A Princess for Christmas - Jenny Holiday Page 0,25

language—though she spoke it perfectly—but some of it, he suspected, was just her.

She frowned. So, not wanting her to feel self-conscious, Leo said, “So what happened at the last store? Do I need to go back there and kick someone’s ass?”

Marie’s forehead smoothed as she smiled. Mission accomplished. “No. I was merely upset because I found out we’re losing some more business.”

He had achieved his goal to make her smile. And he didn’t really give a fuck about the Eldovian watch industry, so he had no idea why he opened his mouth again and said, “You want to tell me about it?”

It turned out she did.

The luxury watch industry, he learned as they ate, was facing some trouble. Production runs, as she’d mentioned before, relied on preorders. That made sense to him. You weren’t going to want to manufacture really expensive products unless you knew there was a market for them. The rest? Not so much.

“So why not make a smart watch?” he asked. “Something classier than the Apple Watch. Every idiot has one of those these days.”

“My father thinks it’s a fad that will pass. He sees it as sullying the brand. Morneau watches have been made entirely in our country via traditional methods for more than two hundred years. He takes pride in that.”

Leo could see it, and oh how he wished Apple everything was a fad. New York was full of zombies too lazy to take their phones out of their pockets, marching through the city staring at their wrists. But . . . “I don’t think smart watches are going anywhere. But anyway, do you have to make them? Can you license the Morneau name? Like, you know the Fitbit?”

She nodded. “It never really took off in our country—I feel as though when you have the Alps, you don’t need a device to tell you how much to walk—but I know it.”

“My mom had one of the early models. She thought it was ugly, though. But there were these Kate Spade band things. Like a container you wrapped around the actual Fitbit. She thought one of those would class it up. But they were expensive.” Well, they were expensive to the Riccis. For all he knew, Kate Spade was actually a ghetto brand when you were a royal. But his point stood, so he pressed on. “My dad kept telling her to go ahead and buy one, but she said she couldn’t justify it. She told us to go in on it for a Christmas present for her. But then—”

Ah, shit.

This was why he avoided talking about his parents. He could force himself to keep his shit together to do it with Gabby because he knew it was important for her to be able to talk about them. But on his own? No. He just didn’t go there.

Because it made his throat close up.

Her hand was on his, suddenly. She was wearing nail polish. He hadn’t noticed that before. It was super pale pink—almost beige. It was an ugly color, actually.

A princess with ugly nails. The thought anchored him. Stopped the drowning.

She was going to say something. Something kind, probably. He didn’t want that, so he rushed to finish the story. “One day—just a normal day; it wasn’t a special occasion—my dad came home with one for her.”

“Oh, that’s so—”

“The point is”—he hated to interrupt her, but he couldn’t let her get all moony over his parents, or he’d embarrass himself by joining her—“the addition of the Kate Spade part made all the difference. I don’t know if it was the brand—the idea of it—or if it made an actual aesthetic difference to her. But she wore that thing every day until she . . .”

“Until she died?”

Leo was too tired, suddenly, to fight Marie’s quiet empathy, so he nodded. “I almost had her buried in it, actually. But then I thought maybe Gabby might want it. But then I thought . . .”

Gah. Shut up. Why was he babbling like this?

“Then you thought what?” she prodded gently. She was looking at him like she genuinely cared about the answer.

“Well, I don’t know. She was only nine. Who puts a Fitbit on a nine-year-old? They’re supposed to run and play because they like it, right? Not because they need something to remind them to get up and move their bodies. So I thought I’d save it for later, but . . .” Well, fuck it, he’d come this far. “She’s older now, but the last two