“Now what?” Vanessa whispered as she stood beside him next to the door leading from her bedroom to the hotel hallway. “Do you have a plan?”
“Of course I have a plan. I’m a Marine Corps officer. That’s what we do. Plan.”
“So what is the plan?”
“While you were getting dressed, I asked Celeste to order lunch for you. Room service should be coming along anytime now….”
“Actually the food is cooked by the royal chef in the hotel kitchen, and then a valet from the royal household brings up the meal. It’s royal protocol. To prevent anyone from tampering with the food.”
“What, no royal taster?”
He was half kidding but she replied, “He stays with my father at all times and doesn’t travel with me.”
Boy, did she live in a different universe than he did. Cracking open the door just a tad, Mark looked down the hallway. The elevator doors opened.
“Ah, here he comes. Get ready to move on my command.” Carefully closing the door, he waited as the valet went past that doorway to the main door leading to the elaborate suite. That’s where Anton was stationed. From there the royal guard had a clear view down both sides of the hallway. “We need to slip out while Anton’s attention is on that valet. Celeste said she’d distract him. I sure hope we can trust her.”
“I trust her with my life,” Vanessa said.
Mark wasn’t accustomed to trusting anyone other than a fellow Marine with his life. Sure he’d trust his own family, but they were all Marines, too. “Let’s go.” He hurried her through the door and down the hallway to the elevator.
Vanessa’s heart beat faster as adrenaline flew through her body. She was doing it, she was making her great escape! Her adventure was about to begin. She couldn’t wait.
Her hand was clasped in Mark’s as he kept their pace leisurely and deliberate. Running down the hall was sure to garner unwanted attention.
Never had a hallway seemed so long. Finally they reached the elevator doors. Vanessa tried not to grin like a fool. Freedom. She could almost taste it.
Eyeing the reflection in the mirrored panel above the elevator’s call button, Mark suddenly swore under his breath and tugged her into his arms.
“Play along with me,” he whispered urgently, his lips almost touching hers. “Anton is watching us. I have to kiss you, so pretend you’re hot for me and kiss me back.”
Vanessa was about to tell him that there was no way Anton could possibly recognize her in the ridiculous outfit she was in—with a baseball cap and sweatshirt hood on her head—when Mark’s mouth covered hers and captured her mumbled protest.
Mark continued the kiss even as he backed her through the open doors into the waiting elevator. The minute the elevator doors closed, he quickly ended the kiss. Looking around, he whispered, “We’re clear.”
There might not be anyone else in the elevator, but they certainly were not clear. Vanessa felt anything but clear. She felt completely befuddled and definitely irritated at his ability to kiss her one minute and toss her aside the next. Who did he think he was to treat her this way?
Before she could voice her complaints, Mark put a finger to her mouth. Leaning close again, he whispered, “Elevator has surveillance cameras. Keep your head down and don’t say anything.”
He’d put a baseball cap on his own head, the brim tugged low to cover more of his face. It was amazing that he’d been able to kiss her at all without the stiffened brims of their caps getting in the way. The man obviously had experience kissing in all kinds of situations.
Draping an arm around her, Mark guided her through the busy lobby and out onto the street, where he turned right and headed away from Central Park at a brisk pace matched by the other New Yorkers on the sidewalk. Vanessa was breathless by the time they paused in front of a fast-food restaurant several long blocks away. She’d lost track of how many turns they’d made, but she hadn’t forgotten her irritation with him.
She didn’t forget it…until he ushered her into the restaurant, and she smelled it—freshly made fries. Then everything else was erased as her mouth watered and her stomach growled.
Standing in front of the stainless-steel counter, she looked up at the photographs of the selections in awe. What should she have? So many choices. She definitely wanted fries, so she told the perky young teenager, “I’ll have a large order of fries.”
“Is that all?”
“No. I want…” She stared at the items offered and couldn’t decide. They had chicken sandwiches, salads, hamburgers, ribs, fish sandwiches. Okay, not a salad. But did she want chicken or beef? Or fish?
“Hurry it up,” Vanessa heard a man growl. It took her a moment to realize it wasn’t Mark who was complaining.
Slinging his duffel bag over one shoulder, Mark hurriedly placed his order and added, “She’ll have a double-deluxe cheeseburger meal number four.”
“Maybe I want chicken,” she protested.
“And maybe you want to start a riot,” Mark quietly warned her. “There’s a huge line behind you.”
“Here’s your change, sir,” the teenager said.
“Thanks.” Grabbing their tray filled with food, Mark hustled her toward an empty booth in the corner.
