Sandra Hill

by Love Me Tender

  “Ferrama, you need to go back to royal charm school.” She ought to be angry, but laughter bubbled to the surface at his outrageous nerve.

  He pretended to be insulted, but then he burst out laughing, too.

  Finally, she wiped tears of mirth from her eyes with a tissue. “Admit you planned this fiasco. Come on. I might give you a few points for honesty.”

  “Carramba!” He exhaled loudly with exasperation. “The first I heard about this kidn…uh, incident was last night. As I’ve told you innumerable times now, my midnight dinner date at Lutèce was interrupted by the unfortunate news of your…um, trip to the Catskills.”

  “Trip? You can put any spin you want on this, buster, but kidnapping is kidnapping.” She picked up a card from the deck, studied her rotten hand, then discarded, not even bothering to bluff. “Lutèce, huh? Who was your date, some princess?” Cynthia had agreed to play cards with Ferrama in the hope she could wheedle some information out of him. Normally, she was a pretty good card player, but it was rather difficult to play cards or carry on a normal discussion when there was nowhere to look except at a big canvas of dark masculine skin and muscle. At least that was the excuse she gave herself for her poor gambling skills today.

  “Who was your date, some princess?” he mimicked. “No, my date was not a princess. Or a queen. Your constant jabs about my royal connections or royal pursuits are becoming tiresome. I’m a businessman now. Pure and simple. Could we just forget that I’m a…ah, prince?”

  “Hard to forget when you keep rubbing it in my face.” On the other hand, he did blush in the oddest way every time she mentioned his being a prince, Cynthia realized. Maybe he’d abdicated or something. Or maybe he didn’t like being different from the common folk. Or maybe she was seeing things that weren’t there. But she was fascinated by his background of nobility and the niggling contradictions in his personality. One minute his language was heavily accented with silky Spanish words and the next he was spitting out Americanized phrases like a born-and-bred New Yorker. “Did you ever meet Princess Di before she died?”

  He hesitated, deliberately not meeting her eyes. “Of course.” And, yes, that was a blush.

  “Did you ever make it with any princesses?”

  “Cynthia!” He did look at her now, and his eyes were wide with consternation. “You can’t possibly think I’d answer such a question.”

  She shrugged. He probably thought she was an ill-mannered Ugly American type who didn’t know anything about polite conversation. Actually, the question had just slipped out. “So, if your date wasn’t a princess, then who? A movie star? Didn’t I read somewhere that you were dating Julia Roberts?”

  “Crystelle.”

  “Crystal what? I don’t see what crystal has to do with Julia Roberts.” There I go again. I give up. Just let all the personal questions spew out. Make a fool of myself. Take a mental hiatus. Let this beefcake bozo take advantage of me. “Oooh, I’ll bet you’re coming out with a new crystal-like, high-heeled shoe—sort of a Cinderella glass slipper—and Julia Roberts is going to be the spokesperson. Great choice!”

  “You’re amazing. That runaway imagination must come in handy on Wall Street.” Then he mumbled, “Not Crystelle what, just Crystelle.”

  Cynthia furrowed her brow and watched with fascination as his darkly tanned face took on a delicious pink undertone. Suddenly, understanding bloomed. “Oh. You mean the model, Crystelle.”

  He nodded and threw his fanned-out cards on the table. “Gin.”

  “Again?”

  He beamed at his ace-high straight.

  She tossed her cards on the table as well, still with only a pair of fives. That was three games in a row he’d won. Enough was enough.

  “What are you writing?” she asked. He’d picked up the notepad on which they’d been keeping score and was scrawling out some message that she couldn’t read upside down. Two of the words were heavily underlined.

  He turned the pad so she could read, “Tell Jake. Glass slipper. Great idea for new shoe design.” Smiling, he gave her a little salute. “Thanks for the idea.”

  “Do I get a percentage of the profits?”

  “Is that all you think about? Money?”

  “Yeah,” she said. Hardly, she thought, gazing at his magnificent chest and sinewed arms and very nice hands, with fingers she’d bet were extremely talented. Not for the first time she wondered what it would be like to make love with a prince. Would he be elegant and refined in his moves, or would he be demanding, as befitted his rank? Would he treat her like a princess in the bedroom, or a diversion to be discarded come morning? Tantalizing food for thought.

