The Prince's Forbidden Cinderella, page 2
Her six-month trial could be terminated at any point and there was a small army of nursery nurses who had learned their trade under nanny Fitzgerald who could fill the gap. He did not foresee a problem, so he moved on to the next issue.
‘Luca, could you send over the details of the eco-friendly start-ups who applied for the new sponsorship fund?’ Before becoming a father, investing in firms that were intended to address some of the world’s environmental challenges would not have been on Marco’s radar, but now he was passionate about making the planet’s future a safe one for his daughter.
‘I already have. There has been quite a response, even after the business team filtered them for obvious duds, though I shouldn’t really be surprised. The kudos of having your name and “royal” associated does bring the sort of brand awareness that any start-up—sorry,’ he tacked on, stifling a yawn.
Marco felt his guilt stir. He had to be hell to work for. Just because he could not manage more than four hours’ sleep it didn’t mean his staff couldn’t have a life outside the office.
‘Take tomorrow off.’
The younger man looked startled. ‘Oh, but the—’
Marco shook his head, the smile staying in his grey eyes and not altering the sensual line of his firm lips as he reiterated firmly, ‘Go home, Luca, and thanks.’
The startled look again and Marco made a note to self to express gratitude where it was due more often. Luca was a really excellent aide and he would be sad to let him go, but the young man had outgrown his position long ago. He deserved some autonomy. The post Marco had in mind for him would give him that.
His own rooms were on the ground floor, his bedroom opening directly to a private quadrangle. Two floors above him was the tower room that he had had equipped as a private gym. Very useful for an insomniac. Choosing between his bed and the treadmill, he selected neither. Instead, he entered the hallway where the stairs led up to the nursery wing.
The need to see his daughter was a physical ache. She would be sleeping but she often was when he chose to visit her. It was easier than when she was awake. Pain flickered across the strong contours of his face. Her eyes were so like her mother’s, the woman he had not loved.
* * *
Her eyes accustomed to the dark now, Kate looked around the unfamiliar room and the unfamiliar objects from her position in the high canopied four-poster.
She was really here, and in the process of getting here she had burnt all her bridges. Her stomach tightened as she was seized by a deep visceral longing for all things familiar: her tiny home snuggled between an antique shop and a tea room, her classroom... Stop it, Kate, she told herself sternly, look forward not back!
Her thoughts were slow to react to the reprimand and lingered on the image of her parents’ hurt, guilty faces when she had confronted them...
‘You lied to me, all my life you lied, my entire life has been a lie. I need to get away.’
They thought she’d been talking about a holiday. Good idea, they’d said, suggesting a week somewhere warm.
Then she’d seen the online ad.
A new job, a new life.
‘It’s so far away, Kate,’ her dad had said.
‘We will miss you,’ her mum had said.
Kate fought free of the memories. Just because she had stepped off the path she’d been on did not mean, as her brother had claimed, she was punishing Mum and Dad. It was good to get out of your comfort zone, especially if you were trying to get to grips with your life when everything that made you feel safe and who you were had vanished.
Comfort zone, she mused with a wry twist of her lips as she looked around her surroundings, thinking, And then some.
The post had been advertised as live-in and though she hadn’t been expecting a room in the attic, given who her employer was, she had been taken aback, pleasantly, when she had arrived at the palace to be shown to a self-contained luxury apartment. Self-contained up to the point there was an adjoining door to the nursery occupied by her new charge, Princess Freya, a shy five-year-old with big blue eyes who she had met very briefly when she had arrived.
Raising herself on one elbow, she reached for her phone and groaned when she saw the time. Every cell in her body was aching from exhaustion but her brain was buzzing. Flopping back down, her flame red hair spread across the silk pillow, she swept back with the crook of her elbow a tangled shiny strand of long golden auburn that was tickling her nose, and sighed before levering herself upright once more and shaking her head to free the fiery strands that were sticking to the dampness of her skin.
Renzoi, she had read during her fact-finding Internet frenzy after she had got the job, enjoyed an enviable temperate climate.
This didn’t feel temperate, it felt clammy and stiflingly hot. Pushing back the covers, she swung her legs out of bed and padded barefoot across to the window and, pulling aside the heavy curtains, she stood on tiptoe to unfasten the window latch and settled back on her heels as the warm air rushed in. At least the light breeze was welcome. She pulled at the neck of her loose cotton nightgown and, head back, she breathed, lifting her hair from her neck to give the breeze access to her hot sticky skin. Her nostrils flared as the room was filled with the strong night-time scents redolent of mint and rosemary. Her reading matter had told her that both grew wild on the hills of the island.
She wandered out of the bedroom and through the pretty living room, into the fitted kitchen with its stone worktops. In the morning she would tackle the coffee machine, which looked impossibly complicated. She opened the fridge, which was stocked with an assortment of essentials, and enjoyed the cool as she filled her glass with iced water from the dispenser.
