Tempted By The Royal. Michelle Celmer
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nothing to dilute the effect of his presence. His legs were as long as she remembered, his shoulders as broad, his jaw as strong, his eyes as dark.
Yes, she remembered all of the details—the thickness of his hair, the curve of his lips, the skill of his hands. But she hadn’t quite remembered—maybe hadn’t let herself remember—how completely fascinating he was as a whole.
He smiled at Fiona. “Everything’s confirmed.”
She threw her arms around his neck. “Oh, thank you, Eric. You’re the best.”
“That’s why he’s the best man,” Scott said, unconcerned by the fact that his fiancée was embracing another man. Eric chuckled.
The sound of that laugh, warm and rich and familiar, sent shivers down her spine, tingles to her center.
It was Scott who spotted Molly first, and he smiled. “Hey, Molly.”
Eric’s head turned. His gaze locked on hers, and widened in shock.
Molly thought she had some idea just how he felt.
“Eric—” Scott turned to his friend “—you haven’t met Molly yet, have you?”
“No, we haven’t,” Molly answered before he could, rising to her feet and praying that her wobbly legs would support her.
“But I’ve certainly heard a lot about her,” Eric said, his eyes never leaving Molly’s face.
She definitely hadn’t remembered everything—like how one look could make her pulse race and her knees quiver, as her pulse was racing and her knees were quivering now.
“And here she is,” Scott said. And to Molly, “This is His Royal Highness, Prince Eric Santiago of Tesoro del Mar.”
“Should I curtsy?” she asked lightly.
“No need,” he said.
She didn’t actually remember offering her hand, but she found it engulfed in his, cradled in his warmth. It was a simple handshake—there was nothing at all inappropriate about it. And yet she felt her cheeks heat, her skin burn, as memories of his hands on her body assaulted her mind from every direction.
The heat in his eyes told her that he was also remembering, and though her mind warned her to back away, her body yearned to shift close, closer.
“It’s a pleasure to see you, Molly,” he said in that low, sexy voice that had whispered much more intimately and explicitly in her ear as they’d rolled around on her bed together.
“Oh, we’re going to have so much fun together in Tesoro del Mar,” Fiona said, then to Molly, “You will come, won’t you?”
A wedding on a Mediterranean island sounded romantic enough, throw in a royal palace, and Molly could understand why her cousin was glowing with excitement and anticipation. And no matter how much Molly’s brain warned that going to Tesoro del Mar was a very bad idea—that going anywhere with Eric Santiago was a very bad idea—she couldn’t refuse something that meant so much to Fiona.
So she ignored the knots in her stomach and forced a bright smile. “Of course I’ll be there. You can hardly get married without your maid of honor.”
Fiona threw her arms around Molly, just as she’d done with Eric, and hugged her tight. “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you.”
Molly hugged her back. “I just want your wedding to be perfect for you.”
“It will be now,” her cousin said confidently.
Molly was pleased that Fiona’s problems were solved, but couldn’t help but think her own had just multiplied.
It had been unsettling enough to accept that she was pregnant with a stranger’s baby, but learning that the stranger was her cousin’s fiancé’s best friend added a whole other layer of complications. And she couldn’t help but wonder how differently everything might have played out if she’d known two months ago what she knew now about Prince Eric Santiago.
“Okay, now that the crisis has been resolved, I should get back to work,” Molly said, eager to make her escape.
But she felt the heat of Eric’s gaze on her as she made her way to the door, and acknowledged that this new information might not have changed anything. Because even now, she wanted him as much as she’d wanted him then.
This time, however, she was determined to prove stronger than the desire he stirred inside of her.
At least, she hoped she would.
Molly knew Eric would show up at her door the next morning. She only hoped to have a cup of coffee in her system before she had to face him again—a hope that was obliterated when the knock sounded just as she was measuring grinds into the filter. She set the basket into place, pressed the button and went to respond to his knock.
He was dressed casually in a pair of jeans and a collared T-shirt, much as he’d been the first night he walked into the bar. And though he looked better than any man had a right to look, there certainly wasn’t anything about his appearance or his attire that warned he was a prince. And even now, even knowing all the details she’d learned from the Internet, she found it difficult to think of him as royalty. She could only remember that he was a man—a man she’d taken to her bed and with whom she’d shared intimacies and pleasures she’d never before imagined.
“Good morning,” he said.
To which she responded with a barely civil, “Come in.”
“A little out of sorts this morning?”
“I work nights,” she reminded him. “The hours before noon aren’t my best time.”
“Should I come back?”
She shook her head. “We might as well just get this over with.”
His lips quirked. “What, exactly, are we getting over?”
“The awkward morning-after conversation that we managed to avoid the morning after.” She reached into the cupboard for two mugs, filled both with coffee, then slid one across the table to him.
He’d drank black coffee at the bar that night, she remembered, which was good because she didn’t have any cream. She dumped a generous spoonful of sugar into her own cup and stirred. She planned to make the switch to decaf soon, but the doctor had assured her a couple of cups a day wouldn’t hurt the baby and she needed the caffeine right now.
“Well, you could explain why you didn’t want Scott and Fiona to know we’d met before.”
“Because they would have had questions about how and when, and I wasn’t sure how to answer.” She sipped her coffee, felt it churn uneasily in her stomach.
“How about the truth?”
“The whole truth?”
“I’m not ashamed of what happened between us. We’re both adults, we were attracted to one another, we acted upon that attraction.”
“I don’t do one night stands with strangers,” she told him.
“I seem to recall you telling me that already—right before you invited me back to your apartment.”
She felt her cheeks flush at the reminder—or maybe it was the heat in his gaze that was causing her own body temperature to rise. She wasn’t in the habit of having sex with men she barely knew, and she’d never had sex with a man she’d met only a few hours earlier. But she’d let herself give in to the yearning because she never expected to see him again.
It was supposed to be a crazy, once-in-a-lifetime impulse, a chance to prove to herself that she could be wild and spontaneous and not tie herself