Something in the Heir (It's Reigning Men, #1) (11 page)

Emma just shook her head in disbelief.

“So tell me more about your family holiday traditions,” Emma said, curious to know more of his country’s culture.

“Keep in mind that mine is a small country,” he said. “So people know each other. Even as royals, we mingle with fellow countrymen much more so than in other countries with royalty. We open the palace to visitors during the holidays so that people can enjoy the festive decorations. Chef makes a massive gingerbread house, so large that children can wander through it. It takes up much of a ballroom, and kids under a certain age can go and explore it. It’s like an edible play fort.

“Finally on the day after Christmas, which is a special holiday known as Santa Christus Day in Monaforte, invited guests get to eat the gingerbread house down to the ground. Only crumbs are left, and rest assured our dogs take care of them.”

“Really? A massive pig-out with the gingerbread house? That sounds like my kind of holiday. Though I might like it better if it were chocolate chip instead of gingerbread. But I can’t be picky with these things. I’ll take what I can get.”

“You’d like to get your hands on that house?”

“Are you kidding me? I’d be in line at midnight, the first one,” she said. “I’d probably run to the back of the house and work my way forward. After all, everyone else would be busily gnawing away at the front and I’d have all that back end to myself.”

Adrian leaned back in his seat and stared at her in the dark. “You seem to have given this some thought.”

“Not really,” Emma said. “It’s the same strategy as at an amusement park. When they open, I begin backwards and ride the roller coasters at the far end, because most people start out toward the front, and then they’re stuck in long lines immediately, whereas I can then ride and ride and ride for a while before people work their way to the back. I figure the same thing for gorging on your cookie mansion. So tell me, is there lots of candy with it?”

Adrian nodded his head vigorously. “So much candy. Once when I was young, I had a stomach ache for two days afterward, I ate so many marshmallows and so much chocolate.”

“Yummm...chocolate and marshmallows. What perfection. Throw it in a mug and heat it up with a candy cane and I’m golden.”

“I take it you have a sweet tooth?”

“Sweet tooth? You don’t know the half of it. I have a sweet mouth. Or sweet face. Maybe sweet body. I can’t get enough of the stuff.”

“Sweet face, indeed,” Adrian whispered.

“Did you just say something insulting?” Emma asked as they pulled up to the next home, which was blasting Christmas carols in beat to a throbbing light show projected against the wall of the house.

“Hardly,” he said.

“C’mon! What’d you say?” She chucked him in the arm like she would a brother who was teasing her.

“Nothing!”

“Of course you said something. What was it?”

Adrian sighed loudly. “If you must know, I said you have a sweet face, okay? I agreed with you. And if you want, I’ll throw in that you have a sweet body as well. Are you happy now?”

Emma squinted her eyes at him. “Are you teasing me?”

Adrian shook his head, bemused and irritated all at once. “Do I look like I’m teasing you?” He reached out his hand toward her chin and with just the tips of his fingers tilted her face toward his. “You have a beautiful face, Emma. One I’m growing to like quite a bit, thank you.” He leaned forward and gave her the tiniest kiss on her forehead.

Emma blinked at him, not knowing how to respond to his sweet gesture. On the one hand, was this a sort of “just friends” thing, with a perfectly platonic peck on the forehead? Or was he testing her, reaching out to see if she reciprocated his feelings.
Did she?
The prince who packs? That stunning shirtless chest? The golden-boy smile? How could she not?

Suddenly Emma could no longer deny that she had it bad, which wasn’t good. She couldn’t crush on Adrian. She was charged with keeping him under the radar for a few days, nothing more. After that she’d never see the guy again. Well, maybe she’d see his ten-page wedding spread in
People
after he succumbed to his mother’s pressure and married Serena. Serena—the name stirred the acid in her stomach. What a complete rhymes-with-witch. Why did she get all the luck of being entitled to become the officially sanctioned Mrs. Prince Adrian? Which made Emma realize she knew little to nothing about Adrian, including his last name. Clearly she would not be a candidate to marry him — she didn’t even know his surname.

Adrian had fixed his eyes on Emma’s, which was making her squirm. Suddenly she remembered she needed to respond to his compliment. She was so busy being a complete doofus about this situation she was going to be rude on top of it.

