The Princess Problem

by Teri Wilson

  Then a tinny clang pierced the quiet and it all fell apart. Like pearls slipping from a string.

  Dalton seemed to realize something was wrong before he saw it. His smile faded, lips compressed. In the final moment their eyes were still locked, Aurélie saw fear in his gaze. Raw, primal fear that made her blood run cold.

  Her throat went dry, and she realized the sound she’d heard had been Diamond’s front hooves hitting the rail.

  Diana.

  The world seemed to move in slow motion as Aurélie’s head swiveled in the direction of the course. Already Dalton was scrambling to his feet, climbing out of the box, as the horse’s back feet sent the rails flying and the big, graceful animal crashed into the dirt with a sickening thud. He hit the ground with such force that Aurélie’s chair pitched forward and she had to grab onto the railing in front of her to keep herself from falling.

  Diamond’s leg twisted into a horrific angle, and a terrible sound came out of him. A sound that would haunt Aurélie’s dreams for weeks to come. She wanted to close her eyes, to block it all out. But she couldn’t. Not until she found Dalton’s sister in the wreckage.

  The horse tried to scramble to his feet, and when he did, Diana’s petite form rolled out of the way.

  She’s okay. She’s all right.

  But Diamond couldn’t support himself on his broken leg and fell sideways, his big, beautiful head smacking down squarely on top of Diana’s helmet.

  Her body went limp. A gasp went up from the crowd. Time sped up again and somewhere in the periphery, Aurélie was vaguely aware of the clock flashing 10:00.

  “Oh, my god.” Ophelia’s hand flew to her throat.

  “Let’s go,” Artem said, helping Ophelia up.

  Aurélie wasn’t sure if she should follow or stay put, but Ophelia grabbed her hand and held on tight as she walked past. So she followed the two of them out of the box and to the entrance to the ring, where Dalton stood as pale as a ghost.

  “I’m so sorry, Dalton. She’ll be okay. She will,” Aurélie said, knowing full well it might be a lie.

  But sometimes people needed to believe in lies, didn’t they? Sometimes a lie was the only thing that kept a person going. At least that was what Aurélie’s mother had written in her diary.

  She swallowed, not quite sure what to believe anymore.

  Diana was already surrounded by EMTs, since qualified medical personnel were required to be on hand at all equestrian events that included showjumping. A siren wailed in the distance, and Artem was talking in terse tones to the show chairman, worried that the ambulance would have trouble reaching the tent through the maze of horse trailers and cars parked outside in the snow.

  Through the chaos, Dalton remained stoic. He didn’t move, didn’t say a word. He scarcely seemed to breathe.

  When at last Diana had been lifted into the back of an ambulance—strapped onto a gurney with her head still in its riding helmet—Dalton seemed surprised to find Aurélie standing beside him. It was as if he’d been in a trance and forgotten she was there.

  “Come with me.” He placed his hand in the small of her back and escorted her out of the tent, to the edge of the parking lot where two sleek black cars sat idling, waiting to follow the ambulance to the hospital.

  The sky had turned an ominous gray, heavy with snow. The cold air hit Aurélie’s face like a slap. She ducked her head against the wind.

  “We’ll meet you there,” Artem called, nodding solemnly as he and Ophelia climbed into the back of a sedan.

  Dalton nodded and held the door open to the town car. Aurélie slid inside and scooted across the seat to make room for him. But he didn’t get in right away. Instead he leaned into the opened window and murmured something to the driver.

  “Yes, sir,” the chauffeur said and shifted the car into Drive.

  What was happening?

  “Wait!” Aurélie scrambled to open the door.

  “Miss,” the driver said in a firm tone. “Mr. Drake has given me instructions...”

  She didn’t wait for him to finish. She pushed her way out of the car and ran to catch up with Dalton, who’d already begun walking away.

  “Where are you going?” She could hear the panic in her own voice, but she didn’t care how desperate it sounded. Didn’t care how desperate she looked, slipping and sliding on the icy pavement. Because she knew what he was going to say before he even turned around.

