The Royal & The Runaway Bride (Dynasties: The Connellys Book 7) Read online

  She thought about that for a moment. “I guess you’re right. It would be nice to have someone to be with, without getting all worked up about whether or not he loves me, or if he will or won’t be around a month from now.”

  “You see? It’s a liberating idea, isn’t it? And since you enjoy acting out other people’s lives, I’m sure you could pull off the role of the spoiled deb for my mother. I’ll even help you work on your dramatic skills.”

  “So you aren’t turned on by holding me this way?” she asked, still just a little suspicious. After all, she knew she wasn’t unattractive. And her ego did rebel just a little at the thought that he might not feel anything for her.

  “Turned on? No way. Might as well be hugging my sister.”

  She nodded. “In that case, let’s make a pact. We’ll be lovers, in the eyes of the world.”

  “In the eyes of the world,” he repeated as solemnly as if he were swearing on his life. But there was a glimmer in his amber eyes that didn’t seem to match his tone. “We need to seal our pact. Do you think a kiss would be appropriate?”

  “A businesslike kiss just to show neither of us has a chance of falling for the other, right?”

  “Absolutely.”

  They were already as close as two bodies could be. All he had to do was lean down a few inches. She smelled the sweetness of his breath as his lips moved over hers. They touched briefly, dryly, perfunctorily.

  “All right?” she asked.

  He scowled down at her. “That wouldn’t convince anyone I was hot for you.”

  “A problem,” she agreed. “Let’s try again.”

  Even though the first kiss hadn’t even approached passionate, Alex had felt something. It wasn’t a sensation she’d experienced before, with Robert or any other man. It was something between a tickle and a twinge down low in her body. It was a feeling she liked…and wanted more of.

  This time she rose up to meet Phillip halfway, and she opened her mouth as she would if the man she was kissing were a man she was in love with. She assumed the role, and he took her lead. His tongue flicked over her teeth and darted between her lips as he tasted her. She let her head fall back as she savored his kiss. As his hand came up behind her head to support her, he pressed harder, their kiss deepening. She felt a chill, then a blaze, then a mysterious and delicious warmth through every part of her body.

  Yes, this was a kiss that would convince anyone they were lovers.

  This was a kiss that might even convince her that Phillip, prince of Silverdorn, actually felt something for her. Even though he swore he didn’t.

  At last their lips slowly parted. They both were breathing heavily.

  “Well,” she said, her eyelashes fluttering, her pulse too fast, her flesh tingling as he released her, “that should do the trick, don’t you think?”

  Phillip cleared his throat and smiled weakly. “I suspect so.” He looked away from her, then took a deep breath. “It will be an effort, though. This acting stuff takes a lot out of a person.”

  More than you’ll ever know, she thought.

  Three

  The days passed, and Phillip cancelled both social and business engagements to remain at the estate. He didn’t miss his old routine, and he didn’t miss competing at the Paris Grand Prix, for which he’d been preparing over the past three weeks. The focus of his life seemed to have shifted without his noticing, but that was all right with him. He spent hours with Alex, sometimes just talking with her or sharing a meal, more often reading quietly in the same room with her. She had discovered his library and selected from it several first-edition novels she had read years before and loved.

  “Books are true friends that stay with you through your whole life,” she said sleepily one night. “They don’t criticize you. They’re never too busy to spend time with you, and when you’re reading—” she stretched and yawned, as contented as a cat “—you can transform yourself into anyone in the world.”

  One day while she was in his library, she came across three long rolls of paper. Thinking they might be maps of Altaria, she unrolled one and found it to be a diagram of a boat, incomplete but beautifully and carefully drawn. The others were also sketches of watercraft in various stages. She suspected Phillip had paid someone to custom design a yacht for him. Why not? He could afford just about any luxury he wished. She rolled up the sketches and stuck them back behind the books where she’d found them, giving them no further thought.

  As soon as Alex felt able to sit a horse, she asked Phillip to take her down to the stables and let her ride inside one of the rings. He was concerned about her reinjuring her shoulder but she waved off his objections.

