Prince and Future... Dad?
Page 1
“Given that you don’t believe you’re pregnant, why am I here?”
Prince Finn Danelaw regarded her steadily. Liv didn’t look away.
“Because I’m willing to admit I might be pregnant. And if I am, I realize I will have to deal with you.”
“You certainly will.”
“Don’t be overbearing. I said that I would.”
“I seek clarity only, my love.”
“Since when did I become your love?”
“Since the moment I first saw you.”
“If you think I believe that, maybe you have a bridge you can sell me.”
He frowned for a moment, then his fine brow smoothed out. “One of your clever Americanisms.” He brought the hand he was forever capturing to his mouth. Her skin tingled deliciously at the touch of his lips. “You could marry me now….”
“I could climb Mount Everest. Go skydiving even.”
“Meaning?”
She pulled her hand free. “Just because I can do something doesn’t mean I will.”
Christine Rimmer
PRINCE AND FUTURE…DAD?
Writing this story reaffirmed my joy in those two most basic and important of female connections: with our sisters and with our moms.
So this one’s for my own sister, B. J. Jordan, and my dear mom, Auralee Smith.
Books by Christine Rimmer
Silhouette Special Edition
Double Dare #646
Slow Larkin’s Revenge #698
Earth Angel #719
*Wagered Woman #794
Born Innocent #833
*Man of the Mountain #886
*Sweetbriar Summit #896
*A Home for the Hunter #908
For the Baby’s Sake #925
*Sunshine and the
Shadowmaster #979
*The Man, the Moon and the Marriage Vow #1010
*No Less Than a Lifetime #1040
*Honeymoon Hotline #1063
†The Nine-Month Marriage #1148
†Marriage by Necessity #1161
†Practically Married #1174
*A Hero for Sophie Jones #1196
Dr. Devastating #1215
Husband in Training #1233
†Married by Accident #1250
Cinderella’s Big Sky Groom #1280
A Doctor’s Vow #1293
†The Millionaire She Married #1322
†The M.D. She Had To Marry #1345
The Tycoon’s Instant Daughter #1369
†The Marriage Agreement #1412
†The Marriage Conspiracy #1423
**His Executive Sweetheart #1485
**Mercury Rising #1496
**Scrooge and the Single Girl #1509
††The Reluctant Princess #1537
††Prince and Future…Dad? #1556
Silhouette Desire
No Turning Back #418
Call It Fate #458
Temporary Temptress #602
Hard Luck Lady #640
Midsummer Madness #729
Counterfeit Bride #812
Cat’s Cradle #940
The Midnight Rider Takes a Bride #1101
Silhouette Books
Fortune’s Children
Wife Wanted
*The Taming of Billy Jones
†The Bravo Billionaire
Montana Mavericks:
Big Sky Brides
“Suzanna”
Lone Star Country Club
Stroke of Fortune
Lone Star Country Club: The Debutantes
“Reinventing Mary”
CHRISTINE RIMMER
Before settling down to write about the magic of romance, she’d been an actress, a salesclerk, a janitor, a model, a phone sales representative, a teacher, a waitress, a playwright and an office manager. Christine is grateful not only for the joy she finds in writing, but for what waits when the day’s work is through: a man she loves, who loves her right back, and the privilege of watching their children grow and change day to day. She lives with her family in Oklahoma.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Epilogue
Chapter One
Princess Liv Thorson woke nose to nose with a sheep.
Karavik, Liv thought woozily. The Gullandrian sheep are called karavik….
Since she’d arrived in her father’s country six days before, Liv had trotted along obediently on several highly informational tours. As a result, she’d seen a large number of karavik—always from a distance, though.
The karavik, up close and very personal, said what any regular American sheep might say: “Baaaa.” Its nose was damp.
“Yuck.” Liv jerked away. Her naked back met another naked back. Her bare foot brushed a hairy leg.
She frowned. For the moment, she decided, she wouldn’t think about that other naked back. Or that hairy leg.
The sheep, spooked, had already turned to trot off. It had a fat, fuzzy tail. Liv stared at that tail until the morning mist and the thick green trees enveloped it.
Her mouth tasted foul. She was lying on her left side on a bed of cool, damp grass. The idea of sitting up—of so much as lifting her pounding head—made her already queasy stomach roll. She shivered. The small clearing where she lay was protected somewhat by the thick circle of surrounding trees. Still it was chilly. Especially since she wasn’t wearing any clothes.
She ought to get dressed.
But to do that, she would have to move, to sit up.
Uh-uh. Sitting up went in the not right this minute category.
Squinting through the lushly green blades of grass in front of her face, Liv pondered the question of how she’d gotten herself into this mess.
It had all started last night. Beyond being Midsummer’s Eve—a major event in the island state of Gullandria—last night was the night her sister Elli married Hauk Wyborn.
Liv licked her dry lips and wished that little man inside her head with the hammer would give up and get lost.
