by Cara Colter
If he was engaged to her, would he have left her when he found out she was infertile?
The question shocked her and she shook it off before she allowed herself an answer. What a ludicrous question to entertain, no matter how briefly. Men like him did not end up engaged to women like her!
She tiptoed across the room so as not to disturb him and added wood to the fire. She blew on it gently until it flared back to life. Then she turned and looked at the Prince.
His hair, so beautifully groomed when he had gotten off the helicopter yesterday, was now faintly rumpled. The rooster tail stood up endearingly. A shadow of whisker growth darkened his cheeks and chin. It made him look faintly roguish—more like a pirate than a prince—and, unfortunately, more sexy than ever.
But then Imogen noticed, even in his sleep, there was nothing relaxed about him. In fact, he looked faintly troubled, as if he carried a huge weight he could never let go.
Except, Imogen reminded herself, she planned to help him let go of it. Had she really asked him last night if he had ever built a snowman? In the light of day, her plan to show him some normal, good old-fashioned fun seemed altogether too whimsical and faintly ludicrous.
The plan seemed even more ludicrous when his eyes opened. For a split second he looked sleepy and adorable. For a split second, he looked at her as if he felt affection for her. For a split second, she thought I know you.
But only for a split second. Then a veil came down quickly over his eyes, making them dark and formidable. Making him both a pirate and a prince. Making her feel as if he was entirely unknowable.
He tossed back the blanket and stood quickly. Despite very wrinkled clothing, he still carried himself with the innate confidence of a man who knew he owned the earth.
“Did you sleep well?” he asked her politely.
“Yes, you?”
He glanced at the heap of blankets and rolled his shoulders. “I’ll live. How’s your foot this morning?”
“It hurts a bit, but I’ll live, also.”
“Good. We have a great deal to accomplish this morning.” He began to reel off a list. “You need to take care of your foot, so light duty for you. Will you be in charge of breakfast?”
She nodded, though it seemed the question was rhetorical. He had obviously already made the decision.
“And then I’ll expect a full inventory of the kitchen supplies,” he said. “I’ll start putting fires in all the fireplaces, and I’ll see to what we need for wood supplies. I’ve determined the number one priority will be to keep water from freezing.”
Of course, he was right. But that tone! He owned the earth—and everything in it, including her—if his bossiness was an indicator! It made it hard to appreciate how much thought he had given this.
“I’ll see to breakfast,” she agreed, tilting her chin at him. “But I won’t be treated like an invalid.” Or as a servant to be ordered about! “I’ll help you with the wood and fireplaces as soon as I’m done. I already know what we have for inventory.”
He looked at her, considering her insubordination with the surprised ill humor of someone who was rarely questioned.
“I told you yesterday,” she said, not backing down from the stern downward turn of his mouth, “that I will let you do your job, if you let me do mine.”
“As you wish,” he said, a bit tightly and as if he had no intention of letting her help him at all.
As he left the room, he seemed as if he was glad to be getting away from her.
“Well, ditto, Your Royal Mightiness,” she muttered to herself. She hobbled down the hall to the nearest washroom. She had mustard on her mouth, and her hair was a rat’s nest! Her clothes looked very slept in. The water she splashed on her face was jolting, it was so cold.
But it was just the jolt she needed. Luca was just trying to be helpful. He was willingly setting himself tasks that would be completely unfamiliar to him. Why was she being so prickly about it? But she knew exactly why. Last night, he had held her foot with stunning tenderness. Last night, he had confided in her. Last night, there had been warmth between them as they had cooked their hot dogs together, looking for the best position in the fire. Last night, she had decided she had a gift to give him. Now he was trying to reestablish the very barriers that she wanted to keep down, and letting her know that he didn’t want any of her gifts!
And wasn’t that a good thing, since she was entertaining ridiculous questions like would he have left her if he found out she was infertile?
No, a voice inside her whispered, he wouldn’t have.
But that really just showed how ill informed she was about the realities of his life. He was a prince. Heirs would be even more important to him than an ordinary man like Kevin.
And Kevin seemed much more ordinary now than he had less than twenty-four hours ago. Imogen splashed more water on her face, needing to stop this flight of fancy right here and right now. You did not compare a prince to your ex-fiancé!
Luca was right. They needed to attend to practical matters first and foremost. Survival—not playing together in the snow, not getting to know each other better—had to be priority one.
What kind of breakfast could she make over the fire?
She settled on a kind of fireside omelet, using the heavy cast-iron skillet. She put a pot of hot chocolate off to one side to heat slowly, and on the other side, a pot of water that they could use for washing up.
“Luca.” She went out into the hall and called him. “Breakfast!”
While she waited for him to come, she found her mobile phone, and under the pretense of checking for service, looked at that picture of her and Kevin. She waited for the familiar twist of loss.
How shallow did it make her that after less than twenty-four hours with a prince, it didn’t come?
