Chapter Thirteen
Enrique braced himself for Gabriela’s rejection.
She was going to say no. What kind of person put a condition on something that had been suggested for his own good, for the good of his family?
What kind of person placed a condition on the suggestion that it would be wise to spend some time with his son?
The truth was, he’d had very little one-on-one time with Marcello. The truth was the prospect of trying to entertain a faintly hostile five-year-old for the day filled him with a sense of being in over his head. Way over.
And buzzing just beneath the surface of those truths was an even deeper one.
He wanted to spend time with her. So much so that he felt himself holding his breath, waiting for her answer.
“I’m a little unsure what Marcello and I would do together,” he said, which was true, but he was also hoping to persuade her.
“Oh, it’s easy,” she said. “A picnic. A ball. There’s a wonderful walking trail through Mariposa Garden. The butterflies float around you. It’s completely magical.”
He could not imagine experiencing that without her.
“Come with us,” he said softly, and he was surprised by the faint pleading in his tone.
Apparently, she was, too, and totally disarmed by it.
“Sure,” she said. “Why not? Should I bring a picnic?”
“I’ll look after it.”
When Enrique left the garden, he was aware of something flitting delicately about him, like one of those dancing butterflies Gabriela had promised.
He contemplated it for a moment before he recognized what it was.
It was happiness.
But he should have learned a long time ago a man’s happiness was an elusive thing, beckoning him to follow it, and then darting away when it looked as if he might catch it.
Because instead of it being a day out of a dream, by the time the royal limo pulled up at the front of the Olivera cottage the next morning, a nightmare was unfolding.
Gabriela was waiting on the curving front walkway.
Despite the ruckus unfolding inside the vehicle, Enrique realized how few times he had seen the front of the Olivera home, since he almost always came along the path that joined the cottage to the palace.
The tiny, vine-covered building reminded him of a cottage that might sit on the edge of a fairy tale. Cute.
And she was also very cute. She was dressed casually, a baseball cap, NYC embossed on it, covering her glossy hair.
She had on pressed beige shorts and a pink V-necked T-shirt, sturdy walking shoes.
It was nearly the exact outfit he had on, except that his T-shirt was navy blue and had the House of Falcon coat of arms embossed subtly over his right breast.
Her look was completed by an enormous bag draped over her shoulder. It was a bit of a middle-aged bird-watcher look, one any sane man would not find sexy.
And yet, when it came to her, where was his sanity? It flitted about him like those butterflies that they might not see today, after all. To Enrique, Gabriela looked incredibly sexy.
His driver would have normally come around and opened the door, but Enrique didn’t wait. He got out of the car, and slammed the door behind him.
It reduced the sound of the caterwauling, but didn’t eliminate it.
She came toward him, her eyes huge with concern.
Just her concern calmed some agitation within him.
“What is going on?” Her voice was so soothing. “I heard him as soon as you opened the door.”
“He’s having a meltdown.”
“Yes, I can clearly hear that. He doesn’t want to go to the Mariposa Garden?”
“Henri invited him to his birthday party. Today. Unfortunately, he didn’t tell me. There was an invitation.”
He produced the crumpled, filthy piece of paper from his pocket. She took it and smoothed it with her hand.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “Poor kid.”
“Henri?”
“Cello! He’s probably never been invited to a party before.”
She meant his kid, that thrashing, screaming, snot-flying-from-his-nose little monster currently taking out his fury on the window glass of the limo.
Bulletproof, thank goodness.
“Usually,” Enrique said, “invitations come through normal channels. They have to be vetted.”
“In other words, normally he wouldn’t have even known he’d been invited.”
“It’s not as if he can just go to a party on a whim,” Enrique said, tersely. “There are security issues.”
“I wasn’t aware the threats on Hermosa Mariposa were so severe.”
“There are protocols.”
“Look.” She gave a pointed glance at the dark gray sedan that had pulled up behind the official palace limo. “There’s plenty of security right there. We can drop Marcello off at the party, and they can sit unobtrusively in front of the house, ever alert to danger.”
She was saying that as if it was actually a possibility.
Was it actually a possibility? The truth was he would consider just about anything to stop that whirlwind of unfettered anger and emotion being contained—barely—inside the bombproof vehicle.
“He’ll need a gift, of course,” she said, as if it had been decided. She looked at the invitation again. “Oh, it’s at noon. It’s got a Ryder theme. It’ll be tight, but it’s doable.”
She cast him a look. There was something faintly pleading in it. The fact that she was so genuinely on his son’s side made him feel weak when he needed to be strong.
She was asking him to make a spontaneous decision, something his life had not prepared him for, at all. She just didn’t know the reality. It took days and weeks of preparation for either of the princes to make public appearances.
So, he was shocked when he heard himself say, without an ounce of tentativeness, “Okay, then, change in plan.”
She beamed at him. He figured he’d enjoy that look while it lasted, which should be precisely until the moment she opened that car door.
“Marcello,” she said, opening the door and not even raising her voice above the ruckus, “that’s quite enough.”
Her voice was firm, and cut through the racket with ease. The screaming came to an abrupt and startled end.
“That is an absolutely appalling way to behave.”
“I want to go to the party!” Marcello shouted, obviously ready to ramp it up again.
