Chapter Four
Gabriela froze. Of course, Marcello’s suggestion was absurd. More than absurd! Prince Enrique was not going to invite her onto his shoulders.
But the man in question was looking at her quizzically. She smoothed her skirt uneasily. He lifted an eyebrow at her.
Just like that, she was young again, and knew what he was saying without him speaking a word.
Was she game to try?
And just like that, the Prince was young again, too, some mischief lighting the dark depths of his eyes, that formidable remoteness gone from him.
He squatted down and tapped his shoulder. Marcello shrieked his approval.
It was a moment that, if a person thought about it for too long, would become way too evident it meant too much. And then the moment would be gone, but the wash of awkwardness would remain.
Gabriela made her choice, if it could be called that. The two princes were quite irresistible.
She strode toward Enrique, kicked off her shoes, tucked her skirt firmly against her thighs, took a deep breath and stepped onto his shoulders.
It was really everything she could do not to gasp as she placed her legs on either side of his neck. Even with the slight barrier of the thin fabric of the skirt, heat radiated from him onto the delicate skin of her inner thigh.
“Okay?” he asked.
She was not okay! She was being swamped with primal feelings that were stunning in their intensity. Of course, she would die before she let him know that.
“Yes,” she lied, through clenched teeth. “Fine.”
He rose effortlessly, lifting her with grace and strength, the soft curve of her legs and bottom molding to his hard, muscular strength way too easily. She wobbled. The truth was, Gabriela felt off-balance in every way it was possible for a woman to feel off-balance.
She folded her hands over his forehead in an effort to stabilize herself.
Again, nothing could have prepared her for the deepening of her searing awareness of him as a man.
The skin-on-skin contact, and the springy sensuality of the silk of his hair beneath her fingertips, made her feel as heady as if she had consumed too much champagne. She wobbled again.
His hands closed around her shins, and he pulled her legs tight into his chest. This new area of contact, the warmth and strength in his touch, made it very difficult—nearly impossible—to focus on the mission.
The electrical jolts of pure awareness threatened her precarious balance even more, and they both tightened their holds.
She forced herself to focus, glad Enrique could not see her, as she could feel a blush rising hot in her cheeks.
Geraldo—the mission—peered at her from the branches of the tree. He meowed piteously. She reached. Enrique adjusted, just a hair, to compensate for her movement.
She felt the broadness of his shoulder shifting under the curve of her bottom, the back of her thigh.
Good grief! She was not an innocent, freshly released from a convent. And yet, there was no denying the ripple of pure want that this unexpectedly intimate encounter was creating in her.
“Geraldo!” she said, out loud, sternly, hoping her tone would disguise all the helpless sensations coursing through her. “Come here.”
She leaned closer to the tree, and held out her arms, hoping the cat would walk into them, but no, he yowled pathetically, and sure enough, when she looked closer she could see it was the non-retracting claws that were causing his difficulty.
Leaning in, her every micro-movement causing a micro-adjustment from Enrique, Gabriela had to get a finger under the cat’s paw, and loosen each of his claws, one at time.
The first paw freed, and while she cajoled him not to reengage it in the tree, she got the other one free.
Finally, after what seemed to be a very long period of extremely intimate contact with Enrique’s neck, she got her hand under the cat’s belly, lifted, and then Geraldo’s substantial weight settled against her breast.
“I have him!” she called, finally, triumphantly.
Enrique lowered himself slowly into a crouch, bracing one hand on the ground. She considered her options. It had been easy to step from behind him to get on his shoulders, but it seemed as if it would be much harder to dismount that way.
Sensing her dilemma, he ducked his head. With as much dignity as she could muster, she slid off his shoulders, over his lowered head. For one stunning moment, her skirt caught, and she felt the heat of his breath on her thigh.
The Prince was under her skirt. It was a millisecond, if that, before she stepped away. She knew there was no way the redness she could feel burning in her cheeks could be possibly attributed to the rescue. Had there ever been a more embarrassing predicament?
Thankfully, there was the distraction of a very excited Marcello.
“Geraldo,” he crooned, holding up his arms for the cat.
