How to Love a Princess (10 page)

“Please, call me Helene.”

“Nicolas!”

He looked up to find
Catherine furiously signalling him to be quiet. He shook his head. “The queen—
Helene’s life is the one at stake here. She deserves to know more than anyone
else.” As much as he wanted to spring to his feet and comfort Catherine, he
turned back to the queen. “I have no doubt that you have been poisoned.”

Both the women gasped. The
queen in astonishment, Catherine in despair.

“Now, either that person
lost courage or, and I’m afraid this seems more likely, they believed a limited
dose would eventually prove fatal.”

“The effects of the poison
are irreversible,” Catherine said hoarsely, repeating the words he’d previously
given her in warning.

Nicolas lifted the queen’s
frail hands in his and held them reassuringly. When he spoke, his eyes held
Catherine’s. “I will reverse this,” he said grimly. “That is a promise.” He
brought his eyes back to the queen. “As soon as I’ve found the source, I will
find the antidote. I need you to trust in me. Believe me. Can you do that?”

Helene was not a woman to
give her trust easily. At times, she felt ready to die. But she wasn’t ready to
leave her daughter. She swallowed through the thickness in her throat, looked
deeply into Nicolas Vecca’s eyes and in that moment saw a man she could trust
with her life. And her daughter’s. “I believe you.”

He grinned and the
softness melting his eyes made her wish she was thirty years younger.

“That is all I require
from you,” Nicolas told her. “The rest is up to me.”

Nicolas placed her hands
back on her lap and tucked them beneath the edges of the quilt. When he joined
Catherine behind the wheelchair again, he voiced the concern etched on her
face. “Who has access to your mother’s personal bathroom?”

“Anyone in the castle,”
Catherine said, her brow pinched in worry. “We don’t live behind locked doors.
We should return. I need to talk to Gascon.”

He placed a hand on her
arm and waited until she turned her chin up and met his eyes. “I’ll take care
of it. Finish your walk with your mother and promise not to worry too much.”

Catherine blinked long.
When her eyes opened again, there were tears that penetrated to his heart.

“Lean on me,” he murmured.
“I swear I won’t let you down.”

She blinked again. And
sighed. A fuzzy smile slipped through her tears. “I know you won’t.”

The yearning to kiss those
lips held up to him was overwhelming. He couldn’t. Of course he wouldn’t. Last
night he’d finally admitted that he was still in love with her. This morning
he’d resolved to begin the weaning process. He wasn’t weak. Death had consumed
him. Unrequited love would not.

“Will you be all right?”
he asked softly.

She nodded. “We’ll be
fine.”

Right.

Nicolas nodded as well.
She’d be fine.

Now all he had to do was
leave. Hunt down Gascon and fill him in on the details. He looked at his hand,
still glued to her arm. He looked back into her eyes, still fixed on him.

Right, then.

He was going.

His head came down, his
eyes shuttered, his mouth found her lips and fed and fed and fed. Her taste
entered his bloodstream and swirled inside his heart. Her lips parted on his
and he slanted his mouth over hers one last time, catching her upper lip for a
lingering moment before he released her and marched off abruptly without
looking back.

“Fool,” he muttered,
kicking at a pile of mouldy leaves. “As if you need another memory of what
you’ve lost.”

Catherine’s lips tingled
long after he’d disappeared around the bend that led up to the castle. She
shook her head, angry at herself for parting her lips so easily in invitation.
She had an iron control on her head and heart, the first locked down in duty to
Ophella and the second locked down in winter, but her body was another matter
altogether, going rogue whenever it came within two feet of Nicolas.

“He kissed you,” her
mother observed.

Heat flushed her cheeks.
“No—no, it isn’t—”

“Hush, darling. I might
not have eyes in the back of my head, but I know the telltale signs of
breathless silence. You never said there was anything between the two of you.”

“There isn’t,” Catherine
protested feebly.

“Why not? He’s a handsome
man.”

Catherine’s shoulders
slumped as she kicked free the brakes and started pushing again. “He wanted to
marry me once.”

The pause lasted until
they’d crossed the stone bridge and entered the forest trail beyond.

“I see,” said her mother
at last, fighting the urge to pry into where and when they’d met before or why
it couldn’t be. She’d made her own mistakes but, assailed with the memory of
her beautiful sons every waking moment and the joy her daughter brought her,
she had no regrets.

Once he’d told Gascon all
he knew, they moved on to suspects. “What of Geoffrey?” Nicolas wanted to know.

Gascon shook his head. “He
has neither the intelligence, commitment nor staying power to plan anything
more intricate than his next party.”

Nicolas huffed in disgust.
“What the hell does she see in him?”

“I believe that those are
the qualities Catherine most appreciates in the man,” Gascon responded dourly.

No. That screaming voice
was back inside his head with irritating predictability. No. This was all
wrong.

Catherine wasn’t shallow.

She was vibrant, strong
and dedicated.

She had more integrity
than a convent of nuns put together. “I don’t understand,” he ground out. “None
of this makes sense.”

Even as he spoke, Nicolas
realised that nothing had made sense since he’d arrived in Ophella. Her body
trembled at his touch. Ever so often, he saw lingering traces in her eyes of
the love he’d once believed in. Sometimes, he’d catch her unawares, looking at
him with an intensity that hitched his pulse, as if she were trying to capture
his image, her heart the camera, her soul the flash. Maybe it was nothing more
than a combination of lust and compassion.

He’d been her first, after
all.

If she’d used him as
callously as he assumed, then some of that compassion might even be guilt.

Probably, it was just
fanciful hoping on his part, he thought in disgust. He had no idea how to go
about the business of falling out of love, but he doubted that was the right
the direction.

