased at the switch. Too bad. Princess Natalia might have to sit dutifully where she was directed—not so just plain Natalie. She was going to grab this chance to be with Finn, no matter if she got dressed down for it later.

  Tristan took his role of Crown Prince seriously. That meant protecting her. Since the loss of their brother, she and Tristan had looked out for each other. But sometimes she had to remind him that she didn’t take kindly to being bossed around by her brother.

  With Finn holding her hand, she made it safely out of the room without detection. Just the casual touch of his hand clasping hers sent shivers of anticipation through her. Never, ever had she felt this kind of thrill.

  She was pleased when he didn’t drop the connection after they’d made it to safety. Then, together, they strolled casually back into the ballroom alongside a group of other guests.

  Each time she looked up to catch his eye she had to suppress a laugh, and saw that he did too. She felt like a naughty schoolgirl. Although in the private all-girls school she had attended there hadn’t been anyone as handsome as Finn to get into mischief with.

  Their surreptitious work had paid off—the swapped name cards were still in place. Finn was hers for the duration of the celebration. She was scarcely able to believe that this gorgeous man was real and seemed to want to be with her as much as she did with him.

  ‘We did it,’ he said in a low undertone after they’d taken their seats at the table. ‘I caught Eliza glaring at me, but there’s nothing she can do about where we’re sitting from where she is, way up there on the bridal table.’

  ‘Clever us,’ Natalia said, holding his gaze and revelling in the warmth of his smile.

  So this is what it’s like to be really attracted to a man.

  Her thoughts were filled with nothing but him. Insta lust. That was what her English-speaking friends called the sudden overwhelming desire to be close to a man. But it wasn’t just a physical attraction. She liked Finn more than she could have imagined she could like someone in such a short space of time. Yes, she ached to touch him, to feel his smooth olive skin under her fingers, and wondered what it would be like to kiss him. But she also wanted to talk with him, listen to him, laugh with him, find out all she could about him.

  She had never felt like this about a man before. Certainly never for any of the six men of noble birth she had rejected as potential husbands. Not even for the boy she’d had a crush on as a teenager in London.

  It hadn’t just been her being caught out at a nightclub that had seen her recalled home to Montovia. She’d also been seen kissing Danny—a fellow student definitely not on the palace-approved list. It had hurt when she hadn’t heard from him again, and part of her heart had shut down, never to recover. It hadn’t been until much later that she’d discovered he’d been paid off by the palace to disappear from her life.

  Her family’s betrayal had added a whole new level of hurt.

  Back then, the law that forbade her and her brothers from marrying someone not of noble birth had still been in place. She’d discovered they’d done the same thing to Tristan—paying off the parents of an English girl he’d loved and moving her to another part of the country. Tristan had been understandably bitter at their interference. Especially co
nsidering what a sham their parents’ marriage was—the King still had a long-time mistress.

  The history of unhappy, loveless marriages in their family had made both her and Tristan deeply cynical about marriage. Fortunately Tristan had found Gemma. For Natalia there had been no one.

  On a trip to Africa the previous year, to visit a girls’ school that her charity had funded, she had travelled with an attractive photographer. Sparks had flown between them—not the kind of powerful attraction she’d felt instantly for Finn, but sparks just the same. But he had made it clear he would never get involved with her. Not when he knew his life would come under scrutiny and he would have to play second fiddle to a princess. Natalia had appreciated his honesty but had felt wounded because she hadn’t even been given a chance.

  That had been back then. Now Natalia wanted to shut the rest of the world out, so it shrank to just her and Finn. She resented the time spent chatting with the other six guests at their table. But politeness dictated that she distributed her time evenly. All that royal training in graciousness and good manners didn’t go away just because she was in disguise.

  The other guests were all pleasant people from Eliza’s pre-Party Queens life. Natalia made it a point to chat with each of them. Finn joined in too, charming and thoughtful in his conversation. The others seemed to assume she and Finn were a couple, and neither of them did anything to make them think any differently.

  One of the women was Chinese, and Finn surprised Natalia by exchanging a few words with her in her own language. ‘You sound fluent in Chinese,’ Natalia said when he turned his attention back to her.

  ‘Thankfully, yes,’ he said. ‘One of my biggest new export markets is mainland China,’ he explained. ‘It’s a great advantage to be able to speak Mandarin.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ she said.

  ‘My grandfather spoke to me in Chinese when I was a child and my mother insisted I study the language formally when I was older. I studied Italian to please my grandmother—also useful for the business. And my sister Bella studied both languages too.’

  Natalia wanted to tell him she was also multilingual, even chat to him in Italian, but it was too risky in case she tripped up over the details of a made-up background. The less she said about herself, the better. Pretending to be someone else, denying the truth about herself, wasn’t as easy as she’d thought. Not when she really wanted to impress Finn.

  ‘Sounds like your grandparents were very influential in your life,’ she said.

  Hers had been too. Her late paternal grandfather had been King when she was a child and had ruled his family like a tyrant, although he’d been seen as a benevolent ruler of the country. She’d been terrified of him. Thankfully her mother and father, despite their differences and the restrictions of their royal duties, had been united in being loving parents to her and her brothers.

  ‘My wonderful grandparents are both still around, fortunately,’ Finn said. ‘I have them to thank for my start in the business.’

  Natalia hadn’t mourned the death of her grandfather, and her grandmother had remained a distant, disapproving figure. She’d never known her mother’s parents.

  ‘Really?’ she said, fascinated to know every detail of his life in the short time she had with him. Through him she could view life through a very different lens. ‘I’d love to hear about it.’

