The Virgin's Proposition. Anne McAllister
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herself. Until her death four years ago. Now beautiful, charming, elegant Ofelia was the woman Anny was supposed to replace.
“Of course,” she’d said quietly. “I forgot.”
“We must understand,” her father said gently. “It is hard for him, Adriana.”
“I do understand.”
She understood that there was every likelihood she’d never replace Ofelia in Gerard’s affections. She only knew she was supposed to try. And that was at least part of the reason she was feeling apprehensive.
“He’ll meet you in the lobby at five. You will have an early dinner and discuss,” her father went on. “Then he must leave for Paris. He has a flight in the morning to Montreal. Business meetings.”
Gerard was a prince, yes, but he owned a multinational corporation—several of them, in fact—on the side.
“What does he want to discuss?” Anny asked.
“I’m sure he will tell you tonight,” her father said. “You mustn’t keep him waiting, my dear.”
“No.”
She hadn’t kept him waiting. It was Gerard who wasn’t here.
Now Anny did tap her foot. Just once. Well, maybe twice. And she shot another surreptitious glance at her watch, while in her head her father’s voice murmured, “Princesses are not impatient.”
Maybe not, but it was already almost quarter til six. She could have stayed at the clinic and finished her argument with Franck about the relative merits of realism in television action hero series after all.
Instead, when she’d had to leave early, he’d accused her of “running away.”
“I am not ‘running away’!” Anny told him. “I have to meet my fiancé this afternoon.”
“Fiancé?” Franck had frowned at her from beneath his mop of untidy brown hair. “You’re getting married? When?”
“In a year. Maybe two. I’m not sure.” Sometime in the foreseeable future no doubt. Gerard needed an heir and he wasn’t prepared to wait forever.
He had agreed to wait until she had finished her dissertation. Barring disaster, that would be sometime next year. Not long.
Not long enough.
She shoved the thought away. It wasn’t as if Gerard was some horrible ogre her father was forcing her to marry. Well, yes, he’d arranged it, but there was nothing wrong with Gerard. He was kind, he was thoughtful. He was a prince—in more than one sense of the word.
It was just—Anny shook off her uneasiness and reminded herself that she was simply relieved he understood that finishing her dissertation was important to her and that he hadn’t minded waiting until she had finished.
Apparently Franck did mind. He scowled, his dark eyes narrowed on her. “A year? Two? Years? What on earth are you waiting for?”
His question jolted her. She stared at him. “What do you mean?”
He flung out a hand, a sweeping gesture that took in the four walls, the clean but spartan clinic room, his own paralyzed legs. He stared at her, then at them, then his gaze lifted again to bore into hers.
“You never know what’s going to happen, do you?” he demanded.
He had been playing soccer—going up to head a ball at the same time another boy had done the same. The next day the other boy’s head was a little sore. Franck was paralyzed from the waist down. He had a bit of tingling now and then, but he hadn’t walked in nearly three years.
“You shouldn’t wait,” he said firmly. His eyes never left hers.
It was the sort of pronouncement Franck was inclined to make, an edict handed down from on high, one designed to get her to argue with him.
That was what they did: argued. Not just about action heroes. About soccer teams. The immutable laws of science. The best desserts. In short, everything.
It was his recreation, one of the nurses had said to Anny back in January, and she’d only been marginally joking.
“So what are you saying? That you think I should run off and elope?” Anny had challenged him with a smile.
But Franck’s eyes didn’t light with the challenge of battle the way they usually did. They glittered, but it was a fierce glitter as he shook his head. “I just don’t see why you’re waiting.”
“A year’s not long,” Anny protested. “Even two. I have to finish my doctorate. And when we do set a date there will be lots to do. Preparations.” Protocol. Tradition. She didn’t explain about royal weddings. Ordinary everyday weddings were demanding enough.
“Stuff you’d rather do?” Franck asked.
“That’s not the point.”
“Of course it is. ’Cause if it isn’t, you shouldn’t waste time. You should do what you want to do!”
“People can’t always do what they want to do, Franck,” she said gently.
He snorted. “Tell me about it!” he said bitterly. “I wouldn’t be locked up in here if I didn’t have to be!”
Anny felt instantly guilty for her prim preachiness. “I know that.”
Franck’s jaw tightened, and his fingers plucked at the bedclothes. He pressed his lips together and turned his head away to stare out the window. He didn’t say anything, and Anny didn’t know what to say. She shifted from one foot to the other.
Finally he shrugged his shoulders and shifted his gaze back to look at her. “You only get one life,” he said.
His voice had lost its fierceness. It was flat, toneless. His eyes had lost their glitter. His expression was bleak. And seeing it made Anny feel wretched. She wanted desperately to provoke him, to argue with him, to say it wasn’t so.
But it was.
He wasn’t ever going to be running down the street to meet Gerard—or anyone else—again. And how could she argue with that?
So she did the only thing she could do. She’d reached out and gave his hand a quick hard squeeze. She had wished she could bring Gerard back with her. Meeting a prince might take his mind off his misery at least for a while. But her father was right, Gerard wouldn’t come.
“I have to go,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
Franck’s mouth had twisted. “Go, then.” It was a curt dismissal. He looked away quickly, his jaw hard, his expression stony. Only the rapid blink of his lashes gave him away.
“I’ll be back,” Anny had promised.
She should have stayed.
Another look at her watch told her that it was ten to six now and there was still no sign of Gerard.
But the moment she glanced down at her watch, a sudden silence fell over the whole room, as if everyone in the entire lobby had stopped to draw in a single collective breath.
Startled, Anny looked up. Had they noticed her prince after all?
Certainly everyone in the room seemed to be staring at something. Anny followed their gaze.
At the sight of the man now standing at the far end of the room, her heart kicked over in her chest. All she could do was stare, too.
It wasn’t Gerard.
Not even close. Gerard was smooth, refined and cosmopolitan, the personfication of continental charm, a blend of 21st century sophistication and nearly as many centuries of royal breeding.
This man was anything but. He was hard-edged, shaggy-haired, and unshaven, wearing a pair of faded jeans and a nondescript open-necked shirt. He might have been nobody.