A Princess for Christmas - Jenny Holiday Page 0,23

A little bit of blue sky was visible between the buildings. The same sky as at home, even if you could only see a thin slice of it here.

Torkel was by her side in an instant. “Is everything all right, Your Royal Highness?”

She didn’t want him. She wanted—

“What’s wrong?”

Leo. Who was here. “You were supposed to text me,” he said as he jogged up. He looked annoyed. “You were supposed to give me a five-minute warning so I could drive around.”

Yes. They had agreed on that protocol because he couldn’t always find a place to park nearby.

When she didn’t answer right away—she was too busy forcing back those tears that were threatening—he jogged around to stand in front of her. She tried to look away, but he kept moving, tracking her gaze with his body, and eventually crouching down so he could get right in her face. In the bright sunlight, his eyes were the color of American pennies. “Hey,” he said quietly, low enough so that Torkel and Mr. Benz, who was hurrying down the sidewalk toward them, couldn’t hear. “What’s wrong?”

She cleared her throat. “Nothing.”

“Bullshit.”

Marie sucked in a startled breath. No one spoke to her like that. She laughed a little. Because how absurd was it that no one ever said anything negative in front of her? But then, to her mortification, a rogue tear escaped, and then another, because she was going to have to tell Mr. Benz, and ultimately her father, that not only had she not gotten the Gregory account back, but Bernard Marx was planning to halve his order.

And those things were probably just the beginning.

What was she going to do? It was one thing to be facing these problems, quite another to be facing them alone.

And she was alone, in this, and in . . . everything. Her father was happy to issue directives, but since her mother had died, he’d simply stopped working. He spent most of every day in his library, but Marie had no idea what he did there. He talked a lot at meetings of his advisory council, but he didn’t actually do anything. She had been trying to pick up the slack, since she’d come home from university, but she constantly felt as though success was slipping through her fingers.

“You know what? I suck at this emotional shit,” Leo said, arresting her rising panic. He pulled her away from Torkel and Mr. Benz, waving them off when they tried to follow. He steered her under the awning of a restaurant next to Marx’s and lowered his voice to a whisper. “But I do know there’s a fantastic deli not too far from here that serves pastrami on rye.”

She smiled and swiped at those mortifying tears. She begged to differ on his claim that he wasn’t good at “this emotional shit.” He seemed very good at it, in fact, judging by how he had read her face, and by the way he’d treated his sister yesterday. But she didn’t want to embarrass him. And . . . “I’m still dying to try pastrami on rye.”

“Any chance you can get rid of these guys?” Leo jerked his thumb at Torkel and Mr. Benz. “Frankly, they’re making me nervous. Have you ever tried to buy cookies at Dean & DeLuca with a butler?”

She stifled a laugh, even though she didn’t know what Dean & DeLuca was. “He would hate to be called a butler. He’s my father’s equerry.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

She pondered his question: Could she get rid of her handlers? Technically, of course she could. She’d done it last night by channeling her mother. It was just that last night, she hadn’t really thought about it. In her panic to get to the boat, she’d just done it.

This morning, she was back to her usual self: the girl who tried to do her duty in all things. And perhaps also the girl who didn’t want to anger her father. Mr. Benz would obey her, when it came down to it, but he was loyal to her father above all. Everything she did here was being reported back to him, of that she had no doubt.

But how much worse could Mr. Benz’s report get? She’d already failed with Philip Gregory, hired a stranger to drive her around, and failed to talk Marx out of reducing his order. By comparison, a little lunch seemed like nothing.

And she really wanted to have pastrami on rye with Leo Ricci. So she