Buch lesen: «The Prince's Cinderella Bride»

CHAPTER ONE

IT WAS A strange sort of medical facility, but the changes made to Almsford Castle since ex-Princess Anais Corlow’s last visit made it seem almost like a new place. Or at least like an alternate version of reality that she could pretend she’d never been to, and never run away from...

Sometimes for several seconds at a time.

Dr. Anna Kincaid—as she was now known—checked her watch. Twenty minutes left in her lunch hour, right on schedule. She climbed onto the gym’s treadmill closest to the exit. She could run for fifteen minutes, shower like lightning, and be back in time for her first patient of the afternoon, same as yesterday.

As soon as she got the belt moving, she increased the speed until she had to push herself to keep up. Not a sensible way to exercise but, no matter how determined she was to remain in the new job that allowed her to stay in Corrachlean with her mother and the quiet life they’d built, every minute she was at Almsford she felt the need to run. It built over the day, faster when she wasn’t busy helping patients than when she sat alone in her office with just her memories.

Anais had more or less died the moment she’d left Prince Charming, Quinton Corlow, second son of Corrachlean. Without her husband, she’d had no title—something she’d never cared to have anyway—but she’d also lost her country, her home, for the last seven years.

Almsford Rehabilitation Center now belonged to Corrachlean’s soldiers, people who wanted her there. People who welcomed her, maybe in even greater proportion to how unwelcome she’d been the last time around. The people made it possible for her to set foot in the grounds. The physical changes to the building made it possible for her to stay, but running in one place kept her from running away.

Protective sheeting covered the stained-glass window running along the top half of the twenty-foot western wall in the ballroom-turned-gymnasium, adding another little barrier to her past, to keep those soul-crushing memories from overwhelming her.

To let her—almost—put it all away.

Laughter, warm and masculine, danced up the corridor that branched off the gymnasium to the first-floor patient rooms.

A sparkling sensation, like the meeting of a million tiny kisses, sprung to life at the top of her head and spilled in a cascade down her back, tickling across her neck and over her shoulders, all the way to her thighs, effectively wiping every thought from her head.

Everything but the thrill, everything but the smile she felt over the thrum of her muscles and the murmur of the machine.

Somewhere inside, part of her soul sat up, and a surge of excitement blossomed in her belly. Images of silk sheets and a field of daisies filled her mind, the brush of green leaves tickled her bare calves as she half ran, half danced through them...

She knew that laugh.

Oh, God.

She stumbled and would’ve fallen off the treadmill if not for the safety bars.

Not him. Not here.

She wrenched herself from the machine and careened backwards, her legs boneless and quaking.

Quinn’s voice came from some distance away, but he might’ve been walking down the corridor towards her. She could poke her head out to check and smack straight into those famed dimples.

Which way? Gardens?

Too exposed.

How awkward would it be if Corrachlean’s beloved, rascally soldier Prince came waltzing down the hallway and saw her there after seven years of self-imposed exile? She’d done her best to change her appearance, even beyond the ways the world and their divorce had changed her. Maybe he wouldn’t recognize her, at least long enough for her to skirt past him?

The patients hadn’t recognized her, and she’d stayed away from anyone who’d known her except for Mom.

He wasn’t supposed to even be in the country—the last she’d heard he was still on tour. At the very least, he should be in another country, castle, the palace or somewhere, with a svelte model on his arm, if gossip rags were to be believed... And why wouldn’t they be? They’d been right about their marriage spiraling down the drain, no matter how painful and horrible it had been for them to publicize it in increasingly callous ways.

She’d been back four weeks. It might be a small island nation, but she should’ve been able to avoid him for a year at least. But one month? Four weeks? Thirty measly days?

Anna shouldn’t have any feelings about Prince Captain Quinton Corlow one way or another. Maybe—if she followed the pattern of most of the heterosexual women who encountered the caramel-haired devil—she should swoon at his movie-star looks if he happened by. Swooning involved paling, so that could seem legit.

