Czytaj książkę: «Once Upon A Tiara»

1

“PEANUT BUTTER,” Lili said to herself, gazing beyond the wisps of vaporous clouds. The airplane was beginning its descent.

Soon, she, Liliane Brunner, Her Serene Highness of Grunberg—oh, my, my. La-di-da!—would have her first taste of genuine American peanut butter. To be excited over such a silly little thing was not at all grown-up or sophisticated. Even though Lili had sworn to her family that she’d behave on this trip, at the moment she didn’t give a fig about what a proper princess would do. There were peanut butter jars to explore! Childish or not, she’d wanted to stick her finger into a jar of Skippy or Jif ever since she’d heard of the exotic brands.

And grab a handful of M&M’s, she added silently, leaning closer to the small window to get a glimpse of land. Oh, and I mustn’t forget hot dogs, slathered in mustard and ketchup and relish and sauerkraut and pickles and five-alarm chili…

Perhaps it would be best not to try it all at once!

Lili smiled, propping a fist beneath her chin in a gesture left over from her storybook childhood, when life at the royal castle in Spitzenstein had been one grand entertainment after another. Her mother’s death in an avalanche in the Swiss Alps had changed all that. Lili had been nine. Her father had grieved deeply, withdrawing from the world for several years. Afterward, he’d become far more restrictive about what he allowed for his three young daughters. Lili and her two older sisters, Natalia and Andrea, had grown up as sheltered as possible in the modern day.

Despite her mother’s tragic demise, Lili’s optimism and outgoing personality could not be stifled. She tried to be good to please her father—especially since Natalia, the eldest, had grown into a rebel, while Andrea played the nonconformist—but being good was terribly boring. Lili loved life—all of it! She wanted to experience everything. This was her first trip to America as an adult, and she was practically light-headed, her anticipation so fizzy it was as if she’d been guzzling expensive champagne straight from the bottle.

Lili nipped the tip of her tongue to quell an eruption of sheer excitement. If she let it out, she might not be able to stop…and it wasn’t very princessy to giggle in first class.

Then again, why should only she have to behave? Prince Franz, her father, was spending a weekend in Cap d’Antibes with his va-va-voom mistress—though Lili wasn’t supposed to know that—while Andrea, the tomboy, and Natalia, who was Lili’s role model for mis behavior, completed preparations to attend a wedding in the American Southwest. They had been enlisted to lecture Lili about the importance of maintaining proper royal comportment, but really… Was she seriously expected to take instruction from Natalia, with her leather miniskirts and bite-my-heinie attitude? Or Annie, who knew her own mind and spoke it frequently?

Lili was the baby at twenty-two. Old enough, in her opinion.

Her father had another, however. She was considered too capricious to handle vital duties. For her first overseas outing as a solo representative of the royal family, the opening of an exhibition of the royal jewels in a diddly-squat museum in Middle America was as safe and insignificant an assignment as Prince Franz could find. Lili didn’t mind. She’d been waiting for any opportunity to strike out on her own.

At her first glimpse of land, Lili nearly bounced out of her seat. She’d spotted green trees and golden-hued fields far below. Those had to be the “amber waves of grain”—a phrase that had piqued her curiosity far more than “purple mountains majesty.” She’d seen plenty of those in her homeland, a pocket-sized principality tucked between the Swiss Alps and the Austrian border. America was a thousand times the size of Grunberg, whose citizens were so stuck upon their traditions they didn’t even have the Golden Arches.

Too thrilled to keep silent, Lili turned to her traveling companion, Mrs. Amelia Grundy. “This is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Mrs. Grundy, a solid British sort not given to hyperbole, shook her head at the young princess. “Surely, sweet child, it’s not better than the time the sheikh from Abu Dibadinia offered Prince Franz two hundred camels and a sixty-carat ruby for your hand in marriage.”

Lili let out a huge smile. “Oh, much better. You know red’s not my color. Besides, he offered three hundred camels for Natalia. I was highly insulted.”

“What about when you ran off with the young Scottish laird of Kirkgordon to the topless beach in Monaco?” Mrs. Grundy had heartily disapproved of the escapade, even though her eyes had twinkled while she’d scolded the young princess. Lili was certain that she brought it up now only to remind the princess of past transgressions.

“That should have been exciting,” Lili mused, her lips curving into a reminiscent smile, “but poor Johnnie, with his unfortunate red hair and all those freckles—he wasn’t prepared for the hot sun of the Riviera.”

“And a lucky sunburn it was for you, young lady. Because of the lad’s solar allergy you made it off the beach in the nick of time. The papparazzi arrived a full five minutes before the palace bodyguards.”

