Cinderella's Prince Under the Mistletoe Read online

  She could tell his experience with snowballs was limited. The ball was misshapen and did not look like it would survive a flight through the air.

  “Yes, Your Highness,” she said with pretended meekness. “Please remember I’m injured.” Then she swatted his snowball out of his hand. Before he could recover himself, ignoring the pain in her foot, she plowed through a drift of heavy, wet snow. She snatched up a handful of it, shaped a missile, turned back and let fly.

  It hit him smack-dab in the middle of his face.

  She chortled with glee at his stunned expression. He reached up and brushed the snow away. But her laughter only lasted a moment. His scowl was ferocious. And he was coming after her!

  She tried to run, but her foot hurt, and her legs were so much shorter than his in the deep snow. He caught her with incredible swiftness, spun her around into his chest.

  “Oh dear,” she breathed.

  “What would an ordinary guy do?” he growled.

  Kiss me. She stared up at him. The tension hissed between them.

  “Cat got your tongue?”

  She stuck it out at him. “Apparently not.” Then she wriggled free of his grasp, turned and ran again. And she suspected her heart beating so hard had very little to do with the exertion of running through the snow, but rather what felt like it was a near miss of a kiss!

  With the carefree hearts of children, they soon filled the air with flying snowballs—most of which missed their targets by wide margins—and their laughter. They played until they were both breathless. Imogen finally had to stop as her foot could not take another second of this. Though with her hands on her knees, breathing heavily, she decided it was well worth a little pain.

  He took advantage of her vulnerability, pelting her with snowballs, until she collapsed in the snow, laughing so hard her legs would not hold her anymore.

  “I surrender,” she gasped. “You win.”

  He collapsed in the snow beside her and a comfortable silence drifted over them as the huge snowflakes fluttered down and landed on their upturned faces.

  Finally, he found his feet and held out his hand to her.

  “We’re both wet. We better get at that snowman.”

  She took his hand. “Before the dreaded hypothermia sets in.”

  He tugged and she found her feet and stumbled into him. His hand went around her waist to steady her, and he pulled her closer. She could feel a lovely warmth radiating through the wetness of his jacket. She could feel the strong, sure beat of his heart. His scent filled her nostrils, as heady as the mountain-sweet crispness of the air around them.

  She looked up at him: the whisker-roughness of his chin and cheeks, the perfection of his features, the steadiness in the velvet-brown warmth of his eyes.

  They were back at that question: What would an ordinary guy do?

  But despite his clothing, he was not an ordinary guy. A prince! She was chasing through this mountain meadow with a prince.

  Would kissing him enhance the sense of enchantment or destroy it?

  It was something she was unwilling to find out. She pushed away from him.

  “Yes,” she said. “Let’s see about that snowman.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE SNOWBALL WAS so big it was taking both of them, their shoulders leaned into it and their legs braced mightily, to move it a single inch.

  “I think it’s big enough,” Imogen gasped. Luca was aware she was favoring one foot, and so he had deliberately taken most of the weight. To be truthful, he was rather enjoying her admiration of his strength!

  “Oh, what do you know about building snowmen?” Luca asked her.

  She laughed. Luca loved seeing her laugh. It was exactly as he had hoped: the sadness that looking at the picture of that baby had caused her was erased from her eyes. Her cheeks were pink from exertion, her clothes were soaked, and her hair, where it poked out from under her toque, was wet, plastered against the loveliness of her face.

  Luca had seen beautiful women in some of the most glamorous situations in the world. He had seen them at balls and concerts and coronations and state functions. He had seen them in the finest designer gowns, in the most priceless of jewelry, in the most exotic settings imaginable.

  Princess Meribel, for an example, when dressed up, was like something out of a fairy tale. With a tiara on her head, jewels dripping from her ears, wearing priceless custom-made clothing from designers who vied for her attention, she was the perfect Princess.

  There was no “casual”—not in her vocabulary and not in her wardrobe. Even on the deck of a yacht, Meribel was elegant, refined, classic. Her perfectly coiffed hair and perfectly done makeup enhanced beauty that was already unearthly.

  And also, Luca reminded himself, cool and untouchable.

  For him. Apparently she had been red-hot and quite touchable to someone else.

  He shook off that momentarily bitter thought.

  Because if he had married Meribel on schedule, he would have never had these glorious, laughter-filled moments, chasing through the snow with Imogen.

  Yes, it was true Prince Luca had seen some of the most beautiful women in the world, and yet he was not sure if he had ever seen a woman quite as beautiful as Imogen Albright, in her bulky snowsuit, dusted with snowflakes, happiness shimmering in the air around her.

  She seemed natural and spontaneous in a way that made every other thing he had ever experienced artificial and contrived. Imogen was real in a way he was not sure he had ever encountered it before. He found himself wanting to pull the hat from her head, just to watch her hair fall around her face.

  He found himself wanting to bend her over his arm and ravish the plumpness of her lips, to find out if kissing her would be as refreshingly wonderful and invigoratingly novel, as awesomely real as the rest of this experience.

