will call you if the king has further questions.” The secretary smiled slightly. “Your report was very comprehensive. King Morgan was pleased.”
At twenty-seven, Megan had long ago learned to contain her emotions, but she felt a tiny glow at the secondhand praise. The royal siblings had always vied for their father’s limited time, and it was a special reward to receive recognition for one’s work on behalf of the kingdom.
“Please convey my thanks,” she said modestly, and left the office as Selywyn held the door. She was clearly but kindly dismissed.
Which was fine by her. The king would not be pleased at her personal news. Unless it aided the affairs of state, she added, frowning. She would not be used as a treaty between two nations the way royal family members had been used in days of old. Even her parents’ marriage had been arranged.
Thinking of the coming months, she trembled like a leaf caught in a gale while worry laced through her composure.
Instead of using the public entry-exit as one was supposed to when seeking or leaving a royal audience, she quickly escaped the huge reception chamber through a side door. A dash through the formal gardens, open to all, and through a gate with a coded lock brought her to the palace’s private gardens where the royals—the three girls and the twins, Owen and Dylan—had played under the watchful eyes of nannies and guards and their mother, Queen Marissa.
For a moment, Megan sat on a stone bench and inhaled the scent of June roses washed clean by the early morning fog. The worry subsided in the tranquillity of the garden.
Finally, drawn irresistibly by the sea, she rose, slipped through another locked gate and walked along the shore path. The trail dropped from a height of forty feet at the knoll, where the original palace had been built nearly four hundred years ago, to the shore in gently rolling swells as if the ocean had etched its restless nature on the land aeons ago. Here, a secluded cove embraced a beach of sand and shells and scattered rocks. Farther out, huge boulders formed a curving breakwater shielding a tiny island in the middle of the bay.
Megan stood on the shore and watched the waves rush in ripples from the Atlantic to break on the shores of Penwyck and its neighbors, Drogheda and Majorco. To the east lay England, Ireland and Wales. Fed by currents that arose in the Caribbean, the ocean brought both cooling breezes and the warmth of the equator to temper their climate. In some sheltered coves, palm trees grew.
Pressing her hands against her heart, she tried to still the great restless longing that rose there. She’d held her worries at bay by dint of will, but her defenses crumbled all at once like a cliff face that could bear the pounding of the waves no longer.
She remembered another night, another sea…
The evening reception was dull. Elegantly dressed dignitaries and their wives, or husbands, as the case may be, moved about the ballroom of the hotel in an ever-changing kaleidoscope of faces, the topics of conversation as varied as the countries represented at the International Trade Conference in Monte Carlo. She was there representing Penwyck in lieu of her older sister—Meredith, the Intelligent One, as the eldest Penwyck princess was known affectionately by their countrymen—who’d been called to other, more urgent, duties at the last minute.
Megan was bored, tired after a week of endless speeches and diatribes, not to mention lunches, dinners and cocktail parties every night. She really preferred her own silent company to all this noise.
Grimacing at how terribly vain that sounded, she glanced around as if looking for an escape route.
At the back corner of the room, she spied a tall masculine figure slipping into the shadows of the terrace. Another soul who needed to escape. She knew who he was.
On impulse, she followed.
Bolted was more like it, she admitted with a carefree laugh as she ducked through the door, which was slightly ajar, and into the star-glazed Mediterranean night. The casinos of Monte Carlo were brightly lit and doing a bustling business. The moon was huge. Its light silvered everything in its glow.
She spotted the lithe frame of Jean-Paul Augustuve as he strolled purposefully toward the marina. She knew he kept a sailboat there, an oceangoing ketch that he could sail alone. She’d never been invited on it, although she’d seen photos of other royal offspring or world-famous models smiling from its teak decks in newspapers from time to time.
Beautiful, competent women who knew their place in the world. Or forged one for themselves.
Megan hesitated, for those traits didn’t describe her at all, then hurried to keep up with his long strides. They arrived at the boat slip, with her not more than ten feet behind him.
“What do you want?” he asked, swinging around to face her after he stepped aboard.
She started in surprise, sure he hadn’t known she was near. “I wondered if you were going for a sail.”
Hearing the uncertainty in her voice, she groaned internally. He would never mistake her for one of those confident women he favored.
His eyes, dark now but a brilliant blue in daylight, studied her for a long, nerve-racking moment, then his teeth flashed in a smile. “Yes.”
She gripped the material at each side of her silk gown. “I want to go with you.”
“No.”
The refusal didn’t surprise her—she’d never expected him to notice her—but it did hurt a bit. The hot press of tears stung her eyes. She was suddenly angry, with herself for the weakness of weeping and with him for his cruel indifference to her feelings.
“Why?” she demanded, surprising both of them.
“I want to be alone.”
“So do I.”
“Then find your own boat.”
“I won’t get in your way,” she promised. “I know how to sail. You might need my help.”
Again the white flash that appeared almost ghostly in the silvery light. He unfastened one of the mooring lines.
“She’s a true lady,” he said of his ship. “She responds to only one hand—mine.”
The sure arrogance along with a second rebuff dissolved the unusual anger. The odd pain flowed over her again.
Megan thought of cold things, of icy fjords and glaciers, of herself as the Ice Princess, remote, cold, untouchable. It was a device she’d used since she was a child—to simply remove her emotions from the situation and lock them in ice. It worked this time, too.
She took one step back on the dock, away from the sailboat and the handsome, arrogant Earl of Silvershire and his wish to be alone.
He moved about the deck effortlessly, fluidly, seemingly one with the night, a fairy prince spawned of something as insubstantial as sea foam and moondust. Nourished by sea and moonlight, he needed nothing from one as mortal as she. Lifting her chin, she turned away.
“Cast off the other line,” he ordered softly and stepped toward the tiller.
Surprised, she spun and caught a flash of silver from his eyes as he glanced her way. She slipped the line from the mooring,
