The Princess and the Duke (12 page)

He didn’t answer.

“It’s very beautiful through here,” she said, deciding that it was prudent, for now, to change the subject rather than pursue her hunch that the shadows in Pierce’s eyes had something to do with Major Fox. “I’ve always liked it in the mountains.”

He shot her a quick look as if he didn’t quite trust her easy retreat. “I grew up near here.”

“I know.” She tucked back a lock that had escaped her clip. “What
is
the event this evening?”

Pierce wished he hadn’t fallen back on that excuse to get Meredith away from Fox. Now he had to come up with something, and the something he wanted was the something he always wanted.

Him. Her. Together.

“I have to attend a dinner party,” he finally said. “For the base.”

“A dinner party that requires my attendance?” She crossed her arms, obviously piqued. “Can’t you simply ask me out in any semblance of a normal fashion?”

“I tried that the other evening at the library.”

“No, actually, what you did that evening was more in the form of a demand. ‘Have dinner with me.”’ She mimicked his low voice.

“You enjoyed it well enough.”

“True,” she admitted.

Pierce knew it had to be his imagination that he could hear the soft rasp of her silk-clad legs as she slowly crossed them. The wind was blowing around them, and the car engine was loud, so hearing such a
soft sound was impossible. A logical reasoning that did nothing to keep his senses from believing what they wanted. It didn’t help that her skirt was shorter than usual today. When she crossed those long, shapely legs, the charcoal gray fabric rode up above her knees.

She had beautiful knees.
She
was beautiful.

“Who is going to be there?”

He harshly marshaled his thoughts and named a few of his senior officers.

“And their wives.”

“Yes. They’ve made reservations in Sterling.” That, at least, was true. Though they’d be mighty surprised when he showed up with a woman. This woman in particular, as he’d never made any bones that he preferred not to socialize with the Penwycks.

She’d gone silent again, making him wonder what was ticking along inside her brain. “This is simply a social thing, then,” she finally said.

“Yes.”

“And you want
me
to go. With you. Together.”

“Yes. Dammit, Meredith, what is so hard to understand about it?”

She held up her hand. “After the evening at Horizons, you made it plain that you didn’t want to pursue a, um, a relationship with me.” She ticked off one finger. “Deliberately proven when you drove me home last Friday night with hardly a good-night despite the fact that we seemed to have had an enjoyable evening together.” She ticked off another finger. “And mostly because you’ve never wanted me anywhere with you that wasn’t an official event. Not even then, really. And certainly not in public.”

“There’s a first for everything, isn’t there.”

He felt, more than saw, her look at him, her mouth opening, but the engine suddenly spit, and steam rolled from beneath the hood. Swearing under his breath, he steered to the side of the road as far as he could near the stone barrier. “Get out of the car.”

“I didn’t take studies in auto mechanics, either.”

“Considering the narrowness of the road, if the car gets hit, better that you’re not inside it, don’t you think?” He climbed out and raised the hood, frowning at it, then at her when she came to stand beside him.

“Can you fix it, Doctor?”

“Have you always been such a smart-mouthed miss?”

She seemed to ponder that. “Unfortunately, I fear I have. It tends to scare off most men.”

“That why you’re still a virgin? You go around deliberately scaring off most men? What’s the deal, anyway? I know for a fact that Dr. Waltham has had you on birth control pills for years.”

Her jaw dropped, and her cheeks went red. “Well, Pierce, you certainly know how to stop a conversation.”

“I also know you had antibiotics a few years back and saw a chiropractor for a while when you took a tumble from your horse when you returned from university. And that, on the whole, you’re unusually healthy.”

“Such important matters for Intelligence,” she murmured, refusing to be any more embarrassed than she already was. “And the birth control is to, um, regulate things, if you must know.”

He nodded, seeming not in the least bit fazed by the utterly private matter.

“Though, frankly—” she sounded piqued “—if you know so many personal details about me, it’s a wonder you didn’t already know about my stellar love life.”

“I know about your health care. The rest was your business. But you’ve been giving me enough hints, Your Royal Highness, to get the gist.”

“Oh, no.” She shook her head. “None of that. Not while we’re discussing my, er, my…”

“Virginity,” he supplied. “It’s not a dirty word. You can say it.” Frankly, he’d been surprised when it had finally dawned on him. Surprised and unexpectedly moved. He’d never been one to take someone’s innocence, yet he was aware there was a damnable satisfaction deep inside him that no other man had touched her that way.

