The Prince's Bride Page 12

  Behind her she thought she heard Jonas call, “Hope? Hope? Where are you?”

  But she could have been wrong. Anyway, she couldn’t face him.

  His Serene Highness. Oh he was serene all right. Telling her bare-faced lie after lie! Getting his fellow Rangers to cover for him! For they all had to know, didn’t they? Probably those Boy Scouts at the rescue knew too. Now she came to think about it, one of them even called him “principe” didn’t he? And she’d wondered vaguely if the word meant a winch! And even before that, when the head-scarfed lady had curtseyed to him, Hope had written it off as a quaint local custom.

  How could I have been so stupid?

  She heard the sound of running feet behind her and broke into a sprint. She was not going to be caught and questioned by Security. She was not going to admit she even knew their damn Serene Highness, damn his lying eyes.

  Only, of course, it wasn’t Security. And, also of course, he knew the chateau grounds too well. She pelted round a ten-foot box tree, topiarized to within an inch of its unfortunate life, and ran straight into a familiar chest.

  “Oof,” she said, recoiling.

  Jonas steadied her by her elbows. Her shoes flew out of her hand. Neither of them noticed. He was carrying the lantern that had nearly discovered her and was breathing hard.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “Bit late for that.”

  Hope was shaking so hard, she could have been at the North Pole. Dammit, even her teeth were chattering.

  He said in his reasonable, I-know-I-can-make-you-agree-with-me voice, “I know. I messed up. I’ve been trying to tell you but things kept getting in the way. I wanted to take time to do it properly, explain, find the right moment. I’m sorry.”

  “You lied to me.” Even to herself, she sounded as if her vocal cords were coated in ice. Well it was better than weeping and shouting and trying to claw his eyes out. Wasn’t it?

  “Actually, I didn’t lie, you know. I always told you my real name.”

  Hope huddled her arms round herself. God, she was cold. Right through to her bones. She felt as if she’d walked under that forest waterfall and found that the water was straight off the snowfields. The sensation of melting ice cascading down her spine just went on and on.

  “My father used to say things like that,” she said remotely. “I didn’t lie. I just left bits out. They could have found everything out if they’d bothered to check. He believed it. Do you?”

  Jonas flinched. “Ouch.”

  “Odd, isn’t it? With my family history, you’d think I’d check everything that anyone tells me. I do, most of the time. How odd that I should have decided to trust you.” Her words bit.

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  She made a dismissive gesture. “Whatever.”

  He shook her. “Hope, listen to me.”

  “Take your hands off me.”

  He started to swear and bit it off with an almost visible attempt at self-control. “I never meant to deceive you.”

  She laughed. It was a horrible grating noise.

  Jonas began to sound alarmed. “Look, I’ve got to ...”

  “... go and dance with the Lady Mayor of Liburno. I know. Off you go.”

  He pushed a distracted hand through his hair. “Yes. OK. I do have to. But we can talk afterwards.”

  She backed away, barefooted on the cold grass, staring at him in the lantern light as if she had never seen him before. She nearly tumbled over one of her discarded shoes. She scooped it up and, with the accuracy of concentrated fury, launched it at a statue of a droopy-looking lady in dangerously loose draperies. The impact echoed round the silent garden.

  “Hope, for heaven’s sake,” he said, half laughing, all charm and negotiating skills. “Just come back with me.”

  Hope really hated him then. “So you can smarm me into saying it’s OK? It’s not OK.”

  He took her by the shoulders. She went rigid.

  “Look, we can work this out. I’m sorry there was a misunderstanding ...”

  “No misunderstanding,” said Hope icily. “You lied. The end.”

  She felt turned to stone by his deceit. She stepped back and his arms fell. He seemed bemused.

  “We are so over,” she said. “And just in case you were thinking of it – don’t contact me again.”

  Chapter Eight

  Hope decided to go home to Combe St Philip.