  ‘My grandfather and grandmother met each other in high school. It was like Romeo and Juliet set in the western suburbs of Sydney. His family owned the local Chinese restaurant—her family the Italian. Neither family was happy for their child to marry out of their culture—the old migrant story.’

  Natalia leaned closer, sensing a real-life romance very different from her own family history of loveless arranged marriages. She was better off being single than being pushed into that kind of marriage—although to be fair to her parents, they had not pressured her, even when she’d said no to each of the unsuitable and unlovable six.

  Anyway, how could you be sure of love? Her late brother Carl’s marriage to Sylvie, the daughter of a duke, had supposedly been a ‘love match’. Carl had been head over heels with her, and she’d seemed the same with him. But once she’d had her lavish wedding in the cathedral she’d proved to be greedy and avaricious, more in love with the wealth and status of being Crown Princess than with her husband. And there was no divorce for Montovian royalty. Make a bad choice and you were stuck with it for life.

  ‘It must have been difficult for them if they had to defy their families,’ she said.

  ‘They say it only made them all the more determined to be together,’ said Finn. ‘Once they were twenty-one they could marry without their families’ consent and they did. Fortunately they were both passionate about food, and my grandparents ended up running both restaurants. Their parents imported authentic ingredients from Asia and Europe, supplying other restaurants too. My nonna was a canny businesswoman and she soon grew the import side of the business so that it eclipsed the actual restaurants and they sold them.’

  ‘So where did you come in?’

  ‘I inherited their interest in food. However, my family also had a passion for education. I did a business degree at university, but worked all my vacations in the business. I went full-time when I graduated. I soon saw the opportunities for export as well as import. My grandparents handed the business over to me and I expanded it way beyond its original parameters. They still have a stake in it, but they’re enjoying their retirement. I take all the risks.’

  ‘Didn’t your parents and your sister feel they’d been passed over?’

  The rules for inheritance were very strict in Montovia—for everyone, not just royals.

  ‘Not at all. My mother is a pharmacist. My father has his own construction company. My sister works with him. Seems we like keeping things in the family.’

  ‘Sounds like your family is very close.’

  ‘Yeah. It is. But that’s enough about me. What about you?’

  ‘My family story isn’t as interesting as yours,’ she said.

  Of course it was—an unbroken line of rulers stretching back hundreds of years—but she couldn’t share that.

  ‘Just ordinary, really. I have a brother.’ It was too painful to mention her other brother, whom she had adored; his loss still cut too deeply. ‘My parents take rather too much interest in my life—which is annoying, considering I’m twenty-seven—but I guess that’s okay.’

  ‘It would be worse if they didn’t take an interest, wouldn’t it?’ he said with a smile.

  ‘True,’ she said, returning his smile and gazing into his green eyes for rather longer than was polite on a shared table.

  Their heads had been bowed closely together, their voices low for the duration of the conversation. Reluctantly she broke her gaze away and returned her attention to the other people at the table, as good manners dictated.

  A pleasant middle-aged couple sat opposite them—Eliza’s neighbours. Natalia and Finn chatted with them about how much they were enjoying the meal.

  Once the plates for the main course had been cleared, the woman—Kerry—sat back in her chair. Her narrow-eyed gaze went from Natalia to Finn and back again. ‘So, is all the romance of this lovely wedding giving you two ideas?’ she said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Natalia, completely taken aback.

  ‘You and Finn. Any plans for a wedding of your own?’

  Natalia wasn’t often lost for a diplomatic reply to an unexpected question. But the Australian woman’s blunt questioning had her floundering. She looked up to Finn for help, only to see him struggling too.

  ‘No plans yet,’ he finally choked out.

  ‘You haven’t popped the question?’

  ‘No!’ he said.

  ‘How long have you been together?’

  ‘We...er...we only just met,’ Natalia said, flushing hot with embarra
ssment.

  The woman frowned. ‘Really? Forgive me. It’s just that...’

  ‘Just that what?’ Natalia prompted, suddenly curious.

  ‘I’ve been around a while, and I can usually tell a perfectly matched couple. You two look so right together.’

  Natalia gasped. She didn’t dare look at Finn, and was at a complete loss as to what to say. But Finn diplomatically came to the rescue.

  ‘I think we’re right together too,’ he said smoothly. ‘But it’s very early days.’

  Natalia wished she could sink through the floor.

  The woman smiled. ‘I see a wedding and I’m never wrong,’ she said, before turning her attention to her husband, who’d been trying to shush her.

  Mortified, Natalia kept her eyes on her plate.

  ‘Don’t worry about her,’ Finn murmured in her ear. ‘She seems harmless. Unfortunately I seem to attract matchmakers. Weddings bring out the worst in them.’

  If he only knew the level of matchmaking that had gone on—and continued to go on—when it came to Princess Natalia of Montovia. Finn O’Neill from Sydney, Australia—a merchant—would seem, in the eyes of her parents and the royal court, like a very unsuitable match indeed.

  She was glad when the speeches started and she was able to turn away from the odd woman and any talk of matchmaking and marriage to face the top table.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE SPEECHES WERE over and the bride and groom were dancing their first dance together. All the guests had been invited on to the dance floor to share the bridal waltz. At last Finn had Natalie in his arms—if only as a dance partner.

  There was something intimate about an old-fashioned waltz. With her hand on his shoulder, his arms around her waist, she was kissing-distance close, her flowery perfume already familiar but no less alluring. Her body so near to his was warm, soft, sensual, and her innate rhythm kept them perfectly in step.

  ‘You dance very well,’ she said.

  ‘I tried to get out of lessons at school but there was no escape.’