“But…” Cristopoulis took the phone. “Why would she care?”
Rico shook his head. “You apparently have not been around her highness any time recently. She’ll pick up on the first ring.”
Cristopoulis fit the phone to his ear and winced as the call connected.
Except the queen didn’t sound angry with him, exactly.
“Cristopoulis!” she began, her voice so rich with the Garronois accent that it sounded instantly like home. “Tell me of this lovely LeeAnn Werth.”
Cristopoulis blinked. “LeeAnn?” he managed, trying for innocent. “She’s the innkeeper here.”
“I know that dear. I have Google. But what is she to you?”
“I…” of all the questions he would have expected from his monarch, this wasn’t it. Queen Catherine hadn’t batted an eye when he’d been summarily booted from the Hellenic Football Federation. She’d wholeheartedly supported his retreat to the US, according to his father, “if that’s what Cristo wanted to do.”
But now she was grilling him about LeeAnn?
“I—she and I don’t really know each other, Your Highness,” he said. “We only began talking a few days ago.”
“A few days?” Catherine scoffed. “You’ve had her to yourself for all these months, and you only now decide to get up the grit to pursue her? What exactly are we not teaching our young men in the military, Jasen?”
Cristopoulis’s eyes widened. King Jasen was with the queen as she conducted this late-night call? He couldn’t hear the response the king gave, but the queen was right back on the phone. “Your king said he will take the matter up with military command,” she said severely, then she laughed. “LeeAnn Werth seems very nice from her picture. Is she? And more importantly, when is she coming to visit? We can get her a provisional visa, hmmm.” She paused, apparently writing something down. “Does she have a passport?”
“Aunt Catherine!” Cristopoulis’s outburst had Rico turning around with surprise, and he struggled to even his tone. “Your Highness—Ma’am—with respect, I have gone to many parties with many women over the past few years. I don’t understand your interest in this one.”
“You have squired women to many parties, yes, and there have been pictures of those women,” his aunt said, her voice rich with satisfaction. “All of them lovely, many of them Garronois, a few of them who would have even made excellent matches had they held your interest for longer than a second. Or perhaps, had you held theirs, either way. I make a study of such pictures when it comes to my nephew.”
She paused, and when she spoke again her voice was gentle, but firm.
“You may not realize this, but you are in love with this young American woman, Cristo,” she said. “The kind of love that doesn’t happen every day.”
“In love?” Cristopoulis barked the words. Rico was now openly gaping at him, and another of his men had drifted closer, eyes wide. “It was one posted picture on Facebook!”
“It doesn’t matter where it was posted,” the queen shot back. “Am I right?”
“I…” Cristopoulis found himself staring out at the lake. The beautiful Lake Haralson, as smooth as glass, where a family of swans slid along its surface, their young baby swans following behind him. He didn’t want to live here. He didn’t want to stay here. LeeAnn was here, yes, but…
“She runs the inn,” he said at length. “She won’t leave.”
“I am right.” The queen sounded far too pleased with herself, but Cristopoulis was already shaking his head.
“I’m serious. She won’t leave. She wants to, I think, but she has too many responsibilities. Even now she is about to resecure a lease on the main building of the inn, which will tie her to this place for five more years.”
The king spoke in the background, and Cristopoulis heard his father’s name mentioned. He grimaced.
“Before you tell me, I know I have to come back. I need to address the fans in Greece, apologize to the coach. I will not play there again, but I owe them at least that.”
“You definitely will not play there. He’s an odious man,” the queen said. “Perhaps it is time Garronia had its own national football team? Relax! Relax,” she said, though Cristopoulis couldn’t tell if she was reassuring him or the king. “Merely something to consider. For now, we must focus on what’s important. Cristopoulis, you love this woman and if she has any sense at all, she is fond of you too.”
Cristopoulis grimaced, remembering LeeAnn’s face when she passed by him. “I’m not too sure about that.”
The queen continued. “But from what you are telling me, she doesn’t truly love where she is, what’s she’s doing.”
Again, he hesitated. “I really don’t know her that well.”
“You know her enough to fall in love with her,” she said pointedly. “The rest is just conversation. And you do know, I think.”
Cristopoulis sighed, his eyes still pinned on the lake. “She surrounds herself with images of travel, and while she’s good at being an innkeeper, she doesn’t love it. Not really. Not when there’s the entire world to explore. But she doesn’t want to let anyone down—especially her father and grandfather, who aren’t even still living but who loved this inn and everything in it.”
“I see. And what would you say to her, if you thought that by saying it, she would leave that little town and come fly away with you?”
“I…” Cristopoulis’s eyes widened as he watched the first swan lift off the water. No sooner had it spread its wide wings than a second swan launched beside it, then the smaller swans lifted up as well, each of them stretching to embrace the stiffening breezes sweeping off the lake. Would they all fly away, he wondered, migrating to another lake? It seemed like the next natural step in their lives, the one thing they most needed to do.
If they could do it, why couldn’t LeeAnn?
Belatedly he realized the queen was still waiting. When he spoke again, his voice was rusty, as if he’d never used it in quite this way before. “Well, I would tell her—”
“Stop,” the queen commanded. “Wait to tell me everything the day you bring her to me. For now—go find her.”
