“I love you so much, mother.” She stroked the limp hand and choked down a rising sob. “Don’t leave me. Please…”
“Catherine?” Her mother’s eyes fluttered open. “Darling, you’re here.”
“Of course I’m here,” Catherine said lightly, forcing a gaiety she was far from feeling. “Tell you what! Why don’t I take you outside for half an hour? The sun is warm today and we’ll wrap you up tightly.”
“Why not?” Some familiar mischief seeped into her mother’s faded eyes. “Dr. Stanzis specifically forbid it.”
Catherine chuckled. “We’ll make a point of letting him find out what we’ve done, unintentionally, of course.”
She quickly called for Gascon and, between the two of them, trussed her mother from head to toe in a luxurious quilt and carried her downstairs. Catherine ran to retrieve the wheelchair and Gascon tucked her mother in comfortably.
“Leave us for a while,” she told Gascon, then pressed her mother’s shoulder gently and added, “Don’t forget to mention our little outing to Dr. Stanzis. We want to hear all the details of his apoplexy.”
“The two of you are acting like teenagers,” Gascon groused, but he could not hold off a wide grin.
In the end, they stayed out the entire morning. The winter day was truly mild and Catherine was too heartened by the life in her mother’s eyes and the colour on her cheeks to argue when she insisted she wasn’t ready to go back inside.
“There you are,” called the familiar voice that never failed to stutter her heart. Nicolas sprinted the last few yards to reach them. He moved to stand in front of the queen. “I heard that Catherine had broken you out and I was starting to worry that you’d actually made it to the border.”
Queen Helene laughed. A little croaky, but it was a laugh.
Catherine was too on edge at their discovery to appreciate the joke. Defying Dr. Stanzis was one thing, but Nicolas was another kind of beast altogether. “We didn’t mean to stay out so long. I hope I haven’t—”
“Fresh air and sunshine hasn’t harmed anyone to date, Catherine.” He turned dark brown eyes on her, deep, sincere, clouded. His gaze seemed trapped, unable to move on.
She wanted to say something. But after their midnight conversation, everything that could be said was said. The final curtain was down and calling for an encore would just extend the agony. The show was over.
A slow, hard grin did nothing to release the tightness in his jaw. “Come, let’s walk a little further. I’ve got news that both of you should hear.”
He nudged her aside with a shoulder to take control of the wheelchair and Catherine fell in step beside him.
“Did you find something in the pills?” she whispered.
“Pills?” her mother queried, glancing up over her shoulder.
“I’ve been analysing your hormone pills,” Nicolas said. “I found nothing unusual at first. You had an expired packet in your medicine cabinet, however, with two unused tablets. I decided to test them as well.”
“You did find something,” Catherine exclaimed.
Nicolas grunted. “Something, yes. What, I’m not yet sure. But it isn’t synthetic and it isn’t anything I’ve ever come across before.”
Her expression fell.
“I’m not done yet. I won’t be done until I know exactly what we’re dealing with,” Nicolas reassured her, even though he knew his next words would do anything but. He stopped pushing and stepped around the wheelchair to hunker before the Queen. “You had six packs.”
“I usually keep six months supply.” She shrugged. “Some days, I forget to take them.”
“The pack that expired two months ago was the only one with traces of the suspect element.” He glanced up at Catherine to see if she understood. By the way her knuckles whitened on the pushing handle of the wheelchair, he assumed she did. He met the queen’s eyes again. “Your majesty—”
“Please, call me Helene.”
“Nicolas!”
He looked up to find Catherine furiously signalling him to be quiet. He shook his head. “The queen— Helene’s life is the one at stake here. She deserves to know more than anyone else.” As much as he wanted to spring to his feet and comfort Catherine, he turned back to the queen. “I have no doubt that you have been poisoned.”
Both the women gasped. The queen in astonishment, Catherine in despair.
“Now, either that person lost courage or, and I’m afraid this seems more likely, they believed a limited dose would eventually prove fatal.”
“The effects of the poison are irreversible,” Catherine said hoarsely, repeating the words he’d previously given her in warning.
Nicolas lifted the queen’s frail hands in his and held them reassuringly. When he spoke, his eyes held Catherine’s. “I will reverse this,” he said grimly. “That is a promise.” He brought his eyes back to the queen. “As soon as I’ve found the source, I will find the antidote. I need you to trust in me. Believe me. Can you do that?”
Helene was not a woman to give her trust easily. At times, she felt ready to die. But she wasn’t ready to leave her daughter. She swallowed through the thickness in her throat, looked deeply into Nicolas Vecca’s eyes and in that moment saw a man she could trust with her life. And her daughter’s. “I believe you.”
He grinned and the softness melting his eyes made her wish she was thirty years younger.
“That is all I require from you,” Nicolas told her. “The rest is up to me.”
Nicolas placed her hands back on her lap and tucked them beneath the edges of the quilt. When he joined Catherine behind the wheelchair again, he voiced the concern etched on her face. “Who has access to your mother’s personal bathroom?”
“Anyone in the castle,” Catherine said, her brow pinched in worry. “We don’t live behind locked doors. We should return. I need to talk to Gascon.”
