by Jada Turner
“But what about you?” I said worried.
“I will be fine. I am careful. We need to get on the boat. I will keep you safe there. We will stay there a long time.”
I breathed in deep and believed him. For the next month we stayed aboard that ship out at sea. We didn’t see or hear anything of his father. I slept with my dark lover in the cabin aboard the old fishing vessel. I enjoyed his company and slowly started to forget about all the danger of being found out. I had a lot of guilt for leaving my aunt and uncle, and I had only left them a vague note that I had run off with my Italian lover. I only left it so that they did not think I had been killed or taken against my will. I did not want them to spend time looking for me thinking I was in danger. Though I’m sure they were doing just that anyway. That thought haunted me and I did wish there was a way that the prince and me could be together. But that was a sacrifice I was willing to take. Damiano had let me into his world and I would never betray him. Not now and not for eternity if he would allow it. For now I had to be happy with just being safe with him. Not knowing if we were still hunted by his father. All I could do was put my faith in the fact that he wanted to keep me safe because he loved me. I didn’t know what lay ahead, but I was open to it and I was ready. I just wanted to be with him, Damiano, and that’s exactly what I got.
We finally crossed the Adriatic Sea. We came onto land. All seemed to be going well. We hired a carriage and began to make our way out of the port city into the countryside. I sent my aunt and uncle another letter to their London address. The guilt really did bother me and I wanted to let them know that I was doing well. Damiano kissed me deeply in the carriage and sighed in relief.
“I think we have made it. I am so happy to start a new life with you here Emerald, and with our child.”
“I am too,” I said as I kissed him.
The carriage suddenly came to a stop. We were both confused and looked out the window. There was an astonishing sight.
There were several carriages, men in elegant uniforms carrying banners mounted on horses, and a stately looking man with the most elegant dress I have ever seen.
“It’s my father. He has found us,” Damiano said.
My stomach sank as I realized this would be the last time we would be together. I couldn’t believe he found us, but how did he know. Damiano got out of the carriage and then helped me out. We looked at all the men and one of them was very familiar looking. It was Damiano’s carriage driver in Assisi. He was the one that drove us to the ship. This was how we were found out.
The king got off his horse and came up to us. He started yelling at Damiano in Italian. I did not understand it.
Then at one point the king looked at my belly. This I did understand. We were then escorted back to the shore. There we were taken aboard a very grand ship. I was put into a very luxurious cabin. Damiano was in his father’s cabin fighting. I didn’t know what would be done with me. I was so confused and hurt. There was a knock at the cabin door and I was excited to see Damiano again. I had hoped that his father had come around. I wasn’t a princess but I was of noble English heritage with a good family name. Though I guess I had drug that name through the mud by running away with him.
I opened the door and a maid walked in carrying a trey full of food.
“Miss I am Maria, if you need anything. Do you need help?”
“I would love a bath if that is possible,” I pleaded.
“Yes, it is. I will have a tub brought up after your meal and start the water on the fire.”
She walked out and I was very happy to be getting good treatment. I considered it a good sign. I ate heartily of the piles of food. There was fresh caught fish, fresh baked breads, and lots of fruit. I wondered if everyone knew I was with child because the portions of food were enormous. I ate almost all of it.
Then my question was answered when the copper tub was carried in. Various women came in with buckets of hot water and filled it half way. Then they left. The maid Maria came back in and helped me out of my dress, then when she helped me into the tub she said, “Careful Miss, can’t have you slip because of the little prince.”
I smiled sweetly. This meant that she knew I was pregnant. It was promising that she called our child a prince, as though I would be accepted.
I took a hot bath and tired my weak muscles. Then I toweled off and the maid brought in a fresh dress for me. It was in the Italian style and it was very lavish. Then hours and hours passed. Finally, Damiano came into the cabin. I ran to him and hugged him.
“Damiano, I was so worried I would never see you again.”
“I am here Emerald. I will not leave you.”
“So what did your father, the king say?”
“Exactly what I thought he would. He wants me to send you to the country. To one of our country estates where you will have our child and you will be provided for, but I must still marry the princess I am betrothed too.”
“I see.”
I burst into tears.
“I told him that where you go I go. That he can force me to stay in the palace if he wants, but as soon as his back is turned I will be off running to you. I will have to be dragged back in chains. I told him that I will do this for as long as I live. That no other land will ever want to marry their daughters to us because we will have a reputation for treating their princesses badly because my behavior will go down in history.”
My eyes were wide with excitement at his brilliant plan. Then he continued.
“I told him he could prevent all of that by calling off the engagement and saving that princess from being treated badly, and keep her land from retaliating against us for it. Or he could keep the engagement, and force us to marry and be the king that started a war.”
“That is brilliant.”
“So after much yelling and screaming. He finally agreed.”
“Agreed to what.”
Then Damiano shocked me. He pulled out a giant emerald rock on a ring and knelt down.
“Emerald will you marry me? Will you be my princess?”
I grabbed onto the chair and sat down because I was so light headed. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I couldn’t believe that this fairy tale had come true.