  He wanted to kiss Imogen as much as he had ever wanted anything in his entire life. He steeled himself against that impulse, waited for it to pass, which it didn’t. He took a deep breath.

  Instead of kissing her, he inspected the huge snowball, the first for their snowman, with far more intensity than it required. “Okay,” he finally managed to say. “This might be a suitable start.”

  “A suitable start? It’s ridiculously large.”

  He shot her a look.

  “What?” she asked.

  “People don’t generally correct me.”

  “Oh well,” she said, with an impish grin and a shrug. “You’re the one who wanted to be ordinary.”

  He had. And the truth was it was surpassing his expectations. Side by side, they began pushing the next ball. When they were done, he could clearly see why she had thought the first ball was big enough. This second one, somehow, had to be hoisted on top of the first one.

  It was, again, a total team effort. Finally, grunting, panting, with Imogen giggling so hard she was barely any help at all, they managed to hoist the second ball into place.

  The last snowball, the one that would make the snowman’s head, was easier to make, thankfully, so that he didn’t have to admit she was right—the snowman was too large.

  And then they were making eyes out of rocks and arms out of sticks and buttons out of pinecones.

  They stood back and eyed their handiwork.

  “He’s perfect,” Luca decided.

  “He’s not,” Imogen argued. She had no idea how refreshing these little disagreements were for him. In his world, when he spoke, everyone deferred to him.

  “He’s leaning precariously to one side. His eyes are different sizes. He has no nose.”

  “I think that’s part of what I like about him,” Luca said. “Perfection, in my world, is expected of everything.”

  He was not really sure he had realized how utterly exhausting that was until this minute.

  Imogen’s mittened hand crept into h
is.

  It was unexpected. A gesture of compassion and sympathy.

  “I’ve never felt what I feel right now,” he said, encouraged by that small hand in his, or weakened by it, he wasn’t sure which.

  She held tight to his hand, amazing strength in her touch, turned her eyes away from the snowman and up to his, full of question.

  “I feel free,” he said slowly, searching for the words. “I feel the enormous freedom of no one watching me. Not meaning you are no one.”

  “No need to explain, I understand. Completely.”

  And astonishingly, he knew she did, and just like last night, when he had confessed the disappointment of Christmases past, this felt like another venture into the unknown, and possibly very dangerous territory. Confiding in someone was alien in his world. And yet he could not seem to stop himself from continuing.

  “I’ve never had this freedom—to be able to just gad about, to laugh, to be goofy. You don’t know what you’ve given me.”

  “You’ve given me something, too,” she said softly.

  He watched her face.

  “What?” he whispered.

  “The hope that I can be happy again.”

  “Why? What’s happened?”

  “Let’s not spoil this moment,” she said. “Our snowman is great, but—”

  “But what? He’s as perfect as I want him to be.”

  “What do you know about snowmen?” she teased him.

  “Okay. What’s missing?”

  “A snow woman. He’s lonely.”

  Luca stared at Imogen. Somehow he had the terrifying feeling that she was not talking about a snowman at all. That somehow, now, as from the very beginning, she saw something about him that others did not see.

  She saw his soul.

  And she saw things there that had been successfully hidden from the rest of the world. Prince Luca, the man with everything, was alone. And he was lonely.

  He wondered if marrying Meribel would have assuaged that sense of being lonely. Looking at Imogen, he had a sense his marriage would have been like so much of his life. It would have been exactly like Christmas at his palace home: it would have looked perfect, and felt empty.

  “A snow woman it is,” he said, letting go of her hand with all possible haste.

  Because he had seen her soul, too. And it promised him something else he had never had before: a resting place, someone to trust with who he really was.

  * * *

  Two hours later, Imogen stood back to admire their handiwork. She and Luca were now thoroughly soaked and exhausted. But an entire snow family of Mama, Papa, two children—a boy and a girl—inhabited the snow-covered front lawn of Crystal Lake Lodge. The snow still drifted down so steadily that the facial features of the snow daddy had already been completely covered by the time the rest of the family was done.

  To her delight, Luca reached for her hand naturally as they headed back to the front door of the Lodge.

  But then he seemed to realize how naturally it had happened and let go as soon as they were inside.

  “Fires to tend to,” he said, dropping her hand abruptly. With relief?

  “We need to get out of these wet clothes first.”

  His face scrunched up in that barely detectable but funny way that let her know he just wasn’t accustomed to someone else telling him what needed to happen first. It goaded her into feeling even more bossy!

  “And into something dry as quickly as possible,” she said. “Come with me.”

  “I’ll just slip into the washroom and put on—”

  “Your clothes from yesterday? Yucky.”

  His lips twitched. Undoubtedly another first in his world: to be called “yucky.”

  Still, he followed her, and so they found themselves back in the coat cupboard, going through bins of long johns that were kept for those unprepared guests. He took what she offered him without argument and went and changed.

  She changed, too, and regarded herself in the mirror with a rueful shake of her head. If she had to have a pajama party with a prince, was it too much to hope for something a wee bit sexier than long johns that bulged and clung in all the wrong places?

