Given what had happened earlier this evening, if the Princess did find a way into his room again, knowing what he knew and how good she felt, would he even bother to send her away?
Of course, he would.
It was ridiculous even contemplating the question. But the fact he’d even had to ask himself required some serious analysis.
Never before had he felt the pull of attraction for one of his rescues. And not since Sophia had he felt the power of attraction for any woman. No woman could take the place of Sophia. So why did the Princess affect him so?
She was both a rescue and a Princess. Double the reason to deliver her safely home untouched by him. He had a contract to find and return her.
He had a duty to return her.
Attraction didn’t come into it.
Her story about her brother selling her off didn’t come into it. That wasn’t part of his remit. That wasn’t something he was contracted to consider. His job was to get her home. End of story.
Except…
Her story still niggled at his conscience. The idea that she’d run away because the Prince planned to marry off his sister in order to settle his gambling debts was fanciful. A fancy she’d then embellished by saying the man she’d been promised to was in his fifties.
Trying to convince him by enhancing the injustice? An attempt to further appeal to his sense of right and wrong by stressing their difference in ages? She’d got him there. The idea that he was returning her home only to be forced to marry a man in his fifties that she wanted no part of—that wouldn’t just be a waste.
It would be a crime.
The Princess was young and vibrant and was entitled to be living her life with the man of her choice.
But if she were lying and her story completely fabricated?
On the other hand, her brother’s story was equally thin. The Princess didn’t look in the least bit worried or envious about not being the one to occupy Rubanestein’s throne. If the Princess was so certain she should be the one to sit on the throne, surely she would be bagging her brother’s efforts at ruling the principality, pulling him down at every opportunity, pushing her own credibility to perform the role instead. On the contrary, she seemed more interested in just being able to live her life the way she wanted.
Certainly, she’d run for a reason. But right now, uncomfortably, her story was making the more sense.
So where did that leave him? She didn’t mean anything to him, not really, other than providing endless irritation one way or another. When she wasn’t needling him with her smart tongue, she was driving him to distraction with her lush mouth or her beguiling eyes or her all too bewitching body. She was a pint-sized distraction he didn’t need. It would be a relief to see the back of her.
And given he was contracted to return her to Rubanestein, what choice did he have?
CHAPTER TEN
THEO WAS UPbefore dawn because lying in bed and not sleeping was getting old. A crew came out at first light to clear the road of the fallen palm, Tom delivering the news that the airport would remain closed another day.
It didn’t matter that Theo had been half expecting it, given the weather, but the complications of this case were grating on his nerves. Never before had he felt so many conflicting emotions in carrying out a recovery, none of them wanting to be resolved any time soon.
The storm was no longer above and around him. The storm was in his head. A royal storm, named Isabella, occupying his headspace, blotting out reason, testing his patience along with his willpower.
He should never have kissed her. That one thought had played on a loop through his head throughout the night. He should never have touched the Princess. There was no greater truth.
The woman was trouble. She threatened his equilibrium at every turn. She tested his resolve. Worst of all, holding her had felt like someone had turned on a light in his life. Kissing her had felt like hope.
It was so long since he’d felt hope.
So merely telling himself again and again that he shouldn’t have kissed her—knowing it—didn’t make it any easier to accept it. Didn’t make it any easier to regret it.
The woman was trouble all right.
No wonder she was messing with his head.
He was sitting at the dining room table on his second pot of coffee when the Princess appeared in the kitchen looking bright-eyed and well-rested. He sighed. Of course she was.
‘Sleep well?’ she asked, helping herself to a cup.
