Kitabı oku: «Cinderella's Royal Seduction / Crowned At The Desert King's Command», sayfa 3
“You just said it. It’s free. No one is making you live like this. You’re the one who plays the martyr all the time. ‘Oh, woe. If you don’t play hostess, I have to.’”
“‘Oh, woe,’” Sopi shot back. “‘I can’t put a sticker on my own toe.’”
“Exactly,” Nanette said with a hair flip and a complete absence of apology. “Set standards for yourself and refuse to compromise them.” Her scathing glance dismissed Sopi’s handful of possessions and the dress that was definitely not living up to her claims.
Such a cow. If Sopi was the cretin they thought, she would push Nanette down the stairs, taking out Fernanda, who had come up behind her to make a face of amused disgust as she looked around. God, she hated both of them.
“Oh, Sopi, no,” Fernanda said when she saw the dress. Her tone held the depth of sympathy one saved for muddy dogs found starving in ditches. “You have to store vintage pieces properly. Otherwise they fall apart when you wear them. Everyone knows that. What a shame.”
“Clearly your standards aren’t being met here,” Sopi said through her teeth. “Kindly leave my hovel and never come back.”
“Does this mean you won’t do my hair?”
“Seriously, Fernanda?” Sopi glared.
“You don’t have to be so sensitive! I don’t understand why she treats us like this,” Fernanda complained as the two women went down the stairs.
They left, and Sopi hurried to lock the door so they couldn’t return. Then she went into the shower and wept over old dresses and lost parents and foolish fantasies about unattainable men.
When she turned off the water, she stared at the bedazzled shoe on her one toe. Stupid. She picked it off so her nail was an ugly, chipped mess, and she left it that way as a reminder to stay grounded.
Then she wished even harder that the prince would marry one of her stepsisters and get them all out of her life for good.
“Say that again,” Rhys growled at his assistant.
Gerard shifted uncomfortably. “I did as you asked. I put the word out that you were trying to locate the woman with the little shoe on her toe.”
“You said I had met her already? That I knew who I was looking for?”
“Perhaps I wasn’t clear on that?” His assistant’s shoulders hunched up to his ears. “It seemed self-explanatory, but…” He trailed off, miserable.
“And now there’s…how many women in the hall?”
“Fifty? Sixty?”
“All with one shoe on her toe.”
“I’m afraid so, sir.” Gerard swallowed.
“What am I supposed to do? Walk the line as though inspecting the troops, looking for her among them?” He’d been trying to be discreet. Rather than make it clear he was looking for someone on staff, he had thought he would get word to her through the grapevine. She could then quietly appear in his room if she was interested.
“How did they even get up here in the elevator?”
“The one shoe, sir. The bodyguards—”
Rhys pinched the bridge of his nose. “Suggestions on how to get rid of them?”
“Perhaps if you simply ate in the dining room? Mingled? Gave them a chance to say hello?”
Rhys had no appetite. “That never works. It only encourages them to approach me later.” But he had to find himself a wife, and what was he going to do? Put a staff member in the unnerving position of having to walk a gauntlet to reach him for a single date that would go nowhere?
If she was out there and wanted to see him, she would already have knocked on his door. No, she was either too self-conscious or wasn’t interested.
What a galling thought. Deep down, however, he knew it was for the best.
It still infuriated him.
“Fine,” he growled. “Tell them I’ll dine downstairs after all.”
When the news came that the prince would in fact need a table, Sopi experienced a rush of panic. She definitely, positively didn’t want to see him. After brooding for a solid hour, she had decided that what he must have meant when he cut short her massage was that he thought she was turning it into something it wasn’t.
Unsurprisingly, her stepsisters both appeared within minutes of the announcement, eager to marshal rivals to terrible tables and have an excuse to brush past the prince’s table while he ate. He would sit with the handful of upper-crust bachelors who had accompanied him onto the slopes and were providing further red meat for the marriage-minded women hungry for a good match.
Sopi gladly relinquished the reservation desk and slipped into the laundry room to help fold sheets and towels.
With nearly every guest now rubbing elbows in the dining room, the rest of the building was quiet. She stuck with her friends in housekeeping, joking and exchanging light gossip about the guests as they restocked the linen cupboards and performed the turn-down service in the top-floor rooms.