Lili put on a pretend pout. “I never even got to take my top off.”

Mrs. Grundy rolled her eyes heavenward. “Goodness, no. Remember, my dear, you promised. There will be no mischief on this trip.”

Lili opened her mouth. How very dull that sounded! “But—”

“No ifs, ands or buts about it, Your Serene Highness. You know what I always say—”

“Not to worry.” Lili interrupted before the dear woman repeated one of her favorite expressions. It was always a bad sign when Amelia Grundy launched into the Your-Serene-Highness song and dance.

Lili glanced sidelong with a foxy smile. “I hear that Americans still emulate the Puritans when it comes to nudity…and other regards. It’s extremely unlikely that Blue Cloud, Pennsylvania, will offer me a single opportunity for naked shenanigans.” She gave an airy sigh. “What a pity.”

“If I didn’t know that you’re teasing me…”

Lili gripped the older woman’s hand. “Of course, I am, Amelia. I remain as pure as the driven snow.” In spite of my best attempts.

Amelia Grundy’s stern but kindly face crinkled into dubious speculation. She was sixtyish, rather tall and formidable, built as round and solid as a ski mogul, with keen blue eyes and silvered hair she wore on top of her head in a pouf. A widow, she’d been with the royal family since before Lili was born, acting first as the three sisters’ nanny, then—when the princesses chafed at being overseen by someone who bore such an old-fashioned term—as their combination escort, companion, social secretary and lady-in-waiting.

“Perhaps you are pure in deed,” Amelia said, “but not, I fear, in thought or intent.”

Lili scrunched her nose. How true! She never could manage to fool old Grundy, who had an almost mystical omniscience when it came to the three princesses. Many a time she’d shown up where least expected, just at the right moment to stop one of their wild adventures or dangerous stunts. Or facilitate a dignified exit when none seemed possible. The sisters had come to accept, and even rely upon, their former nanny’s more “magical” abilities.

Now that Lili was an adult, Amelia’s way of knowing what was on her mind—often before she knew it herself—could be as annoying as it was helpful. When a girl was trying to lose her virginity, it didn’t help to have a nanny overseeing her. Transcendentally or not!

“It’s the twenty-first century, Mrs. Grundy. These days, no girl stays a virgin until marriage.”

“Unless she is the daughter of His Serene Highness, Prince Franz Albert Rudolf of Grunberg, and subject to public scrutiny in all that she does.” Amelia nodded complacently, as if the subject was settled, and reopened the romance novel she’d been reading all the way across the Atlantic.

Lili sighed to herself. Upon their official debut into European society, she and her sisters had become known in the tabloids as The Three Jewels. Although their country was small and inconsequential and their father avoided the press whenever possible, much attention—and not a little speculation—had been devoted to the sisters’ love lives.

Or lack thereof, Lili thought, squirming against the restraint of the safety belt as she peered out the window. They were circling the airport now. She was mere minutes away from freedom. Or as close to freedom as she could get with both Amelia Grundy and Rodger Wilhelm, the bodyguard her father had insisted she take along, watching her backside as if it were spun from glass and subject to shatter at the merest touch. Natalia and Annie were better off; they’d been granted permission to travel on their own. As the youngest, Lili was babied more than she liked.

But no more. She was determined about that. This trip would be the start of something tremendous for her. She could sense it.

Peanut butter, M&M’s, hot dogs and hamburgers, Lili chanted to herself. America was so diverse, so raw, so much an adventure-in-waiting. Hip-hop, bebop, shop till you drop. Drive-ins, push-ups, hoedowns and take-outs!

As the plane dropped toward the runway, anticipation rang in Lili’s ears. This was her chance. She would have herself an authentic American experience or her name wasn’t Liliane Marja Mae Graf Brunner.

Why, she wouldn’t even say no to a daring whirlwind fling with a dashing American playboy!

“WITH ALL THAT’S going on at the museum,” Simon Tremayne said as he waited for the first passengers to disembark, “meeting a spoiled princess from some backward little European country no one but us has ever heard of is the last thing I have time for.”

“Take off your glasses,” said Cornelia Applewhite, the mayor of Blue Cloud, who had a tendency to ignore all complaints, which made it easier to bulldoze her constituency. “You’ll look less like a nerd and more like a dignitary.”

Simon did so, pretending there was a smudge. After he’d finished wiping the lenses with the end of his tie, he slipped the glasses into the breast pocket of his suit coat. Who knew why? It couldn’t have been because in photographs the princess was young, blond and cute as a buttercup.

“I suppose I have to kiss her hand?” he said, making sure to sound long-suffering.

“Didn’t you read the protocol report I faxed over to the museum?”

