The Prince's Bride Page 9

  Hope smiled at her. “Will it be good?”

  The girl flashed her a grin, recognizing a fellow world traveller. “They’ve promised not to yodel. That’s all I know.”

  The food was simple and well cooked with a hint of herbs that Hope didn’t recognize but found intriguing. By the time they’d finished eating, a three-piece band did indeed start up with a wild gipsyish tune. The waitress had pushed tables to one side, so the family could take to the floor in a big circle dance. Hope watched, fascinated.

  “What is it? Do you know?” she asked Jonas.

  He groaned. “Oh yes. We all had to learn it at primary school. What a Spanish friend of mine calls muy tipico, muy folklorico. It goes on forever.”

  Other diners were beginning to join in. The circle broke into two, with much laughter.

  “Can we?”

  “If you want to.”

  She hesitated. “Is it difficult?”

  Jonas smiled into her eyes. “Not if you hold my hand and let me drive.”

  She smiled right back and stood up as if she were floating about six inches above the floor. “Whatever you say.”

  Moby put his nose on his paws and sighed deeply.

  They joined the dance.

  Jonas held her hand tightly, twirled her energetically when appropriate, and rescued her when she started to go the wrong way. They ended breathless but unbruised except, as Jonas pointed out, from enthusiastic back slapping from the family and their friends.

  “Apart from that, I call it a hundred per cent success. We stayed upright!”

  “It was fun,” Hope said, when she got her breath back.

  Jonas laughed. “Ah, but this version definitely comes with a family viewing certificate.”

  “What do you mean?”

  His smile was bland. “There’s a more – er – authentic version. The women form an inner circle and go clockwise and the men circle outside them, going counterclockwise. You’re supposed to dance it on May morning under a linden tree to welcome spring and new life. Goes faster and faster.”

  “Sounds as if it would make you dizzy.”

  “That’s the whole point. When the music crashes out, the boys all chase the girl they want to catch. Lot of bruises in that one. Some couples have disappeared for days, too.” His hand tightened. “Speaking of which ...”

  Under the table, Moby sat up, alert.

  Jonas did not look at the dog. His eyes were intent and very, very serious.

  Hope caught her breath. “Yes. Let’s go home.”

  Outside it was quite dark now, with scudding clouds blocking out the moon. She thought he would take her back to the Rangers’ Centre to pick up the Antons’ car but he drove straight to the villa. They tore through narrow lanes she had never seen before. She thought that a couple of times he even shot off road completely, though she couldn’t be sure. The headlights made a tunnel ahead of them and they seemed to flash through it. His breathing was ragged. They didn’t speak.

  It didn’t take long. At the villa he drove round to the back and stopped. Moby sat up with an excited little bark. Jonas killed the headlights and jumped out to let the dog out. As Moby raced joyously off into the darkness of the garden, Jonas turned to Hope.

  “Just tell me one thing.”

  “Anything.”

  “You don’t sleep with the dog.”

  She walked into his arms, half laughing, half shaking with need. “The dog sleeps in the kitchen.”

  His arms closed round her, hard as steel. “Thank God for that.”

  She unlocked the kitchen door and they went inside. “We’ll have to wait until Moby’s tired himself out,” she said apologetically. “Otherwise he howls in the middle of the night.”

  He kissed her lingeringly. “Whatever. By the way, I meant to ask – did you get to look at the press release?”

  She shook her head. So he brought out his smartphone and called up the page on the forest website. It just said that one person had been slightly injured but it didn’t have a word about the rescue.

  Hope let out a little puff of relief. “I hadn’t realized how jumpy that made me,” she said almost to herself.

  Jonas nodded. “Do you want to talk about it? Tell me why, maybe?”

  She hesitated. She’d taken a policy decision years ago never to try to hide her father’s chequered history. Well, she had told Jonas about it, first chance she got. But the effect on her teenage self, especially when a couple of journalists targeted her – that was different. She hated thinking about it, much less telling anyone. It made her feel weak and needy and oddly ashamed.