  It was a first. Ever since she was eighteen, whenever she had setbacks or problems, she sorted them out herself. She never ran home to her brother.

  She’d always reasoned that Max had more than enough on his plate, with an ex-wife who couldn’t make up her mind whether she wanted to keep him on a string or not, and two small children he adored but didn’t see enough. Not to mention an estate that Gerald Kennard had run to near-ruin and a house that had been in the family forever, with all the endless repairs that entailed.

  But this time was different.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to Mrs Anton. She tried to sound as if she was genuinely contrite but the ice round her heart was a mile deep by then and it didn’t really work. “I can’t take the job, after all. I need to go home.”

  Mrs Anton didn’t argue. She’d taken one look at Hope’s face in the morning and been angelically incurious ever since. “Whatever you want, my dear.”

  Explaining to Poppy was harder. The little girl tried gallantly not to cry but her lower lip quivered and she held tight to Moby. “Will you come back when you’ve been home?”

  Hope managed to say, “I don’t know,” and make it convincing.

  The ice cracked a bit when she said goodbye to them. Girl and dog stood on the station platform, waving as long as she could see them and probably longer. Hope had to swallow hard and blow her nose several times before she could put that out of her mind.

  Of Jonas, she tried not to think at all.

  There had been several calls to her cell phone from a number she didn’t recognize. The resolution not to pick up was like a physical pain. But the memory of him saying, “Actually, I didn’t lie,” hurt worse.

  She’d thought she’d learned. She’d been proud of her instincts, her judgement. Again and again, she’d turned away from people because something had told her that she couldn’t trust them. That, even if they didn’t exactly lie, they left out the really important things. She had been so sure ...

  And then Jonas Reval had called her a dryad and she’d just thrown it all away. She hardly noticed the gaps in what he’d told her about himself. She laid out her history for him, like a map. But he hadn’t told her anything about his home, his upbringing. Just stuff about his student days. And who knew how much of that was real? Cooking pasta for a bunch of musicians? Would a prince really do that? Or would he just say he did it to lull a stupid foreigner into having a four-week affair? Because he’d known exactly how long her job with the Antons would last. She’d told him herself.

  Oh, he was good. Hope flayed herself with that thought. She was no better than a teenager with her first crush on a boy. All that experience, all that time travelling and meeting people and learning – wasted! And now she was right back where she’d started, weeping because love put a blindfold on you and left you to fall off a cliff.

  No more weeping, she promised herself.

  And then her own thoughts caught up with her. Love put a blindfold on you.

  Love.

  How had she never said that before? Not to Jonas. Not to herself. But it was true.

  She loved him.

  She knew it with absolute certainty. Now that it was over.

  She leaned her head against the train window and let the tears seep out of her until she had none left.

  Before she changed trains, she went to the rest room and splashed cool water on her face, especially her puffy eyelids. She even combed her hair. Then, on a rare whim, applied a little lipstick. By the time she saw her brother, she was going to be her own woman again.

  And three day
s later she got out of the taxi that brought her from the station in the nearest market town.

  “Drop me by the Market Cross,” she told the taxi driver. She didn’t want him to drive her up to the front door.

  The last thing Max needed was for her to get the family all over the tabloids again. And there was a real chance that the paparazzi would still be interested that Hope Kennard, the fraudster’s daughter, had come home to Hasebury Hall at last. The news would seep out eventually, of course it would, in a village like Combe St Philip. But Hope had every intention of being safely under cover in London, by that time.

  She said so to Max, when she eventually tracked him down in one of the great glasshouses at the far end of the kitchen garden.

  He was repotting a forest of seedlings, grim with concentration, and didn’t notice her approach at first. But when she said, “Hello, Max,” he looked up and stared as if he couldn’t believe his eyes.

  “Hope?” He flung the trowel away from him and rushed to pick her up in a bear hug, muddy gardener’s gloves and all. “Oh, Hopey, it’s good to see you.” And he swung her round until her feet left the ground, just as he used to when she was a child.