But she definitely should not be breaking out in a cold sweat and considering whether her heart rate had reached a fast enough pace to require cardioversion.

Before she could muster the courage for a mad dash to her office, another blast of his voice ricocheted up the corridor, cutting escape from her mind.

Not laughter.

Not words spoken with joy. His voice trembled with alarm and the hoarse expletive that followed either shook her or the building.

A breath later came a terrible bellow for help.

“Quinn...”

Her heart lurched, and by the time her thoughts caught up with her body she was running again, down the long hallway.

He’d sounded far away, but she couldn’t tell how far. As she pounded past each open door, she slowed down to peek inside for signs of distress, then spent time dodging people as they limped and rolled out of their rooms.

The residents turned further down the hallway, and she relied on their reactions to direct her.

Three rooms from the far end on the right-hand side, a door stood open and people were gathering around it, forcing her to wiggle through.

“Sorry. Sorry...” she said in passing, and didn’t stop until she was through the door.

Even from behind, even despite the changes seven years as a soldier had made to the breadth of his shoulders, every atom in her body recognized him, crouched over someone on the floor.

Her Quinn. Her husband.

No. Once, maybe. Not anymore. As she absorbed his presence, the rest of the room came into focus.

The bed sat upended and had a raggedly cut bed sheet tied to the bars of the headboard.

Hanging.

She moved around Quinn and crouched over the patient on the floor. His skin was still tinged cyanotic.

“Lieutenant Nettle?” She said his name and reached to check the pulse of his carotid, narrowing her focus to the most urgent place: her patient, not her ex-husband.

Before she could count ten seconds, a large hand clamped onto her wrist, yanking her gaze from her watch’s face to Quinn’s.

The shock of recognition blazed across his heartbreakingly handsome features, made only more devastating by the years that had passed. His caramel hair, once short and smart, had begun to grow out, but it was his stormy gray eyes that slapped her like an accusation.

She forced her gaze away, down at the patient, mentally scrambling for what she should be doing.

“Don’t.” She said the only word she could wrench from her mind and, seeing pink returning to Nettle’s face, pulled her arm away and stood back up. “I want him off the floor.”

“I want his neck stabilized first,” Quinn bit back, but the incredulous way he looked at her said he was having as hard a time navigating this sudden overlap of two realities as she was.

But he was handling it better. Of course Nettle should be stabilized first. “I’ll... I’ll get a brace.”

In contrast to the way her body had responded to his laughter, what dug its talons into her now was far darker even than that rise of panic that had bid her run.

Guilt. Sorrow. Anger. Fear.

Nasty beasts that tore at her competence, her professionalism.

* * *

The familiar tang of fear and rage settled like rot at the back of Quinn’s throat.

Prior to his tours, that acrid combination had hit so infrequently he couldn’t have named the emotions without examination. Now he knew them the second they descended. The only thing he didn’t know was which person before him had summoned them this time—the best friend he’d found dangling by his neck, or the ex-wife who’d abandoned him.

He knew one thing: Anais didn’t deserve the space in his head right now, even if she well deserved his rage. Ben was the one who mattered.

“Be still, man,” he said, as Ben struggled beneath his hands, then looked at Anais. She could come back into his life as quickly as she’d left it, but that slapdash, incompetent disguise wouldn’t fool anyone.

She stood still, staring at him as if she’d lost all her sense.

“Collar,” he repeated to break through her shocked expression.

Don’t think about her shock. It couldn’t be anything more than fear that he’d yell at her—out her, maybe—but right now she only mattered inasmuch as she could help Ben.

He quickly smoothed his hands down his thighs, drying the suddenly sweaty palms, and then fixing them around Ben’s head to keep him from moving it as she finally broke into motion out of the room.

Discipline had been drilled into him after the King had ordered Quinn’s divorce and enlistment. He’d learned to follow their orders and he’d taught his body to follow his own. Self-discipline would see him through this, no matter how wrong it had been to see Ben hanging there, no matter how wrong it was for him to finally see Anais again like this, no matter how wrong it was that she’d changed so much. Falsely brown hair, eyes, tanned skin... Wrong. All of it.

