Something in the Heir (It's Reigning Men, #1) (12 page)

Emma’s jaw dropped open for a split second. “I was going to say more like a dog in heat,” she said. “But your version sounds far more upstanding, thanks.”

“My pleasure,” he said, emphasizing the word.

She rolled her eyes at the innuendo.

“No, really. My
great
pleasure.”

Emma groaned, yet again. “Adrian, that was a foolish mistake on my part. We can’t do that. I’m in charge of keeping you out of the public eye for a few days. That’s it. In no way am I supposed to be your, your girl-toy while we do so.”

“Girl-toy?”

“It’s the opposite of boy-toy. Sorry, it’s the only terminology I could come up with on such short notice. Pardon me, but I’m a little under the gun here.”

“You really would have been under the gun, if I’d have had a few more minutes to get us situated,” Adrian said.

“Was that a sexual reference?”

“Do you want it to be one?”

“Your gun?” she asked. “As in that’s what you’re packing?”

“Think of it however you want, Emma.”

Emma turned down a side street that ran perpendicular to the beach road, happy to get away from the prying eyes of uninvited cops.

“Speaking of packing,” she said. “I read that article.”

It was Adrian’s turn to roll his eyes. “Oh, that one? The ‘royal secret,’ exposed, as it were?”

Emma nodded. “So, uh, it’s true, then? Inquiring minds want to know.”

“I knew I’d rue the day I let some team of simpering designers dress me for that charity event at Fashion Week in Milan,” he said. “All these minions happily slapping outfits on me and undressing me with equal fervor. At least in Monaforte when someone helps me to get my dress colors on, they’re not measuring the girth in my crotch.

“Here I was doing this to help out my father’s favorite charity in Italy. Little did I know they would put word out to gossip rags about
it
.” Adrian took a swig of a water bottle next to him in the cup holder.

“It?” Emma asked, grateful he hadn’t given it a name. Nothing like a guy who names his penis Schwartz or Johnson or Big Boy, or whatever else they liked to tag it with. But weird that she was sitting there chitchatting about the princely penis with the guy. “Um, forgive me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that something most men would be happy to have broadcast to the world? I mean, after all, the bigger the package, the bigger the pleasure, right?”

With that Adrian choked on his water, splattering some of it onto the windshield. Emma reached over to pat his back to help clear his airway.

“You okay?” she asked, grinning.

“I have to say, I’ve never had such a frank conversation with a woman about my — how would you say this graciously? My endowment? — before,” he said. “It’s almost a bit embarrassing.”

“Almost,” she said. “But you’re a guy. So if you’ve got it, flaunt it.”

Adrian reached over for Emma’s hand, which was resting on the stick shift. She squirmed in her seat, realizing she was only making matters worse with her suggestive talk but unable to stop herself.

“So how about we pick up where we left off?” Adrian asked with a hopefulness of one who always gets what he wants, when he wants it. “After all, you even admitted it: the bigger the package...”

“It’s a lovely idea in theory,” Emma said. “But honestly, I’ve promised myself I will not get in any more go-nowhere relationships. I simply can’t dabble in men, it’s just not good for my psyche.”

“Your psyche? What does your psyche have to do with this? Can’t you just take pleasure in the moment? Don’t worry about what will happen in ten years. For the here and now we were having a lovely time and I’m quite convinced it was about to get much lovelier, had we not been so rudely cut off by that killjoy.”

“I suspect that killjoy was simply a manifestation of my conscience, reminding me of my vow of quasi-chastity, made under duress after about the thousandth encounter with the wrong man. I need to stop engaging with men who aren’t good for me. Not that you’re not a good man. But you’re not my man. Nor will you ever be my man. And by extension you’re not a good man for me. Does that make any sense to you?”

Adrian knit his brows. “I want to understand what you’re saying but honestly, I think it’s nonsense. We like each other, we enjoy one another’s company. We are clearly attracted to each other. So what is the harm in following through on that to see where it leads?”

