Elizabeth Bevarly - Taming the Prince

Instead of a lengthy silence this time, the response from the other end of the line was a weary sigh. “Oh, dear,” the woman said, not quite under her breath. “This is going to be a bit more difficult than I thought.” Then, “I understand why you might be skeptical, Mr. Cordello,” she added. “But I assure you that I am indeed Her Majesty Queen Marissa of Penwyck. And it is very important that I speak with you about a very urgent mat—”

“Right,” he interrupted again. “If you’re the queen of Penwyck, then I’m the prince of darkness. Tell me another one.”

“Actually, Mr. Cordello, you’re not far from the truth,” the woman said, sounding a bit less imperious than she had before.

Shane opened his mouth to mutter another disdainful quip, but what came out instead was “Huh?”

“I said you’re not far from the truth,” the woman repeated. “Though you’re not—quite—the prince of darkness.”

Once again, Shane tried to summons a haughty retort. And once again, what came out was “Huh?”

“Perhaps it would be better if I let you speak to your brother, Marcus, first,” the woman said.

“Marcus?” Shane echoed, growing even more confused now.

But instead of hearing the woman’s voice in reply again, Shane was treated to his brother’s. “Hello, Shane. It’s Marcus.”

The confusion that had been wheeling around in Shane’s head for the last several minutes came to a crashing halt, crumbling now into a vast heap of bewilderment. “Marcus?” he said, recognizing his brother’s voice immediately. “Where are you? Who was that woman? What the hell is going on?”

“Answering those questions in order,” Marcus said, “as to the first one, I, uh, I’m in Penwyck. You know Penwyck, Shane, surely. Small island nation? Near other island nations of Ireland and Great Britain? It’s been in the news lately because they’re forming a military alliance with the United States. You’ve heard about that, right?”

“Uh…”

“And I think our mother honeymooned here with husband number three, if memory serves,” Marcus continued blithely. “It’s really a beautiful place. Nice people. I mean really nice people. Food could be a little spicier. Not that I’m complaining.”

Marcus Cordello, Shane knew, was not the kind of man to fool around. His brother hadn’t become a millionaire at the age of nineteen by making prank phone calls, and he didn’t maintain a multimillion-dollar real-estate empire in one of the nation’s largest cities by asking people if they had Prince Albert in a can. No way would Marcus jerk Shane around. If he said he was in Penwyck, then, by God, the man was in Penwyck. And if Marcus was in Penwyck, then that meant that the woman who’d called herself the queen of Penwyck could, by God, very well be—

Uh-oh.

“You’re in Penwyck?” Shane echoed miserably.

“I’m in Penwyck,” Marcus confirmed.

“The Penwyck that has a Queen Marissa?”

“So you have been watching the news,” his brother said, clearly holding back a chuckle.

“Um, Marcus?”

“Yes, Shane?”

“Was that really the queen of Penwyck I was talking to on the phone a minute ago?”

“It was indeed.”

“The woman I just blew off so royally was really a queen?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“So you’re standing beside the queen of Penwyck?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Is she, um, really, really mad?”

“Define ‘really, really,”’ Marcus said.

“Like, off-with-his-head mad?”

There was a moment of silence, as if Marcus were contemplating the mood of the woman beside him, a full continent and ocean away from where Shane was standing himself.

“Nah,” Marcus said finally.

Shane expelled a soft sigh of relief.

Then, “She’ll probably just want to take off your hand when you get here,” Marcus added.

“What?” Shane said.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t the take-off-your-hand part of Marcus’s statement that got to Shane most deeply. It was the when-you-get-here part that made him take notice.

Then again, Shane thought, why was he surprised by this surprise? Marcus was beginning to make a habit out of dropping bombshells whenever he called. Hell, the last time they’d spoken, his brother had told him there was a possibility that the two of them had been adopted as infants, not that Shane had believed that for a moment. Now Marcus was suddenly in Penwyck, visiting the queen. What next? Would he announce his candidacy for president of the United States? Shane wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

“Actually, Her Majesty is a very pleasant woman,” Marcus continued, dispelling Shane’s troubling thoughts—sort of. “So she might only want a couple of fingers from you, really.”

Okay, troubling thoughts were back now.

Shane closed his eyes and lifted a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose, in an effort—a totally futile effort, he soon learned—to ward off a massive headache that seemed to erupt out of nowhere.

“Marcus,” he tried again, struggling very hard to maintain his feeble grip on reality. Maybe if he spoke a little more slowly, this conversation would make sense.

And maybe, too, he told himself further, Jennifer Lopez would give him a call this weekend and ask him to go skinny-dipping with her in Puerto Vallarta.

“Marcus,” he said once more. “What. Are. You. Talking. About.”

Marcus expelled a long, weary sigh from the other end of the line. “What I’m talking about, Shane,” he said, “is something you’re probably not going to believe. Are you sitting down?”

Shane dropped into his boss’s big, comfy chair without even asking permission, and somehow didn’t even care when Mr. Mendoza began to glare at him as if this were Shane’s last day on earth. Or, at the very least, his last day on the Wellman Towers construction site.

Whatever.

“I’m sitting down,” Shane said. “Now tell me what’s going on.”

“Well,” Marcus began, “once upon a time, in a kingdom far away, there lived a beautiful queen and a handsome king who were blessed with a pair of royal twin sons….”

Sara Wallington pushed back the sleeve of her pink cashmere sweater and checked the slim gold watch on her wrist for the sixth time in ten minutes, then sighed heavily with impatience. My, how time crawled when one was having woe, she thought morosely. For there could certainly be nothing fun in acting as a glorified nanny for the next twenty-four hours. A nanny for what might potentially be the heir to a throne, granted, but a nanny nonetheless. However, the heir apparently was nowhere to be seen just yet, and they were due to leave L.A. at precisely 11:00 p.m. Right now, it was nearly ten o’clock. Even if they were flying on a private jet, there was a strict departure time they must meet. If the man were any later, they were going to have trouble keeping to their schedule. And she did so loathe not being punctual.

She sighed heavily again, fidgeted with her pearl necklace, twisted the matching pearl stud in one ear and tucked an errant wisp of pale red hair back into her chignon. Then she scanned the hoards of people scampering through LAX like rabid animals and wondered how in the queen’s name she was going to find Shane Cordello among them. Of course, it had been Queen Marissa herself who’d gotten Sara into this. A favor, Her Majesty had told Sara’s mother in Penwyck when she’d called to see if Sara was available to aid Shane in his travels. Never mind that Sara had finals next month to study for and a term paper to write. She’d escort Mr. Cordello to her native country because her queen commanded it. Favor equaled duty when it came to Her Majesty.

Nevertheless, locating the man was going to be a bit of a task since Sara had been given only a sketchy description of him to go by: brown hair, blue eyes, six-foot-two, one hundred eighty pounds. So she had been able to deduce that he was a largish man, though certainly that wasn’t so unique for this vast country of America. Most men here seemed to be big and boisterous and very nearly overwhelming, she had noticed during her four-plus-year stay. Oh, and Shane Cordello was supposed to be rather good-looking, too—according to his brother, at any rate—which ought to make him oh so easy to spot here in Los Angeles where everyone seemed to be beautiful.