nose was one of those little idiosyncrasies that brought me pleasure, so I hoped she’d never get a new pair.
“All right.” She was right about my behavior. “I accept the challenge.” I held my hand out to her, and she placed hers in mine to seal our agreement. Her skin was warm, despite how chilled she’d been, and the way my larger hand completely enveloped hers made me want to smile. Did she shop for gloves in the children’s department?
When we broke contact, she pulled the jacket around herself again and dipped her chin so I could hardly see any of her face. Then I noticed something that made me chuckle.
“Are you smelling my jacket?”
Her head immediately popped out, eyes wide behind her glasses. “What? No. Don’t be ridiculous.” She tugged the jacket from her shoulders as if it were covered in fire ants and thrust it toward me. “You’d better get going or they’ll be sending out a national alert.”
Still smiling from her reaction, I gestured for her to walk ahead of me. “Ladies first.” No wonder she’d been freezing; she wore only a short-sleeved sweater fitted close to her body and one of her pencil skirts. And, if I wasn’t mistaken, her tits weren’t the only things that had grown recently. There was a new curve to her bottom as well, wasn’t there? Either that, or I’d never noticed how nicely her hips curved out from her small waist.
But what was I doing? I wasn’t supposed to have thoughts of any kind about Alice’s body. She was practically like a sister—a sister whom I paid to spend time with me and do things I didn’t like to do. She certainly bossed me around like a sister.
“Are you coming?” Alice turned when she reached the roof access door and I realized I’d stopped walking as I’d been inappropriately considering her hips.
I shrugged my jacket on, catching a whiff of Alice’s familiar scent of citrus and a touch of spice as I straightened it and strode forward to meet her. Having a reminder of her presence would be a reassurance at tonight’s dinner, so I hoped the scent lingered indefinitely.
Chapter 11
Alice
I couldn’t believe he’d caught me sniffing his jacket like a teenage delinquent huffing paint fumes. How embarrassing. But he smelled so good—the familiar spicy and sweet of woodsy cardamom—it had been hard concentrating on the task at hand. The way he gave into the exercise and allowed me behind the brazen self-confidence of his outer wall made me want to both hug him and reconsider some of Tilly’s more colorful suggestions. And since when did Malcolm like folk music? He was making this very hard on me.
There was no way of knowing how the dinner had gone, and the suspense kept me awake long after I lay down in bed. Did he freeze up? Did he make a successful toast? Did he abandon the dinner entirely to go drinking with Nolan Royce? All three were equally possible, as well as a dozen other eventualities I hadn’t imagined.
And now it was one in the morning and all I seemed capable of was pacing around the small flat that had been arranged for my stay and eating handful after handful of cheese and onion crisps. Malcolm and his irresistible vulnerability were going to make me fat. Oh, but what I wouldn’t give for a cannoli to finish me off.
If tonight’s toast hadn’t gone well, I wasn’t sure what I’d do. The only way Malcolm could conquer this fear and panic was to challenge himself again and again while finding ways to understand the fear and methods to weaken it. If he’d frozen up in front of this relatively small group of people with whom he regularly socialized, I feared he’d want to give up on my plan entirely. Patience had never been one of his strong suits. I’d need to convince him to keep trusting me—there were no two ways about it—but keeping this a secret would become increasingly difficult.
By the time I dropped off to sleep, I’d finished the entire bag of Walkers, washed down with a glass of wine and an ibuprofen to ward off the morning headache I’d surely have.
“Good morning, Alice,” Matthias greeted me as he exited Prince Malcolm’s quarters just as I was headed in.
“Good morning. How is he today?” Perhaps I could get an idea of Malcolm’s mood to prepare me.
With barely four hours of sleep, I was running later than I liked, but at