The Star Princess (9 page)

Chapter Six

Ilana expelled a breath of relief. Closing her eyes briefly, she leaned back against the closed door, her hands flat against the cool white wood, and inhaled the sweet scent of her living room. She'd bought fresh lilacs the day before in the flower market by the pier. Good thing. The scent calmed her. A little. And it eased the effects of the pepper spray, which thankfully had been mild due to the smallness of the burst, bonehead that she was, and the wind. Here she thought she'd stepped into The Terminator. Instead, the last few minutes had played out like a bad romantic comedy.

She opened her heavy eyes and massaged her temples. A few curling strands of hair fell over her face. With the inbred insolence so characteristic of royal Vash Nadah men, Ché clasped his hands behind his back and took in the details of her small living room. Her couch was yellow, the two chairs sea-blue, and the walls white. The floor was whitewashed wood covered with groups of pillows, area rugs, and nautical bric-a-brac she'd acquired here and there. Nothing matched. She found the disarray appealing. In her home, there was only one rule: no plants, pets, or anything she had to water, trim, feed, or walk.

She liked her place. It was bright and happy, so she could feel that way, too. Even when she wasn't.

Sniffling, she pressed the tissue in her hand to her burning nose. Ché sneezed. Removing his glasses, he wiped his eyes, muttering something that didn't sound like language Mama Vedla would likely use.

Ilana hid her smirk by blowing her nose. "We're a mess, aren't we?"

It looked as if he'd smile. Then he appeared to catch himself. "Quite." He pocketed his sunglasses, "it is safe to remove my eyeshaders now that we are inside, yes? I would not want to further anger the indigenous species."

Startled, she laughed. He looked pleased. "You have a sense of humor," she told him.

"You think I am joking?"

Touche.

She shook her head. "Prince Ché What-the-hell-are-you-doing-here Vedla, I've already convinced myself not to like you. Don't make me change my mind."

He gave her that you-are-an-alien-creature look she'd come to expect. "Actually, Ilana, you do not know as much as you think you do about Vash men."

"I know enough. All I ever want to. Believe me."

His golden eyes sparked with challenge, an almost playful look that made Ilana wonder if Ché knew was sexy as hell. "We shall see," was all he said.

"I guess we will, won't we?" she shot back.

The air crackled with this unexpected verbal sparring; She found it exhilarating.

Smoothly, Ché moved on to the photos on her walls, Ilana's UCLA diploma, and the filmmaking awards she'd won. He stood there, handsome and poised, at the top of his game; he exuded power and wealth, the kind of confidence born into a man. If ever there was a surreal scene, this was it: Ché Vedla, the man who personified everything Ilana wanted to avoid, standing in the middle of her living room. She was tempted to grab the Canon in her bedroom so she could record the event for all posterity.

"You create entertainment," he said.

She liked the way he said that. He'd expressed what she did for a living perfectly. "Yeah. I'm a filmmaker. My partners and I run a production company that makes movies. We've only made three so far, just finished the last. That was what I was working on when I met you the first time." When your idiot brother singlehandedly almost tore apart the Federation.

… Before Ché stepped in and along with Ian helped save the day, she reminded herself. "We each have our specialties, and even then we share tasks. Mostly, I'm the DP— the director of photography. That means I'm the person responsible for the lighting and cinematography of a film, I decide how a scene should look, taking into account things like contrast and depth of field. But when I can, I enjoy just being the camera operator." She added Basic words and hand motions to her English to help him grasp her explanation. Strangely, she wanted him to understand what she did for a living. She wanted his respect. And yet, she wasn't sure why. Why was it so important that this man, this uppity Vash prince, acknowledge that a woman could do more than produce babies, or act as a decorative fixture on his arm? She had a snowball's chance in hell of changing his views, just as he'd never get her to see why the Vash liked their royal women held back and hidden away.

"But now we're in between projects. We're hoping to find a great script, or an idea we love. Then we'll have to find investors, or get a grant. And if that doesn't work out, we'll probably have to find work as a crew for other people's projects to make money." She cracked a smile. "If it gets really bad, I'll find a part-time gig at a restaurant, or the video store across the street so I can eat."

