Her voice cracked on the words. Even though she played at being offhand, deep down it had come as a shock to see him on the TV. Would it have killed him to have let her know he was coming to America?
“Hmph. I can’t believe you’re not seeing each other while he’s here,” Sally continued, clearly not ready to let go of the topic yet. “Don’t you even want to see him?”
“He probably doesn’t have time,” Mila deflected.
She didn’t want to go into what she did or didn’t want when it came to Prince Thierry. Her feelings on the subject were too confusing, even for her. She’d tried to convince herself many times that love at first sight was the construction of moviemakers and romance novelists, but ever since the day of their betrothal, she had yearned for him with a longing that went deep into the very fabric of her being. Was that love? She didn’t know. It wasn’t as if she’d had any stellar examples during her childhood.
“Well, even if he hadn’t told me he was coming here, I’d certainly make time to see him if he was mine.”
Mila forced herself to laugh and to make the kind of comment Sally would expect her to make. “Well, he’s not yours, he’s mine—and I’m not sharing.”
As she expected, Sally joined in with her mirth. Mila kept her eyes glued to the screen for the duration of the segment about Prince Thierry—and tried to ignore the commentary about herself. The reporters were full of speculation as to her whereabouts, which had been kept strictly private for the past several years. Though she realized, if Sally had put two and two together as to who she was, what was to say others wouldn’t, also?
She clung to the hope that no one would think to connect the ugly duckling of her engagement photo with the woman she had become. No longer was she the timid young woman with a mouth too large for her face and chubby cheeks and thighs. Somewhere between nineteen and twenty she’d begun a miraculous late-blooming transformation. The thirty extra pounds of puppy fat had long since melted from her body—her features and her figure fining down to what she was now, still curvy but no longer overweight. And her hair, thank goodness, had grown long and straight and thick. The dreadful cropped cut and frizzy perm she’d insisted on in a vain attempt to look sophisticated before meeting the prince was now nothing more than a humiliating memory. And she’d finally developed the poise that had been sadly lacking when she was just a teenager.
Would her soon-to-be husband find her attractive now? She hated to think he’d be put off by her, especially given how incredibly drawn she was to him.
Sally had been one hundred percent right that Prince Thierry was hot. And all through the broadcast she saw evidence of that special brand of charisma that he unconsciously exuded. Mila watched the way people in the background stopped and stared at the prince—drawn to him as if he was a particularly strong magnet and they were nothing but metal filings inexorably pulled into his field. She knew how they felt. It was the same sensation that had struck her on the day of their betrothal—not to mention since, whenever she’d seen pictures of him or caught a news bulletin on television when she was home on vacation back in Erminia.
She’d return there in just a few weeks. It was time to retrieve the mantle of responsibility she’d so eagerly, even if only temporarily, shrugged off and reassume her position.
Mila reached for the remote and muted the sound, ready to turn her attention back to her work, but Sally wasn’t finished on the subject yet.
“You should go to New York and meet him. Turn up at the door to his hotel suite and introduce yourself,” Sally urged.
Mila laughed, but the sound lacked any humor. “Even if I could get away from Boston unchaperoned, I wouldn’t get past his security, trust me. He’s the Crown Prince of Sylvain, the sole heir to the throne. He’s important.”
Sally rolled her eyes. “So are you. You’re his fiancée, for goodness’ sake. Surely he’d make time for you. And, as to Bernadette and the bruiser boys,” Sally said, referring to Mila’s chaperone and round-the-clock bodyguards, “I think I could come up with a way to dodge them—if you were willing to commit to this, that is.”
“I couldn’t. Besides, what if my brother found out?”
Sally didn’t know that Mila’s brother was also the reigning king of Erminia, but she was aware that Rocco had been her guardian since they lost their parents many years ago.
“What could he do? Ground you?” Sally snorted. “C’mon, you’re almost twenty-five years old and you’ve spent the last seven years in another country gaining valuable qualifications you’ll probably never be allowed to use. You have a lifetime of incredibly boring state dinners and stuff like that to look forward to. I think you’re entitled to a bit of fun, don’t you?”
“You make a good point,” Mila answered with a wry grin. As much as Sally’s words pricked at her, her friend was right. “What do you suggest?”
“It’s easy. Professor Winslow said that if we wanted he could get us tickets to the sustainability lecture stream during the summit. Why don’t we take him up on it? The summit starts tomorrow and there’s a lecture we could attend,” she said the latter word with her fingers in the air, mimicking quotation marks, “the next day.”
“Accommodation will be impossible to find at this short notice.”
“They’ll never fall for it.”
“It wouldn’t hurt to try, though, would it? Otherwise when are you going to get a chance to see the prince again? At your wedding? C’mon, what’s the worst that could happen?”
What was the worst that could happen? They’d get caught. And then what? More reminders of her station and her duty to her country. Growing up in Erminia constant lectures about her duty and reputation had been all she’d known, after all. But after living and attending college in the States for the past few years, Mila had enjoyed a taste—albeit a severely curtailed one—of the kind of freedom she hadn’t even known she craved.
She weighed the idea in her mind. Sally’s plan was so simple and uncomplicated it might just work. Bernadette was always crazy busy—even more so since she’d begun making plans for Mila’s return to Erminia. A side jaunt to New York would throw her schedule completely out—if she even agreed to allowing it. But Mila still had the email from the professor saying how valuable attending the lecture would be. Mila knew she could put some emotional pressure on the chaperone who’d become more like a mother-figure to her and convince
her to let her go.
“What’s it going to be, Mila?” Sally prompted.
Mila reached her decision. “I’ll do it.”
She couldn’t believe she’d said the words even as they came from her mouth, but every cell in her body flooded with a sense of anticipation. She was going to meet Prince Thierry. Or, at least, try to meet him.
“Great,” Sally said, rubbing her hands together like the nefarious co-conspirator she was at heart. “Let’s make some plans. This is going to be fun!”
Copyright © 2016 by Dolce Vita Trust
ISBN-13: 9781488001772
The Boss and His Cowgirl
Copyright © 2016 by Silver James
All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
® and ™ are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and in other countries.
www.Harlequin.com