She did the prince’s room herself and, as she plumped the pillow, noticed the tiny black shoe on the night table. It sat atop one of the burgundy portfolios Maude liked to use for special event meetings. She would make a note from a bride or other VIP guest, then snap it shut and hand it off to Sopi with instructions to make things happen.
Sopi’s pulse tripped at the sight of the tiny shoe, but a bodyguard stood by observing her, so she closed the drapes, set wrapped chocolates on the pillow and left.
Eventually, the guests retired from the dining room to hit the hot pools. Most of them were drunk and she resigned herself to a lot of cleanup later but helped the kitchen recover first.
While she was there, Maude pulled her aside with another list of to-dos. By the time they were done, it was time to close the pool and saunas. As Sopi marshaled the stragglers out, fully eight people tried to bribe her into calling them if the prince showed up after hours.
She bundled the last naked nymph into a robe and onto an elevator, then switched everything to service. That locked off the treatment level to all but the staff cards. She sighed in relief, facing miles to go before she slept, but the closing chores were ones she almost enjoyed. She could do them at her own pace and no one ever interrupted her.
Humming, she wheeled the mop from the closet and got started.
Midnight and Rhys was wide-awake, standing at the window, wired.
Wondering.
Swearing at himself. At his brother. At life.
For two hours, he’d been surrounded by beautiful, eligible, well-bred women, none of whom had been the one he wanted to see. It wasn’t like him to be so fixated. He didn’t like it. He’d seen the dark side of humans who became obsessed.
The darkest night of his life replayed uninvited. His well-practiced ability to block it didn’t work this time, and his head filled with the shouts and crashing and what he’d thought had been fireworks inside the palace.
He’d been ten, old enough to take in the full horror of being invaded by soldiers in military garb and the gravity of their holding his parents at gunpoint below. He’d been too young to make a difference, though. In fact, he’d made things worse. He had screamed and rushed to the top of the stairs, where Henrik was being held off by a soldier.
If he had halted beside Henrik, his parents might still be alive. He had gone for the soldier’s gun, though, and the soldier had crashed him in the face with the butt of his rifle, splitting his cheek and knocking him onto his ass.
Rhys had heard his mother scream. She had started to race up the stairs to him. A soldier below grabbed her arm and yanked her back. His father intervened, and the tension below erupted into four shots that left his parents crumpled on the floor.
Rhys could still feel the unnatural strength in Henrik as he’d gripped the shoulders of Rhys’s pajamas and dragged him backward, behind the half wall of the upper gallery. Rhys had been limp with shock, gaze held by the cold stare of the soldier who had shot his parents so remorselessly.
He would never forget the ugly lack of humanity in that pair of eyes. He would forever carry the weight of guilt that if he hadn’t given in to his own impulses, his parents might be alive today.
Distantly, he’d been aware of Henrik stammering out pleas. Promises they would never come back if they were allowed to leave. He’d somehow got Rhys onto his feet and pulled him down the service stairs and out of the palace.
Shock had set in and Rhys didn’t recall much of the days after that, but guilt remained a heavy cloak on him. Guilt and loss and failure. He was grateful to Henrik for getting them out, but a day never went by where he didn’t feel sick for escaping. For surviving when his parents had died because of his rash actions.
A day never went by when he didn’t feel their loss as though pieces had been carved out of his heart. His chest throbbed even more acutely with apprehension over Henrik’s diagnosis.
Why Henrik? It should be him staring into the muzzle of a life-threatening diagnosis, not his brother. If he lost Henrik—
He couldn’t let himself think it.
This was why he hadn’t wanted to marry and have children. This agonizing fear and inability to control the future were intolerable.
He swore under his breath.
If grim introspection was the only mood he could conjure, he needed a serious distraction. He walked across to the folio Maude had given him, the one he had said he wanted to review when he had made his abrupt exit from the dining room earlier this evening.
Maude’s eldest daughter, a lithe beauty, had fallen into step alongside him as he departed, offering an excuse about fetching something from her room. Her purpose had been obvious, though. She had deliberately created the impression she was the one he’d been seeking as his dinner companion. In the elevator, she had set her pretty silver shoe next to his, not quite nudging, but definitely inviting him to notice her toe.
