have outgrown that silly crush years ago. And she’d thought she had—until she stood in front of him with her heart beating so loudly inside of her chest she was amazed that he couldn’t hear it.
So now she was trying not to think about the fact that she would be spending the next two months at Cielo del Norte with the sexy prince who was still grieving the loss of his wife, and attempting to focus instead on the challenges of spending her days with an almost-four-year-old princess.
“I wish I shared your faith,” Hannah said to her uncle now.
“Why would you have doubts?”
“I’m just not sure that hiring a temporary replacement is the best thing for a young child who has just lost her primary caregiver.” It was the only concern she felt comfortable offering her uncle, because she knew that confiding in him about her childhood crush would only worry him.
“Your compassion is only one of the reasons I know you’ll be perfect for the job,” Phillip said. “As for Riley, I think she’ll surprise you. She is remarkably mature for her age and very well-adjusted.”
“Then why does the prince even need a nanny? Why can’t he just enjoy a summer at the beach with his daughter without pawning off the responsibility of her care on someone else?”
“Prince Michael is doing the best that he can,” her uncle said. “He’s had to make a lot of adjustments in his life, too, since losing his wife.”
Hannah used to wonder why people referred to a death as a loss—as if the person was only missing. She’d been there when her mother died, so she knew that she wasn’t “lost” but gone. Forever.
And after her death her husband had handed their daughter over to his brother-in-law, happy to relinquish to someone else the responsibility of raising his only child. Just as the prince was doing.
Was she judging him too harshly? Possibly. Certainly she was judging him prematurely. There were a lot of professionals who hired caregivers for their children, and although Prince Michael kept a fairly low profile in comparison to other members of his family, she knew that he had occasional royal duties to perform in addition to being president and CEO of his own company. And he was a widower trying to raise a young daughter on his own after the unexpected death of his wife from severe hypoglycemia only hours after childbirth.
Maybe her uncle was right and he was doing the best that he could. In any event, she would be at Cielo del Norte in a few days with the prince and his daughter. No doubt her questions would be answered then.
“So what are you going to do with your Friday nights while I’m gone this summer?” she asked her uncle, hoping a change in the topic of conversation would also succeed in changing the direction of her thoughts.
“I’m sure there will be occasional medical emergencies to keep me occupied,” Phillip told her.
She smiled, because she knew it was true. “Will you come to visit me?”
“If I can get away. But you really shouldn’t worry about me—there’s enough going on with the Juno project at the hospital to keep me busy over the next several months.”
“Okay, I won’t worry,” she promised. “But I will miss
you.”
“You’ll be too busy rubbing elbows with royalty to think about anyone else,” he teased.
She got up to clear their empty plates away, not wanting him to see the flush in her cheeks. Because the idea of rubbing anything of hers against anything of Prince Michael’s—even something as innocuous as elbows—made her feel hot and tingly inside.
Heading up to Cielo del Norte on Saturday afternoon had seemed like a good idea to Michael while he was packing up the car. And Riley had been excited to start their summer vacation. Certainly she’d given him no reason to anticipate any problems, but if there was one thing he should have learned by now about parenting, it was to always expect the unexpected.
The trip itself had been uneventful enough. Estavan Fuentes, the groundskeeper and general maintenance man, had been waiting when they arrived to unload the vehicle; and Caridad, Estavan’s wife and the longtime housekeeper of the estate, had the beds all made up and dinner ready in the oven.
As Michael had enjoyed a glass of his favorite cabernet along with the hot meal, he’d felt the tensions of the city melt away. It was several hours later before he recognized that peaceful interlude as the calm before the storm.
Now it was after midnight, and as he slipped out onto the back terrace and into the blissful quiet of the night, he exhaled a long, weary sigh. It was the only sound aside from the rhythmic lap of the waves against the shore in the distance, and he took a moment to absorb—and appreciate—the silence.
With another sigh, he sank onto the end of a lounge chair and let the peacefulness of the night settle like a blanket across his shoulders. Tipping his head back, he marveled at the array of stars that sparkled like an exquisite selection of diamonds spread out on a black jeweler’s cloth.
He jolted when he heard the French door slide open again.
“Relax—she’s sleeping like a baby.” His sister’s voice was little more than a whisper, as if she was also reluctant to disturb the quiet.
He settled into his chair again. “I thought you’d be asleep, too. You said you wanted to get an early start back in the morning.”
“I do,” Marissa agreed. “But the stars were calling to me.”
He smiled, remembering that those were the same words their father used to say whenever they found him out on this same terrace late at night. They’d spent a lot of time at Cielo del Norte when they were kids, and Michael had a lot of fond memories of their family vacations, particularly in the earlier years, before their father passed away. Their mother had continued the tradition for a while, but it was never the same afterward and they all knew it.
Gaetan Leandres had been raised with a deep appreciation for not just the earth but the seas and the skies, too. He’d been a farmer by trade and a stargazer by choice. He’d spent hours sitting out here, searching for various constellations and pointing them out to his children. He’d once told Michael that whenever he felt overwhelmed by earthly burdens, he just had to look up at the sky and remember how much bigger the world was in comparison to his problems.
Marissa sat down on the end of a lounger, her gaze on something far off in the distance. “I know they’re the same stars I can see from my windows in the city, but they look so different out here. So much brighter.”
“Why don’t you stay for a few days?” he offered, feeling more than a little guilty that she’d driven all the way from Port Augustine in response to his distress call.
“I wish I could, but I’ve got three full days of meetings scheduled this week.”
“Which you should have told me when I got you on the phone.”
She lifted a shoulder. “I couldn’t not come, not when I heard Riley sobbing in the background.”
And that was why he’d called. His daughter, tired from the journey, had fallen asleep earlier than usual. A few hours later, she’d awakened screaming like a banshee and nothing he said or did seemed to
