“I know this is hard, Abby, but you might take heart in the fact that the paper didn’t do a hatchet job on you and your husband. They presented the facts without making judgments, something that is so rare in the media world, I found myself blinking.”
“That’s because of the publisher’s long-standing friendship with the king. I shudder to think what the other newspapers have printed.”
“I haven’t read anything else except the story in one magazine. Do you remember the one after Michelina’s death that said The Prince of Every Woman’s Dreams in Mourning?”
“Yes.” She’d never forget.
“The quote now reads, ‘Hopeful royal women around the world in mourning over prince’s marriage to American beauty.’”
Abby groaned. “The truth is, that magazine would have been writing about me if he’d decided to marry Princess Odile.”
“But he didn’t!” Carolena cried out ecstatically. “Listen to this article from that same magazine. ‘Enrico Rozzo, a sailor in the coast guard who was at the scene of the terrible death of Holly Loretto, the mother of then seventeen-year-old Abigail Loretto, said, “Prince Vincenzo thought nothing of his own life when he went in search of Signorina Loretto during the fierce storm. He found her body floating lifeless in a grotto and brought her back to life. His bravery, skill and quick thinking will never be forgotten by the coast guard.”’”
Abby’s body froze. “How did they get hold of that story?”
“How do they always do it? It’s a glowing testimonial to your husband, Abby. He’s well loved.”
“I know.” By me most of all. She was blinded by tears, still euphoric after knowing Vincenzo’s possession for the first time.
“Just think—he married you under threat of losing the throne. Talk about Helen of Troy!”
A chuckle escaped despite Abby’s angst. “Will you stop?”
“I always thought you were the most romantic person I ever knew. After what you went through to get that baby here, no one deserves a happier ending more than you.”
“I’m not looking very romantic right now.” She wiped her eyes. “At my six-week checkup yesterday morning, the doctor told me I’m fifteen pounds overweight. I won’t be able to wear that gorgeous yellow dress for at least two months! I look like an albatross!” Carolena’s laughter came through the phone.
“A stunning albatross,” Vincenzo whispered, sliding his arms around her from behind. She hadn’t heard him come in. He was in his robe.
At his touch Abby could hardly swallow, let alone think. “Carolena? Forgive me. I have to go, but I promise to call you soon. You’ve got to come to the palace and see the baby.”
“I can’t wait!”
He was kissing the side of her neck, so she couldn’t talk.
“Your time is coming.”
“When the moon turns blue.”
“Carolena, you’re being ridiculous.”
“A presto.”
The second Abby clicked off, Vincenzo took the phone and tossed it onto one of the velvet chairs. He pivoted her around and crushed her against him. “Do you have any idea how wonderful it is to walk into a room, any room, day or night, and know I can do anything I want to you?”
She clung fiercely to him, burying her face in his hair. “I found out how wonderful it was yesterday after you brought me home from my checkup.” Heat filled her body as she remembered their lovemaking. She’d responded to him with an abandon that would have been embarrassing if he hadn’t been such an insatiable lover. They’d cried out their love for each other over and over during the rapture-filled hours of the night.
“I told the nanny we’d look in on the baby tonight, but for the next eight hours, we’re not to be disturbed unless there’s an emergency.”
“We’ve got eight hours?” Her voice shook.
His smile looked devilish; he rubbed her arms as a prelude to making love. “What’s the matter? It is our honeymoon. Are you scared to be alone with me already?”
Her heart was racing. “Maybe.”
“Innamorata—” He looked crushed. “Why would you say that?”
She tried to ease away from him, but he wouldn’t let her. “I guess it’s because the news has gone public about us at last. I don’t want you to regret marrying me. What if the parliament votes for you to step down? It’s all because of me.”
He let out a deep sigh. “Obviously you need more convincing that I’ve done exactly what I wanted. Whether I become king one day or not means nothing to me without your love to get me through this life.” He kissed her mouth. “Sit on the bed. There’s something I want to show you.”
While she did his bidding, he pulled the scrapbook from one of his dresser drawers. “I’ve been busy filling the pages that hadn’t been used yet. Take a good long look, and then never again accuse me of regretting the decision I’ve made.”
With trembling hands she turned to the place where she’d put her last entry. On the opposite page were the two ultrasound pictures of the baby. Beneath them was a news clipping of her on the steps of the courthouse the day she’d won the case for Signor Giordano. A quiet gasp escaped her throat as she turned the pages.
Someone had taken pictures of her coming and going from the palace. Pictures of her on the funicular, at the restaurant, the swimming pool, the yacht, the church where she’d worn the hat, pictures on the screen while they’d Skyped. But she cried out when she saw a close-up of herself at the opera. The photo had caught her in a moment of abject grief at the thought of a permanent separation from Vincenzo.
He’d always found a way to her...
