Chapter Twenty-Three
Enrique sighed heavily.
“This is exactly what I mean,” he said, to Gabriela, “about things not going according to plan.”
He scooped up Marcello and headed for the door. Gabriela followed. William was waiting at a long black car, with no markings on it.
It was only when she saw the look on his face that she realized she was still dressed in Enrique’s shirt.
“Sir?”
“To the nearest hospital,” the Prince said.
Because they had gotten to the hospital so quickly, the doctor chose an endoscopic removal of the ring.
Whether it was because Enrique had been recognized or because Gabriela looked a little come-hither in her man’s shirt, they had been ushered into an office, rather than being put in a public waiting room.
Now, while Marcello recovered from the procedure, the doctor came and gave a rather rumpled tissue to Enrique.
“He’s fine,” he assured them both.
After the doctor left, Enrique unwrapped the tissue. He looked down at the ring hidden in those folds for a long moment, then gazed around the cluttered office and sighed.
“Why do I have a feeling, Gabriela, nothing with you will ever go as planned?”
And then he got down on one knee, and held the ring, in its bed of tissue, up to her.
Whatever script he had planned, he didn’t say it. He choked, but the words came straight from his heart.
“Gabriela, I love you.”
From the way he said it, it felt as if she was the first woman who had ever heard those words from him.
“I love you madly and endlessly,” he continued. “I have loved you since I was a little boy and, if you’ll have me, I will love you until I’m an old man, until I breathe my very last breath.”
And then he took the ring from the tissue.
He looked at it, suspiciously inspecting it for stomach fluids. He carefully wiped it on his shirt.
Gabriela thought it was probably the most beautiful marriage proposal in the history of royal families everywhere.
He slipped it onto her finger. Despite nothing else going according to plan, that ring fit her perfectly.
But she didn’t even look at it.
She looked right past it into the face of her beloved.
“Yes,” she said.
Gabriela and Enrique had decided, together, to have their wedding in the garden, with only a few close friends and family around them. An official ceremony, a royal wedding, would have taken months to prepare. Maybe longer.
After waiting a lifetime, neither of them was in any mood to wait.
They would spend a week on a honeymoon together, on a private island owned by a friend of the Falcon family. When they returned, an announcement would be made and, as Enrique had warned her, her life would change for all time.
Gabriela stood at the kitchen door, with Guido. The top half of the Dutch door was open a crack, and they peered out.
The garden had been transformed.
“The Queen is arriving,” she whispered.
“In a few minutes, she will be your mother-in-law,” Guido said.
“You think she is difficult, but I want you to remember she is the strongest and most courageous woman I have ever had the privilege of serving. The tragedies she has endured and the sacrifices she has made for this island would have shattered a lesser person than her.”
The Queen had none of her usual entourage with her. She was shown to the front row, where she sat down, always regal, even in a plastic garden chair.
“She’s probably never been in this garden before,” Gabriela said.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Guido said.
Something in his voice—a soft tenderness—made Gabriela turn swiftly and look at him.
“She’s just a little younger than me. We grew up in much the same way that you and Enrique did.”
“Papa!” She looked at him closely. “You loved her,” she guessed.
He did not admit to that, and she realized perhaps Guido was better at keeping secrets than she had given him credit for.
“Love finds a way, Gabriela,” her father said softly. “Always. Sometimes, maybe it takes a long, long time. Maybe even lifetimes. But it finds a way.
“Though, sometimes,” he continued with a lift of his shoulder, “even love needs a little nudge in the right direction.”
There was a mischievous twinkle in his eye, and Gabriela gasped.
“Papa, you didn’t pretend to be ill did you, to get me home?”
Guido widened those sparkling eyes at her, as if appalled by the suggestion that he would be capable of such duplicity.
Then he put his hands in his pockets, and rocked back on his heels.
“You know how the nanny, Darla, just happened to be in the toy store the day you went there? And how everything just happened to line up? Perhaps it was the same with me getting sick. The universe using everything in its considerable power so that what is meant to be finds a way.
“People,” he said softly, “should trust that power more, and what they perceive as their own power less.”
The music started. Enrique appeared through the garden gate, William flanking him.
Proof that Guido was right, as usual. Love would find a way.
Guido swung the cottage door open wide, first the top half of it and then the bottom. He looped his arm through Gabriela’s. If there had ever been anything wrong with him, it did not show now, his stride long and proud and confident.
Enrique saw her. His jaw dropped. He swiped at his eyes with the cuff of his shirt.
She moved toward him, and her future. She was wearing the simplest white dress. Her feet were bare. She had flowers threaded through her hair.
As she walked up the makeshift aisle, between the chairs, butterflies danced in the air around her. She caught a glimpse of Geraldo, peering at her from under the shrubs, a put-out expression on his crabby face.
Marcello, she saw, had found a seat on the Queen’s lap.
He rested against her, comfortably, and tilted back his head to look at her.
“Granny,” he said loudly, “I love you.”
His announcement was met with laughter from the wedding guests, but Gabriela slid a look at the Queen’s face and at the formidable cast of her features The Queen looked at her grandson, and the sternness in her features melted momentarily with indulgence.
And then her eyes met Gabriela’s and glanced off Guido, before she looked quickly back to the front.
But in that moment, Gabriela saw Katalina’s strength. And her sacrifice.
Gabriela saw the absolute truth in the words her father had just said to her.
Love finds a way.