Chapter Seven
LeeAnn had made her way to the back porch of Swan Cottage, but a glance inside told her that nothing had changed since she’d reviewed the property two days ago. Now she sat on the porch swing that looked out over the small pond and the wide sky beyond.
She knew she should call Mr. Prentiss. Even more importantly, she knew she should call the inn to get someone to cart her and the bike back down to the mountain. But she could wait a little while longer, she thought. No one was expecting her anytime soon, and with Cristopoulis leaving, the inn would seem quieter than ever.
Another hour passed as she sat on the bench, hugging a Werth Inn cushion to her stomach, making mental lists of everything she needed to do. She was feeling almost human again when the sound of a car turning into the driveway made her straighten.
The inn, she thought, probably sending out a rescue crew when they couldn’t find her. She smiled despite herself. They were a good staff, all of them still left from when her father had run the place, some of them holdovers from her grandfather’s time. She was lucky and she knew it. Signing away her life for five more years would not be the hardship she was making it out to be.
She just needed to convince herself a little more of that, then she’d be set.
“LeeAnn?”
She’d expected the interruption but not the voice, and she scrambled off the bench to her feet, dropping the cushion.
“Cris!” she said, resisting the urge to straighten her hair. Her tears had long since dried but she’d scrubbed off her makeup. She knew she once more looked like she always did—a small town Minnesota innkeeper.
Well, one thing being an innkeeper had taught her was to fake her way through the worst of news with a calm smile and a cheerful manner. She would do it with Mr. Prentiss when she called him later, and she could do it with Cristopoulis Matre
tti now.
She took the offensive. “You’ll be the talk of the soccer team for the next year, you know,” she said with a bright smile. “Some of the kids might even start calling it football if we’re not careful.”
“They’re good players, and they love the game, which is the most important part,” he said, his smile as easy as hers. He leaned against the banister of the back porch, not coming too close. “How did the bike run for you?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Terribly. It gave out right before I reached the cottage, and I had to push it the rest of the way. I don’t have the money to fix it—well, I do, but it’s not top on the list.”
He laughed. “I don’t think you’ll need to fix it. It should be tuned up by a mechanic is all, but the buyer can do that.”
“Right, I need to get on that too.” She added it to her mental list. “It will help as we get the paperwork in place for the inn, that’s for sure. Thank you very much for letting me know what I had.”
“I haven’t done a very good job of that, I’m afraid,” Cristopoulis said. Was it her imagination, or had he moved closer? His eyes shifted to meet her gaze. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you who I really am, LeeAnn.”
“Oh, it’s—”
“No.” He lifted a hand to wave off her reply. “It’s not fine, or all right, or whatever other excuse you were going to make on my behalf. I’m used to doing stupid things, then letting tempers cool while everything gets sorted out, but that doesn’t mean I should have kept the truth from you. You deserved better.”
She wrinkled her brow at him, unused to accepting apologies. “You came to my inn for privacy, Cris. I can understand that, especially after I read those internet stories you left for me. You were raked over the coals pretty hard. I would’ve needed downtime too, without nosy people in my business.”
“Yes,” he grimaced. “But that changed when I asked to learn everything about you. Here I posed all these questions, but held back the truth about me. That isn’t honorable, and I’m sorry for the pain I caused you.”
“You didn’t cause me any pain.” LeeAnn’s heart shimmied a bit as Cristopoulis stepped up onto the back porch though, still wrung out from her crying jag. “I get emotional sometimes over dumb things. It’s okay.”
“I’d like to make it up to you,” he said, and the intensity in his eyes made her more nervous, not less. Her natural self-protection surged to the fore, and she lifted her hands to ward him off.
“That’s not necessary,” she said, hoping he couldn’t hear the tremor in her voice. “Last night was…a great memory. We can keep it that way.”
Her words sounded right—logical. Sane, certainly, at least to her. But Cristopoulis kept coming toward her, stopping only when he was a few feet away.
“I don’t want to keep it a memory, if it’s all the same to you.” He drew in a deep breath. “I want you to come to Garronia.”
“Garronia!” LeeAnn blurted. That, she hadn’t expected. “I have an inn to run. I’m afraid the job isn’t one that allows for much in the way of vacations.”
“And if it wasn’t your job?” He took another step toward her. “This morning Jake couldn’t stop talking about your inn, said he hadn’t been here for years. He said the work you’ve done to build the place is remarkable.”
Despite herself, LeeAnn felt a flush of pride. “Well, it’s a remarkable place.”
“Then why not sell it to him?”
“Cris, he’s not serious when he says such things. I told you that.”
“But if he was?” He stepped forward again, and lifted his hand to brush away a lock of hair that had escaped from LeeAnn’s top knot. “You said yourself your lease paperwork is due. Why couldn’t you sell this place instead of remaining here for another five years?”
“Because I have responsibilities.”
“You have dreams too,” Cristopoulis said. “Dreams that deserve a chance to be explored.” He gestured to the now-empty pond. “If suddenly you could fly away, as easily as the swans do when the time is right, would you want to?”