  There had been a photograph of her, an awkward fourteen in her first full-length gown, at the birthday party of one of the girls at her posh boarding school. The tabloids had bought it from the so-called friend and regularly trotted it out whenever they did a piece on her father’s crime. Sir Gerald Kennard and his socialite daughter was the usual caption. The story would hint that her father had defrauded all those people while he went to their parties so that Hope could live a celebrity lifestyle. And of course some people had believed it.

  She tried to explain it now, haltingly. “The crazy thing is, I hated the big dances. Still do. Won’t go near them. And I’m never wearing a ball gown again.” She swallowed. “Someone spat at me in the street once.”

  Jonas was appalled.

  “Not in the village, of course. My mother had taken me to town, shopping. That was always her comfort recreation.” She gave an unhappy smile. “She whisked me away of course. Told me it wasn’t my fault. Nobody who knew me would believe the stories that the papers were printing. But it gave me a bit of a phobia about the press. And I’m still not great about going into clothes shops.”

  He hugged her. “I’m not surprised.”

  She rested her head against his shoulder. It felt good. She could almost feel the old hurt slide away. At least she could look at it now without wincing. Maybe she could even probe a little deeper ...

  “I had to change schools. I was glad to get away, to be honest. I didn’t like boarding school. The girls were cliquey and their mothers all hated mine. She was a bit of a flirt, to be fair, and the fathers probably made too much of a fuss of her. But then, when I went to the local school, there were a couple of photographers who hung round the gates, trying to get a shot of me looking miserable. They wanted to publish some stupid story about me getting my comeuppance, my brother said.”

  “And did they?”

  Hope gave a hard laugh. “No. I went into school every day with a manic grin on my face and came out the same. So they never got the shot they wanted. But just having them hanging round made some of the people at my new school think I was a – well, a spoilt wannabe celebrity, like they said.”

  That had been almost the worst time. Hope hated remembering it. If it hadn’t been for Ally and then Flora she would have wanted to die.

  Jonas sat like a rock, his shoulder steady and somehow homelike.

  Hope rubbed her face against the cloth of his jacket. “It’s kind of made me want to duck whenever anyone points a camera at me.”

  “And I suppose that’s why no Facebook page or anything?”

  “Yes. I got used to having no social media presence and then I didn’t miss it. I email my mates. I’ve never wanted to go back.”

  “Do journalists still hound you?”

  “Not really. Sometimes someone digs a bit when there’s a new fraud case and wants to know what happened to us. My brother tells me about it. He has to have a Facebook page, Twitter, Instagram, the works. He runs a landscape gardening outfit and needs it for his business. So they get in touch with him. Or they go to the village pub and try to dig some dirt. The landlord runs them out.”

  “Is that why you don’t go back home?”

  “No. That’s just me wanting to find out who I am.”

  “You mean apart from the paparazzi’s victim?”

  Hope shook her head. “Apart from the under-educated girl with no i
dea what she was good at or what she wanted to do,” she corrected.

  “But it still hurts.” He sounded really tense, as if it mattered to him. As if he couldn’t bear what had happened to her.

  She wanted to comfort him. “Hey,” she said. “It was a long time ago.” And realized that it was true. She stopped nestling in his shoulder and reached up to bring his mouth down to hers. “Let’s get the dog in and go to bed,” she whispered.

  They did. She pulled out Moby’s bed from the cupboard, then locked the kitchen door and hid the key where Mrs Anton had told her, all on autopilot.

  They went upstairs hand in hand.

  Hope felt a moment of strangeness when they went into her shadowed room together. The tension had been building all evening, tiny notch by notch. She’d expected it, welcomed it, unfamiliar though it was. It was exciting. And yet now, here, there was this feeling that she had walked into another universe where she couldn’t be sure of anything any more. Not Jonas. Not herself. Least of all herself.

  Then he started to undo her shirt, kissing the exposed flesh button by discarded button. And she remembered the scent of his hair, the taste of his skin and she knew his heartbeat. The universe flipped back to normal.