“Yes! Yes I will marry you.”
At our wedding, my entire family from England came including my aunt and uncle. I still wanted to prove to them that I was in fact well and in good hands. They still scolded me for running off with a man like that. I apologized over and over. Once our son was born, the king finally warmed up to me. Since I did come from some nobility he considered it an alliance with London and felt proud for that. Mostly he was just proud that I was giving Damiano sons. It was unbelievable that all of this had happened to me, when things seemed so dark in the beginning, but now I was a princess living happily ever after.
Billionaire Tiger
An Erotic Paranormal Romance
CHAPTER 1
As it was her habit to do, Lara Everly studied herself in her full-length mirror. She was dressed all in black--a lycra top, Capri pants, her best high-heeled leather shoes. She stood and looked at herself. She ran her hands over the round and full contours of her form and studied the lines of her body. She turned to one side and did the same. She ruffled the long, thick, tumbling locks of brown hair that crowned her head, flowed over her shoulders, and fell halfway down her back. She smiled her best red-carpet smile. It was the same as it had ever been. She told herself that it was only nature showing its sense of humor. A capricious nature had given her a supermodel's face, a dancer's legs--and a pear-shaped body.
There was no question about it. Lara was a pear. A very pretty pear, but a pear all the same, full and round in the middle. If she were really honest, the legs holding up the pear were a little more stout in the thighs than those of a dancer would be. They were not ugly legs by any means; the words "pleasantly plump," which she learned from her parents when she was a little girl, were her mantra for many years, until she learned to think o
f herself as a pear. She had the shape of a pear, and, she thought, the sweetness of a pear--the pear, after all, being the sweetest fruit. She thought she should eat more of them than she did. The only trouble with pears was that chocolate--which was the color of her thick, rich hair--was so much more satisfying. To hell with diamonds; a girl's best friend was a chocolate truffle.
Still, she thought as she studied herself in the mirror, what was so wrong with pears? The face looking back from the mirror, the features that could grace a thousand commercials for shampoos and cosmetics, had no answer for her. It had nothing to say about what lay below her bust. It was only light bouncing off glass and told her nothing about the roundness and fullness from her stomach to her bottom to her upper thighs, which was where men's eyes always stopped when they looked down from that face. Men's taste for fruit was sadly limited. When she saw men out and about, the ones that appealed to her the most had a tendency not to pick pears.
And see them she did. Living in a big city, Lara saw them everywhere. The city was a veritable nest of beautiful-looking men. She saw them in the park and at the market, in restaurants and cafes. She saw them in the streets and in stores. She saw them in the hallways of the apartment building where she lived, and in the offices of the clients that she served as a freelance fundraiser. She used to frequent the gym. She stopped because she saw so many of them there, in their tank-tops and shorts and swimsuits, and it grew difficult to look at them. And the reason was what she found they liked to look at--and touch, and walk holding hands with. When the beautiful men went foraging for mates, they did not pick pears. The fruit that they picked was tall and slender. When it had curves, they were not curves like those in the middle of Lara's body, full and broad and ample. The curves on the fruit that the beautiful men picked were sleek and subtle and sinuous, things that Lara had stopped trying to be.
Many times Lara had thought, Why not just work with what I've got? She smiled at herself in the mirror again. From the bust upward, she was what they considered "a knockout". She was gorgeous, as pretty as any of the lean fruits, prettier than many. She primped her flowing, rippling locks again. Damn, Girl, you've got it going on, she told herself. And she believed it. After all, men liked a pretty face. A pretty face and a bright smile could turn many a male head. She had looks. She had brains. She could get their attention. The problem, she found too often, was that their attention was all that she could get, and even that did not last.
After too many first dates that never turned to seconds, and too many men who were there for a night and skidded off like hit-and-run drivers in the morning, and the sight of too many women who were not at all plump, pleasantly or otherwise, on the arms of too many beautiful-looking men, Lara had weighed her options and found them not to her liking. More than once she had thought to place a personal ad specifically looking for a "chubby chaser". There were problems with that as well. She hated thinking of herself, or identifying herself, as "chubby," even though she was. And personal ads, she had learned early in her dating life--such as it was--came with their own pitfalls. There were the men who lied about their looks and their jobs and their living situations, the men who were older than she wanted, the men who were chubby themselves. She had stopped talking to her girlfriends and the women in her family about her troubles with men. She was tired of hearing that she was "too picky" and of the insinuation that she was being "shallow". To Lara, those were the things people told you when you respected yourself enough to think you should have what your heart really desired, the things people said when they thought you had no business thinking of yourself as anything special--or anything more special than they. People, however well intentioned, trying to talk her out of her heart's desire for what they thought was her own good, did Lara no favors, so she kept her feelings and her heart--and, alas, everything else--to herself.