LeeAnn blinked at him, his words striking a chord deep within her, and the answering keening note of hope seemed to fill her whole mind.
Would she leave this place, if suddenly there was money and the freedom to spread her wings and fly? Would she give herself the permission to explore the world the way she always thought she might, before her dad fell ill and her plans suddenly turned back on themselves? She’d thought of the possibility before, but now, with Cristopoulis in front of her, it had never seemed more reasonable. Less like a pipe dream, and more like the most natural thing in the world.
But could she do it?
She stared at Cris’s earnest face, his eyes trained on hers, his mouth set into a determined line. His hands half-raised as if she was a foal about to bolt—or a woman so unsure of what her dreams were anymore that she’d long ago stopped dreaming them. Was this the chance for her to fly, though? Was she ready to see what the world held for her?
“I don’t know,” she whispered finally.
Cristopoulis closed in another inch, careful not to startle LeeAnn. She still wasn’t looking at this the right way, but she didn’t have the benefit of his queen to put her heart into painfully obvious perspective. She only had him.
It would have to do.
“I don’t think I’ve been clear enough,” he said, and LeeAnn blinked at him, as if she’d gone off to somewhere else, her obligations and her to-do list weighing on her more heavily than her yearning to explore what lay beyond the next ridge.
She smiled, and shook her head. “You’ve been very clear. And I do appreciate it—I do. A ticket to Garronia would be the vacation of a lifetime. I know that. But I—” her smile went a little lopsided, and she drifted a hand over the bench next to her. “I haven’t had the luxury of truly imagining I could do something like that for a very long time. It takes a little getting used to the idea for an innkeeper from Minnesota. Even if she doesn’t bake.”
“But you’re not an innkeeper from Minnesota, LeeAnn.” The words came out of his mouth with such assurance that she blinked. “You’re a woman with a heart as big as these north woods you know so well, who became an innkeeper with all this responsibility simply because you felt it was the right thing to do. People were counting on you, yes. Important people. But those same people would want you to be happy.”
“I am happy,” she said, automatically.
“You are. I know you are.” He reached out for her hands and she let him take them, and nothing felt more right. “But you could be happier, don’t you think? You could let yourself fall into those travel posters you have on your walls, walk down those streets with your own feet and see those skylines with your own eyes. And then if you want to come back to Minnesota, you’d find your way back, no?”
Her hands were gripping his now, and something clicked in his mind that he hadn’t expected, but which seemed so obvious to him now, gazing into her eyes. Swans didn’t fly alone. And neither, he realized suddenly, did he want LeeAnn to suffer that fate. Not when he could be with her. “I’d travel with you, if you’d like. We could see the world together.”
LeeAnn’s eyes filled with sudden tears, but she shook her head. “You can’t promise me that, Cris,” she said. “You have your life to lead in Garronia, or Greece, or wherever you want to be.”
“I do,” he said. “But what if where I most want to be…is with you?”
LeeAnn couldn’t help herself. She tried to laugh, but it came out as a half-sob. This gorgeous man—a stranger—was filling her mind with incredible dreams that couldn’t be true. Wouldn’t be true, she knew, after a little while. That simply wasn’t how life worked. People went their separate ways, plans were disrupted, dreams derailed. And that wasn’t a bad thing, necessarily. Troubles made you strong.
But here, standing with Cristopoulis Matretti staring at her so intently, LeeAnn could almost believe in the magic of his far-off country, almost believe that he rea
lly did want to fly away with her. That they’d be able to take a journey of a lifetime—together.
He didn’t waver, and she managed a wobbly smile. “I read a dozen articles about you, Cris. You could travel with anyone in the world.”
“Excellent,” he smiled broadly. “Then I choose you.” He squeezed her hands. “Where shall we go first?”
He bounced on his toes, and it struck her he did that a lot. How had she not noticed it before? All the little tells that betrayed his athletic background—the early morning workouts, the healthy food choices, the easy camaraderie with his men.
No, not his men. His bodyguards.
The gulf between them yawned wide again. “Cris…”
“No. No second thoughts yet, not when you were doing so well. You must think about all the possibilities, not all the reasons to say no, you see?” He finally drew her close, and dropped a light kiss on her brow.
“This is ridiculous,” LeeAnn said, and he chuckled.
“Leaving my country to hide in the Minnesota wilderness was ridiculous. Deciding it was a good idea to slug my coach was also ridiculous. This thing between us, whatever it is, this is not ridiculous.”
He held her out again, studying her. “It is completely up to you, LeeAnn. I can make one call, today, to delay my plans. Or I can leave and make arrangements for you to come to Garronia when you are ready—as long as that’s not too long from now.”
“You don’t even know the Donaldsons will buy.” LeeAnn freed her hands from his and placed them on either side of her head. “Buy! What am I talking about? Even if there is a purchase plan in place, it will take time. Months, certainly, to manage everything.”
“Months, I cannot wait.” Cris frowned at her, then his expression cleared. “I tell you what. You contact Jake or his father, and let them know you are interested, but tell them you are taking a trip, yes? Then when you come back you will consider their offer, when they make one.”
“If they make one.”
Finding Chris Evans: The Royal Edition Page 7
