Rescuing the Royal Runaway Bride

by Ally Blake

  For he was in London, it was Monday and he had work to do.

  Will slid out of Sadie’s bed, picked her nightgown up off the floor and shook it out, preparing to fold it. He stopped himself, tossing it on the edge of the bed instead.

  Stretching out his limbs, he turned at the door and looked back. Took stock.

  He would give her sanctuary so long as she required it, and he could get back to real life, driven by a brutal calendar, living on the rush of his work, banking his meticulously architected reputation to make sure he was in the rooms of power.

  But now he had finally slayed the sentimental obstructions that had been dogging him for years, he did not intend to replace one kind with another.

  Stepping over the comforter in her doorway, Will went back to work.

  * * *

  Sadie felt like herself for the first time in days. Weeks even.

  It could be the jeans.

  While packing her a nightgown fit for Queen Victoria, Sadie’s all too clever mother had also packed her favourite jeans. Soft from wear, skin-tight and worn away at the knees. Add a warm top, an oversized cream jumper and a leopard-print scarf and she was happy as a clam.

  It could also have been the coffee.

  She’d managed to find an espresso machine in Will’s concrete kitchen and actual ground coffee. Not instant, or pods, but fresh ground: manna from heaven.

  Of course, it might well have been Will.

  Last night had been...unexpected. Not the fact that it had happened. Something had had to give, what with the tension that had been building between them in incremental steps for days. But the way of him—intense as he was in the everyday, all dark, brooding eyes and devastating detail. But also tender. Cherishing her. Making her ache so sweetly, all over, so deeply, she’d lost all sense of place and time. She didn’t remember falling asleep so much as drifting away as if on a cloud.

  Then, as though she’d closed her eyes and opened them again, it had been morning. And she’d been fully awake. Every fibre, every cell, every hair follicle switched on. As though the night before had acted like some kind of psychic system reset. As if things would be different from hereon in, she just had to figure out how.

  But first...coffee.

  Sipping, she stared across the great expanse of Will’s plane-hangar-sized abode. The weak morning sunlight did nothing to make the living space appear homelier. While stunning in its über-masculine detail, it was sterile. The perfect pad for the man who’d leapt from his car and accused her of being obtuse.

  But what about the man who’d held her in his arms, caressing a length of her hair, breathing softly into her neck as they’d floated into slumber together? There had to be proof of him here somewhere.

  She began a room-by-room reconnoitre.

  The kitchen cupboards were mostly bare. His office had not a pencil out of place. It was as if he’d deliberately not left his mark on the place. As if being packed, ready to leave a place, wasn’t the mark of a well-seasoned traveller but a way of life.

  Despite the underfloor heating and the coffee in her system, Sadie suddenly felt the cold.

  What brought a man to the point where being alone was the only choice?

  The few times Sadie had managed to solicit her mother to talk about her father, Genevieve had admitted she’d been smitten. That his passion, his joie de vivre, his dashing good looks had been hard to resist. That she’d been so blinded by it she’d never for a moment imagined he’d desert her the way he had.

  Cradling the cooling coffee, she wandered aimlessly about the upper level, bypassing small doors probably leading to storage areas and a ladder that went up to who knew where.

  And then she found the library.

  She stepped inside the cool, shadowy room. The heavy dark shelves were covered in books organised by colour and shape rather than author or title. Visually stunning, but futile.

  Nevertheless, she searched. For something she couldn’t be sure was there but was certain all the same. Going over each row, each column until... There.

  She pulled down the textbook, its pages soft and heavy in her hands. Then she turned it over to see the cover, her heart lodging in her throat at the words on the cover—Waiting to Be Known by Dr Will Darcy.

  Swallowing hard, she looked inside. The title, it explained, was taken from a quote by Carl Sagan. Reviews included praise by famous scientists. The dedication read simply, “For Clair.”

  She flicked through the rest to find that from there it went into full scientific-textbook mode. Words upon words, diagrams, maths and the occasional colour picture to break it up. Clever man, this friend of Hugo’s. This friend of hers.

  But waiting to be known? Could it be?

  She put the book down and looked a little further until she found a large, softcover book amongst the hardbacks. Its spine was creased with use. A book someone had actually read.

  She pulled The Collected Works of William Shakespeare from the shelf. Opened it to find dog-ears. A handful of notes in the margins. The sign she’d been looking for. The sign someone had lived here. Someone had left something of themselves behind.

  A piece of paper fell out. A receipt that had been used as a bookmark. By the date, it had been bought after Will had moved in, meaning Will had bought the book himself. Read it. Made notes.

  She brought the heavy tome to her chest, pressing it against her rocketing heart. The brand he’d burned there the night before pulsed like a fresh wound as the tendrils of his life twisted a little tighter around hers.

  Why was she doing this to herself? Looking for connections? Just because she felt as if she’d glimpsed the core of the man, it didn’t mean she ought to keep digging. It didn’t mean that knowing him, understanding him, would get her what she wanted.

  And she wanted... No.

  Will had said it himself—she had a predilection for self-sabotage. Or maybe, she was beginning to wonder, was it more of a compulsion? Do unto herself before someone else did unto her.