At that, Ché glanced up sharply. Had he assumed she lived off the limitless B'kah wealth? Had he ever socialized with anyone who lived as simply as she did? Welcome to the real word, Mr. Prince.

"But that's the nature of the business," she finished with a shrug. "It's unpredictable at first— and even later on, everyone tells me."

He nodded, his classic features reserved. "You love your work."

She jerked her gaze up to his. Pale, intense eyes glowed in his shadowed face. And yet, she couldn't read his expression, couldn't make out what he thought of her passion for her art. "Yes. I love it. I love making movies. I can put the pictures I see in my head out there for others so they can enjoy them, too. I love tweaking a scene until it gives the exact feeling I'm looking for, the shot that evokes the right mood. I never want to give it up."

She felt suddenly awkward. It was that morning-after feeling where, now that the rush of lust had passed, you realized that you'd been physically very intimate with someone you weren't sure you wanted to know that well— or know at all. It felt like that now with Ché, only she'd been intimate emotionally, not physically, revealing hopes and dreams she'd never intended to bare.

He rewarded her with interest and maybe even admiration; she could see it in his expression as he took a closer look at her trophies, accolades, and memorabilia. Or was it wishful thinking on her part? One thing was for sure: enigma described Ché Vedla perfectly.

On her kitchen counter, her answering machine was blinking. She strode across the room to get a closer look. There were fifteen messages waiting. Since her friends and associates used her cell, this could only mean one thing.

Dread filling her, she touched the Play button. "Ms. Hamilton, this is Paul Friedman from the Wall Street Journal— " She skipped to the next message. "Hello, I'm Marjorie Stevens with the Los Angeles fi— " Ilana winced. "This is Newsweek magazine calling for— "

"Ah!" She punched the Off button. "First the reporter, then the jerk with the camera, and now this."

Ché waved at the front door, which she'd.bolted. "At least the beasts are locked outside for the night."

She snorted. "You're still here, aren't you?"

Ché appeared unsure whether he should laugh or act insulted. "You consider me a beast?"

She dropped her hands to her hips and gave him a slow, very thorough onceover. Big hands. Big feet. She supposed it would be too crude to admit that she hoped so. "Too early to tell," she said.

With something between indignation and awe, Ché regarded her. She strode across the living room and extended her hands. "Since you're staying, let me put away your coat."

Slowly, he unbuttoned his Armani suit. His shoulders and biceps flexed as he shrugged off the jacket.

"Thank you." He draped the coat across her outstretched arms. The fabric smelled like him, a masculine scent of clean, warm skin, and something exotic and different, reminding her that he was anything but the guy next door.

He tugged on his shirt sleeves, smoothing out the wrinkles. The white linen was so fine that the Vash-bronze skin of his upper body showed through. The palms of Ilana's imagination slid over the cool shirt, her fingers slipping under the fabric to explore firm, hot skin.

"I'll put away your coat," she said quickly. "Sit down, make yourself at home." Take off the rest of your clothes; I won't mind.

She spun away to hang the jacket in the closet. An umbrella fell out. She righted it. Then her vacuum cleaner tried to lunge forward. With her knee, Ilana shoved it back inside, slammed the door, then paused to compose herself before she turned around.

Did Tee'ah have any idea what she'd given up to marry Ian?

Ilana cut off the thought. Her brother was an Earth guy at heart, and that's what Tee'ah wanted. Someone without pretense, someone who wasn't spoiled, who would let her have the freedom she wanted. Not someone like Ché. Sure, with the sex lessons he'd had and a genetically perfect body, Ché would be the ideal fling. But what woman in her right mind would want to be his wife? His queen?

A Vash woman, she guessed with a shudder. The thought of losing herself, everything she was, everything she'd worked for, in the black hole of Che's patriarchal society scared Ilana in a deep, almost irrational way that was almost as bad as flying. Marrying a Vash would be the ultimate loss of identity. Of control.

Her mother hadn't lost herself, Ilana thought.

Yeah, but Jas had a husband who supported her independence. Ché was everything Rom wasn't. He was a Vedla, a family of stuck-up, narrow-minded, chauvinistic pigs. He didn't appear that way now be cause he was in her home and wisely on his best behavior. But scratch the surface and she'd find the real Che: a wealthy prince who kept a legion of concubines on call, a man who thought a wife's only role was to make heirs, and who deep down felt that anyone from Earth was a barbarian.