This constant circling was exhausting. In the space of a day, he’d come around from thinking he should marry to impatience for task completion. Maude’s eldest was exactly what was expected of the royal family—well-bred, smoothly sophisticated and picture-perfect beautiful. She struck him as the possessive type, too. Overtures from other women would no longer be a problem. She would make damned sure of it.
“Please allow me to arrange a more peaceful dining experience for you tomorrow,” she had offered with the silky sweetness of a white chocolate mousse. “We often close the solarium for honeymoon couples.”
Honeymoon was a deliberate choice of word, he was sure. So exhausting.
“I’ll let you know.” He had cut away to his own room, not the least bit compelled to spend another minute with her, let alone a lifetime.
As he flipped open the folio, interest in purchasing this property nonexistent, the tiny black shoe fluttered to the carpet. All the darkness in him folded in on itself, becoming a burst of light with a single focus. Her.
He tried to shake it off. He had no business obsessing over anyone, let alone the least suitable woman here. How did he even have the energy to experience a rush of masculine interest? He ought to be physically exhausted from his day of skiing, but he couldn’t shake this buzz of sexual hunger. This sense of something being unfinished.
Maybe he could work it out in the pool.
He stripped where he stood and pulled on his robe. This time he had the sense to bring one of his bodyguards and ordered him to stand at the door to ensure he wouldn’t be stalked.
The lights were dimmed in the change room, the mirror and taps polished, the floor dry. The music and water feature were both turned off, along with the jets in the tub. It was blessedly silent as he walked past the still water of the indoor pool and hot tub. Through the fogged windows, he saw steam rising off the mineral pool in gentle wafts against the black sky.
Just as he was about to walk outside and dive in, however, he heard a noise down the short hallway that led to the sauna area. A woman was singing.
The scent of eucalyptus carried with her voice on the humid air. A bucket of cleaning supplies stood outside a door to a steam room. The sound of spraying water cut off, and he clearly heard her crooning a modern ballad that reverberated beautifully off the tiled walls.
He stood transfixed as she emerged to drop a long-handled scrubbing brush into the bucket. Her hair was in a messy ball atop her head, but tendrils stuck to her damp neck. She wore light cotton pants and a baggy smock, both heavily soaked at the cuffs. Without looking his way, she quit singing and sighed. She picked up the bucket and carried it down the hall and around a corner where an authorized-personnel-only sign hung.
What was she doing cleaning the sauna at midnight? She was a goddess who possessed a healing touch and a siren’s voice, not a scullery maid.
He crossed his arms, scowling as he listened to a door open and close. He waited for her to reappear.
And waited.
Had she locked herself in a utility closet? He followed to the end of the hall, where he found two doors. One opened to a closet that was empty of all but fresh linens and cleaning supplies. Her bucket sat on the floor inside it.
The other door read Emergency Exit Only. Door Locks Automatically.
It hadn’t set off an alarm when she went through, so he pushed it open. The night was clear, the air bracing. A narrow footpath had been stamped into the snow. He glimpsed a maintenance building in the trees.
Don’t, his rational head warned.
He felt for his key card, tried it against the mechanism on the outside and saw it turn green. He stepped into the cold and let the door lock behind him.
CHAPTER THREE
TO HELL WITH IT. That was what Sopi had been thinking the whole time she’d been scrubbing the saunas. She felt grimy and sweaty and resentful and entitled to enjoy herself.
Not in the treated waters of the hot pool, though. No, she was going to the source, the original spring that had been formed by long-ago explorers, possibly ancestors of the nearest First Nations tribe. No one knew exactly who had dammed the hot water trickling out of the mossy ground, forming a small bathing pool on a bluff in the woods, but through the 1800s and into the early 1900s the small swimming hole had been used by hunters and snowshoers who heard about it through word of mouth.
Eventually, an enterprising railway baron had built the first rustic hotel here. He had brought in a crew to dig a proper pool by hand, and that hole had eventually become what was the indoor pool today. He had lined it and filled it with snow that he melted and heated by piping water from this tiny hot spring. Since this natural, rocky pool was impossible to clean, the hotel wasn’t allowed to let guests use it. It was kept as a heat source and a point of interest. In the summer, the gate next to the pump house was left unlocked so guests could picnic on the bench nearby, enjoying the view of the lake and the soothing trickle of the water.