“Oh, God, thank you,” she said. “I mean, oh, God, I forgot to say thank you. Not ‘Oh, God, thank you.’ I don’t want you to think I’m like praying to God or anything for what you just did. Nor do I want you to think I was so exceedingly thankful to you because I never get compliments. Oh, God, not that I get a ton of compliments. I mean, I don’t, but I’m not a total loser. I’m just not on anybody’s radar, I guess—”

“Emma?” Adrian brushed some hair away from her eyes, still staring at her, not letting his eyes leave hers.

“You probably think I’m a certifiable lunatic,” she babbled. “Poor Emma, can’t even accept a compliment, she’s so unaccustomed to anyone paying her one.”

Adrian raked his fingers gently through her hair. “I was thinking nothing of the sort. I think you’re rather charming, in a nutty sort of way. And I think it’s refreshing that you don’t soak in flattery like a thirsty houseplant demanding water. There’s something to be said for someone being completely unaffected by attention.”

Emma snorted. Lovely sound, that. “It’s not that I’m unaffected,” she said. “It’s more that I’m just uncomfortable with people singling me out for things. Maybe it’s a side effect of being on the back end of a camera: I’m used to not being noticed. I hide behind my equipment, I suppose. So if someone puts me front and center, I honestly don’t know what to do.”

Adrian affectionately tweaked the tip of her nose. “It’s what’s most charming about you, Emma. You’re totally you. No pretense, no ego. I’ve been with women who shamelessly fish around for the second compliment the very minute they get the first one.”

“Yep, that’s me, good old Emma, estranged from even the possibility of a compliment. It bounces off of me with the power of my flattery-rejection force field. I deflect it like a superhero dispels bullets.”

Adrian kept staring at her, compounding her discomfort tenfold. “You are an interesting bird,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone quite like you. So different from the women who show up on my doorstep.”

“Women show up on your doorstep?” Emma asked, smiling. “Don’t you have palace guards to take them away to the dungeon? Maybe a spare guillotine lying around so you can lop off their—”

Adrian shook his head and then took her face between his hands and pulled her toward him. “I’m not quite sure what is possessing me to do this,” he said, leaning in even closer. “Part of me thinks I must be mad, but the other part of me thinks I must be mad about you.”

With that he settled his warm lips on hers, pressing softly against hers as he pulled her closer to him. Emma let out a quiet groan, wrestling with whether to join in the fun or resist. It was sheer folly to think this could go anywhere at all, but he was right here, and those blue eyes, the dimples when he smiled, so charming, so
Prince
Charming, so—

“Wait! What am I doing?” she said with a start, halfway pushing away from him. “I can’t kiss you! You’re a prince. I’m a commoner. An American one at that. This has no future whatsoever, and I can’t engage in going-nowhere-fast activities like this that are totally counterproductive and so completely out of character—”

Adrian pulled her closer again, this time his tongue reaching out and grazing the tip of her lips. "Shhhh,” he implored her. “Maybe you shouldn’t think so much, and instead, let’s just
be
, okay? It’s just me, and you and these giant air-filled Christmas decorations enjoying a quiet—with the exception of the confounded air pumps and blasting holiday tunes—moment. Let’s not spoil it with thoughts about now or later, shall we?”

At that Emma let out a sigh and released the tension in her body that held her tight like a bow ready to launch an arrow far off into the ocean. And with it she melted just a little bit into his grip, opening her mouth to him as he tilted his head just enough to fit perfectly to her lips. Outside she could hear the dulcet strains of a rapper chanting, “Give up the dough on Christmas, yo,” one of the more dubious holiday tunes going. But Emma barely heard the noise through the sounds inside the car of his breathing and her gasping and a few moans and a groan or two and the sounds of their tongues dancing in unison as they explored one another for the first time.

Adrian’s hands slipped from her face and worked their way down her body and
oh, right there, yes, oh, yes,
Emma’s mind was chanting silently to him as he tried to lean across the gear shift of her car in an attempt to gain some leverage and access and all those good things one wants when one is trying to get to know someone just a little bit better while enjoying the local color. Emma’s hands glanced across a few of Adrian’s spare parts, and she realized the rumors about what he was packing just might well be true.
Don’t get your hopes up, girl
.
He’s a look-don’t-touch guy for you
. But damn, she’d be thinking about that package for the next umpteen years if she had any say over it.