Sighing, Lara kicked off her shoes and padded in bare feet from her bedroom to the office section of her living room, where she kept a large, comfortable leather chair at the desk. She curled up in the chair and reached over to her iPad which rested next to the computer. She put it in her lap. She then reached over next to where the iPad had rested and took from there the thin, rectangular white box, which she rested on the arm of the chair. She lifted the lid and smiled a little smile at the rows of chocolate truffles nestled in the box. They were nothing but truffles; she always ordered them specifically. The confectioner's shop down the street knew her as "the truffle lady". She may not be able to get or hold onto the kind of man she wanted, but chocolate was another matter entirely.
With a truffle in one hand, Lara used the other to turn on the iPad. Munching on her sweet surrogate for a boyfriend, she opened her PDF reader and went over her notes for the fundraising party she was attending this evening. Her latest project was for wildlife organizations focused on the conservation of tigers. Scrolling through PDF pages copied and downloaded from the Web, Lara again went over the things that she had been reading for the last couple of weeks about tigers, all the facts with which she would need to arm herself to help the conservation groups persuade wealthy guests to donate to their cause, the protection of one of the most beautiful and endangered animals on the planet.
In the documents that had pictures and illustrations in them, Lara saw page after page with images of tigers: in tall grass, in forests, in water and by the sides of streams. She saw them in zoos and in performing acts. As she kept paging through, so many of the things that she saw disturbed her, dismayed and appalled her, made her almost want to cry. There were images of places with tiger skins stretched out, stripped and ripped from the beautiful animals after they were slain. There were pictures of places where tigers' body parts were sold as trophies, as delicacies, and for quack "medicines". She saw pictures of hunters standing proudly with their guns beside the bodies of tigers they had shot. What the hell do you have to be so proud of? she thought. As a fundraiser, Lara worked mostly with things about which she had no personal feelings. Most of the time she was only helping people collect money, and the work was only work. But this was different. What men were doing to the tigers, whose numbers had fallen precipitously into mere thousands in isolated pockets of the wild, was nothing less than the destruction of something beautiful. The destruction of beauty, the rendering of beauty into extinction, made Lara want to cry. Or get very, very angry. This time it was not just a job, just a thing to pay the bills. This time it meant something. She bit into a truffle and felt like a tiger biting into a deer.
By the time she finished lunch--which the chocolate did not spoil--and she had to shower and dress for the party, Lara had fixed her mind on the work awaiting her. She could not show the people at the party how she really felt. She had to keep it all on a professional level. She would keep it professional--and she would get results. The theme of the party, which was being held at a penthouse just off the park near the river, was in fact tigers. Everyone invited was required to wear something to evoke the image of the big striped cats. Lara imagined the tableau that would meet her eyes when she walked in, as the party filled up; all the tiger outfits that people would be wearing. Some, she guessed, would even be in costumes. Back at the mirror, she let the corner of her mouth turn up in a wry smile at the thought of being in a penthouse full of stripes, whiskers, ears, and tails. For her part, Lara chose to don the shoes from earlier and her slinkiest black strapless formal, or at least the slinkiest such dress made for a pear. This she accented with a sash across the waist, for which she had searched high and low in the city and which she had finally found on line--a silk sash with a tiger skin print. She was satisfied that it was appropriate for the evening and for the part she would be playing in it; tasteful and not ostentatious. Ruffling her hair one last time and putting on her black tiger-print wrap--another painstaking find--she was ready to go to work.
CHAPTER 2
The party was held in a penthouse taking up the uppermost two floors of a building of condos in the toniest, ritziest part of town, on a st
reet that looked as if one should have a six-figure income just to walk there. The penthouse itself looked as much like a museum or an art gallery as a place where someone lived. It was all huge picture windows, vast and spacious rooms, wide stairways, brass railings, an indoor water fountain with koi fish swimming in the pool, and sumptuous furniture, all done up for the evening with potted palms, exotic ferns, and wild flowers to suggest a rain forest. This was the home of the very monied widow Mrs. Eve Dwight-Harrington, a member of that idle rich benefactor class whose names one saw in the lists of donors to arts and cultural programs on Public Television. Arriving at the party, Lara found her friend Clara Olstead, a friendly looking African-American woman, standing near the door, mingling with various tiger-garbed guests. Lara was an old friend that Lara had met after college; as a freelance publicist and party planner she traveled in many of the same circles as Lara herself.
Clara noticed Lara and excused herself from the people with whom she was chatting. With a broad smile, she went over to Lara and gave her a hug. Lara grinned at Clara's tiger-striped tiara, arm bands, and bracelets accenting her eggshell-colored dress. "Looking good, Girl," she said.
"You too, Girl," Clara said back. "Come say hi to Eve." Clara took Lara by the arm and together they made their way among people in tiger suits, tiger masks, tiger hats, tiger coats and jackets, and the like, to where a middle-aged lady in a tiger print dress stood looking like a Hollywood star from the 1940s. "Eve," called Clara, "Lara's here."
The older woman turned her attention to the two younger women and smiled warmly. "Lara, Dear, good evening."
Lara clasped hands with Eve, returning the smile. "Hello, Eve. So nice to see you again. I've been so looking forward to this. It's good to take on a project that means as much as this. How is everything going so far?"