Tonight, Sopi’s were the only footsteps as she veered off the path to the maintenance shed and wound through the trees. The snow wasn’t too deep under the laden evergreens, but she was only wearing sandals. By the time she emerged and shoved at the gate to open it against the accumulation of snow, her feet were frozen and aching.
She waded through the knee-high snow the final few yards. As she reached the edge of the pool, she kicked off her sandals and stepped into the hot water. It hurt like mad, but was a relief, too.
She hadn’t been to the pool in a long time. Not since she had come out here to cry after getting the news her father had passed from a sudden heart attack. This had always been her sad place, and that moment had been one of her saddest. Since it wasn’t something she liked to revisit, she didn’t come here often.
She had forgotten how peaceful it was, though. The height of the trees hid it from hotel windows. The only reminders of civilization were the fence and gate and the distant hum of the pump house. She turned her back on those man-made things and faced the lake. The slope fell away, allowing a clear view of its sparkling, snow-blanketed surface.
The longer she stood here, the better she felt. The waters truly were capable of healing, she decided with a sigh of reclaimed calm. She started to pull her top up over her head but froze when she heard the crunch of footsteps.
Really? She almost screamed in frustration. Who? Why? She twisted to glare at—
“Oh.”
“You’re not supposed to swim alone.” The prince’s breath fogged against the frosty air. He wore his robe and rattled the gate to open it farther before he took long strides through the snow in his slippers. As he came closer, she was able to read his frown of dismay in the moonlight reflecting as a faint blue glow off the surrounding snow. He abandoned his slippers next to her sandals and stepped into the water, hissing at the bite of heat.
She looked back the way he’d come, expecting at least a few bodyguards and one or two of his cohorts, if not a full harem of adoring women.
“Are you lost? What are you doing here?” she asked him.
“What are you doing here?”
“You inspired me,” she admitted truthfully, although Nanette’s pithy talk of refusing to compromise had also lit a fire of rebellion in her.
“To try skinny-dipping? This is hotter than the pool.”
“It is. Too hot in the summer, which is the only time this area is open to the public.” She nodded at the sign obscured by a buildup of frozen condensation. “No swimming allowed.”
“Ah. I’ve inspired you to break rules.” His mouth barely twitched, but he sounded pleased. “Live dangerously.”
“Not really. I happen to know it’s tested regularly and is always found to be potable.” The fence kept wildlife out, so risk of contamination was next to zero.
“That takes some of the thrill out of it, doesn’t it?”
His words made her think of her stepsisters’ disparagement of her. Their contempt had gone far deeper than a scoff over a moth-eaten dress. They knew she wasn’t any match for a man in his position. Sopi knew it. She was standing here prickly with self-consciousness, aware that she was still covered in sweat from laboring in the spa. Definitely not anywhere near his exalted level.
The water beckoned, but she murmured, “It was a dumb impulse. We should go back.”
He dragged his gaze from the frozen lake, eyes glittering in the moonlight, but his expression was inscrutable. “I wanted you to join me.”
“Here?” She shook her head. Part of her was tempted. Where was the harm in a nude swim with a stranger? And where had such a reckless thought come from, she wondered with a suppressed choke of laughter. But he was the first man to make her consider such rash behavior. Everything about this was a rarity for her.
“For dinner,” he clarified. “Did you…get that memo?”
The air that came into her lungs seemed to crystallize to powdered ice. “I didn’t imagine for a minute you were looking for me. Besides, every woman here got a decal—”
“I know that,” he cut in, sounding aggravated. “Now.”
She bit back a smile. “You could have sent me a proper message.”
“I didn’t know your name. My assistant asked the booking clerk, but Karl was listed as my masseur. Who are you?”
She hesitated. Tell him everything? Would he care?
“I know this is inappropriate,” he growled into the silence that she let stretch out with her indecision. “That’s why I didn’t want to make overt inquiries.”
Inappropriate? It hadn’t been, not really, until he used that word. Now she reeled, astonished that he was making this private conversation into more than she would have let herself believe it to be.
“If I’m out of line, say so. We’ll go back right now.”
