next morning. She only hoped to have a cup of coffee in her system before she had to face him again—a hope that was obliterated when the knock sounded just as she was measuring grinds into the filter. She set the basket into place, pressed the button and went to respond to his knock.
He was dressed casually in a pair of jeans and a collared T-shirt, much as he’d been the first night he walked into the bar. And though he looked better than any man had a right to look, there certainly wasn’t anything about his appearance or his attire that warned he was a prince. And even now, even knowing all the details she’d learned from the Internet, she found it difficult to think of him as royalty. She could only remember that he was a man—a man she’d taken to her bed and with whom she’d shared intimacies and pleasures she’d never before imagined.
“Good morning,” he said.
To which she responded with a barely civil, “Come in.”
“A little out of sorts this morning?”
“I work nights,” she reminded him. “The hours before noon aren’t my best time.”
“Should I come back?”
She shook her head. “We might as well just get this over with.”
His lips quirked. “What, exactly, are we getting over?”
“The awkward morning-after conversation that we managed to avoid the morning after.” She reached into the cupboard for two mugs, filled both with coffee, then slid one across the table to him.
He’d drank black coffee at the bar that night, she remembered, which was good because she didn’t have any cream. She dumped a generous spoonful of sugar into her own cup and stirred. She planned to make the switch to decaf soon, but the doctor had assured her a couple of cups a day wouldn’t hurt the baby and she needed the caffeine right now.
“Well, you could explain why you didn’t want Scott and Fiona to know we’d met before.”
“Because they would have had questions about how and when, and I wasn’t sure how to answer.” She sipped her coffee, felt it churn uneasily in her stomach.
“How about the truth?”
“The whole truth?”
“I’m not ashamed of what happened between us. We’re both adults, we were attracted to one another, we acted upon that attraction.”
“I don’t do one night stands with strangers,” she told him.
“I seem to recall you telling me that already—right before you invited me back to your apartment.”
She felt her cheeks flush at the reminder—or maybe it was the heat in his gaze that was causing her own body temperature to rise. She wasn’t in the habit of having sex with men she barely knew, and she’d never had sex with a man she’d met only a few hours earlier. But she’d let herself give in to the yearning because she never expected to see him again.
It was supposed to be a crazy, once-in-a-lifetime impulse, a chance to prove to herself that she could be wild and spontaneous and not tie herself up in knots about it forever after. Except that it turned out to be a crazy, once-in-a-lifetime impulse that was going to have some major, long-term repercussions.
Repercussions Prince Eric still didn’t know about.
“Just because I slept with you once doesn’t mean I’ll do so again just because circumstances have thrown us together and it’s convenient.”
He smiled at her across the table—a smile that made all of her bones turn to jelly and made her grateful she was sitting down.
“I wasn’t thinking about the convenience factor so much as the it-was-really-great-sex factor.”
“The only reason I made an exception to my rule was because I didn’t expect to ever see you again.”
“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again, either,” he admitted. “And yet, you’ve been on my mind almost constantly over the past few weeks, and it was always my plan upon returning to Texas to find you.”
“That wasn’t our agreement,” she reminded him.
“So let’s make a new agreement.”
“What do you propose—lots of hot sex in the few weeks leading up to Scott and Fiona’s wedding, after which I go back to serving drinks and you go back to doing whatever it is a royal does?”
Something in her tone must have given her away, because his brows lifted. “You’re annoyed that I didn’t tell you I’m a prince,” he guessed.
“Do you think?”
“Why don’t I remember your affinity for sarcasm?”
“Maybe because we really didn’t know one another at all before we fell into bed together.”
“Are you saying your decision to sleep with me would have been different if you’d know I was a prince?”
“Yes,” she asserted vehemently.
“Why?”
“Because then I would have known that I meant nothing more to you than another conquest in another town.”
Even as she spoke the words, she realized how hypocritical they sounded. After all, she was the one who’d insisted that a one night stand was all she wanted.
But he didn’t point out this fact. Instead he said, “You were never a conquest. You were a beautiful woman who intrigued me as no woman has done in a very long time.”
She wanted to believe him, but she couldn’t get past the fact that he was a prince and she’d been rejected by too many average guys to believe that she could have captured the attention of someone so extraordinary.
“I’m not going to sleep with you again.”
He lifted his cup to his lips, drank. “I got the impression, when Fiona asked you about coming to Tesoro del Mar, that you wanted to refuse.”
“It’s not that I wanted to,” she denied. “It’s just not a great time for me to be leaving the country.”
“Is that the truth? Or is it that you didn’t want to be with me?”
“You weren’t a factor in my decision,” she lied.
“No?” he challenged softly and, reaching across the table, brushed his knuckles down her cheek.
The gentle caress sent tingles down her spine, and when she responded with another no, it sounded almost like a sigh.
He smiled. “Well, I’m glad you are coming. Tesoro del Mar is a beautiful country, and I will look forward to showing it to you.”
“I’m going for Fiona, not for a vacation.”
“There’s no reason you can’t do both.”
She shook her