“Where it leads? You’re here hiding out from your mother, who is telling you how your entire future is to unfold, and it does not involve a lowly photographer from across the pond, I can assure you that. Your mother would want to see me on your arm about as much as she’d welcome news that you were gay. Which I’m sure you’re not. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

“No, no, of course not,” he said. “But I wish you’d reconsider. Can’t think of a better way in which to pass the next several days together. Think of it: you and me, alone together, nothing but the sound of water lapping along the shores, and our hearts beating as one.” He waggled his eyebrows trying to milk his pathetic plea to her as much as possible.

“I hope you’re not trying to pass yourself off as a poet.”

He squinted at her. “Didn’t work?”

She shook her head. “Nope. I think we should get back to the house and call it a night, before we happen upon more compellingly romantic holiday decorations that’ll make me feel the need to rip my clothes off.”

“Are you trying to torment me?”

“It seems to come with the territory with me. Sorry. Let’s go back to the house and have a taffy pull or maybe we can practice our knitting or something equally unsexy so that temptation doesn’t take hold again. Deal?” She reached out her hand to shake his.

“That is so not my deal, but I’ll respect your wishes if that’s what you’d prefer.” He shook her hand, trying to hold on a little longer just because it felt so perfect.

~*~

E
mma helped Adrian get settled into her parents’ bedroom and retreated to her own room as soon as possible, locking her door just in case she failed in self-control (which was guaranteed, if Adrian chose to show up unannounced, in, say, an hour). She drifted off to sleep, thinking this royal rescue stuff she’d gotten herself into was apparently harder work than she could have imagined.

~*~

U
nable to fall asleep, Adrian sent a quick email on his phone to Darcy.

“
It’s the damndest thing,”
he wrote.
“For the life of me I can’t remember a time in which a woman completely shunned my advances. It’s making me crazy! Not to mention horny. It’s made me realize that I rather like a woman who buckles at even the most fleeting of attention I pay them. Sure, it’s a little pathetic, but it’s so damned easy that way.

“I say that, but then again this challenge from Emma is a bit intriguing. The more unlikely she is to reciprocate my advances, the more determined I seem to be to press on. What the hell is the matter with me? Am I that daft? Or just desperately horny?”

Adrian could only laugh when he read Darcy’s minimalist response a few seconds later.

“Horny.”

Adrian sighed. It was going to be a long night.

“
Bob
! You frisky devil, you!” Emma’s mother Ellen squealed when her husband squeezed her ample behind as she mounted the steps to their beach house.

“I still got it, don’t I sweetheart?”

“You’ve got something, that’s for sure,” she said with a laugh, opening the front door and then lugging her overnight bag and toiletry kit across the living room to the master bedroom down the hall. Her husband followed closely behind with his own duffle, and grabbed her just as she was about to enter their bedroom.

“Across the threshold, my dear,” he said, bowing, and with a gallant swoop, lifted his bride up and over his shoulder to gales of laughter from her as she pounded on his backside to let her down. Her bottle-blonde graying hair dangled upside down from her roots toward the floor, and her face turned red from being the wrong direction.

“You’re going to throw your back out again! And you know how long it takes to get an appointment with Dr. Farrington!” She flailed her arms and legs, an aging damsel in faux distress.

Bob crossed the doorway with her, not even bothering to flick on the overhead light, and instead dropped her onto the queen-sized bed, whereupon Ellen squealed even louder.

“Ouch!” she said. “What the devil is the lumpy thing under this quilt? It feels as if there’s a body beneath me!”

“There will be in two seconds if I have any say—” her husband growled, only to be interrupted by a near-naked Adrian sitting up abruptly, jarred from a deep sleep and face-to-face with two raucous strangers who seemed about to have much better luck in the sack than he’d had.

The woman let out a scream that certainly would have woken the man up had he not already been frightened awake upon having a two-hundred-pound woman hefted atop him like a sack of concrete in the middle of the night. Adrian yelled, which then caused Ellen to scream louder. Bob fumbled for the nearest potential weapon, which unfortunately happened to be the lamp on the nightstand, and he had to choose between shining some light on the situation or clocking the stranger in his bed with the thing. Only he couldn’t figure a way to get a good grip on it without the lampshade getting in the way.