“I intended to.” It was on his list, right after Put On Clean Underwear.

“Si-mon!” the mayor pealed.

He winced. Cornelia—you had to remember to pronounce it Cor-nell-ia, and saints preserve the person who shortened it to Corny—was a short woman with a voice and figure like Foghorn Leghorn. Speaking in a normal tone made her vibrate. When she turned it on full blast to give orders—and she lived to give orders—her entire body swayed with the effort, from the tassels on her pumps to the rooster fringe of her upswept hairdo. Simon wondered if it was considered good protocol to megaphone greetings forceful enough to puncture the princess’s eardrums.

“They’re coming,” Cornelia said to the small group of Blue Cloud VIPs she’d recruited to greet the princess. “Look sharp, people. Pretend you know what you’re doing. And you, Simon, tuck in your tie.” She took a closer look. “King Tut? Couldn’t you have gone for a nice sedate blue or gray?”

“Too late now,” he said, tucking Tut in. The greeters murmured with excitement. The princess and her entourage had naturally been deplaned first. Between the oncoming phalanx of tall, stern people in dark blue suits, all Simon caught of the princess was a flash of pink and a glimpse of ruffled corn-silk hair.

The blond head bobbed. Several times. He chuckled. The petite princess was on springs.

Cornelia said “Shush,” to him in her normal tone—loud—just as the princess’s plaintive voice announced, “But I can’t see anything!”

Everyone hushed.

A small feminine hand appeared on the broad shoulder of the closest bodyguard. Next, a blond head with short hair going in six different directions pushed past the woolen sleeve of a woman who looked as starched as her collar. The princess peeped out at the group from Blue Cloud. She blinked several times. Long spidery lashes curled back from her eyes like stamens.

The greeters returned the stare in complete silence.

“My goodness,” she said. “I do hope you weren’t shushing me. I haven’t been shushed since boarding school, even though I suppose there were plenty who might have liked to.”

She smiled, very prettily.

And Simon’s heartstrings went zing.

Fortunately, Cornelia began booming her practiced welcome speech, and he was able to classify the electric thrumming in his veins as sound-wave reverberation. Corny’s reverb had been known to register on the Richter scale.

He had neither the time nor the inclination for dallying with princesses, even when they were cuddly little blondes built for the boudoir. The very idea was absurd, particularly when he remembered who he was: Simon Stafford Tremayne, boy genius, college egghead, museum wonk. Before he’d learned to keep activities that required tuxedos and courtliness permanently outside of his comfort zone, his greatest success with the opposite sex was slow-dancing with Valerie Wingate at his high school prom, and that had happened only because she was mad at her quarterback boyfriend and had grabbed the nearest nerd at hand for revenge. That one dance had earned Simon a broken nose, and it hadn’t even been worth it. Valerie Wingate had been so vapid, not even the chance to look down her cleavage was compensation. At least, not after the first thousand or so mental slow-motion replays.

The older woman with the bulk and the bulging leather satchel was shaking each of their hands, taking names, and introducing them to the princess. “Mrs. Amelia Grundy,” she said to Simon.

He gave his hand. “No, it’s Simon Tremayne, actually.”

Her lips crimped. No sense of humor. She gripped his hand a beat too long, staring straight into his eyes. Damned if he didn’t feel the zing again. Well, that was good. That meant the feeling could be anything—static electricity from the carpet or maybe indigestion. He’d inhaled a spicy burrito at lunch. Give him a Tums and he’d be safe from all manner of embarrassing eruptions. Burps to bolts from the blue.

“Cor-nell-eee-yah,” Princess Buttercup was saying, with an ill-concealed mischievous glitter to her eyes.

“Cornelia Applewhite. My, that’s too long a name. I shall call you…”

She glanced at Simon. He arched a brow.

“Nell,” she said. “You look like a Nell to me, born and bred among the amber waves of grain on a wholesome American farm.”

Simon barely withheld his laugh. Cornelia, for once, was too flustered to bluster. She was hugely and loudly proud of her venerable family background, but contradicting princesses was undoubtedly against protocol.

The stern Englishwoman glanced sidelong, her mouth pinched into a disapproving knot.

The princess saw the look and sobered so suddenly it was comical. She drew herself up, tipping the saucy royal chin into the air and taking on a formal tone. “That is, unless you prefer Mayor? Or would it be Madam Mayor?”

The British battleship returned her attention to Simon. “And you are?”

“Boggled.”

Mrs. Grundy frowned. “Is that a distasteful American slang term?”

“No, it’s the Queen’s English.” He’d never been so irreverent in his life, but there was a certain gaiety in the air and he couldn’t resist. “Its definition is to be overwhelmed with fright or amazement.”

