Marie shook her head. Dashing Zander was the event chair for this very fancy benefit she found herself a part of. There wasn’t to be anything personal between the two of them. Zander was a member of the upper class. Men like him didn’t give a second glance to girls like her, who’d had it rough and were just scraping by. Money attracted money, confidence married confidence and so on. Wasn’t that how it went? And what was she doing thinking about marrying anyway? Her love life thus far had just been links in a chain of the disappointment she had always known.
Starting with the top one, Marie moved the boxes that were on her desk and stacked them into a corner on the floor. She needed a workspace. Picking up the office phone with its many buttons, she called the front desk to find out what Felice’s phone extension was. And left a message that she was available for the end-of-the-day meeting they’d agreed upon.
Before they parted Zander had asked her if she could continue working tonight and said that he’d send his driver at seven. So she’d need to finish up with Felice at the office and then go to her room to change into something more appropriate for the evening. Zander hadn’t mentioned where his driver would be taking her.
After skimming through the files, Marie had a better sense of the agency’s events. Some of the paperwork was from a year ago, some from five. It was a daunting prospect to have to sort through it all. She’d get to it as she could, but Felice had stressed to her that the gala was the number one priority.
Marie bit her lip, thinking again that being forced to spend lots of her time with Zander on this gala was one heck of a high-quality problem to have. Although she needed to tamp down her attraction to him, and fast!
“How did the meeting go?” Felice entered her office and closed the door. Marie looked up from the notes she was reviewing.
“Well, I think. He wants to meet with me again tonight to go into more detail.”
“And you’re available I hope?”
Marie bit back a snicker. Why wouldn’t she be available? When she’d arrived this morning, she’d dropped off her suitcases and come straight to the office. And with no guarantees that she be promoted to the job permanently, she wouldn’t even be giving up her room in Toulouse just yet. In short, Marie Paquet’s life was in complete flux. Evening plans were the last thing on her mind.
“You’ll need to devote yourself to Zander for the time being,” Felice continued. The words devote yourself to Zander crawled down Marie’s back, making her twitch in her seat. Devotion wasn’t hard to imagine.
Perhaps there was already someone who had devoted herself to him. In fact, why on earth wouldn’t there be? A smart and sophisticated man like him would surely have devotees lined up around the block. For all she knew, he was married or spoken for. Who was the Iris he had been talking to on the phone earlier today?
Regardless, Marie’s task was to render this gala to everyone’s satisfaction. Not to pry into Zander’s relationship status.
“He talked to me about how extravagant he wants this to be. Something about being on par with the great balls of Venice. Do we have party vendors that can pull off something that ambitious?”
“This is Cannes,” Felice assured. “This town knows how to throw a party better than most of the world. Of course, we have event partners up to the task.”
Felice tapped into her phone. Once the ring began, she placed it on Marie’s desk and hit the speaker button.
“Chef Jean Luc Malmond.”
“Jean Luc, Felice here at the APCF.”
“Felice, my sweet.”
“We’ve had a bit of a staff shake-up here. And we’re not entirely clear what has been settled upon for the gala’s menu.”
“Let me pull up my notes.”
“And I have you on speakerphone with Marie Paquet, who will be our liaison for the event.”
“A pleasure to meet you.”
“You, too. On the phone, that is.”
“As you know we have Zander de Nellay as event chair,” Felice said to Jean Luc. “He wants to go lavish. I’m not sure Marie’s predecessor had a grasp on the scale of the event.”
“One thousand guests at the mansion,” Marie added. That headcount was far larger than anything she’d ever worked on before. She was excited by the challenge. Among other things.
“I see we talked about starting with waiters passing hors d’oeuvres on trays during the cocktail hour,” Jean Luc reported. “Then we seat the guests for a soup course. Followed by the entrée course with wine. Then a salad. Afterward, dessert buffets stationed at several locations in the ballroom. Continuous cocktail service in the great hall, ancillary salons and on the lawn.”
“Do you have that, Marie?” Felice asked her across the desk. “You can discuss this with Zander when you meet with him tonight. See if he likes that basic outline.”
“Got it.”
“Jean Luc, I’m going to have Marie call you to set up a meeting this week.”
“Yes, let’s finalize as soon as possible. With the social season upon us, I’m like a decapitated chicken.” Jean Luc let go of a laugh.
After they got off the phone, Felice helped Marie make a list of points to discuss with Zander when she saw him later.
Intrigue still nagged at Marie.
She sensed something a bit mysterious about Zander. For example, he never directly answered her innocent-enough query about what he did for work, saying only that he was affiliated with several charities.
“Felice, what does Zander do for a living?”
“Do?” Felice looked at her like she had just arrived from Mars. Marie wanted to impress the director by having all the information, but nothing in the notes said anything specifically about that. “You mean other than his royal duties?”
“Royal duties?” Marie’s shoulders arched back.