  “I’m hungry,” he said, yawning, as he stretched his arms wide. The posture caused his stomach to flatten even more, his abs to become prominent and his shoulder and upper arm muscles to bunch. Mid-yawn, he caught her appreciative stare and winked.

  Her heart stopped for an exaggerated second, then jumpstarted into a faster beat. Criminey! Can a wink cause heart failure?

  Sometimes she had a sneaky suspicion that he deliberately posed his body—bending over to pick up a pencil, reaching across her line of vision to fluff a pillow, hunkering down to fiddle with the TV dials—just so she would be tempted. Could it all be part of some harebrained seduction plot?

  Not that she was tempted. At all. Nope.

  Oh, God, think of something else. He mentioned being hungry, didn’t he? “You already ate three of Elmer’s fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches for breakfast.”

  “That was hours ago. And I didn’t get to finish my red caviar omelet last night. Or the unopened bottle of Mouton Rothschild 1975 I left on the table.”

  “Treat yourself nice, do you, Ferrama?” Caviar and vintage wines were undoubtedly nightly fare for the prince. He’d probably never stopped at a McDonald’s drive-through in his pampered life…although he had scarfed down those plebeian sandwiches of Elmer’s with remarkable gusto.

  “At four hundred dollars a bottle, I at least expected to sniff the cork.” He lifted his shoulders indifferently, then tossed in, “Call me P.T.”

  “I can’t. It sounds too much like Petie, a little boy’s name. I don’t see you as a little boy.”

  “I hope not.” He threw back his shoulders as if to demonstrate.

  Cynthia didn’t need any convincing, as evidenced by her heart, which did another one of those stop-start maneuvers. “I guess I’ll just have to call you Peter.”

  Back to pacing again, he stopped and glanced at her in a funny way. “Never mind. I can live with Ferrama.” Then he resumed pacing.

  The insufferable man even paced with elegance. Darn it! Back and forth across the room, chain dragging noisily, his long legs strode with the inborn grace of a cougar. With all that natural grace, he must be a great dancer. “Can you flamenco?” she blurted out, hitting on the only Spanish dance she could think of.

  He stopped pacing and gaped at her. Then he poised himself on one foot, with the other leg raised at the knee. Head bobbing like a pink lawn ornament, he inquired with a chuckle, “Like this?”

  “Flamenco, you idiot. Not flamingo.”

  “It was a joke, Cynthia,” he grumbled. “Even princes are permitted a sense of humor.” Then he resumed his aimless pacing.

  She understood his misery and frustration, having two days’ headstart on him. She decided to take pity on him. “Listen, why don’t you go take a bubble bath? By then, our guards should bring us some lunch. Believe me, it helps pass the time.”

  “A bubble bath? Me? In that ancient tub?”

  “Sorry, we’re fresh out of gold-plated spas, your highness. But you do get to choose between lilac or musk essence…from the Priscilla and Elvis bath lines.”

  He sniffed with disdain. “I much prefer my Dior toiletries, but I’ll take the musk, of course.”

  What a self-indulgent narcissist! “Of course.”

  “I don’t suppose…” He gave her one of those slow, sweeping looks of his that she wa
s now convinced were an affected ploy, but which nevertheless made her warm and ill at ease and jittery.

  “No, I’m not going to scrub your back.”

  “Tsk-tsk,” he said, wagging a forefinger at her. “That’s not what I was going to say.”

  “Oh?” I wish I could sink into the floor. But wait, he might have had something even worse in mind. “Well, I’m not joining you.”

  “Tsk-tsk,” he chided again.

  I wonder if my face is as red as it feels.

  “Would you draw my bath?”

  “Get a life!”

  He laughed softly. “Dare I hope that the bath towels are heated?”

  “What bath towels?”

  That stopped him in his tracks. “No bath towels?”

  “Nope. Naomi is afraid we’ll escape wrapped in a towel. So all we have to dry off with are those little guest hand towels,” she informed him with relish.

