CHAPTER ONE
New York City, Now
Marnie froze, which was very awkward given the fact that she was currently hovering over the cheese tray in the rear corner of the bookshop. She had wanted to make sure that she got some cheese and some grapes before the rest of the crowd realized that there was free food, and she thought she had done quite well for herself before she turned around and caught sight of the dark-haired man closer to the front of the room.
It really can't be him, can it?
She told herself that it was foolishness. There was no way it could be Philip, none whatsoever, but the longer she watched, the more she recognized the man's way of standing, the tilt of his head, even the way he raked his fingers through his thick, dark hair as he spoke.
Cassie elbowed her in the ribs. "Marnie, you really need to step aside and let someone else—oh hello, that's nice, isn't it?"
Her best friend offered the object of Marnie's regard an appreciative look, but when she glanced back at Marnie, it was clear that Marnie wasn't just appreciating a handsome man.
"Look, I know you've not managed to get out for a while, but seriously, we're in New York. There are lots more handsome men around, though I have to admit, the one that you're eying up is pretty impressive. What gives?"
Marnie recovered enough to step back from the table. Without thinking of what she was doing, she stuck herself behind a shelf of travel books. She was short, and it hid her quite well, but still she had to resist the urge to crouch down.
"I know there are more handsome men out there, but this is one that I know." When Cassie still looked a little confused, Marnie winced. "He's one that I know intimately."
"Oh my, one of those situations, eh? Well, what do you want to do? Want me to start talking loudly about politics so you can make your getaway?"
Marnie bit her lip. If she were being practical and sensible, there would be nothing smarter than to take Cassie up on her offer. Cassie was a good friend, and the only thing she liked more than having a good time with her friends was causing a scene.
However …
It was Philip.
Some people enter your life and write their initials on it. Over time, their initials might become eroded or worn away entirely. When it came to Philip, he hadn't just initialized her rock. He had blasted his full name into it, and some days, the letters looked as if they had been cut yesterday.
"I don't know," she said, but then he turned towards her. If she had had any doubts that it wasn't Philip, the man's nearly black eyes would have blown those doubts away. She had never known anyone with eyes that dark, and as always, it was a struggle to avoid drowning in them.
The moment he saw her, he started cutting through the crowd to get to her, and Cassie tensed.
"So what's the plan? Do I trip him so you can make it through the fire exit?"
"There's no plan," Marnie said faintly, but then what else was new? When it came to Philip, there never was.
***
New York City, Six Years Ago
Marnie had been minding her own business, but if she were being honest with herself, that had never saved anyone. She was as wary and mistrustful as any native New Yorker, but the truth was that you simply couldn't be on guard all the time. That spring day, she had had nothing on her mind more pressing than getting down the street to the café to do some writing. Her small laptop was zipped securely in its bag, safe from theft, but apparently, she had left her wallet in the open front pocket.
The thief saw it, and apparently, it was too good to pass up. In another world, the thief got an easy wallet, she cursed her absentmindedness, and Philip Demarier kept right on walking. She didn't live in that world, however.
The thief plucked her wallet out of her bag, but somehow, at the last minute, his arm got tangled in the strap. Marnie was pulled back with a hefty yank, and thanks to years of martial arts training, she spun around and got her fists up to defend herself and to also make anyone who threatened her very, very sorry.
At that point, the thief wanted nothing more than to get away, but somehow he had gotten even more tangled in her strap. Marnie, who was not entirely sure what was going on, yanked backwards, making things worse, and at that point, she still had no idea he wanted her wallet.
They were both shouting at each other, unwilling to give a single inch, and that was when Philip intervened.
To Marnie's view, a tall, striking man stepped up and grabbed her strap with one hand, while grabbing the thief's arm with the other. With a surprisingly deft move, he pulled them apart, and when the thief tried to melt into the crowd, Philip shook him just enough to make him quit.
"What the hell is going on?" Marnie sputtered, which in retrospect was not the most charming thing she had ever said to a handsome man.
"This man was trying to pick your pocket," Philip replied, a slight note of humor in his voice. "If it helps, I wasn't trying to do anything but help. You, not him, if there's any confusion."
