by Liz Fielding
‘But she insisted?’ Then, without giving her an opportunity to reply, ‘I wasn’t actually referring to your culpability, merely to your reasoning.’
What?
‘Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Princess Katerina told me that she wasn’t supposed to be out. I get the picture, okay? You’re mad at her and she’s in trouble. But that scarcely matters under the circumstances. She’s disappeared and you have to do something. Now!’
‘I’m sorry, Miss—’ He paused, offering her an opportunity to introduce herself.
‘Varndell,’ she completed quickly. She was beginning to suspect that this was a man who wouldn’t do anything until the social niceties had been satisfied. No matter what the emergency. ‘Laura Varndell. But I really don’t think—’
‘Alexander Orsino,’ he replied, offering his hand. ‘How d’you do?’
That was it. Enough.
‘This isn’t a cocktail party!’ she declared furiously, ignoring his hand. ‘And I know who you are. All I want to know is what you’re going to do about finding your niece!’
‘Nothing while I’m standing in this alleyway,’ he informed her, his voice cool enough to freeze a whole pitcher of cocktails. ‘If you’ll come back into the house—?’
Ice? Had she thought the man was made of something as warm as ice?
‘I don’t want to go back into the house!’
What was she saying!
Hadn’t she been standing on the pavement trying to come up with some plan to get herself invited inside? Her whole career depended upon it. Possibly. But right now Princess Katerina’s disappearance took precedence.
‘I want you to call the police—or Special Branch—or the Diplomatic Protection Squad. Right now!’ she demanded, when he didn’t leap to her command.
‘And how do you suggest I do that?’ he enquired, apparently unperturbed by the crisis.
The ‘serene’ bit of his title wasn’t just for show, apparently. But this wasn’t a time for serenity. It was a time for panic.
‘Shout?’ he offered, when she didn’t help him out.
The air left her lungs with a little whoosh, deflating along with the rest of her. ‘No, sorry—of course not,’ she muttered. Then she laughed. Well, it was more of a giggle, really, but even so quite unforgivable under the circumstances. ‘I don’t appear to be thinking very clearly.’ Which had to be the understatement of the year. ‘I’m not used to this kind of thing.’
‘You’ve had a shock, Miss Varndell, one for which my niece will, in due course, apologise. In the meantime I really do think you should come inside. Take a moment to recover.’
It was hysterics, of course. The desperate urge to giggle. In some small rational part of her brain she recognised that. This man’s niece had been kidnapped and all he was concerned about was that a total stranger might have suffered a little shock.
Noblesse oblige was safe in the hands of His Serene Highness Prince Alexander Michael George Orsino.
And why would she be complaining, exactly?
She’d got her wish. The Prince was inviting her into his home and handing her a scoop on a plate. The inside story on a royal kidnapping was just what she needed to get back into Trevor McCarthy’s good books. The very least she could do was to say ‘thank you’ very nicely and let His Serene Highness take her inside so that she could do her research in comfort.
While she was recovering.
Slowly.
So that she could watch the story unfold around her.
‘Thank you,’ she said, as nicely—if somewhat breathlessly—as she knew how. ‘I do seem to be feeling a little bit shaky.’
One moment it was an act, the next it was nothing but the truth as the Prince took her elbow in his palm and directed her firmly towards his front door. His manner suggested that, thoughtful though his invitation had appeared, he’d had no intention of letting her go anywhere until he’d grilled her about her involvement in his niece’s disappearance.
She swallowed.
It would make great copy, she reminded herself.
Once she’d got bail.
He paused as they reached the lights of the elegant porticoed entrance, glancing down at her, his devilish eyebrows drawn down in the slightest frown and, for just a moment, she thought those dark eyes could see right through her. Read her mind.
‘You’ve grazed your cheek, Miss Varndell,’ he said. She instinctively lifted her hand to check, but he caught her wrist, stopping her. ‘And your knuckles.’