“Marie, His Highness Zander de Nellay is a prince. He’s the son of His Serene Highness Prince Hugh and Princess Claudine of Charlegin.”
Marie’s fists opened and closed. She’d just had lunch at an outdoor café with a prince? Obviously, a poor orphan from the meanest streets in North Marseilles had never met a member of royalty before.
She’d seen enough of the royals who were always on television and in magazines to know that they didn’t wear regalia and crowns every time they were seen in public. Still, there was nothing about Zander, nor had he said anything, to give her any indication that he was a prince.
A prince!
“Felice, I didn’t know. It wasn’t anywhere in Jic’s paperwork.” Although she remembered in a handwritten note Jic had doodled a crown above Zander’s name. Hardly a clear communiqué, but now it made sense.
“I assumed you knew, therefore it never occurred to me to mention it.”
She’d be working on this gala with a prince! Why hadn’t he told her who he was? It seemed like he went out of his way not to mention it.
When she saw him tonight, should she tell him that she’d only just found out? Or should she let it remain unspoken as if it was something she’d already known? Nothing in her previous reference taught her protocol for this sort of thing.
“His Highness Prince Zander de Nellay of Charlegin.” Marie said it out loud to try it on for size. He’d mentioned his homeland but not that his family were the rulers there!
“It’s a small principality reigned over by a prince rather than a king. Surely you heard the news a year ago when Zander’s sister, Elise, who was the crown princess, and her husband were killed in a plane crash?”
Once Felice began to explain, Marie vaguely remembered hearing about that tragedy on the news. At the time she hadn’t heard of Charlegin and had forgotten all about it. Royal comings and goings were of no interest to her. But she recalled the photo that had been shown on the news of Elise, a beautiful woman who, now that Marie thought about it, had those dark almond-shaped eyes the same a
s Zander.
“Is there a specific reason the prince is affiliated with the APCF and chairing our gala?”
“Alain really didn’t fill you in, did he? Princess Elise and her husband, Prince Valentin, had a baby girl. She was left an orphan. Zander has taken her in. Princess Abella de Nellay is the next heir to the Charlegin throne.”
CHAPTER THREE
MARIE WALKED DOWN the corridor to the room she was staying in. When Alain had described the facility as “nothing fancy,” he hadn’t been kidding. The carpet was a worn gray and the white walls were cold. He’d told her the building was a multipurpose center for the APCF, providing temporary shelter to orphans in foster care who were, perhaps, being relocated and awaiting placement. Or to those who needed to be removed from bad situations but before new arrangements could be made.
A chill swept through her at the memory, several memories in fact, of herself being in those circumstances. When frightened children were grouped together in nondescript locations to, essentially, sit around and wait to see where they were going to live next. Often fearful that as bad as their previous placement might have been, what awaited them in the future could be worse.
While there were many generous and compassionate people in the world who became foster parents, Marie hadn’t had the luck to be placed with any of them. Uniformly, the six overcrowded and dirty apartments she’d been sent to over the years were habitats with adults who should not have been entrusted with the care of children.
Her parents had been no better suited. Marie had never been part of a healthy, living and breathing family. The kind she used to dream about, where people helped each other through the hard times and enjoyed each other’s successes. An adult now, she’d long accepted that was never to be for her.
At twenty-five, Marie was on her own. The past might forever haunt her, but the future was hers to make or break.
The key to her room’s door stuck as she pushed it into the lock and it took a couple of jimmies to fit it in. Her two suitcases were exactly where she had left them this morning after her train ride from Toulouse.
A single-sized bed with an unpainted wood nightstand beside it and a table with an armchair were the only furnishings. Sparse, institutional but clean. Time would tell whether she was in Cannes to stay, and if so, she’d look for a small place she could personalize. At least this would be a private space to think in, and her phone and the laptop Felice had given her would allow her to work and communicate as needed.
In fact, she pulled the laptop out of her bag and brought it with her as she kicked off her shoes and sat down on the bed. She propped her back against the wall and set the computer on her knees. Logging on to the internet, she had business to take care of. Research, anyway.
Into the search field she typed “Prince Zander de Nellay.” Dozens of links popped up. She clicked to the first one, Single Hot Royals, even though the name sounded like a gossip site that may or may not contain anything true.
An hour and many websites later, she had gathered plenty of reconnaissance. Firstly, Prince Zander was incapable of taking a bad photo. Whether snapped in a tuxedo at official occasions, socializing in a tailored suit worn without a tie or on the golf course in well-fitted sportswear, the man was simply gorgeous.
Next, unsurprisingly, he had been associated romantically with several beautiful and famous women. Marie found photos of him from all over the world, either vacationing in tropical paradises or in the thick of pulsing cities, with stunning females on his arm. With an American movie star on a sailboat in the Caribbean. Riding horseback in the countryside with a London fashion model. At an Italian opera house with a Chinese ballerina.
