The Prince's Baby. Lisa Laurel Kaye
asked Lexi about her father, and do you know what she told them?”
Drew shook her head, while apprehension prickled along her scalp.
“She told them she didn’t have a father, but she was going to have a prince.”
“A…prince?”
Mrs. Vittorini nodded. “She made a ‘magic lamp’ at the craft table, and the class gathered around while she rubbed it, asking for a prince to appear. I got them all busy doing something else, but not before a few of them laughed at her.”
Drew felt for her daughter. She herself had developed a tough veneer—that was what made her a survivor—but she had not passed that trait on to her sensitive daughter. Drew tried her best, but it still hurt to know that she couldn’t always protect Lexi. “Thank you for being tuned in to her,” she said.
“There’s more. Yesterday she got into the art supplies and sprinkled glitter all over the room, saying that it was magic pixie dust that was going to make her prince appear.”
“Oh, my gosh. I’m so sorry.”
Mrs. Vittorini brushed the apology aside. “Messes happen. Lexi did the lion’s share of the cleanup, believe me.”
“Good. And if anything else happens—”
“It did.”
Drew groaned inwardly. “What else?”
“On the playground this morning she tried to pull a prince out of Jason Greenwell’s hat. This time she had the whole first grade laughing at her.” The teacher’s eyebrows puckered with concern. “And right before the children went in to the all-school nature assembly today, she announced to the class that her prince was definitely going to show up before the end of the day.”
“Oh, no.”
“Oh, yes. That’s why I called you,” Mrs. Vittorini said. “I just don’t know what she’s going to try next. Not to mention that her hopes are so high she’s bound to come down with a crash by the end of the day. The assembly is going to end shortly and I thought that having you nearby—”
A burst of shouting and laughter from the gym brought Mrs. Vittorini to her feet. Her teacher’s antennae were up. Without a word she headed down the hall toward the gym, with Drew right behind her.
The assembly had apparently gotten out of control. Looking through the gym door, Drew saw right away what all the laughter and shouting was about. And what she saw made her heart drop right into her toes.
In front of the crowded bleachers, under a banner that said Reptiles and Amphibians, were an assortment of cages and tanks filled with live specimens. And all alone at one of them stood Lexi, a smile on her face, a crown on her head and a frog in her hands. As Drew watched in dismay, her daughter bent down and gave the frog a kiss on the top of its head.
“There’s no prince!” the children in the stands shouted.
“There will be!” Lexi shouted right back. She picked up another frog and gave that one a kiss, too.
“There’s no prince!” The chant was louder this time, and the laughter in the stands grew, but Lexi determinedly reached for another frog.
“There will be!”
Drew stood rooted to the ground, both in awe of her daughter’s guts and in dread of the inevitable humiliation Lexi would suffer after she kissed the last frog. Mrs. Vittorini rushed in to help the other teachers, who were in the stands trying to restore order, but to no avail.
Kiss.
“There’s no prince!”
“There will be!”
Kiss.
“There’s no prince!”
“There will be!”
A collective intake of breath was heard as Lexi picked up the last frog.
Kiss.
The stands fairly erupted with the shout, “There’s no prince!”
Something inside Drew tore apart as she watched Lexi standing there, small and alone and with a handful of frog, unable to make her defiant reply this time. Drew started forward.
Suddenly a deep, commanding voice cut across the shrieks of laughter that filled the big room.
“Yes…there…is.”
Silence fell. Drew watched in disbelief as a man strode from behind one of the big tanks to stand before Lexi. He was the last person she ever expected to see. But here he was—back in Anders Point after all these years. She froze, unable to do anything but stare, an old but familiar ache slicing through her.
In his jeans and leather jacket, he looked more like a bad-boy rebel than a fairy-tale prince, but there wasn’t a woman in the world who wouldn’t recognize the Prince of Hearts on sight, and Drew could tell by their murmurs of astonishment that the teachers in the audience were no exception.
His face perfectly serious, he bowed to Lexi. “I am Prince Whit of Isle Anders,” he said.
Drew closed her gaping mouth and tried to get a grip on the emotions that churned inside her. Surprise at seeing Whit was quickly supplanted by dread, as she watched the prince kneel before Lexi, studying the little girl’s delighted features.
Incredibly, Whit stood and looked at the audience, then, right at Drew. Her heart stopped in mid-beat as their glances caught and held for an electrifying moment; it was almost a physical connection. She stood motionless, helpless to break the contact.
Then Whit returned his gaze to Lexi, who looked up at him, enthralled.
“I am here at your wish,” he said to her.
Whit spoke with the barest trace of an accent. His father was the ruler of Isle Anders, a small island not far from Iceland, but his mother had been born right here in Anders Point, Maine, and Whit had gone to college in the States. But there was a richness to his deep tones, a thrumming vibrancy that suggested the faraway, the exotic, the forbidden.
No one knew that better than Drew, who had been the first of many women to fall victim to Whit’s powerful masculine lure. His having been born a prince was a quirk of fate, and his good looks were a gift from his parents’ gene pool; but his reputation as the Prince of Hearts he had earned by his own willful actions.
And if she’d been the first to fall, she’d also been the first to break free, she reminded herself pointedly.
She had seen him for the first time in seven years just a few weeks ago, at the marriage of her friend Julie to his brother, Prince Erik. Among the guests, it had been easy to keep her distance from him, during those few hours. Other than that, she hadn’t been this close to Whit since the summer she had fallen so deeply in love with him that she’d thought she wouldn’t be able to draw breath without him by her side.
Now she saw that the passing of time had only served to enhance his appeal. He was, as all media accounts made him out to be, an extraordinarily handsome man. A handsome prince, no less; complete with stunning blue eyes, black hair that fell to his shoulders in luxuriant waves and the kind of body that looked scrumptious in everything from tuxedos to gym shorts. And then there was his legendary smile, the one he was right now beaming at her daughter, who stood looking up at him, spellbound, holding a papier mâché crown on the top of her head.
The daughter who meant the world to her. The daughter she would protect to her dying breath.
Lexi. Fear tightened every muscle in Drew’s body until she ached with tension. She couldn’t let him find out about Lexi. She had to hide her daughter from him. No matter what.
But there they stood, face-to-face. The tension became almost unbearable for Drew. She had to fight the impulse to run up front and snatch Lexi away, out of his sight; instead, she took a deep breath and tried to