Royal Chase (15 page)

Colorado? I turned to the crew, wanting an explanation, but they were how they always were—silent, stone-faced, and nonparticipatory.

Why were we in Colorado? This wasn’t exactly exotic.

A car waited for us and drove us to my favorite ski lodge, the Rocky Mountain Red Lodge. The one where I spent all my free time skiing during the winter when I was still in college. I wondered the entire way what I was doing here and why Dante had chosen to take me to the mountains instead of a beach.

He waited for me outside the lodge, and I was both happy to see him and thoroughly confused about what was happening.

After he kissed my cheeks hello and made my toes curl, I said, “What is going on? How come everyone else gets the beach and I’m here?”

Then he made everything better by saying, “We’ve skied my slopes, so I thought it was time to try yours.”

“Um, it’s May. Most of the snow is gone.”

He got a huge grin. “Leave that up to me.”

The lodge was empty of any other visitors, as they had closed for the summer. The woman who checked us in said they had a skeleton staff—she’d given us suites with their own kitchens as room service wouldn’t be available and the restaurant was closed. She kept trying not to look at the cameras directly. She wasn’t successful. They’d probably cut every shot she was in.

“I don’t have anything to wear for skiing. I only packed swimsuits,” I told Dante as we went to our rooms, which were side by side.

“You can ski in those. I won’t complain.”

I hit him for laughing, and when I opened my door, I saw all the equipment and clothing I would need. I looked back at him with a grateful smile and let my door close behind me. The room was large and luxurious, dominated by a king-sized bed. As promised, there was a small kitchen with a fridge, stovetop, and a microwave. There was an adjoining door between my room and Dante’s. I started toward it to check the locks, when I heard his door slam shut. He was already dressed! I hurried and changed, eager to get to the slopes.

He was waiting in the hallway for me. “Let’s go.”

We went outside the lodge and headed toward the medium difficulty slopes. I put my hand up to my eyes and realized the entire run was covered in snow.

“How did you . . .”

He pointed and I saw three snow cannons pumping out man-made snow. “I can’t believe you did this!” It must have cost a fortune.

“Let’s go!” He sounded as excited as I felt.

We spent the entire day going up and down the slopes, over and over. I absolutely loved having the place practically to ourselves, with the exception of our camera and sound guys. When they picked the crews to come with us, someone had failed to find out whether or not they could ski. They spent more time in the snow than skiing on it. Dante and I had to keep helping them back to their feet. We laughed and skied and laughed some more.

As it started to turn dark, I felt exhausted physically, but emotionally and mentally I was recharged and refreshed.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you this way,” Dante said, right before we walked into our separate rooms.

“What way?”

“Sparkly. Alive. Happy.”

He was right, and we shared another one of those emotionally laden moments that scared me like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

“Skiing always makes me happy,” I said, a little too brightly. “I’m glad we came.”

“That’s what I’m good for. You need someone to remind you to not be so serious all the time. To have fun. Life is too short.”

There was no answer to that other than hiding in my room from him. Like the yellow-bellied coward that I was. I took a very long shower, putting on one of the resort’s fluffy white robes when I finished and towel-drying my hair. I wondered whether there was any food in the kitchen as I hadn’t eaten in hours, and was relieved to find that there was. I had started putting together a salad when a large black spider, which bore more than a passing resemblance to a tarantula, began running across the floor.

I screamed and grabbed my salad bowl, putting it over the spider, trapping him in place. I snagged a wooden spoon and climbed up on the counter, not sure what to do next.

Dante came barreling into the room through our adjoining door. If he’d been a cowboy, he would have had his six-shooters out. “What’s wrong?”

“Spider,” I managed, and pointed to the bowl. It barely registered that he too had just come from the shower and only had on a pair of jeans. I had to be terrified if I couldn’t even enjoy his gorgeously sculpted chest and arms.

He immediately relaxed and came into my kitchen, looking at the bowl and then back at me. “How did you imagine this standoff would end?”