The resolve to speak evenly was all that let him banish his anger as he turned his attention to Ben—who obviously didn’t know who she was. “What’s the doctor’s name?”

“Anna,” Ben answered.

A brown name for a bizarrely brown makeover.

Grasping for the only way he knew how to face such a situation, he attempted some levity to try and take the bleakness out of his friend’s eyes. “The good news is, your arms still work great. I’m fairly certain I’ll have a black eye later.”

“You should’ve left me be,” Ben said, his voice a painful-sounding rasp that could only come from an injured throat.

“I don’t think so,” Quinn muttered and then looked at the door. “Rosalie would be doomed to treason if I had, after she’d murdered me slowly in retribution.”

Where the hell had Anais gone to get the brace—across town?

“What are you even doing here, Doc?”

“You’ve been avoiding my calls worse than my ex-wife,” he said just as Anais came back into the room, the sounds of tearing straps accompanying her ripping the collar open, and perfectly complementing the color draining from her face. She’d heard him. Good.

He focused back on Ben, and that anger instantly diminished. “I came to see you, idiot.”

Quinn accepted the collar and fitted it around Ben’s neck for stability. Only when it was in place did he help Ben into the wheelchair.

Having tasks to do helped. Not looking at Anais helped. If he looked at her, the way his heart thundered in his ears, he’d say or do the wrong thing. That was something about the military that had worked for him—he’d never had to worry about how to say something, just whether he should say it or not. Soldiers appreciated blunt honesty more than diplomats. Something his brother Philip would remember after Quinn’s first royal function.

“You should’ve let me hang,” Ben said again, the words sinking into the middle of Quinn’s stomach.

He shook his head. “I came to see you before I met with the King, which should give you some idea of my priorities right now. You’re the last person in this room I’d let hang.”

She’d hear that too. And she’d hear this... “Maybe even the last person in the world, though I might have to make an exception for any of GQ’s cover models. Even May’s, and you know how that ended.”

Petty. But it felt good to be just a little bit mean. Not that it could be all that mean—she was the one who’d left. And it made Ben almost smile, even the slight quirk of his lips was better than the desolation he’d seen in his friend’s eyes.

“You’re going to have to suffer me checking you over.”

She’d returned with a bag, wearing a white jacket over what he could only classify as workout clothes, the shoulder of the jacket embroidered with the lie that she claimed as her name. Dr. Anna Kincaid.

Kincaid. Family name. Just not her maiden name. Or his name.

From the bag, she produced a stethoscope and handed it to him without his asking, but not without her hand trembling.

Afraid? Maybe she trembled with sympathy or worry for her patient, if she could even feel those human emotions.

He snatched the device, fitted it in his ears, and went about his job. His former job. He wasn’t a medic anymore; yesterday had been his last day as a soldier.

Concentrating on the fast but steady thudding he heard through the ear pieces took more willpower than he’d have thought he had to spare. The urge to throw Anais over his shoulder like a caveman and take her somewhere to make her give him answers was just as strong. Maybe stronger. He’d been waiting seven bloody years for answers, and he’d never gotten a satisfactory one. He’d wait until he’d helped his friend, because today his luck had changed. She was here; answers were a matter of time.

Breaths sounded ragged but normal, all things considered.

“Let’s get out of here. I think we could use some fresh air.”

“Qui—Prince... Captain? There is a protocol...” Anais said from behind him.

He turned and looked pointedly at her embroidered shoulder. “I’m sure there is. Send whoever will be coming out to the garden, Anna.”

“Yes, sir.” She didn’t flinch, though he noticed she also didn’t look him in the eye.

Grabbing the handles of Ben’s chair, he maneuvered them both right out the door and down the hallway. He knew the way to the garden.

He’d loved a girl in those gardens. A girl who apparently no longer existed.

