The Dollar Princess Dilemma

Prologue

Jane O’Neill had never seen anyone like him before.

She ducked down between a stack of books and stared at him through the gap between leather covers, trying not to let anyone see her gawp like what her ma would call a ‘cailin uagneach’.

She remembered the women at their old tenement building who would pause in hanging out their laundry on the roof to point and giggle at the dockers passing below, their powerful arms revealed by rolled-back shirtsleeves.

There would always be whistling and shouts all around.

‘Don’t listen to them, mo storin,’ her mother had scolded.

‘They should have their mouths washed out with soap for saying such things!’ Jane hadn’t cared; she hadn’t really understood, anyway.

The lads were flah enough, sure, but she’d rather be left alone in a corner with a precious book.

Quietness had been a rare prize on Mulberry Street, and now that she lived on cozy Gramercy Park with plenty of bookshops nearby and pocket money to get what she wanted, she hadn’t changed her mind.

But now, as she watched the young man over in the Botany section, she saw what those giggling colleens meant. He was a bright sight amid all those shadows and dusty corners.

Jane guessed he wasn’t much older than her own fifteen years.

His skin was smooth as silk, though touched with bronze as if he spent time out under the sky, his tumble of waving hair a light brown threaded with gold.

He pushed an impatient hand through it as he studied a book, leaving it in disarray.

He was tall and slim but not reedy, reminding her of the classical statues at the Metropolitan Museum, relaxed yet powerful.

His suit was a fine one, caramel-coloured tweed, but his cravat was askew, and she glimpsed an ink stain on his fine linen shirt-cuff as he reached for another book.

Not perfect, and not flashy, like her would-be suitor Paul Brosnahan, who strutted, brawled and demanded. This young man was most intriguing.

Who was he? She was sure she’d never seen him at the shop before.

She’d come to know many of the regulars, as she stopped there a few afternoons every week, and she was certain she’d have remembered him.

Most of the people she nodded at when she arrived, or sat next to at the long wooden tables, were many years older than her, stooped scholars and the sort.

This young man looked as if he could be a character in a novel himself! A prince in disguise.

What was he reading? Jane had found she could discover a great deal about anyone by what they read.

Did they like philosophy, history or poetry?

Her brother Connor read the financial papers, or maybe an adventure novel set in the Wild West or African gold mines, on his rare evenings at home.

Her mother chose religious tomes, or sentimental romances about Irish lasses and their unhappy fates. And Jane herself…

She glanced at the towers of volumes she’d made around herself on the table: poetry, a new novel from Paris, a history of the Medici in Florence and guides to pedagogy.

Well, maybe it would be hard to read her that way.

She always read whatever caught her eye in the moment, whatever she thought would be useful.

But in general that sort of clue worked fairly well, at least as a start to knowing someone.

The life in Gramercy Park was still a new one to her; she had to learn how to make friends, how to socialise and how to talk, walk and speak.

She never quite felt like she fit. And something in that mysterious young gentleman whispered to her that maybe he was rather the same.

The way he moved, perhaps, or his expression.

He seemed rather alone, as if he, too, sought solace between those leather covers.

Yet he didn’t seem as unsure in the world as she so often felt.

He held himself with confidence, carelessness, as if he knew his place and never worried about where he was or who watched him.

He stretched to take another volume from a high shelf.

It seemed effortless and natural, the muscles of his lean back and shoulders rippling beneath his coat, an almost musical movement.

She wondered what it would be like to dance with a man like that.

To float in his arms over a polished dance floor, gliding and spinning, staring into his eyes…

Jane leaned forward to try and read the titles he held in the crook of his arm, filled with yearning to read him.

To know just a little more about him. To make that rare moment of something different, something colourful in her life, last. Frustratingly, he held the titles turned away, and she leaned closer to squint at them.

Her book tower wobbled and creaked, and she gasped as she reached desperately to keep it from tumbling.

They evaded her grasp anyway and crashed down.

People at the other tables huffed in indignation, and Jane had no place to hide.