  If so, not any more.

  She’d woken up that morning and she was never going to fall asleep to her life again.

  * * *

  It was long dark by the time Will returned.

  And it had been a hell of a day. Determined to get back on track, he’d made a dozen phone calls, finished research papers and begun others, fitting a trip out to the Royal Observatory with a meeting with the gaming crew. He felt as if he could only remember half of it. Probably for the best, as the game had major holes—meaning he had to front up more money, and agree to replace one of the designers, in order to get it back on track. A paper was rejected, as the core theory had already been covered by a fellow scientist from Tulsa. And Natalie was still stubbornly unhappy with him for not being more “sharing”.

  Music was playing as he headed to the front door and for a second he found himself checking he was outside the right warehouse. When he opened the door he was overcome with the scent of home cooking.

  It was so foreign, so specifically outside the basic absolutes of his life, and yet so sorely welcome after such a long, difficult day, he nearly shut the door.

  But then he heard the clang of pots and pans. His natural curiosity had him edging inside to find Sadie behind the kitchen bench wearing an apron he didn’t know he had, using pots he’d never seen, dancing along with Otis Redding coming from a record player somewhere, cooking up a storm.

  She looked up, lips puckered around the end of a wooden spoon, then slid the spoon away before calling, “Honey, you’re home!”

  It was so sexy Will found himself in the middle of an out-of-body experience—pleasure warring with good judgment. He gripped his briefcase hard enough to break.

  Then she burst into laughter. “I’m kidding! Oh, my God, you should see your face. Come in. Put down your stuff. Sit. And wipe that look of abject terror off your
face. All this is me going a very small way to making it up to you for being my babysitter, and my bodyguard, my newfound friend.”

  Will found himself holding his breath as he waited for another title. When none came it felt insufficient.

  He dropped his briefcase by the couch, then moved towards the kitchen. Antennae on the blitz, he wasn’t sure whether to kiss her on the cheek and ask after her day, or keep the bench safely between them.

  In the end, he moved around to the working side of the bench. Plates and cutlery, napkins and wine glasses were lined up ready to be filled. He looked in the pot. Some kind of soup was bubbling away. It smelled amazing. Rich, decadent and wholesome.

  “Where did you find all this?”

  “In the cupboards. And a local grocery store delivered the ingredients.”

  “You cooked this?”

  “Of course I cooked this. I’m fixing things in reverse, you see. Stitching up the mess I’ve made, starting with thanking you.”

  He looked up to find her nudged in beside him. Not touching, but close enough to see the light dusting of flour on her cheek. The sparks of gold in the ends of her hair sticking out of the messy topknot on her head. Her jeans fitted like a second skin and on her feet she wore a pair of socks he would have sworn were his.

  Tendrils of attraction curled around him like a fast-motion creeper, twisting and tugging, shooting off in random directions until he couldn’t tell where it all began. “I assumed...”

  “That I lorded it up in the palace? I learnt in the palace. Thank goodness too. When I lived in New York I shared a tiny studio apartment with three other starving actors who waited on tables on the side. I worked in hotels, so I didn’t get any of the leftover food they did. For me it was cook or starve.”

  “You lived in New York.”

  Her gaze swept to his. Snagged. Whatever she saw in his gaze had her pupils growing dark. A pulse beat in her neck.

  Brow furrowing, she moved away from him to clean a bench that already looked pretty clean. “For a few years, in fact. In order to...expand my dramatic education. Why? Do I seem that parochial?”

  “Yes.”

  She laughed, the sound tinkling up into the rafters. And Will found himself imagining coming home to this every day. Not the food, though his taste buds were watering like crazy. The woman. Her smile, her impudence, her interminable optimism.

  “I get that,” she said. “But, as I keep telling you, you didn’t meet me at my best. I can be quite erudite when the situation calls for it. Charming too. And I know some of the best dirty jokes you will hear in your life.”

  Will breathed out hard, trying to find some kind of equilibrium. He was so out of sync, he felt like coming through his own front door and trying again.

  It was his fault. Work or no work, he shouldn’t have left as he had, not without discussing what had happened. Without putting their night together into some kind of sensible model—with margins, and objectives, and a deadline.

  He’d just have to do it now.

  First, he turned to pour himself a large glass of water, but he stopped when he saw the open book on the bench next to the fridge. His textbook. Open to a page about a third of the way through. A couple of bookmarks fashioned out of kitchen towel poked out of the top. And she’d scrawled question marks in the margin.

  “You read my book?”

  “You read Shakespeare. Seemed a fair exchange. Hungry?” she asked.

  “Famished,” he said, his voice a growl.

  She ladled a hefty amount of soup into each bowl, tore some bread apart and lathered it in butter, then finished the look with a small pinch of herbs. “Voilà!”

  Will breathed it in. And rubbed a hand up the back of his neck.

  “You okay? You look like no one ever cooked you soup before.”

  “The kitchen at my grandmother’s place was three floors down and locked away in the servants’ quarters. The house smelled like demoralisation and thousand-year-old paintings. It never smelt like this.”