He placed a hand on her arm and waited until she turned her chin up and met his eyes. “I’ll take care of it. Finish your walk with your mother and promise not to worry too much.”
Catherine blinked long. When her eyes opened again, there were tears that penetrated to his heart.
“Lean on me,” he murmured. “I swear I won’t let you down.”
She blinked again. And sighed. A fuzzy smile slipped through her tears. “I know you won’t.”
The yearning to kiss those lips held up to him was overwhelming. He couldn’t. Of course he wouldn’t. Last night he’d finally admitted that he was still in love with her. This morning he’d resolved to begin the weaning process. He wasn’t weak. Death had consumed him. Unrequited love would not.
“Will you be all right?” he asked softly.
She nodded. “We’ll be fine.”
Right.
Nicolas nodded as well. She’d be fine.
Now all he had to do was leave. Hunt down Gascon and fill him in on the details. He looked at his hand, still glued to her arm. He looked back into her eyes, still fixed on him.
Right, then.
He was going.
His head came down, his eyes shuttered, his mouth found her lips and fed and fed and fed. Her taste entered his bloodstream and swirled inside his heart. Her lips parted on his and he slanted his mouth over hers one last time, catching her upper lip for a lingering moment before he released her and marched off abruptly without looking back.
“Fool,” he muttered, kicking at a pile of mouldy leaves. “As if you need another memory of what you’ve lost.”
Catherine’s lips tingled long after he’d disappeared around the bend that led up to the castle. She shook her head, angry at herself for parting her lips so easily in invitation. She had an iron control on her head and heart, the first locked down in duty to Ophella and the second locked down in winter, but her body was another matter altogether, going rogue whenever it came within two feet of Nicolas.
“He kissed you,” her mother observed.
Heat flushed her cheeks. “No—no, it isn’t—”
; “Hush, darling. I might not have eyes in the back of my head, but I know the telltale signs of breathless silence. You never said there was anything between the two of you.”
“There isn’t,” Catherine protested feebly.
“Why not? He’s a handsome man.”
Catherine’s shoulders slumped as she kicked free the brakes and started pushing again. “He wanted to marry me once.”
The pause lasted until they’d crossed the stone bridge and entered the forest trail beyond.
“I see,” said her mother at last, fighting the urge to pry into where and when they’d met before or why it couldn’t be. She’d made her own mistakes but, assailed with the memory of her beautiful sons every waking moment and the joy her daughter brought her, she had no regrets.
Once he’d told Gascon all he knew, they moved on to suspects. “What of Geoffrey?” Nicolas wanted to know.
Gascon shook his head. “He has neither the intelligence, commitment nor staying power to plan anything more intricate than his next party.”
Nicolas huffed in disgust. “What the hell does she see in him?”
“I believe that those are the qualities Catherine most appreciates in the man,” Gascon responded dourly.
No. That screaming voice was back inside his head with irritating predictability. No. This was all wrong.
Catherine wasn’t shallow.
She was vibrant, strong and dedicated.
She had more integrity than a convent of nuns put together. “I don’t understand,” he ground out. “None of this makes sense.”
Even as he spoke, Nicolas realised that nothing had made sense since he’d arrived in Ophella. Her body trembled at his touch. Ever so often, he saw lingering traces in her eyes of the love he’d once believed in. Sometimes, he’d catch her unawares, looking at him with an intensity that hitched his pulse, as if she were trying to capture his image, her heart the camera, her soul the flash. Maybe it was nothing more than a combination of lust and compassion.
He’d been her first, after all.
If she’d used him as callously as he assumed, then some of that compassion might even be guilt.
Probably, it was just fanciful hoping on his part, he thought in disgust. He had no idea how to go about the business of falling out of love, but he doubted that was the right the direction.
“Are we talking of Geoffrey and Catherine or the poisoning,” Gascon asked, well aware it was the former.
Nicolas took the offered gap, but wasn’t ready to give up on his favourite suspect completely. “Who other than Geoffrey stands to gain at the queen’s death?”
“No one that I can think of. Not even Geoffrey.”
“Maybe he’s impatient to be king.”
Gascon sipped at his orange juice, then set the glass down and pushed to his feet. Palms pressed to the table, he looked Nicolas in the eye. “Alexander would have been the first king in almost two centuries. Geoffrey might be a prince one day, but he’ll never be king. Catherine will rule supreme as queen, regardless of whom she marries.”
The workings of Ophella’s politics brought a slant to Nicolas’s lips. “And if Alexander had lived and married, would his wife be queen?”
Gascon nodded.
“Talk about inequality of the sexes,” Nicolas chuckled, amused enough to forget his frustrations and concerns for the moment. “I assume a former queen passed this law?”
“The law is not as biased as you may think. King ranks above queen, so although the titles may vary, the result remains the same.”
“The true Ophella blood heir, male or female, is always left holding the trump card,” Nicolas surmised, but his quick brain was already leaping ahead to wipe his bout of humour. “Still, king or not, Geoffrey would promote more power to a queen than a princess with his pillow talk.”