‘It’s nothing,’ she said automatically, her expensive boarding-school having instilled the stern lesson that ladies did not make a fuss.
Fortunately, Alexander Orsino ignored her stoicism.
‘I’ll get someone to see to them,’ he said, every inch the autocrat.
He paused to speak briefly to the footman in a language that wasn’t quite Italian, or French, but a Montorinan dialect that her brain wasn’t quite up to unscrambling at such speed. It was already fully occupied.
The man bowed in acknowledgement and backed away while Prince Alexander, his hand still welded firmly to her elbow, led her towards a wide curving staircase without another word.
She should be looking around, she thought, as she attempted to keep a grip on reality. She should be taking mental notes. But she was having trouble enough just catching her breath.
The man was right. She had to be in shock. That would explain why she had the oddest feeling that she’d stepped into the set of an operetta, with its sweeping staircase, crystal chandeliers and very superior footman wearing black tails.
Add to the mix a cold-hearted prince, a peasant girl and a missing princess—there were all the ingredients for a fairy tale frivolity.
The clothes were all wrong, of course. Peasant girls wore dirndl skirts and embroidered blouses—at least in operetta—while she was wearing a pair of extremely functional cargo pants and a sweatshirt of such antiquity that whatever words had originally been splashed across her bosom had long since faded to illegibility.
Not that the Prince, with his open-necked shirt and cashmere sweater, was getting more than three out of ten for effort. Didn’t he dress for dinner, for heaven’s sake?
Where were his standards?
She dragged herself back from the beckoning arms of hysteria as he opened a door and ushered her into a book-lined room that clearly doubled as sitting room and study.
Here, the baroque evaporated and they were back in the twenty-first century. Computers, a couple of large sofas, a functional desk and enough paperwork to keep an average-sized business going for a month. But running a small country presumably entailed a vast amount of paperwork, and for just a moment she felt a twinge of sympathy for the man. No time to put his feet up with the television, or a pretty girl for this prince.
‘Brandy?’ he offered.
‘What?’ Distracted, she turned back to the Prince. ‘I think the princess’s welfare is more important right now. What are you going to do about finding her?’ she asked. But politely. She suspected that she’d already stretched her luck to breaking point.
‘Nothing. I know where she is. Please make yourself comfortable, Miss Varndell,’ he continued, indicating one of the sofas.
‘You know?’
‘More accurately, I know where she’s going. My niece wished to go to a club with some friends. I refused to give permission. She is, after all, under age.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ve despatched her security officer to bring her home.’
She stared at him. ‘Are you crazy? Weren’t you listening? She had a broken ankle!’
‘Are you absolutely sure about that?’ he replied as he took her hand and placed an exquisite crystal glass in it, closing his long fingers around hers until he was certain she had it safely. Long, slender fingers, one of them bearing a heavy gold signet ring embossed with his personal coat of arms. ‘Did you see it for yourself?’
She blinked, looked up. ‘See what?’
‘Princess Kate
rina’s ankle?’ he prompted.
‘Oh. Well, no, she was wearing boots, but she said—’
She’d said it was broken—had groaned convincingly. Laura subsided on to the sofa as she realised that, once again, she’d been played for a fool.
‘Oh, I see. You’re suggesting that she was just pretending. Playing hurt to get rid of me while she made good her escape.’
‘I would say it’s more likely than a chance kidnapping, wouldn’t you?’
It would certainly explain why she’d insisted on being left where she was rather than attempting, with help, to make it inside, which would have been her own choice under the circumstances, no matter how painful. She took a sip of the brandy, felt the steadying warmth as it slipped down.
She’d been very convincing.
‘How can you be so sure?’ she asked.
Prince Alexander lifted one eyebrow the merest fraction of a millimetre as he poured another measure for himself.
‘Oh, I see. She’s done this before.’
‘Not Katerina. She wouldn’t have managed it twice,’ he assured her in a tone that left her in no doubt he was telling the truth.
