She took his hand with her own gloved one and allowed him to help her out.
‘You must be freezing,’ she said, her teeth chattering. The temperature had dropped substantially since they’d started their drive. ‘Take my hat. I’ve more hair than you.’
‘I’ll be fine.’ He dismissed his offer. His coat was warm. The main thing was that Catalina was bundled up well under her thick snow coat and boots, her hair hidden under a black woolly hat, a thick scarf covering half of her face.
Keeping a firm grip on her hand, Nathaniel led them up the steep deserted road to the hotel, which upon closer inspection was a very pleasant-looking two-storey wooden lodge. They made it there without any mishaps, and opened the front door to a blast of warmth and the blare of distant music.
First impressions were good. The reception was airy and spacious, a place that, while maybe not fit for a princess, was good enough for a woman who no longer wanted to be a princess.
Nathaniel rang the bell on the front desk, which was answered by a frazzled-looking teenage girl.
‘Can we have two rooms for the night?’ he asked carefully in Spanish. He spoke it well but not as fluently as some of his other languages.
The girl stared at him and held up a hand, then called something over her shoulder in a tongue he didn’t recognise.
Catalina pushed forward and said something in what he took to be the same language.
The girl’s eyes lit up, and suddenly there were nothing but smiles and sweetness as the two women chattered away. A middle-aged man appeared from a door behind the desk, saw everything was in hand, and closed the door once again.
After a couple of minutes, Catalina turned to Nathaniel looking concerned. ‘Do you have your passport? She says she needs it.’
He pulled it out of his inside pocket while Catalina opened her small case and removed hers.
‘I didn’t know it was a law to show passports in a hotel.’ She blinked in amazement.
He bit back a laugh. ‘It’s a law us mere mortals have been dealing with for a number of years now.’
He handed them over to the girl along with his credit card. She opened Catalina’s passport first and was inputting the details on a computer when her eyes suddenly widened and she looked back up at them.
Catalina leaned forward to speak quietly to her, the girl nodding vigorously in agreement to whatever was being said. A few minutes later she presented them with an old-fashioned key and got to her feet, and Catalina took her hands between both of her own. The girl pointed to a door to their left and sat back down.
‘We’re in room eighteen,’ Catalina said, waving goodbye to the awestruck teenager. ‘And we’ve a table booked in the restaurant for thirty minutes.’
He opened the door, which led into a long, wide corridor. ‘We have only one room?’
‘We were lucky to get that.’
As she replied he caught a trace of her scent.
He could laugh. Caught a trace of it? She’d disappeared for ten days and her scent had never left him. It had fuelled him.
Gritting his teeth together, Nathaniel said, ‘Why didn’t she understand me?’
‘She only speaks minimal Spanish—this town considers itself Catalan and mostly caters to fellow Catalan tourists. She’s only filling in because the blizzard has brought a swarm of guests in.’
‘I didn’t know you could speak Catalan.’
‘My mother was Spanish and was raised speaking Spanish and Catalan. She taught Isabella and I Catalan so we could be free with what we said to each other.’
‘Your mother was a member of the Spanish royal family, wasn’t she?’
‘She was a cousin to the King.’
‘Monte Cleure and Spain have strong links, don’t they?’
‘Yes. They’re as strong as our links to France, which is good seeing as we’re sandwiched between the pair of them.’
‘I can imagine. And I imagine your mother’s upbringing meant she adapted easily to life in the Royal Palace of Monte Cleure.’
Catalina grimaced in response and came to a stop by the door with a number eighteen on it.
What secrets would the Queen and her daughters have wanted to share that had necessitated them speaking a language no one else understood?
But it wouldn’t even have had to have been secrets. From what he knew of the palace, nothing was private.
He recalled what she’d said about catching a couple making love, and the image of the raven-haired Queen Claudette came to his mind. The way Catalina had spoken, it had sounded as if she’d known the lovers well. Nathaniel had seen the Queen a number of times at school concerts and open days in his younger years, and then at various functions he’d been invited to at the Agon palace, but they had never been introduced.
His money was good enough to be courted in the hope of investment but he was only just considered good enough to be introduced to a Monte Cleure princess, never mind the Queen. She’d resembled her younger daughter, Isabella, more than Catalina, but had had the same willowy figure, poise and serenity her elder daughter carried so effortlessly.
No, Queen Claudette was certainly not the kind of woman who would have demeaned herself by making love in a herb garden.
Queen Claudette hadn’t been a rampant teenager struggling to contain her hormones.
Not like him, who had once been a hormonal teenager who’d embarked on a tawdry, seedy affair.
‘It must have been difficult growing up knowing every wrong move or word would have consequences,’ he said quietly, trying to imagine what it must have been like to grow up as a princess in the House of Fernandez.
‘It’s my life,’ she said simply before correcting herself, ‘was my life. I was born into great privilege. My mother never let me forget how privileged it was and I never let myself forget either. And here’s our room.’
She stuck the key in the lock and turned it.
The door opened to reveal a surprisingly large room that was as clean and airy as the reception. A carved wooden king-size bed with an enormous fur throw dominated it. The other items of furniture blurred into insignificance.
He turned to face her.
Her eyes were already upon him.
‘There is only one bed,’ he said, studying her, remembering the way she had trembled when he’d trapped her against the kitchen counter earlier. His body still ached from the remnants of the need that had pulsed through him when he’d run his fingers over her soft cheeks and inhaled the fragrance that could have been designed for his senses alone.
‘Do you have a problem with that?’ Her gaze was steady and unflinching.
Did
