HOLIDAY ROYALE by Christine Rimmer

the part where they ended up in bed together. She understood that their making love wasn’t a given. She’d said it herself: they would see how it went. He planned to see to it that it went nowhere.
    “Dami.” She tugged on his arm. “What are you thinking about?”
    He studied her fabulous elfin face. “That you remind me of a princess from a Montedoran fairy tale.”
    She colored prettily. “Thank you.” And then she commanded, “Take me to your apartment.”
    He opened his mouth to remind her that it had been a long day, but somehow what came out was, “Yes, Your Highness. This way....”
    In his rooms, they went straight to the kitchen. She asked for hot chocolate. He made it the way they did in Paris, chopping bars of fine-quality bittersweet chocolate and whisking the bits into the heated milk, stirring in brown sugar and a few grains of sea salt.
    She admired the Limoges demitasse and sipped slowly. “Dami. Your hot chocolate is even better than your coffee.”
    He poured himself a cup and sat down opposite her.
    And she said, “I probably shouldn’t admit this. It will only prove all over again how gauche and immature I am....”
    He set down his cup. “You’re not. Admit what?”
    She sucked her upper lip between her neat white teeth, then caught herself doing it and let it go. “When you went to pose for those pictures with Vesuvia?”
    “Yes?”
    “I actually got jealous.”
    As a rule, when any woman mentioned jealousy, he tended to get nervous, to feel hemmed in, under pressure. But with Lucy he only felt flattered at her frankness. And a little bit guilty for deserting her. “I shouldn’t have left you....”
    “Oh, don’t you dare apologize. You didn’t do anything wrong— Well, except when you kissed me on the forehead. That made me feel about five.”
    “It was a kiss of affection.”
    “I know. Still. Five.”
    “Fair enough, then. No more kisses on the forehead.”
    “Cheek, temples, ears, lips... Well, just about anywhere is great. But not smack-dab in the middle of my forehead.”
    Kissing her just about anywhere sounded way too appealing, and he probably shouldn’t be thinking about that. “All right. Not on the forehead.” He found he needed to be sure she had it clear about V. “And about V?”
    She was midsip. She swallowed fast and set down the cup, big eyes getting bigger. “Yeah?”
    “Nothing to be jealous of. I meant it when I told you that Vesuvia and I are over.”
    She turned the painted gold-rimmed cup on the delicate saucer. And then she sipped again. “You were, um, exclusive with her for quite a while.”
    “Yes.”
    “But you have such a rep as a player, as someone who never makes it exclusive with any woman....”
    “I was exclusive with V.”
    “Why?”
    He looked into his cup of chocolate and then back up at her. “You are very nosy.”
    She nodded, a sweet bobbing motion of her pretty head. “Yes. I am. I know. But only because I’m your friend and I want to understand you better.”
    He believed her. And so he explained, “When I met V, I was looking for the right wife. I wanted someone suited to me. At first V behaved reasonably for the most part. She’s bright and beautiful. I thought we could make it work together. I was attracted to her.”
    “You loved her.”
    “Love wasn’t really the issue.”
    “But when you get married, love is always the issue.”
    He gave her his most patient look. “No, Luce. Not always.”
    “So then why did you choose her?”
    “I found her attractive and intelligent. I thought we had a lot in common. She’s descended from a very old Italian family. We know many of the same people. I never proposed marriage to her, but V understood that I needed to marry and she told me more than once that she wanted to be my wife, to be a princess of Montedoro.”
    “You needed to marry? Why?”
    He’d assumed she knew. Apparently not. “You haven’t heard of the Prince’s Marriage Law?” She shook her head, so