One Night with Prince Charming (Aristocratic Grooms 2)

It was a daring move. But she felt as if their evening had been cut short when he’d had to meet with the CEO of MetaSky.

He paused and looked at her meaningfully for a moment. “Sure…I’d love to.”

He settled the cab fare, and then they raced up the front stoop of her building, sharing her small umbrella.

She managed to fish out her keys in record time and let them inside. They stumbled into the vestibule and out of the cold and wet.

She lived in a studio on the top floor of a four-story brownstone. At least, however, the rental was hers alone. On a night like tonight, she didn’t have to worry about the awkwardly timed arrival of a roommate or two. She’d made the best of her situation by putting up a partition wall to create a separate bedroom, though she couldn’t do anything to alter the fact that her windows were the small ones beneath the roof.

As she heard and felt the tread of James’s feet behind her on the stairs, she couldn’t help feeling nervous about having him step into her little world.

Fortunately, she didn’t have much time to dwell on the matter. Within a few minutes, they reached the uppermost floor, and she inserted her key in her door and let them inside.

She dropped her handbag on a chair and turned around in time to see him scanning her apartment.

He dominated the small space even more than she’d anticipated. Here there were no fellow bar patrons to defuse the full force of the magnetism that he exuded. There was no crowd to mitigate the sexual attraction between them.

James’s eyes came back to hers. “It’s cute.”

She’d tried to make the apartment cheerful, as much to lift her own mood as anything else. A tiny table flanked by two chairs and sporting a vase of pink peonies and tulips sat near the door. The kitchen lined one wall, and a love seat guarded the space on the opposite side. Facing the entry, a small entertainment center stood in front of the partition that separated her bedroom from the rest of the space.

Pia knew what lay beyond the partition that shielded what remained of her apartment from James’s gaze. A white croquet coverlet covered the full-size bed that occupied most of her sleeping area.

Nervously, she wet her lips. She couldn’t keep her eyes from straying to the rain-soaked spots of his shirt. Some of those wet areas clung to the muscles of his arms and shoulders.

She’d never done this before.

“Pia.”

Pia found herself jerked from her memories as Tamara closed the space on the lawn between them. Over Tamara’s shoulder, she noticed the member of the household staff with whom Tamara had been speaking was heading back toward the stone terrace and French doors at the back of the house.

Hawk was nowhere to be seen. He, too, must have gone indoors.

“I’m sorry to have left you stranded here.”

Pia pasted a bright smile on her face. “Not at all. It’s all part of the prerogatives of the bride.”

And one of her prerogatives, Pia thought, was to stay away from Hawk for the rest of this wedding…

Four

Pia walked along East 79th Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side looking for the correct house number. She’d received a call from Lucy Montgomery yesterday about being hired as a bridal consultant. She hadn’t paid much attention to the particulars, but had jumped at the chance for new business because it had been a slow summer.

She hadn’t liked to dwell on how much her silent phone

was due to the Wentworth-Dillingham wedding being, well, both more and less than expected. She hadn’t been directly to blame for the first part of the debacle. But the hard truth was that if the wedding had been a resounding success, her phone might have been ringing with more interested brides.

True, she’d been called on to help with Tamara’s wedding last month. But that had been a small wedding—mainly family—and had transpired in England, so her involvement hadn’t counted for much in the eyes of New York society. And while she’d also worked on a wedding in Atlanta over the summer, she’d been retained for that function before Belinda’s nuptial debacle.

Now, though, on a breezy day in late September, with clouds overhead and the threat of rain in the air, she walked along one of Manhattan’s tonier side streets, glad she’d worn her belted trench to ward off the threatening elements and even happier for the possibility of a new client.

Finding the house number she was looking for, she stopped and surveyed the impressive double-width, four-story limestone town house. A tall, black, wrought-iron fence guarded the façade, and flower boxes and black shutters framed tall, plate-glass windows. In the center of the building, stone steps ascended to the double-door front entrance at the parlor level. But instead of windows, the parlor floor boasted French doors embraced by tiny balconies.

There was no doubt that Lucy Montgomery came from money. This house was a well-preserved example of Manhattan’s Gilded Age.

Pia ascended the steps and knocked before ringing the doorbell.

Within moments, an older gentleman, dressed in somber black and white rather than a clear uniform, responded. After Pia introduced herself, the butler took her coat and directed her to the parlor.