  “I won’t try to ride Eros, but if you have a horse that’s a little more dependable, I could use some exercise. I don’t want to get rusty,” she added, sticking to her horse trainer’s image.

  “I know just the horse for the recuperating wounded,” he said with a wink that set her smiling.

  He had arranged for her clothing to be brought from the castle days earlier, so she had her own riding clothes to change into that morning after their Continental breakfast of warm rolls, jam and coffee. Her arm was still in a sling, but she was insistent she could manage the reins with one hand.

  Phillip phoned the stables to have Maxmillian saddled for her. “Max is an old trouper of the Grand Prix circuit. He’s like riding a pillow.”

  She laughed. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that expression.”

  He grinned. “You’ll see.”

  Max was a gorgeous, wide-hipped, sixteen-hand-high Thoroughbred with chestnut coloring and golden eyes. He observed her calmly from beneath a black forelock. She patted him on the side of his thick neck, and said, “Let’s be friends, old man.”

  He seemed to listen to her and understand. She mounted him, and Phillip was right. He felt like a big, overstuffed sofa on hooves, broad and softly muscled between her thighs, moving at an effortless and smooth gait. She barely felt any rise and fall in his canter. His gallop was flat and easy, like silk drawn through the Mediterranean air.

  Phillip had said he no longer jumped the horse competitively, but the animal was capable. She didn’t want to force Max beyond his limits, but when she turned him toward a low rail, the gelding took it easily and seemed happy to do more. She cleared two feet with him, then a three-foot wall, but stopped at that because her shoulder was starting to hurt.

  When she brought Max around to the gate and stopped, Phillip was watching her appreciatively. “You look great up there.” His eyes were intense, reminding her of their shared kisses. Kisses she had thought about far too often in the past days.

  “He’d make anyone look wonderful,” she said with a sigh, leaning down to hug the horse’s gleaming neck. “We should arrange for him to give Eros lessons.”

  Phillip chuckled. “Now there’s a thought. One horse to another. Leave humans out of the picture entirely.” His gaze shifted, and she followed it to the water’s edge, below the long expanse of manicured lawn.

  A flock of sailboats skimmed the azure water. Phillip’s gaze grew distant, dreamy.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “It’s been ages since I took time off to sail.”

  “You have boats. Why not go for a sail?”

  “I do have boats,” he said. “But not the one I want.”

  “So buy it,” she said simply.

  His wistful smile caressed the distant water. “It doesn’t exist.”

  Alex lifted a leg over Max’s head and slid off to the ground. The landing jolted her shoulder and she winced.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, coming around to face him.

  Placing a hand on her good shoulder, he looked over her head. “It’s something I’ve dreamt of since I was a boy. A boat anyone could sail, and most anyone could afford. Nothing fancy, but perfect in design, seaworthy and large enough for a couple with their children.”

  She had never seen such an expression of pure love and l
onging in another person’s eyes. It must be wonderful, she thought, to be the object of those emotions. But Phillip wasn’t in love with a woman, he was in love with a boat. A fantasy boat.

  “Tell me more about it,” she prompted.

  He opened his mouth as if to answer her then slowly shook his head and the remoteness dropped away from his eyes. “It’s nothing. One of those things you invent in your head as a child and have to let go once the realities of adulthood hit you.”

  “Phillip—”

  He looked down at her, his expression suddenly blank. It was as if he’d completely forgotten their previous conversation. “So, what do you suggest I do now about Eros? Give up on him as a competitive jumper? I wish you could have seen him. He was magnificent.”

  Alex sighed in frustration but let him change the subject for the moment. “Don’t count him out yet. I still think if you take his retraining slowly enough, he may come around.”

  “But who’s going to train him? You said that using my regular trainer wouldn’t be a good idea.”

  She shrugged. “I’d like to try riding Eros again.”