‘So how do you—?’ And then, in a flash of intuition, she realised that the Princess was not the first member of the Royal House of Orsino to have made a break for freedom. Prince Alexander might have had something of a reputation as a young man, but he’d only been following a trail blazed by his older sister.
‘She not only looks like her mother, but has apparently inherited her laissez-faire attitude to personal behaviour,’ he admitted stiffly. ‘You have my sincerest apologies for the fright you’ve been given, Miss Varndell. My niece will make her own apologies in due course.’
Under normal circumstances two Miss Varndells were about as much as she could take before she begged to be called Laura. Outside, on the pavement, she might have begged. Inside, his formality made such a request unthinkable.
‘That’s not important. I’m just relieved that she’s not in danger.’ Then, ‘This security character—he’s not going to haul her out of the club, is he?’ She imagined how humiliated she’d feel under such circumstances. ‘It’ll only make her more resentful,’ she began. Then stopped. ‘I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.’
‘No, it isn’t.’ Then, with the faintest crease softening the corners of his eyes, ‘But if you’ll forgive me for saying so, it’s somewhat sexist of you to assume that her security officer is male.’
A crack in the ice? He was a lot more attractive when he smiled. Almost human.
‘Did you really think I’d send some uniformed heavy to barge in and drag her home?’ The smile deepened in response to her embarrassed flush. ‘There’s no need to answer that. I may be a monster—my niece certainly believes so—Miss Varndell, but I was once a young monster with my own problem with rules.’
‘But you’re still going to have her brought home.’
‘Certainly.’ Then, ‘You have some objection?’
‘It’s not my place to object. I just think that making a public spectacle of the girl isn’t likely to improve matters.’
‘You’re suggesting that with a proper chaperon she should be allowed to stay for a while?’
‘A chaperon? Heaven forbid! I’m sure she’d rather come home than submit to that,’ she said. Just to see how deep the crack went. ‘Poor girl.’
‘Scarcely that,’ he replied, abruptly losing the smile. Not very far, then.
‘There’s more than one way to experience poverty,’ she muttered, but not quietly enough, and his eyebrows rose with sufficient alacrity to indicate that he was unused to having his actions questioned. Especially since he clearly thought he was being incredibly relaxed about the whole matter.
‘You’re suggesting emotional impoverishment?’ he demanded.
‘I wouldn’t be that impertinent.’
‘Oh, I think you would.’
Cold, but perceptive. He didn’t wait for her to admit it, but picked up the telephone and spoke briefly into it before glancing back at her.
She’d been holding her breath, but his expression did not suggest he was about to have her bodily ejected. Yet.
‘So,’ he continued, as if there had been no interruption. ‘Enlighten me. What are you suggesting, Miss Varndell?’
Her mouth dried. Lecturing the man on the best way to raise his niece was not going to get her the prized interview. But it might get her some memorable quotes.
If she provoked him sufficiently she fancied she’d be able to name her price for the story. And Trevor McCarthy would have to stand in line.
‘Well?’ he demanded.
Well, why not? He’d asked for it, and the least she could do in return for his unwitting assistance in promoting her career was to give the Prince the benefit of her experience.
‘Young people need to test themselves against the world so that they can learn from their mistakes. Discover safe boundaries. Keeping them wrapped in cotton wool leaves them vulnerable.’ His face remained expressionless. No hint of that smile now. She swallowed nervously. ‘Later.’
‘You are speaking from personal experience?’
‘Well, I’m young,’ she hedged. Then realised that the Princess would probably think her well past it at twenty-four. ‘Well, youngish,’ she amended. ‘Young enough to remember being Katie’s age.’
Not that she’d had parents to restrict her movements. But school had been worse. You couldn’t have a row with an institution. And slamming doors was pointless. You didn’t get understanding. You just got a lecture on the subject of thoughtful behaviour, followed by a week of detention.