“Shh, don’t talk,” I whispered. “He’s the size of your face. I think he might even have a knife. I don’t want him to hear my voice and come back and get revenge by laying spider eggs in my ears while I’m sleeping.”

“I can’t believe you’re afraid of spiders. I didn’t think you were afraid of anything.”

“Oh, be quiet, funny man. I need you to do your manly duty and kill the spider, please.”

He went over to the bowl and I closed my eyes. I heard paper towels being ripped, a scraping noise of the bowl being moved and then silence. “All done. You can open your eyes. I have vanquished the spider for you. Quest number three completed.”

“Are you sure he’s dead?”

“Very sure.”

I jumped off the counter and ran to him, hugging him tightly. He put his arms around me, holding me close. Fear and adrenaline had been coursing through me, and now they were turning into something else.

Something even scarier than the spider.

Chapter 15

I have developed a deep-seated jealousy of your mirror and all the time it gets to spend looking into your eyes.

He didn’t have on a shirt, and there was only my bathrobe between us. I gulped as my pulse pounded all over my body.

Even though my hair was wet, I felt a wave of heat blast through me. I finally looked up at him, and he had a roguish grin that turned my legs to rubber.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he asked.

“Not even sort of,” I lied, and hoped he wouldn’t see through it. This all felt so deliberate, like he knew he made me crazy and he thought it was hilarious.

Dante smiled like he knew something I didn’t, and then said, “I was thinking it would be fun to go swimming. They heated the pool for us. Do you want to come with me?”

Right then I probably would have done anything he asked. “Is the pope Catholic?” I blurted out, something my daddy often said.

He had a slight frown. “Last time I checked. Oh!” His frown went away. “That means you’ll come swimming.”

“I, um, just need to get my bathing suit on.”

“You don’t have to,” he teased, and we still just stood there, locked in each other’s arms, neither one of us moving. It didn’t seem to be an issue for him, but I was liable to have a case of the vapors.

“I think swimsuits are necessary.”

I knew he had been joking, but I definitely didn’t need to add skinny-dipping into this situation. While I kept swallowing and trying to keep my breathing even, he studied me. “I’ll meet you in the hallway in ten minutes.”

Then he let go of me and went back to his room, closing the adjoining door behind him. I leaned back, gripping the counter for support.

I should tell him I’d changed my mind. That us swimming together, alone, was not a good idea. I shoved some lettuce into my mouth. Now
I could invoke the “no swimming for an hour after eating” rule.

I looked at the door. I had to figure out a way to overcome my attrac
tion to him. Yes, this show and experience would end, but my contact with
him would not. I would still be doing PR for his family, which he happened to be a part of, and soon Kat would be a part of it, too. She would invite me to events and special occasions. Dante would keep being in my
life. I could not be married to someone else and still react to him this way.

Maybe the answer wasn’t hiding from him and avoiding him, but spending more time with him. Kat had told me once about something called exposure therapy, where kids overcame their fears and anxieties by constantly being around the thing that scared them. Supposedly, this would desensitize them and lessen their reactions. At this point I was willing to try anything to get him out of my head.

After eating a bit, I chose my most modest bikini—a red and white polka-dot 1950s-inspired suit that always made me feel like Marilyn Monroe.

Putting the robe back on over my suit, I grabbed a towel and went out into the hallway. Dante gave me a gorgeous smile, which I concentrated on rather than his half-nakedness, and we started walking to the pool. He told me a story about breaking his left arm that involved his six-year-old belief that he could fly if he just really put his mind to it.

He stopped at the gate of the fence that surrounded the pool. There was a rule sign posted, and he studied it.

“What are you doing?”

“Acquainting myself with the rules. Okay, I’m ready.”

We went in, and he threw his towel onto a nearby chair and dove into the pool’s deep end. He resurfaced quickly. I slipped off my sandals and took off my robe. I could feel his eyes on me and the tension that it caused for both of us.