  His expression darkened. “Perhaps on the flat, but I don’t know about—”

  “Listen, there’s something else you probably haven’t considered,” she interrupted with a new thought. “Maybe Eros was never meant to be a jumper.” She started leading the chestnut back toward the stables. “Just because he was trained to jump doesn’t mean it’s in his soul. Maybe he knows that better than anyone.”

  Phillip considered this new idea. “We’re trained to do a lot of things, aren’t we? You and I and everyone else. I mean, from the time we’re born there are expectations, roles, right and wrong things to do and say. It’s all pounded into us.”

  She frowned and handed Max’s reins to the stable boy, who walked the big creature into the stable. She looked up into the sun, almost at its zenith, but had to blink and turn her eyes away from the hot, orange sphere. “I suppose. Like, my parents have always had certain expectations about the kind of person I should be. They’d never, ever tell me I’d disappointed them. But sometimes I worry that I won’t be good enough for them…you know, be worthy of their love.” She swallowed and her throat felt suddenly dry and raw.

  Phillip touched her arm and gazed at her with compassion.

  “And my friends—I don’t dare guess what they think of me. Flighty Alexandra, she never knows what she wants or sticks to anything for long.”

  Phillip’s arm came around her and, without thinking about it, she leaned into the curve of his strong body. “Poor misunderstood Alex,” he breathed.

  “I guess I don’t make it easy on them,” she admitted. “One minute I’m sure I’m going to be the perfect wife and mother, just be happy with my little family. The next, I’m hot to take skydiving lessons. It’s always been that way with me.”

  She looked up at Phillip and was surprised by how intently he was listening to her. I could get lost in those eyes, she thought to herself with a shiver that wasn’t entirely unpleasant. I could sink into them like slipping into a warm bath and stay forever. “One summer I decided I wanted to be a dancer on Broadway.”

  “Before you got involved with horses?”

  “Yes,” she said, avoiding his too perceptive gaze. “Before then. I moved to New York and actually had the nerve to audition for the chorus in three different musicals.”

  “You’re kidding!” He laughed, but she didn’t feel he was making fun of her; he was just surprised by the idea. “Had you taken dance lessons?”

  “When I was a little girl, sure. But not for ages, and not at the level of the other dancers who were trying out with me.”

  “Did you get a part?”

  She snorted. “Not even close. They were polite—don’t-call-us, we’ll-call-you sort of thing. I didn’t go back to the theaters for the final word. By then I’d changed my mind and wanted to be a writer, a novelist.”

  “With your imagination, you’d probably do great,” he said encouragingly.

  “You think so?” She pondered that one. “Well, I didn’t give that career much of a go, either. I spent three months holed up in a moldy, Greenwich Village flat I shared with three other girls. I wrote all day and partied all night, at first. Then I wrote just in the mornings and the parties started earlier. In the end I wrote for an hour a day if I was lucky. That’s when I decided to be a librarian.”

  “A librarian?” His eyes sparkled with amusement, as if he wasn’t sure how much of her story was true and how much she was inventing to entertain him.

  She nodded. “The scholarly type, with horn-rimmed spectacles, hair pulled into a bun, whispery voice. But I found out you needed a degree for that, and I didn’t want to go to school anymore, so that was that.”

  “My little chameleon,” he murmured.

  She was shocked not by his comparison, but by his use of the pronoun. My. She wondered if he’d even heard his own words.

  After a moment he continued. “I have a proposition for you,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “We’ve already agreed in theory to help each other out. As long as you’re available in this part of the world, you will be my significant other. In return, I’ll fend off Robert if he shows up, since I’m your new love interest and will be the very jealous type.” A sexy sparkle lit his eyes that made her suspicious of his motives, but he continued too quickly to allow her time to figure it out. “As part of your job, you can start by helping me out of a tight spot with my mother.”

  “Your mother,” she repeated. “How’s that?”

  He walked her back toward the main house. “She wants me to meet the daughter of an old school friend of hers. Apparently the young woman is spending a few weeks with Mother at her villa here on the island. I’m supposed to come for dinner sometime this week. You can accompany me and bring along your obviously active imagination.”