“Can you go to a party with your face all swollen and your nose running from crying? Here, let’s go into the cottage and clean you up.”
She held out her hand, and after a moment, Marcello slid out of the car and took it.
“Am I going to the party?” he whispered, wiping his nose on his arm, and sniffling.
“Is he going to the party?” she asked Enrique.
He saw, gratefully, what she was doing. Allowing him to be the good guy, in his son’s eyes. He nodded, and Marcello gave him a look as if he had personally ordered the stars to line up.
Gabriela was right. Why not? The island was safe, there was security and the very spontaneity of the decision meant absolutely no one would know Marcello was in attendance until he was actually there.
“Can you ask your driver to leave Marcello’s car seat?”
“What?”
“Well, obviously he can’t arrive in an official vehicle with a crest on the door and flags flying. I can’t even imagine the fuss that could cause. It would probably spoil the party.”
Enrique felt chastised, somehow. He watched as Gabriela and Marcello walked, hand in hand, up to the front door of the cottage.
“Please don’t tell Guido I’ve been naughty,” Marcello said before they went in.
Enrique contemplated that. It was perfectly fine to be naughty—an understatement if he’d ever heard one—to his own father. But not Guido.
The driver, trying not to let his utter astonishment show, moved Marcello’s car seat onto the walk.
“Will you be needing the basket, sir?”
The basket? Ah, the picnic lunch from the now-aborted plan. Why not? He wasn’t sure what the day held, but he felt as if he was going to need nourishment at some point.
The huge wicker basket the kitchen had prepared was set beside the car seat.
And then with one more are you sure about this look, his driver got back in the official royal vehicle and pulled away.
Enrique went and apprised the security team of the change in plan.
Both men’s mouths flattened into disapproving lines.
They, like him, enjoyed solid plans, immutable schedules, predictability.
But no member of his staff would ever argue with him.
In a few minutes, the pair reemerged from the house. Marcello’s hair was freshly combed, his shirt had been straightened and he was holding a cold cloth on his tear-swollen face.
“Now what?” Enrique said. Were they squeezing in with the security team?
But no, Gabriela pointed a set of keys at Guido’s ancient jalopy. Enrique was pretty sure the vehicle predated his mother’s coronation and had not been moved since Guido got sick.
Then she took the baseball cap off her own head, and pulled it low over Marcello’s brow. She handed Enrique one of Guido’s familiar newspaper-boy hats.
And a pair of sunglasses.
He put them on, and a little smile tickled her lips as she surveyed him and Marcello. “You look just like a pair of American tourists,” she said. “You could be anybody!”
He felt that first delicious breath of fresh air that was anonymity.
“Except,” she said, “for the shirt. Could you take it off, and turn it inside out?”
He pulled the shirt off from the hem, pulled it over his head. He paused for a moment, aware of her eyes on him, and absolutely relishing the look in them.
Pure, unadulterated want.
He played with it a bit, taking his sweet time turning the shirt inside out. He pulled it back over his head very, very slowly.
And when his head came back out the neckline, he could see her little pink tongue caught between her teeth.
“Chasing witches,” she said, as if she was trying very hard to distract from the look in her eyes.
“Sorry?”
“A line about inside-out shirts from a children’s book. While you figure out the car seat, I’ll go ask them,” she said, not able to disguise the hoarseness in her voice and jerking her chin at security, “to follow us.”
“To?”
“To Lido’s Toy Store, of course. Where else are we going to find a birthday present at this late time?”
“Where else, indeed,” he said. The truth was he had never been inside the only toy store on the entire island.
He watched for a moment, as Gabriela approached the men, stuck out her hand and introduced herself.
He noticed that William, the younger of the two, said something that made her laugh.
He looked at the man more closely. William would probably be considered very good-looking.
Single, if he recalled the personnel file.
His behavior was utterly professional, of course, but still, Enrique picked up the subtle signals.
Was he ever so faintly jealous, the same way he had been after she’d called the vet by his first name, Leon?
“Do you know how to drive a stick?” she asked, when she came back. He’d successfully wrestled the car seat into place and put the picnic basket in the trunk.
Her tone suggested it was some sort of test of manhood and that if he did not she would not think as highly of him. He was somehow unwilling to surrender even a little bit of the appreciation of his masculinity that had stormed through her eyes moments ago when he had taken off his shirt.
“Of course I know how to drive a stick!”
And then, he was in the driver’s seat, trying to figure out the operating system of the ancient car. It lurched to life, and soon they were careening down the narrow road toward Hermosa Mariposa’s main village, Benito.
The car had no springs. The clutch was cranky, and he was out of practice. The brakes seemed, if not iffy, at least very tired. There was no air-conditioning, so dust flew in the windows, and clouds of it came out of the seats every time he hit a bump. Which was often.
The heat inside the vehicle was suffocating.
So even though the old car was impossibly uncooperative when he was trying to show off for a pretty woman, and even though he was choking on dust, and the interior heat of the car was probably only slightly cooler than a lava lake, he felt a tickle of pure delight at the unexpected twists and turns of the day.
He started to laugh.
And then so did Gabriela.
And then Marcello joined in.
They were three people experiencing the utter and pure bliss of finding themselves on an unexpected holiday from regular life and on a rough road that seemed to lead to pure adventure.