“Are we talking of
Geoffrey and Catherine or the poisoning,” Gascon asked, well aware it was the
former.

Nicolas took the offered
gap, but wasn’t ready to give up on his favourite suspect completely. “Who
other than Geoffrey stands to gain at the queen’s death?”

“No one that I can think
of. Not even Geoffrey.”

“Maybe he’s impatient to
be king.”

Gascon sipped at his
orange juice, then set the glass down and pushed to his feet. Palms pressed to
the table, he looked Nicolas in the eye. “Alexander would have been the first
king in almost two centuries. Geoffrey might be a prince one day, but he’ll
never be king. Catherine will rule supreme as queen, regardless of whom she
marries.”

The workings of Ophella’s
politics brought a slant to Nicolas’s lips. “And if Alexander had lived and
married, would his wife be queen?”

Gascon nodded.

“Talk about inequality of
the sexes,” Nicolas chuckled, amused enough to forget his frustrations and
concerns for the moment. “I assume a former queen
passed this law?”

“The law is not as biased
as you may think. King ranks above queen, so although the titles may vary, the
result remains the same.”

“The true Ophella blood
heir, male or female, is always left holding the trump card,” Nicolas surmised,
but his quick brain was already leaping ahead to wipe his bout of humour.
“Still, king or not, Geoffrey would promote more power to a queen than a
princess with his pillow talk.”

The thought of Catherine
and Geoffrey sharing a home churned his stomach. The thought of them sharing a
bed made it that much worse and he had to clench his abdomen muscles to keep
that churned mess inside his stomach.

Gascon straightened and
walked to the large arched window in Catherine’s office. “A princess of Ophella
is not easily persuaded from her own mind, in or out of bed.”

“Of course not,” Nicolas
retorted bitterly. His sexual prowess certainly hadn’t kept Catherine in his
bed. “They’re trained from birth to override all else with duty to Ophella.”

“It’s more than training,”
Gascon disputed, his eyes turned to the courtyard view below. He saw Catherine
pushing her mother up the driveway and spun about from the window. On his way
to the door, he threw a grin at Nicolas. “It’s in their blood.”

“Blood?” Nicolas muttered
to himself as the door closed behind Gascon. “How can they have blood when they
have no heart to pump it?”

Still muttering inside his
head, he rocked his chair backward on its hind legs and crossed his boots on
top of the desk. His love for Catherine had been so strong, so overwhelming and
replete, it seemed impossible to imagine that it wasn’t returned in full.
There’d been just too much love between them to come from a single source. His
heart simply wasn’t big enough for such a vast supply.

Difficult to imagine, but
clearly not impossible.

It
had
happened.
Obviously.

He folded his arms and
bowed his head, shaking it slowly, laughing, a dry, unpleasant sound.
“Apparently my heart is bigger than I thought.”

When Catherine entered her
office a short while later with Geoffrey in tow, Nicolas rocked the chair back
onto all its legs and jumped to his feet. As big as his heart might be, it
wasn’t big enough to embrace the handsome sight the pair made. “Catherine, may
I see you outside for a moment?”

“I won’t be long,” she
told Geoffrey as she followed him into the passage.

Catherine clicked the door
shut, then walked a couple of steps down the passage before putting her back to
the wall to face Nicolas. “What is it?”

His gaze settled on her
mouth. She instinctively raised her fingers to trace his earlier kiss on her
lips. As soon as she became aware of what she doing, she abruptly dropped her
hand to her side. When his eyes travelled up to scorch her with a dark look,
she could only wonder what she was being accused of now.

“I think we should keep
the details of your mother’s poisoning private until we know more,” he said.

And then she knew. “I
haven’t mentioned a thing to Geoffrey and don’t intend to.”

“Good,” he said bluntly.

Her eyes narrowed in a
flash of anger. Did he always have to sound so arrogant? As if he’d just bended
her to his will, as if she hadn’t already made the decision on her own? “Was
that all?”

A lazy grin crossed his
jaw as he looked at her. And looked.

For a split second, she
thought he might kiss her again. That thought was akin to a hammer, knocking
holes into the back of her knees. The second stretched to a minute. What was he
thinking? What was he feeling?

“I’ll get back to my lab
then and leave you to Geoffrey,” he said.

Her throat was too dry to
reply.

He wasn’t leaving.

Go, she screamed silently.
Just go.

On a sigh that pulled his
gaze back down to her lips for a brief moment, he turned and left.

Don’t go.

Her hands found the wall
behind her. She braced herself and reached inside for strength, sadly admitting
that this had been that much easier when he’d hated her. How could he still
love her? After all she’d done to him, after the way she’d left him, how on
earth had he managed to let go of that hate and hurt and anger? How had that
old love slipped through his defences and why did he not run from it?

Because
he is Nicolas Vecca.

He
is not a coward. He will face that love, acknowledge it and fight it in his own
time and way.

He
is and always will be the man I fell in love with.

She pushed away from the
wall with a heavy heart and went back to her office and Geoffrey.

“Catherine, it’s time we
set a date.”

The announcement added
extra weight to a heart already sagging at her knees. She sucked back a weary
sigh and put a smile on her face.

“Is this your way of
proposing?” she said as lightly as she could manage.

His features hardened at
her teasing and she knew it was irritation that she was forcing him to exert
himself at anything. Why was she? She’d never bothered before.

“Our engagement has been
more or less assumed for years,” he grumbled.

Since my birth, she
thought dryly. What Geoffrey didn’t know was that she hadn’t considered
marriage to him once in all those years, not until recently. “We’ve never
discussed this properly. Not between ourselves. I would never base my future on
a general assumption and neither should you.”