The Princess and the Billionaire Read online

  “But I thought we had a vow, Juli. I thought we’d promised that whoever was the first would share absolutely everything with the other. Didn’t we?”

  “Well, yes, but...” Her voice grew faint. That was before you slept with the man I love. Before Eric took you to his bed. That silly promise had been made years and years ago when they were prepubescent girls, giddy from holiday punch. “If you tell me everything, I shall not be able to look at Eric again without giggling.”

  “But it was so wonderful, Juli. I couldn’t wait to tell you every last detail.”

  I would never tell anyone, thought Juliana. I would hold it to my heart and keep it special, for the two of us alone.

  “You have had too much champagne,” said Juliana after a moment. “Perhaps you should take a warm bath and go to bed.”

  Isabelle laughed, but her laugh no longer had the sound of girlhood about it. Her laughter told Juliana everything she didn’t want to know. “No bath, Juli. I can smell his cologne on my arms. I can’t bear the thought of washing it away.”

  Isabelle leaned over and kissed the top of her sister’s head, and for an instant Juliana imagined the scent of bayberry and spice. She could almost see Eric standing before her, knife in hand, ready to cut out her heart.

  “Good night, Juli.” Isabelle did a pirouette in the center of the room. “It really was a wonderful party, wasn’t it?”

  Juliana watched, spellbound, as her dark and fiery sister drifted from the room. Isabelle was everything Juliana had ever wanted to be, all passion and grace and daring.

  You’ve lost, thought Juliana. You waited too long and now you have lost. Isabelle had walked through the door into womanhood while Juliana still sat on the sidelines, dreaming her life away. Her whole existence had been one of waiting for the moment when she would take her rightful place in the scheme of things. “This will all be yours one day,” her father had said, gesturing toward the towering mountains and deep valleys flowered with alpine roses and deep blue lupine that were part of her homeland. “There is nothing more important in this world.”

  She lay back against her pillow, heart pounding with rage and pain.

  How she wished she could close her eyes and will herself back into a dreamless sleep, anything to escape the vision of her younger sister in the arms of the man Juliana loved. Those long, splendid limbs of Isabelle’s entwined with his. Eric’s face, flushed with desire, coming closer and closer.

  She pressed her fists against her mouth, willing herself not to cry.

  She’d been so careful, so fearful, so concerned with protecting her heart that she’d allowed the love of her life to slip through her clumsy hands.

  “Fool,” she whispered into the quiet of her bedroom. It hadn’t been her heart she’d been trying to protect, it had been her position. The lust for power had taken hold of her, bending her to its will. The inevitability of power and the ways in which power could serve her well attracted her. She loved the way the servants bowed in deference when she passed. Sitting next to her father during a meeting with his ministers, seeing men of stature lower their graying heads to her, knowing full well she would one day hold their lives in the palm of her hand.

  But since Isabelle’s return to Perreault, Juliana had begun to perceive the other ways in which power set her apart from others. She’d been willing to wait for Eric, so certain had she been that the lure of power would prove as potent an aphrodisiac to him as a pair of open thighs. Maybe she’d been wrong, and the ancient lure of sex was more powerful than she had ever imagined. Isabelle had been willing to cast her fate to the winds of desire because she had nothing of value to lose.

  As a little girl, Juliana had been aware of the way adults and children alike were drawn to the flame that was her younger sister. Governesses and nannies laughed at Isabelle’s antics, even when those antics were in defiance of nursery rules. They despaired ever teaching the child to obey, but still they held her close and smoothed her ebony hair with loving hands. Juliana would sit quietly on her rocking horse, her pinafore scarcely wrinkled after a day at play, and watch Maxine double with mirth as Isabelle imitated their stern-faced tutor. Sweet Juliana with her soft voice and placid temperament rocked silently on her toy horse and wished her sister dead.

  The day Isabelle left for boarding school, crying so hard Maxine feared the child would faint, Juliana had stood beneath the porte cochere and bitten the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing in triumph.