  “Well, then, you’re welcome.” A second slunk by before she said, “You were raised by your grandmother, weren’t you? Were your parents not around?”

  “They died when we were five.”

  “That’s rough. I can’t imagine not having my own mother around, baffling woman that she is. Is that why you always call it your grandmother’s place and not home?”

  “As you call the place you grew up ‘the palace’.”

  “Huh. Do I really?”

  He looked to Sadie, hip nudged against the bench, holding a glass of wine in her hand, watching him. She was the very picture of friendly nonchalance.

  Except he knew better. For all the happy chatter, she was on edge. Her energy level was at altissimo, pitching and keening. His pitched with it. An echo. Her shadow. The dark to her light. North to her south.

  He moved in closer.

  She swallowed, her wine dropping a fraction.

  “Nowhere I’ve lived has ever smelt like this.”

  “Because I live out of a suitcase, Sadie.”

  “Or a soft black bag and battered silver telescope case.”

  He smiled and it felt good. The best he’d felt all day since leaving her bed. “Or that. The truth is I can’t stay in one place longer than about a month before it starts to feel too comfortable, my work suffers and I leave. Relationships follow the exact same pattern. I don’t like it when my work suffers. When it suffers—”

  “You suffer?”

  He moved in closer again and she put the wine on the bench.

  “The data I am able to collect, collate, decipher and impart is important.”

  “To whom?”

  “To the entire world.”

  An eyebrow kicked north. “Wow. That’s a lot of pressure.”

  “I like pressure,” said Will, moving in close enough that the tips of his leather shoes prodded her socks. “I live for the pressure. Pressure is my bliss.”

  Sadie crossed her arms but her feet stayed put. “Will, is this some kind of warning?”

  “Sadie, since you came into my life I have no bloody idea what I’m doing.”

  He slid a hand into Sadie’s hair, tucking his hand over the back of her neck. He gave himself a moment to soak in those eyes, the freckles, energy enough to keep this place alight for a week.

  “Wait,” she said on a whisper, “what are we doing?”

  “Again, if you need me to tell you that—”

  “Will.”

  It was the perfect moment to explain to her the margins and objectives, and a deadline.

  Instead he ran his thumb over her cheek and leaned towards her. Her mouth opened on a sigh just before he put his lips to hers.

  A second later her hands crept up his chest, sliding under his collar and pulling his head closer. She opened to him, pressing her body against his. Making sweet little murmuring sounds as she melted into his arms.

  He held her tighter still. So tightly she lifted off the ground. Swinging her around, he sat her on the bench.

  Her eyes flashed open and her hands flew away as the cool of the concrete seeped into her jeans. And then she smiled against his lips.

  This. This was what he’d been thinking about all day. Coming home to this. The intimacy he’d been avoiding his entire adult life. It was terrifying. It was irresistible.

  She pulled back just enough to slide his jacket from his shoulders, letting it drop to the floor.

  “You’re a bad influence,” he murmured as he tried to go in for another kiss.

  But she pushed him away, moving to undo the buttons of his shirt, one by slow damn one. Once his shirt joined his jacket she ran a hand over his chest, following the line of the now purple and yellow bruise. “Does it hurt?”

  “Not right now.”

  She laughed, the sound s
exy as hell.

  Then she kissed the bruise, right at the top, and Will sucked in a breath. He held it still as she pulled him into the cradle of her thighs and kissed him. On the jaw, the cheek, the tip of his nose.

  Her kisses were so delicate, so exquisite, he felt as if he could barely hold himself together. As if he might crack right down the middle if he breathed too hard.

  But then she touched her lips to his, ran her tongue over the seam and tugged his head to hers and he fell apart anyway.

  He’d been overachieving by every quantifiable measure of success. But it had been a straight and narrow road. He hadn’t been living until that moment.

  Pathways opened up inside of him as he ran his hands over Sadie’s hair, as he pressed into her warmth and swallowed her gasp in a kiss that changed his world.

  He grabbed her by the backside and lifted her off the cold kitchen bench. She wrapped her arms about his neck and didn’t break the kiss for even a breath as he carried her upstairs. But still Will held on tight.

  She had a habit of running when the going got tough. Making her feel safe enough to stay would take finesse, timing and patience. The hours he’d spent behind the eyepiece of a telescope attempting to focus on precise celestial bodies light years away proved he had the staying power.

  At the top of the stairs he turned left, heading into his room this time.

  They never did get around to eating that soup.

  * * *

  “Do you have a warmer coat?”

  Sadie looked up from her coffee to find Will had come home early. Then down at the clothes she’d had on the day before. Her underwear was clean, so she figured that was winning. “I do not.”

  “Wait here.”

  “Okay.”

  Will ducked back upstairs, into his bedroom, and came out with a familiar black tracksuit top.

  “Hello, old friend!” she said, putting it on under her jumper, letting the hood fall out of the top. “Now what?”

  “Now we go out.”

  “We can’t go out.”

  “Well, we can’t stay here. Not for ever.”

  “If we go out there someone might see you.”