“Robert!” Ellen shouted, invoking his birth name, something she reserved for rare occasions, like, say, if she was furious with him for having finished off the pie she’d been saving for her dessert. “Do something! There’s a strange man in our bed and he’s naked!”

Adrian, groggy but finally grasping what was going on, fumbled around for some more sheet to pull up over him as he wrested his way out of the bed, as if modesty was the most important thing at the moment—a hazard of the job when you were royalty, especially after your brother’s been caught starkers in the tabloids. Besides, with an enraged man and shrieking woman at arm’s length, flapping those family jewels at this moment would be a particular mistake, likely even jeopardizing their very existence.

But thank goodness he did cover up enough, or Ellen would’ve fainted clear away at the sight of this evidently well-endowed — if
People
magazine was to be believed — unclad crazy man standing over top of her.

“Robert! Call the police!” Ellen shouted, even though at that point she was perfectly capable of reaching the phone on the nightstand just as easily as he was.

~*~

I
n the distance, in the middle of her REM sleep cycle, Emma heard what sounded like some sort of fracas and at first thought it was a really fun party she was attending in her dream. She was with Adrian and that little friend of his, who was making out with Caroline in a corner. Typical, that hussy. Emma was holding Adrian’s hand and somewhere someone was introducing the royal couple and all of a sudden she realized that it was she! Well, it was they! Well, they were the royal couple that were being announced while Caroline sucked face with that Darcy fellow back behind the bar, where her hottie bartender was shaking cocktails just like he did the other night, oblivious that Caroline had gone to greener — and more sexily accented — pastures.

But the screaming was getting louder and louder and even though Emma was so excited that she was Her Royal Highness Mrs. Adrian Whatever-his-last-name-was, somewhere in the back of her sleep-fogged brain she recognized that squealing screaming sound—her mother. Surely her mother wasn’t objecting to her being married to a prince. Hell, Ellen wouldn’t object to Emma being married to a toad, for that matter. As long as the creature put a ring on it. But then Emma morphed out of the reverie of her dream and realized there was a whole lot of screaming going on.

Flummoxed by the sounds, she raced out of bed and down the stairs and back to her parents’ bedroom, flicking on the overhead light to find a kerfuffle on a grand scale unfolding before her very tired eyes. As she assessed the situation she saw her mother on her back kicking her legs in the air like a toddler having a tantrum, her granny pants exposed, and her father — what was left of his hair askew atop his head like a nutty professor — fumbling around in search of what? A weapon? And Adrian standing there so damned close to his natural state that Emma’s mouth dried up at the thought. She raced over to separate her parents from Adrian before any injury ensued, and found herself wrapping her body around Adrian to prevent her father from striking him with the hand mirror he’d just picked up off the dresser. Talk about seven years’ bad luck!

“Daddy! Stop!” Emma shouted as Adrian slung one arm around her while still holding up the sheet against his crotch and inching ever more backward away from her father’s reach. Emma couldn’t help but notice how warm Adrian’s body felt pressed up against hers, but she banished that thought immediately in order to prevent bodily harm from coming to him, not to mention emotional harm to her.
Adrian is off-off-off limits, down doggie
, she mentally repeated over and over.

“It’s me, Daddy, Emma, your daughter,” she shouted at her father above her mother’s operatic yelping.

“Baby doll?” her father called out. “Sugar?”

“Yes, Daddy, it’s okay. This is my friend, Adrian. He’s not an intruder and he’s not going to threaten Mom’s virtue, trust me.” She winked at Adrian. “Mom, you can calm down now. Everything is fine.”

Her mother’s noises settled down to a quiet whimper finally as her father regained his composure and smoothed his hair back into its normal slicked-back position. Adrian, though, held tight to Emma as he gazed with mistrust upon these two demented gray-hairs who’d accosted him. Her father was wearing a pair of very bright green pants with erect-standing English Pointers embroidered all over the things. His crisp knit golf shirt was red, white and blue plaid; his matching skills were notoriously ghastly. Adrian hesitated to look too closely at her mother, whose girdle was exposed from her kicking around in her floral print dress while flat on her back on the bed. He gave her a minute to straighten up before glancing at her again.