The Princess Bride Read online

  “It helps if both partners work at it,” Tiffany said.

  “I agree. Get in there and do your part,” her godmother prodded, jerking her red head toward the closed study door. “If you want answers, he’s the only person who’s got them.”

  Tiffany stared at the carpet for a minute and then got slowly to her feet.

  “That’s the idea,” Lettie said. “I’m going to make him a pot of coffee. We have a few complications. Get him to tell you about them. Shared problems are another part of building a marriage.”

  Tiffany laughed, but without mirth. She went to the door after Lettie vanished down the hall and opened it.

  King glanced at her from behind the desk as she came into the room. “I didn’t plan to strand you in Montego Bay,” he said pointedly. “I would have been on my way back that night.”

  “Would you?” She went to the chair in front of the desk, a comfortable burgundy leather armchair that she’d occupied so many times when she and her father had talked. She sighed. “The whole world has changed since then.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  She leaned back, sliding her hands over the cold leather arms, over the brass studs that secured it to the frame. “Tell me how he died, King.”

  He hesitated, but only for a second. His chiseled mouth tugged into a mocking smile. “So they couldn’t wait to tell you, hmm? I’m not surprised. Gossip loves a willing ear.”

  “Nobody told me anything. It was inferred.”

  “Same difference.” He spread his hands on the desk and stood up. “Okay, honey, you want the truth, here it is. He fired Carla and they had a royal row over it. I walked in and he started on me. I followed him to his office and got there just in time to watch him collapse.”

  She let out the breath she’d been holding. Her nails bit into the leather arms of the chair. “Why did you follow him? Were you going to talk him out of it?”

  “No. But there’s more to this than an argument over Carla,” he added, searching for the right way to explain to her the tangled and devastating fact of her father’s loss of wealth.

  “Yes, there is. We’ve already agreed that I maneuvered you into a marriage you didn’t want,” she said curtly. “We can agree that what happened in Montego Bay was a form of exorcism for both of us and let it go at that,” she added when he started to speak. “Charge me with desertion, mental cruelty, anything you like. Let me know when the papers are ready and I’ll sign them.”

  His eyes flashed like black fires. “There won’t be a divorce,” he said shortly.

  She was surprised by the vehemence in his tone, until she remembered belatedly just what her status was. As her father’s heir, by a quirk of fate she was now his business partner. He couldn’t afford to divorce her. What an irony.

  She cocked her head and looked at him with cold curiosity. “Oh, yes, I forgot, didn’t I? We’re business partners now. How nice to have it all in the family. You won’t even have to buy me out. What’s mine is yours.”

  The look on his face was a revelation. Amazing how he could pretend that the thought had never occurred to him.

  “That’s a nice touch, that look of surprise,” she said admirably. “I expect you practiced in front of a mirror.”

  “Why are you downstairs at this hour of the night?” he asked.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she replied, and was suddenly vulnerable. She hated having it show. “My father was buried today,” she drawled, “in case you forgot.”

  “We can do without the sarcasm,” he said. “Wait a minute.” He reached into her father’s top desk drawer and extracted a bottle. “Come here.”

  She stopped with the width of the desk between them and held her hand out. He shook two capsules into her hand and recapped the bottle.

  “Don’t trust me with the whole bottle?” she taunted.

  That was exactly how he felt, although he wasn’t going to admit it. She’d had one too many upsets in the past few weeks. Normally as sound as a rock, even Tiffany could be pushed over the edge by grief and worry. He couldn’t add the fear of bankruptcy to her store of problems. That one he could spare her. Let her think him a philanderer, if it helped. When she was strong enough, he’d tell her the truth.

  “Take those and try to sleep,” he said. “Things will look brighter in the morning.”

  She stared at the capsules with wounded wet eyes. “He was my rudder,” she said in a husky whisper. “No matter how bad things got, he was always here to run to.”