“My
decision,
” she said deliberately, “to not sleep around. Which, in any case, is none of your business.”

He saw the broken hose and knew he had nothing on hand to fix it. Which meant they had a walk in store. He could handle it. But Meredith’s sexy shoes would be another story. “Then why did you make it a point of hinting around about it?”

“I think there’s an oxymoron in there somewhere.”

“I think you suspect I’m not scared off so easily.”

Her lips pursed and her eyebrows shot up. “Colonel, I seriously doubt there is anything at all that scares you, least of all me.”

He ran his gaze over her, settling, catching hers. “That’s where you are wrong, Meredith. Because you are the one thing in this world that does scare me.”

S
he was staring at him as if he’d lost his head.

Obviously, he had.

He pushed down the hood until it latched and wondered what would have happened if he’d let nature take its course between Meredith and Major Fox. Pierce’s father had always warned that truths could never remain hidden forever. “I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do with this. We’ve got to walk. I’d call for assistance, but the cell won’t work up in the mountains.”

She seemed as eager to forget what he’d just said as he was. “Then we walk. At least it’s not raining.”

“Yet.” He looked at the threatening clouds. When the storm hit, it would be a devil of one.

She reached over the side of the car and pulled out her little square of a purse. “I’m ready.”

There she stood. The princess dressed in gray silk and sky-high heels, her long brown hair contained in a tumble of waves by a thin gold clasp. And he, an unwilling duke with grease on his hands and blood on his soul.

A more unlikely or ill-advised pairing he couldn’t begin to imagine. No matter what, though, he still seemed to head right down that path.

He waited for her to join him, making sure he walked between her and the road, on the off chance a car did pass. They headed in the direction from which they’d come.

He kept his pace slower than usual to accommodate her spiky heels, though she made no complaint. They’d been walking for quite a while when she finally broke the silence. “I might point out,” she said rather breathlessly, “that had I driven the car Dr. Herrold offered, we might not be in this situation.”

“
You
might not be,” he agreed. “But that hose would’ve broken whether you were with me or not.”

“Ah.” She smiled faintly. “But if I’d been driving the other car, I would have taken this route. As such, there would have been at least
one
car on this dratted road to come by and rescue you.”

“Nobody’s ever spoken about rescuing me. It’s usually the other way around.”

She wobbled when her foot slid on a stone, and caught his arm, steadying herself. “Maybe it’s time someone did rescue you,” she said softly.

Her eyes were serious, and Pierce suddenly wasn’t at all certain they were still talking about incapacitated cars. They’d come to a fork in the main road, and he guided her toward the smaller road.

“Where will this take us?”

He looked up the unpaved road that was nearly overgrown with grass and let out a long breath. He took her hand in his and headed forward. “Home.”

Home, Meredith soon learned, meant his parent’s home. The small cottage they’d shared with their only son. Her feet were positively throbbing, and as soon as he unlocked the front door and ushered her inside, she slipped out of her shoes, certain she’d never wear high heels again. “You’ve kept your parents’ place all these years? Do you come here often?”

“Not enough. Obviously,” he added as he dashed away a cobweb before she could step into it. “I don’t know why I hold on to the place, when it comes right down to it.”

She knew. He’d kept the house and property because it had been his parents’ home. His home. It was sentimental, and she knew he’d deny it if she said a single word to that effect. So she didn’t. Realizing it was enough.

Pierce went through the small living room, turning on lamps as he went. “Sit. I’ll get you something to drink.”

Despite her sore feet, she had no desire to sit and an insatiable desire to see every inch of the home in which he’d grown up, so she followed him to the small kitchen where he was filling a glass at the tap.

He handed it to her. “Do you
ever
follow instructions?”

“Not when they come in the form of orders from you,” she said with a sweet smile.

“I’ve noticed that. Nobody gives you orders.”

“Not even my father.”

“Maybe he ought to have.”

“He prefers a rousing debate with me, if the truth be known. Besides, I thought we agreed that I’m not the spoiled girl I once was.”

“Yes. Now you’re an intractable woman.”

