Royal Weddings. Joan Elliott Pickart

holes right through her. “Pack. Now.”

      She bit her lip, shook her head.

      “You will destroy us both,” he whispered.

      “No. That’s ridiculous. It’s an…attraction, that’s all. It happens between men and women. It’s natural. We don’t have to act on it. And if we did—which we won’t—it would be nobody’s business but yours and mine.”

      He was scanning her face again, his gaze burning where it touched. “You understand nothing.”

      Fury flared again within her. She ordered it down. “Well, then.” She spoke calmly. Reasonably. “I guess you’d better explain it to me.”

      He didn’t reply—not right away. She started to think he wouldn’t reply. But at last, he said, “I am assigned to bring you to your father. That is all the extent of the contact you will ever have with me. Whatever your father has planned for you, I am not a part of it. I could never be a part of it, not in any way.”

      “My father told you that?”

      “He had no need to tell me. It’s fact, pure and simple. It’s true that if fortune smiles on me, the daughter of some minor jarl might agree to reach out and clasp my hand in marriage. But no king would willingly give his daughter to a bastard. Some doors, as I told you, are forever closed to me.”

      “Not to me, Hauk. Never to me. I’m the one who decides who I’ll be with, not my father. He has no rights at all when it comes to my private life.”

      “That may be. I am in no position to say. However, your father does have rights over me. He has all rights. I live and breathe for him. All my acts are acts in his service. I am his warrior. It is a high honor. And a sacred trust.”

      Chapter Eight

      By tacit agreement, there was silence between them.

      Hauk went where she went within the apartment. In the living room, she sat on the couch and he sat in the easy chair. She read—or she tried to read, though she continually lost her place and had to go back and reread whole passages to have any idea what she was reading about. She could feel his eyes on her the whole time—or so it seemed.

      But then, when she couldn’t stand it a moment longer and glanced up, he would be looking not at her, but beyond her, into the distance. His body would be so very still and straight. She would stare at his chest, wondering if he was even breathing.

      Eventually, he’d draw himself back from whatever distant meditative state he’d put himself in. He’d meet her eyes.

      And she’d know that he had been there all the time, watching—and yet not watching. Across the room from her. And a million miles away.

      Around five, she gave up on her book and went into the spare room. She tried to pretend Hauk wasn’t sitting on the futon behind her as she paid a few bills to get them out of the way and answered a few last e-mails, then put her various listserves on No-mail.

      By seven or so, she was starting to get that frantic feeling—that feeling that if they remained alone in her apartment, just the two of them, for much longer, she would do something unforgivable.

      Start screaming like a maniac. Start throwing things—favorite figurines, a lamp or two.

      Climb him like a big tree, grab him close and kiss him, force him to put aside everything he believed in and make love with her.

      Oh, how had this happened? How had this gone so dangerously far so very, very fast?

      She honestly wasn’t some sex maniac. Okay, she wasn’t a virgin—but she was no wild thing, either.

      Serious relationships? She’d had a few—well, if you included her two high-school boyfriends. One in sophomore year and one when she was a senior. At the time, she’d been certain she would love each of those boys forever and ever. But she’d grown up and so had they.

      Surely this crazy attraction to Hauk was like her schoolgirl crushes—destined to flare high and hot and then, soon enough, fade away. It was the lure of the forbidden. And they’d both get over it.

      Maybe he was right. She should throw some stuff in her suitcase and tell him she was finally ready to head for Gullandria.

      But somewhere deep inside, she had a true stubborn streak. She wasn’t leaving until she had to leave and she didn’t have to leave until tomorrow. She shoved the chicken she’d never gotten around to roasting into the freezer and told Hauk they were going out for dinner.

      He didn’t argue. He didn’t say anything. He kept his sculpted mouth shut and his expression closed against her, as he’d been doing for hours by then.

      She took him to a restaurant over in Old Sacramento, where the food was excellent and so was the service. The steward brought the wine list. She waved it away.

      Yes, a glass of wine or two would have soothed her frayed nerves right then. But she couldn’t afford to be soothed. When they went to bed tonight, she would need all her inhibitions firmly in place—and not because she feared that Hauk might make a move on her. He had way too much self-control to do that.

      No, he wasn’t the one she was worried about. It was herself. She would need to fight her own wayward, hungry heart and her yearning body, too, if she planned to get through the whole night without doing something they would both later regret.

      Hauk spoke with the waiter briefly but politely. He didn’t speak to Elli, not the whole time they sat at that table. Anyone watching them probably would have guessed that they’d either been forced against their will to share a meal—or they were locked in some private battle, some intimate tiff, and currently refusing to speak to each other. Both speculations would have been right on the money.

      Too soon, the meal was finished. It was only 8:15. She didn’t want to go back to her apartment, not yet. She wanted it to be late—after midnight at least, when they got there. She wanted to be really, really tired.

      But every nerve she had was humming. She felt as if sleeping was something she would never do again. And she’d made the mistake of drinking two glasses of water with her meal.

      She had to use the ladies’ room.

      Hauk stood outside in the hall. She hoped it embarrassed him, to lurk there by the ladies’-room door. She used the facilities and she washed her hands, glancing now and then at her unhappy face in the wide mirror above the sink.

      She was blowing her hands dry when the small window over the center stall caught her eye. It was a single pane of pebbled glass, roughly a foot and a half on each side, hinged at the top. To open it, you undid the latch and pushed it outward.

      She was reasonably certain there would be an alley on the other side. It wouldn’t be that difficult to hoist herself up there, to slither through it and…

      What? Run away? Go into hiding and terrify her mother and Hilda and her sisters, too? Go to the police? Tell them that her father was having her kidnapped and she needed protection?

      After they sorted it all out, they might even believe her. And just maybe they’d be able to protect her. It was a good chance, with all the publicity that would ensue, with her face and the faces of everyone in her family splashed all over the tabloids, that her father would back off, give up on whatever scheme he was hatching.

      Hauk would be disgraced for letting her get away. And she would stay right here, in Sacramento, where she belonged. She would not see Gullandria—or her father, after all. And she would never see Hauk again.

      The dryer had turned itself off. The ladies’ room seemed very quiet.

      Behind her, the door to the hallway swung open. She turned. It was Hauk. He looked at her and he looked at the window above the center stall and then at her again.

      ‘‘So all right,’’ she muttered. ‘‘I was tempted. But notice I’m still here.’’

      ‘‘Ahem.