Abby could hardly breathe for the love enveloping her. “Darling—” She put the album on the bedside table and turned in his arms. He pulled her on top of him.
“You’re the love of my life and the mother of my child. How can you doubt it?” he asked in that low, velvety voice she felt travel through her body like lava, igniting fires everywhere it went.
“I don’t doubt you, sweet prince,” she whispered against his lips. “I just want you to know I’ll never take this precious love for granted.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Now love me, Abby. I need you desperately. Never stop,” he cried.
As if she could.
* * * * *
Keep reading for an excerpt from THE MILLIONAIRE’S HOMECOMING by Cara Colter.
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CHAPTER ONE
BLOSSOM VALLEY. IN A fast-paced world, David Blaze thought, a trifle sardonically, his hometown was a place unchanging.
Built on the edges of a large bay that meandered inland from Lake Ontario, it had always been a resort town, a summer escape from the oppressive July humidity and heat for the well-heeled, mostly from Canada’s largest city, Toronto.
The drive, two hours—with the top down on David’s mint 1957 two-seater pearl-gray ragtop convertible—followed a route that traveled pleasantly through rolling, lush hills dotted with contented cattle, faded red barns, weathered fruit stands and sleepy service stations that still sold ice-cold soda pop in thick, glass bottles.
Upon arrival, Blossom Valley’s main street welcomed. The buildings were Victorian, the oldest
one, now an antiques store, had a tasteful bronze plaque that said it had been built in 1832.
Each business front sparkled, lovingly restored and preserved, the paned windows polished, the hanging planters and window boxes spilling rainbow hues of petunias in cheerful abundance.
Unfortunately, the main street had been constructed—no doubt by one of David’s ancestors—to accommodate horses and buggies and the occasional Model T. It was too narrow at the best of times; now it was clogged with summer traffic.
David, though he had been here only on visits since leaving after high school, found himself uncharmed by the quaintness of the main street, pretty as it was. He still had a local’s impatience with the congestion.
Plus, once there had been two carefree boys who raced their bicycles in and out of the summer traffic, laughing at the tourists honking their horns at them....
David shook it off. This was the problem with being stuck in traffic in his hometown. In Toronto, being stuck in traffic was nothing. He had a car and driver at his disposal twenty-four hours a day, and it was a time to catch up on phone calls and sort through emails.
He was accustomed to running Blaze Enterprises, his Toronto-based investment firm, and he had only one speed—flat out. His position did not lend itself, thank God, to ruminating about a past that could not be changed, that was rife with losses.
Then, up ahead of him, as if mocking his attempts to leave the memories of those kids on bicycles behind, he saw a girl on a bike, threading her way through traffic with a local’s panache.
The bicycle was an outlandish shade of purple, and the old-fashioned kind, with a downward sloping center bar, high handlebars and a basket. Pedaling away from him, the girl was in a calf-length, white, cotton skirt. The midday sun shone through the thinness of the summer fabric outlining the coltish length of her legs.
She was wearing a tank top, and it was as if she’d chosen it to match the bike. The girl’s narrow, bare shoulders had already turned golden from the sun.
She had on a huge straw hat, the crown encircled with a thick, white ribbon that trailed down her back.
He caught a glimpse of a small, beige, wire-haired dog, or maybe a puppy, peeping around her with a faintly worried expression. The dog was sharing the bicycle basket with some green, leafy lettuce and a bouquet of sunflowers.
For a moment, David’s impatience waned, and he felt the innocence of the picture—all the things that had been so good about growing up here. The girl herself seemed familiar, something about the slope of her shoulders and the way she held her head.
He could feel himself holding his breath. Then the girl shoulder checked, and he caught a glimpse of her face.
Kayla?
Someone honked at a jaywalker, and David began to breathe again and yanked his attention back to the traffic.
It wasn’t Kayla. It was just that his hometown stirred a certain unavoidable melancholy in him. The loss of innocence. The loss of his best friend.
Kayla. The loss of his first love.
Grimly, David snapped on his sound system and inched forward. The street, if he followed it a full six blocks, would end at Blossom Valley’s claim to fame, its lakefront, Gala Beach, named not because galas were held there, but after a popular brand of apples that grew in the local orchards.
Gala Beach was a half kilometer stretch of perfect white sand in a protected cove of relatively calm, shallow water. The upper portions, shaded by fifty-year-old cottonwoods, held playground equipment and picnic tables, concessions and rental booths.
It had been a decade since David had been a lifeguard on that beach, and yet his stomach still looped crazily downward when he caught a glimpse of the sun-speckled waters of the bay sparkling at the end of Main Street.
David Blaze hated coming home.
He turned left onto Sugar Maple Lane, and the difference between it and Main Street was jarring. He was transported from the swirling noise and color and energy of Main Street to the deep, shaded silence of Sugar Maple: wide boulevards housed the huge, century-old trees that had given the street its name.
