Operation: Monarch. Valerie Parv
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mind diving with a black sheep, I take adventurous tourists down at exorbitant fees.”
It was out before she knew it was what she wanted. “Would you take me sometime?”
He shrugged. “Your money is as good as anyone’s.”
Annoyed with herself for feeling hurt, she said, “I was thinking more for old time’s sake.”
He drew his legs up and hooked his arms around them. “I wasn’t aware we had any old times.”
“Not because I didn’t want to have them,” she said softly.
“Is that why you made a bet with your friends that you wouldn’t have the nerve to kiss me?”
She felt her face flame. “The bet was their idea, not mine.”
“You took them up on it.”
“Yes I did, and I’ve regretted it ever since.”
He tossed the cable aside and rolled over onto his stomach, levering himself up on his arms and exhaling slowly as he pushed himself away from the mat.
Inhaling, he lowered himself down to the point where his chest was a few inches from the floor. His control left her breathless. Resignedly she rolled over and began a set of push-ups as demanding as his own. Showing off? She wondered.
By the time she finished her repetitions she was breathing hard. Garth had already finished and his chest was hardly moving, she noted. And she had thought she was fit.
“You shouldn’t have regrets, especially about me,” he said unexpectedly.
She sat up and blotted her face with a towel. “Don’t flatter yourself. I haven’t exactly been pining.”
A water bottle lay within arm’s reach. Picking it up, he drank then offered it to her. She swallowed some water, trying not to think of his lips on the bottle before hers. Too intimate by far.
“I shouldn’t think you’d be left to pine for long.”
Her head came up. “Because I’m a doll who trades on her looks?”
A shadow darkened his rugged features. “That was cruel. I was out of line.”
Better late than never, she thought. “Thanks, but you were right. I let my parents manage my life for too long. Modeling was never what I wanted to do, but they came to depend on the glamour and the excitement. Whenever I go home I hear about what could have been.”
“They managed without you.”
She laughed hollowly. “I didn’t give them much choice.” When she finally convinced them she was serious, her mother had started a business advising other would-be models and her father had gone back into banking.
“Asserting yourself must have taken courage.”
Finally she had demonstrated a quality he could admire. She fought to stop her spirits from leaping. After he found out why she was here, he wouldn’t waste time admiring her. He would think she was being just as dishonest with him as she had been before. He would be right, too. She decided enough was enough.
She dragged in a steadying breath. “This meeting isn’t exactly an accident.”
“Surprise, surprise.”
She felt her eyes widen with astonishment. “How did you work it out?”
“I saw a program on TV about the facilities you people have available at the palace gym. You wouldn’t be here without good reason. Obviously your reason involves me.”
“I’m sorry,” she began.
His gesture sliced across her apology. “Never mind that, Serena. What do you want from me?”
Chapter 2
She looked around. The thumping music had stopped and people were streaming in from the other room, scattering themselves around the equipment. “Not here,” she said. “Can we go somewhere more private?”
He draped the towel around his neck. “I’ll meet you out front in ten minutes.”
She was ready in nine but he was already waiting for her, his dark hair glistening from the shower and his shirt damp as if he hadn’t taken the time to completely dry off. She knew better than to think he had been anxious to meet her. More likely he wanted to get the meeting over with as quickly as possible.
He gestured toward the battered pickup. “We can talk in my truck.”
She had been thinking along the lines of coffee and a baguette in a café by the waterfront. She saw him read her body language and frowned in disapproval. For the latte set he thought she still belonged to, or for her company?
Probably both, she thought on an inward sigh. One day she would learn that he simply didn’t want her around. “Lead on.”
He threw his duffel bag into the pickup and opened the passenger door for her from the inside. Before she could climb in, he reached down and pushed an assortment of fast-food wrappers under the seat. If not for the immaculate state of his diving equipment, she would have believed he was a complete boor.
“Now you can get in,” he said, sounding as if he didn’t care either way.
He slammed the door and she inhaled a mix of chlorine and southern-fried chicken. When he joined her, she asked, “Do you live in this thing?”
“Not usually.”
Only since his parents were killed, she interpreted, feeling a surge of compassion for him. She knew he didn’t have any other family, and losing them must have hit him hard. Her background check showed that he normally lived aboard his dive boat which was presently in dry dock. He would have inherited his parents’ house, but maybe he couldn’t bring himself to move in there yet and was living out of his car until his boat was repaired.
He could also be the rightful heir to the Carramer throne, she reminded herself, although without much conviction. If he ever assumed the crown, the country was in for a shock. The members of the royal family she had met were fairly down-to-earth, but none could match a long-haired, fried-chicken-eating bad boy like Garth. That he could be a de Marigny by birth seemed fantastic beyond belief.
Luckily she didn’t have to make the decision, only bring Garth to the palace so Prince Lorne could investigate his relationship to the throne. She choked back a smile as she pictured them together, alike enough in looks to be brothers, but as different in temperament as night from day.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing, really. I’m here because Prince Lorne asked me to renew our acquaintance.”
“How did you know where to find me?”
This was the tricky part. A man as private as Garth wouldn’t take kindly to learning she’d been asking about him. “The castle has its resources.”
“Resources like having me watched?”
“Only so I could bring you to meet Prince Lorne.”
He slammed his palms against the steering wheel, making her jump. “The hell with that. Carramer is supposed to be a free country.”
In many countries he would probably have disappeared before he could destabilize the monarchy, she thought. “It’s precisely because it’s a free country that the prince asked to see you, instead of having you arrested and brought before him.”
He looked as if he didn’t particularly appreciate the courtesy. “Don’t tell me the navy has seen the error of its ways and the monarch wants to apologize and restore my commission personally.”
His cynical tone made her want to squirm. She didn’t tell him that the prince had already started a discreet investigation into Garth’s experience with the navy. No sense getting his hopes up in case nothing new was uncovered. “I wouldn’t