LUCY MONROE - The Prince's Virgin Wife

“Have you considered it will not be so easy to find another job?”

“Yes.”

“At least agree to stay until you find something else.”

“Fine.”

She’d ended up staying until the end of the semester as she’d originally planned, because finding another job to work with her tight school schedule had been impossible. But things changed between them.

She still took care of the domestic side of his life, but she spent a lot more time on campus, at the library and with the few friends she’d made. She now prepared most of his meals ahead of time and left instructions for heating. When he wanted Liana to dine with him, she made the extra portions without complaint, but never shared another meal with him herself. Not even breakfast.

Thankfully Liana was not a local college student, so she wasn’t there often, but her presence could be felt in the daily constraint between Tom and Maggie.

When he asked the other woman to marry him, Maggie was not surprised, but being prepared for it did not soften the blow, and her heart bled.

He invited her to the wedding and she told him they didn’t have that kind of relationship, that she didn’t plan to see him again after school ended for the summer. He was her boss, not her friend and when school got out, he would no longer be even that.

For once, he had not stubbornly insisted on getting his own way, which said all she needed to know about how he really saw her.

She’d worked out a job and living arrangements by the end of the semester and moved out a week before he did. She did not bother giving him her new address and did not ask for information on where he planned to live after graduation.

She would not be able to handle seeing him married to the other woman, but she hoped he was happy. She loved him too much to ever wish otherwise.

She attended the graduation ceremony though, sitting high in the bleachers where he would not see her watching him receive his master’s degree with honors. He’d worked hard to be at the top of his class.

She clapped enthusiastically when his name was called, but was gone from the stands by the time the graduates left their designated seating to join the crowd.

She’d never seen Tom Prince again, but she’d never been able to forget him, either.

Some women only fell in love once, or so she’d been told, and she figured she was one of them. He’d married a woman worthy of his incredible looks and dynamic personality, but there was a part of Maggie’s heart that would always belong to him.

Maggie had only been asleep for about forty-five minutes when the feel of a small body climbing into either side of her bed woke her. She opened her eyes. “Gianni?”

“Anna got scared, Maggie. She wants to sleep with you.”

The little girl snuggled up to Maggie’s back, giving credence to her brother’s words.

“And you do, too?”

Gianni nodded in the shadowy dark of the room. “I had a bad dream.”

“I miss Papa,” Anna said from behind Maggie.

Maggie was too tired herself after staying up with her memories and the movie to argue. She merely cuddled them both close and slipped back into sleep herself.

However, two hours later, after the third small and pointy elbow poked a sensitive body part, she carefully climbed out of her bed and went in search of somewhere else to sleep.

Both children were sleeping too soundly for her to willingly wake them and put them back in their own bed, but she wasn’t sure what to do with herself.

Their beds were much too short for a grown person, even a woman of her no more than average height. The Victorian-style sofa in her sitting room was no longer than a love seat and no better a proposition. To her knowledge, the only other bed made up was in the master suite.

She stumbled sleepily down the hall to Anna and Gianni’s father’s room. He would never know she’d slept there. She’d get up in the morning and wash the sheets and replace them and when he returned the next day, he would be none the wiser.

She tossed the extra decorative pillows from the bed onto the floor and slid between the sheets. There was something vaguely familiar about the scent on the pillow where she laid her head, but she was too tired to work out what it was.

Tomasso let himself into his home quietly, forcing a brain muddled by lack of sleep and other things to remember the alarm codes to allow his entry without setting off sirens. He’d pushed himself mercilessly for the last five days so he could finish his business early and come home. He missed his children and he was impatient to see Maggie again, to find out if she was all that he remembered.

He’d gone totally without sleep for the last thirty-six hours, catching only a catnap on the plane between bouts of work. He didn’t want to go into his office for a couple of days and that meant getting ahead on everything. He’d taken meds for the motion sickness he got flying when he was too tired, and then forgotten he’d taken them and had a glass of wine with his dinner and a neat Scotch whiskey an hour later.

He’d never been drunk in his entire thirty years, but he thought this graceless fumbling was as close as he had come to doing so.

Nevertheless, he scaled the stairs with a sense of anticipation and relief he had not felt in a very long time. Tomorrow Maggie would learn she was working for him. He had no idea how she would react to that news, but now that she was bonded with the children, he did not believe her first reaction would be to quit her job.

He had planned it that way of course, doing his best to stack the odds in his favor, like he did with any business deal. Unlike his first marriage, where he had allowed lust and foolish emotion to cloud his judgment, he planned to approach the situation with Maggie from the same perspective he did business. With cool, calculated reason and an intent to win.

Regardless of how she reacted to learning she was working for Tom Prince again, or that he was really Principe Tomasso Scorsolini of Isole dei Re, he had no intention of letting her walk away from him a second time.

He dropped his briefcase in the study connected to his bedroom and his carryall in the room beyond. He pressed a small button on the panel beside the door and low-level recessed lighting came on. Even so, it felt glaring to his bloodshot eyes. He was never taking that antinausea medication again.

He was loosening his tie as his gaze landed on the pile of pillows on the floor. His foggy brain could not work out why they would be there. His staff was impeccable and his children far too respectful to have had a pillow fight in his bedroom, even assuming the new nanny would let them.

Frowning over that mystery, he peeled off his jacket and hung it over the suit valet while his gaze skimmed the rest of his room. As it landed on his bed, he stopped still in his tracks.

The bed was occupied.

Who would have the temerity to invade his sanctuary? No woman he knew could make it past his security and his staff were too loyal to help any woman intent on snagging a royal lover and/or husband.

And no one, man or woman, would have been expecting him to sleep in his bed tonight. As far as anyone but his personal security team and pilot was concerned, Tomasso was still out of the country on business.

He moved closer to the bed to get a closer look. He had to brush back the mass of curling blond hair to reveal the woman’s features. He did it carefully, so as not to wake her.

Disbelief warred with a feral sense of purpose as his brain identified the intruder.

Maggie.

What was she doing in his bed?

Memories of another bed, another time washed over him.

They’d shared a scorching kiss and he had come very close to making love to her. But she’d been a virgin and she’d hesitated at the last step. He’d wanted her so badly, he was shaking with it, but she had chosen her job over him.