Charlene Sands - Christmas with the Prince

Fifteen years her senior and her mentor since college, Will wasn’t especially handsome, and he was more studious than sexy, but he was kind and sweet and generous. The truth was, his proposal had come so far out of left field that it had nearly given her whiplash. They had never so much as kissed, other than a friendly peck on the cheek on holidays or special occasions. But she respected him immensely and loved him as a friend. So she had promised to give his proposal serious thought while she was away. Even though, when he’d kissed her goodbye at the airport—a real kiss with lips and tongue—she hadn’t exactly seen fireworks. But sexual attraction was overrated and fleeting at best. They had respect and a deep sense of friendship.

Although she couldn’t help wondering if she would be settling.

Yeah, right. Like she had a mob of other men pounding down her door. She couldn’t even recall the last time she’d been on a date. And sex, well, it had been so long she wasn’t sure she even remembered how. Not that it had been smoking hot anyhow. The one man she’d slept with in college had been a budding nuclear physicist, and more concerned with mathematical equations than figuring out sexual complexities. She bet Prince Aaron knew his way around a woman’s body.

Right, Liv, and I suppose the prince is going to show you.

The thought was so ridiculous she nearly laughed out loud. What would a gorgeous, sexy prince see in a nerdy, totally unsexy woman like her?

“So, what do you think of our island?” Aaron asked as they descended the stairs together.

“What I’ve seen of it is beautiful. And the castle isn’t at all what I expected.”

“What did you expect?”

“Honestly, I thought it would be kind of dark and dank.” In reality, it was light and airy and beautifully decorated. And so enormous! A person could get hopelessly lost wandering the long, carpeted halls. She could hardly believe she would be spending weeks, maybe even months, there. “I expected stone walls and suits of armor in the halls.”

The prince chuckled, a deep, throaty sound. “We’re a bit more modern than that. You’ll find the guest rooms have all the amenities and distinction you would expect from a five-star hotel.”

Not that she would know the difference, seeing as how she’d never been in anything more luxurious than a Days Inn.

“Although…” He paused and looked over at her. “The only feasible place for the lab, short of building a new facility on the grounds, was the basement.”

She shrugged. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d worked in a basement lab. “That’s fine with me.”

“It used to be a dungeon.”

Her interest piqued. “Seriously?”

He nodded. “Very dark and dank at one time, complete with chains on the wall and torture devices.”

She gazed at him skeptically. “You’re joking, right?”

“Completely serious. It’s been updated since then of course. We use it for food and dry storage, and the wine cellar. The laundry facilities are down there, as well. I think you’ll be impressed with the lab. Not dark or dank at all.”

Because the majority of her time would be spent staring in a microscope or at a computer screen, what the lab looked like didn’t matter all that much to her. As long as it was functional.

He led her through an enormous kitchen bustling with activity and rich with the scents of fresh baked bread and scintillating spices. Her stomach rumbled and she tried to recall the last time she’d eaten. She’d been way too nervous to eat the meal offered on the plane.

There would be time for food later.

Aaron stopped in front of a large wood door that she assumed led to the basement. “There’s a separate employee entrance that the laundry staff use. It leads outside, to the back of the castle. But as a guest, you’ll use the family entrance.”

“Okay.”

He reached for the handle but didn’t open the door. “There is one thing I should probably warn you about.”

Warn her? That didn’t sound good. “Yes?”

“As I said, the basement has been updated.”

“But…?”

“It did used to be a dungeon.”

She wasn’t getting his point. “Okay.”

“A lot of people died down there.”

Was she going to trip over bodies on her way to the lab or something? “Recently?”

He laughed. “No, of course not.”

Then she wasn’t seeing the problem. “So…?”

“That bothers some people. And the staff is convinced it’s haunted.”

Liv looked at him as though he’d gone completely off his rocker.

“I take it you don’t believe in ghosts,” Aaron said.

“The existence of spirits, or an afterlife, have never been proven scientifically.”

He should have expected as much from a scientist. “Well, then, I guess you have nothing to fear.”

“Do you?” she asked.

“Believe in ghosts?” Truthfully, he’d never felt so much as a cold draft down there, but people had sworn to hearing disembodied voices and seeing ghostly emanations. There were some members of the staff who refused to even set foot on the stairs. Also there was an unusually high turnover rate among the laundry workers. But he was convinced that it was more likely overactive imaginations than anything otherworldly. “I guess you could say I try to keep an open mind.”

He opened the door and gestured her down. The stairwell was narrow and steep, the wood steps creaky under their feet as they descended.

“It is a little spooky,” she admitted.

At the bottom was a series of passageways that led to several different wings. The walls down here were still fashioned out of stone and mortar, although well lit, ventilated and clean.

“Storage and the wine cellar are that way,” he said, pointing to the passages on the left. “Laundry is straight ahead down the center passage, and the lab is this way.”

He led her to the right, around a corner to a shiny metal door with a thick glass window that to him looked completely out of place with its surroundings. He punched in his security code to unlock it, pulled it open and hit the light switch. The instant the lights flickered on he heard a soft gasp behind him, and turned to see Liv looking in wide-eyed awe at all the equipment they’d gotten on loan from various facilities on the island and mainland. The way one might view priceless art. Or a natural disaster.

She brushed past him into the room. “This is perfect,” she said in that soft, breathy voice, running her hands along pieces of equipment whose purpose he couldn’t begin to imagine. Slow and tender, as if she were stroking a lover’s flesh.

Damn. He could get turned on watching her do that, imagining those hands roaming over him.

If she were his type at all, which she wasn’t. Besides, he wasn’t lacking for female companionship.

“It’s small,” he said.

“No, it’s perfect.” She turned to him and smiled, a dreamy look on her face. “I wish my lab back home were this complete.”

He was surprised that it wasn’t. “I was under the impression that you were doing some groundbreaking research.”

“Yes, but funding is an issue no matter what kind of work you’re doing. Especially when you’re an independent, like me.”

“There must be someone willing to fund your research.”

“Many, but there’s way too much bureaucracy in the private sector. I prefer to do things my way.”

“Then our donation should go far.”

She nodded eagerly. “The truth is, a few more weeks and I might have been homeless. You called in the nick of time.”

She crossed the room to the metal shipping containers that had preceded her arrival by several days. “I see my things made it safely.”