“I don’t know what this is,” she admitted, hugging herself against the cold, because the hot water on her feet wasn’t enough to keep her warm when she was outside at midnight before spring had properly taken hold. “My father bought this hotel for my mother. She named it after me. Cassiopeia. My friends call me Sopi.”
“Cassiopeia.” He seemed to taste the syllables, which made her shiver in a different way. “Maude is your mother?” He sounded surprised. Skeptical.
“Stepmother. She took control of the spa after my father died. I wasn’t old enough to do it myself and… Well, I’d like to challenge her now, but lawyers cost money and… It’s a long, boring story.” She doubted he would believe the spa ought to belong to her anyway, not when she stood here all sweaty and gross. “I’m really cold. Can we—” She looked for her sandals.
“Yes. Let’s warm up.” He skimmed off his robe, tossing it to hook on the fence before he made his way farther into the pool. Naked, of course, carefully choosing his footing on the slippery rocks.
She looked to the sky, begging for guidance from higher powers.
“It’s deeper than I expected,” he said with satisfaction. He sank down as he found one of the rocky ledges that had been set in place for seating. “What are you doing? You said you wanted to try this.”
“Alone.”
“I’ll turn my head.” His tone rang with prude.
She was wearing a bra and underwear, basically a bikini. She knew that was a rationalization to stay here and swim with a man who intrigued her, but she also liked the idea of proving she could interest a prince, even if she was the only one who would ever know it.
Could she?
With an internal tsk, she decided to—for once—do something for herself. She stepped out of the water long enough to drop her drawstring pants and throw off her top.
She gingerly made her way into the pool, one eye on his profile to ensure he wasn’t witnessing her clumsy entry. She winced at sharp edges pressing into her soles, bent to steady herself with a hand on a submerged boulder and let out a sigh as she sank to her shoulders and heat penetrated to her bones.
The pool was about four feet deep and maybe six feet wide. The prince had found one of the best perches facing the lake. She bumped her foot into his and he looked at her.
“Cheater,” he accused as he noticed her bra strap.
She ducked under, unable to resist the lure of baptizing herself even though her hair would freeze into its tangled bun. Her long, strenuous day began to rinse away as she did it again. She came up with another sigh of sheer luxury.
“I didn’t bring a towel. This is literally the dumbest idea I’ve ever had, but I don’t regret it one bit.”
“I would be a gentleman and offer you my robe, but then I’d have to streak like a bald yeti across the snow to get back inside.”
“I’m pretty sure I saw one of those this morning.”
His teeth flashed white. “Have you always lived here? You’re Canadian?”
“I am. My mother was Swedish, I think. I don’t have much information on her. She was an only child, and my father was funny about her family. Didn’t like to talk about them. I don’t think my grandparents approved of him.”
“Why not?”
“Snobs, maybe? He sold two-way pagers and the early mobile phones into the European markets. Not very sexy at the time, but it was lucrative. That’s how he paid for this.” She nodded toward the hotel hidden by the spiky trees. “Then Silicon Valley crashed the party. His heart trouble started when my mother passed, and financial worries made it worse.”
Sopi didn’t know what kind of means Maude had pretended she had, but based on what Sopi had learned since, she believed Maude had misrepresented herself and worked on her father’s desire for Sopi to have a mother with the goal of taking over his bank account and assets.
“It’s a strange purchase for someone in that industry, especially since you don’t have cell service beyond the hotel.”
“My mother was struggling as a new mom in a new country. Dad traveled a lot, and she didn’t have anyone to rely on. She wasn’t working and felt very isolated. She loved her spa visits, though. She came here on one of them, talked to the owner who was thinking of selling. My father bought it for her.”
“Romantic.”
“Not really. It was worse for wear, and she had a lot of challenges with its remote location. She knew what she wanted, though, and made it happen. It was quite successful until she passed a few years later.”
“What happened?”
“A bad flu that turned into pneumonia. Can we not talk about that? I was quite young, but it still makes me sad.”
“I understand,” he said gravely.
She recalled a bleak line in the history of Verina stating his parents had been killed in an uprising, forcing him and his brother to live in neighboring countries for fifteen years. For the first time, she wondered if the platitude he’d just used was actually true. Maybe he really did understand the hollow ache inside her.
