The silence returned as I continued to hold out the bottle. Finally, the prince took it from me and set it on the table. “Thank you, Miss Andrews,” he said. “Mother, will you be dining with us?”
Please say no. Please say no. I was already nervous enough about meeting the children. Please say no.
“No,” she said. “But I will have some tea.”
“Of course.” Prince Nickolaus glanced at a server, who turned on his heel and exited the room. The prince held out a chair for his mother and she sat down at the head of the table.
Next, the prince pulled a chair out for me across from the children. His move disconcerted me. He was a member of the royal family. Shouldn’t I be holding his chair for him?
The warmth of his body behind mine triggered a pleasant but poorly-timed memory—the way he’d caught me earlier and held me as if I were weightless. The way his lips had twitched upward in amusement. My face heated as I tried to push those thoughts away. I was in the presence of a queen, a princess, and two princes. This was definitely not the time to get distracted by the fact that one of them was devastatingly handsome.
To get my mind in a safer place, I smiled at the children as the prince pushed my chair in. Both of them had dark brown hair like their father and grandmother. Derrick’s was short and a bit on the unruly side, sticking up in a couple of places. Elyse’s was long and luxurious, twisted into elaborate braids. Her head was bowed, but her brother was watching me. When I caught his eye, he answered my smile with a shy one in return.
The prince returned to his seat across from the queen and everything got quiet. And nerve-racking. What the hell was I doing having dinner with a royal family? Talk about a high-pressure situation in terms of table manners, though none of us actually had anything to eat at the moment. Apparently, the queen was the highest priority because two uniformed servers brought a tray with a teapot, cups, cookies, doilies, and several bud vases with white roses.
While the servers were fussing over her, the prince introduced me to my new charges. “Children, this is Miss Andrews. Remember what we talked about—please only speak English when she’s with you. Miss Andrews, this is my son Derrick and my daughter Elyse.”
Derrick nodded at me. Though he was nicely dressed in a crisp white short-sleeve shirt, he looked like a regular kid. Elyse’s head remained bowed, but with her gorgeous hairstyle and the lace-covered ivory dress she wore, she looked like the princess she was. All that was missing was a tiara.
Smiling, I tried to catch her eye, but she wouldn’t look up. I couldn’t quite tell if she was shy or upset. Hopefully I’d be able to get a better sense of her in a less formal setting, if such a thing existed in a castle. “It’s very nice to meet you, Derrick and Elyse.”
“It’s nice to meet you too, Miss Andrews.” Derrick’s gaze moved from me to his sister, as if he was trying to include her in his greeting.
To my left, the queen picked up her teacup. “It’s Prince Derrick and Princess Elyse.”
Color rose to my cheeks. “My apologies, Your Majesties.”
“No need for formality in the family quarters,” Nickolaus said, waving my words away.
The queen took a small sip as if not having heard her son. Was now a good time to ask him to call me Cara? No, it was probably best to wait until the queen was safely ensconced in her chambers. Gretchen had said that she rarely emerged from there—hopefully that was true. Not that it wasn’t fascinating to meet a head of state, but it was extremely daunting.
Now that the queen had been served, the rest of us were brought soup. It smelled delicious, but my earlier hunger was all but forgotten. More than anything, I wanted time to process everything that had happened today. Every time I thought about the things I’d said in the car, my face flushed. Why hadn’t the prince identified himself? Had he been messing with me? Did princes do that sort of thing?
I couldn’t get a read on him. As he ate his soup, the prince kept glancing over at me. If he were any other man, I might interpret the look in his eyes as one of appreciation of me in my dress. It was one of my favorites… a soft material in pale rose that I thought looked good with my blonde hair. It had a low—but not too low—scoop neck and was pulled in at the waist. Then it flared out in a way that usually made me want to spin around just for the pleasure of seeing it spread out. My sister said I looked like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music when I did that.
