Affaire Royale (14 page)

This time she jerked her hand away and rose. “I told you I won’t wear it.”

Before she could pull the ring off he was beside her. “And I told you you would. Think.” When she paused, the ring half off her finger, he continued. The tone he used was precisely the tone he used to draw the answer he
wanted out of reluctant suspects. Deals, he thought ruefully, were deals. “Would you rather swallow your pride and wear it, or explain every time you go out why you don’t have an engagement ring?”

“I could say I don’t care for jewelry.”

He grinned, touching the sapphires on her right hand, then the deep-blue stones she wore at her ears. “Could you? Some lies are more easily believed than others.”

Brie pushed the ring back on. “Damn you.”

“Better,” he said with a nod of approval. “Curse me as much as you like, just cooperate. It might occur to you, Your Highness, that I’m just as inconvenienced by all this as you.”

Trapped, she turned away. “Inconvenienced? You seem to be enjoying it.”

“I’m making the best of a bargain. You could do the same, or you can stomp your feet.”

She whirled back around, eyes flashing. “I don’t make a habit of temper tantrums.”

“Could have fooled me.”

She calmed, only because to have let loose would have gratified him. “I don’t like it when you make me feel like a child, Reeve.”

His voice was equally calm. “Then don’t object when I make you feel like a woman.”

“Have you an answer for everything?”

He thought of her, of what was growing inside him. Briefly he touched her cheek. “No. A truce for the moment, Brie. Before this business of the engagement came up we got along well enough. Look at it as a simplification.”

She frowned, but discovered she was willing to call a truce. Until she had her full strength back. “A simplification of what?”

“Of everything. With this”—he lifted her left hand again—“you won’t have to explain why we spend time together, what I’m doing here. As an engaged couple we can get out a bit, get away. People are tolerant of lovers escaping. You won’t be as tied to the palace.”

“I never said I felt tied.”

“I’ve seen you looking out the window. Any window.”

Her gaze came back to him and held. Abruptly she surrendered and, with a sigh, sat back on the window seat. “All right, yes, sometimes I feel closed in. None of this is familiar to me, and yet it isn’t altogether strange. It isn’t a comfortable feeling, Reeve, to feel as though you belong, but never being quite sure you won’t make a wrong turn and find yourself lost again. And the dreams—” She broke off, cursing herself. It was too easy to say more to him than was comfortable.

“You’ve had more dreams?”

“Nothing I remember very well.”

“Brie.” The patience wasn’t there as it had been with Franco, but the knowledge was.

“It’s true, I don’t.” Frustrated, she pulled her fingers through her hair. He saw his ring throw out fire against the fire. His fire, he thought. And hers. “It’s always basically the same—the dark, the smells, the fear. I don’t have anything tangible, Reeve.” For a moment she closed her eyes tight. Weakness was so easy. Tears were so simple. She wouldn’t allow them for herself. “There’s nothing for me to hold on to. Every morning I tell myself this could be the day the curtain lifts. And every night …” She shrugged.

He wanted to go to her, hold her. Passion he could offer safely. Comfort was dangerous. He kept his distance. “Tomorrow you won’t have to think about it. We’ll go out on the water. Just sail. Sun and sea, that’s all. There won’t be anyone there you have to play a role for.”

A few hours without pretenses, she thought. He was offering her a gift. Perhaps he was taking one for himself, but he was entitled. Brie looked down at her ring, then up at him. “Nor you.”

He smiled. She thought it was almost friendly. “Agreed.”

Like too many other things, Brie had forgotten what it was to really relax. Learning how was a discovery in pleasure, and one that was blissfully easy. She hoped that when other memories came back to her, they’d be as sweet.

Still, she’d found one more thing she could be certain of. She was as at home on the sea as she was on land. It was a simple pleasure—as relaxing was—and therefore an important one, to find that she knew her way around canvas and rope. If she’d been alone on the pretty little sloop, Brie could have sailed her. She’d have had the control, the knowledge and the strength. Of that she was certain.

She could listen to the noise of the water against the hull as the boat gathered speed and know she’d heard the sound before. It didn’t matter where or how.