As she gulped down the water she caught sight of her reflection in one of the shiny cupboards. She looked like a pale wraith, a ghostly vision in need of a comb, some concealer for the dark shadows under her eyes and a good meal. Not that the meal part would matter—no matter what she ate her collarbones stood out, leaving delicate hollows above. She envied other women their lush curves, not that her lack of them kept her awake nights.
She was firmly of the mind that you worked with what you had. From nowhere the tears welled in her eyes, emotion kept locked inside spilling out in the form of salty liquid that slid down her cheeks.
She gave a loud sniff. ‘Oh, God, Kate, what are you doing?’
Running away? Trying to find herself?
Her lips twisted in a grimace of self-mockery. A few weeks earlier she would have poured scorn on both options. She was proud that she never avoided reality even when it was not palatable.
Take her early obsession with ballet, not in itself so unusual for a young girl, but what set her apart was the fact she didn’t drift away like most of her friends and become distracted by the latest craze or boys. The only thing that had made her walk away from her dream was the realisation that she lacked the indefinable something that a top-class dancer needed. She would only ever be competent.
Competent wasn’t good enough, the brutal truth was her best wasn’t good enough, so she had diverted her passion into something that she didn’t have to be second-best at: her schoolwork. And then, after she won a scholarship to a top university, gaining a degree in teaching.
Kate knew she was a good teacher. Her natural aptitude for engaging children’s interest and her work ethic had been recognised.
The youngest deputy head at the prestigious primary school, being groomed, everyone knew, to take over when the head retired in two years. Not that she’d necessarily intended to take the post—she’d had a tentative approach from a failing inner-city school in a deprived area. They needed someone with an innovative approach to turn the school around, someone who thrived on a challenge.
She was no longer the person who had been excited by the idea, the person who had known who she was and where she was going. Now, shaking her head and brushing the last cooling tear from her face, she closed the fridge door.
Bed, she decided, calculating that if she fell asleep in the next thirty minutes she could still get five hours’ sleep in before she had to get up again.
She had barely taken a couple of steps when a sound made her pause. Head tilted to one side, she listened, straining to make it out. Music? Her brow furrowed. Or a voice?
There was nothing but silence. She shrugged. She had imagined it. A few moments later, her hand reaching for the handle of her bedroom door, she stopped. This time there was no doubt: another noise, a thump and even a muffled curse, emanating from the speaker on the wall that, as had been explained to her earlier, was wired into the nursery. It was one piece of the massive amount of information she had received that her time-zone-whacked brain had retained.
It was not the sort of sound a child made...it was...
There was someone in Freya’s room and the only way to find out who was to go in. She stared, her thoughts racing, at the wall that separated the room from the nursery, seeing the layout in her head, rows of books, their spines colour-coordinated, educational toys and...well, actually it looked like a very expensive toy store glossy advert. Everything looked pristine, brand new, neatly arranged on shelves and in labelled boxes. A world away from her own childhood bedroom or, for that matter, her brother’s.
Thinking of her brother brought a half-smile to her face. It lasted a split second before she remembered the row they’d had before she left. Like she would ever forget? The spark left her eyes as the sense of betrayal resurfaced.
It had been enough of a life-changing blow to learn that her parents, who had always taught her the importance of truth and honesty in life, had been lying to her, but discovering that her brother had been party to the conspiracy of deceit had been worse somehow.
She would never forget the expression she’d seen in his eyes when she had broken it to him, but before he’d said a word she’d known that this was not news to him.
He’d known they were adopted, that he wasn’t even her brother.
They had argued before but nothing like the argument that had followed. Jake, she’d discovered, had found out by accident too, but years ago and he couldn’t see why she had a problem.
‘It doesn’t change anything.’
For Kate it changed everything. She really couldn’t understand how he could feel that way. Jake told her that this reaction was exactly why he hadn’t told her.
She dashed away a stray tear angrily as the conversation ran through her head.
‘You’re the best friend, or sister, a person could have. You’d fight to the death for the people you love.’
‘And that is a bad thing?’
‘You don’t just love Mum and Dad, you put them on a pedestal, Kate. You’re tough on yourself and the rest of us, you expect too much. Can’t you see that Mum and Dad were protecting you, I was protecting you?’
‘You don’t protect someone from the truth.’
He had not even come to say goodbye.
Kate gave her head an angry little shake to dislodge the memories and thought, Stop dithering. Straightening her narrow shoulders, she pulled the connecting door open. Whatever was on the other side could not be more disturbing than the company of her own thoughts.
Or maybe not?
CHAPTER TWO
DESPITE HER THUDDING HEART, Kate did not actually expect to discover anything sinister on the other side of the door and she was fully prepared to feel stupid.
In her head she was inventing crazy scenarios she’d discover, the room filled with people disinfecting the toys, or sweeping for bugs, the snooping kind, or maybe both...? The nursery did not remain showroom pristine without a lot of work.
So, it took Kate several frozen seconds before the adrenaline rush kicked into life. By this point the large figure on the opposite side of the room had put a toy doll back on a shelf that was, her racing brain noted irrelevantly, out of reach to a five-year-old. For that matter it was out of reach for someone her own height, which was a diminutive five-three.