  It seemed almost at once there was sunlight streaming through Hope’s window and she was waking up to the sound of a man looking for his shoes.

  “Huh?” she said, swimming reluctantly up to consciousness.

  “Good morning.”

  That brought her awake fast. She shot upright on the pillows, realized she was naked and slid down again, holding the sheet to her breast in what she hoped was a casual manner. Though it was ridiculous after what they had done last night. But that was in the dark and now the spring sun was insolently bright on the devastation of last night’s activities.

  There was a pillow lying on top of the dressing table. Remembering the circumstances in which she had kicked it to the ceiling, Hope blushed.

  Jonas followed her eyes and grinned. He flipped it up and tossed it over to her.

  Hope stuffed the pillow behind her. One-handed, of course, while she retained what she hoped looked like a firm but nonchalant grip on the covers.

  “Th-thank you.”

  The bed creaked as he sat on the side and bent to give her a quick, casual kiss. As if they had woken up together before, hundreds of times instead of just twice. “How you feeling?”

  “Not really awake yet.” It was even the truth.

  “Wish I could stick around and wake you up properly. But it’s tree-lopping day down in the forest.”

  He kissed her again more lingeringly. He was clearly a morning person. Hope relaxed her convulsive grip on the covers and one hand slid round his shoulders.

  “I can’t,” he said thickly after a prolonged and pleasant interval. “It’s an early start. I promised Klaus.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” She let go at once.

  “Yeah, so am I.” He released her much more slowly and only after another long kiss.

  As if he were committing it to memory, thought Hope. She was amused but deeply touched too. She stopped caring that she was naked and swung her legs out of bed.

  “I’ll make you coffee at least.”

  But he stood up, shaking his head. “No time. Gotta go.”

  But he didn’t. Instead he gathered her to him and wasted several more minutes when he could have been on the road. Hope decided that being naked was a positive pleasure when you were in a full-body lock with a man who had all his clothes on and wished he hadn’t. It felt deliciously decadent. She wondered why she hadn’t thought of it before.

  “Don’t tempt me.”

  She opened her eyes wide. “Who’s tempting? Look I’m not even touching you.” And she took her arms away and waved them in the air teasingly.

  He groaned as if he were really in pain.

  She beamed.

  He let her go. “I’m going. If I don’t you’ll eat my soul and I will lose my reputation as the most obsessive volunteer on the books.”

  Hope could not stop smiling. She could feel it from her eyebrows to her toenails. “Poor lamb,” she crooned.

  “I’ve never been late for a working party call in my life. Oh the hell with it ...” and he reached for her.

  But she sidestepped neatly. “I could never come between a man and his responsibilities,” she said primly. “On your way, hot shot.”

  He laughed. And went.

  Hope shrugged herself into the glamorous garment on the back of the door: a black velvet full-skirted robe – thank you, Mrs Anton – stuffed her feet into flip-flops and pattered after him. She caught him up on the stairs.

  He raised an eyebrow, but he was already into man-going-to-work mode, with his jacket slung over one shoulder and the car keys in his hand. “I wasn’t joking. I really don’t have time for coffee.”

  “I know. But you may not be able to get out of the house without me. Did you see where I put the kitchen door key last night? It’s a blank. Mind you, I’m quite proud that I remembered to lock up last night at all, given the distractions.”

  His eyes gleamed. “Impressive.”

  He clearly remembered the distractions as well as she did. It was incredibly sexy. Hope gave a small voluptuous shiver and his eyes darkened.

  “I focus well,” she said sedately.

  Jonas folded his fingers round hers. They went down the rest of the staircase hand in hand.

  Hope led the way to the kitchen. The key wasn’t on its proper hook in the secret cupboard but Jonas found where it had fallen and handed it to her. Hope gave a big sigh of relief and unlocked. Jonas drew back the big bolts and opened the door onto a bright, cold day. He turned to say goodbye.

