by Cara Colter
But she, of all people, should know by now that the desperation of a prayer in no way led to its answer.
“Your Royal Highness,” she said, and all her grace fled her as she did a clumsy curtsy.
“You can’t be Meredith Whitmore,” the prince said, clearly astounded.
“I can’t?”
Even his voice—cultured, deep, melodic, masculine—was unfairly attractive, as sensual as a touch.
It was no wonder she was questioning her own identity!
Meredith begged the confident, career-oriented woman she had become to push the embarrassed servant’s daughter off center stage. She begged the vulnerability that the memory of Carly’s laugh had brought to the surface to go away.
“Why can’t I be Meredith Whitmore?” Despite her effort to speak with careless confidence, she thought she sounded like a rejected actress who had been refused a coveted role.
“From what Adrian said, I was expecting, um, a female version of Attila the Hun.”
“Flattering.”
A hint of a smile raced across the firm line of those stern lips and then was gone.
It was definitely a smile that could break hearts. Meredith reminded herself, firmly, she hadn’t one to break!
“You did give me a hard time for standing inside my own door,” he said thoughtfully. “Adrian said, er, that you were something of a taskmaster.”
The hesitation said it all. Meredith guessed that Prince Adrian had not worded it that politely. The fact that the two princes had discussed her—in unflattering terms—made her wish for the floor to open up redouble.
“I was actually about to leave,” she said with the haughtiness of a woman who was not the least vulnerable to him, and whose time was extremely valuable—which it was! “He’s very late.”
“I’m afraid he’s not coming. He sent me with the message.”
Meredith felt a shiver of apprehension. “Is it just for today? That Prince Adrian isn’t coming?”
But somehow she already knew the answer. And it was her fault. She had driven him too hard. She had overstepped herself. He didn’t want to do it anymore. She had obviously been too bossy, too intense, too driven to perfection.
A female version of Attila the Hun.
“I’m sorry. He’s been injured in an accident.”
“Badly?” Meredith asked. The prince, puppylike in his eagerness to please, had been hurt, and all she was thinking about was that she was being inconvenienced by his tardiness?
“He’s been in a riding accident. When I left him his knee was the approximate size and shape of a basketball.”
Meredith marshaled herself, not wanting him to see her flinch from the blow to her plans, to her girls.
“Well, as terrible as that is,” she said with all the composure she could muster, “the show must go on. I’m sure with a little resourcefulness we can rewrite the part. We aren’t called No Princes for nothing.”
“No Princes? Is that the name of your dance troupe, then?”
“It is actually more than a dance troupe.”
“All right,” he conceded. “I’m intrigued. Tell me more.”
To her surprise, the prince looked authentically interested. Despite not wanting to be vulnerable to him in any way, Meredith took a deep breath, knowing she could not pass up this opportunity to tell someone so influential about her group.
“No Princes is an organization that targets girls from the tough neighborhoods of the inner city of Chatam. At fifteen and sixteen and seventeen a frightening number of these girls, still children really, are much too eager to leave school, and have babies, instead of getting their education.” Her story, exactly, but there was no reason to tell him that part.
“We try to give them a desire to learn, marketable skills, and a strong sense of self-reliance and self-sufficiency. We hope to influence them so they do not feel they need rescuing from their circumstances by the first boy they perceive as a prince!”
Michael Morgan had been that prince for her. He had been new to the neighborhood, drifted in from somewhere with a sexy Australian accent. She was fatherless, craving male attention, susceptible.
And thanks to him, she would never be that vulnerable again. Though the man who stood before her would certainly be a test of any woman’s resolve to not believe in fairy tales.
“And where do you fit into that vision, my gypsy ballerina?”
So, the prince had seen something. His gypsy ballerina? Some terrible awareness of him tingled along her spine, but she kept her tone entirely professional when she answered him. She, of all people, knew that tingle to be a warning sign.
“I’m afraid all work and no play is a poor equation for anyone, never mind these girls. As well as looking after a lot of paperwork for No Princes, I get to do the fun part. I teach the girls how to dance.”
“Prince Adrian didn’t seem to think it was fun,” he said dryly.
“I may have pushed him a little hard,” she admitted.
Prince Kiernan actually laughed, and it changed every thing. Did the papers deliberately capture him looking grim and humorless?
Because in that spontaneous shout of laughter Meredith had an unfortunate glimpse of the kind of man every woman hoped would ride in on his white charger to rescue her from her life.
Even a woman such as herself, soured on romance, could feel the pull of his smile. She steeled herself against that traitorous flutter in her breast and reminded herself a man did not get the name Prince Heartbreaker because he was in the market for a princess!
In fact, before he’d been called Prince Heartbreaker, hadn’t he been called the Playboy Prince? And something else? Oh, yes, the Prince of Heartaches. He was a dangerous, dangerous man.
“Kudos to you if you could push him hard,” Prince Kiernan said wryly. “How did Adrian come to be a part of all this?”
It was a relief to hide behind words! They provided the veneer of rational, civilized thought, when something rebellious in her was reacting to him in a very upsettingly primal way!