Currently I didn’t have a boyfriend, but I’d seen men checking me out when I’d worn this dress before. But the prince wasn’t a regular man, and his reactions weren’t anything like what I was used to. Plus, they seemed to change from moment to moment. He was looking at me again, and this time it didn’t seem to be with appreciation. His expression was more like his mother’s when I’d offered her the bottle of wine.
That didn’t bode well. But with the queen in the room, I likely wasn’t going to get a very accurate sense of him or the children.
Eventually, I tried the soup, and while I was too preoccupied to focus on the taste, I was grateful for its warmth. If it was always this cold here, I was going to need a lot more winter wear. Luckily, my sister was always knitting scarves and hats even though they weren’t often needed where we lived. I wondered how long it would take for a care package to get to me.
The prince finished his soup and set his spoon down. A server sprang to his side, taking the bowl from him. I was done with mine, too, but I hadn’t eaten very much. My hand wavered as I debated whether to put the spoon down or not. Would I insult the royal family if I didn’t eat much of my dinner? Or would it be a worse crime to keep the prince from his next course?
Nickolaus caught me looking his way and smiled in what seemed like an attempt to dispel my unease. Suddenly, doing something else embarrassing in front of him didn’t seem so bad. But I really didn’t want to do so in front of the queen again. Note to self: never attempt to hand a bottle of American wine to a European monarch.
A server whisked away our soup bowls while others placed plates of steak and roasted vegetables in front of us. After the prince dug in, I cut a small piece of steak and brought it to my lips. It was delicious, but I was too distracted to truly enjoy it. After my third bite, I realized that Elyse was surreptitiously sneaking peeks at me. Maybe she’d been too shy before, but now wanted to check out the new nanny?
I smiled and tried to catch her eye, but after a few moments, I realized she was looking lower—at my plate, in fact. Was I doing something wrong?
It was my turn to peek surreptitiously around me, and I saw that the prince was raising a mushroom to his mouth, the fork upside down to my way of thinking. Elyse was using her knife to push a slice of cooked carrot onto the back of her fork.
Oh, right. I forgot that Europeans had a different way of eating. One that, unfortunately, I’d never quite mastered. Trying to remember what little I knew about the Continental style of eating, I used my knife to push a piece of potato onto the back of my fork. It felt wrong to use my left hand to lift the fork to my mouth, but that was what the others were doing.
Carefully, I tried it, managing to successfully balance a bite of meat on the tip of my upside-down fork. When that worked, I took a few more tentative bites, trying to copy Elyse, who was sitting directly across from me. Since she seemed too shy to look directly at me, it was unlikely she noticed how much worse I was at it than her.
But it was possible someone else noticed, because a minute later, the queen said, “My dear Elyse, you have such lovely table manners, just like your mother.”
The young princess looked up at the queen and hesitated for a brief moment. When she spoke, her voice was so quiet I could barely hear her. “Thank you, Grandmother.”
Studying the little girl, I tried to decide if her grandmother’s compliment had pleased her or not. It was hard to tell. Still, most children enjoyed being told they did something well, so I decided to add my praise. “I was just admiring your manners too, Princess Elyse. I’m not very familiar with t
he Continental style of eating, but I think I’m getting the hang of it.”
To demonstrate, I used my knife to push a small piece of potato onto the back of my fork and carefully lifted it. Just before I opened my mouth to take a bite, I glanced over at Prince Nickolaus. My breath hitched for a moment. With those hazel eyes surrounded by dark lashes and brows, he really did look like a fairy-tale prince. It was mesmerizing.
And distracting.
When I finally tore my gaze away, my hand wobbled and the potato began to slide off the edge of the fork. Hastily, I tried to get it into my mouth, but almost in slow motion the small chunk of potato fell, bounced off my chin, landed on the top of my chest… and then slid down the front of my dress, coming to a rest between my breasts.