Ignoring him totally once they sat down, she focused her attention on her meal, gobbling a handful of French fries in the first two seconds. She closed her eyes in delight. Ah, heaven. Sheer heaven.
Sure, while in America, she’d sometimes sent Celeste out to get her fries, but by the time she brought them back to the hotel they’d gone cold and lacked this just-out-of-the-oil taste that was so addictive. Vanessa had even tried getting her limo to stop yesterday and have Celeste run in to pick up fries, but the driver had refused, saying her father had forbidden such behavior because it was not deemed befitting of a royal princess.
“Look, we’re going to have to get a few things clear,” Mark began after she’d made some headway on her cheeseburger.
“I agree.” She gave him a haughty stare, not easy to do when she’d just wiped mustard from her chin and had to look at him from under the stupid bill of her cap. “For one thing, it’s very rude to order for me without consulting me.”
“You were standing there as if you’d never been in a place like this before.”
“Which I haven’t. That’s why I wanted to come here.”
He frowned. “I thought you went to school in America.”
“Only for one year, and I wasn’t allowed off-campus.”
“Sounds like boot camp. Minus the weapons.”
She had to smile. “The only weapons we had were the pancakes Mrs. Manly cooked up in the cafeteria every Sunday. They made great Frisbees.”
“What was Prudence doing in a ritzy boarding school in the first place? Her dad’s a Marine.”
“She was there on a partial scholarship, and her father sent her as a form of discipline.” She nibbled on another fry. “We met and became friends.”
Tearing his gaze away from her lips, he spoke in a curt voice. “As I was saying, you can’t create a scene like you almost did by holding up the ordering line that way. It makes you stand out like a sore thumb.”
Her smile disappeared. Being likened to a sore thumb did not amuse Vanessa. No one had ever dared to speak to her in such a manner. Even at school, she’d been treated with deference and respect, even when she was being disciplined for some escapade. And since then, she’d been a working princess, traveling the world on behalf of her country. She was not a sore thumb.
Suddenly she wasn’t as hungry as she’d been. Putting her burger back down, she nibbled on a French fry.
“Finish your food,” Mark said.
“We definitely need to clear some things up,” Vanessa stated, straightening her shoulders and tilting her head back to bestow another regal stare upon him. The darn billed cap made it hard for her to see anything above chest level, but she didn’t dare remove it for fear of being recognized. All she’d need was for some paparazzi to snap her picture, and the jig would be up.
“It is not your place to order me around. If I choose not to eat, then I won’t eat. If I choose to take time over selecting my lunch, I shall do so. That does not mean I am a sore thumb. If I make a few missteps, you may politely guide me. But you are merely giving me direction, not issuing an order. Besides, I find your orders to be extremely contradictory.”
Now that she’d taken the edge off her hunger, her earlier irritation at his actions back at the hotel returned tenfold. “Earlier today you told me not to kiss you back, then a short time later you told me to kiss you as if I was ‘hot for you,’ I believe is the way you so elegantly put it. I would suggest that you make up your mind one way or the other.”
“I only kissed you because Anton was looking our way.”
She gritted her teeth. Could the man be any more insulting? He was as good as telling her that he’d kissed her under duress. How was that supposed to make her feel? Infuriated, that’s how it made her feel. And strangely bereft.
“You’ve made it perfectly clear that you didn’t kiss me because you wanted to, there’s no need to repeat yourself on that matter. I only kissed you back out of curiosity the first time, and the second time because, as you said, Anton was watching us. But I suggest that there not be a third time where kissing is concerned. In Volzemburg we have an old saying ‘Third time watch out.’ Now if you are done eating, and it looks like you are, judging by the empty tray, then I suggest we move on. There are people waiting to sit, and I certainly wouldn’t want to hold them up and stand out like a sore thumb,” she noted tartly.
Women! Slinging his duffel bag over his shoulder, Mark dumped the paper wrappers from their lunch into the trash. He’d never had trouble figuring them out before, but then this woman was a princess. He might not be quite as much of a ladies’ man as his younger brother, Joe, but he’d had more than his fair share of success with the female sex.
And while it was true that Mark had told her not to kiss him and then had reversed that order a short time later, that didn’t mean that his strategy was faulty. He had to remind himself of the real goal of his mission.
The trouble with that was that she got to him. As a woman not as a princess.
Dressed as she was in casual clothing, Mark could almost imagine that Vanessa was a tourist out to see New York City. But then she’d tilt her head a certain way, as if she was more accustomed to wearing a tiara than a baseball cap. Which was no doubt true. That knowledge didn’t stop him from wanting to kiss her again, however.
Which went beyond foolish and fell into the downright-stupid arena.