But back to last night.
Back to Elli and Hauk.
Liv wasn’t sure she approved of the marriage. Yes, it was true they adored each other, Elli and Hauk. But what did they have in common, really—a kindergarten teacher from Sacramento and a huge, be-muscled Gullandrian warrior?
Liv brushed impatiently at a blade of grass that was tickling her nose. Those Gullandrians. They didn’t fool her. The tour guides loved to point at the spires of the local churches and call themselves Lutherans, but everyone knew better. Okay, it had been eight or nine hundred years since the last Gullandrian raider had kissed the wife goodbye and set off in his swift, sleek Viking ship to do a little raping and pillaging along the coasts of England and France. But every Gullandrian knew the Norse myths. They lived by them, really. They were Vikings at heart.
And on Midsummer’s Eve, they threw one hell of a par-tay.
Liv groaned softly.
Actually, much of last night was a blur. There had been a lot of that tasty, slightly sweet Gullandrian ale, hadn’t there? She really shouldn’t have drunk quite so much of it.
She remembered….
Laughter. And lots of raw jokes at the bedding of the bridal pair.
Hauk had
gotten fed up with them—all the young, unmarried men and women—and ordered them out. So Liv and the rest of them had raced down the back stairs and through the gardens and out to the open parkland where, in honor of the occasion, Liv’s father, the king, had ordered a Viking ship set ablaze.
She had danced, hadn’t she?
Oh, yes, she had. Danced drunkenly right along with everyone else, laughing and singing as she pranced around the ship’s blazing hull.
But after that, well, it all got pretty fuzzy.
She was shivering steadily now. She wrapped her arms around herself in a futile attempt to warm up a little.
Seven or eight feet away—maybe halfway to the trees—she could see a swatch of midnight-blue silk. Her bra. Past the bra, nearer the trees, lay the long, glimmery peacock-blue skirt of the terrific two-piece crushed velvet dress she’d been wearing. Where were the rest of her clothes?
Oh, really. How could she have allowed herself to get so out of control? What could have gotten into her?
Beyond too much ale, the answer to that one lay behind her. Carefully, still shivering, stifling a groan at the way her head pounded and her stomach rebelled, she rolled over.
And there he was: Prince Finn Danelaw.
Oh, God. She did remember.
She’d kissed him in the shadows of the trees. And he had led her here, to this lovely, cozy private spot. The grass had shone golden in the faint endless twilight of Gullandrian Midsummer’s Eve. He’d undressed her and she’d undressed him and…
Liv turned back to her other side, dropped to the grass again, closed her eyes and stifled a long, self-pitying moan.
This was so not her. She was a second-year law student at Stanford, top of her class. Hardheaded and take-charge and always a model of self-control.
A princess? Well, all right, yes. By birth. But not by inclination. At heart, in her soul, Liv Thorson was American. Capital A. And she had plans for herself. Big ones.
By the age of forty, she’d be a senator, at least. Or maybe she’d end up taking a seat on the Supreme Court. She could never be president because she hadn’t been born in the U.S.A. But nobody ever got anywhere by not thinking big. Her prospects were better than most.
Which was why her current situation was so…disappointing.
A woman who dreamed of being on the Supreme Court one day did not have sex in fields. She did not have sex with men she’d known for less than a week. And she certainly did not have sex with men like Finn, who was charming, heartbreaker handsome and nothing short of legendary when it came to his exploits with women.
Slowly, carefully, ignoring her roiling stomach and her spinning head, Liv propped herself up on her forearms and looked at him again.
He was turned away from her, his beautiful, leanly muscled back curved to a bow, his hard, long legs drawn up against the morning chill. He remained—as far as she could tell—sound asleep. His hair, rich brown shot here and there with hints of gold, curled a little at his nape.
Even as her stomach lurched and her face flamed, Liv had to stop herself from reaching out. Her fingers itched to touch that silky hair, to trace the vulnerable bumps of his spine. He really was one gorgeous hunk of man. And last night—at least what she could remember of it—had been absolutely splendid.
She let her head drop to the grass again, shut her eyes and stifled another moan. Oh, how could she?
Liv wasn’t married. She wasn’t even engaged. But she and Simon Graves, a fellow student from back home in California, were more or less a steady couple. And even if she’d been completely free, well, Prince Finn was a player, for heaven’s sake. The man was incredibly charming. All the available—and some of the not so available—women in her father’s court adored him. They vied for his attention. He had his pick of them and he did his best to satisfy them all.
Never—ever—would she have imagined she’d wake up one morning and discover she’d become a notch just like all the other notches in some player’s bedpost. She was seriously disappointed in herself.
She was also outta here.
Now.
With bleak determination, Liv braced her hands against the grass and pushed. That brought her to all fours. It also caused her stomach to do something distinctly unpleasant—a lurch, followed immediately by a long, awful roll. She found the sensation not the least reassuring. And she didn’t even want to think about what might happen once she was fully on her feet.
