A Princess for Christmas - Jenny Holiday Page 0,79

was going to pass out.

Luckily—kind of—it was taking a hundred years to get Gabby settled.

She was yammering a mile a minute about the Cocoa Fest preparations she’d been allowed to help with and the book she and the king had talked about over dinner. Tomorrow, she was going skiing. Marie had arranged for Mr. Benz to take her to a gentle hill for lessons.

Which Leo was pretty sure meant Marie intended for them to spend a good portion of the day in bed.

“That Mr. Benz guy is kind of funny, actually,” Gabby said.

“He is?” Leo didn’t see it.

“Yeah, he seems so stuffy, but he brought me one of those marble things like we saw at Kai’s. Oh, and there was this time when I was in the kitchen with Frau Lehman, and he came in, and . . .”

He zoned out. He tried not to. It was funny. Gabby used to talk all the time, when she was younger. But lately, at home, there were days where Gabby barely said two words to him. Days when he bent over backward to extract the merest morsels of information about her inner life.

Here, he couldn’t get her to shut up. It was like Eldovia had unleashed her repressed inner chatterbox.

Which, normally, he’d be thrilled about. Normally, he would try to settle in and try to steer the conversation toward how she was doing. To find out how much and in which areas he was falling short. But not tonight. He kept looking at his watch. Initially, anyway. But then he checked himself. It was a real dick move to ditch your sister so you could go bang a princess.

A princess you were going to bang like she wasn’t a princess.

Whatever.

Finally, though, Gabby went to sleep.

Leo detoured back to his room to take a shower. Which probably wasn’t necessary as he had showered before dinner. He just . . .

Aww, fuck. He felt so much pressure.

Which wasn’t like him. Leo wasn’t a guy who got his undies in a bunch over sex. Sex was fun. Sometimes it was great. He generally took care to make sure his partner had a good time. But he didn’t give it too much thought beyond that.

He would never admit it to Marie, because clearly to do so would be a royal mood killer of the first degree, but he was kind of worked up about doing it with her. Not because she was a princess. He didn’t think so anyway—though he’d be the first to admit that he wasn’t naturally talented at examining his emotions. But because of this whole thing where he was her last hurrah before she had to get married to some royal dickwad or other.

So, yeah, pressure.

He didn’t like it. They needed to get this over with.

And when was the last time he’d thought that about sex? He was in the upside-down. But, of course, he already knew that. That had been true since they’d driven up the hill the first time and he’d spied the palace with its maddeningly asymmetrical turrets.

Leo paused in front of Marie’s door, took a deep breath, and tried to find another emotion, something beneath his jitters. He closed his eyes and felt again her breath on his cheek as she moved over him in the woods. A shiver ripped through him as if he were back there, but he wasn’t cold. It was excitement. Of the sexual variety but also just . . . the regular kind. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d looked forward to something so much.

He rapped on her door, and she answered almost immediately, as if she’d been standing just on the other side of it.

She was wearing a white nightgown. Of course she was. He swallowed a laugh as he assessed it. It went to her ankles, though it was sleeveless. It looked like something Anne of Green Gables would wear, or Laura Ingalls.

Or, you know, the princess of a small Alpine country he’d never heard of a week ago.

“What?” she asked urgently. “What’s wrong?”

Leo forced his face into submission. “Nothing.” Even he knew it wasn’t a good idea to laugh in a situation like this. And he wasn’t really laughing at her. She was just so . . . herself. As much as he didn’t want to be, he was charmed. Really fucking charmed.

What the hell had he gotten himself into?

Marie smiled shyly and gestured him inside. The gown, which he was still examining, laced up the front like a