Her Royal Husband (11 page)

A group of exhausted-looking men, covered in dust emerged from the mine opening, and Owen went to them next, shaking hands, clapping shoulders, speaking with each man in turn.

Again, he gave off incredible energy, she could see his presence lifting these men up both emotionally and physically.

Jordan needed to be useful, now. Enough people were standing here staring at Owen, as mesmerized as she was by the power of him, by the energy of his interactions.

Not far away, she saw a pagoda being erected, a tent with a roof but no sides. She had helped Meg cater enough outdoor weddings to know that’s where she would be able to help. The tent would mean food and drink for these exhausted workers, for the distraught families.

She unexpectedly caught Owen’s eye, gestured slightly. He understood immediately and she saw him nod, detected approval in that nod and was annoyed that it meant something to her.

Another set of hands was welcomed eagerly at the makeshift canteen. Aside from being teased about being a “Yank” no one questioned her being there, or asked who she was. She blended seamlessly with the team helping to get food and hot drinks ready.

Jordan spooned coffee into one of the giant percolators, began to boil water for tea or instant coffee in the meantime. When she saw chaos developing around the supply boxes, she used her years of experience in chaotic kitchens to help get people organized into specific teams with specific jobs to do.

With an assembly line of workers making sandwiches,
the coffee done, she grabbed a tray and loaded it with steaming cups and fresh sandwiches. She knew who the people were who would faint from hunger and shiver from cold before they would leave that mine shaft opening.

She moved among the families quietly, offering food and coffee. The tray emptied and she set it down to go in search of blankets. That woman in the worn coat was so cold her teeth were chattering. When Jordan came back and put a blanket over her shoulders, she was rewarded with a pat on the cheek, tired eyes meeting hers with gratitude.

To have offered small comfort was so humbling.

She was distributing the rest of the blankets to other family members who had left home too suddenly and with too little thought for their own comfort when she heard a collective gasp go up.

She looked over to the mine opening, hoping to see a successful rescue team emerging.

Instead, she saw Owen pulling overalls over his suit, shoving a hard hat over his ears, picking up a shovel.

She recognized one of the secret service men from the helicopter flight was close to her, and wondered why he wasn’t with his prince.

“Should he be doing that?” she asked the man, a nice-looking fellow, with short-cropped blond hair.

He looked at her, and obviously recognized her as well. He shook his head, resigned, looked back toward Owen. “When the prince has made up his mind to do something, there’s not much point in arguing.”

“Shouldn’t somebody be ordering him not to go down there?” she demanded.

He gave her a look that suggested Americans had such limited understanding of how other nations worked. He
explained patiently, “Prince Owen is the second highest ranking man on the island now, and there’s speculation that within weeks he’ll be the highest. Who’s going to give him an order?”

“But aren’t you supposed to protect him? Isn’t it going to be dangerous down there? Geez, he’s only twenty-three years old. And take it from me, he’s capable of being really dumb.” Was that a note of hysteria creeping into her voice?

The man looked as if she had spoken blasphemy, but let’s face it, he hadn’t been there five years ago when Owen wanted to bungee jump off a cliff on the California coastline.

Still, she didn’t like the way the man was looking at her. She felt like things she didn’t want anyone to see, things she had not even admitted to herself, were naked in her face.

His expression gentled. “Look at him,” he suggested softly. “Look at the way people are reacting to what he’s doing. He’s a brave man, and they need bravery right now. God knows, Broderick isn’t giving it to them.”

She did look. A quietness had come over the crowd. They looked solemn and sad, and yet there was no missing the love and devotion in the faces of those watching their prince.

“It is what he was born to do, miss,” the man said. “I can look after some things. I have to trust God to look after the rest.”

Owen turned at the mine opening, held up the hand with the shovel in it. He disappeared into darkness to a loud cheer from the crowd.

Owen, she thought indignantly, had just discovered he had a daughter. Why was he putting himself unneces
sarily in harm’s way? It made her feel furious with him. He wasn’t even qualified to go down there. What did he know about collapsing mines? About picks and shovels? He was an expert on picnic lunches, for God’s sake!

