The Irresistible Prince. Lisa Laurel Kaye
from hell had been too much for her. That was it. Her imagination had finally gone haywire and sent her over the edge.
She blinked and looked again at the man standing not two feet in front of her. When she finally met his eyes, the physical jolt it gave her decided the matter: the prince on her porch was no hallucination, and no one in her right mind would call him a figment. He filled the doorway to Annah’s coffee shop, regal and imposing, six feet of muscled male all packaged up in an impeccable charcoal gray suit. The wind was ruffling his hair and bringing her the faint but very real scent of a woodsy, masculine shampoo. This was no storybook prince, but a real-world ruler from a land across the ocean who came fully equipped with a royal pedigree—and the most blatant bedroom eyes Annah had ever seen on a man.
“Annah Lane?” he asked, his deep voice betraying just a hint of an accent.
“You—you know my name?” she blurted out. They had met briefly a few months earlier, at the marriage of her friend Julie to his friend Prince Erik. He had made a strong impression on her, but she never expected that he would remember an unremarkable woman who had been just one of many introductions that day. She cleared her throat. “I mean, how nice to see you again. Your Highness,” she added belatedly.
He didn’t smile, exactly, but his lips twitched before he spoke. “It seems that you know who I am, as well.”
Shocker, she thought wryly. Any woman between the ages of eighteen and eighty who had a pulse would recognize him at a glance—even if he showed up out of the blue on her doorstep. He was Prince Lucas of the Constellation Isles, the inveterate bachelor prince whose marriage deadline had created an international furor. He had the world’s most prominent women tied up in knots waiting for him to choose one of them to be his bride. Annah couldn’t imagine a less likely place for him to be than here in her little out-of-the-way town on the coast of Maine.
“What brings you to Anders Point, Your Highness?” she asked, her voice filled with its customary warmth and with newly piqued curiosity. He was friends with the Anders brothers, but no one was living at their family castle at the tip of the Point right now, what with both princes newly married and taking time off to enjoy wedded bliss.
“I’ve come here to see you, Miss Lane.”
“Me?” Annah said incredulously. A prince looking for a bride, and he’d come this far off the beaten path just to see her?
“Yes. I would like to speak with you.”
“Certainly,” she said, her heart banging around in her chest like an empty trash can rolling down a hill. “Won’t you come in?”
His glance swept the dimly lit room that housed her coffee shop and came back to rest on her again. “This is a private, personal matter,” he said in a low voice that made those warm chills race along her skin.
“I...see.” She gulped. “My coffee shop is closed, so we’ll have privacy here.”
Just then a wave of laughter swept in from the back room. He looked at her questioningly.
“Oh, I forgot. I’m waiting on a batch of customers in my secondhand shop in back. That’s my other business,” she explained. There was a loud shuffling noise, and one of the girls called out for her. “I’d better take care of this.” Whatever was happening back there, it was something she felt more up to handling than the prince’s sudden appearance in her life. A little dose of real life—her life—might not be a bad idea right now.
His eyebrows drew down in the slightest frown. “Miss Lane, this is a matter of import...and urgency.”
“I figured it must be. That’s why I’m going to see you next,” Annah assured him. “Right after I finish with these customers and close up shop.” She saw his frown deepen. Unless she missed her guess, it wasn’t every day that His Highness the Prince of the Constellation Isles was asked to wait his turn while the owner of a modest secondhand shop sold used clothing to a group of teenagers. “You’re welcome to come back and have a look around in the meantime,” she added politely.
Just then a new gale of giggling swept in from the back room. She glanced down the hallway and then looked back at the prince. Somehow she couldn’t picture him browsing through the racks with the girls. “On second thought, maybe you’d be better off waiting up front here, Your Highness. Please, come in and make yourself comfortable.”
He hesitated just inside the doorway, looking about as comfortable as a snowman at the equator. A tiny, wayward impulse plucked at Annah’s heart. Not caring that she was probably breaching several of the more consequential rules of royal etiquette, she took him by the arm and steered him over to the counter. He felt solid and real under the expensive material of his suit jacket, and Annah felt that unfamiliar tide of warmth begin to rise again. She dropped his arm abruptly and went behind the counter, busying herself with filling a teakettle.
“Feel free to make yourself a cup of tea. Water’s on, and you’ll find everything you need here behind the counter,” she said as she hurried off “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
In the hallway she paused to exhale, leaning back against the wall. She addressed the ceiling again. “You know, when I asked for a miracle before, I was thinking more along the lines of the deliveryman with my replacement part. Are you sure this isn’t some kind of a mistake?”
She glanced over her shoulder, but the prince didn’t disappear in a puff of smoke, so she disappeared into her secondhand shop.
Prince Lucas leaned over and grasped the edge of the counter, slowly counting to ten as his knuckles turned white. Waiting was the last thing he wanted to do right now. Time was running short for him, shorter with each tick of the clock. A delay after he had come this far served no purpose beyond giving him fodder for second-guessing—which was all too easy to do when he was on the verge of putting his pride on the line. This was a real gamble, coming here to see this woman with whom he was barely acquainted. It wouldn’t take much to send him walking back out that door before he even asked her what he had come to ask her.
He released his grip and straightened up, trying to relax by sheer force of will. He looked around him, feeling conspicuously out of place in her cozy little house in this quaint little town that time and tourists seemed to have overlooked. It was one thing to think of Annah Lane as an abstract idea. It was quite another to come barging into her world to turn that idea into a proposal.
Right now the whole idea seemed more like a foolish risk than a viable solution. And even beyond convincing himself, he had to convince her. Because, dammit, he needed her; he had never needed anyone as he needed her right now. The stakes couldn’t be higher for him... and his hand was forced.
After his father’s unexpected death last year, Lucas, his only child, had assumed rule of the Constellation Isles, as tradition would have it. His succession was unanimously confirmed by a vote of the council of elders, the elected body that ruled hand in hand with the prince, but with one great big caveat. To stay on the throne, he had to get married—and he had just one year in which to do it.
On paper, a year had seemed like enough time. Not surprisingly, ever since the deadline had been announced, women had been launching themselves at him from all sides. But even in the exclusive stratum of society that was the milieu of royalty, an altar-bound prince seemed to meet nothing but social climbers, hangers-on and mercenaries—all cleverly disguised as the ideal princess. He himself had met one too many. After ten months Lucas had finally faced up to the fact that the kind of woman he wanted wouldn’t be the type to come sashaying up to the palace gates, anyway. He would have to go to her. So here he was.
He paced between the counter and the window, finding a narrow path through a maze of closely set, round tables that were each bracketed by a pair of wooden chairs. Coming here had been the idea of his two closest friends. They were brothers, princes of Isle Anders, which was his country’s long-time ally and closest neighbor in the remote North Atlantic waters near Iceland. Prince Erik and Prince Whit had both recently married, well and fruitfully—Whit had finally settled down with the love of his life, who was