Repeated exposure
, I reminded myself.
Keeping my company alive by making Matthew Burdette happy
. Those were the things I needed to concentrate on.

Ignoring my pounding heart, I went over to the stairs and descended slowly, acclimating myself to the water. It was warm and inviting, and if I closed my eyes I could almost imagine that I was entering some tropical ocean instead of a pool at a ski lodge.

I got to a place where I could touch the bottom and keep my head and shoulders above water comfortably. He swam to a point across from me.

“I heard that the men who star on this show keep a running bet on who can make out with the most women. Where are you ranked?” It was a good thing to ask him. Him messing around with other girls was still the one thing I could hold against him. The one thing I couldn’t abide in a man.

He smiled and stayed quiet. I was about to ask him again when he said, “I invoke my Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.”

I knew it. “You’re not a US citizen. The Constitution doesn’t apply to you.”

“You could always rectify that by marrying me.”

I narrowed my eyes at him while he laughed at his own joke. “Pass. And thanks for not answering my question.”

“Why do you care if I kiss anyone else?”

“I don’t!” I said, a little too quickly.

He treaded water, watching me. “You really want to know how many women I’ve kissed from this show?”

I did, desperately and inexplicably. “Yes.”

“Including you?”

I nodded.

“One.”

Which filled my heart with both glee and disbelief. “I find that hard to believe.”

He shrugged one shoulder. “I’ve never lied to you, so I don’t know why you wouldn’t believe me. I haven’t kissed anyone. Out of respect for you.”

I couldn’t have adequately described to anyone the twenty different things I felt when he said that. It was overwhelming, terrifying, and made me tremble.

“I know you better than that.” I had meant to sound playful, but I came across as accusatory.

“You don’t know me as well as you think you do.”

“Really? Fine. Tell me something I don’t know about you.”

“You’ve stolen my heart.”

That made the million different swirling emotions kick up into overdrive. I tried to laugh, but it came out weird. “Something real and not flirtatious,” I told him.

A strange expression crossed his face, and then his smile returned. “I don’t keep secrets from you,
Limone
. You know that.”

My heart palpitations were making me jumpier than a cat on a hot tin roof.

“But in the interest of full disclosure, I have a terrible credit score.”

“How can you be rich and have a terrible credit score?”

His muscled arms moved back and forth in the water, keeping him in place. I wondered how long he could tread water. I was extremely impressed by his endurance.

“I don’t get my trust fund until my twenty-fifth birthday, and I used to be terrible with money.”

“Used to be?”

His eyes twinkled with mirth. “I’m still working on it.”

“Me too,” I admitted.

“What made you more careful?”

“Meeting Kat freshman year. I felt bad being so extravagant when she had nothing. I could see myself through her eyes and how I wasted my money, so I economized.”

He cocked his head to the side. “You spend a lot of time worrying about how other people see you, don’t you?”

I crossed my arms, ready to let him know just how wrong he was, but he kept speaking. “I am impressed that you’re able to handle your money so well.”

“You should be,” I retorted. “It sucks.”

He held his arms up in a “look who you’re talking to, I get it” gesture.

Before I could ask him to clarify, he said, “Tell me something I don’t know about you.”

There were probably a lot of things he didn’t know about me. A lot of things that I thought and felt that were better kept private.

I remembered his story about breaking his arm, and thought broken bones were probably a safe topic for conversation.

“I broke my ankle skiing right before my last solo ballet recital.”

He raised both eyebrows at me. “I didn’t know you were a dancer. Given your hatred of all things exercise-related it should be unexpected, but I guess it’s not that surprising. I’ve danced with you often enough to know that you know what you’re doing.”

“Grandma Lemon wanted me to compete in beauty pageants, but I couldn’t sing, and she said twirling a baton was beneath me as a Beauchamp, so I started taking ballet and I loved it. I miss it so much.”

I had enjoyed it, the exactness and grace of it, and at the time, I wanted nothing more than to earn a solo and become a professional ballerina someday.