The fury evaporated as quickly as it had come. The strength of her emotion for him could no longer be denied. And now, Jordan understood finally, completely, what duty meant to him.

It had taken him from her arms in California.

It was sending him down a cold and dark mine shaft.

His duty. This was the destiny he shouldered. Owen’s personal life would always come after his public one. His first allegiance was to his people, his subjects, and looking at their faces as they watched him go into that mine, she knew he had not been born to their love, but had earned it, one act of selflessness at a time.

Sighing, she took more coffee to the families. She spoke to the mothers, told them she had a child, too.

She pressed several onlookers into mobile coffee service and went back to the canteen. They were getting soup ready and sandwiches, and she pitched in, feeding exhausted rescue workers, dispensing kind words and encouragement.

She made sure a constant flow of sandwiches, hot soup in mugs, coffee went over to the family members poised at the tunnel opening.

She was aware, as the hours disappeared, of feeling grateful for this opportunity of being out of herself. Her own problems and the confusions of her life seemed to dim as she performed these simple acts of service for others. She was grateful that a twist in the path of her fate had given her the skills to make herself useful.

She got her hands on a cell phone and called the palace, spoke briefly to Whitney, and found out, with riding
lessons now in progress, she’d hardly been missed. She didn’t know whether she was miffed or slightly relieved to see her daughter was more independent of her than she would have thought.

She talked to her aunt next, and even though she had absolutely no authority to do so, she promised she would try and send a helicopter. Meg wanted to send Dancing Chocolate Ecstasy for the rescue workers.

“Will you be able to make more in time for the banquet?”

“Banquet,
schmanquet,
” Meg said. “Obviously people there need my DCE right now. You now how mood-elevating it is. We can have Jell-O for the banquet if we have to.”

Smiling that her aunt sincerely believed food—and particularly her food—was the answer in any crisis, Jordan went and talked to the pilot. The helicopter left readily when she put in her request, and she went back to the makeshift kitchen.

As the minutes ticked by into hours, she became aware that she felt like she was holding her breath, waiting for Owen to reemerge from the black mouth of the mine. It was evident he wasn’t just putting in an appearance underground. He was staying until they found what they had gone down there for.

She would not allow the panic she felt at the thought of that mine collapsing, with him down there, surface. Nor would she allow the emotion behind such panic to come forward so that she could identify it.

The Dancing Chocolate Ecstasy arrived at about the same time as good news from the tunnel. Rescuers had now made a small hole in the wall of rock that blocked the tunnel. They were able to communicate with the children on the other side, and all were alive. One girl was
injured, it was not known how severely. She could speak, and was coherent, which lightened the mood of the gathering immeasurably. Also, with being able to communicate with the children the rescue was now going to progress far more rapidly.

Jordan dispensed the chocolate concoction to the crews, and delivered it personally to the families. Her aunt would have loved seeing how it put smiles on faces. Hope was taking a strong hold, and Dancing Chocolate Ecstasy made a wonderful underscore to that.

As darkness fell, people linked hands and began to sing softly.

Jordan had never heard the folk songs of Penwyck. They told stories of generations of people who had faced hardship and won, of people who were strong and hardy and courageous. She felt Owen in the sung tales of great heroism and courage that littered Penwyck’s history.

Candles came out, the singing faded, but the growing crowds quietly prayed and kept vigil. Huge electric lights came on.

She kept the coffee and food flowing, fighting off weariness. And then she heard a cheer swelling from the crowd. Jordan raced from the kitchen and made her way forward.

A stretcher came first, being carried by two men. One of them was Owen, almost unrecognizable for the layer of dark coal dust that lay over his features. Several men rushed forward to take his end of the stretcher.

The little girl on the stretcher was conscious, and medics rushed forward. Owen scanned the crowd and waved over to one of the service men. He gave him an order that sent the man running.