  “Naomi is nuts. I’d run down the highway naked if I could escape from this nuthouse…uh, nutcastle.”

  “That’s what I told her. ‘The prince has absolutely no modesty. He’d run naked in the New York Marathon if it would save his company.’”

  “And did you tell her you would run with me?” he inquired, his eyes sparkling merrily. “Naked?”

  “Get a life!” she repeated.

  But that was not what she was thinking.

  “We have company,” Ferrama announced later that afternoon. He was sticking his head out of the side window, straining to peer at something toward the front of the castle.

  “It’s probably one of Naomi’s workmen,” Cynthia commented idly. She was sitting on the bed giving her toenails a second coat. It was either that or continue to ogle the prince in his shamrock shorts, something she’d been doing entirely too much of for the past eight hours. Much more and her hormone generator was going to explode.

  “I…don’t…think…so.”

  “Contractors come and go all the time—electricians, painters, plumbers, landscapers. I think she’s making arrangements for a massive renovation project to begin the minute she gets her cash from the stock settlement.”

  “Nope. This guy is driving a fifty-thousand-dollar black Cadillac Seville.”

  “How can you tell from this distance?”

  “I have good eyesight. And it’s hard to miss the lines of that luxury vehicle. Believe me, this is no plumber.”

  “Hah! Have you heard what plumbers charge these days? I have one client from Staten Island with a $ 1.2 million portfolio, all earned from toilets.”

  “Come over here. Quick. You have to see this.”

  “In a sec. I want to finish painting my toenails.”

  “Enough with the nail polish! You’ve giving me impure thoughts.”

  She glanced up to see if he was serious.

  He was.

  She could see his erotic appreciation in the flare of his aristocratic nostrils, in the lingering sweep of the tip of his tongue over presumably dry lips, in the slight rise of one of the shamrocks.

  Oh, boy!

  She set the polish aside and shimmied off the bed, sashaying over to the window. She was testing just what a shamrock could do with a little incitement.

  He watched her the whole time with a smoldering, dangerous gleam in his dark blue eyes.

  When she got to his side, she asked, “Nail polish gives you impure thoughts, huh? Are you a pervert?”

  “Maybe.”

  She tilted her head.

  “Picture a pitch-black bedroom, two naked bodies, preferably male and female, and ten glow-in-the-dark fingers performing…magic tricks.”

  She got the picture. “You are a pervert.” She tried to laugh as she spoke, but it came out a squeak.

  He grinned at her. She hated when he grinned at her as if he could have her anytime he wanted with a snap of his elegant fingers. He probably could, but that was beside the point. She refused to let him get the upper hand in these mental games they played with each other.

  “Would you like me to paint your nails later?” she offered saucily.

  He blinked with surprise. And interest. “Pink nail polish? Not on your life!”

  “Oh, but didn’t you know? It comes in Clear Night-Glow, too.” She stared at his manicured fingers with their transparent enamel. The fact that he polished his nails still stopped her short, even though she knew many men did.

  The grin he gave her then was slow and sexy and full of wicked promise.

  She shifted uncomfortably, aware of the heat his body threw off—or was it hers?—and Elvis in the background appropriately belting out the seductive lyrics to “Loving You.” It was a double-whammy assault on her senses, which she fought to control.

  “What did you want to show me?” she demanded testily.

  He hesitated, as if reluctant to break the electrifying mood. Then he put one arm on her shoulder, urging her to lean out the window with him, and pointed.

  Cynthia tried to ignore the weight of his arm or the smell of his Elvis musk. Eventually, after a heart-stopping moment, she looked where he was pointing and saw what did indeed appear to be an odd sight.

  One man in a dark suit, presumably the driver, emerged from the front of the sleek black car and opened the back door for another dark-suited man. The hounds were yipping and yapping like crazy, pulling against the limits of their retractable dog chains. Elmer restrained them during the daylight hours, freeing them to guard the palace grounds at night.

  One of the animals had almost reached the driver and was attempting to nip at his pant leg. To her horror, the man reached under his suit jacket, pulled out a pistol and shot into the air. That poor dog and the other hounds went wild, barking and leaping futilely against their chains.

