A Mistletoe Kiss with the Boss

She said nothing, a little tired of the way he knew so much more about her than she knew about him.

“You’re not going to share?”

“I’ll tell you that story, if you tell me a story about you.”

“Okay. Go ahead.”

“Oh, no. I know this scam. I’ll tell you how I chose my charity and suddenly the limo will be at the hotel and you’ll stay Mr. Mysterious.”

He laughed. “Mr. Mysterious?”

She shrugged. “That’s how you look to me. If it isn’t in your bio, I don’t know it.”

“All right. I’ll go first. What do you want to know?”

“I want to know what happened between you and Alex.”

He winced. “Right for the jugular. You couldn’t settle for hearing the story of how I was a poor kid, raised by a grandmother who was too tired for another child, who got underwear for Christmas?”

She knew he’d meant to be funny, but once again she could hear the sadness in his voice and picture him as a little boy, alone, quiet. She was suddenly very grateful Jason had come into his life, and wished with all her heart that he had other people in his life, so many that he’d never be alone again.

“I can guess what you went through as a child.” Her gaze crawled over to meet his. “But it’s hard for me to understand how Prince Alex dislikes you when he loves everybody.”

“I tried to steal his girlfriend.”

Kristen couldn’t help it. She laughed. “That’s not enough to make him hate you.”

“It’s a much longer story.” He took an exaggerated breath. “He had a girlfriend, Nina, who was the daughter of a Saudi prince I was schmoozing for funding when I first started out. Nina came into her dad’s office one day when I was there. She smiled at me, and the prince thought this was a good opportunity to get his daughter away from Alex, who, at the time, was a gambler.”

“Her dad wanted you to put a wedge between them?”

“Actually, her dad thought she and I were better suited for each other. And though he didn’t say the words, he more or less tied his investing into my company to me hanging around Nina, trying to steer her away from Alex.”

“That’s awful.”

“It isn’t, when you remember that Alex wasn’t a nice guy. He was the spoiled prince of a filthy rich country. He had access to more money than God and did what he wanted, including take Nina for granted and ignore her most days.”

Though it was difficult to picture Alex that way, Kristen had to admit she’d heard those rumors.

“At first, I just started showing up at the places Nina frequented. Bars. The marina. A club or two. Then she accepted a date.” He cleared his throat. “I fell head over heels in love with her, but she was only using me to make Alex jealous. And it worked. He stopped gambling, started paying attention to her and proposed.”

Kristen’s heart sank, as little pieces of things began to fall together in her head. Not just about Dean being an inexperienced kid hanging around jet-setters, who now had a rule about not mixing business with pleasure, but also about Prince Alex. She remembered the princess telling her that Alex had had his heart broken when he was younger, when his fiancée had died.

The magnitude of the loss almost overwhelmed her and she whispered, “Nina died, didn’t she?”

Dean quietly said, “In a boating accident after an argument with me. For a while Xaviera’s royal guard investigated me, but I was nowhere near the dock or her boat. But I’d been with her that morning. She called me to have breakfast with her, to let me down easy, and she’d told me about the engagement, showed me the ring. I was flabbergasted and confused, and she admitted to using me. Young and stupid, I argued that she loved me, but she disabused me of that notion really quickly. She loved Alex. I had been a pawn. I felt like an idiot.” He met her gaze. “I was an idiot. Then I heard she’d been killed driving her boat recklessly, and I fell into a depression so deep I thought I’d never come out. Not just because she was dead but because I was so crazy about her that I didn’t see she was using me. It was humbling and humiliating because the story got around really quickly. I left Xaviera. Hell, I left Europe. I came back to New York, licking my wounds and vowed it would never happen again. None of it.”