The man turned away from his shelf and looked right at her. And, she saw now, his eyes were as blue as a summer sky, so vibrant and luminous. He looked a bit startled, but not angry at the rip in the dusty silence of the shop.

Then he smiled.

His eyes crinkled at the corners, genuinely delighted, easy and confident.

It took him from good-looking to beautiful, made sunshine seem to pour through the shop, through the whole world.

Jane was sure she’d never be quite the same after that moment; she’d been waiting for a smile like that for her whole life and hadn’t even known it.

Jane felt her face catch fire, the curse of a pale Irish complexion. She longed to sink down into the floor, to run away. She grasped at the fallen books and tried to restack them, even as they slipped out of her fingers to crash down all over again.

‘Oh, really!’ The closest reader sniffed, and stomped away with his volumes.

The handsome young man’s smile just widened and, oh, mallacht, but he had dimples—adorable dimples set low in his cheeks, highlighting that smile. He strolled toward her, intent but in no hurry even as everything seemed to have slowed down around her. She had nowhere to run.

Not that she could possibly have moved at all. She felt frozen in place, unable to look away from him.

‘May I be of assistance?’ he said. His voice was low, musical, touched with an English accent. Oh, what would her ma say now if she could see Jane mooning over an Englishman?

His hair, those rich, tumbling waves, fell over his brow again. He swept them back with one impatient swipe, and reached for her fallen books…just as she reached for the same one, and their hands brushed.

She trembled at the sparks his skin left behind on hers, the raw longing that swept all through her. Oh, no wonder the girls on the roof would whistle and shriek so after the braw men! She didn’t blame them one bit, if this was how they felt. She drew back, shaking out her hand as if it burned.

‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘I’m not usually quite so clumsy.’ But that was a lie. She was a terrible bumbler, always tripping over her own feet since she’d grown so tall, but he made her want to be as airy and graceful as a pixie.

‘I would certainly wager not,’ he said. His tone—could it be admiring…of her? She felt his gaze linger on her, but she dared not look directly at him. It would be as blinding as looking at the sun.

They stacked books in silence for a moment, and Jane found she couldn’t quite breathe, either. He smelled of sandalwood soap, warm and delicious, and he felt so warm and enticing so close to her.

‘You must be a visitor here,’ she finally said.

She wasn’t at all sure what to say; she only wished she could make him stay there for just a few more minutes.

The world had seemed filled with colour since he’d appeared, gone from grey to vivid blue, gold and green in an instant, and she didn’t want to lose it yet.

He grimaced. ‘Do I not fit in? I do try.’

Jane laughed. ‘Not really, I’m afraid. Mostly, it’s because I’m here at the shop so often, I’ve seen the same people over and over. But not you. And there’s your accent…’

‘Ah, I’m caught.’ He piled up a few more books, a smile spreading across his lips.

They crinkled in a modest, enticing way, and he glanced down.

That smile made his eyes shimmer. ‘Yes, I’m from Derbyshire, visiting my aunt who lives here in New York.

Aunt Louisa is very kind; I just felt the need to escape for a little while.

’ He turned a book over in his hands, a rueful grimace tugging at that smile.

‘I’ve always thought books were the best way to do that—escape, that is. ’

‘So they are.’ Jane thought of those days in the hot, cabbage-stinking apartment, hiding behind an old sheet in a corner with a book of fairy tales or historical romances helping her fly up and away.

‘What are you hiding from, then, Miss…?’ He looked at her with his head tilted in curiosity, watching her as if she was the only person in the world, the only person whose words mattered.

‘My name is Jane.’

‘Jane. I’m Benedict…’ His voice trailed away, as if he suddenly realised he should keep something back. ‘Just Benedict.’

‘I’ve used books to hide from many things, I suppose—reality, mostly.

Sometimes my mother.’ She thought again of that grimy little apartment, barely room to turn around, and the pretty pink bedroom that was all hers now.

So much had changed, but not her need for stories; for glimpsing different lives, different ways of thinking.

This man seemed like something that had popped out of one of those tales, something special.

‘So you found a way to slip out of reality? To be free?’ he said wistfully.