“One of our girls, Erin Fisher, wrote a dance number that really tells the whole story of what No Princes does. It’s quite a remarkable piece. It takes girls from hanging out on street corners flirting with boys, going nowhere, to a place of remarkable strength and admirable ambition. The piece has a dream sequence in it that shows a girl dancing with a prince.
“Unbeknownst to any of us, Erin sent it to the palace, along with a video of the girls dancing, as a performance suggestion for An Evening to Remember, the fund-raiser that will open Blossom Week. She very boldly suggested Prince Adrian for the part in the dream sequence. The girls have been delirious since he accepted.”
Meredith was shocked by the sudden emotion that clawed at her throat. She shouldn’t have a favorite, but of all the girls, Erin was so much like her, so bright, so full of potential. And so sensitive. So easily hurt and discouraged.
“I’m sorry for their disappointment,” Prince Kiernan said, making Meredith realize, uneasily, he was reading her own disappointment with way too much accuracy.
Prince Kiernan was larger than life. He was better than the pictures. His voice was as sexy as a piece of raw silk scraped along the nape of a neck. He was a real prince.
But still, she represented No Princes. She taught young women not to get swept away, not to believe in fairy tales. She rescued the vulnerable from throwing their lives away on fantasies, as she had, no matter how appealing the illusion.
The abundance of tabloid pictures of actress Tiffany Wells’ tearstained face since her broken engagement with this man underscored Meredith’s determination not to be vulnerable in any way, to any man, ever again.
Her days of vulnerability were over.
“A little disappointment does nothing but build character,” she said crisply.
He regarded her thoughtfully. She thrust her chin up and folded her arms over her chest.
“Again, I’m sorry.”
“It’s quite all r
ight,” she said, forcing her voice to be firm. “Things happen that are out of our control.”
She would have snatched those words back without speaking them if she knew that they would swing the door of memory wide open on the event in her life that had been most out of her control.
Meredith slammed the door shut again, blinking hard and swallowing.
The prince was looking at her way too closely, again, as if he could see things she would not have him see. That she would not have anyone see.
“Goodbye,” Meredith managed to squeak out. “Thank you for coming personally, Your Highness. I’ll let the girls know. We’ll figure something out. It’s not a big deal.”
She was babbling, trying to outrun the quiver in her voice and failing. She kept talking.
“The girls will get over it. In fact, they’re used to it. They’re used to disappointment. As I said, we can rewrite the part Prince Adrian was going to play. Anybody can play a prince.”
Though she might have believed that much more strongly before standing in the damnably charismatic presence of a real one!
“Goodbye,” she said, more strongly, a hint for him to go. The quiver was out of her voice, but she had not slammed the door on her worst memory as completely as she had hoped. She could feel tears sparking behind her eyes.
But Prince Kiernan wasn’t moving. It was probably somewhere in that stuffy royal protocol book she’d been given that she wasn’t supposed to turn her back on him first, that she wasn’t to dismiss him, but she had to. She had to escape him gazing at her so piercingly, as if her whole life story was playing in her eyes and he could see it. It would only be worse if she cried.
She turned swiftly and began pack up the music equipment she had brought in preparation for her session with Adrian.
She waited for the sound of footfalls, the whisper of the door opening and shutting.
But it didn’t come.
CHAPTER TWO
MEREDITH DREW TWO OR THREE steadying breaths. Only when she was sure no tears would fall did she turn back. Prince Kiernan still stood there.
She almost yearned for a lecture about protocol, but there was no recrimination in his eyes.
“It meant a lot to them, didn’t it?” he asked quietly, his voice rich with sympathy, “And especially to you.”
She had to steel herself against how accurately he had read her emotion, but at least he didn’t have a clue as to why she was really feeling so deeply.
It felt like her survival depended on not letting on that it was a personal pain that had touched her off emotionally. So, again, she tried to hide behind words. Meredith launched into a speech she had given a thousand times to raise funds for No Princes.
“You have to understand how marginalized these girls feel. Invisible. Lacking in value. Most of them are from single-parent families, and that parent is a mother. It’s part of what makes them so vulnerable when the first boy winks at them and tells them they’re beautiful.
“So when a prince, when a real live prince, one of the biggest celebrities on our island recognized what they were doing as having worth, it was incredible. I think it made them have hope that their dreams really could come true. That’s a hard sell in Wentworth. Hope is a dangerous thing in that world.”
Kiernan’s face registered Wentworth. He knew the name of the worst neighborhood on his island. She had successfully diverted him from her own moment of intense vulnerability.
But before she could finish congratulating herself, Prince Kiernan took a deep breath, ran a hand through the crisp silk of his dark hair.
“Hope shouldn’t be a dangerous thing,” he said softly, finally looking back at her. “Not in anyone’s world.”
Honestly, the man could make you melt if you weren’t on guard. Thankfully, Meredith’s life had made her stronger than that! She had seen lives—including her own—ruined by weakness, by that single moment of giving in to temptation.
And this man was a temptation!