The thought of Catherine and Geoffrey sharing a home churned his stomach. The thought of them sharing a bed made it that much worse and he had to clench his abdomen muscles to keep that churned mess inside his stomach.
Gascon straightened and walked to the large arched window in Catherine’s office. “A princess of Ophella is not easily persuaded from her own mind, in or out of bed.”
“Of course not,” Nicolas retorted bitterly. His sexual prowess certainly hadn’t kept Catherine in his bed. “They’re trained from birth to override all else with duty to Ophella.”
“It’s more than training,” Gascon disputed, his eyes turned to the courtyard view below. He saw Catherine pushing her mother up the driveway and spun about from the window. On his way to the door, he threw a grin at Nicolas. “It’s in their blood.”
“Blood?” Nicolas muttered to himself as the door closed behind Gascon. “How can they have blood when they have no heart to pump it?”
Still muttering inside his head, he rocked his chair backward on its hind legs and crossed his boots on top of the desk. His love for Catherine had been so strong, so overwhelming and replete, it seemed impossible to imagine that it wasn’t returned in full. There’d been just too much love between them to come from a single source. His heart simply wasn’t big enough for such a vast supply.
Difficult to imagine, but clearly not impossible.
It had happened. Obviously.
He folded his arms and bowed his head, shaking it slowly, laughing, a dry, unpleasant sound. “Apparently my heart is bigger than I thought.”
When Catherine entered her office a short while later with Geoffrey in tow, Nicolas rocked the chair back onto all its legs and jumped to his feet. As big as his heart might be, it wasn’t big enough to embrace the handsome sight the pair made. “Catherine, may I see you outside for a moment?”
“I won’t be long,” she told Geoffrey as she followed him into the passage.
Catherine clicked the door shut, then walked a couple of steps down the passage before putting her back to the wall to face Nicolas. “What is it?”
His gaze settled on her mouth. She instinctively raised her fingers to trace his earlier kiss on her lips. As soon as she became aware of what she doing, she abruptly dropped her hand to her side. When his eyes travelled up to scorch her with a dark look, she could only wonder what she was being accused of now.
“I think we should keep the details of your mother’s poisoning private until we know more,” he said.
And then she knew. “I haven’t mentioned a thing to Geoffrey and don’t intend to.”
“Good,” he said bluntly.
Her eyes narrowed in a flash of anger. Did he always have to sound so arrogant? As if he’d just bended her to his will, as if she hadn’t already made the decision on her own? “Was that all?”
A lazy grin crossed his jaw as he looked at her. And looked.
For a split second, she thought he might kiss her again. That thought was akin to a hammer, knocking holes into the back of her knees. The second stretched to a minute. What was he thinking? What was he feeling?
“I’ll get back to my lab then and leave you to Geoffrey,” he said.
Her throat was too dry to reply.
He wasn’t leaving.
Go, she screamed silently. Just go.
On a sigh that pulled his gaze back down to her lips for a brief moment, he turned and left.
Don’t go.
Her hands found the wall behind her. She braced herself and reached inside for strength, sadly admitting that this had been that much easier when he’d hated her. How could he still love her? After all she’d done to him, after the way she’d left him, how on earth had he managed to let go of that hate and hurt and anger? How had that old love slipped through his defences and why did he not run from it?
Because he is Nicolas Vecca.
He is not a coward. He will face that love, acknowledge it and fight it in his own time and way.
He is and always will be the man I fell in love with.
She pushed away from the wall with a heavy heart and went back to her office and Geoffrey.
“Catherine, it’s ti
me we set a date.”
The announcement added extra weight to a heart already sagging at her knees. She sucked back a weary sigh and put a smile on her face.
“Is this your way of proposing?” she said as lightly as she could manage.
His features hardened at her teasing and she knew it was irritation that she was forcing him to exert himself at anything. Why was she? She’d never bothered before.
“Our engagement has been more or less assumed for years,” he grumbled.
Since my birth, she thought dryly. What Geoffrey didn’t know was that she hadn’t considered marriage to him once in all those years, not until recently. “We’ve never discussed this properly. Not between ourselves. I would never base my future on a general assumption and neither should you.”
“But—”
She put up a hand to stop him. “I can’t think about this now, Geoffrey. There’s too much going on.”
He backed down immediately. “I’m sorry. I just thought…”
“Thought what?” she demanded when he stalled.
“Nothing.”
She almost rolled her eyes at the pout on his face. “What did you think?”
He shrugged. “That you might want your mother to attend your wedding.”
Catherine’s spine snapped straight. “She will.”
“I didn’t mean to imply—”
“Oh, I think you did.” Her voice echoed the chill running through her veins.
As she’d come to expect, Geoffrey back-pedalled from the confrontation with a hasty smile as he rose to leave. “I’m only thinking of you, darling. Don’t let us make this our first fight.”
“No, of course not.” Catherine shook off her anger and returned the smile. Her nerves were strung tight on one too many tensions, but none were due to Geoffrey. She’d never been this harsh with him and he didn’t deserve it now.
She’d make it up to him, Catherine decided an hour later and closed the folder she’d been studying.
How to Love a Princess Page 7