  His face hardened. Once, he’d been there to run to, before they married and became enemies. “You’ll never know how sorry I am,” he said tightly. “If you believe nothing else, believe that I didn’t cause him to have that heart attack. I didn’t argue with him over Carla.”

  She glanced at him and saw the pain in his eyes for the first time. It took most of the fight out of her. She seemed to slump. “I know you cared about my father, King,” she said heavily.

  “And in case you’re wondering,” he added with a mocking smile, “she’s gone. She has her severance pay and some sort of reference. You won’t see her again.”

  She studied him silently. “Why?”

  “Why, what?”

  “Why did my father fire her?”

  It was like walking on eggshells, but he had to tell her the truth. “Because she dragged me home from Jamaica with a nonexistent emergency, just to interfere with our honeymoon, and he knew it. He said he’d had enough of her meddling.”

  “So had I,” she returned.

  “Not half as much as I had,” he said curtly. “Harrison beat me to the punch by five minutes.”

  “He did?”

  “Come here.”

  He looked faintly violent, and he’d been drinking. She hesitated.

  He got up and came around the desk, watching her back away. “Oh, hell, no, you don’t,” he said in a voice like silk. His arms slid under her and he lifted her clear of the floor. “I’ve listened to you until I’m deaf. Now you can listen to me.”

  He went back to his chair and sat down with Tiffany cradled stiffly in his arms.

  “No need to do your imitation of a plank,” he chided, making himself comfortable. “Drunk men make bad lovers. I’m not in the mood, anyway. Now, you listen!”

  She squirmed, but he held her still.

  “Carla wasn’t supposed to have anything to do with the flowers for our wedding,” he said shortly. “I gave that task to Edna, who heads the personnel department, because she grew up in a florist’s shop. But I was out of the office and Carla went to her with a forged letter that said I wanted Carla to do it instead.”

  Tiffany actually gasped.

  He nodded curtly. “And she didn’t get those arrangements from a florist, she did them herself with wilted flowers that she either got from a florist, or from a florist’s trash can! She never had any intention of bringing you a bouquet, either. The whole thing was deliberate.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “I went to see Edna when I flew back from Jamaica and found there was no emergency. I gave her hell about the flowers,” he said. “She gave it back, with interest. Then she told me what had really happened. I was livid. I’d gone straight to my office to have it out with Carla when I found your father there.”

  “Oh.”

  He searched her stunned eyes. “You don’t think much of me, do you?” he asked quietly. “Regardless of how I felt about the wedding, I wouldn’t have deliberately hurt you like that.”

  She grimaced. “I should have known.”

  “You wore a suit to be married in,” he added. “That was a blow to my pride. I thought you were telling me in a nonverbal way that you were just going through the motions.”

  “And I thought that you wouldn’t mind what I wore, because you didn’t want to marry me in the first place.”

  The arm behind her shoulders contracted, and the big, warm hand at the end of it smoothed over her upper arm in an absent, comforting motion. “I drew away
from you at a time when we should have been talking about our insecurities,” he said after a minute. “We had too many secrets. In fact, we still have them.” He took a quick breath. “Tiffany, your father’s personal accountant just did a flit with the majority of your inheritance. I’ll bet that’s what really set your father off, not Carla, although she helped. He was upset because he knew he’d have to tell you what had happened when you came home.”

  Tiffany’s eyes widened. “You mean, Daddy was robbed?”

  “In a nutshell,” he agreed. He smiled faintly. “So, along with all your other woes, my wife, you may have bankruptcy looming unless I can find that accountant and prosecute him.”

  “I’m broke?” she said.

  He nodded.

  She sighed. “There goes my yacht.”

  “What do you want with one of those?”

  She kept her eyes lowered demurely. Her heart was racing, because they were talking as they’d never talked before. “I thought I’d dangle it on the waterfront for bait and see if I could catch a nice man to marry.”