“Ah, that sort of boggled.” She looked him over. “You’re not cowering…”

His gaze strayed to the princess, who’d relaxed as soon as Grundy wasn’t looking. She was charming Corny’s cravat off despite the farm-girl nickname. “Maybe I’m amazed.”

“Wings,” Mrs. Grundy said, surprising him. “Paul McCartney. A Liverpool lad.” Simon tore his attention off the princess and refocused on the Mistress of Starch. Amelia Grundy’s eyes were Atlantic blue, and not nearly as humorless as he’d first assumed.

“I’m the curator of the Princess Adelaide and Horace P. Applewhite Memorial Museum,” he said. It was a terrible mouthful; the townspeople had already shortened the museum’s name to “The Addy-Appy.” “We are most honored to host the debut exhibition of the Brunner family jewels.”

Usually the term family jewels provoked a grin or a snicker—Blue Cloud wasn’t a bastion of sophistication despite Corny’s pretentions—but all he got from Grundy was a stiff nod. “As is the princess to be your guest of honor,” she said.

“Indubitably,” Simon said, because it sounded very British.

Mrs. Grundy’s lips twitched as she passed him over to the princess, introducing him by name and occupation. “Mr. Tremayne,” she continued, “may I introduce Her Serene Highness, Princess Liliane Brunner of the sovereign principality of Grunberg.”

You may indeed.

The princess placed her hand lightly in his, palm down. He found himself succumbing to a deep bow, propelled by some instinct he hadn’t known he possessed, his lips hovering above the smooth skin on her delicate hand. Her scent suited the season—spring fresh, green and sweet as tender rosebuds.

Gather them while ye may, he thought, one hair-breadth away from a courtly kiss when his suit coat gaped. His glasses fell out, landing on the princess’s toes. She trilled a startled “Oh, my!” and gave a little backward hop. Her big, jowly bodyguard moved in swiftly, crunching Simon’s glasses beneath his heel before Grundy could wave him off.

Princess Liliane patted the mastiff’s arm. “It’s quite all right, Rodger.”

The guard swung around to glare at Simon. Crackle.

“Dear me, your glasses,” said the princess.

She and Simon knelt at the same moment. “Please, let me.” She lifted the mangled wire-framed spectacles in both hands as if she were cradling a bird with a broken wing. “I’m afraid they’re ruined.”

He plucked them off her palm. Tiny cracks spider-webbed through one of the lenses. “I have another pair at the museum, Your Royal…uh, Your Serene Princess—”

“Please call me Lili.” She looked into his eyes.

“Lili,” he said, blinking.

“Are you nearsighted?”

No, just boggled. “Farsighted.”

“Then I’m too close…” she whispered, bringing her face another millimeter nearer nonetheless.

“For what?”

Her face was youthfully round, her skin like buttermilk. Her smile was generously wide and unaffected, but it was her lips that stole his breath away—they were full and pink and utterly, undeniably kissable. “For you to see me clearly,” she said, suddenly turning her face up and her delectable smile down when Mrs. Grundy reached between them and pulled the princess unceremoniously to her feet, bracing Lili on a protective, sturdy arm as if the young woman were an invalid.

Simon also rose, the glasses dangling from his fingertips. He didn’t need them to see that he was more than boggled. He was enchanted.

What a pain in the patoot.

WITH ALL THE FAWNING and milling around, it took Simon several minutes to sort out that the princess’s entourage, which consisted of a large portion of airline personnel and only two official watchdogs: Amelia Grundy and Rodger Wilhelm, the heavyset middle-aged bodyguard, who kept shooting suspicious glances at Simon, as if museum curators were high on the dangerous-kook list.

Kooks, yes, he conceded, thinking of a colleague who’d paid a cool million for a fake Rembrandt or the poor sot who’d had a scarab stolen out from beneath his nose. Kooks, but not dangerous kooks.

The assemblage moved toward the exit. The princess’s head was on a swivel, as if the small municipal airport was a fascinating tourist site. Simon overheard her telling “Nell” that she’d hadn’t been to America since she was a child. Apparently, her father considered the country an immoral wasteland filled with mobsters, cowboys, homeboys and decadent Hollywood movie stars.

“Well, my goodness, that’s just ridiculous,” Corny said, forgetting that it was bad etiquette to deprecate princely opinions—even those belonging to the ruler of a mostly overlooked sliver of a country that had produced nothing of consequence for the last three or four hundred years of his family’s monarchy. “Your grandmother was an American.”

“Hot dogs!” the princess said.