  But Hope shook her head and knotted the tie of her robe tighter. “I’ll come and see you off.”

  She walked with him to his car and stood watching, while he threw the jacket into the back. There was a film of moisture over the car, completely obscuring the windows. She found a tissue in the pocket of her robe and started to clean a wing mirror absently.

  He took the tissue away from her. “I’ll do that. Don’t get cold.”

  “No, I won’t.” She didn’t move.

  He took her hand and swung it gently.

  “I’ll call you.”

  “Yes.”

  Hope looked at his mouth. God, he was gorgeous.

  He said raggedly, “Don’t do that.”

  She jumped and flushed scarlet. His fingers tightened.

  “Look, I’ve got to go and help the guys make the site of that fallen tree safe. I’m committed, God help me. And you need to get some clothes on.”

  Hope stood very still. It was so cold that the garden was white with spring frost. The breeze was icy. Yet for a moment all she wanted was for him to push her back against the cold, wet car and have her now. Just the thought of it made her gasp.

  It seemed he was reading her mind. His eyes flared. “You’re not serious?”

  She fell back against the car. The wind caught the skirt of her robe and wrapped it round Jonas’s legs. The velvet tie slipped. She was trembling with cold and lust. She tugged on his hand, just a little.

  For a heartbeat he resisted. Then, like a mountain tumbling, he crushed her against him. His mouth was hard on hers and his hands everywhere.

  Hope caught fire. She fumbled for his zip. Her hands were shaking. She found he was as aroused as she was and heard him catch his breath. It seemed more than she could bear. Fiercely she clenched her body against him, one leg round his waist, as she reached to guide him into her. The velvet tie finally gave way and the robe billowed. She hardly noticed. They drove into each other, wordless. Her blood thundered in her ears. I must, I must ... Her spine arched, her throat arched, the pleasure was almost anguish ... And then she crested the peak and was soaring on a great cry of triumph.

  Moments later he groaned and shuddered, like a glacier shaking itself free, and stumbled forward. He threw out one hand to brace himself ag
ainst the car to stop himself crushing her and buried his face in her hair. They were both breathing hard.

  For a long minute they stood where they were, both of them coming back to their senses, while the wind whipped her robe around them like a live thing. Then he took a steadying breath and shifted. Hope felt his lips move at her temple, where the pulse beat. Shaken, Hope she put up a hand to touch his hair. It felt crisp – and damp.

  “I – er – I think it’s raining,” she said in a small voice.

  Reluctantly, it seemed, Jonas raised his head and looked up. His chest was still rising and falling like a runner’s. A fine rain, not much more than mist, had closed in. He gave a choke of laughter.

  “Rain? More like thunderbolts and lightning. You know we’re crazy, right?”

  He put the back of his hand against her cheek. It was somehow more intimate than a kiss. She hugged him.

  But he was already looking at his watch. “And we need to start motoring.”

  “You’re going?”

  “We’re both wet, you’re cold and I’m late. Of course I’m going. You need to get warm.”

  He started to pull her robe together across her breasts to reinforce the point. But he was momentarily distracted and bent to drop a light kiss on her cold flesh before knotting the velvet tie tight again. Actually, not that light a kiss. Hope jumped at the heat of it.

  “Enough,” he said and she didn’t know whether he was talking to her or himself. “I’m going. I’ll call you as soon as I can.”

  He got into the car and drove off.

  Hope watched him out of sight. She was shaking convulsively, while the robe and her hair tossed in the wind. She didn’t notice. She couldn’t believe what she had just done.

  When the sound of the engine died in the mist, she turned and shot back into the house. It was nearly as cold as the outdoors. Her hands were clumsy on the lock and, when she looked, she saw that her fingers had gone white and were now turning blue at the ends.

  “Bath,” she said, hugging herself. “I’m a new woman!”

  Chapter Seven

  Jonas made it back to the Rangers’ Centre in time to shower and change into clothes he hadn’t been wearing yesterday. The Antons’ car was still outside, of course. Nobody was tactless enough to comment.