  Hope began to laugh. And then she cried. And then he put her down and looked at her searchingly.

  “Sorry,” she said, scrubbing the back of her hand across her eyes. “Long journey.”

  “Hmm. Coffee?”

  He relieved her of her backpack, as he’d always done, and carried it ceremoniously up to the house, where he found some digestive biscuits and started to make coffee.

  Hope sank bonelessly onto one of the old chairs, looking round. The kitchen was bigger and emptier than she remembered, she thought. Of course, she was thinking of the big weekend parties her parents had held during the good times. The cook and her husband had been long gone before Hope actually left on her travels.

  “How have you been?” they said simultaneously. And then laughed.

  Hope made a gesture. “You first.”

  “Kids are fine. Ben likes his new form teacher. Holly’s going to be a ballerina.”

  Hope pulled a face. “That’ll be expensive.”

  Max grinned down at her. “I’m not worried. Last week she wanted to be a cavalier. That girl has a rich fantasy life.”

  “And the business?”

  “Surprisingly good. Landscape is a bit slow at this time of year, but the pot plants for offices project just keeps growing.”

  “Good. You deserve it.” Hope knew how much it had hurt him, when he had to sell off land that had been in the family for generations to meet their father’s debts, and how hard he had worked since to build a viable business to keep Hasebury Hall going. She tactfully didn’t mention his ex-wife, who’d moved on to a man who earned more and worked fewer hours.

  “And what about you?” Max put a mug of coffee in front of her and got milk from the fridge.

  “Oh you know. Bit of this. Bit of that.” Was she trying too hard to sound bright, Hope wondered? “I thought I’d come home and see spring this year. I love an English spring.”

  “Oh to be in England, now that April’s there?”

  “Exactly,” she said, grateful.

  “What about the kid you were looking after?”

  Hope managed not to wince. “She’s fine. Her parents are back now and she’s healing well.”

  “And the forester guy?”

  Hope was suddenly aware of great big solid lump in her throat. She just shook her head, praying that her eyes wouldn’t fill with tears.

  Max didn’t say anything.

  “Anyway, I’m tired of living in backwaters. I want me some metropolitan buzz. I thought I’d try Aunt Cindy, see if she can find me a job with one of her smart mates.”

  “London? Doesn’t sound your scene.”

  “Oh I don’t know. I’ll be a small fish in a bloody big pond.”

  “Are you going into hiding, Hope?”

  “I suppose I am,” she said on a note of discovery.

  He looked worried but, bless him, he didn’t criticize, much less argue. “Well, if you must, you must. And London’s certainly the place to do it. You can disappear like an eel in mud there.”

  “Sounds perfect.” She meant it.

  Aunt Cindy, when approached, offered enthusiastic help. Hope went to London.

  Cindy Grace was no real relation but she and her husband had been regular attendees at the big parties at Hasebury Hall for a couple of years when Hope was small. Cindy’s husband had died, about the time that Gerald Kennard was first arrested, and she had come to stay for a while. Then she had turned herself into a businesswoman and gone off to live in London.

  Hope always felt that she had nothing to hide from Aunt Cindy, who had seen the Kennard family at their lowest point. Besides, she liked her. So she was taken aback by the style of her home – overstuffed cushions and objets d’art on every available surface weren’t what she would have expected from the practical Mrs Grace, who had brought common sense and restored order to the distraught Kennard household.

  She gave Hope tea in an ultra feminine sitting room and grilled her gently in a manner worthy of an Ambassador’s widow. “How long are you back for?”

  Hope shrugged. “How long is a piece of string?”

  “No commitments elsewhere then?”

  “No commitments,” Hope agreed steadily.

  “Ah.” Cindy looked at her notes. “You say you have no qualifications or particular skills but you’re practical. Can you sew?”

  Hope nodded.

  “And you don’t mind what you do? Have I got that right?”

  Hope nodded again.

  “Well then, I have a job for you, if you’re interested.”