A policeman had been found surprisingly quickly, and then it was just Marnie and Philip standing in the middle of the pavement while people crowded around them.
"Oh, let's get out of the center of the sidewalk, people are trying to walk," she said.
Without thinking of what she was doing, she hooked her arm through his and tugged him into the slight protected area right next to a building. Now that she was calming down, she was startled to see how truly handsome her rescuer was. He towered over her own five feet nothing, and his black hair and black eyes combined to give him a compelling attraction. His face was stern, but his lips were sensual. When he smiled, he sent a shiver up her spine.
"Are you all right?" he asked, and his voice was like chocolate—rich and dark.
"I'm just fine, thanks for the assist," she said. Now that it was over, she was a little shaky, but she wasn't sure if that had more to do with the theft or the man who had helped her.
She patted her bag, startled when she realized that she couldn't find her wallet, the subject of all of this fuss.
"Oh god, I think I lost …”
Marnie blinked when he held her wallet up to her.
"I saw it hit the ground, and I figured that the last thing that you wanted was to go rummaging underneath the foot traffic to find it."
"Yeah, that's a good way to get trampled," she said ruefully, taking the wallet from him.
"I have been in stampedes that were calmer than Manhattan sidewalks," he said with a slight smile, and she realized that while his English was perfect, there was a certain crispness to his words that made her think of Switzerland and Germany.
"Have you been in that many stampedes?" she asked. She wondered if she sounded like an idiot.
At the age of twenty, she had had the odd boyfriend, but she always seemed to fall into relationships rather than have them occur with any planning. She was short, her black hair hanging free to her shoulders, and curvy, but most people would likely say that her best features were her dark blue eyes. Marnie knew that she wasn't bad looking by any stretch, but she wasn't really the type to pick handsome men off the street.
He shrugged. "I've run with the bulls in Pamplona. That's about as close as I care to get."
It sounded like a story or a myth, but he said it as if it was as normal as going to Brooklyn for some really good pastry. Marnie's eyes widened, and suddenly her fascination was deeper than simply for his looks.
"Wow, that sounds amazing," she said. "Look, have you got some time? I'd love to pick your brain all about that, and I could buy you some food for your trouble. Oh, and to say thank you for the help, too, of course …"
She stuttered to a stop, slightly red-faced over her own enthusiasm, but he laughed. At least he seemed to think mouthy little New Yorkers were amusing.
"Well, that sounds entertaining," he said, "but I have to say that I would like to know who I'm talking to."
The implied question caught her off guard, and she laughed a little. "I'm Marnie Drake," she said. "I promise I don't bite."
"Well, I'm Philip Demarier, and I don't bite unless I am very clearly requested to do so."
He flashed bright white teeth at her, making her laugh a little even as she shivered at the idea. With every moment that passed, she was liking this man more and more.
"All right, to Ruffio's, and I'll get you the biggest cheese and strawberry Danish they have!"
She was a writer. It was her calling as much as she wanted it to be a career, and though she didn't know much, she knew that the more information she had about the world around her, the better her work would be. She wasn't the best; she wasn't even very good yet, but she knew that if she kept on slogging at it, someday, she would see her name in bookstores.
"Why were you in Pamplona? What kind of preparation did you have for running with the bulls? Were you afraid?"
The questions tumbled out of her mouth in a rush as soon as they sat down in the small booth, and Philip laughed at her.
"I was in Pamplona because my family was visiting there. The preparation that I had was having a little too much to drink, and no, I was nowhere near as afraid as I should have been."
She was struggling to deal with the idea of running with animals as large and as dangerous as bulls with nothing to prepare you but some alcohol when Philip surprised her.
"Why are you asking me these questions? Are you a student here? Do you make a point of stealing innocent men off the streets to get information on them?"
"I graduated earlier this year, and no I have never grabbed a man off the streets to grill him about bulls and Spain before," she said. "And as to why I am asking you these questions, I'm a writer."
Philip looked suitably impressed, but then he asked the question that they all did. "Oh? Have I read anything that you've written?"