  “Aurélie.” He gripped her shoulders and held her at arm’s length. “Get back in the car.”

  She shook her head and opened her mouth to object, but no words would come out. They stuck in her throat. She couldn’t seem to make a sound.

  Dalton’s expression hardened, and she was hit with the realization that it didn’t matter what she said. Or what she didn’t. There were no words that could make him change his mind.

  “I want you to go, Aurélie,” he said, and she wished with her whole heart that he would call her princess again. Just one more time. “Go home.”

  Home.

  The word hung in the space between them, ominous with meaning.

  He wasn’t talking about his apartment back in Manhattan. He didn’t mean his home. He meant hers. Delamotte.

  “I can’t go, Dalton. Not now.” How could he expect her to walk away at a time like this?

  “I’m not asking you, Aurélie. I’m telling you.” He paused, took a deep breath. He suddenly didn’t look so stoic anymore. Or angry, either. Just tired. So very tired.

  “I want you to go. It’s time.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Dalton hadn’t set foot in a hospital since the day Clarissa died.

  He’d managed to avoid the beeping machines, the drawn curtains, the memories steeped in antiseptic perfume for six long years. Even in the wake of his father’s heart attack, he’d stayed away. At the time, it had been alarmingly easy to explain his absence as a necessity. While Diana sat vigil at their father’s bedside and Artem had gone MIA doing God knows what, no one had actually expected Dalton to show up.

  They’d expected him to be sitting at his desk. Just like always. It was what their father would have wanted, after all. This expectation had of course been partially instrumental in the events causing Dalton to despise hospitals to begin with.

  Oh, the irony.

  Dalton had been at the office until 2 a.m. the night Clarissa slit her wrists. What no one knew, either then or now, was that he’d put away his spreadsheets and emails sometime around 10 p.m. After scrolling through all the notifications of Clarissa’s missed calls on his cell, he’d opted to sleep on the sofa in his office rather than going home.

  He hadn’t been in the mood for another argument about his work schedule. Or his inattentiveness. Or anything, really. Whatever feelings he’d had for Clarissa had long since faded. He’d been going through the motions for months. A year perhaps. He just hadn’t gotten around to officially breaking things off, in part because he’d had too much on his plate at Drake Diamonds. But mainly because Geoffrey Drake would have been livid when he found out Dalton was calling off his engagement. It had been his father’s plan all along to have Clarissa join the Drake dynasty with the diamond empire her grandfather ran.

  And like the obedient son that he’d always been, Dalton had fallen into step.

  Until he couldn’t.

  He didn’t love her. He was quite sure she didn’t love him, either. They’d been thrown together like two animals in a cage, and each in their own way, they’d begun fighting for a way out.

  With hindsight had come the benefit of clarity. Dalton could see the arguments, the tantrums, even the suicide, for what they were. Clarissa had wanted to escape. And she’d done just that.

  Nevertheless, knowing why she’d done it hadn’t lifted the mantle of regret. Dalton should have
seen what was happening. He’d always prided himself on his attention to detail, his keen sense of accountability. Whether they’d loved each other or not, Clarissa had been his fiancée. His responsibility. He should have gotten her the help that she needed.

  He should have picked up the godforsaken phone.

  Instead, he’d woken up sometime in the middle of the night and finally headed home. But only after checking his phone first and seeing that the calls had stopped. He’d assumed Clarissa had finally given up and gone to bed. He wished to hell and back that he’d been right. He wished so many things.

  “Mr. Drake, your sister’s room is right this way.” A nurse wearing mint-green scrubs and holding a clipboard led him down a corridor on the third floor of Southampton Hospital.

  Dalton fell in step behind her.

  A sign on the wall announced he was in the Head Trauma unit. Just up ahead, Dalton saw a young man in a wheelchair with his skull immobilized in a halo brace, eyes staring blankly into space. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen years old. Dalton dropped his gaze to the nurse’s feet in front of him and her soft-soled white shoes padding silently down the hospital corridor.

