Snowbound with the Prince, page 12
He was barely eating and he wasn’t sleeping. It might not be the best time to make a decision, but it was in that vulnerable state that he arrived at his conclusion.
This was his truth.
He had been born to power. He was a disciplined man. He had nearly always done what his station required of him.
So he was shocked by this awareness, this unfolding truth, that when it came to Erin, he was powerless. He had to see her. If she was not going to come to him, he had to go to her. He could not fight it.
There were pieces to set in place, naturally, so that the press would not be hot on his trail. He and Erin needed privacy. He would arrange a leaked story. Maybe even a decoy to send them in the wrong direction.
While he followed the direction his heart was leading him in.
* * *
It was nearly dark when Erin came back through the clearing. She had cut it close, but she was glad. She had snowshoed all day. She was exhausted. Hopefully, that meant tonight she would fall into bed too tired to even think This is the bed we shared.
She stopped short and frowned.
There was a light on in the cottage. The golden light from the gas lamps inside spilled out the windows and across the snow, warmly welcoming, like a painting on a Christmas card. She shrugged it off. She must have left them on this morning, but usually she was not careless with the gas lights. On the other hand, nothing about her seemed “usual” right now. Admittedly, she had been distracted.
As she got closer, she realized there was also a faint whiff of woodsmoke in the air. Surely that would not still be there from this morning’s fire?
She felt a bit annoyed. Had some skiers or other mountain enthusiasts found her little sanctuary and made themselves at home? These mountain cabins were always left unlocked in case they were needed as emergency shelters, and she didn’t begrudge anyone that, but she didn’t feel up to company, either.
She had another thought. Maybe it was her father, taking a break from gallivanting around the globe, an aging playboy. Maybe, like the rest of the world, he was curious about her notoriety.
She felt as if she didn’t have the energy to deal with him right now, either.
Making as much noise as possible, so much so that Harvey gave a little mewl of reprimand from inside his carrier, she took off the snowshoes, slammed them together and clumped up the steps to the porch. The door opened just as she put her hand to the latch. She braced herself, but nothing could have prepared her for—
Valentino.
“Hello,” he said softly. His voice was like a caress. His eyes were like a homecoming. She wanted nothing more than to fly into his arms.
But—
“Aren’t you married?” she snapped.
“Married? Me?” He tilted his head at her. “How long have you been hiding up here?”
She didn’t like it that he knew she was hiding. From the world. From her pain. From the insecurities that had, unfortunately, followed her.
Who do you think you are?
“Someone sent me the paper.”
He quirked an eyebrow at her. Something was wrong with his eyebrows. They were white at the tips, and curling, as if he had cleaned a spider web with them. It was distracting.
“Of me? Married?” he asked, innocent, incredulous.
What kind of world was this he lived in? A celebrity world, obviously. One she could never belong in. Wouldn’t want to! Engaged one day. Not engaged the next. Married one day...
Did those vows not mean anything to anyone anymore?
She stormed by him.
The paper lay where she had tossed it on the kitchen table. It was untouched, still folded. She grabbed it and thrust it at him, crossed her arms over her chest, waited for his explanation. Oh, how he loved to explain things!
Instead, he looked down at the paper. He looked up at her and had the nerve to smile.
“Sometimes,” he said, “you just have to look at the world from a different angle.”
He turned the paper over.
She saw the headline completed:
After!
And she saw the photo—the one she had been avoiding but could not quite bring herself to burn—of the groom looking adoringly at his new bride, Princess Angelica.
And that groom was not Valentino.
Her head shot up. She stared at him. Her mouth opened and then closed. She could feel tears filming her eyes.
“Come,” he said, helping her out of her jacket, taking Harvey from her. “Sit down. I’ve made you hot chocolate.”
She sat, stunned, while the prince brought her hot chocolate, sank beside her on the couch, watched her with that familiar warmth in his eyes. His eyebrows were still distracting.
She was dreaming, naturally. She took a sip of the hot chocolate while she contemplated his eyebrows. Scorched. Surely, in a dream, the hot chocolate would be perfect? And his eyebrows wouldn’t look like that.
“Did you have some kind of incident lighting the stove?”
He cocked his head at her and looked a little sheepish. “And the lamps. How do you know that?”
The prince looking sheepish was too adorable to resist. She reached up and touched his eyebrows. “Your eyebrows have turned to ash.”
“Better than ass,” he said, straight-faced.
She giggled.
“I watched you light the stove and the lamps several times. I might have had the sequence wrong. There was kind of a poof and a flash of fire and light. It was a little more excitement than I anticipated doing such a simple task.”
The truth was that everything he did made simple things exciting. But she needed to remember there was a very thin line between excitement and disaster. That poof he described was about three seconds away from a cabin burned to the ground.
“Are you ready to let me explain? Ass that I am?”