There was horrified silence as everyone in the room stared at the spot where the piece of potato had disappeared from view. Then Derrick burst into laughter, and Elyse’s hand flew to her mouth to cover a small giggle. Looking to the right, I saw the prince’s mouth twitch as he struggled not to smile. And to the left, the queen looked disapproving.
My mind and my tongue, apparently, were frozen. Should I apologize? Should I excuse myself from the table and extract the potato? That last thought caused me to look down at the small morsel nestled at the bottom of my bra. I opened my mouth to apologize to the queen, to the prince, and to the still-giggling children… but no words came out.
Instead, I closed my eyes, shook my head, and laughed.
4
Nico
“You just about scared that poor girl to death.”
I moved away from my mother as soon as I’d escorted her back to the richly ornate chambers she spent most of her time in.
As I looked out the window at the dark, starlit sky, she took off her crown. That was about as relaxed as she got. My mother could categorically be defined as a monarch 24/7.
As for me, I was half and half: a prince sometimes, and regular guy at other times. Or at least I used to be. Ever since Lisette died, the “regular guy” had been getting less and less screen time. However, he’d emerged tonight and almost caused me to laugh out loud when that potato slid down Cara’s dress.
Though it had heightened my mother’s disapproval, it had chipped away a bit at mine. I’d never expected that snooty agency to send a young woman like Miss Andrews. I’d been anticipating a no-nonsense, experienced nanny. Cara didn’t seem to be any of those things.
Maybe, just for the hell of it, I’d give her a tour of the place tomorrow. It would be interesting to hear her take on a place where my family had lived for centuries. There was really no need to shove her out the door first thing in the morning. Maybe a day or two in a real castle would soften the blow when I told her she wasn’t the right person for the job.
Or course, if my mother frightened her off, then problem solved. “You could’ve warned me you were coming to dinner.”
“I deserve to know who’s going to be minding my grandchildren.”
“She was sent by one of the best agencies in Europe.”
“She’s a child.”
Despite the fact that that had been my first thought, it irritated me to hear her say it. “She’s twenty-three.” Though that still seemed very young to me, an odd realization popped into my head. “I was her age when the twins were born.”
“She looks twelve. You said she was a teacher—she must’ve lied on her application.”
“I’m sure she didn’t do that. The agency does very thorough background checks. I believe they said she had a major in English and a minor in theater or music or something, and that she’d taught high school.” Though she couldn’t have taught for very long even if she’d graduated early. That could be the case—she wasn’t unintelligent. One of the few things they’d sent in time was her application essay. Cara was a good writer and seemed genuinely devoted to working with children.
My mother sat down on a dainty chair by her antique writing desk, while I remained standing. This dynamic was exactly the kind of thing I didn’t want for my children. I didn’t want them to have to follow rules and protocols around me. I wanted to be their dad.
But I also had a country to run, and I couldn’t spend as much time with them as I wanted. Somehow, I found myself saying, “It’s possible she’ll be good for them. You know the past few years haven’t been easy.”
“The tutor helps them keep up their English. Why not just let Gretchen continue to look after them the rest of the time?”
“Because they’re getting too old to follow the head housekeeper around all day.” Plus they hadn’t been, not really. “Gretchen says they wander off for large portions of the day. That’s too much unsupervised time. And grammar and writing lessons aren’t the same as speaking the language day in and day out.” We were speaking German now, but everyone in my family had lived in an English-speaking country at some point. We were all fluent, but I knew that if the children didn’t use it regularly, they’d start to forget.
“She didn’t speak much to them tonight.”
“Don’t you think you were a bit intimidating? She was a chatterbox on the drive here.”
She looked at me sharply. “You picked her up?”
“Relax, no one knew it was me. I wore a disguise.” The look on her face would’ve terrified most the staff around here, but I was used to it—far more than Cara was, at any rate.
She gave a queenly sniff of disapproval. “We have servants for that. Why did you have to go?”