He begged for redirection.

She turned around. Ché stood in front of the window that overlooked the street and the ocean beyond. At this hour, the light-dotted blackness of the Pacific was almost indistinguishable from the starry sky, soon to be swallowed up by midnight fog.

His hands were clasped behind his back, one placed neatly inside the other, and his back was ramrod straight, as if to stand another way had been forever forbidden. But his legs were set apart, a relaxed confident stance, as if watching the ocean were soothing.

Well, they had that in common at least. She couldn't imagine ever moving away from the shore. For someone who'd grown up in Tempe, Arizona, it was a strange sentiment. Ian loved the desert. So did her mother. But not Ilana. She needed to be near water. As soon as she could afford it, she'd live on the beach, not across the street from it. But even here, she could hear the waves if she listened hard enough above the Friday-night summer beach traffic.

There were the smells, too— salt, dampness, dead kelp fermenting on the sand— carried in with the breeze billowing past her gauzy whiteand-yellow striped curtains. The air ruffled Che's elegant white shirt, but he remained so very aristocratic, dignified, and confident with his broad shoulders, perfect posture, and lean athletic build. He'd look just as noble standing around in his underwear.

Now, there was an interesting thought: Ché Vedla— boxers or briefs?

"So," she said. "Feeling better now?"

"Quite." His tone had turned formal again, she noticed. "I traveled here by private courier. The journey was rather long." Stiffly he kept his hands behind his back. "My sleep period is not yet aligned with yours on Earth."

"We call it jet lag."

"Jet lag, yes," he replied courteously, his attention drawn back to the window.

Drawing-room conversation, she thought. It must be his way of keeping distance between them, dampening the palpable intimacy of the two of them alone.

He radiated confidence, sexual confidence, and yet she could unnerve him with a casual touch. A bizarre blend of puritanical values and sexual abandon, he was the consummate product of his society, a people who adhered to laws set down by an eleven-thousand-year-old book.

She'd been studying the Treatise of Trade. Five years, and she still hadn't made it all the way through. But she kept at it doggedly, partly out of intellectual curiosity and partly out of a desire to understand the strange culture into which her family had married. When it came to societal guidance, the Treatise was one-stop shopping. It was the Declaration of Independence crossed with the Kama Sutra and the Old Testament. Where else could you find detailed information on lovemaking— with illustrations!— alongside passages on family values that gave new meaning to the words moralistic, stuffy, and old-fashioned?

"Here it reminds me of my home," Ché said, gazing outside. She thought of the gorgeous images she'd brought up on the computer months ago. A world of water. It had spawned both the man who'd tried to ruin her brother, and the man who'd smoothed it all over. Ché was also the first of the princes to give Ian his support, which had proved crucial for Ian's acceptance amongst the Vash Nadah. "Eireya," she said.

He turned around. "Yes."

"Ocean covers eighty percent of the surface. You have one continent. The rest is broken into small islands."

Scattered across blue-purple water as if a giant had flung a handful of emeralds from the lavender sky, she thought.

Ché reacted with genuine pleasure. "You've studied my world."

"It sounded pretty, so I looked it up once." She shrugged it off. "So— homesick already?"

He looked startled by her sudden change in subject, or maybe by her directness, but he recovered instantly. Oh, how she appreciated a man who resisted intimidation! Of the many words she could use to describe Ché Vedla, wimp wasn't one of them.

Che shook his head. "If I had to go many days without the sea nearby, perhaps. But it is near, and so I am not."

Something ate at him, though. There was a little muscle in his jaw that made a dimple when he concentrated; she'd noticed. Now it looked like the Grand Canyon.

She leaned one shoulder against the wall. Tell me why you're here, Ché. Why did you come to Earth?"

"For a holiday." He hesitated. "Of a sort."

He was hiding something. "Of a sort? What's that supposed to mean? Spare me the mystery, please." Anger thickened her voice. Ian maintained that Ché knew nothing of the attempts on his life, but that the incidents occurred at all tainted her interaction with Ché with risk and danger. "Neither of us has forgotten that your brother tried to murder mine. And here you are, showing up without warning— "