Speaking of the Prince, he’d come into the room. Despite rumpled clothing, there was no denying how his presence—powerful, almost electrical—filled the room.
“Service?” he asked her hopefully, pulling out his own phone.
She shook her head.
“Your boyfriend must be very worried about you.”
“I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“But—” he stopped.
“But what?”
“Your phone dropped on the floor last night. The screen saver came on. I assumed—”
Was that why the barriers had been so firmly back in place this morning? Because Luca had assumed she was in a relationship? She scanned his features.
No, of course not, he looked every bit as remote as before she had announced she didn’t have a boyfriend.
The barriers were up because he was a prince and she was a common girl. Because their lives were intertwined under unusual circumstances did not invite friendship or familiarity. She had no gifts to give him and it had been just a moment of madness that had made her think she did.
He looked back at his phone.
“We’ve had service at some time during the night,” he said. “I have a message. From Cristiano.”
As she watched, he opened it. His barriers melted. A light came on in his face that made her want something she had no right to want.
“Look,” he said softly. He turned the phone to her.
And she started to weep.
CHAPTER SEVEN
PRINCE LUCA’S RESOLVE to keep his barriers firmly in place dissolved instantly when Imogen began to cry.
“What?” he asked, distressed. He turned his phone back and stared at the picture. “It says they are both well. The baby very thoughtfully put off his arrival until they got to the hospital. Why are you crying?”
And please stop. Immediately.
“It’s nothing,” Imogen insisted, wiping frantically at the tears. “I’m just so happy. The baby is beautiful. Please show me again.”
Luca handed his phone
to her and watched her face. He would be the first to admit he was no expert on women. Good grief, he’d had absolutely no idea his own engagement was on such perilous ground. He was so oblivious to emotional language that Meribel’s admission of loving another—a baby on the way that was not Luca’s—had taken him completely by surprise. He could not think of a single clue that Meribel had dropped that this bombshell was about to explode in his life.
So, an expert at reading the complexities of a woman’s mind, he was not.
But even so, there was something in Imogen as she looked at that picture of the maid and her baby that was not entirely happiness. There was a terrible combination of both joy and sorrow on her face.
“It’s a boy,” she said softly. Her tone, and her eyes—diamond tears still pooling and falling—spoke of a well of sadness that was soul deep.
And yet despite that, yesterday she had wanted to give him the gift of an ordinary experience. She had been willing to overcome whatever this was that haunted her, to give him, a complete stranger, something she had discerned he lacked.
“Let’s have breakfast,” he suggested. “And then should we venture outdoors? See if the snow is indeed perfect for making a snowman?”
What was he doing? Trying to make another person happy. That was a good thing. She was leading with her example. He never wanted to be one of those royals who was indifferent to the pain of others, above it all somehow, privileged to the point of complete insensitivity.
This offer was no different than ministering to her foot yesterday; he felt desperate to take her pain away.
And yet when he saw he had succeeded—when he saw her blue eyes sparkling with anticipation behind the tears—he felt instantly as if his decision could have catastrophic consequences. For both of them. His initial plan—distance and the very serious business of surviving the storm—had been so much better. Reasoned and reasonable.
Of course, reasoned and reasonable had gotten him dumped by his bride-to-be on the eve of his wedding. Maybe it was time to experiment with something new?
No!
“Of course, I don’t have the right clothing,” he said hastily. “I guess it wouldn’t be a good idea to get my only clothes wet. Hypothermia and all that.”
She went from crying to laughing in one blink of her gorgeous blue eyes. “I’ll keep you from getting hypothermia.”
He had a sudden forbidden flash of sharing body warmth! “It would be better if we just didn’t invite it in the first place.”
There was that look in her eyes again: as if she could see right through him.
“We keep plenty of winter clothing here,” she said.
“What? Why?”
“All kinds of people arrive thinking they know what a vacation in the mountains entails, but many are ill-prepared for the realities of the Canadian climate. We stock everything so that our guests can have a safe, enjoyable stay, even if they haven’t prepared properly.”
“Oh,” he said. “Snowman making it is, then.”
Luca didn’t want to admit, even to himself, how he felt he was looking forward to the activity.
To chase any remaining sadness from her eyes, he told himself. But he knew that was not completely it. Maybe it was chasing some all-prevailing somberness from his own soul that he was looking forward to.
And so, after eating a breakfast that was as delicious as it was humble, she led him down the hall to a large storeroom. He noted with relief that she was barely limping.
She held open the door, and they both squeezed into a coatroom made tight with two walls hung with hooks that held winter jackets, sturdy pants, woolen shirts. The far wall was covered with cubbies stuffed with mittens, scarves and toques. Neat shelves above the hooks held rows of boots organized according to size.
“It’s like the quartermaster’s store,” he said. She was very close. Her scent—sweet and clean and light—tickled his nostrils.
“I know,” she said. “We could make snowmen all week long without any risk of hypothermia at all.”