Vanessa hated her disguise. The jeans were extremely tight now that she’d eaten, and they made her feel fat. And the sweatshirt may have been washed, but it still smelled like Mark, which kept reminding her of being held close in his arms.
Salvation was across the street. A large well-known discount department store. What she needed was a makeover. She’d already gone from princess to bum, now she needed to go from bum to regular American woman.
“Hey, where are you going?” Mark demanded as she made a beeline toward the street.
“Shopping.”
His stomach turned. “Now?”
“Yes, now.”
“We can’t cross here,” he stated, taking her by the arm as if fearing she’d make a dash for it. “We have to go to the corner. We don’t need you getting a jay-walking ticket.”
“We certainly don’t,” Vanessa agreed, casting a cautious look at a fierce-looking policewoman who was checking parking meters and giving out tickets.
“Okay, here’s the plan for shopping,” Mark began as they joined a group of pedestrians waiting for the light to turn green.
He was interrupted by Vanessa, who said, “I don’t want to hear about any more plans. I just want to go shopping and have fun.”
“You tell him, girlfriend,” a young woman with an elaborate cornrow hairdo said from beside them.
A man on the other side of them said, “Yo, man, you got a right to be the boss.”
Luckily the light turned green before any further debate could ensue.
Once the group had gone on to cross the street, Vanessa turned to him and said, “See what you started?”
“Me? You’re the one.”
“Come on—” she tugged on his arm “—before the light turns red.”
He was seeing red. How could one woman be so much trouble?
Blithely unaware of his thoughts, Vanessa hurried to the store like a kid racing to see what Santa had left her under the tree Christmas morning. He’d expected more of a stiff-upper-lip attitude from her, not this show of excitement and enjoyment. When she’d closed her eyes and moaned over a French fry, he’d almost moaned himself. She’d looked like a woman in the throes of passion. And she’d kissed that way, too. Totally immersed in the moment.
He needed to remind himself that she got just as excited about fries or shopping. He was nothing special here.
But Vanessa, well, she was something else. And she was heading for the door without waiting for him. He had to hurry to catch up with her, the strap of his duffel bag digging into his shoulder.
“I’ve always wanted to come to a place like this,” she confessed as he held the door open for her. “Thank you.” She paused inside to simply gaze around and soak everything in.
Whenever she went into a store, everyone else was locked out. The only people around were those intended to serve her every need. Did she want a drink? Was this chair comfortable enough? Models would parade a designer’s latest couture outfits for her perusal.
She’d never been surrounded by other shoppers before. They all seemed to know where they were going. The teenage boy in black leather with a nose ring, his girlfriend in matching attire and nose ring, the woman pushing a stroller with a toddler crying—they all moved with utter confidence like ants in an anthill, scurrying about with a definite purpose in mind.
How nice it must be to be so sure of yourself, of your life, to know where you were going rather than just following orders. How rewarding it must be to have goals of your own rather than living your life to please others.
“Seen enough?” Mark asked. “Ready to leave now?”
“We just got here.”
“Funny,” he muttered. “It already feels like we’ve been here for ages.”
“Surely a big bad Marine like you isn’t afraid of a little shopping,” she teased him.
“It wasn’t exactly part of my officer training,” he retorted.
“A pity. I guess we’ll just have to learn as we go along.”
“Hold on.” Grabbing her arm, he stopped her from taking off down the main aisle. “We have to stay together.”
“Fine.” She paused in front of a sign listing various department locations. “I’m going up to the women’s department.”
“You want more clothes? You don’t have enough already?”
Vanessa sighed. “You don’t have any sisters, do you.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“If you had sisters, you’d be more accustomed to a female’s point of view.”
“Hey, I’ve had plenty of experience with females,” Mark retorted.
“Really.” She gave him a doubtful look. “I find that hard to believe. Now your brother Joe, he’s the charmer in your family.”
“All the Wilder men have a way with women.”
“And so modest, too,” she noted dryly. “Come on, the women’s department is upstairs.” As they rode the escalator side by side, she confessed, “I’ve never actually bought anything on sale before. I’m looking forward to it.”
She had that little-girl-at-Christmas look again, the one that Mark found so endearing. How did she manage to do that, go from regal to adorable in the blink of an eye? Was that part of being a princess or was it simply part of her personality?
Placing his duffel bag on the floor at his feet, he watched her as she headed for the nearby sale racks. Her green eyes were shining but the overhead fluorescent lighting leached some of the gold from her hair. She wasn’t looking her best, if he was perfectly honest here, in that baseball cap and his bulky sweatshirt.