  Hope felt a great rush of relief. It had been like holding her breath for too long, having no job, trying not to think about Jonas, not knowing where she was going to live. “Oh, that’s great. Who with?”

  “Me.”

  “What?” Hope was appalled. Cindy had changed beyond belief, it seemed. If she wanted some sort of assistant, surely she could see that Hope wasn’t, well, girly or elegant enough? “I mean it’s very kind of you, but ...”

  Cindy looked amused. “Do you even know what I do, Hope?”

  “Um – no. Sorry.”

  Cindy waved her apology away as of no importance. “I plan weddings for people too busy, too fraught, or feeling too out of their depth to do it for themselves. We’re just coming into our busiest season.

  “I’m not good enough at sewing to make a wedding dress,” said Hope, even more alarmed.

  “Of course not. But it’s an essential skill for running repairs.”

  “Oh well then, I can do emergency mending all right.”

  Cindy beamed. “You could be a great asset. Though I’d like you to meet my assistant Natalya first. She’s what I call the troubleshooter. I’m more of a big-picture person. She fixes things. You’d be working with her, if you come on board. But I think you’ll get on. She’s another one with a suspected broken heart.”

  Hope froze.

  Cindy gave her a bland smile and picked up the phone. “Hi, Natalya. Would you join us, please?”

  That was when Hope realized that the suffocatingly pretty rooms she’d seen so far must be a business space. She gave a great sigh of relief, especially when Natalya turned out to be a jeans-clad powerhouse with a friendly smile and absolutely no patience with romance.

  “Basically, this business is event management with seriously loopy clients,” she said, showing Hope round the office downstairs when Cindy left them alone. “No matter what they come up with, you have to take it seriously, cost it and sometimes point out how it affects their guests. After that, if they still want to go ahead, you do it, even if the mother-in-law will never speak to the bride again.” She thought for a moment. “Unless it actually involves blood sacrifice, I suppose.”

  Hope gave a snort of laughter. “That bad?”

  “And then some.” Nataly
a had a lovely smile, like a mischievous monkey. “Fortunately, Cindy does all the diplomatic stuff. I’d just tell them to get real. But she says, ‘Oh yes, a sub-aqua wedding would be lovely,’ and then starts exploring issues like hair and photographs and how you get a tubby ninety-year-old aunt into a wetsuit. And they work it out for themselves. Mostly.”

  “So what would you want me to do?”

  “Support me. Do research I haven’t time for. Pick up and deliver stuff, especially if it’s urgent. Herd flower girls, under my direction. By the way, your weekends won’t be your own from mid May onwards. Is that a problem?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Welcome to the team.”

  Jonas was working like a demon. He was in the office before it was light and often stayed until midnight. He worked through lunch. His work output was phenomenal. He took no personal phone calls and turned down all invitations, including semi-official ones from the Palace.

  “The rest of us are going to run out of cases, if you go on like this,” joked his brother Carlo.

  Jonas just nodded and went back into his office. And closed the door.

  Carlo gave up.

  In the end Jonas did what he always did. He went back to the forest. “I’m going out,” he told his PA. “Won’t be back for the rest of the day.”

  He avoided the Rangers’ Centre and plunged straight into the trees. Eventually he stood still, listening for the sounds of small animals, the chatter of the stream nearby. He’d shared all those things with Hope. Would the waterfall still be carrying ice down from the mountains? Birds called whose names he’d learned as a boy in long walks with his godfather. He’d shared that with her too.

  None of his family understood about his feeling for the forest but Hope did. She’d said he knew the forest soundscape as well as he knew his own heartbeat.

  And then, in the scientists’ hideout what had she said? “I can hear your heartbeat. I’d know it anywhere.”

  Remembering, he felt again the astonishing tidal surge of feeling. Shared feeling. He would stake his life on it. They had been utterly together then. Totally open to each other. He hadn’t even thought of telling her that he was prince then. It hadn’t mattered.