She was teasing him. Danger!
“It’s not going to be a week,” he replied.
She lifted one of those shoulders. “Talk to Mother Nature. It’s her plan, not ours.”
He was not sure he wanted to be in this tight little closet with Imogen Albright thinking about what Mother Nature might have planned for a man and a woman alone together in the middle of a blizzard.
Without even considering his choices he grabbed things he thought he might need, and with his arms full of clothing, he brushed by her, to the washroom down the hall.
* * *
Imogen considered the Prince’s departing form. Crazy, but she, a common woman with the most unromantic of jobs, managing a small hotel in the middle of nowhere, seemed to be making the Prince uncomfortable in some way she could not help but delighting in.
Oh, she could feel the discomfort, too. A faint sizzle between them, a primal kind of awareness. It was no doubt the circumstances of being stranded together in a snowstorm, and she should be careful about reading too much into it.
One of them should be putting on the brakes.
But she didn’t feel like putting on the brakes. She felt like having some fun, living with spontaneity and verve, for once. She was aware he was turning the tables on her; she could tell he felt sorry for her when she’d reacted—overreacted—to the baby like that.
If she was totally honest about her reaction to the baby, it wasn’t just her own loss that had brought on the unexpected tears.
It was the look on Luca’s face, the unguarded tenderness with which he had looked at that photo.
Maybe he didn’t even know it, but he was a man who wanted babies of his own. Something she could never give him.
Even if she was fertile, she reasoned with herself, she would never be giving the Prince babies.
So why not just give herself over to giving him what she could?
Her motivation could be very simple: she had felt sorry for him when he revealed details of what seemed as if it might have been a cheerless childhood. Imagine having no fond memories of Christmas.
And so this experience was going to be good for both of them. She was determined about that.
She chose some winter clothes for herself, shut the door of the closet and changed in there. The door had a full-length mirror on the back of it, and she studied herself.
One might hope to be a bit glamorous for a playdate with a prince, but that was a hard look to accomplish in winter clothes. The puffy pink coat and blue pants, padded with insulation, made her seem as if she was quite plump. Her hair was rather messy from sleeping on the couch, but she quickly covered the worst of it with a toque.
With its reindeer dancing around the brim and the too-big pom-pom, the toque hardly seemed an improvement, but there was no point dwelling on it. Still, there was something in her eyes that gave her pause. Despite the fact they were slightly red rimmed from crying, they were now sparkling. There was a look about her of—what?
Excitement. She contemplated that. It was true that it had been a long time since she had felt any excitement about life.
Imogen had not noticed a sparkle in her eyes since the day she had told Kevin she would not be having their baby. Two griefs: the loss of Kevin and the loss of a dream of having children of her own, of forming a family unit so much like the loving one she had grown up in.
Over the past few months, she had not believed this would ever happen. That the light would come back on in her eyes. That she would have hope that she could have happy moments again. To have hope. Was that a good thing or a dangerous thing?
“Oh, Imogen,” she whispered to herself. “You don’t have to sort out the whole world and its meaning right this second. Lighten up.”
With that vow fresh in her heart, she took a deep breath and exited the closet.
> When she came out, she could see the Prince was standing outside the front door. She went out, too, and he looked at her, then looked away, faintly sheepish.
She smiled. He wasn’t looking away because she didn’t look good! Unless she missed her guess, he was entirely self-conscious in his winter getup.
He looked back at her and glowered. “Don’t laugh,” he warned her.
She chuckled. “Why would I laugh?”
“I look a fool.”
She studied him openly. He had made a complete transformation from a prince. He looked like a Canadian lumberjack. Except that nothing quite fit him. The rough woolen pants were too short, as were the sleeves of the colorful plaid jacket. The boots were too big. The toque had a pom-pom on it even larger than the one on hers. Colorful mismatched mittens hid the elegance of his hands. He looked like a boy who had grown too quickly.
“You look quite adorable,” she decided.
“Adorable?” he sputtered. “Like a new puppy?”
She cocked her head and studied him. “More like a yard elf. Dressed for Christmas.”
“A yard elf?” he asked, aghast. “I don’t exactly know what a yard elf is.”
“It’s—”
“Please.” He held up a mittened hand. “Don’t edify me.”
She laughed.
“I warned you not to laugh.”
“Or? Is there some particular punishment saved for the occasion of laughing at the Prince?”
“There is,” he said with dark foreboding.
“Do tell.” She raised an eyebrow at him.
He jumped from the top step to the bottom one, leaned over and scooped up a handful of snow. “Death by snowball,” he said.
“Seems a little harsh.” She came down the steps, trying not to wince at the pain in her foot, put her hands on her hips and looked up at him defiantly. Despite his effort at a stern expression, his eyes were glittering with suppressed mirth.
“It’s a serious infraction. Laughter.” He took the ball he had shaped and tossed it lightly, menacingly, from one mitten to the other.