What a scatterbrain, Simon thought, certain his eyes were glued to her as they’d be to a train wreck. She trotted to the airport restaurant, where a half-dozen shriveled wieners rotated on spits around a feeble warming bulb. They were withered, like an old man’s…finger.

And she was in raptures. “I’ve always wanted to taste a genuine American hot dog, not the pale European imitation. Please, may I have one?”

“Of course,” said Corny, with less than her usual gusto. Doubtless, she was thinking of the tea-and-cake tent reception planned for the princess’s arrival in Blue Cloud.

Simon stepped in. “Trust me, Princess Liliane, you don’t want one of those. We can get better hot dogs at the Blue Cloud drive-in.”

“A drive-in restaurant? Like the one in American Graffiti?” Lili’s eyes widened. They were exotically almond-shaped. Brown, almost black—the color of semisweet chocolate. “Do you promise?”

Before Simon could make the date—protocol demanded it—Grundy interrupted. “We must follow the schedule, Princess.” She literally said “shedjul,” but only Simon seemed to notice. He pressed his lips together, holding back a smile.

“Yes, you’re right.” Lili quickly conceded, allowing them to hustle her away even though she threw a longing glance over her shoulder. At the hot dogs, alas, and not him.

Simon shrugged. There must be hot dogs in Grunberg. The country was a stone’s throw from Germany, home of the bratwurst. In the days of the World Wide Web and supersonic air travel, even a sheltered, pampered princess couldn’t be that naive. Going by the diamonds in her elfin ears, the pale pink designer suit wrapped around her luscious curves and, particularly, her easy charm—well-schooled, perhaps—she had to be more sophisticated than her bubbly personality would have him believe.

It’s because she’s only twenty-two, practically a child, he thought, with all the wisdom and maturity of his twenty-nine years. A bright, enthusiastic child. You can’t have a crush on a child.

Even one packaged in a hoochie-mama body.

“IT LOOKS LIKE a picture postcard,” Lili said as they drove past the rolling green-and-gold fields, quilted by white fences and mounds of trees that grew medievally thick. She was enjoying herself again, after being momentarily distracted by disappointment when only the mayor and a bald, beady-eyed man named Spotsky had accompanied her, Grundy and Rodger in the limousine from the airport. The oddball museum guy with the flashy tie and the quiet chuckle had been left at the curb along with the rest of the greeters.

She’d been subjected to Nell’s running discourse on the history of the town ever since. If the oddball had come along, he would have smirked, devilishly. His eyes would have twinkled and one brow would have arched high on his even higher forehead, and Lili might have gotten the little hitch in her throat again. He wasn’t knock-your-socks-off handsome, not in that awful tie and the terribly wrinkled suit, but there were his intelligent eyes to consider, and the cowlick that distracted from his receding hairline, and the adorable way the two sides of his face didn’t quite match up…

Simon Tremayne, she thought. Not a solid All-American name like Chip or Hank or Dave, but it suited him. She liked him instinctively, even if he wasn’t what she’d expected. Or hoped for.

Lili tuned in to the mayor, who was saying, “My esteemed grandfather, Horace P. Applewhite, founded the Society of Concerned Citizens, putting into action the preservation of the…”

She tuned her out again, careful to maintain a wide-eyed look of interest. It was a talent she’d developed when stuffy state dinners became de rigeur, quickly followed by de trop. Mrs. Grundy would fill her in on the highlights later. If there were any.

Lili let her gaze stray to the window. Despite her longing to emulate her sisters and quit trying to conform to her father’s expectations, it seemed to her that she was always looking at the world out of windows, from a distance. Was it so wrong of her to want to experience her life instead of only observing it in a dull and stately manner? She wasn’t blunt like Annie, nor gutsy like Natalia. All she wanted was a bit of fun now and then.

The limo was entering the town. Lili was delighted by what she saw, even if it was through a pane of glass. Blue Cloud appeared to be the quintessential small American town. There was a spare white church with a steeple on one corner, a stone post office with an American flag on the other. The car passed through a bustling downtown—with parking meters!—populated by gift shops and tourists, who pointed and took photos of the limo. She glimpsed something called a Freezee Treat, a redoubtable bank with pillars and stone lions and an old-fashioned brick schoolhouse—with a crossing guard!—and then they were cruising through tree-lined streets of quaint bungalows and wood-frame houses as upright as Puritans.

Lili pressed the toggle to roll down the window. “Prin-cess,” cautioned Mrs. Grundy, but Lili went ahead anyway and thrust her face into the wind, not caring a whit that she would probably be mistaken for a Pomeranian with its head hanging out the car window. Her hair fluttered against her cheeks and forehead, just like the little flags at the front of the car. Wonderful!