  When she saw him in his long johns she realized it was a reprieve. He could not maintain the persona of a prince in a bright red waffle-weave shirt and matching pants, long legs tucked into woolen socks.

  He was still her ordinary guy, the one who had played side by side with her all afternoon.

  He went off to tend to fires and she found some tinned fish and frozen bread and carried them down to the office. She stoked the fire and then toasted the bread over the flames and made slightly blackened sandwiches.

  By the time she finished making sandwiches and setting a pot of hot chocolate in the coals, Imogen was astonished that the light was already fading from the sky. They had played outside the whole day.

  When Luca returned, they munched happily on their sandwiches, and then before the light was gone completely, he went and fetched the first aid kit and insisted on looking at her foot.

  “I almost totally forgot I had a sore foot,” she told him.

  “Nonetheless, let’s have a look. I could see you favoring it at times. The bandage may have gotten wet today and probably needs to be changed.”

  As he knelt at her feet unwrapping the old bandage, she contemplated the fact that she had forgotten the injury.

  It seemed to her a new realization—this one that bliss was capable of obliterating her pain.

  And it seemed to her that applied not just to physical pain, but to emotional pain, as well.

  She did what she had wanted to do yesterday.

  She reached out and touched his hair. It was still damp from being outside. At first, she just touched it lightly, and then she ran her fingers through it, smoothing down his sweet rooster tail. Then, on pure impulse, she dropped her lips, and kissed the top of his head.

  He froze. And then slowly he tilted his head up to her. And then he went back to bandaging her foot. “What was that for?” he asked gruffly.

  “I’m not sure,” she admitted. “Just this kind of heart-deep gratitude for an amazing day. I feel healed by it, somehow, and not just my foot.”

  He finished what he was doing, packed away the supplies with more care than might have been completely necessary. He rose, hesitated, and then, in some kind of surrender, came and sat beside her on the couch. They watched the flickering fire. His hand found hers.

  “Tell me about it. You wouldn’t earlier, but tell me now. What makes you cry when you look at babies?”

  She could sense then the absolute command of his presence, because, even though Luca was dressed in long johns and his tone was gentle, it was not an invitation, but an order.

  Imogen sighed. She told him everything. She told him about meeting Kevin here at the Lodge, Kevin an instructor at the nearby Crystal Mountain Ski Resort. She told him about a relationship that had felt steady and safe and secure. She told him about how she thought she had found the very steadiness that she had grown up with and had craved since her family had moved away. She told him about wanting nothing more than a family of her own.

  Then she stopped, and her voice faltered.

  “What happened?” Luca’s voice encouraged trust.

  She told him about the proposal, and the fortune cookie. “That’s the picture you saw on my phone,” she said, “of the night Kevin asked me to marry him.”

  “So why didn’t he marry you?”

  She sighed. She willed the tears not to fall. “I had a ski accident when I was a teenager. The worst of the injuries healed, but I suspected something that wasn’t quite as obvious was wrong. In a way, I didn’t want to know, because all my dreams were about family. So I just never followed up on it. But the fact that Kevin’s proposal included the mention of babies forced me to f
ind out if what I suspected was true.

  “The news wasn’t good. I can’t have babies.”

  Luca’s hand tightened on hers. “Ah,” he said, and she knew he was thinking of her reaction to the photo of Rachel’s new baby.

  “Of course, Kevin said it didn’t matter, and said all the right words. That it was me he loved, and we would figure it out, but right underneath the words, there was some crushing disappointment in his face that I could not bear. So I broke it off. I set him free.

  “I’d like to say he seemed heartbroken by the breakup, but his reaction was more one of relief. Even though it had taken him three years to propose to me, he was engaged and married to someone else almost instantly. They’re pregnant now.”

  He was silent for the longest while. When he spoke, his voice was low. She wasn’t sure what she expected from him. He struck her as having such an inborn sense of honor, that maybe she expected outrage on her behalf.

  She wondered why she had told him any of this. Could it change anything? Of course it could not.

  And yet a burden she had carried for months now suddenly felt lighter.

  “In time,” Luca said, his voice strong and sure, “you will understand what a blessing this was.”

  “Not to have children?” she said, her voice strangled.

  “I was speaking to your broken engagement. Your relationship sounds as if it was as comfortable as an old shoe. I think there are things in you that need better than that. Perhaps he found it—that spark, that passion, that recognition of two souls meeting—perhaps that is why his new life unfolded so quickly. Not as any kind of insult to you.

  “As for children,” a smile tickled his lips and he touched her chin and lifted it with his finger, so her eyes were forced to meet his, “you will be a beautiful mother one day. We live in an age of miracles. And you will have your miracle. Whether it is through science, or through adoption, or through an act of divinity, of this I am certain—the souls of your children will find their way to you.”

  Her mouth fell open and tears studded her eyes.

  “What an amazing thing to say.” Of all the things he could have said, how was it the Prince had said something so perfect?