A Bride for the Island Prince / The Last Goodbye. Rebecca Winters

someone handy like me. I get it, Alex. I really do. And you didn’t take unfair advantage of me. It’s been so long since I’ve been around an attractive man, my hormones are out of kilter right now.”

      “Is that what this tension is between us? Hormones?” he said with a twinge of bitterness she felt pierce her where it hurt most.

      “I don’t have a better word for it.” She buried her face in her hands. “I loved Neil more than you can imagine. Thank heaven neither of us had a royal bone in our bodies to prevent us from knowing joy.”

      He stroked the back of her neck in a way that sent fingers of delight down her spine. “How did you manage after they were killed?”

      “My aunt. She reminded me not everyone had been as lucky as I’d been. Her boyfriend got killed when he was deployed overseas in the military, so she never married. In her inimitable way she told me to stop pitying myself and get on with something useful.

      “Her advice prompted me to go to graduate school in New York City and become a speech therapist. After graduation I was hired on by the Stillman Institute. Little did I know that all the time I’d been helping Cory with his speech that last year, I was preparing for a lifetime career.”

      “Is your aunt still alive?”

      “No. She died fourteen months ago.”

      “I’m sorry. I wish she were still living so I could thank her for her inspired advice. My Zoe is thriving because of you.” He pulled her closer. “What about your parents?”

      “They died in a car crash when I was just a little girl.”

      “It saddens me you’ve had to deal with so much grief.”

      “It comes to us all. In my aunt’s case, it was good she passed away. With her chronic pneumonia, she could never recover and every illness made her worse.”

      “My mother was like that. She had been so ill that Stasi and I were thankful once she took her last breath.”

      “What about your father?”

      “He developed an aggressive cancer of the thyroid. After he was gone, my grandmother took over to make sure we were raised according to her exacting Valleder standards. She was the power behind my grandfather’s throne.”

      “She’s done a wonderful job. I’ll tell her that when I leave Hellenica.” Dottie took a deep breath and sat back in the seat. “And now, despite her disapproval that I haven’t left yet, here I am making out in an unmarked car with Prince Alexius Constantinides. How could you have given Zoe such an impossible last name? Nine consonants. Nine! And two of them are T‘s,” she half sobbed as the dam broke and she felt tears on her cheeks.

      Alex reached over and smoothed the moisture from her face. He put his lips where his hand had been. “I’m glad there are nine. I won’t let you go until she can pronounce our last name perfectly. That’s going to take a long time.”

      “You’ll have gone through at least half a dozen speech therapists by then.”

      “Possibly, but you’ll be there in the background until she no longer needs your services.”

      “We’ve been over this ground before.”

      “We haven’t even started,” he declared as if announcing an edict. “Shall we get out of the car? We’ve been back at the palace for the past ten minutes. My driver probably wants to go to bed, which is where we should be.”

      She didn’t think he meant that the way it came out, but with Alex you couldn’t be absolutely sure when his teasing side would suddenly show up. All she knew was that her face was suffused with heat. She flung the car door open and ran into the palace, leaving him in the proverbial royal dust.

      The death of her husband had put an end to all fairy tales, and that was the only place a prince could stay. She refused to be in the background of his life. It was time to close the storybook for good.