  “Here we are.” She stopped in front of a closed door. Room 367.

  She extended a hand to push the door open, and Dalton stopped her. “Wait. Before we go in...”

  “Yes?” She smiled politely at him, her kind eyes full of concern. She was being so nice. Everyone was. The paramedics. The ambulance driver. Even the damn Uber driver who’d come to pick him up at the horse show.

  It made Dalton want to scream.

  “How bad is it?” he asked, hating himself for sounding so desperate.

  Clarissa’s death should have prepared him for this. What good was the cement wall he’d so carefully constructed around his soul if it didn’t protect him from falling apart in the face of tragedy?

  “We’re still waiting on the results of the CT scan, so I’m afraid I can’t really say. She’s conscious, and that’s a great sign. Her head hurts, though, so she’s drifting in and out. The doctor should be in to speak with you shortly. In the meantime, Diana is resting comfortably. Her monitors will alert us if her vital signs change. But if you need anything—anything at all—we’re right down the hall, Mr. Drake.” She smiled again. Too big. Too nauseatingly nice.

  “Very well. I understand.” He nodded, and pushed the door open himself, needing to feel as in control of the situation as he could.

  As if such an idea were remotely possible.

  The nurse checked the beeping machine by Diana’s bed and made a few notations on her clipboard while Dalton shifted his weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other. The room was huge. Private. What good was all that time spent at the office if the Drake money couldn’t be put to good use? The sheer size of it, along with the huge bay window overlooking the beachfront of Southampton, made the mechanical hospital bed in the center of the room seem absurdly tiny. Resting in a hospital gown and sterile white sheets with her eyes shut tight, Diana looked pale and dainty.

  Dainty was a word Dalton had never associated with his sister before. Strong, yes. Fearless, most definitely. Dainty had never been part of the equation.

  Even now, it didn’t seem right. Dalton frowned, struggling for the right adjective. It was a relief to have something to concentrate on. Something concrete and logical. Until he realized the word he was looking for was broken.

  His chest seized, and he let out a cough.

  The nurse rested a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Give us a shout if you or your sister need anything.”

  Her voice was a soothing whisper. Dalton nodded, wondering when he’d sunk into the overstuffed leather recliner at Diana’s bedside. He had no memory of it. Nor of taking his sister’s hand in his own. He wondered if he might be in shock, medically speaking. Not that it mattered. Only one thing mattered right now, and it most definitely wasn’t him.

  Wake up.

  He’d feel a lot better about her prognosis if she’d simply open her eyes. He didn’t say it aloud, though. He didn’t dare, lest it come out as harshly as it sounded in his head.

  Wake the hell up.

  Dalton didn’t want to be that guy—the angry one screaming orders at an unconscious young woman. Even though deep down, he knew that was exactly who he was. The moment Diana’s horse went down, the second his hooves hit the rail and his slender ebony legs buckled beneath him, something had come unwound inside Dalton. Something dark and ugly.

  Anger.

  Six years of bloody, blinding anger that he’d buried in numbers and sales figures and marketing strategies. But like a diamond buried in a mine, his fury hadn’t crumbled during its time in the darkness. It had grown exponentially sharper. Stronger. Dazzling in its intensity.

  She wasn’t in a coma. She’d been alert when they’d taken her away in the ambulance. She needed rest. He knew that.

  But once she’d closed her eyes, Dalton worried they wouldn’t open again. After all, that’s what had happened last time he sat beside a hospital bed.

  His fists clenched in his lap. He was furious. Furious at the horse. Furious at Diana and whatever terrible impulse drove her to hurl herself in harm’s way over and over and over again. He was even furious at poor Clarissa.

  And his father. Always.

  Was there anyone he wasn’t angry at?

  Unbidden, Aurélie’s lovely face came to mind. The pull of the memory was irresistible, dragging him under. He closed his eyes and let himself drown. Just for a moment. Just long enough to summon her generous lips and the elegant curve of her neck. Regal. Classic. A neck made for ropes and ropes of pearls.

