Princess in the Making. Michelle Celmer
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a bedroom with Gabriel, and a bed, made her stomach do a nervous little flip-flop.
Everything will work out.
She laid Mia in the crib and covered her with a light blanket, and the baby didn’t even stir. The poor little thing was exhausted.
“Maybe I should unpack her things,” she told Karin.
“I’ll do it, ma’am.”
Vanessa sighed. So it was still “ma’am”? That was something they would just have to work on. “Thank you.”
She kissed the tips of her fingers, then gently pressed them to Mia’s forehead. “Sleep well, sweet baby.”
After reiterating that Karin was to come get her when Mia woke, she walked back to her suite. She pulled her cell phone out of her bag and checked for calls, but there were none. She dialed Gabriel’s cell number, but it went straight to voice mail.
She glanced over at the sofa, thinking she would sleep there for an hour or so, but the bed, with its creamy silk comforter and big, fluffy pillows, called to her. Setting her phone on the bedside table, she lay back against the pillows, sinking into the softness of the comforter. She let her eyes drift closed, and when she opened them again, the room was dark.
Three
After leaving Miss Reynolds’s suite, Marcus stopped by his office, where his assistant Cleo, short for Cleopatra—her parents were Egyptian and very eccentric—sat at her computer playing her afternoon game of solitaire.
“Any word from my father?” he asked.
Attention on the screen, she shook her head.
“I’m glad to see that you’re using your time productively,” he teased, as he often did when he caught her playing games.
And obviously she didn’t take him seriously, because she didn’t even blink, or look away from the cards on the screen. “Keeps the brain sharp.”
She may have been pushing seventy, but no one could argue that she wasn’t still sharp as a pin. She’d been with the royal family since the 1970s, and used to be his mother’s secretary. Everyone expected she would retire after the queen’s death, and enjoy what would be a very generous pension, but she hadn’t been ready to stop working. She claimed it kept her young. And since her husband passed away two years ago, Marcus suspected she was lonely.
She finished the game and quit out of the software, a group photo of her eight grandchildren flashing on to her computer screen. She turned to Marcus and caught him in the middle of a yawn and frowned. “Tired?”
After a month-long battle with insomnia, he was always tired. And he wasn’t in the mood for another lecture. “I’m sure I’ll sleep like a baby when she is gone.”
“She’s that bad?”
He sat on the edge of her desk. “She’s awful.”
“And you know this after what, thirty minutes with her?”
“I knew after five. I knew the second she stepped off the plane.”
She leaned forward in her chair, elbows on her desk, her white hair draped around a face that was young for her years, and with no help at all from a surgeon’s knife. “Based on what?”
“She only wants his money.”
Her brows rose. “She told you that?”
“She didn’t have to. She’s young, and beautiful, and a single mother. What else would she want from a man my father’s age?”
“For the record, your highness, fifty-six is not that old.”
“For her it is.”
“Your father is an attractive and charming man. Who’s to say that she didn’t fall head over heels in love with him.”
“In a few weeks?”
“I fell in love with my husband after our first date. Never underestimate the powers of physical attraction.”
He cringed. The idea of his father and that woman … he didn’t even want to think about it. Though he didn’t doubt she had seduced him. That was the way her kind operated. He knew from experience, having been burned before. And his father, despite his staunch moral integrity, was vulnerable enough to fall under her spell.
“So, she’s really that attractive?” Cleo asked.
Much as he wished he could say otherwise, there was no denying her beauty. “She is. But she had a child out of wedlock.”
She gasped and slapped a hand to her chest. “Off with her head!”
He glared at her.
“You do remember what century this is? Women’s rights and equality and all that.”
“Yes, but my father? A man who lives by tradition. It’s beneath him. He’s lonely, missing my mother and not thinking straight.”
“You don’t give him much credit, do you? The king is a very intelligent man.”
Yes, he was, and clearly not thinking with his brain. No one could convince Marcus that this situation was anything but temporary. And until she left, he would simply stay out of her way.
Vanessa bolted up in bed, heart racing, disoriented by the unfamiliar surroundings. Then, as her eyes adjusted to the dark and the room came into focus, she remembered where she was.
At first she thought that she’d slept late into the night, then realized that someone had shut the curtains. She grabbed her cell phone and checked the time, relieved to see that she had only slept for an hour and a half, and there were no missed calls from Gabriel.
She dialed his cell number, but like before it went straight to voice mail. She hung up and grabbed her laptop from her bag, hoping that maybe he’d sent her an email, but the network was password protected and she couldn’t log on. She would have to ask someone for the password.
She closed the laptop and sighed. Since she hadn’t heard a word from Karin, she could only assume Mia was still asleep, and without her daughter to take care of, Vanessa felt at a loss for what to do. Then she remembered all the bags in the closet waiting to be unpacked—basically her entire summer wardrobe—and figured she could kill time doing that.
She pushed herself up out of bed, her body still heavy with fatigue, and walked to the closet. But instead of finding packed suitcases, she discovered that her clothes had all been unpacked and put away. The maid must have been in while she was asleep, which was probably a regular thing around here, but she couldn’t deny that it creeped her out a little. She didn’t like the idea of someone else handling her things, but it was something she would just have to get used to, as she probably wouldn’t be doing her own laundry.
She stripped out of her rumpled slacks and blouse and changed into yoga pants and a soft cotton top, wondering, when her stomach rumbled, what time she would be called for dinner. She grabbed her phone off the bed and walked out to the living room, where late afternoon sunshine flooded the windows and cut paths across the creamy carpet. She crossed the room and pulled open the French doors. A wall of heat sucked the breath from her lungs as she stepped out onto a balcony with wrought iron railings and exotic plants. It overlooked acres of rolling green grass and colorful flower beds, and directly below was the Olympic-size pool and cabana Gabriel had told her about. He put the pool in, he’d bragged, because Marcus had been a champion swimmer in high school and college, and to this day still swam regularly. Which would account for the impressively toned upper body.
But she definitely shouldn’t be thinking about Marcus’s upper body, or any other part of him.
Her cell phone rang and Gabriel’s number flashed on the screen. Oh, thank God. Her heart lifted so swiftly it left her feeling dizzy.
She answered, and the sound of his voice was like