The strange thing was that he found her incredibly sexy anyway as she held a dress up to her body, wrapping an arm around the waist as she stared at herself in the mirror. The dress was light blue with little flowers on it, and it was short, well above the knee.
“What do you think?” she asked, turning for his opinion. “Would this look good on me?”
“Anything would look good on you,” he replied without thinking.
She appeared surprised by his answer.
She wasn’t the only one. What was he doing, talking like that? He couldn’t afford to be flirting with her. “Go try it on,” he ordered her. “There’s a fitting room over there.”
“I thought you said we had to stay together,” she reminded him.
Right. Jeez, he wasn’t thinking straight here. “Just buy it. If it doesn’t fit you, too bad.”
“Is that what American shoppers do?”
“If it doesn’t fit they return it, but we’re not going through that process.” Shopping was bad enough, returning stuff was out of the question. He’d drawn his line in the shopping sand, and he wasn’t crossing it.
“Okay,” she said, so agreeable that he was immediately suspicious.
“Okay?” he repeated.
“Yes, okay. I think I’ll get this dress too.” She plucked a simple black cotton dress from the rack. “I can’t believe the prices here.” She moved to another sale rack and picked out a pair of jeans and a skirt. All the while Mark stood guard impatiently.
“Look, the point of this exercise is for me to enjoy shopping the way a regular American woman would. You’re not making this a pleasant experience by breathing down my neck the way you are,” she told him in exasperation.
“I can assure you that American women have to deal with impatient men all the time when they’re shopping together.”
“I bet most women leave the men at home,” she said.
“Well, that’s not possible in your case, so don’t even think about it.”
“Then stop sighing and glaring at your watch every second.”
“Marines do not sigh.”
“Grunt then. Whatever you call that noise, it’s distracting me.”
“Heaven forbid I distract you,” he drawled, folding his arms over his chest.
Oh, he was distracting her all right. He was doing it now, his biceps straining against the sleeves of his black cotton T-shirt.
She looked away, but that didn’t end things. He still had the power to make her heart skip. The truth was that even wearing his sweatshirt and baseball cap was getting to her.
Vanessa needed a new outfit—not princess attire, not borrowed garments, but something of her own. Something that had nothing to do with her position.
She wanted to shed that persona along with the mismatched clothes and let the new Vanessa appear, like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. And that’s how she felt, as if she’d been locked in a cocoon. Only, Vanessa’s cocoon was made of glass and had all the world looking in as she went through her changes.
From the time she’d been a small child, the paparazzi had watched her every move and commented on everything from her hair and her gangly height to her clothes and her weight. That kind of constant critical inspection had turned her into an approval-seeking machine from a very young age. But she’d never quite learned how to gain that approval.
Sometimes she thought she began disappointing her father the second she was born. He’d wanted a son. He’d gotten her instead.
Things had gotten worse since her mother’s death. Her mother had acted as a buffer. Vanessa had barely turned sixteen when her mother died in a car crash.
There never is a good time to lose a parent, but Vanessa had been particularly vulnerable as a late-blooming gawky teenager who lacked her mother’s grace and style. Whenever her father had criticized her, her mother had always managed to say something to soothe the hurt. Vanessa still missed her intensely.
Since then she felt as if her every move was being dissected under a microscope, and she was constantly found lacking by her father.
Vanessa shook off the melancholy such thoughts always brought her. She was here, in a department store in the middle of New York, free to do as she chose for the first time in her life. She needed to enjoy this moment.
“Are you done yet?” Mark demanded in an aggravated voice.
Suddenly Mark represented the male dominance she’d had to suffer through because of her father. She was tired of pleasing. She was tired of a man telling her what to do, of a man trying to drain her pleasure by laying on guilt.
“No, I’m not done yet.” She deliberately walked through the neighboring intimate apparel section, hoping to make Mark even more uncomfortable. He grabbed his duffel bag and came after her.
Glancing over her shoulder, she noticed that Mark’s eyes were shifting from side to side and his jaw was clenching rather like a man forced to do girl stuff against his will. He bumped into her before realizing she’d paused in front of a display of lilac-colored bras and matching panties. He stared at the lacy bras and then at her.
To her surprise, his frazzled look was replaced with a heated gaze in her direction. “You’d look good in that color,” Mark noted huskily.
Instead of him being the one discomfited, now she was the one blushing. He watched her with those impressive blue eyes of his, the slide of his eyes down her face and body like the brush of fingertips—tangible in their visual touch.
Her breath caught in her throat, and she was overcome with the awareness of the man standing so close beside her that she could almost hear his heartbeat. Twice today she’d been held in his arms and kissed until she could no longer tell up from down.