She went to pass the feline to its most ardent admirer, only to find Geraldo’s claws were as firmly caught in her blouse as they had been in the tree branch.
She tugged, and nothing happened. When she tugged a little more firmly, the cat, who had thankfully not panicked at his predicament while in the tree, panicked now. He tried, with increasing franticness, to jerk his paws free from the fabric of her blouse.
“He’s stuck,” she told Enrique, trying for a calm tone, but hearing the faint edge of desperation. “It’s that problem he’s having with his claws. If you could get a finger under his—”
But they both froze at the very thought, because the Prince’s finger under the cat’s paw would put it directly on her breast.
“Here,” Enrique said, “I’ll put my hands around the cat’s middle, and you can disengage him.”
But when he reached for the cat, Geraldo hissed and tried to scramble away, climbing her blouse with his back paws, while his front ones remained firmly caught in the fabric above her breast.
As the cat became more panicked—writhing mightily in his determination to free himself—his trapped claw met her skin. She gave a little cry of pain and could feel her own panic rising.
Quickly, operating on what seemed to be pure instinct, Enrique reached past the cat, flicked open the buttons of her blouse and slid it open and off her. He guided it to the ground with the cat still stuck in it, howling his indignation at his predicament.
Marcello darted toward the cat, but without taking his eyes off her, Enrique ordered his son to stop. Even though the little boy looked like he had a tendency not to listen, some note of pure authority in his father’s voice stopped him in his tracks.
Gabriela was standing in front of the Prince in her bra! The gods had apparently decided to show her there was, indeed, more embarrassing predicaments than having the Prince under her skirt!
It was as if everything went very, very still. Even the yowling of the cat seemed to be far off in the distance.
She watched Enrique’s stunned expression as he took her in. She watched his eyes darken with something so smoldering it jumped the small space between them and lit an answering fire in her.
Ridiculously, she glanced down at herself, and found a moment’s satisfaction in her choice of underwear this morning: her bra was a blush of pink, spider webs and lace, sophisticated and sexy. It was standard fare in New York City boutiques. Here on the island? Not so much.
She folded her arms over the confection of silk and lace.
“You’re bleeding,” he told her, but there was a hoarse catch to his voice that she suspected had nothing to do with blood.
Gabriela glanced down at herself. A tiny, thin line of red was appearing, above her folded arms, but between her breasts.
“It’s nothing,” she said, meeting Enrique’s gaze again. Was there a certain hoarseness to her own voice? “Superficial. A scratch.”
For a suspended moment, it looked as if he might move closer, to get a better look. Perhaps to touch the blood-lined scratch.
The tiniest shiver—anticipation of being touched by him again?—went through her. She took a small step back from him, and from the magnetic field that had sprung up, powerfully, between them.
In a blink, Enrique unbuttoned his own shirt, stripped it off and closed the small distance she had managed to put between them.
His naked chest inches from her own, she took him in. He looked like one of those warriors that graced the covers of romance novels. She made herself look away from his chest before she licked her lips in pure hunger.
But looking into his face was almost a worse torment. She could see the fine shadow of whiskers on his cheeks and chin. She could see the small dent, like a thumbprint, in the plumpness of his lower lip. She could see the sooty tangle of his lashes, the multiple shades of darkness in his eyes.
His scent, beautifully clean, seductively masculine, tickled her nostrils and then embraced her completely as he swung his shirt gently around her own naked shoulders and tucked it protectively around her.
Now, it was her turn to be stunned.
Oh, how the boy of her memory had matured! He was deep-chested, breathtakingly sculpted, as perfectly made as the marble statue that graced the front courtyard of his palace home.
They stared at each other for a moment, some forbidden and primitive awareness absolutely raw between them.
The intensity of the moment was shattered when the garden gate was flung open and a harried--looking young woman tumbled through it.
Enrique moved a quick step back from Gabriela. She turned from him and took in what could only be Miss Penny.
The poor girl looked young and terrified. Her eyes found Marcello first, and she started to call out his name.
But then she froze, and took in the scene before her: bare-chested prince, strange woman with a man’s shirt draped around her.
The girl glanced over her shoulder, debating escape, but instead dropped into an awkward curtsey.
“Your Highness,” she said.