It was definitely not out of reach for the intruder, whose back view was revealed by the light shining from the room behind her as tall and also powerful. She took in the stretch of fabric across his shoulders, making her aware of the muscles beneath the tailoring. This was one well-dressed and very fit intruder!
If good tailoring was an indicator of character, she had nothing to worry about, but it wasn’t, and she did.
Better to assume the worst and laugh when the innocent truth was revealed, but laughter would be premature. The main thing was to stay calm and not panic...
Oh, God, the panic button beside her bed!
Five minutes ago was the time to remember that. When the red button had been pointed out to her it had seemed a massive overkill because you’d need to be some sort of ninja warrior or possess superpowers to get past the armed guards that had seemed to be lurking around every corner during her whirlwind tour of the nursery wing.
The point was someone had, and the button was not within reach. She weighed the option of retreating but realised the chances of doing so without alerting this man to her presence were zero. He was going to turn around any second, at which point she might discover there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for him being there, but she wasn’t about to give him the benefit of the doubt. Caution was called for and there was a five-year-old child to think about.
He’d have to go through her to get to her new charge... Which probably wouldn’t take more than a few seconds. She pushed the unhelpful thought away and, her bare feet silent on the polished boards—not so her heart, which was throwing itself against her ribcage—she edged towards the little princess’s bedroom door. The intruder remained oblivious to her presence.
She reached the door, took her position and cleared her throat, trying to project her inner Amazonian kick-boxer, while aware that on the outside what he would see made any threat she made laughable.
‘Security is on its way.’ Pleased her voice did not even wobble, she pushed ahead with her warning. ‘I suggest you—’
* * *
‘Hold on a moment, will you?’ Marco pushed out between gritted teeth, irritated that the entire elaborate toy display was about to slide once more, domino fashion, off the shelf. On the plus side, the new nanny possessed not only a pleasant speaking voice but excellent hearing, which was one up on her predecessor, who’d refused to wear the hearing aids she really had needed in her advancing years. It could make for some interesting conversations, especially as she took offence if you raised your voice.
She squeaked when one of the dolls let out a horribly realistic crying sound. Marco’s response was to swear, proving he had mastered three languages or at least he knew how to swear multilingually.
‘Right, sorry about that.’ Marco turned, transferring his attention towards the waiting new nanny...only to discover that the person standing there was not the new nanny!
He refused to accept this possibility as for a few stark mind-freezing seconds his brain shut down. Not so his primal functions. Hormones pumped through his bloodstream, leaving heat that pooled hot and heavy in his groin and making a mockery of both the control he prided himself on and his much-admired lightning wits.
In two startled blinks he took in the cause of the blip in his self-control, his glance sweeping her from head to toe—not a long journey. She was petite.
He knew about female nightwear. He’d removed quite a bit of it over the years, but none that looked like the thing the woman standing there was wearing. Not intended to titillate or light the sort of fire it had in him and therein lay the irony. The white cotton shapeless thing covered quite a lot and heavily hinted at a hell of a lot more, courtesy of the directional beam of the wall light in the adjoining flat making it one shade short of transparent. It revealed the dark tips of her small high breasts, the dip and flare at her waist and hip and the shadow at the juncture of the slim, sinuous length of her thighs.
Her skin was the next pale on the colour spectrum to her nightdress but, unlike the fabric, had a pearly, almost opalescent quality. Again, probably courtesy of the lighting. She possessed the most extraordinary hair he’d ever seen; the lustrous waves and heavy coils didn’t need any lighting effects to reveal the gold highlight interwoven with the deep titian waves that fell untidily around her small oval face and tumbled down her back.
As their glances connected her luminous amber eyes widened and her mouth fell, not unattractively, open. As he stared at the pink, slightly quivering outline any number of inappropriate thoughts slithered through his mind. Inappropriate when thought in connection with his daughter’s nanny and they made it hard to retain his mental image of the anticipated sensible female in his head. In essence she would be a slightly younger version of Nanny Maeve, all no-nonsense common sense and even more sensible shoes. His glance ran to her bare narrow feet and glittery painted toenails.
Clearing his throat, he dragged his gaze upwards.
‘If you’re not going to use that...?’ He nodded at the porcelain vase she held in a white-knuckled grip.
He watched her eyes travel to the ugly thing in her hand, a look of surprise widening the eyes she took off him for one split second. Her elbow dropped but not all the way, similarly her defences as she retained a grip of both.
‘Your only chance of braining me was utilising the element of surprise and you’ve lost that now, so you might as well put it down.’
Tomorrow, he decided grimly, he was going to find out which proxy had decided at interview that this woman represented a suitably mature candidate. And it wouldn’t have been one person; the vetting procedure would have been as detailed as the background check.
* * *
Deep velvet with an edge of gravel to the dark chocolate flavour, his sardonic drawl shook Kate free of the thrall that had held her staring transfixed, mouth open, drooling... She closed her mouth with a snap.