Well, not really. Not realistically. He was a prince, and she was a servant’s daughter. Some things did not mix, even in this liberated age. Her roots were in the poorest part of his kingdom. She was not an unsullied virgin. She had known tragedy beyond her years. It had taken away her ability to dream, to believe.
The only thing she believed in was her girls at No Princes. The only thing that gave her reprieve from her pain was dancing.
No, there were no fairy tales for her.
She did not rely on anyone but herself, and certainly not a man, not even a prince. That was why she had been so immune to Prince Adrian’s charms.
Merry, Merry, Merry, she could almost hear her mother’s weary, bitter voice, when in all your life has a man ever done the right thing?
Her mother had been so right.
So Prince Kiernan shocked Meredith now. By being the one man willing to do the right thing.
“I’ll do it,” he said with a certain grim resolve, like a man volunteering to face the firing squad. “I’ll take Prince Adrian’s place.”
Meredith felt her mouth open, and then snapped shut again. There was no joy in the prince’s offer, only a sense of obligation.
Naturally I’ll marry you, Michael had lied to her when Meredith had told him about the coming baby.
Oh, darlin’, pigs will fly before that man’s going to marry you. You’re dreaming, girl.
Meredith had a feeling the prince would never run out on his obligations. Still, she had to discourage him.
Teaching Prince Adrian the steps to the dream sequence dance had been one thing. Despite his royal status, working with the young prince had been something like dealing with a slightly unruly younger brother.
This man was not like that.
There were things a whole lot more dangerous than hope.
And Prince Kiernan of Chatam, the Playboy Prince, the Prince of Heartaches, Prince Heartbreaker, was one of them.
“It’s not a good idea,” Meredith said. “Thank you, anyway, but no.”
The prince looked shocked that anyone could turn down such a generous offer. And then downright annoyed.
“You just have no idea how much work is involved,” Meredith said, a last ditch effort to somehow save herself. “Prince Adrian had committed to several hours a day. We have just over a week left until An Evening to Remember. I don’t see how we could get you caught up. Really.” He didn’t seem to be hearing her, so she repeated, “Thanks, but no.”
Prince Kiernan crossed the room to her. Closer, she could see his great height. The man towered over her. His scent was drugging.
But not as much as the light in those amazing blue eyes. Still cool, there was something powerful there. His gaze locked on her face and held her fast in a spell.
“Do I look like a man who is afraid of work?” he asked, softly, challengingly.
The truth? He didn’t have a clue what work was. He wouldn’t know it probably took a team of people hours on their hands and knees to polish these floors, to clean the windows, to make the crystals on the chandeliers sparkle like diamonds.
But she didn’t say that because when she looked into his face she saw raw strength beneath the sophisticated surface. She saw resolve.
And Meredith saw exactly what he was offering. He was saving the dreams of all the girls. As much as she did not want to be exposed to all this raw masculine energy every single day for the next week, was this really her choice to make?
Ever since Prince Adrian had agreed to dance in her production, Erin had dreamed bigger. Her marks at school had become astonishing. She had mentioned, shyly, to Meredith, she might think of becoming a doctor.
Meredith couldn’t throw away the astonishing gift Prince Kiernan was offering her girls because she felt threatened, vulnerable.
Still, her eyes fastened on the sensuous curve of his full lower lip.
God? Don’t do this to me.
But she already knew she was not on the list of those who had their prayers answered.
&
nbsp; The prince surprised her by smiling, though it only intensified her thought, of don’t do this to me.
“I’m afraid,” he said, “it’s probably you who doesn’t know how much work will be involved. I have been called the Prince of Foot Aches. And you have only a short time to turn that around? Poor girl.”
His smile heightened her sense of danger, of something spinning out of her control. Meredith wanted, with a kind of desperation, to tell him this could not possibly work.
Dance with him every day? Touch him, and look at him, and somehow not be sucked into all the romantic longings a close association to such a dynamic and handsome man was bound to stir up?
But she had all her pain to keep her strong, a fortress of grief whose walls she could hide behind.
And she thought of Erin Fisher, and the girl she herself used to be. Meredith thought about hopes and dreams, and the excited delirium of the dance troupe.
“Thank you, Your Highness,” she said formally. “When would you be able to begin?”
Prince Kiernan had jumped out of airplanes, participated in live-round military exercises, flown a helicopter.
He had ridden highly strung ponies on polo fields and jumped horses over the big timbers of steeplechases.
He had sailed solo in rough water, ocean kayaked and done deep-sea dives. The truth was he did not lead a life devoid of excitement and, in fact, had confronted fear often.
What came as a rather unpleasant surprise to him was the amount of trepidation he felt about dancing, of all things.
He knew at least part of that trepidation was due to the fact he had made the offer to help the No Princes dance troupe on an impulse. His plan, he recalled, had been to see the Dragon-heart with his own eyes, make Prince Adrian’s excuses, and then dismiss the dance instructor.
One thing Prince Kiernan of Chatam was not, was impulsive. He did not often veer from the plan. It was the one luxury he could not afford.
That eighteenth summer, his year of restless energy, heady lack of restraint, and impulsive self-indulgence had taught him that for him, spontaneity was always going to have a price.