She loved to sail. Everyone Reeve had spoken to had confirmed it. The idea for a day on the water had come to him when he’d noticed that the finely strung nerves, the strain and the depression hadn’t eased. Not as much as she pretended. She’d told him not to be kind, but it wasn’t always possible to follow even the orders of a princess.

Relying on his instincts, he’d let her take the tiller when they’d cast off. Now he watched her turn it slightly, away from the wind. In accord, he pulled in on the main-sheet to quiet and stretch the flapping canvas. As the boat sped across the wind, it gathered more speed. He heard Brie laugh as the sails filled.

“It’s wonderful,” she called. “The best. So free, so simple.”

The wind exhilarated her. Speed, on this first run, seemed to be imperative. Power, after being for so long under the power of others, was intoxicating. Control—at last she’d found something she could control. Her hand
was light on the tiller, adjusting, as Reeve did, whenever it was necessary to keep the pace at maximum.

Walls, obligations, responsibilities disappeared. All that was left was water and wind. Time wasn’t important here. She could push it aside, as perhaps she’d done before. As she now knew she’d do again. The sun was as it should be on a holiday. Bright, full, warm—gold in the sky, white on the sea. Holding the tiller steady with her knee, Brie slipped out of the oversized cotton shirt. Her brief bikini made a shrug at modesty. She wanted the sun on her skin, the wind on it. Skillfully she navigated so that she avoided any other boats. Privacy she wouldn’t sacrifice.

For a few hours she’d be selfish. For a few hours she didn’t have to be a princess, but only a woman, stroked by the wind, soothed by the sun. With another laugh she shook back her hair, only to have the wind swirl through it again.

“I’ve done this before.”

Reeve relaxed; the wind was doing the work for the moment. “It’s your boat,” he said easily. “According to your father, Bennett can outride anyone, Alexander can outfence the masters, but you’re the best sailor in the family.”

Thoughtful, Brie ran a hand along the glossy mahogany rail. “
Liberié
,” she mused, thinking of the name on the stern. “It would seem that like the little farm, I use this for an escape.”

Reeve turned to look at her. Through his amber-tinted glasses she looked gold and lush. Primitive, desirable, but still somehow lost. Whatever his inclinations, it wouldn’t do to be too kind. “I’d say you were entitled. Wouldn’t you?”

She made a little sound, noncommittal, unsure. “It only makes me wonder if I was happy before. I find myself thinking sometimes that when I remember, I’ll wish I’d let things stand as they are now. Everything’s new, you understand?”

“A fresh start?” He thought of his own farm, his own fresh start. But, then, he’d known where he’d ended, where he’d begun.

“I’m not saying I don’t want to remember.” She watched Reeve pull his T-shirt over his head and discard it.
He looked so natural, she thought, so at ease with himself. His trunks were brief, but she felt no self-consciousness. She’d been held against that body. Brie let herself remember it. He was lean, hard. Little drops of spray glistened on his skin. A dangerous man. But wasn’t danger something she’d have to face sooner or later?

Yes, she remembered his embrace. Should she be ashamed to discover she wanted to be held against him, by him, again? She wasn’t ashamed, she realized, whether she should be or not. But she was cautious. “I know so little,” she murmured. “Of myself. Of you.”

Reeve took a cigarette from the shirt he’d tossed on the bench. He cupped his hands, flicked his lighter, the movements economical. As he blew out smoke, he looked at her again. “What do you want to know?”

She didn’t answer for a moment, but studied him. This was a man who could take care of himself, and others when he chose. This was a man, she was all but certain, who made his own rules. And yet … unless she was very mistaken, he was a man who’d lived by rules already set for most of his life. Which was he doing now? “My father trusts you.”

Reeve nodded, making the adjustments as the sail began luffing. “He has no reason not to.”

“Still, it’s your father he knows well, not you.”

His lips curved. The arrogance was there again, she thought, no matter how elegant, how well groomed he was. It was, unfortunately, one of the most attractive things about him.

“Don’t you trust me, Gabriella?” He made his voice deliberately low, deliberately challenging. He was baiting her; they both knew it. So her answer, when she gave it, left him speechless.

“With my life,” she said simply. She turned into the wind again and let the boat race.

