A Princess for Christmas - Jenny Holiday Page 0,54

Life could be a lonely business, and having someone who shared your experiences and your blood made it a little less so. He suspected that growing up royal, despite its perks, was a lonelier road than average. The cage was gilded, but it was still a cage.

It occurred to him suddenly that despite the huge economic and social gulf between them, he had more freedom than Marie did. Or at least a different kind of freedom.

“My parents had trouble conceiving, then never managed to get pregnant again after me,” Marie said. “Once I got old enough to understand that, I’d wish for frivolous stuff. A crush to like me back. A good grade on a test.” She paused. “Now I wish my mother was here.”

Her voice was so small. Leo wanted to grab Marie’s hand but checked the impulse, saying instead, “What was she like?” A fan of 90210, but he wanted to know more.

He could hear the smile in her voice when she answered. “She was a force of nature.” Marie paused, trying, he sensed, to put words to complicated emotions. “She was like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She was fun and charming and always bursting with plans for some grand adventure. She’d throw an impromptu dance party and invite everyone from the village, or she’d take me to L.A. for the weekend and we’d go on star tours in disguise. She loved L.A., because of the American TV obsession.”

“They say we live in the golden age of TV,” Leo said. He didn’t watch any himself—no time—beyond Thursday-night K-drama.

“Oh, but it wasn’t good TV that she liked. No HBO for her. No, she was into the old, cheesy 1990s stuff of her youth. Programs you couldn’t get on satellite or via streaming. She was always ordering DVDs. So that combined with the L.A. trips meant my vision of America was all these beautiful people with puffy, shiny hair hanging around by pools and having affairs with each other.”

Leo laughed. It was so incongruous to imagine a European queen watching that stuff.

“Movies, too, though she preferred the serial format of TV.” Marie was gathering speed, clearly happy to be talking about her mother. “But when my father would start getting cranky or stressed by work, she’d declare it family movie night. He would grumble, but he knew better than to refuse family movie night. We always watched in a small private parlor in their suite—you would call it a den, I think. She would order up a feast of all our favorite food, make everyone put on their pajamas, and we’d watch whatever silly movie she’d selected. My father always started off annoyed, and he’d sit at the far end of the couch. But by the end of the movie, they’d be all cuddled up. He was like a horse she had to break every few months. She’d get him back into a good mood. It was like she was . . .”

Marie’s mother sounded lovely. Like a woman who cared for her family in little ways. Not that different from Leo’s mom, really, except that she’d mostly done it with pasta. The princess had trailed off on her last thought, left off the final adjective she’d been going to use to describe her mother. He wanted, suddenly, to know what she’d been going to say. “It was like she was what?” he prompted softly.

“Magic. It was like she was magic.” She waved a mittened hand in front of her face like she was erasing a chalkboard. “That sounds silly. She wasn’t magic. She just knew how to handle my father. No one else could—no one else can.”

“He loved her enough that he let himself be handled, maybe,” Leo ventured.

“I think that’s right,” Marie said quietly. “Of course she also took after Audrey Hepburn in that she was lithe and graceful and beautiful and refined.” She snorted. It seemed like a snort that was tinged with self-disgust.

“What?” Leo asked, genuinely confused.

“Nothing. It’s just that life as a female royal is a lot easier if you’re beautiful. My life would be so much simpler if I took after her in that regard.”

“Hang on, now.” He supposed what she meant was she didn’t look like Audrey Hepburn—and she didn’t. But Audrey Hepburn, or at least the Breakfast at Tiffany’s version of her that he knew from watching the movie with Gabby, was not the be-all and end-all of female beauty.

“Oh, I’m not fishing for compliments. I know I’m not beautiful,