[Montacroix Royal Family Series 02] - The Prince & the Showgirl (8 page)

A gust of wind blew in off the lake, causing the nighttime temperature to suddenly drop. Sabrina shivered.

The involuntary shudder didn't escape Burke's shrewd eyes.

"You should go back inside," he suggested, remembering his reason for seeking her out in the first place. "Before you catch a cold."

"I suppose I should." Her heart was thumping uncomfortably. What was it about this man that made her throat dry up and her nerves jangle?

Burke watched her lips tighten and mistook the reason for her frown. "I'm sorry if I saddened you by bringing up memories of your father."

"It wasn't you." With a wistful sigh, she looked out over the moon-gilded waters of the lake. "I think about him all the time."

"It sounds as if you and he were very close."

"I adored him," Sabrina said simply.

A very strong part of Sabrina still did. Another part which she knew to be irrational, continued to be angry at her father for not having been perfect.

"Enough to put aside your career to pay his tax bills?" It was a shot in the dark, gleaned from something Chantal had told him after dinner. If his sister had found his sudden interest in Sabrina strange, she had been thoughtful enough not to comment.

"My father was not a tax dodger!" Sabrina rose quickly and heatedly to Sonny's defense. Just because she was angry with him didn't mean that her loyalty toward the man had diminished.

"I'm sorry. I did not mean to offend you. Or your late father."

Sabrina knew that her quick flare of anger had been an inappropriate response. She'd always had difficulty controlling the Darling temper, especially when her nerves were on edge.

"No, I'm the one who should apologize for snapping at you. Especially since it's true that the only reason we're on tour is to try to pay off the IRS." Indeed, they'd signed an agreement that all royalties earned on album sales went directly to the government.

Burke had always admired family loyalty. "Repaying your father's debt is an admirable undertaking."

Sabrina made a vague gesture. "It's not at all admirable. It's simply necessary. And although I'll admit to being a little touchy about the subject, that still didn't give me an excuse to bite your head off."

She managed a faint, self-deprecating smile. "I don't suppose I could get away with blaming it on jet lag?"

Burke didn't immediately answer. A brief silence settled over them. He found Sabrina as intriguing as she was finding him unsettling.

Having grown up with two half sisters, Burke knew that the clever use of cosmetics could make a pretty woman beautiful and a beautiful woman stunning. But Sabrina Darling was one of those rarest of women, a true natural beauty.

In heavy stage makeup, she appeared lush and sultry and vampish; at dinner, she'd possessed a nonconformist, individualistic type of glamour. But in the moonlight, with her bare face revealing a dusting of freckles, Sabrina Darling seemed delicate and vulnerable.

"A woman as lovely as you could use any excuse and a man would have no choice but to forgive her."

His voice was smooth and silky. Something in his gaze set off warning bells.

"Is that a pass, Your Highness?" she managed with far more aplomb than she was feeling.

"Not a pass, merely the truth," Burke assured her mildly. "I'm sure your presence—and that of your lovely sisters, of course—shall add much to the upcoming celebrations," he added, swiftly changing the direction of the conversation.

Still vaguely shaken by the flare of desire she'd witnessed in his midnight dark eyes, Sabrina gave him a distant smile.

"You're right. I really should be going in," she said. "I've got a busy day tomorrow. Today," she amended. "We need to check out the theater, begin interviewing musicians and, of course, we'll have to coordinate logistics with the coronation committee."

"I will personally ask the members of the committee to help you in every way. Will using local talent be a problem?"

Sabrina shrugged. "Nothing we can't deal with." She neglected to mention that Raven had hit the roof when informed that they wouldn't be able to bring along their own keyboard player, drummer and guitarists.

"I realize that the situation is not ideal," Burke allowed. "But when the opposition objected to having a foreign group perform, I felt that a compromise was in order."

"Opposition?" Sabrina gave him a sharp, probing glance. "Please tell me that we're not going to get booed when we come out onstage."
Wouldn't that make terrific press
.

"You needn't worry. The malcontents are a very small group. Unfortunately they tend to also be very vocal, but I assure you that I won't allow them to disrupt either the ceremony or your performance." His tone provided immediate reassurance.

"It must be nice, having your own country."
And making your own laws
. The subtle accusation, unspoken, hovered between them on the perfumed night air.

"It has its moments," Burke agreed amiably.

Her extraordinary eyes, her- soft, throaty voice, pulled him in two contradictory directions. Move closer. Back away. The second option was safer, the first eminently more appealing.

"Let me escort you back to the house." He slipped his hands into the pockets of his jeans, resisting a sudden impulse to run his fingers through the golden slide of her hair.

Quicksand, Burke warned himself. Take one more step and you're lost. For some reason that he didn't want to dwell on, the idea was inordinately tempting.

As they walked back to the palace, side by side, Burke was all too aware of the ever-present shadow trailing a discreet distance behind.

Burke was almost grateful for Drew Tremayne's silent presence. It had been one more reason for not giving in to temptation and kissing Sabrina Darling in the moonlight.

And as attractive as he admittedly found her, she was a complication he honestly didn't need. Not now. Not with everything else that was happening in his life.

Sabrina was surprised when the tall double doors, which Dixie had informed them originally belonged to an ancient monastery, swung open at their arrival. The servant, a tall muscular young man in his early thirties, greeted Sabrina and the prince with a polite nod of his prematurely gray head.

"Do the servants always stay up until the entire family is in bed?" she asked as she and Burke climbed the ornate curving stairway to the family quarters.

"Kirk is very loyal," Burke answered obliquely, unprepared to let Sabrina in on the small fact that Kirk Peterson was a former U.S. government agent, now in the employ of O'Bannion and Tremayne Security, Inc.

