Kate Hardy - Crown Prince, Pregnant Bride

‘Yes.’

‘Forgive me for saying so, but you don’t look like...’ He stopped. ‘Actually, no. Just ignore me. I’m digging myself a huge hole here.’

She grinned, and the sparkle in her eyes made his pulse speed up a notch. ‘I don’t look like a glass restorer, you mean? Or I don’t look the type to have been at school with Lottie?’

Both. Ouch. He grimaced. ‘Um. Do I have to answer that?’

She looked delighted. ‘So, let me see. Which shall we do first? School, I think.’ Her voice dropped into the same kind of posh drawl as Lottie’s. ‘I met her when we were eleven. We were in the same dorm. And unfortunately we shared it with Lolly and Livvy. I suppose we could’ve been the four musketeers—except obviously I don’t have an L in my name.’

‘And it sounds as if you wouldn’t have wanted to fight on the same side as Lolly and Livvy.’

‘Absolutely not.’ Her eyes glittered and her accent reverted back to what he guessed was normal for her. ‘I don’t have any time for spitefulness and bullying.’

‘Good.’ He paused. ‘And I hope you didn’t think I was bullying you, this morning.’

‘If you’ll kindly delete the file,’ she mimicked.

He grimaced. How prissy she’d made him sound. ‘I did apologise for that.’

‘So are you a film star, or something?’

‘No.’

‘Well, you were acting pretty much like a D-list celeb, trying to be important,’ she pointed out.

Should he tell her?

No. Because he didn’t want her to lose that irreverence when she talked to him. He didn’t think that Indigo Moran would bow and scrape to him; but he didn’t want to take that risk. ‘Guilty, m’lady,’ he said lightly. ‘Are you quite sure you’re a glass restorer and not a barrister?’

She laughed. And, oh, her mouth was beautiful. He had the maddest urge to pull her into his arms and find out for himself whether her mouth tasted as good as it looked. Which was so not how he usually reacted to women. Lorenzo Torelli was always cool, calm and measured. He acted with his head rather than his heart, as he’d always been brought up to do. If you stuck to rigid formality, you always knew exactly where you were.

What was it about Indigo Moran that made him itch to break all his rules? And it was even crazier, because now absolutely wasn’t the time to rebel against his upbringing. Not when he was about to become King of Melvante.

‘I’m quite sure I’m a glass restorer. So were you expecting me to be about forty years older than I am, with a beard, John Lennon glasses, a bad haircut and sandals?’

Lorenzo couldn’t help laughing. And then he realised that everyone in the room was staring at them.

‘Sorry. I’m in the middle of making a fool of myself,’ he said. ‘Not to mention insulting Ms Moran here at least twice.’

‘Call me Indigo,’ she corrected quietly, and patted his shoulder. ‘And he’s making a great job of it,’ she cooed.

‘I, for one,’ Gus’s mother said with a chuckle, ‘will look forward to seeing the drawing pinned up in the breakfast room.’

Indigo grinned. ‘He hasn’t earned one. Yet.’

‘I’m working on it,’ he said, enjoying the banter. How long had it been since he’d been treated with such irreverence?

Though a nasty thought whispered in his head: once he’d been crowned, would anyone ever treat him like this again, as if he was just an ordinary man? Would this be the last time?

‘Indigo, may I sit with you at dinner?’ he asked.

She spread her hands. ‘Do what you like.’

Ironic. That was precisely what he couldn’t do, from next month. He had expectations to fulfil. Schedules to meet. A country to run. Doing what he liked simply wasn’t on the agenda. He would do what was expected of him. His duty.

CHAPTER TWO

WHEN THEY WERE called to dinner, Lorenzo switched the place settings so he was seated next to Indigo.

‘Nicely finessed, Mr Torelli,’ she said as he held her chair out for her.

Actually, he wasn’t a Mr, but he had no intention of correcting her. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Your name’s very appropriate for a stained-glass restorer.’ Not to mention pretty. And memorable.

‘Thank you.’ She accepted the compliment gracefully.

‘So how long have you been working with glass?’

‘Since I was sixteen. I took some evening classes along with my A levels, and then I went to art college,’ she explained.

Very focused for someone in her mid-teens. And hadn’t Lottie said something about Indigo leaving their school at the age of fourteen? ‘So you always knew what you wanted to do?’

She wrinkled her nose. ‘It’s a dreadfully pathetic story.’

‘Tell me anyway,’ he invited. ‘It’ll make me feel better when you savage me in one of your cartoons.’

‘I was sent away to boarding school at the age of six.’

Lorenzo had been five years older than that when he’d been sent away, but he remembered the feeling. Leaving home, the place where you’d grown up and every centimetre was familiar, to live among strangers. In his case, it had been in a different country, too. With a child’s perception, at the time he’d thought maybe he was being sent away as a punishment—that somehow he’d been to blame for his parents’ fatal accident. Now he knew the whole truth, and realised it had been his grandparents’ way of giving him some stability and protecting him from the potential fallout if the press had found out what had really happened. But it had still hurt back then to be torn away from his home.

‘I hated it,’ she said softly.

So had he.

‘I cried myself to sleep every night.’

He would’ve done that, except boys weren’t allowed to cry. They were supposed to keep a stiff upper lip. Even if they weren’t English.

‘The only thing that made school bearable was the chapel,’ she said. ‘It had these amazing stained-glass windows, and I loved the patterns that the light made on the floor when it shone through. I could just lose myself in that.’

For him, it had been music. The piano in one of the practice rooms in the music department. Where he could close his eyes and pretend he was playing Bach at home in the library. ‘It helps if you can find something to get you through the hard times,’ he said softly.

‘I, um, tended to disappear a bit. One of my teachers found me in the chapel—they’d been looking for me for almost an hour. I thought she’d be angry with me, but she seemed to understand. She bought me some colouring pencils and a pad, and I found that I liked drawing. It made things better.’

He found himself wanting to give Indigo a hug. Not out of pity, but out of empathy. He’d been there, too. ‘Why did you decide to work with glass instead of being a satirical cartoonist?’ he asked.

‘Drawings are flat.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘But glass... It’s the way the colour works with the light. The way it can make you feel.’

Passion sparkled in her dark blue eyes; and Lorenzo suddenly wanted to see her eyes sparkle with passion for something else.

Which was crazy.

He wasn’t in the market for a relationship. He had more than enough going on in his life, right now. And, even if he had been thinking about starting a relationship, a glass artist with a penchant for skewering people in satirical cartoons would be very far from the most sensible person he could choose to date.

Besides, for all he knew, she could already be involved with someone. A woman as beautiful as Indigo Moran would have men queuing up to date her.

‘You really love your job, don’t you?’ he asked.

‘Of course. Don’t you?’

‘I guess so,’ he prevaricated. He’d never known anything else. He’d always grown up knowing that one day he’d become king. There wasn’t an option not to love it. It was his duty. His destiny. No arguments.