A Princess for Christmas - Jenny Holiday Page 0,13

to yachts. Also, collected? He typed a reply. Everything okay, Your Royalness?

She sent an eye-rolling emoji. Apparently even though her vocabulary was that of an octogenarian, she knew emojis. It was quickly followed by a question. Did you mean it when you offered to pick me up?

Well, shit. He’d meant it at the time, when he was face-to-face with her fear. Or face-to-face with her unnaturally soft, goose-bumpy back. Or maybe both.

Did he mean it at eleven thirty after a strangely emotional day he just wanted to be over?

He sighed. He wasn’t the kind of guy who made false promises.

Leo: Sure. It will take me a while to get there, though.

Marie: That’s fine. I’m still on the boat, but we’re headed back to shore.

Leo: Enjoy your champagne. It will probably take me forty minutes, maybe a little longer.

Marie: No champagne for me. I was working, and now I’m hiding in the bathroom.

Hiding in the bathroom? Huh? Another text arrived before he could think what to say in response. Thank you, Mr. Ricci. You are a good man. I will meet you where you dropped me off.

Luckily, Dani would still be up and would come over and sit with Gabby. Dani was an English professor who, as far as Leo could tell, worked pretty much all the time including into the wee hours of the morning. So he heaved himself out of bed, got dressed, and went across the hall to knock on her door.

He had a princess to rescue.

Again.

Marie was hiding in the bushes.

Hiding. In. The. Bushes. The way Americans sometimes wrote sentences with a period after each word in order to convey the gravity of a situation used to seem excessive to her. She was beginning to understand.

She tried to tell herself that hiding in the bushes was better than hiding in the bathroom. In the bushes, you could cry without anyone seeing.

She’d cried in the bathroom on the boat, after Philip Gregory informed her, in no uncertain terms, that Gregory Inc., the largest independent watch retailer in North America, would not be reconsidering its decision to drop the Morneau brand from its inventory. And that, moreover, if she and her people didn’t leave him alone, he was going to have to pursue legal action. He’d had too much to drink, even though the boat had just departed, and he’d started ranting about restraining orders. She had watched enough American legal shows with her mother to know that she had done nothing to warrant a restraining order—a restraining order, for heaven’s sake—but his vitriol had stung nevertheless.

And of course Lucrecia had heard everything. Witnessed Marie’s humiliation.

And said some choice things to her friends while freshening her makeup in the same bathroom Marie was hiding in. She’d known Marie was in there—Lucrecia didn’t miss anything.

It’s a pity her mother is dead. She was a lot more at ease at these sorts of things.

That one barely stung. It was true, after all.

But then they’d moved on to how no one would have her except poor Maximillian, who had to have her.

Can you imagine? Someone like him marrying someone like her?

You’re forgetting that she’ll be queen one day, Lu.

Of that ridiculous little country. Honestly. At least Max looks the part.

Marie was stuck in her stall, feet pulled up so they wouldn’t recognize her pink pumps. She’d selected them to match the pink ribbons in her dress, but on the ground here in America they seemed girlish and unsophisticated. Like the kind of shoes someone who was pretending to be a princess would wear.

At least here in the bushes, she didn’t have to listen to any of that. There was only the ambient noise of the city, soothing in its anonymity.

And the sound of a car pulling up, an engine being cut, a door slamming.

Was it her knight in a yellow taxi?

She rose from her hiding place—and he was right there. A foot from her.

“What’s wrong?” he said urgently.

“Nothing. I was merely . . . hiding.” She tried to laugh. It didn’t work.

“You’ve been crying.”

“No, no.” But why lie? This man didn’t know her. And she had already, bizarrely, told him about the sad king. “Yes.”

He didn’t press her, just led her to the cab, opened the back door, and gestured for her to climb in.

“May I . . . sit up front with you?” She didn’t want to be a passenger, or at least not the anonymous, sit-in-the-back kind. She wanted to sit next to him and notice things about him, like