  “Don’t look so sad, lovey,” Maxine had said, clutching Juliana to her ample bosom. “Our Isabelle will be home on holiday before we know it.”

  Juliana counted the days spent without her sister, savoring each and every one of them. With Isabelle away at school, the spotlight shone on her alone, white hot and intense. The way it should be. After all, the throne of Perreault would one day belong to her. It was her birthright and her privilege and not even her sister with her wild and beguiling ways could change that. But the love of the people, of their father? It seemed those were Isabelle’s alone and always would be.

  “It isn’t fair,” Juliana said, her voice rising in the lonely stillness of her room. “She cannot get everything she wants.”

  There was still a chance to change things if Juliana could only summon up the courage. Sexuality was a two-edged sword, and Isabelle wasn’t the only one able to wield that particular weapon. Isabelle had drawn first blood, but Juliana would claim the prize. A bright future was there for the taking, and it was time Juliana claimed what was rightfully hers, beginning with Eric Malraux.

  Chapter

  Two

  It wasn’t every day a kid from Queens got to spend the night in a castle.

  Daniel Bronson was no stranger to the perks money could buy, but even he had been set back on his nouveau riche heels by the power of old money. Funny thing, it didn’t matter how much old money you had; it only mattered that the money in question came with a history attached to it, preferably a history that included a title.

  Rumor had it Prince Bertrand of Perreault had plenty of titles, but not much of the long green—or long blue in this case. Still, Daniel had to admit you couldn’t tell by the spread Bertrand had put out tonight in honor of his principality’s tricentennial celebration. The champagne had flowed freely while mountains of caviar graced every tabletop in sight. Even the waiters’ uniforms looked as if they’d been tailored on Savile Row. The prince had been expansive in his generosity. Women had been gifted with diamond stud earrings, while the men eagerly accepted elegant Swiss watches that would have fed a family of four for a year back home in Queens, New York.

  Not that Daniel knew too much about what went on in Queens these days. It seemed he spent half his life on the road in search of the ultimate business deal. “You’re just like your old man,” his father Matty liked to say. “Can smell money two states away.” Hell, thought Daniel with a rueful laugh, make that two continents away.

  Getting an invitation to the Perreault Tricentennial Ball had been easy. All you needed was fame and a world-class fortune and you were in like Flynn. The famous and the infamous on both sides of the Atlantic had flocked to the tiny alpine principality in droves to be part of the festivities. Only an elite few, however, had been chosen to spend the night in the castle, surrounded by battlements and suits of armor and the ghosts of three hundred years of history, most of which had been spent in a dance of conquest and surrender.

  Everywhere you looked, you could see evidence of a past that included a rich tapestry of splendor and savagery: the small towns, walled in stone to withstand ancient invaders; the freshly painted farmhouses whose walls still held the gunshot scars from more recent wars. History was in the road you walked on, the music you danced to, and the castle that dominated the entire landscape.

  It was more opulent than Bronson had ever dreamed possible. You didn’t grow up in an apartment overlooking a concrete playground and expect to spend the night with royalty. Hell, you were lucky if your dreams took you as fa
r as the Hudson River. A tiny snowball of a country, Perreault was perched high in the Alps, hard to find and even harder to forget. Some said it was Perreault’s inaccessibility that gave it its cachet; others said it was the aura of mystery and sadness that hung over the principality like a morning fog. Either way, it wasn’t much of a monarchy, but Bronson wasn’t fussy. Castles still had the power to impress, and he wasn’t afraid to admit it—at least, not to himself.

  He looked over at the woman asleep on the pillow next to him. Greta was from one of those Eastern European countries whose borders were more flexible than the Pentagon’s budget. Greta had long limbs and hair the pale gold of Dom Pérignon. Her morals were dependent upon the occasion, and he was moderately glad he’d been able to rise to that occasion tonight.

  There were rules for this sort of thing, and he’d mastered them the way he’d mastered the rules of business. Keep things light and breezy. Never mention anything as crass as a future together.