She nodded. Her heart, that organ she had thought was dead inside her, was living again, thudding a tattoo inside her chest. “Yes, please tell me why you are here. What’s going on. Why you didn’t marry Angelica.”
“Angelica and I have known each other since we were children. It was expected of us that we would marry. Love, of course, does not have anything to do with these kinds of arrangements in families like ours.”
A man like Valentino—so passionate, so alive—condemned to a loveless life? It made her feel furious at the system he was bound to.
“To my shame, now, I didn’t feel my marriage had to have love. She’s beautiful. I respected her. And liked her. We’re good friends, which I suppose is a love of sorts.”
A love of sorts, yes, Erin thought, but not the kind you married. And yet, wasn’t that exactly what she herself had been going to do? Marry Paul without passion?
“I actually felt as if I’d done fairly well in the arranged marriage department,” Valentino continued. “Both kingdoms were in a frenzy of preparation for the engagement party.”
Again, the parallel—she, too, had thought she had done fairly well in her relationship with Paul.
“But then she told me she didn’t love me.”
Just as Paul had told her. Not that he didn’t love her, not exactly, but that something was missing.
“And I knew by the way she said it, that she already loved someone else. She said, of course, she would go through with our marriage. It was her duty. What she’d been born to.
“That’s when I came to Touch-the-Clouds. I needed to think. There is something that cuts the legs out from under a man to hear a woman that you care for talk about marrying you as if it will be a trip to the gallows.
“I think I already knew in my heart what had to be done. But would I have had the courage to do it? Before I met you? Before I found out what I would be asking both her and I to miss? Maybe not. But, believe me, the first thing I did after I got down from the cabin that day after the storm was phone Angelica to tell her she was free.
“And then I was free. To ask you to dinner.”
Erin was struck by the truth of it: they had both been on course to make a tremendous mistake. They had both willingly accepted less than they’d deserved from life.
She owed Paul a debt of gratitude that he had somehow seen that something was missing.
Valentino owed Angelica that same debt of gratitude that she had freed him.
They both owed it to the universe to embrace this second chance they had been given to get it right.
“Oh, Valentino,” Erin whispered. “I called you an ass. I didn’t even give you a chance.”
“Well, given that my engagement was unexpectedly announced—equally surprising to me as to you—I can hardly blame you. Though I did at first. I blamed you. I was hurt.
“I thought you, of all people, should know who I was. My family—my mother, the queen—had gotten wind that I was with you. She rushed the announcement, thinking it would force my hand, force me back into the fold. She counted on me to be who I have always been. A man who put duty first.
“But when I left here, and I wasn’t that man anymore, I couldn’t put anything first, before what I had felt for you. So, I called it off. I tried to make it seem as if it had been my decision, hoping it would protect Angelica.
“Unfortunately, even having lived with the media all my life, I could not have predicted the ensuing circus.”
He smiled wryly. “Angelica let me know, in no uncertain terms, she did not need my protection. And that she would make her own choices.
“Which were to be true to herself and show the entire world she was not afraid to marry the man that she loved.”
“I’ve been a complete idiot,” Erin said softly. And not just about getting angry with him, jumping to conclusions, but about accepting so much less from life than it wanted to give her.
“Yes, you have been,” he teased her.
She slugged him softly on the arm and he pretended hurt. “At least I didn’t blow up my own eyebrows.”
They laughed and the laughter made something inside Erin sing back to life. She realized she had not laughed since he had left.
“What now?” she asked him. “Where do we go from here?”
“Before,” Valentino told her, “I wanted you to come to my kingdom. I wanted to see if we could have a future.”
She registered the before. Her heart fell. She had, it seemed, missed her chance.
“But now?” she said. “Why are you here if I have thrown away my chance?”
“Thrown it away?” he asked, astounded. “That’s not it, at all.”
“Then what is it?”
“Traveling to the kingdom right now is out. The press are on me like hounds on the fox. If you showed up now, they would never leave us alone. We would have drones buzzing us every time we tried to step out. I couldn’t ask you into that, and I needed to escape it.
“And then I thought, I know the perfect place to escape.”
“That’s why you’re here,” she said. “To escape.”
“Why are you so resistant to the truth?” he asked her softly.
“Which is?”
“Erin, I want to be with you. I was dying without you. Yes, I want to escape. I want to get lost in your eyes. I want to dive into them as if they were a cool pond on a hot summer day. I want to let what I see in them fold over me and soothe me, to heal all the parts of me that are wounded.
“I want to see where this all can go. I want to spend a week up here, intensely with you, and nothing else. How many places in the world would allow such an experience?”
That was true. She had never seen the cabin quite like that. A sanctuary. A love nest, hidden from the rest of the world.
“I want to see if the universe brought me to a ski hill in a storm so that I could change my destiny,” Valentino told her softly. “So that I could know love instead of duty.”