“Sometimes I like to wander off, too. Besides, I wanted to see what she was like before I introduced her to Derrick and Elyse.”
“Obviously you approve, or I suppose she wouldn’t have been invited to dinner.”
That wasn’t exactly my thought process, but I found myself saying, “The jury’s still out, but she deserves a chance.” It was a lie, but I wasn’t ready to admit to my mother that I’d made a mistake. It was better to let Cara stay here a day or two and then claim that she didn’t seem to be a good fit.
In the meantime, I could tell that Cara was going to be a disruptive influence. That was the last thing I needed, but maybe it would be good for the twins, at least in the short term. They hadn’t had a lot of fun in their life since we moved back from the US, and Cara struck me as a person who knew how to have fun. Hell, it’d been fun listening to her excited chatter on the ride up here—a memory that caused dual jolts of guilt and amusement.
Who knew, maybe her enthusiasm would rub off on Derrick and Elyse. When they were younger, they’d spent hours laughing and playing with each other. That definitely wasn’t the case now.
“Keep an eye on her,” Mother said before bidding me good night.
“I definitely will,” I muttered under my breath as I left. At least that much was true. I hadn’t been able to keep my eyes off her for the entire car ride—which made navigating the twisty, narrow road up here even more dangerous. But there was just something so mesmerizing about her energy and enthusiasm, not to mention the nonstop talking. Involuntarily, I recalled her sparkling blue eyes staring up at me as I held her at the train station.
When was the last time I’d held a woman in my arms? She’d been so light, so small. But I suspected her small stature belied a big personality. I couldn’t think of a single other woman on the planet who would’ve been able to laugh at themselves after dropping a potato down their dress. I’d expected Cara to be horrified. To blush. To run from the room. And instead, she’d laughed.
Laughed.
And somehow, she’d made the children laugh as well. Even Elyse. Didn’t that prove I’d been right to let them meet her? A day or two with her wouldn’t hurt them. It’s not like they’d get attached to her in that short time. That much I knew. I’d spent many evenings worried about how different they were now that Lisette was gone. It was night and day.
Tomorrow, I would find out more about Cara and her background, but for tonight, I’d put her out of my mind. Or at least I’d try to.
An under ste
ward brought me coffee as I sat down at my computer. As I tried to settle into work mode, various scenes from the day kept coming to mind. The expression on my mother’s face when Cara had brought her the bottle of wine. The sound of my children’s laughter. The way Cara’s eyes had widened when she’d first seen the castle. And then another visual surfaced: the way the piece of potato had slid into the creamy valley between her breasts. It’d made me want to dive in after it.
Annoyed, I slammed my fist down on the desk, making coffee slosh out from the cup. That was exactly the kind of thing I shouldn’t be thinking about right now. Or ever. I had a country to run, children to raise, my corporation, and a hand in half the international businesses in Falkenberg. Dwelling on the antics of the soon-to-be-ex-nanny wasn’t on my agenda.
And it was so unlike me. Or at least unlike the person I was now. Before? Back in college in the states? That would’ve been a different story. But that man was long gone—for good reason. He’d vanished the day Lisette had died.
There was no reason for him to reemerge now.
No reason at all.
5
Cara
After eight hours of deep sleep, my thoughts were much clearer.
First off, yesterday had been a disaster, to put it mildly. But today wouldn’t be. I’d make sure of it. It would help a lot, however, if I could actually use my phone. There was so much I was dying to know about Nickolaus and his family. Surely there was something online that could help me figure out how to reach the overworked single father and his shy children.
It was clear they needed help. They’d barely talked during dinner. Hopefully that wasn’t the case when it was just Nickolaus and the kids. How sad to have a family sit there and dine in silence—especially a family with children. During my teen years, it’d just been my sister and me, yet meal times had been full of conversation… at least when I hadn’t been studying my butt off at the library in the evenings.
Dashing: A Royal Cinderella Billionaire Story Page 3