‘Well, thank you for your advice, but I’d rather my niece didn’t make her mistakes on my watch. She can return to Montorino to complete her education.’
‘That’s a little harsh, isn’t it? One mistake and she’s out?’
His mouth straightened into a hard line that warned her to have a care. Then, presumably because she was an outsider and could not be expected to understand this, he gave a curt bow of the head and, conceding the point, said, ‘Maybe it is harsh, but this family has provided the newsprint of Europe with more than enough scandal. I do not want a photograph of Katerina, under age and behaving badly, to appear in your newspapers,’ he said.
Her throat dried.
‘I suppose the British press is no worse than anywhere else, but they’d make the most of such a story,’ he continued.
‘Oh, yes. I see.’ He’d been speaking generally. It took a moment for her heartbeat to return to something approaching normal. ‘It’s, um, just as well there wasn’t a newspaper photographer lurking outside when she made a break for it, then.’
There was nothing in his expression to suggest that he had even noticed her sarcasm, but his upper lip was so stiff that any kind of expression would have been difficult.
‘That kind of photographer only lurks where there is likely to be something worth his time. If tonight’s escapade becomes public knowledge they’ll be stacked ten deep.’
‘It won’t become public knowledge, surely? Unless she makes a fuss when the leash is jerked.’
‘You’re suggesting that if I don’t jerk it no one will notice her?’
‘Well, she wasn’t wearing a tiara.’
‘You recognised her,’ he pointed out.
Oh, sugar. Think. Think. ‘Only because she was coming out of your official residence.’ Another raised brow queried how she knew that. ‘I’ve seen the flag,’ she said, which appeared to satisfy him. ‘I wouldn’t have recognised her if I’d seen her in the street.’
‘No?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘In black denim, and with a hair-do from hell, she didn’t look like anyone’s idea of a princess.’
‘Nevertheless, seventeen is a dangerous age,’ he declared with the confidence of a man who remembered just how dangerous it could be. ‘Which is why I am sending her home.’
‘It’s a dangerous age wherever you live,’ she rep
lied. And, since she had nothing to lose, she added, ‘Or are the boys in Montorino different? A little less testosterone-driven?’ She met his cool stare, matched it, then, with measured insolence, added, ‘Sir?’
‘Not noticeably,’ he admitted after an epic pause. ‘But I can be certain that she’ll receive appropriate respect there.’
‘She’s seventeen! She doesn’t want respect. She wants to have fun—and you can’t keep her locked up in an enchanted tower for ever. Try it and she’ll escape with the first good-looking scoundrel with a head for heights—’ Too late, she remembered that his sister had done something very like that.
There was a tap on the door and, with the temperature of Prince Alexander’s expression sinking in direct proportion to the depth of the hole she was digging with her mouth, Laura seized the opportunity to shut up.
He continued to stare at her for what seemed like for ever before he finally turned away and snapped, ‘Come in.’
One of the doors opened and a young maid appeared bearing a first aid box resting on a silver tray. She dropped a curtsey in the direction of the Prince before putting the tray on the table in front of Laura. ‘Excuse,’ she said, nervously. ‘You will—? I will—?’
Laura smiled encouragingly, but the girl was too shy to respond. Instead she picked up the first aid box and, her hands shaking noticeably, tried to open it. The lid at first refused to give but when, in desperation, she gave it a sharp tug it flew open, scattering the contents over the table and floor.
There was a moment of utter stillness before, with a wail of anguish, the girl rushed from the room.
‘Why on earth do these silly girls behave as if I’m going to beat them?’ the Prince demanded.
‘I can’t imagine,’ Laura said caustically as she bent to retrieve the contents of the box. ‘You’d better send her home with Princess Katerina—’
‘Leave that!’
She glanced up.
He lifted a hand in a gesture that was at once supplication and exasperation. ‘My apologies. I did not mean to bark at you.’