How the hell had she managed to sneak back into the country under a different name, and start practicing medicine at a government facility, of all things?

Once they wheeled out into the fresh air, Quinn angled them to a bench so he could sit and be on eye level with the person he’d actually come to see. The one who obviously needed to talk.

Parked in a patch of summer sunshine, he waited. It wasn’t the time for pushing. It wasn’t the time to tell Ben he should want to live, or to tell him anything about his own condition. He’d listen. And he’d talk about other things. Be a friend. Be present.

Call Ben’s fiancée and family as soon as he left.

Leave this Anais nonsense to figure out later. It wasn’t really important. There was nothing she could say to him to make any of what had gone on between them better.

I never loved you.

I stopped loving you.

You were never that important to me...

What could she really say to explain leaving?

The desire to know was just a natural reaction to seeing her again, a summoning of that anguish he’d moved past at least a few years ago.

It didn’t really matter. She didn’t matter anymore.

* * *

Three hours and at least a hundred self-reminders not to think about Anais later, Quinn found himself outside the shut door to Dr. Anna Kincaid’s office.

Anna Kincaid. Anna. Kincaid. The name summoned bile to his throat. Seven years might as well have been seven minutes for the crush of desperation that had him wanting to claw through the door to reach her.

He’d managed to shove her to the back of his mind—for part of the time—and been present for his best friend, but it wasn’t good enough. He’d heard the sparse number of words Ben had been able to speak, but in the long silences she’d filled his head again and again. When the psychiatrist had found them he’d been allowed to stay, but he hadn’t learned much more about what had driven the attempt. All he really knew was what his eyes could tell him, and the memory of the strangeness he’d felt when he’d lost comparatively insignificant pieces of his own body to service. Some days still, he was shocked when he looked down at his hand and saw that not only the fingers but his wedding ring were gone. Some days, he still expected to find her beside him in the morning when he woke.

What he should be doing right now was making calls and going to the palace—where they’d expected him a few hours ago. Instead, he stood at her shut door. He couldn’t hear her inside, but he could feel her in there, like heat on his skin.

If he felt like admitting it to anyone else—he barely felt like admitting it to himself—he’d felt her at the old family castle the moment he’d stepped into the building. At the time, he’d put it down to memories haunting him more than something in the present. But, standing there, he didn’t even have to touch the door to feel her on the other side. His mangled hand hovered over the knob, and it heated his palm like light...

His hand wavered; he had to pull back from the knob. His arm felt seconds from a cramp, riddled with tension.

He didn’t know which was worse—not knowing still, or that he could be so daft to even think for a fleeting second that anything about her could still warm him. The heat was long-simmering rage and pain. Nothing light about it.

If anyone noticed him standing here, feeling the energy emanating from her door when any rational person would just go inside...the psychiatrist would want to spend some time alone with him next.

He opened the door and it slammed directly into something, halting his forward march.

She stumbled out from behind the door, looking disoriented, but her stagger gave him room to enter and he took advantage of it, shutting the door directly behind him.

“Why were you standing there?”

“I was thinking about locking the door,” she said without preamble. Then, redirecting his question, “Why were you standing outside the door?”

“Anais, I’ve had a hell of a day. I paused because I wanted to make sure I had control of myself and didn’t come right in here and shake you hard enough to knock the brown off of you. What the hell are you playing at with this drab makeover and the name-change? Are you in the country illegally?”

She flinched, then shrugged back from him across the distance of her tiny office. He’d struck another nerve. That shouldn’t please him, but the pink that flashed in her artificially tanned cheeks and the way she smoothed her hair down felt almost like satisfaction. He had seven years of jabs in reserve and, by the look of things, it wasn’t going to get boring anytime soon.

“Of course I’m not here illegally. I had my name changed. Legally. Then I changed my appearance. My mother is getting older—she’s got diabetes and had a heart scare last summer, not that I should have to explain myself. This is my country too, and I shouldn’t have to lose it forever because I married poorly when I was young and naïve.”

A tic in his right eyelid flickered at her return volley.

