Marie Donovan - Royally Seduced

“The South of France—this is so exciting!”

Jack had to agree with Lily.

Exciting…but damned inconvenient that his libido had come roaring back after being nonexistent for so long. And he’d just promised to take the sexiest woman he’d ever met to the most romantic place on earth—and treat her as a sister.

Lovely. Lovely Lily, with sparkling green eyes and glossy peach lips begging for him to kiss them. For him to pull her into his lap and show her what real French kissing was about. But…no.

“When do we leave?”

“If we take the high-speed train, we can leave early tomorrow and be in Avignon in under four hours.”

“Only four hours,” she breathed. “I won’t get a wink of sleep tonight.”

Jack gave her a dry smile.

Neither would he…but for a much different reason.

MARIE DONOVANis a Chicago-area native who got her fill of tragedies and unhappy endings by majoring in opera/vocal performance and Spanish literature. As an antidote to all that gloom, she read romance novels voraciously throughout college and graduate school.

Donovan worked for a large suburban public library for ten years as both a cataloguer and a bilingual Spanish story-time presenter. She graduated magna cum laude with two bachelor’s degrees from a Midwestern liberal arts university and speaks six languages. She enjoys reading, gardening and yoga.

Please visit the author’s website at www.mariedonovan.com.

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To my own Eleanor of Aquitaine.

A sunny French book for a sunny girl.

With much love always.

LILY ADAMS STOOD in front of her New Jersey apartment building shivering in the predawn morning skies. Although it was July, the air was still damp and chilly at four in the morning. Her cousin Sarah and her cousin’s husband Curt should be here any minute to take her and Sarah to the airport. She and Sarah were less than a year apart in age. Sarah’s dad was the brother of Lily’s late father, and he had done his best to act as a stand-in dad. Although Lily and Sarah had grown up in different suburbs of Philadelphia and gone to different schools and colleges, they had gone to summer camp together and shared major milestones.

And now they were sharing a fabulous trip together. Lily shivered again, this time in anticipation. Her first time in Europe! Sarah had studied in France and was a high-school French teacher, but Lily was a total newbie. A European newbie, so to speak.

After graduating from college with a somewhat-less-than-lucrative journalism degree with an even-less-lucrative English-literature minor, Lily had decided to remedy a childhood of never going anywhere by starting a modest career as a travel writer. So far, she had done several articles on her native city of Philly and had branched out to New Jersey and New York.

But writing articles for the local parenting magazine on top ten historic sites for kids in Philly was shooting fish in a barrel. Adventure lay outside the Tri-State area, so she’d scraped together enough money for a trip to France. Just her and Sarah for the next few weeks.

She craned her neck. Yes, that was their car, a dark sedan that glided smoothly to the curb. Sarah hopped out…in her pajamas? Comfort was important for flying, but, well, okay. Lily didn’t much care what their fellow passengers thought of her cousin’s baggy pink T-shirt and red flannel pants, complete with monkeys dangling off palm trees. It was all good, as long as Sarah could pass through security without being tagged for crazy.

But Sarah also looked like death warmed over, her short brown bob scraped back by a linty black headband that looked like an Alice in Wonderland reject. Her face was pale even in the dim light, and her lips were dry and cracked.

“Um, are you okay?” Stomach flu on an international flight would be kind of dicey.

Sarah’s mouth spread into a wide grin and then she burst into tears of all things, clutching Lily as she sobbed. Curt hopped out of his side of the car and hurried to them. “What the heck is going on, Curt?”

“No!” Sarah jerked her head up, her expression alarmingly close to a snarl. “Don’t you dare say a word!”

Curt and Lily cringed. “Of course not, darling. It’s yours to tell, precious.” He wrapped his arm around his wife’s shoulder and kissed the top of her limp hair.

Darling? Precious? Curt was usually about as romantic as a rock.

“Sarah?” Lily said cautiously. She wasn’t sure what was going on, but she had a nonrefundable ticket to Paris leaving in about four hours.

Her cousin’s face smoothed out until it was almost beatific. “Lily, I’m pregnant!”

Lily shrieked loud enough to wake the neighbors, who wouldn’t bother calling the cops even if it were some mad strangler coming into her apartment. “Pregnant!” She started to jump up and down but quickly stopped when she saw the queasy look on Sarah’s face.

“I know, I know! After all these years, all those times when it didn’t work out…”

Lily gave her a quick kiss, remembering Sarah’s several miscarriages until the damn doctors had figured out she’d had a blood clotting disorder all along. This trip to Europe was supposed to be a kind of decompression from the pain and stress of her infertility and losses—no pressure to conceive with a husband five thousand miles away. “But how did you find out?”

Sarah giggled. “I’d been feeling kind of off for the past week but I figured it was a touch of flu. Then last night about eight, I started throwing up hard, and Curt was worried. He took me to the E.R. They put in an IV but also ran a pregnancy test.” She shrugged, her face splitting into a grin. “And here we are.”

“Well, of course you can’t go.” Lily wouldn’t have her cousin risk her baby on a strenuous overseas trip.

Curt’s shoulders sagged in relief. He had obviously expected some hassle.

“But, Lily, how will you manage all by yourself? You don’t speak a lick of French, and you’ve never been anywhere.”

Great for her self-confidence. “Didn’t you tell me that if you ever got pregnant again you would need very close prenatal care along with anticoagulant shots right from the start?”

“Yes,” Sarah admitted. “But I feel so terrible about abandoning you.”

“Please,” she scoffed. “I’m a big girl. I have my itinerary and my French phrasebook.”

Sarah winced. Lily had a terrible accent, being unable to master the sheer nasality of the language. “Well, at this time of year there are always English speakers roaming around if you get into a bind. And Curt and I will take you to the airport like we planned. I wish I had given you more notice than this,” she fretted.

“I wouldn’t change anything,” Lily told her, and that was the truth. Later on in the pregnancy, when her cousin felt more secure, Lily would inform her she was going to be the godmother. Maybe she would bring back a little French toy for the baby and keep it hidden until he or she was born.