Love?
It seemed so wrong. It seemed too soon. It seemed so right. It seemed as if the rules of time were silly structures, not intended for them.
Destiny.
That is what this felt like. Destiny.
“Is it wrong to want to do so without the surprise of a drone shot of our most private moments being splattered all over the front pages? I admit I have sent the paparazzi on a bit of a wild-goose chase, worthy of their own devious devices, so that I could have time with you. Just you.”
Erin carefully set down her hot chocolate.
And then she leaped into his lap, twined her arms around his neck and took his lips with her own. Homecoming.
“I plan to fit into your world,” he informed her between kisses.
Didn’t he know he already did? Wasn’t it obvious?
“I brought books with me. So we don’t get bored.”
“I don’t think there’s much chance we are going to get bored,” Erin told him. Still, if he’d brought books, she was hoping for the Kama Sutra.
Or maybe they could lie in bed and read Elizabeth Barrett Browning to each other.
“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways...”
“How to Build an Igloo,” he announced, pleased.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
AS IT TURNED OUT, Valentino discovered building an igloo, aside from needing perfect snow, required several elements that the book failed to mention.
For amateurs, building an igloo required a good sense of humor. It required puzzle-building ability. It required tenacity. Most of all, it required that he and Erin to work as a team.
If you wanted to get to know someone, he decided, building an igloo was nearly the perfect way to do that.
But that activity—and all else they did from cooking simple meals to making the bed together—was overshadowed by the awareness of each other that crowded out nearly everything else. Everything was complicated by it...and made better by it. His life had taken on a light that shone more brilliantly than the sun on snow around them.
Her laughter filled him.
Her touch healed him.
Her intelligence awed him.
Her strength complemented his strength.
Erin and Valentino had somehow happened on an activity that unveiled to them how, despite so many cultural differences, they were incredibly compatible.
And despite the fact they exhausted themselves on their project, they barely slept. Talking deep into the night, often falling asleep with the next word dying on their lips.
And yet they woke energetic, filled with excitement for another day spent together. Valentino had never felt so exquisitely and intensely connected to another human being in his entire life.
It filled a part of him that Valentino had not been aware was empty.
Finally, three days and six collapsed, abandoned, restarted, rethought, reconfigured igloos later, they stood staring, awed, at their completed project.
The polished snow blocks that formed the dome got their strength only from leaning on each other. There was no additional supporting structure.
There was a lesson about life here, Valentino thought.
“It’s supposed to support the weight of a man standing on the roof, if we did it correctly,” he announced.
Erin grinned impishly at him and crossed her fingers.
Like an ice climber, he scaled the rounded wall. On the top of it, he pulled himself to standing. It was a gorgeous, spring-come-early kind of day. He surveyed the clearing that had become his world: the cabin, smoke chugging out the chimney; the clearing still filled with the melting outlines of snow angels; closer, the cat in a basket they had brought for him, belly to the sun, paws pointed at the air, indifferent to their accomplishments.
Valentino crouched and held out his hand to Erin.
She giggled—that carefree, breathless sound he had come to live for—and took his hand despite the fact she was protesting.
“Does the book say anything about it supporting the weight of two people?”
“Let’s live dangerously,” he suggested and pulled her up beside him on the dome. It was a perilous balance on the slippery curved surface, but they clung to each other, as interlocked as the snow blocks.
Isn’t that exactly what they were doing? Living dangerously? Challenging every limitation others—and themselves—had tried to put on them?
The structure—their salute, really, to forging their own way in a world that wanted to tell them what to do—held.
He kissed her and let go of her hand. Erin slid on her bottom off the roof and he followed her, the crystal-clear air of the clearing ringing with their laughter.
He gathered supplies they had brought—a blanket, a candle, a thermos of tea—and crawled through the ice tunnel that led to the interior of their snow structure.
Given how bright it was outside, it was fearsomely dark in there. He spread the blanket and lit the candle. Erin wiggled in, the cat in her jacket.
It was tinier than they had first envisioned, but that meant the candle they had brought in, plus their body warmth, heated the space, as the book had promised it would. There was just enough room to shrug out of their jackets.
“It’s tight in here,” Erin said.
“Cozy,” he corrected her.
“Here’s to cozy.” Erin unscrewed the lid from the thermos, put it to her lips and then passed it to him.
He took a sip and offered his own toast. What had become their toast.
“Here’s to surprises.”
Four full days with her and she was still surprising him in the most delightful ways. He still loved his lips touching places her lips touched, like the rim of the thermos. Still lived for intimacy between them, small touches. Still was awed by the growing comfort, the heated looks, the moments of quiet contentment.
Harvey, on her lap, seemed quite crabby about the whole experiment. He glared back and forth between them, as if to say, Uh, we have a perfectly good cabin...what nonsense is this?
