One Night with Prince Charming (Aristocratic Grooms 2)

Pia’s chest rose and fell with outrage. Under other circumstances, Hawk thought with the back of his mind, he might have been able to enjoy the show.

“So I’m somehow responsible for your vanishing act?” Pia demanded.

He quirked a brow. “No, but let’s agree that we were both putting on an act that night, shall we?”

Heat stained Pia’s cheeks. “I turned out to be exactly who I said I was!”

“Hmm,” he said, studying her upturned face. “As I recall, you disclosed that you’d never had unprotected sex—now who was shading the truth?”

After he’d accompanied her back to her apartment—a little studio on Manhattan’s Upper East Side—they’d done the responsible thing before being intimate. He’d wanted to assure her that he was clean and, in return, she’d…lulled him into unintentionally taking her virginity.

Damn it. Even in his irresponsible younger days, he’d vowed never to be a woman’s first lover. He didn’t want to be remembered. He didn’t want to remember. It didn’t mesh with his carefree lifestyle.

But she’d claimed to have forgotten him. Was it pride alone that had made her toss out that put down—or was it true? Because he hadn’t succeeded in getting her out of his mind, much as he’d tried.

As if in answer to his question, Pia stared at him in mute fury, and then turned on her heel. “Th-this time, I’m the one walking away. Goodbye, Your Grace.”

She strode away from him and deeper into the recesses of the kitchen, leaving Hawk to brood alone about their chance encounter—the perfect cap to a perfectly awful day. Pia had been nonplussed, to say the least, by his unexpected appearance and her discovery of who he really was.

But it was also clear that Pia was worried—Belinda’s almost-wedding couldn’t have good consequences for Pia’s wedding planning business. And the fact that Pia herself had given him an unexpected taste of baba ghanoush before some stupefied guests couldn’t have helped matters, either.

Pia obviously needed help. For, despite tasting eggplant and their angry confrontation, he still felt an overriding and overdue obligation to make amends.

And with that thought, Hawk contemplated a burgeoning idea.

Two

When Pia got home from the reception at The Plaza, she did not conduct an exorcism to banish Hawk from her life again.

She did not create a likeness of him with ice cream sticks to ceremonially take apart.

Instead, after picking up and removing Mr. Darcy from her computer chair, she went straight to Google and typed in Hawk’s name and title. She told herself it was so she could find a photo to make an Old West sheriff’s poster: WANTED: RENEGADE DUKE MASQUERADING AS MR. RIGHT. In reality, she was thirsty for information now that she had Mr. Wrong’s real name.

James Fielding Carsdale, Ninth Duke of Hawkshire.

The internet did not disappoint her. It offered up a bounty of hits in a few seconds.

Hawk had started Sunhill Investments, a hedge fund, three years ago, shortly after he’d—she let herself think it—taken her virginity and run. The company had done very well, making Hawk and his partners multimillionaires many times over.

Drat. It was hard to accept that after his dumping of her, he’d been visited with good fortune rather than feeling the wrath of cosmic justice.

Sunhill Investments was based in London, but had recently opened an office in New York—so Hawk’s presence on this side of the Atlantic might be for more than the Wentworth-Dillingham wedding that wasn’t.

As Pia delved beyond the first few hits, she absently scratched Mr. Darcy’s ears as he stroked by her legs. She’d adopted the cat from a shelter close to three years ago and taken him back to the two-bedroom apartment that she’d just moved into—still, however, on the less fashionable edge of Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

The fact that the apartment was rent-stabilized and also served as a tax-deductible office permitted her to afford a place that was on the outer fringes of the world that she wanted to tap into—that of Upper East Side prep school girls and future debutantes with well-heeled parents and with living quarters in cloistered prewar buildings guarded by uniformed and capped doormen standing under ubiquitous green awnings.

She’d decorated the apartment as a showcase for her creativity and style because she had the occasional visit from a potential client. Mostly, however, she traveled to see brides in their well-appointed and luxurious homes.

Now, she clicked on her computer mouse. After a few minutes, she brought up a link with an old article about Hawk from the New York Social Diary. He was pictured standing between two blond models, a drink in hand and a devilish glint in his eye. The article made it clear that Hawk had been a regular on the social circuit, mostly in London and somewhat in New York.

Pia’s lips tightened. Well, at least the article served as some confirmation that she was his physical type—he appeared to have an affinity for blondes. However, at five-foot-four, she was a few inches shorter—not to mention a bit fleshier—than the leggy, skinny catwalkers he’d been photographed with.

The only saving grace in the whole situation was that Hawk’s detestable behavior three years ago had given her the courage to embark on her own and start her namesake wedding planning business. She’d realized it was time to stop waiting for Prince Charming and take charge of her life. How pathetic would it have been if he’d been scaling the heights of the financial world while she’d been pining away for him, cocooned to this day in the studio apartment where she’d lived three years ago?

She’d moved on and up, just as he had. And Hawk—the duke or His Grace or however he liked to be referred to—could take a flying leap with his millions.

Still, she couldn’t help digging for further information online. It was an exercise in self-flagellation to understand the extent to which she’d been a naive virgin who’d given away the goods to a smooth-talking playboy.