Royal's Untouched Love (4 page)

To him, they were nothing.

When they made it to the ground, Marisol was there to greet them. Marisol turned out to be a tall woman with gleaming dark skin and an aureole of lighter natural hair that made her look like she had a halo. She was dressed in bold red, making Heidi feel a bit like an ugly duckling, but she welcomed Heidi with enormous warmth.

"Welcome to Athens!" she said happily. "If you come with me, we can take care of getting your papers in order and making sure that everything is arranged properly."

The next few minutes were a whirl of activity, and by the time Marisol was done, Heidi felt more than a little overwhelmed. Marisol assured her that it was all normal, that in just a few days, she would find her feet.

Marisol was apparently driving her to her new apartment, and as they got into Marisol's elegant Citroen, a sleek red sports car pulled out of the airport parking lot ahead of them.

"And there goes the big man," said Marisol. "He does love that car."

Heidi was sure that the car was gorgeous, but what captured her attention was the brunette in the seat next to him. Her olive skin was displayed beautifully by her low-cut white sundress, and her deep chestnut hair whipped behind her in perfect waves. Her mouth was open in a laugh, and before the car disappeared, Heidi saw her lean close and drop a kiss on Jaque's cheek.

"Oh," Heidi stuttered. "I didn't know that Jaque was married …"

Marisol chuckled, pulling out into traffic at a slightly more moderate pace. "Oh, you are new. No, the boss isn't married. He does like his female companionship, though. That's his latest. She's a model from Italy, but she's here for school."

Beauty and brains
, Heidi found herself thinking.
How can I compete?

She shook herself. She wasn't competing. She wasn't even playing the game.

Marisol glanced at her with a curious expression as they drove. "Are you here on your own?" she asked. "Not importing a boyfriend or a husband with you, or god forbid, doing the long distance thing?"

Heidi shook her head, wondering if she should be embarrassed. At twenty-four, her life had had precious little space for romance, and as she had told Olga not all that long ago, what she had tried hadn't been very impressive.

"That's good, then."

"Because LaMer Enterprises isn't going to leave me much time for someone important?"

"Hmm? Oh, no, not at all, honey. The truth is that you are in Athens now, one of the most ancient cities in the world that also happens to be among the most modern. Things happen here in a way that I never see them happen anywhere else. The truth is that when it comes right down to it, Athens changes you. A lot of relationships don't survive that."

While Heidi tried to think about how she felt about that, Marisol reached over and squeezed her hand reassuringly.

"You're going to love it. You can really become who are you are meant to be here."

Heidi repeated Marisol's words to herself a few hours later, when she was alone in her apartment. It was a charming space, one that she might have thought of as on the smaller side if she hadn't lived in New York apartments. The walls were pure white, and they reached up high above her. Her bedroom was barely big enough for her bed, but when she walked through her kitchen, there was a small balcony with a small table and two chairs on it, offering her a view of the street market below.

The space was beautiful, but for some reason, Heidi had never felt more alone. The sun was going down, and soon the people on the streets below would be going home to their loved ones while she was still out there on her own.

"Well," she said out loud. "Here's the future."

Without her will, her thoughts turned to Jaque. She wondered if he was still with the olive-skinned beauty she had seen in his car. She wondered if they were taking in the sights of the town, or whether they had retired to Jaque's home.

She cut that train of thought short. She was a little country mouse who had come to Athens, and to expect anything at all from her CEO besides fair treatment was asking for trouble.

Instead, she prepared a cup of tea for herself that she had bought at the tiny grocery store around the corner, and she sat on her new balcony. She looked up at the darkening sky, and waited to see if she could find any familiar stars.

CHAPTER THREE

Two Months Later

Jaque realized that he had stayed at work so late that it had technically become early. He spun his chair towards the enormous glass wall behind him, the one that looked out over the sea. It was still dim, as the window faced west, but the sky was distinctly lighter. Soon it would be swept with pinks and oranges, and after that, they would give way to the stunning Mediterranean blue that had inspired artists around the world for centuries.

His office was austere to the point of ascetic. There was only the enormous desk of polished dark wood, a powerful computer, and a surprisingly ancient couch that looked out of place among the modern furnishings.

No matter how much his secretary despaired about that couch, and no matter how much interior designers despised it, he refused to get rid of it. It was one of the most comfortable pieces of furniture that he owned, and whenever he lay down on it, he could be asleep in minutes.

He had just laid down on it to get a quick nap before his meetings at eight when his phone rang. He was ready to flip it off and ignore whoever it was, but when he saw it was his mother, he flipped it on.

"Good morning, Mother," he said. "I take it that you did not notice the time difference between Athens and wherever you are?"

"As a matter of fact, I am in Spain, and I always remember the time difference. I just assumed that if I tried you at odd hours, you'd actually hear your phone."

"In all fairness, I've been at dockyards and fabrication plants as well as noisy clubs when you call," he said peaceably, but his mother only snorted.

"Did you know that you were a father?" she asked, and Jaque's blood ran cold.

"What are you talking about …? I've not …"

Greta's laugh was caustic. "Calm yourself. It was disproved. This woman claimed that you were in Japan, which you haven't been to in almost four years. She agreed to a blood test, and you were proven innocent for once. Her child has no relation to any of us."

Jaque felt himself start to breathe again, but he couldn't see himself sleeping again any time soon. Instead he stood up, stretching as he did so, and began pacing his office.

"Mother, was there possibly a way to break that news to me that was a little less shocking?"

"I'm sure there was, but as that news was presented to me without the reassurance afterward that it was false, you still got the better end of the deal."