"Not unless you read a few very small university presses last year," she had to admit.
"Ah, so you are really …?"
She prickled a little at that. "I'm really a writer," Marnie said, her chin held high. "It's what I do whenever I'm not sleeping, working, or otherwise occupied. Right now, I'm earning my rent with a job at a copy place, but really—I'm a writer."
She had gotten all sorts of responses when she said that. Some people had politely laughed and changed the subject. Others had tried to argue with her. To her surprise, Philip did neither. Instead he looked surprisingly wistful.
"You sound like a woman who knows who she is," he said. "That in itself is very impressive."
Their food came then, offering a welcome distraction, and over the next few hours, she picked his brain about his life, which seemed to have taken him all over the globe. After that, she was reluctantly just thinking that she should let him go when he suggested a walk down to see a gallery that was just opening up for a show that evening. Marnie was grateful that she had worn her blue dress without stains that day, and happily agreed.
From there, the next few months had played out like the first reel in a romance movie. He lived in a penthouse in downtown Manhattan, and she shared her eleventh-story apartment with two roommates. He wore Armani when he dressed up, and her clothes could fit into two suitcases. Somehow, they were enchanted with each other, and Marnie had stars in her eyes until he dropped a bombshell.
"Wait—prince? Like a real prince of a country?"
"Can you be the prince of anything else?" Philip wondered, but she was in no mood for jokes.
Her roommates were out of town for a concert, and they had seized the opportunity to make love at her apartment. Now she gathered the sheet under her arms, pulling away to pace. Her mind was still spinning.
"Why didn't you tell me?" Marnie asked. Somehow, it felt as if the man who lay on her bed was different from the one who had been so lovingly touching her before. She hated it.
He shrugged and she was gratified to see that he looked slightly ashamed of himself. "Because it is not something that one brings up immediately." Then he shook his head. "No. I want to be honest with you. I always want to be honest with you, Marnie. Because I wanted you to see me for me, without the title, without the history. Being the Prince of Navarra has colored every aspect of my life, or at least it had until I met you. I wanted to … keep that for a while."
She understood. She wished she didn't, but she did. She came to sit down next to him again, but she held herself stiffly apart.
"All right," she said softly. "Tell me what that means for us."
He started to say something about it not meaning anything for them, but she cut him off with a sharp gesture.
"I am falling in love with you," she said, and when she turned to him, her blue eyes were brimming with tears. She hadn't said the word love yet, and when she had thought about it, it was never like this. "What does this mean for that?"
Philip looked stricken, and then he gathered her into his arms. She wished she had the strength to fight him, but just then, it felt so good, too good. She allowed him hold her, and when she felt the faint tremor that ran through his body, she was comforted. He wasn't so apart from her. This wasn't some rich boy's game.
"Dear god, I love you too," he whispered. "But … you must understand. I am the eldest son, my father's heir. There are … expectations. I cannot throw them aside."
Marnie nodded, swallowing the lump that had appeared in her throat. "Then you understand that this is the last time we can do this," she said softly.
For a moment, it looked like Philip was going to argue, but then he saw the look on her face and subsided.
She loved him. There was no question of it in her mind. However, she knew herself and she knew her own worth. She knew what she wanted. Even for a man she loved like she loved Philip—and oh, she loved him with all of her heart—she couldn't let herself be used like that.
It felt as if her heart was ripping in two when he finally let her go. He stood up, and Marnie kept her back turned to him as he dressed. It was somehow too intimate to watch him do that. When they first slept together, the morning after, she had found herself watching him step into his clothes and do up his buttons as quickly and as eagerly as she had watched them come off. Now she couldn't bear to look at him.
When he was fully dressed, he had stood behind her for a full minute before sighing. "Goodbye, Marnie. I am … so sorry I hurt you. I wish I hadn't."
She had spent the rest of the week in a deep depression, and the one after that in a red rage. After that … well, she had other things to worry about and a big decision to make.
At the end, a month later, her phone let her know that there was a mention of Philip Demarier in the news, and it was all about his return to his home country after an extended time in the United States. By then, even if her heart still twisted when she thought of him, she had been relieved.