Set well off the road in large, perfectly manicured yards were turn-of-the-century, stately homes—Victorians. Solid columns supported roofs over deeply shadowed verandas. On one he caught a glimpse of white wicker furniture padded with overstuffed, color-splashed cushions that made him think of sugary ice tea in the heat of the afternoon.
And there was the girl on her bike again, up ahead of him, pedaling leisurely, fitting in perfectly with a street that invited life to slow down, to be savored—
He frowned. There was something familiar about her. And then, as he watched, the serenity of the scene suddenly dissolved.
The girl gave a small shriek and leaped from the bike. It crashed down, spilling sunflowers out onto the road. The puppy, all five pounds of it, tumbled out of the basket and darted away, tiny tail between tiny legs.
The girl was doing a mad jig, slapping at herself. It momentarily amused, but then David realized there was an edge of desperation in the wild dance. Her hat flew off, and her hair, loosely held with a band, cascaded out from under it, shiny, as straight as the ribbon around the brim of her hat, the soft light filtering through the trees turning its light brown tones to spun gold.
David felt his stomach loop crazily for the second time in a couple of minutes.
Please, no.
He had slowed his car to a crawl; now he slammed on the brake and shoved the gear stick into Neutral in the middle of the street. He jumped out, not even bothering to shut the door. He raced to the girl, who was slapping at her thighs through the summer-weight cotton of the skirt.
His shadow fell over her and she went very still, straightened and looked up at him.
It wasn’t a girl. While he had denied it could be her, his deepest instincts had recognized her.
Despite the snub of the nose and the faint freckles that dusted it, making her look gamine and eternally young, it was not a girl, but a young woman.
A woman with eyes the color of jade that reminded him of a secret grove not far from here, a place the tourists didn’t know about, where a waterfall cascaded into a still pond that reflected the green hues of the surrounding ferns that dipped into its waters.
Of course, it wasn’t just any woman.
It was Kayla McIntosh.
No, he reminded himself, Kayla Jaffrey, the first woman he had ever loved. And lost. Of course, she had been more a girl than a woman back then.
He felt the same stir of awareness that he had always felt when he saw her. He tried to convince himself it was just primal: man reacting to attractive woman.
But he knew it was more. It was summer sunshine bringing out freckles on her nose, and her racing him on her bike. Look, David, no hands. It was the way the reflection from a bonfire turned her hair to flame, and the smell of woodsmoke, and stars that she could name making brilliant pinpricks of light in the inky black blanket of the sky.
David Blaze hated coming home.
* * *
“David?”
For a moment, the panic of being stung was erased from Kayla’s mind and replaced with a different kind of panic, her stomach doing that same roller-coaster race downward that it had done the very first time she had ever seen him.
Except for the sensation in her stomach, it felt as if the world had gone completely still around her as she gazed at David Blaze.
She tried to tell herself it was the shock of the sting—knowing that she was highly allergic and could be dead soon—that made the moment seem tantalizingly suspended in time. Her awareness of him was sharp and clear, like a million pinpricks along her arms.
Kayla didn’t feel as if she were twenty-seven, a woman who knew life, who had buried her husband and her dreams. No, she felt as if she were fifteen years old all over again, the
new girl in town, and the possibility for magic shimmered in the air around her that first time she looked at David.
No, she told herself, firmly. She had left that kind of nonsense well behind her. That pinprick feeling was the beginning of the allergic reaction to the sting!
Still, despite the firm order to herself, Kayla felt as if she drank him in with a kind of dazed wonder. It seemed that everyone she ran into from the old days had changed in some way, and generally for the worse. She’d seen Mike Humes in the hardware store—her new haunt now that she had been thrust into the world of home ownership—and the former Blossom Valley High senior year class president had looked so comically like a monk with a tonsure that she had had to bite her lip to keep from laughing.
Cedric Parson ran Second Time Around—an antiques store that she also haunted, ever on the lookout to furnish her too-large house—and the ex-high school football star looked as if he had an inflated tire tube inserted under his too-tight shirt.
Cedric was divorced now, and had asked her out. But even though she had been a widow two years, she was so aware she was not ready, and that she might never be. There was something in her that was different.
Even the fact that she judged her two high school pals in such a harsh and unforgiving light told Kayla something about herself. Not ready, but also harder than she used to be, more cynical.
Or maybe “unforgiving” said it all.
But trust David Blaze to have gotten better instead of worse. Of course, she knew what he did—the whole town took pride and pleasure in following the success of a favored son.
Even though she’d been back in Blossom Valley less than two weeks, one of the first things Kayla had seen was his picture on the cover of Lakeside Life. The magazine was everywhere: in proud stacks at the supermarket, piled by the cash registers of restaurants, in leaning towers of glossy paper at the rental kiosks.
Expecting the Prince's Baby (Harlequin RomancePrinces of Europe) Page 16