"He must be," Sabrina murmured. "To still be up at this hour."

She wondered idly what it would be like to have so many people at your beck and call, and decided it would be suffocating. Sabrina found herself almost feeling sorry for Burke. They'd reached the door to her family's suite. They stood there, face-to-face, for a long, silent time, both loath to leave, and both equally reluctant to admit it.

"If you'd like, it would be my pleasure to give you the grand tour of the royal theater tomorrow." Burke kept his voice low, to keep from disturbing her mother and sisters.

"Thanks, but as I told you, we've got a lot to do. And Noel's already arranged to show us the ropes."

"If you need any help locating musicians—"

"Chantal's taken care of it. The first audition is scheduled for eight-thirty."

"So soon," Burke murmured, glancing down at his watch. Her schedule certainly didn't allow for much sleep.

"There's a great deal to do. And not much time in which to do it," she said. Her own voice was little more than a whisper but easily heard in the hushed stillness of the palace hallway. "We want everything to be perfect."

So, she, too, was a perfectionist. Burke told himself that along with an intense loyalty to family, this was another thing they had in common. Not that he was keeping score, he assured himself quickly.

"Well, then, I'll say good night." He took her hand, as if to give it a polite handshake.

"Yes." As his long dark fingers curled warmly around hers, Sabrina's feet seemed nailed to the floor. A trickle of anticipation raced along her skin. Even as common sense told her she should pull her hand away, Sabrina allowed it to linger in his much larger one, pleasing them both. "Good night, Your Highness."

Caprice was an alien concept to Burke. Giving in to a rare impulse, he lifted her crimson tipped fingers to his lips.

"Bonne nuit, Mademoiselle Sabrina."

Burke's rich, deep voice, the touch of his lips against her skin, the warmth of his gaze, all conspired to stir something elemental inside her.

Oh, no
, Sabrina begged silently.
Please. Not again
.

It wouldn't happen.

She wouldn't let it happen.

Even as she vowed not to make the mistake of falling in love with a man who was admittedly a dead ringer for that Prince Charming who'd starred in so many youthful romantic fantasies, Sabrina was still dwelling on that warm, wonderful, stimulating feeling twenty minutes later, as she finally drifted off to sleep in the magnificent canopied bed.

The royal Montacroix theater seemed, at first glance, to be a marzipan building decked with paper flags. A towering structure that seemed to belong more to fantasy than reality, on the outside, it was a dazzling alabaster affair of wedding-cake spires and cupolas trimmed in rich, gleaming gold.

Inside there were ascending rows of rich red velvet chairs, an Ionic colonnade trimmed with marble theatrical masks and garlands, and a trompe l'oeil coffered ceiling, adorned with the same gilt that dazzled the eye on the exterior of the building. Between the Ionic pillars were towering mirrors, designed to reflect the movement onstage, surrounding the audience with dramatic action.

Behind the scenes, the stage machinery consisted of an ancient yet still operating system of thick, hand-hewn beams and elaborately designed contraptions of block and tackle and cables. Fortunately, Sabrina discovered over the next three days of rehearsal, the architect of this fairy-tale theater had been ahead of his time when it came to acoustics—they were remarkable. And the lighting, while far from state of the art, was more than adequate for their purposes. The one glitch was the need for additional power to run the computerized video equipment.

Following the lead of Natalie Cole, who'd achieved unprecedented success by singing duets with old televised performances of her fattier, Dixie had come up with the idea of Sonny Darling's three daughters singing along with him, in the same way they had when they were girls.

Although the idea of having the Darling sisters perform in Montacroix had been Chantal's idea, Sabrina quickly noticed that it was Noel who provided the upcoming concert's adept organizational skills. She was a paragon of quiet efficiency.

On the afternoon of her fourth day in the principality, Sabrina was in the theater, rehearsing with her sisters and the musicians when the lights flickered over-head and went out. The enormous screen darkened; Sonny's larger-than-life picture faded from view. "We've obviously overloaded the electrical system," Raven decided, her voice echoing in the empty, cavernous, turn-of-the-century theater.

"I'd say that's a distinct possibility," Noel, who'd been watching from the wings, agreed. She picked up the cellular phone she seemed never to be without and made the call to the director of palace maintenance. "An electrician will arrive momentarily."

"It's just as well the power went out," Ariel decided. "My throat's a little scratchy. I think I'd better have some tea."

"With honey and lemon," Noel said knowingly. "I've a thermos right here."

Having watched her in action for the past three days, Sabrina was not surprised that Noel not only knew of Ariel's preferred throat-soothing drink, but also had it on hand.

"I think I'll take a walk while we wait for the power to come back on," Sabrina said. "All the coffee I've had this morning has left me a little edgy."

She was not about to admit that it had been too many sleepless nights that had her nerves on edge— nights spent gazing out her window toward the lighted garage and picturing Burke hunkered over his beloved race car.

She hadn't seen him since their conversation in the gardens. He'd not shown up for breakfast or dinner, and during the day, she had immersed herself in rehearsals, while Burke was occupied with time trials and the whirl of social events that were part of every Grand Prix event.

Sabrina told herself that she should not care what Burke was doing. She assured herself that she had absolutely no interest in the playboy prince.

So why, she had asked herself innumerable times during the past three days, did her mind continually drift toward Prince Burke? And why had she found the picture of him in this morning's paper, with Monaco's glamorous Princess Caroline, so disturbing?

Sabrina had never experienced such a surge of hot, feminine jealousy as that caused by the sight of Burke's devastating smile directed the princess's way. Not even on that fateful day when she'd returned home early from the doctor and discovered her husband in bed with his mistress.