She tapped the temporary boot cast that was nearly hidden beneath her loose-legged slacks. “This, at least I can walk in and remove from time to time until I lose it for good.”
“You have something major to look forward to then.”
“Truth to tell,” Helena confessed, needing to take the focus away from herself, “I am so looking forward to seeing Casa Royale. An honest-to-goodness Texas ranch. How exciting.” Rallying another smile for Anna’s benefit, she confided with a teasing lift of a brow, “This cowboy thing is…well, it’s fascinating, isn’t it?”
Another rap sounded on the door.
“Ladies?” a deep masculine voice intoned. “How are we doing in there?”
Helena’s eyes were twinkling when they met Anna’s. “Speaking of fascinating…”
Helena laughed when Anna answered her wicked grin with one of her own.
“Actually, we could use your help, Gregory.” Anna eyed Helena’s wheelchair with a dubious scowl as her husband walked into the room. “I’m not sure how to make this thing work. Or for that matter, how to get you into it, Helena.”
“That part, I can manage,” Helena assured them, then proved it by easing carefully off the bed. In halting steps, she maneuvered into the chair.
Greg Hunt was quick to kneel down in front of her, support her cast and adjust the leg and foot brace on the chair.
“Goodness, you’re very good at that dropping to one knee business.” Helena’s eyes sparkled as she watched his dark head bent over her leg. “Makes one wonder if Anna pulls rank on occasion and has you kneeling to the crown.”
A totally male, totally engaging grin stole across his darkly handsome face. “A loyal subject always knows when to step and when to fetch where the princess is concerned.”
Anna looked from Greg to Helena and back to Greg. She smiled sweetly. “Having fun?”
“Always, darling.” He stood and dropped a kiss full of promises on her brow then turned back to Helena, who was quietly envying the love they shared. “All set?”
“Absolutely.” Helena told herself it wasn’t a lie. She was ready to do this, and she held on to that belief right up until a racket in the hallway had them all turning their heads.
Greg strode swiftly to the door and looked outside. He turned back with a scowl. “Looks like it’s show time. The press are on the floor—and they’re salivating.”
Helena had been anticipating this. She’d been preparing for it. And she’d thought she was ready. Her racing heart said she wasn’t. The rush of dizziness confirmed it.
The press had tried to feed on her for her entire life. She’d always known how to handle them, had always maintained control. She’d treated them like the predators they were, using her looks to hold them at bay as a lion tamer used a whip and chair.
In a stunning moment of truth, she realized that no matter what she’d thought she could do, she couldn’t hold them off now. Not in this condition. She most definitely could not control them. She wasn’t that strong. To her mortification, she realized that she wasn’t that brave. Without her full arsenal to draw from, they would rip her to shreds.
She met Greg’s eyes, determined he’d see neither her shame nor her fear as the noise in the hall escalated to an electric buzz in anticipation of the feeding frenzy she knew it would become.
“You know,” she said, drawing on her reserves to keep her voice steady, “I really don’t think I want to do this today. It’s so pedestrian and, well, tacky—this spectacle they would make of something as uneventful as my release from the hospital.”
Greg and Anna exchanged a concerned glance.
“I mean—can’t we just make them go away somehow?” she suggested with a regal calmness her racing heart worked to undercut.
Her breath caught when the door swung open, and it suddenly seemed it was going to happen with or without her permission. She steeled herself, closed her eyes, and waited for the first verbal blow to land.
Instead of a chorus of demanding voices, one voice—a gruffly velvet, Texas drawl—rang out, clear, composed, and in total control. “It seems we’ve got a situation out here.”
If possible, her heartbeat quickened, not with fear but with relief as she looked up and into a pair of forest-green eyes that burned so furiously and so fiercely that she would have flinched if she hadn’t recognized them.
It was Matthew Walker. Her tall, green-eyed Texan. On the heels of that shock, came another. Neither her memory nor her dreams had done justice to this magnificent man in a silver-gray Stetson, slim dark slacks and crisp white shirt who had just burst back into her life like an avenging angel intent on slaying Lucifer himself if he had to.
He glanced first at Anna then at Greg before his gaze settled, with grim intensity, on her.
She didn’t stop to ask him why he was here. Didn’t think to question whether it was odd or out of the ordinary. She only knew that he’d come. And because he’d come, she knew that everything would be all right.
“Well,” she said, praying that neither her relief nor her panic affected her voice, “it would seem the cavalry has arrived. How wonderfully John Wayne of you.” Like her tone, her smile was carefully contrived to convince everyone—including herself—that this was all one grand adventure. “So tell me, darling, how, exactly, do you intend to save the day?”
Three
The quick plan Matt had hatched to get Helena out of the hospital without being bombarded by the press was simple and effective—if reliant on a little sleight of hand. After pressing the call button to summon a nurse—who, upon hearing him out, was not only game but also excited by the prospect of a little intrigue involving a princess and the daughter of an earl—they set it in motion.
As expected, when the door to Helena’s hospital room opened and Greg, with Anna by his side carrying Helena’s overnight bag, wheeled the chair out into the hall, the paparazzi swarmed like piranhas around the woman bundled from head to toe in a hooded bathrobe.
Inside the room, Matt and Helena listened to the commotion. Matt watched her face and told himself he wasn’t indulging in the look of her after a month of watching her from a distance. As he’d intended, she’d never been aware that he’d been standing guard. Just as she hadn’t needed the extra stress of knowing she faced a potential threat added to her already difficult recovery, he hadn’t needed the complications that getting to know her better would surely bring.
From the moment he’d met her, his physical reaction to her had been far too intense. His interest, much too strong. Just because he was finally face-to-face with her, just because her eyes were a deeper shade of blue than he’d remembered, the silk of her hair as lustrous as spun gold, her face and body the epitome of a heroine in a romantic novel, it didn’t mean he was going to change his game plan now.
All he had to do was get her safely away from the hospital, settle her at the Hunts under the 24/7 guard he’d arranged, and he’d be back to business as usual. And yet, he couldn’t take his eyes off her.
She