“Shoes,” she muttered, trying to hang on to her composure. Breaking off eye contact, she noted, “I need a pair of sandals.”
“We’re not buying you a whole new wardrobe here,” he warned her.
“I can’t keep wearing these heavy walking shoes.” She held out her foot and moved her ankle to show him what she meant. “It won’t take me long.”
“Yeah, right. Where have I heard that before?”
“I have no idea,” she replied in a lofty tone. “You certainly haven’t heard it from me.”
“I certainly have. Several times. Back at the hotel when you were changing clothes.”
“That delay was entirely your fault. You’re the one who was unhappy with my attire.”
“Are you going to buy the stuff you’re holding in your arms?”
She had the items she’d collected all squashed against her body, as if they could provide some kind of protection from this powerful attraction between them.
“Yes, of course I am. I have some cash.”
She had just enough left after making those purchases to buy sandals. Mark’s long-suffering sighs seemed to arise every two seconds despite her best efforts to hurry.
Because of her borrowed tight-fitting jeans, she was having a hard time bending over to fasten the straps on the sandals she was trying on. She was wondering if perhaps she should stick with a slide style instead when Mark took matters into his own hands, literally. Bending on one knee, he took her foot in a firm but gentle hold as he slid the sandal into place and fastened it. His fingers were warm on her skin as they brushed against her ankle, creating a surge of awareness that zipped through her entire body.
“Look, Mommy, that man on his knees is proposing!” a little girl exclaimed.
Mark and Vanessa both froze in place. Their eyes met and held. Vanessa barely realized that the girl had come over to put her sticky hands on her knee. All she could think of was the concept of Mark proposing to her.
The girl’s harried mother quickly joined them, breaking the moment. “Don’t touch!” she scolded her daughter. “Sorry about that,” she told Vanessa. “Ever since she saw my brother on his knees proposing to his sweetheart a few weeks ago, she thinks any man on bended knee is proposing.”
Mark quickly leaped to his feet as Vanessa said, “That’s all right. No harm done. Right, Mark?”
“Affirmative.” He still looked a little shaken to her eyes, however.
She quickly decided to get the shoes she was wearing and made her purchase in the shoe department. They placed the shoes she had been wearing in a bag for her. Accustomed as she was to others doing her carrying for her, she left that bag and the larger one with the clothing she’d bought earlier at the cashier’s desk as she turned away to pocket her meager change. Sure enough, Mark picked the paper bags up for her. He carried them over to where she stood and then dumped them at her feet. “These are yours.”
“I know that.” Placing the smaller shoe bag into the larger one, she gamely picked it up.
The store had gotten much more crowded while she’d been searching for the perfect sandal.
Mark noticed the increasing crowd as well. “Stay close to me,” he ordered her.
Easy for him to say. He was powerfully built and carrying a huge duffel bag. While Vanessa was taller than many of the women around her, many of them had Olga’s hefty build and looked as though they could have taken on the entire East German fencing team themselves.
It happened in the blink of an eye. The crowd spilled out from the aisles and suddenly Vanessa was swept up in it as the rush of humanity surged forward. Carried along by the crowd, she became separated from Mark as she struggled to maintain possession of her large shopping bag.
Shrieks from excited shoppers made her ears ring as the stampede continued. It wasn’t until Vanessa almost knocked over a mannequin wearing a wedding dress that she realized she was in the bridal department. Huge banners hung from the walls, proclaiming, Bridal Bonanza Sale: One Hour Only!
Vanessa tried to work her way toward the outer walls, but she was hemmed in by women determined to find a bargain. Fear welled up inside her. She’d never experienced anything like this.
Then out of the blue, she was plucked from the crowd, the comforting safety of Mark’s arm guiding her through the chaos. It seemed to take forever to get out of the melee. But held tucked against him, her earlier fear was gone.
It wasn’t until they were on the escalator heading back downstairs and away from the marital mayhem that Mark spoke. “I told you I hated shopping,” he growled.
“Are stores like this all the time?”
“Like I’d know,” he retorted, keeping his arm around her as they descended to the main floor.
“The shops are closed for me when I go shopping.”
“A princess perk, huh?”
She nodded.
“Sounds like one you should keep,” Mark noted dryly before holding the door open for her.
Out on the street, he wasted no time in hailing a cab.
“Where are we going now?” she asked as he hustled her inside so fast she almost lost her baseball cap.
“This time I’m calling the shots.” Mark gave an address to the cabbie before continuing to speak to her. “I think we’ve had enough excitement for one day, don’t you?”
Vanessa nodded. Being a regular person was more work than she’d expected.