problem was, Shane didn’t want to occupy his mind with all those other things right now. Maybe not ever. How the hell was a man supposed to react to the news that he might be the heir to a royal throne in a country he’d hardly thought about before? King Shane? Gee, that didn’t sound like the appropriate moniker for a blue-collar construction worker whose closest brush with nobility had been his childhood visits to White Castle. There had to have been a royal foul-up somewhere. Still, he hadn’t quite been able to turn down Queen Marissa’s royal command when she’d insisted he come to Penwyck to join his brother, Marcus, until they could get to the bottom of the mystery.
Hey, if nothing else, Shane thought, he could have a nice little vacation and spend some time with his brother. No matter that he didn’t have any vacation time coming. He was pretty sure he’d lost his job anyway, by taking off the way he had yesterday. Mr. Mendoza hadn’t looked as if he’d believed the story about King Shane any more than Shane believed it himself.
Inevitably, his gaze stole across the aisle to linger on Sara Wallington again. She really was beautiful, he thought, no matter how tightly she bound herself. The loose sweater and tailored skirt had done nothing to hide her curves, and a few errant wisps of silky hair had fallen from their confinement, giving her the look of a woman who might just be able to let herself go wild once in a while if given the right kind of provocation. Her profile, in the soft light raining down from above her, was elegant and fine, her skin creamy and flawless, touched with just a hint of pink on her high cheekbones. But it was her mouth that caused Shane to feel most restless. Full and delicious looking, all he could do was wonder how she would taste if he touched his lips to hers.
Her head snapped up suddenly then, and she turned to look at him, her gaze falling directly onto his. Her expression was slightly alarmed, as if she’d somehow known what he was thinking about—or maybe she’d been thinking about it, too? he couldn’t help wondering—and the pink on her cheeks darkened some when she saw him gazing back at her so resolutely. Instead of calling him on it, however, she only smiled—albeit with a bit of starch.
“Was there something you wanted, Mr. Cordello?” she asked softly.
Oooo, loaded question, Shane thought. What would she do if he answered her truthfully? he wondered. “No, nothing,” he lied instead. “I think I have everything I need.”
“Excellent,” she replied. “Should you think of something…” Her voice trailed off before she finished the remark, as if Shane should know how she’d intended to finish it.
“If I think of something?” he prodded her, a spark of hope flickering to life somewhere inside him. Maybe they were on the same wavelength.
She smiled that cool, starchy smile again, and what little spark he’d felt firing suddenly sputtered and died. “Feel free to summon one of the attendants,” she finished crisply.
He smiled back, a smile, he felt certain, that was every bit as stiff as hers was. “I’ll do that,” he assured her. Somehow he refrained from adding Your Highness, even though that was exactly the sort of response she seemed to command.
She smiled yet another perfunctory smile, then dropped her gaze back to the book she had opened in her lap. It was a big, thick hardback, probably a textbook, and Shane realized then that she must be a student. Certainly she looked young enough to be, but there was something in her carriage that made her seem like a much older woman, so he hadn’t until now realized that she was probably pretty close to his own twenty-three. He told himself not to bother her, because she so clearly wanted to be left alone, but reluctant to consider the prospect of sixteen hours of silence, and still feeling restless for some reason, and still not wanting to think about that possible-prince business, he jump-started their conversation—what little they’d enjoyed so far—again.
“Are you a student?” he asked her.
Very slowly she lifted her head and turned to look at him again. “Of sorts,” she said evasively.
“UCLA?” he asked.
She shook her head, but said nothing to enlighten him, as if she didn’t want to tell him what school she attended.
“USC?” he tried again.
And again she shook her head. Then, clearly reluctant to divulge even a vague direction to her place of learning, she told him, “I attend a small private college near Santa Barbara.”
Woo, now they were gettin’ somewhere, Shane thought. That was just so specific. “But you’re not American, obviously,” he said, wanting to know more about her, even if she was evasive and starchy and refined and wearing a pink sweater.
“No, I’m from Penwyck originally,” she told him. Adding nothing more to enlighten him.
“You grew up there?”
“Yes,” she said. And nothing more.
“So…” he tried again. “What brought you to the States?”
“That small, private college near Santa Barbara,” she told him.
“You couldn’t major in your specialty in Penwyck?”
When she smiled this time, it was in a way that made Shane think she knew something he didn’t know, and that she got great pleasure in the knowing of it. “You could say that,” she said. Evasively. Starchily. Refinedly. Pink sweaterishly.
Shane narrowed his eyes at her. Just what was she trying to hide? he wondered. What could she possibly be studying here that she couldn’t study in her homeland? Especially since she looked like the kind of woman who would major in English or library science or home ec. Surely they had those things in Penwyck.
“So,” he began again.
“Mr. Cordello, I don’t wish to be impolite, but I do have finals next month and quite a bit of work to do before they arrive. Since I’m obligated to miss my classes for the rest of this week, I thought the least I might do was take advantage of our flight to get in some study time.”
In other words, Shane translated, Leave me the hell alone.
He lifted both hands, palm out, in a gesture of surrender. “Sorry,” he said, finding it hard to feel apologetic. “Don’t want to distract you from your studies. I’ll just, um—” he glanced at the call button on the arm of his seat “—summon the attendant. How will that be?”
And before Miss Pink Sweater, Finals-to-Study-For Wallington could say another word, one of the flight attendants appeared at Shane’s side, obviously ready at his beck and call. And although she was by no means a princess—unlike some people, he thought morosely—the attendant was quite…fetching. Fetching in the dark, curvy way he liked for women to be fetching, too, and not wearing a pink sweater and pearls. Fetching enough that she might very well make the next sixteen hours more bearable. If Shane played his cards right.
Sara read over page 548 of Detente and Diplomacy for a New Millennium for perhaps the sixteenth time and tried not to notice how tantalizing was the sound of Shane Cordello’s rough, rich laughter. It was much more appealing than the flight attendant’s laughter—which Sara found much too high-pitched and much too obvious—that was certain. And Sara should know. She’d been listening to both of them laugh for the better part of fourteen hours now.
Of course, there had been a few breaks in the hilarity during that length of time, periods when Sara and Mr. Cordello had slept with