Definitely different from the Anais he’d known.

“How...?”

“Your brother changed my name for me quietly.” She rubbed her cheek and he knew where the door had clocked her, but she stayed standing there, close enough—only because of the wall behind her—that he could reach out and touch her if he wanted to.

He did want to, so he shoved his hands into the well-worn fatigues he preferred these days, comfortable clothing he’d soon lose as he picked up a new mantle of duty.

“I went with Anna because it’s close enough to Anais for me to still save myself if I start to say my old name. Kincaid is my grandmother’s maiden name, so I have some attachment to it. Doctor, however, is legitimately mine.”

Softness had always abounded in Anais. Tender heart. Soft, free-flowing wavy strawberry-blonde hair. Curves that bewitched him. Gentle aqua eyes. Youthfully plump cheeks and lips... Soft.

A red mark darkened that formerly plump cheek, outside the blush that had already faded. She’d had her ear to the door listening when he’d slammed it open. Not locking it. Or maybe not locking it yet, whatever she’d claimed.

She made herself sound even harder than she appeared. That physical angularity was by far the biggest change, and the one that had momentarily thrown him when she’d come into Ben’s quarters. Not her hair color, her eye color, the glasses, or that suspicious tan... It was how square her jaw seemed now, the gauntness of her cheeks, and the now slender but apparently strong body supporting it all. Anna Kincaid was hard.

He didn’t know what else to say.

For seven years, he’d had a million questions for her—mostly in the first couple of years when everything was hardest. But now, standing here, he didn’t want to ask her why she’d gone. Those old wounds could pop back open with the slightest prod. His chest already ached just looking at this shadow of his brightly colored Anais.

“Are you living back in Easton?”

“No. Are you still at the penthouse?”

“Yes,” he answered. Why it had been so important to him to come find her after speaking with Ben? “Is there something you want to say to me?”

Like I’m sorry?

She shook her head, then seemed to change her mind as the shaking turned into a nod, her voice going quieter. “How do you know Lieutenant Nettle?”

“Served together. First tour,” Quinn answered again. Did she feel anything for him anymore? Besides anger? Somehow, he’d earned her anger? Her anger, and the fact that she wanted him gone was all he could make out. Her eyes used to sparkle when she saw him, even the last time she’d seen him—which she’d no doubt known would be the last time—they’d still sparkled. But with them hidden under those unremarkable brown contacts, he couldn’t see it. Or it wasn’t there. A wife who had feelings for her husband...her ex-husband even...wouldn’t look so hard when he’d never wronged her. Never done anything wrong but love her. Even a friend would look kindly upon a soldier returning home after seven years in a war zone, but she just wanted him gone.

Over the course of his tours, he’d learned to fight his way out of dodgy situations. Fight and survive first, complete the mission second. He couldn’t fight his way out of this. He didn’t even know where to start.

He could make her feel anger, maybe some polite curiosity, but nothing else. Touching her would just hurt him; there was no Braille hidden on her flesh that would tell him the truth, or what he wanted to hear: that she regretted leaving, that she’d suffered because of it, that she was sorry.

He forced his arms to relax, then thought better of it and wrenched his mangled left hand from his pocket to present to her.

“Ben was there to help when my fingers were shot off.” Seeing her blanch only emboldened him. With as much detail as he could summon from that day, he described the way the wedding band he’d still worn had become platinum shrapnel Ben had to pull from the remains of his palm. The way Ben had to cut away his dangling finger. “And that still hurt less than you.”

Her eyes went round, with his hand held up for her inspection, and her breathing increased in speed and force; soon the heated air fanned his hand across the distance. The two fingers, thumb, and partial palm felt the flutter like the barest breeze.

“Get used to seeing me around here. I’ll try to keep the cameras away, for Ben’s sake.”

Her open-mouthed breathing turned to choking, and he realized she was going to be sick a half-second before she turned and flung herself over her office trash bin and retched. Her whole body convulsed with the force of each spasm.