Laurie Paige - Royal Affair

She skimmed the large print. A movie star was getting a divorce. Ho-hum. The Lion Roars, proclaimed another above a picture of a handsome man holding the arm of a fragile beauty—

Ivy gasped. She grabbed the edge of the counter as the room went into a dangerous spin.

“Are you all right?” the clerk asked, leaning close and peering into her eyes.

Ivy blinked several times and the world righted itself. Except for the abyss giving way under her feet. “Yes, just a…a sort of…of a dizzy spell. I’m fine now.” She smiled to prove that she was.

The clerk nodded sympathetically. “When I was pregnant with my first, I fainted at the drop of a hat. Blood was especially bad. My sister cut her finger one night when we were having dinner at her place. I fell right out on the kitchen floor. Scared my husband to death. He didn’t know I was expecting. Neither did I, come to think of it.”

Ivy dredged up a smile while the clerk and the woman behind her in line laughed nostalgically. “I’ll take this, too,” she said, and put the tabloid on the counter.

By the time she’d paid cash for her purchases and rushed to her car, every nerve in her body was quivering like an aspen leaf in a playful breeze. As she got in, she tossed her purchases into the passenger seat, grabbed the tabloid and read the article that went with the headline.

Her eyes widened and narrowed by turns as she skimmed through the hyperbole to get to the meat of the story. It seemed Prince Maxwell von Husden, Crown Prince of Lantanya, who was soon to be king, had been seen at a popular tourist resort in the tiny country with a mysterious beauty in July. After a romantic night of dining and dancing and passion, the woman had disappeared.

Ivy gasped and felt faint again. How could they have known about the passion?

Reporters always made up the stuff to fill in the blanks, she decided grimly, trying to calm the emotions that roared through her like a tsunami. She read on.

The prince was furious that the woman had slipped out on him before he grew bored and dropped her, according to one “close palace source.” Another source contended that the prince was heartbroken but covering it with anger.

Ivy pressed a hand to her thundering heart. “Liar,” she said. She’d been right to leave without waking him the next morning, although it had been difficult to do.

He’d looked so handsome lying in the king-size bed, his hair mussed and a morning beard shadowing his face, his expression one of contentment. She’d contemplated kissing him goodbye, but she’d had a plane to catch and she wasn’t sure they could stop at one kiss.

Again passion flared at the memory. She clenched the steering wheel and closed her eyes, slowly winning control of the hunger running through her.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” a voice asked through the window.

She opened her eyes with a jerk and stared at the woman who’d been in line behind her. “Oh. Oh, yes. Thank you.” She smiled brightly, her heart pounding so hard she could hear each beat in her ears.

The woman, who looked fortyish and had a certain world-weariness in her eyes, smiled, too. “Take care of yourself,” she advised in a kindly tone and walked to a car in the next row.

Ivy composed herself and drove out of the parking lot to an apartment complex recently built on the outskirts of the city. Portland General Hospital was the next exit off the highway. At least she was close to medical care in case her heart gave out completely.

The cynical thought evaporated after she got inside her place, the door closed and locked as if a whole platoon of reporters might come charging after her.

She read the article again, then looked through the whole tabloid in case there was more information. There wasn’t. All the reporter really knew was that she and Max had had a late supper at the resort. And that the prince seemed to have been in a bad mood of late.

For a while she sat there in a stupor, shocked that the handsome, humorous, beguiling man she’d met wasn’t Max Hughes, a foreigner attending to business matters in Lantanya the same as she was. She stared at the grainy print as if that could change the images in the photo that was snapped without her knowledge six weeks and four days ago.

However, the woman, whose face was partially turned from the camera, was her, and the man, who was smiling right into the lens, was apparently the man who was due to be crowned Maxwell V, King of Lantanya, in a few weeks.

The tiny island country was nestled in the Adriatic Sea, a perfect Brigadoon hidden from the rest of the world and far from reality.

Way far from reality, she silently admitted, feeling beyond foolish. Her family was right to treat her like a baby. She needed a keeper.

Laying the paper on the coffee table and leaning her head on the sofa back, she closed her eyes and groaned. A playboy prince. She’d fallen right into the lying, deceitful arms of a playboy prince. A last fling before he assumed the duties of king?

Get real. Did leopards change their spots? He would simply move on to being a playboy king. And she’d fallen for his charm, his wit, his warmth…the timbre of his deep voice, the passion in his eyes, the odd glimpses of sadness in his expression…. She’d thought they were soul mates.

A lie. It had all been a lie. And she’d believed it. Every word. He must have thought it amusing—the naive American…the shy virgin….

“Ohhh,” she moaned and buried her face in her hands.

How could she have allowed herself to be taken in like that? She was smart. She’d graduated with honors in systems management and computer science. With her team of workers, she’d devised a brilliant network for the kingdom’s education program—

Oh, no! She would have to go back. She might even have to face him.

The plastic bag containing her purchases rattled against her leg as she shifted in despair. Slowly she removed a small square box and stared at it as if viewing a poison potion she was supposed to drink.

“The moment of truth,” she said to it.

This was indeed such a moment. It was time to confirm her direst suspicions and find out if her magical night of passion had left her with a little souvenir of the evening.

She dropped the satiric mood at the thought of a child, a sweet innocent who’d had no say in its conception, and laid a hand protectively over her abdomen.

Her home life hadn’t been great during her growing years. She’d wanted better for her children. A loving family. A faithful mate. Honor and integrity and caring. She had screwed up royally.

“Ha-ha,” she muttered at the unintended pun.

Rising, she walked down the short hallway to the master bedroom. Its furnishings didn’t comfort her as they usually did. She’d picked them out upon leaving the family mansion and moving to the apartment in a bid for independence shortly after agreeing to work at the family business.

Well, she’d needed a job. The dot-com where she’d started right out of college had made it four years before crashing. She’d learned a lot about computer systems during that time, so she was a valuable employee.

Not that anyone else thought so. Her fellow analysts thought she was a pretty face who’d gotten her position due to family connections. That much was true, in that her sister had pressured her to come into the company.

Ivy had gladly taken on the job of bringing Lantanya’s educational facilities into the twenty-first century when no one else had wanted the time-consuming task, which had included long flights across the Atlantic to Rome. She’d then had to take a puddle jumper, as some called the small jet, to Lantanya, which lay off the eastern coast of Italy in the Adriatic Sea, which was really an arm of the Mediterranean.