Owen returned to the child’s side. He knelt beside the stretcher, kissed her on the cheek, with great and abiding
tenderness. The secret service man returned, and unobtrusively passed Owen something. It was a small tiara, and he carefully placed it on her head. The child smiled with pleasure so great it appeared to erase her pain and dry her tears. Then the crowd roared, the night went white with the flash of cameras.

The other children, ragged and dirty, tear-stained and exhausted emerged from the mine in a tight little group.

Owen shook each of their hands, had a few words for each of them, accepted sloppy kisses and wiped tears from cheeks. And then as parents and families swarmed forward, he stepped back, and scanned the crowd.

And with her heart in her throat, she knew, this time, he was looking for her. She smiled, suddenly shy, when his eyes found her. He waved her forward, but she shrank back.

One thing she had never been comfortable with was the limelight. She went back to the kitchen, and put on fresh coffee for the exhausted rescue workers. They came and filled the tables, gulping down soup and sandwiches, polishing off Meg’s favorite dessert.

It wasn’t until a long time later, when the crowds were dispersed and the rescue workers had moved on to pack up gear, that she felt his presence behind her.

“Hi.”

She turned and looked at him. He was so handsome, his hair dirty, a smudge of dirt remaining across his cheek, a large rip in the coverall he was wearing revealing the sinewy strength of his forearm.

“The helicopter has taken Alicia to the hospital. And two other children. They want to observe them for the night. A car’s being sent for us.”

“It ended happily,” she said, not at all sure she
wanted to contemplate happy endings in such close proximity to him.

“Yes, it did.”

“An emergency tiara in your pocket. Incredible.”

He laughed.

“Why did you go down in there? When you didn’t have to?”

“Why did you come to work in the kitchen? When you didn’t have to?”

“I had to do something.”

“So did I.”

“What I did wasn’t dangerous.”

“Were you worried about me?”

“No!” She dropped her eyes from his. “Maybe a little.”

“Thank you for caring about me, even a little.”

But looking at him, she knew it was more than that. She took a deep breath and crossed the distance between them. She put her arms around him.

And was astonished when he did not return her embrace. Though he did not back away from it, his arms did not close around her, either.

She stumbled back from him, hurt. Maybe it wasn’t proper protocol to hug princes publicly.

He was watching her closely, and she saw a muscle twitch in his jaw.

“Please don’t be like the rest of them,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Anybody can love a prince, Jordan,” he said quietly. “But underneath is just a man, like any other. A man who is flawed. Vulnerable. I don’t need anyone else who can love me as a prince.”

Her jaw dropped open.

“I need,” he said, “one woman who knows who I really am, and who can love that.”

He was inviting her to love him. The real him.

“The car is here, Your Royal Highness.”

“Thank you.” He held out his arm to her, and as he did so, a photographer leaped forward and took a picture of them.

He suddenly looked grim and tired.

“Not now,” he snapped, but she noticed the photographer just smirked.

He looked at her as he handed her into the car, and he looked sad. “It’s no life to wish on anyone, is it?”

He climbed in the car beside her, and almost instantly was asleep. His head fell against her shoulder, and she touched his hair, stroked a cheek now rough with stubble.

A real man, who used all his energy, who could not go on endlessly. Who was flawed and vulnerable.

And as she looked at the sweep of his lashes against his cheek, she felt that familiar and frightening unfurling in her stomach.

Was she woman enough to love the man behind the prince?

The press decided to answer that question before she had even contemplated it fully. The next morning there was a knock on her door, and Owen came into her bedroom.

“I’m sorry to wake you so early. I wanted to be with you when you saw these.”

That picture of Owen kissing the little girl and putting the tiara on her head was in full color on the front page of a dozen different international papers.

But many of the papers also carried a second picture: a dreadful picture of a girl in kitchen clothes, with her
hair sticking straight up riding in a carriage, smiling and waving goofily. In some pictures of the rescue scene, Jordan had been picked out of the crowd, pulled from the rest of the photo with a circle of light. And they all seemed to have that picture of him putting his arm around her.