But it couldn’t be helped. She was standing up and she was doing it now.
With a muffled groan, she lunged upright. For a minute, she swayed there, certain she was going to spew the contents of her stomach all over the dewy grass and the gorgeous naked man at her feet.
Somehow, she held it in.
Her clothes—and his—were strewn around the clearing. She had to swallow more than once to keep from hurling, but somehow she managed to lurch around from garment to garment, disentangling her soggy things from his.
She located everything—well, except for her shoes and her panties. The shoes, she remembered now, had been left behind long before Finn led her to the clearing—back there while she was dancing around the burning ship. As for the panties, well, she just didn’t care to consider what might have happened to them.
She made herself get dressed, more or less. Everything was limp and damp and hard to manage, and wooziness left over from all that ale she’d drunk didn’t help matters any. Right away, she gave up on her bra and the clingy calf-length half-slip that went under the skirt. She just put on the two damp halves of the dress, smoothed them as best she could and carried the rest in a wad in one fist. She did not look back as she headed for the trees.
Her father’s palace—unlike her panties—was easy to find. Isenhalla loomed several stories tall, a marvel of gleaming gray slate, with a fairy tale’s worth of turrets and ramparts, towers and widow’s walks. It rose majestically over the parkland where the revels of the night before had taken place, the red-and-black Gullandrian flag flying proudly from the tallest spire.
Liv walked fast, through the thick copse of trees that ringed the clearing, out into a broad, sloping meadow where the ashes of the burned-out ship still smoldered. She kept her head down and her feet moving and managed to avoid contact, verbal or otherwise, with the few leftover revelers sprawled here and there on the grass.
Beyond the grass were high topiary hedges, broken at intervals for access to the gardens. Head hammering and stomach churning, Liv pushed on through the gardens, ignoring the way the pebbled paths abused her poor feet.
By blind luck, she ended up at the same narrow back palace entrance the bridal party had come down the night before. Miraculously, the door had not been locked. She slipped through, padded down a short, dim hallway and then began climbing the narrow flights of stairs.
At the third floor, she pushed open the landing door. She went down a narrow hallway to another door. Through it was a main hallway—a wide one with an arched, intricately carved ceiling and a beautiful marble floor. A thick Turkish runner led off in both directions.
Liv went left. It wasn’t far—maybe a hundred feet—to the tall, carved double doors of the suite she shared with her “baby” sister, Brit—they were fraternal triplets, Liv, Elli and Brit. Liv was the oldest, Brit the youngest.
The doors, as per usual, were guarded.
Liv had hoped against hope that the pair of Gullandrian soldiers, beautifully rigged out in the dress uniforms of the palace guard, would for once have taken the morning off. But there they were, resplendent and impassive, as always. Liv tried her best to look dignified as she approached them, an effort severely hindered by her soggy dress, her battered, dirty bare feet and the wad of limp underwear she clutched in her fist.
Not that they said anything. The guards never said anything. They stared straight ahead, their handsome, square-jawed Nordic faces about as readable to her as runes. In unison, white-gloved fists hit proud, broad chests. As one, they each took an equal sideways step toward
each other. Each grabbed a handle of one of the doors. Smoothly they pulled the doors wide.
Liv walked through with her shoulders back and her head high. Not until she heard the doors click shut behind her did she allow herself to droop a little.
The suite was huge. The marble-floored antechamber opened into a massive drawing room done in rich damask and heavy silk, with lots of gilded intricately carved tables and an ornate fireplace rigged, by way of a beautiful wrought-iron insert, to burn gas.
Liv kept walking. She walked through the entry hall and the drawing room, down a hallway, right past her own bedroom to Brit’s room. The door was shut. She grasped the gilded door handle. Not locked, it turned.
Just as she was about to push the door inward, Liv became aware of movement to her right. It was the chambermaid. For their stay in Gullandria, Liv and Brit shared a maid to take care of their rooms and their clothes and a cook who inhabited the small galley off the private living area to one side of the drawing room. The maid was young—eighteen or nineteen, max—and way too thin, with big, slightly protruding eyes in a wan, pointy face. She wore soft-soled shoes, so you couldn’t hear her coming. It seemed to Liv she was forever popping up out of nowhere, startling her and Brit when they thought themselves alone. Right now, the girl hovered in the open doorway to Liv’s own room.
“What?” Liv demanded in a distinctly crabby tone.
The pale, pointy face seemed to get paler and pointier still. “Highness, forgive me. Just tidying up—are you all right, Highness?”
“Never better,” Liv lied with a sneer.
The maid dipped a quick curtsy and escaped toward the drawing room. Liv watched her scurry off. Once she was sure the girl was gone, Liv swayed toward the door frame. For a moment she just sagged there, disgusted with everything, herself most of all.
She needed to lie down. To lie down and go to sleep and not wake up until her head had stopped hurting and her stomach quit churning.