One thing was consistent about Marie’s online detective work. There were few pictures of Zander taken in the past year, other than at charitable or royal functions. After his sister and her husband died, Zander all but went into hiding. As Felice had told her that he was now the one caring for his baby niece, his absence from the party scene was understandable.
Although about six months ago, when he had been photographed he’d always had the same eight-foot-tall stick insect on his arm. A glamazon named Henriette Fontaine. Three months later, he’d made the same appearances alone. Marie’s detective work added up to a conclusion that Zander was heterosexual and unmarried.
Wanting a few minutes to ready herself before she met with him again, Marie closed the laptop. She opened her suitcases and hung her limited and plain wardrobe in the room’s one closet. Not sure what to wear for the evening, she flipped through her options.
He hadn’t specified where they were going. So it wasn’t a dinner invitation, yet it wasn’t a business meeting. A suit would be wrong, but one of her few dressier dresses wouldn’t be right, either.
A quick glance in the mirror on the closet door was a blaring reminder that she needed a haircut. Obviously, she wasn’t planning to move to Cannes, where absolutely everyone had a “yacht chic” style that must have cost them a fortune. How would she have known that a haircut was urgent? And in her wildest dreams she couldn’t have known that she’d be interacting with a prince and had to consider what to wear to spend the evening with him.
Deciding on the best middle ground she could think of, she put on a black pencil skirt with black flats. But she dressed it up with a shiny red blouse—not real silk, of course—that had a low neckline with a bow detail. Hair swept into a twist and the pearl earrings that she’d saved for a year to buy, she hoped she looked respectable. This wasn’t a date, Marie kept reminding herself as she applied a bit of makeup to try to cover up the telltale signs of her very long day. She hadn’t been on a date in a long time. Two years ago, in fact.
Gerard.
Marie had been on casual dates with a few men and had one boyfriend. Gerard was fifth generation of a farming family. He frequently came into Toulouse for banking and supplies, and they met at a brasserie close to the APCF’s office there.
Gerard took a liking to her. Or so it seemed. Attending a sporting event or movie together, Marie thought they were at ease with each other. She didn’t have a lot of friends so she appreciated Gerard’s companionship. While there were warning signs from the very beginning, she shoved them aside. For a few months, she convinced herself she was happy.
But when she went with him to meet his parents, they didn’t welcome her with open arms. They asked a lot of questions. She’d learned to say as little as possible about her past because people seemed to always judge her by it. Not leaving it as a mystery, they took it upon themselves to do some research. And once they found out about her, that was that. No son of theirs was going to be with a girl left orphaned by criminals. Think of the gene pool. They saw to it that the relationship didn’t last long.
Gerard didn’t protest. Obviously, Marie hadn’t meant enough to him to defend her to his parents. No one had ever fought for her. She didn’t think anyone ever would.
Yet now she was making up her face for her meeting with a prince. The juxtaposition gave her hope. People never really knew where their road would take them.
Something she did know was that she was only herself. With her checkered upbringing and her emotional scars. If she was ever to be with a man again, which she highly doubted anyway, it would have to be somebody who accepted and even loved her for who she was.
Although that was all speculation. Marie had no intention of getting into any kind of relationship with anyone again. She’d had enough hurt, neglect, betrayal and disappointment to last a lifetime. There was only one person she could count on, who had her best interests at heart.
Herself.
With a click on her purse’s buckle, she left to meet the striking gala chairman who just happened to be a prince.
* * *
The buzz of the doorbell snapped Zander’s attention from his paperwork. A glance down to his phone informed him it was later than he’d realized. It was time for Ma
rie’s arrival.
It had been a long day with moving into the apartment and his visit to the APCF, but there was more work ahead. While Marie was pleasant, not to mention attractive, she was not educated on the requirements for the gala. He couldn’t do this alone so hoped to get her caught up quickly.
“Come in.” Zander opened the door wide for her to enter.
He noticed that she had gussied herself up for the evening. The hair that had been rather adorably a mess at lunch was now pulled sleekly back. The sparkle of the round blue eyes was set off by a shade of pink lipstick that brought focus to her small and perfectly shaped mouth.
A lovely young woman had come calling. And it took Zander aback.
Until he reminded who he was, who she was, and that she had only come to work.
“Oh, my gosh!” Marie seemed to be startled as soon as she passed into the apartment. She countered with, “I mean, how nice, your...”
He waited while she took in the full panorama of the spacious living room with its solid wall of sliding glass doors leading to the terrace and the sea view beyond.
With the doors slid fully open, a twilight breeze billowed the white gauzy curtains. Inside, the blond wood combined with fabrics in shades of soothing taupes and grays gave the furniture a calm feel amid the opulence of the room. There was no denying that it was a spectacular residence.
“May I ask, is this where you live?”
“Yes, why?” That wasn’t the first time Marie had blurted out a direct question that someone might consider private and not to be asked in casual conversation. He found her bluntness refreshing. People hardly ever let their thinking show when they were around His Highness Prince Zander.
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