  To his family’s dismay, he’d reached his early thirties without forming the kind of alliance his parents believed necessary to survival. His one attempt at marriage had been more to placate his folks than to build a future, and it had come as a relief when his wife found a more welcoming pair of arms elsewhere.

  He couldn’t blame her. A part of himself was always standing aside, watching, wondering if happily-ever-after was possible or if the concept was just the collective fantasy of a culture raised on John Wayne movies and Disney World vacations. A fine Irish gloom had captured his soul at birth, and it seemed there had never been a time when he hadn’t seen the dark cloud on the horizon, waiting to steal away the silver lining.

  “The Golden Boy,” they’d called him in the New York tabloids. The man with the Midas touch. Nobody suspected the layers of deeply rooted, old-fashioned Catholic guilt the good sisters of Saint Dominic had instilled in him over the years. Prove it, he heard them say. Prove you have what it takes.

  And so he did. Over and over and over again, with each new deal taking him closer to the top.

  Even Bronson’s most vociferous detractors had to admit, however, that he’d never once forgotten where he came from. How could he? The rhythm of the New York City streets was in his blood. But not the streets of Fifty-seventh and Fifth. The streets the Bronsons called their own weren’t home to Tiffany’s and Bijan; they were home to Sam’s Deli and Nino’s Pizzeria and Shamrock Realty where his old man had made his fortune, parlaying prewar apartment buildings into co-op urban dream machines for the average man.

  His father had taken Daniel under his wing, exposing him to both the good and the bad the city had to offer. Matty had no illusions about the place of honor in business. He adhered to his own strict code of behavior, but he had stopped being surprised when others stumbled over their ethics.

  “Take a good look around you, Danny,” his father had said time and again. “You’re no better than the rest of ’em. You only have more money.”

  Unlike Trump and his ilk, Bronson hadn’t forgotten his roots. He built for those at the top of the ladder and those who had to reach up to touch the bottom. It wasn’t unusual for him to have dinner with the governor and an ambassador or two at some posh Manhattan eatery, then show up a few hours later for a beer and a few laughs at a Queens neighborhood bar. You never knew when you might need a favor, and it was those no-bullshit blue-collar types from Ridgewood and Woodside who made his dreams possible. He wasn’t about to forget that.

  Sometimes he felt as if he was the only one who recognized the way the global economy was shifting. You’d have to be blind not to see the way the Japanese were nosing their way into the American mainstream. First it was cars, then VCRs. Before you knew it, they’d be buying up enough land to carve out a new country. And it wasn’t just the Japanese who were expanding. Phrases like “global economy” and “world market” had taken on new meaning, and he wasn’t about to let his patriotism get in the way of his pragmatism.

  People had warned him that doing business with Prince Bertrand would be like dancing on quicksand. Like most Europeans he’d met, Bertrand was a natural pessimist. Both frugal and cautious, the prince had an appalling lack of interest in anything remotely resembling progress. So far, Daniel’s best efforts had been met with nothing more than maddening courtesy.

  Next to him Greta stretched lazily, a lean and gilded cream-fed cat. Those magnificent amber eyes fluttered open, and the look she gave him was pure heat.

  “Good morning, darling,” she said.

  “It’s not morning yet.”

  “How wonderful.” She spread her perfect legs and opened her arms to him.

  Sometimes being a red-blooded American male was a definite asset.

  * * *

  Yves was waiting at the foot of the winding staircase when Isabelle glided down from her bedroom suite early the next morning. Dressed in his formal daytime uniform, Yves held his bony frame erect, as befitted his position. His sparse, light-brown hair was neatly plastered to his head, and his narrow face held its perennially gloomy expression. Isabelle sighed. Poor Yves. It must be terribly sad to be so old and to have no one to love.

  “Breakfast is in the garden room,” he said, with obvious disdain. “Mademoiselle desires anything special?”