***
Now
If Marnie was totally honest with herself, she would admit that she thought of Philip far more often than most people thought about their old love affairs. It probably wasn't healthy, but she contented herself that it wasn't as if she was looking back with bitterness. There was some wistfulness there, but she could certainly say that she had moved on. There was some sadness there, but certainly that was natural? She didn't mourn, she didn't pine, and up until five minutes ago, she had thought that the only feelings she had left for Philip were gentle things, sweet and nostalgic.
Then on a windy night in October, he had spotted her from across the room at a poetry reading and she had realized that that was all a lie. When they locked eyes, all of the emotions that they had shared leaped straight to the forefront, and she felt exactly like that twenty year old who was in over her head.
"Marnie?" he asked, and even the way he pronounced her name made her belly turn over. "That can't be you, can it?"
"Of course it can," she said, surprising herself. "I'm New York born and bred. You're the one who's out of place, Your Highness."
He had the grace to flinch at that, but she could tell from the slight curl of his smile that she had amused him.
Now that Marnie was this close to him, she could see that he wasn't quite the young man he had been. He was a year older than her when they had known each other, and now she could see that he was still something of a boy six years ago. He was the same height, but his shoulders were broader, and he had filled out. With a few more lines on his face, he looked sterner, but to Marnie, it only made him more handsome.
"Are you doing well?" he asked, and it struck Marnie how ridiculous it was that they were making small talk in the aftermath of a truly awful poetry reading.
"Don't ask me something like that," Marnie said challengingly. "Ask me something real."
Philip's dark eyes narrowed, and she remembered with a pang that he had never in all of their time together backed down from a challenge, not once.
"Do you think well of me?" he asked, almost formally. "Should I simply say it was good to see you and take off before you decide to dump the salsa over my head?"
His question made her laugh, and she shook her head. "I do think well of you," she said. "Even if we weren't meant to be … yes, I do think well of you and you're in no danger of having salsa dumped over your head, at least not by me."
Philip's smile was as brilliant as she remembered it being. "Good," he said, stepping closer. "Then perhaps you would come out and have some dinner with me. I have a feeling we have a lot of catching up to do."
For a moment, she was twenty again, and there was nothing in the world she wanted better than to step out with a man who made her feel the way that Philip always had. Then her real life crashed through, and she knew that it was an impossibility. She started to flail around for an excuse, but then Cassie, wonderful Cassie who had been silent throughout this entire mad exchange, stepped in.
"Sorry, I'm sure Marnie would love to, but tonight she promised that she would get me home safely."
Philip looked startled, but nodded. "That is … very good of her," he said. "Marnie … it was a pleasure to see you. Here, take my card. If you want to see me again, just call, all right?"
She took the card from him with hands that felt as if they were frozen in ice, and she nodded. At that moment, the owner of one of the local presses flagged Philip down, and Cassie and Marnie made their escape.
"Thank you," Marnie said as they walked down the street. "That was getting strange to say the least."
"No problem at all. I'll do that for you any time, but seriously, what's going on with you and Mr. Kinda European? That was pretty intense."
Marnie took a deep breath and started to tell her friend all about her history with Philip, but her mind was already skipping ahead to her own apartment and the person who was waiting for her there.
When she had gone out this evening for the poetry reading, everything had been so simple.
Now nothing was.
***
When Philip managed to break away from the grasp of a particularly unctuous publisher, he was disappointed to see that Marnie was gone. He hadn't been fooled by her friend in the least. He had gone to enough public functions to know when one woman was extricating a friend from a situation perceived to be troublesome, and he bore her no ill will.
However, when he thought about it, he had to admit that he was stung that Marnie had gone along with it. When he had seen her, he had been catapulted back to that summer he had spent in New York. If he was honest with himself, that was what had set him on the path that had taken him back to New York this very week.
Less than two weeks ago, he had walked out of a dinner with the royal family of Svarta and had turned to his parents with disbelief.
"You cannot be serious," he had said, and his father had frowned.
"She is a perfectly delightful woman," Alexander had rumbled. "She is attractive. What more do you want?"