Just as Adrian was gaining a toehold against the gear shift and his hands had started landing on Emma’s most prime real estate, they heard a loud rap on the window. Emma gasped and jumped at the unexpected interruption. They both looked up, startled, only to realize the windows were completely steamed up and they couldn’t even tell who the damned killjoy was who’d stopped their most important forward momentum at the most inconvenient of times.

“Oh, my God, I feel like it’s eleventh grade all over again with Randy Michener back behind Dogwood Park,” Emma groaned.

“Should I know what you mean by that?” Adrian asked, wiping his lips with his shirtsleeve.

“Hell, no,” she said. “Bad boyfriend number three, I believe he was. It was early days, still, well before I realized that all males were evil incarnate. Sadly, I was hot to trot for Randy but Randy was looking for just one thing from me and I wasn’t putting out. At least not as far as he’d expected. We were making out in the back seat of his father’s mid-life crisis Mustang and darned if the windows weren’t steamed up just like this, and then we heard someone pounding on the window and—”

There was another knock, this time even harder. Emma sat up fast, straightened out her mussed-up clothing and flattened her tangled hair, then wiped a sight line across the driver’s side window, only to see a nosy cop staring in at them.

“Oh, man, it’s Randy Michener, redux,” she moaned. “What is it with me and The Man?”

“‘The Man?’” Adrian asked as he tried to make himself look less obviously in the throes of hot and bothered teeny-bopper make-out session behavior, hoping the dark would adequately hide the bulge in his brand new surfer-boy pants.

“The cops. PoPo. Men in blue,” she said, as if that made more sense. “Though I guess for you, men in uniform are usually at your beck and call, so they never would threaten your moves, even if you were underage in the back seat of a car with some girl with her shirt half off and your hand up her skirt.”

“Believe me, I was working on that,” he practically sobbed back at her, dismayed at this completely unfair
make-out-us interruptus
.

“Excuse me while I get this. And how about you act completely innocent so they don’t run an identity check on you. And don’t say a word. That accent will arouse more suspicion than we need to deal with.”

“As if we need any more arousal around her than we already have,” he said. Emma just rolled her eyes at him while she wiped lipstick smudges away from her mouth.

She pushed her window button to make it go down. “Officer? Can I help you?”

He peered in with suspicion, no doubt assuming it was a couple of fourteen-year-olds, surprised at their comparatively stately age. “Some neighbors noticed you loitering and saw the car rocking and called us to check up on what was going on.”

Emma blushed, grateful no one could see her crimson-stained cheeks in the dark. The car was
rocking
? Unbelievable. Seems she couldn’t even discreetly make a fool of herself, and instead had to act like an oversexed, hormonally charged beer wench or something. “Sorry, sir. I’m afraid we got a little carried away. ‘Tis the season and all that.” She shrugged her shoulders and held her hands palm-side up in a
what’re ya gonna do
gesture, trying to make light of the situation so he’d leave her the hell alone in her shame.

The cop paused for a minute, aiming a blinding flashlight into the far recesses of her vehicle, peering more closely, ensuring nothing untoward was going on inside her car. Well, nothing more untoward than they all knew had been happening in there, but at least it was between two consenting adults.

“I’d suggest you move along, ma’am, maybe get a room,” the cop said, nodding toward Adrian as well.

“Absolutely, officer,” she said, mortified, quickly pulling on her seatbelt and getting ready to peal out of there as soon as he stepped one foot away from them, silently muttering
get a room
under her breath, appalled at herself.

The cop tipped his hat toward her. “Have a good evening,” he said, dusting his hands off like he’d completed his work there. Emma tried hard not to cringe and instead probably looked like she had bad gas.

As soon as he was a safe enough distance from her car, Emma took off like a bat out of hell.

“
That’ll
teach me for behaving like a, like a, a, a—”

“An insatiably adorable and surprisingly sexy rescuer of wayward royalty?” Adrian asked, filling in the blanks.