He had braced his elbows on nearby rocks above the surface and tipped his head back to look up at the clear sky.
She took stock of where she was, soaking with a prince in the wilderness, the only sound a distant hum and a closer trickle of water seeping from the seams in the rocks and off a worn ledge into their bath.
“There you are.” He tilted his head. “The trees were in the way. Cassiopeia.”
Hardly anyone used her whole name, not when they addressed her. She’d begun to think Cassiopeia only applied to things that weren’t really hers.
“A queen, if memory serves.” It was hard to read his expression with the shadows and his beard.
She almost mentioned the silly rumor about her mother being descended from royalty but thought he might think she was trying to elevate herself to his stratosphere.
“A vain one who gets tied to a chair for eternity,” she said instead. “Maybe I am vain.” She didn’t look for the W in the sky, having searched it out nearly every starry night since childhood. “My tiny mind was blown when I learned on the first day of school that not everyone had their own constellation.”
He snorted. “I don’t.”
“Because you’re a star on earth.”
“Don’t,” he said flatly. The steam seemed to gust off the water so there was no mist between them, only clear, dry air that stung her cheeks and nose. “Don’t put distance between us.”
She swallowed her surprise, but a lump lodged in her chest, one that her voice had to strain to speak around. “There is a continent and an ocean between us.” Among other things. His mountain of society and stature, her vast desert of education and life experience.
“Rhys,” he said, laying down a gauntlet. “If you’re going to reject me, use my name so I’m clear that you mean me.” It was such an outrageously arrogant statement she wanted to laugh, yet he drew her in as his equal by offering the familiarity. Such an enigmatic man.
“I thought I was pointing out the obvious,” she said quietly.
“You’re the least obvious person I’ve ever met. Any other woman would be naked and straddled across me by now, whether I wanted her here or not. You wouldn’t even come to dinner with me. Why not?”
Cowardice.
“I didn’t think you were serious,” she repeated. “Where would this even go? That’s not opportunism talking. I don’t have affairs with rich, powerful men. You tell me what happens. How long does it last? What happens when it’s over?”
His eyes were obsidian, his jaw gleaming like wet iron. With a muttered curse in what sounded like German, he turned his glower toward the frozen lake below.
He didn’t tell her she was wrong.
Sopi felt for another of the worn rocks that provided a rough seat and settled onto it. “Do you want the truth?”
“Always,” he bit out.
“Maude wants you to marry Nanette. I thought if I facilitated that, I could get rid of all three of them and finally have my home to myself.”
A pulse of astounded silence, then he barked out a humorless laugh. He snapped his head around to glare at her. “I’ll marry if and whom I desire. It won’t be either of them. I promise you that right now.”
She kissed goodbye her pipe dream of being free of her stepfamily, which left her to contemplate whether she should allow herself to get closer to this compelling man who, for the moment, at least, was not that far away.
“I don’t know what happens, Sopi. I wish I did,” he said cryptically.
At the sound of her nickname on his lips, she found herself trying out the sound of his. “Rhys.” It caught with tugging sensations in her chest and across her shoulders.
He looked at her.
Everything altered. The air shimmered and the earth stood still. Her scalp prickled and her breasts grew tight and heavy.
“That does not sound like a rejection, süsse.” His voice melted her bones. He extended a long arm across the surface of the water, palm up in invitation.
She hadn’t consciously meant to turn this into anything, but her hand went into his. She floated across the short space between them, drawn by his firm grip to set her hand against his neck. The top of her foot hit a rock, and she reacted with a jerk of her knee, knocking it into his.
He made a noise of concern and gathered her into his lap. His hand cupped her knee and he soothed her kneecap with his thumb. “Tell me,” he murmured. “Do you feel the same when I touch you?”
“The same as what?”
The hand behind her back ran up to cradle her neck. With the lightest squeeze, he had her shuddering and turning her torso into his.
“Like that,” he growled, lips coming close enough to nibble at her chin. “The way you made me feel on the table today.”
Streaks of light and heat seemed to shoot through her at the graze of his whiskers and the mere touch of his mouth on her skin. She cupped his wet beard and searched for his lips with her own, not really knowing what she was doing, only knowing she needed the press of his mouth to her own.
