“The family legend—I’m surprised I never told you about it,” she said, and Ari masked his own grimace. Fortunately, Edeena’s gaze shifted to the far wall, as if remembering something told to her a long time ago. When she spoke again, her tone was resigned.
“According to family lore, if the Saleri family has three girls or more in a single generation, one of us is destined to marry a prince. If we manage to pull that off, then all the sisters will achieve wedded bliss, and the family’s fortunes will be secured for generations. If we miss our prince, no one marries. The family’s fortunes will be ruined, all the sisters will die spinsters, and…” she frowned, tilting her head. “It’s possible we’ll catch the plague. I’m not sure.”
“The plague!” Ari’s brows went up. “That’s a pretty dire threat when there’s technically only one or two princes in Garronia at any given time.”
“Why do you think Silas has been so obnoxious?” Edeena grimaced, glancing around the room until she located her father. “He wasn’t so bad when mom was alive. She didn’t believe in those old stories. There’s also one about three Saleri brothers being forced to marry princesses—and a trio of boyswasborn to the Saleris, two generations back. Strangely enough, they didn’t transform into frogs when my grandfather decided to marry my grandmother instead of yours. Although,” she frowned, fixing her father with a glare over the rim of her glass, “their son is kind of a toad.”
Ari slanted her a glance. “He’s been unkind to you?”
He expected her to disavow the question, but she merely shrugged. “He won’t go too far. And he’s remarried, if you didn’t know. His new wife is expecting so—perhaps his fortunes will increase tenfold. There’s an old tale about four daughters too.”
Ari stared at her. “How did I miss that he’d remarried?”
“Happened after you left. He was pretty distraught about your death, as you might imagine. All his dreams went poof the same day you did.” She grimaced at her unintentionally cold language. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Ari shook his head, and another thought struck him. “Kristos?”
“Tried it. Silas had Caroline all lined up for a run at the poor boy, right up until he fell for Emmaline. And frankly, thank God. We’ve had our fill of princes, as you might imagine.” She nodded to the side of the room, where he knew without looking that Francesca stood with Nicki. “Speaking of, are we about to lose our second royal son to an American? Because that’s got to be some kind of magic spell all on its own.”
He tried to be angry with her for her directness, but he couldn’t. Instead he shrugged. “It’s a little too early to tell.”
“You think so?” Edeena granted him a condescending look, appearing suddenly as wise as his mother, for all that she was his age. “I think it’s pretty clear to anyone with eyeballs.”
“I’ll take it under advisement.”
“You do that,” she grinned. “And you better invite me to the wedding, since my failure made your happiness possible.” She tilted her head. “Besides, if you end up having a little boy right out of the gate, maybe all of Silas’s dreams will come true the next time around.”
“Stop!” Ari begged, determined to bring the conversation back around to less explosive topics. “So—what’s next for you then? Surely you’re not going to keep letting Silas boss you around.”
“No,” she shook her head. “But we had to be smart about it. We’re all educated and capable, for all that he doesn’t let us move without his say so. He holds onto our purse strings because Marguerite isn’t twenty-five yet. But that’s happening in a few months, then—we’re gone.”
“Gone?”
“We’re traveling. Our mother dabbled in real estate and owned properties all over the world—including one on the southeastern coast of the US. Silas has sold most of her holdings, but that property, something’s wrong with it. We’ll start there. We’re fluent in English and we could more or less fit in, I think. Anything to get away from here for a while.”
Ari sighed. “I’m sorry you have to go through this.”
“I’m sorrier for my sisters. You and I had been friends for so long, they sort of assumed something would work out between us.” She took another sip of champagne. “Now I tease them mercilessly that I’m depending on them to save me from spinsterhood. All because I couldn’t bag my own prince.”
“Well, to be fair. If you’d really wanted to bag me you wouldn’t have filled my wetsuit full of sand when we were scuba diving,” Ari said.
Edeena grinned at him. “Except you totally had that coming. And sometimes there are more important considerations than a family curse. Like being able to laugh my ass off.”
He accepted a glass of champagne from another server, and clinked her glass. “It’s good to have a sense of perspective.”
“I thrive on it,” she said. Her gaze shifted behind him, and her eyes danced. “You may need to move a little more quickly, though. Francesca’s attracting her own legion of admirers.”
Ari pivoted so quickly that Edeena coughed out a startled laugh, and he handed his champagne to her. She accepted it readily enough, then nodded to Francesca. “Go get her. If anyone ever looked at me the way she looks at you, I’d hold onto him with both hands.”
It wasn’t so easy, of course, to get across the ballroom floor. Ari was stopped no less than three times by well-wishers, glad-handers and distant family cousins. By the time he reached the far end of the floor, the music had struck up in earnest, easing into a traditional Garronois ballad.
As Edeena had warned, Francesca was surrounded by a half-dozen young men, each of them plying her with questions, their English at various levels of disaster. Ari didn’t recognize any of them, but that was just as well. Fewer people for him to kill later.
“Sir!” The furthest man from Francesca saw Ari approach, and had the good sense to stand back. “Welcome home, Your Highness.”
“Thank you,” Ari said gravely as the other men fell away from Francesca like leaves drifting from a tree. Apparently there were greater benefits to being crown prince than he realized. He held out his hand to Francesca.
“If I could claim you for this dance?”