What could he say to her? There’d been no guile in her words, no irony. She meant exactly what she’d said, not merely the phrase but the intent. He should have been pleased. Her trust, theoretically, would simplify his job. So why did he feel uncomfortable with it, wary of it? Of it, he asked himself, or of her?

It came back to him now what he’d realized from the first moment he’d seen her again in the hospital bed. Nothing between them would ever be casual. In the same way, he was all but sure nothing between them could ever be serious. So he was caught, very much as Brie was, in an odd sort of limbo.

They were both, in their own way, beginning a new life. Neither of them had any reason to want the other complicating it. The truth was that Reeve had made himself a promise to simplify his life. Almost as soon as he’d begun, there had been the call from Cordina, and things had become tangled again.

He could have said no, Reeve reminded himself. He hadn’t wanted to. Why? Because Brie, as she’d been at sixteen, had stayed in his mind for too many years.

Since he’d come to Cordina, things had only become more involved. The bogus engagement had the international press kicking up their heels. A royal wedding was always good copy. Already three of the top American magazines were begging for interviews. The paparazzi were there like eager little terriers every time he or Brie stepped out of the palace.

He could have refused Prince Armand’s request that he pretend to be engaged to Brie. The fact that it was a logical solution to a delicate problem was outweighed by the nuisance value. But he hadn’t wanted to. Why? Because Brie, the woman he was coming to know, was threatening to stay in his mind for a lifetime.

Being with her, and not being with her, was like taking a long, slow walk a few inches over very hot coals. The steam was there, the sizzle—but it wasn’t possible to cool off or take the fatal plunge into the heat.

“That little cove.” Brie lifted her hand to point. “It looks quiet.”

Without fuss they began to tack toward the small shelter. She worked with the wind, coaxing it, bowing to it. Once the lines were secure, Brie merely sat staring across the narrow strip of water.

“From here Cordina looks so fanciful. So pink and white and lovely. It seems as though nothing bad would ever happen there.”

He looked with her. “Fairy tales are traditionally violent aren’t they?”

“Yes.” She smiled a little looking up at the palace. How bold it looked, she thought. How bold and elegant. “But then no matter how much it looks like one, Cordina isn’t a fairy tale. Does your practical democratic American mind find it foolish—our castles, our pomp and protocol?”

This time he smiled. Perhaps she didn’t remember her roots but they were there, dug in. “I find it intelligently run. Lebarre is one of the best ports in the world regardless of size. Culturally Cordina bows to no
one. Economically, it’s sound.”

“True. I, too, have been doing my homework. Still …” Brie ran her tongue over her teeth before she leaned back and circled her knee with her arms. “Did you know that women weren’t granted the right to vote in Cordina until after World War II? Granted as though it were a favor, not a right. Family life is still very Mediterranean, with the wife subservient and the husband dominant.”

“In theory, or in practice?” Reeve countered.

“From what I’ve seen, very much in practice. Constitutionally, the title my father holds can pass only to a male.”

Reeve listened, looking across the water as she did. “Does that annoy you?”

Brie gave him an odd, searching look. “Yes, of course. Just because I have no desire to rule doesn’t mean the law itself isn’t wrong. My grandfather was instrumental in bringing women’s suffrage to Cordina. My own father has gone farther by appointing women to positions of importance, but change is slow.”

“Invariably.”

“You’re practical and patient by nature.” She gave a quick shrug. “I’m not. When change is for the better, I see no reason for it to creep along.”

“You can’t overlook the human element.”

“Especially when some humans are too steeped in tradition to see the advantage of progress.”

“Loubet.”

Brie sent him an appreciative look. “I can see why my father enjoys having you around, Reeve.”

“How much do you know about Loubet?”

“I can read,” she said simply. “I can listen. The picture I gain is one of a very conservative man. Stuffy.” She rose, stretching so that the bikini briefs went taut over her hips. “True, he’s an excellent minister in his way, but so very, very cautious. I read in my diary where he tried to discourage me from my tour of Africa last year. He didn’t feel it proper for a woman. Nor does he feel it proper for me to meet with the National Council over budget matters.” Frustration showed briefly. She was, Reeve noted, learning fast. “If men like Loubet had their
way, women would do no more than make coffee and babies.”