The silence between them was heavy. Jaque broke it first.

"Your silence sounds furious," he said, trying to lighten the mood, but the Queen of Sweden was having none of it.

"Jaque, I have told you before that it was past time to stop this nonsense. You have a responsibility and a family name to uphold, and your antics are making you vulnerable in a way that no Swedish royal has ever been."

"You cannot expect me to curb my behavior over the actions and lies of a woman I have never seen before," he argued.

"Jaque," said his mother. "For a moment there, you believed me. It is not so far outside of the realm of possibility as you might think day to day, but when I presented that information to you, you knew that it was all too likely."

"I don't know what you want me to say."

"I don't need you to say anything. Just know that something like this could have hurt our family's standing very badly, and I don't need to remind you of the fact that our standing is Sweden's standing. If I believe you are going to hurt that, I will disinherit you. It might be the hardest thing that I have done since I married your father, but it is something that I will do."

A thousand things crowded in Jaque's mind, but at the end, there was only one response he could make.

"I understand, Mother," he said curtly.

"I hope you do," was her soft reply, and then the call ended.

He and his mother had always been too much alike to get along when he was younger. Her temper was formidable, and he suspected that his own came directly from hers. However, one of the problems of being too much like his parent was the fact that he could see when she was right too easily as well.

News of the illegitimate child of the Prince of Sweden was simply too good for the world to pass up. He and his family would be raked through the worst publications, and, his mother was right, Sweden would suffer.

He rubbed his face with both hands, trying to ignore a thought that was worming its way through his head.

When his mother had announced his impending fatherhood, there was something in him that didn't hate the idea. He had always thought that fatherhood was a chore that he would of course one day have to undertake, but when it had been presented to him, even by Greta at her most caustic, the first feeling in him had been one of joy.

No. He didn't have time to think about what that might have meant, not today.

He strode to the well-appointed bathroom next to his office, the one that held a state-of-the-art shower complete with all of his preferred toiletries.

Just a few hours later, he was in a meeting with his head developers and one thing was becoming very clear.

"The world is changing," said the woman who headed up his top engineering team. "What we are told over and over again is 'go green or get gone.' Our yachts are still the prizes for the elite, but unless we are seen making intense improvements on our designs over the next two to five years, we are going to be going the way of the dinosaurs."

"All right," said Jaque. "Tell me what you need to alter the designs."

The engineer listed a few resources that Jaque had already been considering anyway, and then she said something that made him look up.

"And of course, a sustainability consultant. We know what our yachts do, but we don't know what they do to the world, not precisely. Do we need vessels that are localized to different environments? Is there some kind of blanket solution we should have on everything we put out? Right now, these are things that we don't know. A consultant with the right skills and qualifications could help guide us a great deal."

Jaque's mind flashed to a shy Columbia graduate with a braid of sunrise red hair, one who couldn't seem to look up at him until he made her.

"Actually, I think I have just the person for you," he said. "I'll get her installed in your wing by next week at the latest."

When he left the meeting, he found that he couldn't get her out of his head. He remembered her name had been Heidi, and he remembered green eyes that seemed both frightened and defiant. With skin as fair as snow, he wondered if she had burned when she stepped out into the intense Athenian sunlight. He wondered if she freckled, and when he started thinking about where those freckles might be, he had to pull himself back.

When he finished up with his meetings, he realized that it was barely past two. If he made it over to the research center, he'd be able to meet up with her and let her know about her new position. It would be good to see how the shy young woman was doing.

The research center of LaMer Enterprises was housed in a small building across the company's quad. While the main building was ultramodern, the other buildings were older, some of them much older. Jaque had built with modernity and tradition mixed in mind, and so the research building was a thoroughly modern building in the shell of a building some two hundred years old.

When he got through security and figured out where Heidi's office was, he made his way up a wide marble staircase up to a small room on the third floor. There was something almost subterranean about the long hallway, something cool about the marble floor and arched ceilings. He found her door at the end of the hall, pausing for a moment before he knocked.

When he had first laid eyes on her, there was something in him that wanted to protect her. He wasn't sure what it was, whether he felt brotherly or simply amused by a young woman so out of her element, but he had wanted to make sure that she got her feet underneath her.

Of course, all of that had gone out of the window the moment they got back to Greece, where he had found a very enthusiastic Enola waiting for him. That had been an affair to remember, but then he realized that the model from Italy
had already surprisingly faded in his memory.

Well, I left her with Marisol, who wouldn't have abandoned the poor girl alone in a strange city,
he consoled himself.

He decided abruptly to make it up to her. After all, she probably hadn't spent the last two months shivering in fear at her new city, creeping from house to work and back again.

At least, he hoped that she hadn't.

He was just raising his hand to knock again when the door opened, and the girl he had just been worrying about opened the door.

The girl he had met in May had been a shy thing, her shoulders hunched in and her green eyes staring at the ground. This girl looked up at him, unafraid and curious.

"Jaque?" she said in surprise, and even the way she said his name was more confident and sure of herself.

"Heidi," he said, finally recovering. "You remember me."

Her laugh was softly musical. "It's a pretty poor policy to forget the person who signs my paychecks," she said. "I didn't expect to see you here in the research wing. What can I do to help you?"

He had thought that they would sit and converse in her office, but abruptly, he decided on a different course of action.

"I have some things to run by you, but I thought you might enjoy it if we did it outdoors. It's a beautiful day, and there's this café down by the water …"

"Angelo's?" she asked perking up, and he laughed at himself a little inwardly.

"Yes, Angelo's," he said. "Come on, my treat, and I think you'll like the news I have for you."

"Sure, just let me get my purse."