“Did you stop because of your ankle?”

“I stopped because when puberty hit, I no longer had the right figure for ballet.”

He waggled his eyebrows at me suggestively. “Ballet’s loss was my great gain.”

I shook my head. One-track mind. “My sophomore year, I finally got my solo. Madame La Grand let me know that it would be my last performance with them. My company was performing excerpts from
The Nutcracker
, and I won the part of Clara. We had rehearsals every day, and then I would go home and practice for hours every single night. I wanted it to be perfect. Then my family went skiing in Utah the weekend before the show, and that was it. I never got to perform it.”

“That’s so sad,
Limone
. I’m so sorry that happened to you.”

I could feel the tears welling at the back of my eyes at the emotion in his voice. “Speaking of sad, I still remember every single step of my routine even though it’s been almost ten years.”

“Couldn’t you go back? Do ballet for fun?”

“Sometimes you need to know when to let go of impossible dreams and be real about your life.”

He slowly swam closer to me. “So you think you have to settle for less?”

We were no longer talking about ballet, and Sterling needed to be off-limits. “It’s not settling to be with someone who I know won’t cheat on me.”

Even closer. “This isn’t about cheating or getting hurt. It’s about control. You think you can control your life if you choose a certain kind of man. But you can’t control anything. If that’s the one thing in my life I’ve learned, it’s that everything is out of our control.”

From the timbre in his voice, I knew he was talking about his father. The king had become a quadriplegic after a boating accident.

“You should be choosing a man who loves you so much that he could never even conceive of hurting you. A man who would always put you first, above everything else.”

He was close enough to touch me, but he didn’t. I couldn’t drag air into my lungs fast enough as that zing of electricity crackled between us.

Speaking was pretty much out of the question when he looked at me like that.

“
Limone
, there’s something I need to say to you.”

That loosened my tongue. I couldn’t let him continue. “Stop. Don’t say it. If you do it will ruin everything. I’m engaged.”

“And yet you’re here with me.”

“I’m here because I don’t have a choice,” I snapped.

“You’ve always had a choice,” he said, his silky voice making my stomach flip repeatedly. “And if you were mine, I could never go this long without seeing you. Without touching you. Without kissing you.”

He was going to kiss me. And I just stood there frozen, unable and unwilling to move.

“Is it magic between you two the way it is with us?” His seductive voice was almost more than I could stand.

And even then, I couldn’t lie to him. I needed to, for my own self-preservation. For the preservation of my upcoming wedding. To keep my heart intact.

So I did the only thing I could think of to put some distance between us.

I splashed him.

He wiped the water from his face slowly, with a grin that promised retribution. I should have known he’d take it as a challenge.

Maybe that was why I did it.

“There are rules,” he said. “You can’t simply splash me. Did you not see the sign?”

“Oh, I saw the sign.” I splashed him again.

He turned his head this time, as if he’d been expecting it. “As a member of the household of a reigning monarch, it is my duty to report this. Who do you call for pool violations?”

I splashed him again, and kept splashing him. We were both laughing when he reached through the mountain of water for me, restraining my arms. He held them up in the air, which made the rest of me slam into him.

The laughter died quickly, and he let go of my arms. They fell to my sides, but I didn’t move. I couldn’t. I could feel his heart rapidly beating against his chest. We were both breathing hard and fast, and it wasn’t from the splashing.

I stared at his mouth, willing him to kiss me. My tingly lips and racing pulse throbbed. But he didn’t move. We stood, pressed together, surrounded by the warmth from the pool and each other. I wanted him to make that first move so that I could blame it on him later. Just one kiss wouldn’t hurt, would it? If it wasn’t my fault? What could I do if he just grabbed me and kissed me? I had to make the show happy, right?

Thinking about the show made me remember the camera, and I turned to see them still filming. This would look so bad. So, so bad.

“Are you sure we can’t . . .” he started to say as I backed up, and I knew then that he wanted it just as badly as I did.