  But then he remembered her expression when she’d climbed out of the car and come running after him—the bewildered hurt in her emerald eyes, coupled with the painful knowledge that such damage had been his doing.

  He opened his eyes and pushed the memory back into place.

  I want you to go, Aurélie. It’s time.

  It had been past time for her to return to Delamotte, gala or no gala. He’d done the right thing.

  For both of them.

  Then why does it feel so wrong?

  “Dalton?”

  His heart crashed to a stop. He blinked in relief at the sight of Diana’s opened eyes, wide and searching.

  He forced himself to smile. “You’re awake.”

  “I am.” She nodded, winced and closed her eyes again. “My head hurts. I keep drifting off.”

  “It’s okay. I’m here.” He gave her hand a reassuring squeeze.

  There was a smudge of red clay on one of Diana’s cheeks. Dirt from the riding arena. He wiped it away with a brush of his thumb and pondered the fact that they hadn’t cleaned her up. Yet there was a startling lack of blood, given the seriousness of her condition. She didn’t have so much as a bruise.

  Relief flooded through Dalton’s veins and he swallowed. Hard. He could taste the rusty fragrance of blood in his mouth, a sensory memory of the last time he’d sat at a bedside like this one.

  With Clarissa, there’d been so much blood. Red everywhere. Afterward, he’d had the apartment painted top to bottom and all the furniture replaced with nothing but white.

  Again, his thoughts drifted to Aurélie. Aurélie, with her porcelain skin and windswept hair. Aurélie, swaying to Gershwin in his arms. Aurélie, adopting a dog on a whim. The ugliest one of the bunch.

  He shouldn’t be thinking of her at a time like this. He shouldn’t be thinking of her at all. She didn’t have anything to do with his family or his life. She was business. She was temporary. She was royal, for God’s sake.

  Yet when Diamond’s hooves hit the rail with a sickening clang, when he’d watched his sister’s head slam into the ground, Aurélie had been the one he’d wanted at his side. N
ot wanted. Needed. Needed with a ferocity that terrified him.

  He didn’t want to need anyone, least of all a princess.

  You’re in love with her. Ophelia sees it. I see it. Why can’t you?

  Dalton half believed Artem had been joking. Maybe. Maybe not. But his words had touched a nerve.

  Out of the question.

  He couldn’t have feelings for Aurélie. Absolutely not. Not before Diana’s accident, and most definitely not now. Not when he’d been reminded so vividly of all the reasons why he was better off on his own.

  He wasn’t made for this. He never had been. He was his father’s son, through and through.

  The door swung open again. Dalton turned, hoping with every fiber of his being to find a doctor standing in the doorway. A shining beacon of hope. Instead, he took in the tear-stained face of his sister-in-law, followed closely by his brother.

  He dropped Diana’s hand and stood. “Artem. Ophelia.”

  “Dalton?” Ophelia’s brow furrowed. “How on earth did you get here so fast?”

  “I gave the driver an incentive to get me here in a hurry.” Again, the Drake money had come in handy.

  “Marvelous.” Artem rolled his eyes. “Don’t you think we’ve had enough accidents for one day?”

  “I got here in one piece, didn’t I?”

  “Stop. Both of you.” Ophelia’s voice wobbled a little. Great. He’d reduced a pregnant woman to tears. That might be a new low, even for Dalton. “This isn’t the time for bickering. Diana needs us. All of us.”

  Diana needs us.

  Dalton sank back into the chair and dropped his head in his hands. He wanted to tear his hair out by the roots. The door opened again, and it took superhuman effort for him to look up.

  A man wearing green scrubs entered the room and extended his hand. “Hello, I’m Dr. Chris Larson.”

  Dalton shot to his feet. “Doctor.”

  Artem and Ophelia introduced themselves, then Dr. Larson cut to the chase. “I have the results from your sister’s tests. As you know, she took a nasty spill. Fortunately, she was wearing a helmet. A good one, by all appearances.”