"I want a great deal more," he had shot back. "If I am to be married, I am certainly not interested in it being to some placid little cow."
"Keep your voice down," his mother had hissed. "She was perfectly polite and kind to you, and the last thing you should be doing is hurting your future wife's feelings."
“Future—? Mother, Father, no. I have nothing but respect for you, but I am not going to marry Johanna. There is no way in hell."
Alexander had stepped up to his son and for a moment, Philip had wondered if they were actually going to come to blows. The older man was still hale and hearty, but Philip matched him pound for pound. The prince had narrowed his eyes, but his father only came close to him, eyes cold as icy steel.
"You have been raised to serve this country," he had said. "And from the time you were a child, you know that part of serving the country would be to marry a suitable woman and to have an heir for the throne. This is not a duty that you can abdicate while still remaining the Prince."
Philip had met his father's gaze without flinching. "Do you think you are going to frighten me with my disinheritance?"
"You are a full-grown man, and for the most part, I respect you as much as I care for you. I wouldn't threaten you, but I will tell you this." Alexander had paused, as if the words that he was going to say were too heavy for him. "I am not threatening you," he had said solemnly. "I am not going to rail at you or try to punish you. You are a man, and the only thing I will say is that your actions contribute to an inevitable result. If you refuse to do your duty, if you will not take up the responsibilities that have been part and parcel of the duty of every Demarier male heir, I will disinherit you. You will no longer be a prince. You will no longer be my heir."
Philip had frozen. His father had intimated that Philip could be disinherited before, but he had never come out and said so quite so bluntly. Philip's first emotions had been an empty grief that he could be so easily ushered out of his own family, and then it was followed with a raw and red rage.
He couldn't trust himself in that moment. If he had continued, he might have said something that he didn't mean, something that was even more disastrous than a disinheritance might be. Instead, he had stared at his parents, bowed abruptly, turned on his heel and had left.
They probably had thought he was going to go to his own home to sulk, or that he was even going to go on a tear through the capital. Instead, he had walked straight up to his own apartments, packed a bag, and had booked a ticket.
Less than five hours later, he had been on a plane bound for New York.
New York had always been a kind of promised land for him. It was a place where he could disappear into the tumult, where cashiers and waitresses rubbed elbows so often with stars and politicians that it simply wasn't worth mentioning anymore.
It was in New York where he had met the first great love of his life, and though he knew that time had passed and the world had moved on, he would have been lying if he said he harbored no hope of seeing her.
He had appeared in New York, and spent some time at the hot spots before he began craving something more sustaining. The poetry reading was dismal, however, and he was just beginning to think about excusing himself when he had seen her from across the room.
His brain might not have known how he was going to react, but his heart had its own ideas. His heart throbbed with a kind of recognition that made him ache, and it was all he could do not to walk over and try to pick up where they had left off.
She had changed, he noticed when he got closer. She was still short, with a fall of hair as black as his and those enormous blue eyes. She was a little curvier as well, but it only made her look more womanly to him. He saw her, and his first instinct was still to plant a gentle kiss on her full lips.
He kept himself back however, and when she looked a little frantic, he had let her go.
Philip woke up the day after the reading feeling more contemplative than he had been before. When he checked the news from home, he made a face to see that his parents had revealed that he was taking a trip to New York for family and business purposes. He supposed that telling the press he was running away from a dull-as-dirt future marriage was out of the question.
He skimmed through the society pages, and then with feelings of surprise and fate, he recognized Marnie's name.
Marnie Drake can't be stopped as she heads out tonight to promote her third novel, The Wind that Sustains Us. The prodigy authoress will be giving a talk at Sandhill Bookstore in Manhattan at 7 this evening and signing her new novel shortly thereafter.
Philip debated with himself briefly, and then he gave in. If Marnie didn't want to see him, he would get a book signed by an old flame who had grown into all the promise she had when they knew each other. If she did …
Philip's heart beat a little faster. He told himself that he had to recall his position and hers. If she didn't want to see him, he would be fine with that and move on. Despite that, something in him that felt as if it had been asleep for six years was waking up, and he had no idea what would happen now.