Cinderella's Prince Under The Mistletoe. Cara Colter
THE two men. Both swung around to look at her. Both were frowning. This was not the usual reaction of vacationers arriving to the pristine beauty of the mountainside lodge! A bit flustered, she managed to paste a smile on her face.
“Prince Luca?” she said. “I’m sorry, we were expecting Prince Antonio.”
Both men looked at her as if it wasn’t up to her to tell them who she was expecting.
“Welcome to the Crystal Lake Lodge,” she stammered, resisting an impulse to touch her hand to her forehead and bow away!
She extended her hand. Too late, she thought maybe she was not supposed to extend her hand. The soldier type looked at her, dismayed, and as if he might block her from touching the Prince with his own body.
But the Prince stopped him with a barely discernible motion of his head. He took her proffered hand.
His touch was warm and dry and exquisitely strong, subtly but unarguably sensual. His eyes, so dark and deliciously brown, met hers squarely.
Something about his eyes increased that thought that tickled the back of her brain: I know him.
But of course she did not know him. And for someone who had met dozens of celebrities, her next reaction was startling. Ridiculously, she felt like a starstruck teen who had gotten way too close to her rock idol. With all the grace she could muster, she extracted her hand from his grip before she fell under some kind of enchantment. She reminded herself, sternly, that enchantments were over for her.
As if a prince would ever look to a woman like her to be a partner in his enchantment, anyway. Life was not a fairy tale! Fairy tales ended with happily-ever-after. And beyond the final line of the story—beyond the “the end”—was the unwritten expectation of babies. She guessed this was probably even truer for royal families. Weren’t they highly focused on heirs? On the continuation of their line?
“Prince Luca,” she managed to say. “Or Prince Antonio?”
Neither men offered to clarify who he was, so regaining her composure as quickly as possible, she said, “I’m Imogen Albright. I’m the Lodge manager.”
“My pleasure, Miss Albright,” he said. “It is Miss?”
The words were said with the deep composure of a man who was very used to meeting people in a variety of circumstances.
There was no need to feel as if his voice—deep, faintly accented, husky—was a caress on the back of her neck.
“Yes, it is,” she said, blushing as though it were a failure of some sort. She turned quickly and offered her hand to the other man.
“Cristiano,” he said briefly, taking her hand and bowing slightly.
She didn’t feel any jolt of electricity from his hand!
For a moment there was silence, and she rushed to fill it. “Obviously, you wouldn’t have flown from Casavalle in it, so how does one customize a helicopter with an insignia in such a short time?”
The Prince lifted a shoulder, but Cristiano answered.
“It was on order, anyway, from a North American company. We asked the delivery date be pushed up and changed the city of delivery.”
It made her very aware of the kind of power and wealth the Prince casually wielded—no wish too great to be granted—and made her even more aware, suddenly, of her own appearance. She was in faded jeans, the lumberjack-style shirt she favored for days with no clients and sneakers with bright pink laces! She didn’t have on a speck of makeup and her hair not only wasn’t up, but now it was windblown to boot.
She had planned an outfit suited to greeting royalty: a pale blue suit with a tailored jacket and pencil-thin pants, paired with a white silk blouse. She had planned to have her hair up and her makeup done.
“It’s a magnificent place,” Prince Luca said, glancing at the Lodge.
The two-story building was timber framed and stone fronted, and had a beautifully complicated roofline that made it fit in perfectly with the landscape of towering peaks around it. It was magnificent, and coming from someone who was no doubt surrounded with magnificence all the time, it was indeed a compliment.
And yet, even as he said it, she sensed, not insincerity, but a fine tension in him, as if the Prince was preoccupied with matters of significance. Again, his reaction to his surroundings made it seem as if he were not here for a relaxing holiday in the mountains.
When his eyes left the Lodge and returned to her, she glimpsed something in them that took her aback. He didn’t just look preoccupied. There was a shadow of something there. Distress?
Which begged the question again: Why was the Prince here? To heal some wound? The thought made him seem all too human. Insanely, it made her want to step toward him, look into the astonishing familiarity of his brown eyes more deeply and assure him everything would be all right.
How silly would that be, especially from her, from someone who had ample evidence everything was not always all right?
“I’m sorry, Your Highness,” Imogen said, avoiding a name altogether. “We weren’t expecting you today.”
“I believe a message was sent,” Cristiano said, a bit stiffly, as if she had insulted his competence, “to your cell phone.”
Since it felt as if her own competence might be in question, she felt compelled to defend herself. “Our satellite reception here is beyond spotty, so cell phone service can’t really be relied on here. It’s because of the forests and the mountains. I’m very clear about that when people book.” She realized she sounded as if she was justifying herself, so added, “I see it as part of our charm.”
The Prince tilted his head at her, considering this. “Is our early arrival a problem, then?”
“No, of course not.”
Yes, it was a problem! It was very nearly dinnertime and the chef had done all the meal planning, not Imogen. What was she going to offer them? A peanut butter sandwich? “It’s just, um, we aren’t quite ready,” Imogen said. “The chef won’t be arriving until morning. And the cleaning staff isn’t quite finished up.”
“I trust you’ll overcome these difficulties,” the Prince said.
His voice was so beautiful it sounded as if he had said something outrageously sexy instead of something extremely mundane.
Of course she would overcome these difficulties. Even though she wasn’t the greatest in the kitchen and cooking department, the Lodge was well stocked.
But before she could figure out the specifics of how she was going to overcome these difficulties, the crisp mountain air was split with a scream from inside the Lodge. It sounded as if someone was being murdered.
The scream snaked along Imogen’s spine. She turned to the Lodge, frozen with shock. Neither of the men experienced that same paralysis.
They both bolted toward the front door, and she snapped out of it and ran after them, even as she registered surprise that the bodyguard would be running, with his Prince, toward an unknown situation.
The men, with their long legs, quickly outstripped her. Though neither man had ever been in the Lodge before, they must have followed the sound of wailing, and when she found them, they were squeezed into an upstairs bathroom with Rachel.
“Cristiano?” the Prince asked.
The bodyguard, on the floor with Rachel, looked up. His expression was calm, but his voice when he spoke held urgency.
“She’s going to have the baby,” he said tersely. “And she’s going to have it soon.”
“But she’s not due for another two weeks,” Imogen stammered.
“Where’s the nearest hospital?” Prince Luca asked her.
“There’s a walk-in