  Isabelle tossed her dark hair and favored him with a smile. What on earth was the matter with Yves? God knew, he was always dour but the way he was looking at her was almost as if...

  Ridiculous. He couldn’t possibly know. If he hadn’t known last night when the proof was right there in her eyes and on her lips, he would never know.

  “Nothing special, Yves.” She frowned when he didn’t return her smile. “Coffee and melon will do.”

  “Je suis votre serviteur.” The traditional statement of obeisance. He bowed, then left the room.

  Let him have his dark and dreary thoughts. Isabelle had more wonderful things with which to concern herself. She dashed off toward the garden room where a bountiful repast was laid out on the sideboards, attended to by a bevy of fluttery young parlormaids; with nary a thought in their heads. Yesterday she had been just like those girls, giggling and silly, wondering what life held in the palm of its hand for her.

  Ah, but today she knew!

  Today she knew that at the center of her future was Eric Malraux and their happiness stretched as far as the eye could see.

  * * *

  “Spreading lies, is it?” Maxine Neesom’s broad Irish brogue grew stronger as she stared at her nemesis. “How dare you be saying such nonsense about one of my girls!”

  Yves didn’t flinch beneath her flinty gaze, and that unnerved Maxine more than his words had. Lord in heaven, could it be true?

  “Honore Malraux’s boy,” Yves said with such authority that Maxine’s indignation wilted before it. “I saw them near the garden with my own eyes.”

  “Ridiculous!” said Maxine with a snap of her broad fingers. “In this dreadful October cold? Never.” Her beloved girl’s first time would be on her wedding night in a beautiful room made perfect by Maxine. Maxine had been with the family from the moment when both of the royal sisters drew their first breaths. God willing, she would be with them when she drew her last.

  Poor little things they had been, so tiny and defenseless. So forgotten. Their mother had been a flighty one, more concerned with dancing the night away than in seeing to it her own babies were cared for and happy. “No one could take better care of them than you, darling Maxi,” the mother had said once as she kissed the babies good night before leaving for yet another cotillion.

  Maxine, young herself and eager for adventures of her own, had known the cold fingers of dread along her spine that night, for with those careless words the lives of two helpless babes had been placed in Maxine’s hands as surely as the rosary she prayed with each night. She squared her shoulders, feeling the sharp flare of arthritis in her neck and spine. The unmistakable sign that her youth was long gone and old age waited to enfold her in its cold embrace. Still
, she had no regrets. She lived a good life and she had done her job well. She loved the girls with all her heart and soul and knew God would forgive her if the princess Isabelle occupied a bigger part of her heart than perhaps was fair. Juliana was self-contained and obedient; she would always fare well.

  Isabelle, however, was ruled by emotions as fiery as her dark eyes and, as Maxine listened to Yves spin his tale, the truth of his words found its mark.

  “I saw the mademoiselle with my own eyes last night,” Yves continued, cool and calm as could be. “Grass stains across the backside of her fancy dress and a smile on her face that can mean only one thing.”

  Maxine drew herself up to her full height and looked the uppity butler right in the eye. “Coincidence,” she said, almost as if she believed it. “And I’ll be thanking you to keep your opinions to yourself.” She lowered her voice and leaned closer to him. “One word of your suspicions to any of the servants, and I’ll have your head on a silver platter or know the reason why.”

  “I do not gossip with the help, madame,” said Yves with a regal snort. “I simply tell the truth.”

  With that he turned and disappeared toward the kitchen, leaving Maxine with the terrible feeling that disaster was right around the corner.

  * * *

  Isabelle stepped over to the sideboard and waved away one of the serving girls. She was about to help herself to a large plateful of eggs and kippers when she saw Bronson, that brash American, in the archway to the room. He looked different than he had last night in evening clothes. His dark hair fell artlessly across his forehead, shaggy and quite appealing in a rough-hewn way. Even from across the room she could discern the vivid green of his eyes. Contact lenses, she thought with a sniff. No one’s eyes were that green.