  Alex grinned. “Let’s see, I could be a princess from Eastern Europe, or even better, a dancer you met at a topless bar!” She laughed at the prospect.

  “That might be overdoing it,” he cautioned. “How about just being—” He broke off and frowned at her. “My God, I don’t even know your last name!”

  “Anderson.” It was the first one that came to mind.

  Alex looked up at Phillip, having half a mind to end her game and come clean right then and there. But if Phillip knew she was one of the heiresses he so despised, she sensed he’d no longer find her such good company. And she really was having a lot of fun with him.

  “Will you do it, Alex?” he asked eagerly.

  She ran her tongue between her lips and looked up at him. Their eyes met and, for an instant, she was convinced she would have done anything he asked. Anything at all. “I’ll try. Sure. Why not?” She aimed for a casual tone, then added impulsively, “If you’ll do something for me in return.”

  “What’s that?”

  She wasn’t really sure what she had in mind, but it seemed important that she strike a deal now. Who knew when she might need a favor? “I’ll let you know as soon as I figure it out,” she said hastily. “Now, when is this dinner?”

  The night of Genevieve Kinrowan’s dinner party, Alex removed the muslin sling the doctor had given her. The joint felt only a little stiff when she tried to move it, but the ugly thing didn’t advance the image she had imagined for Phillip’s lover. And that was who she would be that night, his new mistress, at least as far as his mother and her guests were concerned.

  She wore a white gauze dress that came up in a halter and looped around her neck before dipping low between her breasts. To give herself an airy summertime look, she chose a silver jewelry set with turquoise that she’d bought in Arizona on a trip with friends. Her black hair was moussed into a short, sophisticated style that bared her long neck.

  When she glided down the stairs of Phillip’s house into the foyer, he looked up at her, and for a moment there was astonishment and something more in his eyes. “You l
ook unbelievable,” he said and held a hand out to guide her down the last two steps.

  “Is that good or bad, as far as your mother is concerned?” she asked.

  “Very good, as far as I’m concerned, too.” He threaded her hand through the crook of his arm.

  He wore a tuxedo that had been tailored for him. She admired the workmanship and wondered if it was Italian or English—the cut was unusual with broader shoulders and a slimmer waist than most, but then it might have been cut that way to fit his muscular physique.

  A midnight-blue Mazarati was parked out front and that was what they drove to his mother’s villa on the far side of the island. He had put the top down, and the wind ruffled Alex’s loosely tousled hair. In a playful mood, she was prepared to put on her best act. She imagined little things she might do to show she and Phillip were involved—a brush of her fingertips along his lapel as she flicked off imaginary lint, a sideways glance and half smile that carried private meanings, positioning herself close enough to him in a circle of conversation so that her hip occasionally bumped up against his. She smiled to herself. A new role, and one she could really throw herself into with gusto. Fantastic!

  The villa wasn’t small or quaint or modest as some of the pastel stucco homes on the island that they’d passed. It was modern, glassy, perched arrogantly on a cliff overlooking a breathtakingly blue harbor as if it owned the scene spread before it. She immediately felt uncomfortable there, the way she felt with the people she’d called her friends all through her school days when she’d visited their lavish homes. She was used to expensive surroundings, but her parents’ home had always had a comfortable, lived-in feeling about it, with children’s toys strewn around and cozy nooks you could cuddle up in with a book. Here, like other homes built for the pure purpose of impressing guests or outdoing your neighbors, she felt on edge. All the more reason to become someone other than Grant Connelly’s daughter from Chicago.

  Phillip left the Mazarati in the drive and a valet drove it off to a spot on the lawn with a few dozen others. They walked through high wooden portals that were the front entrance to the house, past statues that could only have been classic Greek, not revival, and into a formal parlor crowded with guests in expensive clothes and far too much jewelry. It was a crowd Alex was familiar with but had never liked. She straightened, aware of the dull ache in her shoulder and regretted having removed the sling, then let her eyes drift half-closed in a bored attitude meant to belittle the glitz in the room.