“Because I let Bobby off for the afternoon? Because I didn’t sit when you said to do so? Please, Pierce, you would be bored stiff with an agreeable little woman who jumped to your every bidding.” She decided she was heading down a dangerous road and quickly lifted the water glass.

“Well,” he said after a moment, looking as if he were laughing at himself, “you definitely don’t
bore
me stiff.”

Her gaze immediately flickered over him, and realizing it, she flushed and headed into the living room after hastily finishing the water. There was a piano there, with framed photographs crammed on the top, and she stopped, peering at each one. The largest was a photograph of a young Pierce in his army uniform flanked by his parents. “You look like your father,” she murmured, picking up the frame.

“That was taken the summer before they died.”

She glanced back and caught the expression that flitted across his face. “You miss them.”

He didn’t answer that directly. “You remember my mother?”

“Of course I do.” She’d been slender, very tall and very blond, with a ready laugh and a gentle word for her students. “I’m sorry that I never met your father.”

“He was a tough old man,” Pierce mused. “He
didn’t take kindly to my enlisting. He wanted me to follow in his footsteps.”

“The Reverend Pierceson Prescott,” Meredith murmured.

“Yeah.” He ran his hand over his jaw, then through his close-cropped hair. “I thought about it.”

“Really.” She swallowed the jolt of pleasure that he’d actually shared something personal with her.

“You look surprised. What’s the matter? I’m not pious enough for you?”

“Oh, Pierce. Relax your jaw,” Meredith chided gently as she carefully set the picture frame into place. “I don’t think anything of the sort. It
is
hard for me to picture you having any career other than the military, though. It’s such a part of who you are. Just as I know at the center of you is a man of great faith.”

He set his glass of water down with a thunk. “How would you know that?
I
don’t know that,” he muttered.

He was serious, and her heart broke a little. She touched his arms, feeling the warmth and strength of him through the sleeves of his khaki-beige uniform. “Pierce, honor practically oozes from your pores. And what is at the base of honor, if not faith in a greater power?”

He caught her hands in his, enfolding them tightly. “I believe in doing the job,” he said flatly. “Honor has no part of it.”

She sucked at her lower lip for a moment. “I don’t believe that. You’re so much more than the job. Why do you refuse to see it?”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

“I told my mother just about that very same thing the other morning.” She quickly slid her fingers around his wrists, reversing the hold when he suddenly let go of her. “I was wrong,” she said urgently. “You see, there are some things I
do
know about you. I know that you command respect simply by entering a room. Not because your men and women fear you, but because they trust you. Your political judgments are rock solid, your economic and strategic wisdom immense, or the King would never have asked you to be part of the Royal Elite Team.

“I know you can be dangerously fierce when the situation calls for it, and I know you can be gentle and incredibly sweet, particularly with little girls who’ve dumped their ice cream on their toes.”

“Meredith—”

“No, let me finish. Please?”

“Could I stop you?”

“Probably not,” she admitted. “When I get something in my head—”

“You’re relentless.”

“I think I’ll choose to take that as a compliment.”

“If you must.”

She let out a little laugh, dropping her forehead to his chest for a moment before looking at him again. “See? This is what we end up doing. We dance around each other. And while, when it comes to verbal sparring, I’d rather do it with you than anyone else, I think we fall into that easy habit rather than deal with the more difficult issue of what we feel. Of what we
could
feel, if we let ourselves.”

“Meredith, you don’t want to know what I feel.”

“Yes,” she countered fiercely, “I do. That’s
all
I
want, practically. I can’t sleep at night because of you. I can’t focus on my work like I used to because of you. I thought, after that day at Horizons, that no matter what was between us, we were going to go back to generally avoiding one another. But then you kept showing up. We kept running into each other. And I think—no, I
know
you find it as impossible to go back to that limbo between us as I do.”

“Pardon my bluntness, Your Royal Highness, but that’s lust talking between us.”

“That may be part of it,” she agreed, feeling her cheeks grow hot. “I want you, Colonel. I’ve been painfully miserable at hiding it, lately. And I know you want me, whether you like admitting it or not. I’m not
that
naive. But if lust was all it was, then we’d have slept together long ago and been done with it. And you wouldn’t have told me not one hour ago that I scare you.”

“It is just sex.”

She knew him better than that. “Is it? What are you really afraid of here, Pierce? How could I possibly hurt you?”