  Cynthia screamed.

  Ferrama shouted, “Hey! You can’t do that!”

  But no one heard them. There had to be at least two hundred feet and six stories separating them, not to mention a buffer of fake banana trees.

  Naomi came rushing out of the castle then, waving her arms and no doubt giving them a tongue lashing. Good thing Elmer and Ruth had gone grocery shopping. Elvis might possibly be dead again since Elmer would never have stood for the stranger shooting deadly weapons around any one of his precious dogs.

  Amazingly, another dark-suited man emerged from the back of the car, and everyone turned to him. He must have weighed about three hundred pounds, had a shiny bald head and a pet snake draped around his massive shoulders. He reached out a fat hand and, to their amazement, Naomi shook it in welcome.

  “Sammy ‘The Snake’ Caputo,” she and Ferrama said at the same time, recognizing the renowned underworld figure. “The Mafia!”

  Chapter Eight

  “The Mafia!” Naomi scoffed a short time later.

  She was standing in the hallway, beyond the reach of his hands, which ached to get a grasp on her skinny neck. He’d wring it like a chicken’s, given the chance. But, unbelievable as it was, his crazy stepsister was aiming a pistol at a point midway between his heart and his other favorite organ. He decided to forestall the pleasure, for now.

  “We saw you talking to Sammy Caputo. We both did.” He inclined his head toward the bed, where Cynthia was taking a little afternoon nap. “Don’t deny it.”

  “Sammy Caputo?” Her eyes widened with what appeared to be surprise, but who knew with Naomi.

  “Yeah, the guy with the bald head and the snake wrapped around his neck.”

  Naomi gave a little twittering laugh. “That was a silk scarf, not a snake.”

  The idea of the Cosa Nostra dropping by his estate to chat with Naomi had been preposterous to begin with. Was it possible that he and Cynthia had been mistaken? Hah! His life was one big mistake of late. “Who the hell were they, then?”

  Naomi shrugged. “Businessmen. They said they’re thinking about opening an Italian restaurant in the Catskills, and they made a wrong turn for Indian Mountain.”

  “That was a helluva wrong turn!” She is lying
through her teeth.

  “Whatever.”

  “Businessmen who carry guns?” he persisted. He couldn’t give up the notion that something had been strange about the Cadillac trio. And Naomi had seemed to be shaking hands with one of them.

  “They’re from the Bronx. Everyone carries a weapon in the Big Apple. Even I own a handgun.”

  “I noticed. But even you don’t shoot at helpless dogs.” You kidnap people but spare animals. A real paragon of virtue.

  Her shoulders sagged at that horrifying reminder, but then stiffened immediately. “He only shot in self-defense. He thought the dogs were going to attack him.” She gulped several times, as if the words gagged her. Then she added, “We could have been sued, you know? Elmer should be more careful with those mutts.”

  “We’re already about to be raked through the courts. What’s one more lawsuit?”

  Her upper lip curled into a sneer.

  Uh-oh! Best not to rile her…too much, anyway.

  “Why’d you call me up here? I have work to do,” Naomi snarled, shifting from foot to foot in her ridiculous work boots. By the splatters on the steel-reinforced toes, he’d guess she was laying concrete today. Jeesh!

  “Naomi, put down the gun. We have to—”

  “What’d you do to wipe out the shark?” she asked with a leer, cocking her head toward the bed where Cynthia still slept.

  “Not what you think.” Not what I’d like.

  Elmer and Ruth had brought them back a late lunch, Kentucky Fried Chicken with the works…chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, buttermilk biscuits. All that heavy food, with no exercise, was making him groggy, too.

  Not that he’d remotely consider slipping into the sack with her. He’d had a hard enough time keeping his eyes off her for the past hour—the key word being hard.

  He followed Naomi’s gaze to where Cynthia lay on one side, curled into a ball, like a kitten. Her cheek rested on her two hands, which were folded in a prayer position on the pillow. From the back he could see more than she’d like him to see of her butt through the straining silk of her panties. Her big mop of strawberry blond hair was strewn all over the place, but even so, her shoulder blades were visible against the lace camisole.