He shrugged off her hands and grabbed his water glass, but he didn’t drink. “I told you before. I’ll end up hurting you.”

“Why?”

“Men don’t dally with royal princesses,” he said flatly. “Particularly virginal ones.”

Her face flamed. “I hate to tell you this, but I really don’t believe you’re the dallying sort, either. And don’t bother telling me it’s because you’re afraid my daddy will come tearing after you with a shotgun if he finds you’ve sullied his little girl.”

“He doesn’t need a shotgun,” he said blandly. “I believe there is a guillotine somewhere around the palace.”

She blew out an impatient laugh, throwing up her hands. “You know, Pierce, if you’d ever just open up about whatever it is that puts those dark shadows in your eyes, maybe you’d find it in you to enjoy life a little.”

“Does anyone else know what an active imagination you have?”

“Stop dismissing this.”

“Stop making more of it than it is.”

“Is it something to do with you being awarded the dukedom? You’ve never been comfortable with—”

“Hell. You’re worse’n a dog with a bone.” He shoved the glass on the piano and plowed his hand through her hair, dragging her onto her toes and planting his mouth on hers.

She swayed, fingers digging into his hard shoulders, and gasped when he let her up for air. “A dog? You’re the one who…mmm.” He kissed her again.

Her knees went weak. Her head fell back. His mouth burned over her cheek, her jaw, her earlobe. “Enlightened…women,” she gasped breathlessly, “do not appreciate the Neanderthal approach.” Her eyelids felt impossibly heavy all of a sudden, and some meager portion of her brain was aware that she was trembling wildly.

She turned her head, trying to find his mouth, but he eluded her, laughing softly, triumphantly, just like the Neanderthal he was, when she twisted her fingers in his short hair and pulled, dragging his mouth to hers with a demanding cry.

He’d said they were going home. He’d meant his parents’ home. She couldn’t help but think, though, when he finally capitulated—not with the hot, hungry kiss she’d expected, but with such softness, such exquisite, unexpected tenderness—that kissing him, being in his arms, was where the real home was.

Her palm slid to his jaw, her eyes filling. She knew he’d pull away, he always did. And she wanted to savor the moment. Savor the whisper-soft caress of his lips over hers, the pump of his heartbeat against her breast.

Yes, she wanted to feel his skin against hers. She wanted to be his in all the ways that could mean. But she wanted more than to share their bodies. She wanted to share what was in his head. In his heart.

Then he bent, and she caught her breath when he swept her into his arms. She grabbed his shoulders. “Pierce?”

His eyes were dark. Dangerous. “I want you. More than I’ve ever wanted anyone in my life. But I am telling you.
Nothing
will come of this. I’d have your innocence, and you’d have nothing. I could take you to bed and we could stay there for a month of Sundays. But that would be it. That’s all it will ever be. Is that what you want? Is that
all
you want?”

Her heart clutched as he carried her to the small chintz-covered couch and settled her on it. Her heart climbed into her throat.

She’d danced with heads of state, dined with the rich, the famous and the beautiful. She’d debated with scholars and she’d adroitly avoided proposals from billionaire oil magnates.

She’d never been so unsure of herself as she was
at that moment. “Because you don’t feel anything beyond that for me?”

He stepped away from the couch, arms akimbo, head bowed. She could see the tendons in his neck, the sinews in his forearms where he’d rolled up his shirtsleeves. A muscle in his jaw worked.

She sat on the edge of the aging, too-soft couch, afraid if she stood her shaking legs wouldn’t support her.

“Yes.” He gritted the word. “That’s all I feel.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, absorbing the dull pain that rolled over her until she thought she could bear it without weeping. Only then did she open her eyes and look at him. Truly look at him. Only then did she see the way he held himself. As if he were hovering on the edge of a cliff. Too still. Too controlled.

Perhaps she was making a fool of herself. Perhaps it was just as he said. But, just possibly, her instincts were dead-on. “I don’t believe you.”

His head went back, his lips twisting. “You think I’m lying.”

“Through your very tightly clenched teeth.”

“Fine,” he said flatly. “Think whatever the hell you want to think. I’m going to take care of the car. You can wait here.”

She expected him to go to the telephone, which sat in plain view on top of a curious little triangular table beside a striped chair. But he strode through the kitchen, and she heard the distinctive sound of a door.