  That sounded like the girl he used to know. His eyes began to twinkle just faintly and he smiled. “What are you going to do with the husband you’ve already got?”

  She studied his lean face with pursed lips. “I thought you were going to divorce me.”

  One eyebrow levered up. His eyes dropped to her slender body and traced it with arrogant possession. “Think again.”

  Chapter 10

  The look in his eyes was electric and Tiffany watched him watching her for long, exquisite seconds before his head began to bend.

  She lay in his arms, waiting, barely breathing as he drew her closer. It seemed like forever since he’d kissed her, and she wanted him. She reached up, barely breathing, waiting…

  The sudden intrusion of Lettie with a tray of coffee and cookies was as explosive as a bomb going off. They both jerked.

  She hesitated just inside the door and stared at them. “Shall I go away?” she asked, chuckling.

  King recovered with apparent ease. “Not if those are lemon cookies,” he said.

  Tiffany gasped, but he got up and helped her to her feet with a rakish grin. “Sorry, honey, but lemon cookies are my greatest weakness.”

  “Do tell,” she murmured with her hands on her hips.

  He gave her a thorough going-over with acquisitive eyes. “My second greatest weakness,” he said, correcting her.

  “Too late now,” she told him and moved a little self-consciously toward Lettie as King swept forward and took the heavy tray from her.

  He put it on the coffee table and they gathered around it while Lettie poured coffee into thin china cups and distributed saucers and cookies.

  “I’m going to be poor, Lettie,” Tiffany told Lettie.

  “Not yet, you’re not,” King murmured as he savored a cookie. “I’ll get in touch with the private detective your father hired to trail your elusive accountant, not to mention Interpol. He’ll be caught.”

  “Poor Daddy,” Tiffany sighed, tearing a little as she thought of her loss. “He must have only found out.”

  “About two days before the heart attack, I think,” Lettie said heavily. She leaned over to pick up her coffee. “I tried to get him to see a doctor even then. His color wasn’t good. That was unusual, too, because Harrison was always so robust—” She broke off, fighting tears.

  Tiffany put an arm around her. “There, there,” she said softly. “He wouldn’t want us to carry on like this.”

  “No, he wouldn’t,” King added. “But we’ll all grieve, just the same. He was a good man.”

  Tiffany struggled to get in a deep breath. She bit halfheartedly into a cookie and smiled. “These are good.”

  “There’s a bakery downtown, where they make them fresh every day,” Lettie confided.

  “I know where it is,” King mused. “I stop by there some afternoons to buy a couple to go with my coffee.”

  Tiffany glanced at him a little shyly and smiled. “I didn’t know you liked cookies.”

  He looked back at her, but he didn’t smile. “I didn’t know you were allergic to aspirin.”

  He sounded as if not knowing that fact about her really bothered him, too.

  “It’s the only thing,” she replied. She searched his drawn features. “King, you couldn’t have known about Daddy’s heart. I didn’t even know. You heard what the doctor said. There was no history of heart trouble, either.”

  He stared at his half-eaten cookie. “It didn’t help to have him upset…”

  She touched his hand. “It would have happened anyway,” she said, and she was sure of it now. “You can only control so much in life. There are always going to be things that you can’t change.”

  He wouldn’t meet her eyes. His jaw was drawn tight.

  “Yes, I know, you don’t like being out of control, in any way,” she said gently, surprising him. “But neither of us could have prevented what happened. I remember reading about a politician who had a heart attack right in his doctor’s office, and nobody could save him. Do you see what I mean?”

  He reached out his free hand and linked it with hers. “I suppose so.”

  Lettie sipped coffee, lost in her own thoughts. She missed Harrison, too. The house was empty without him. She looked up suddenly. “Good Lord, you only had a one-day honeymoon,” she exclaimed.

  “It was a good day,” King murmured.

  “Yes, it was,” Tiffany said huskily, and his fingers contracted around hers.

  “We’ll finish it when we solve our problems here,” King replied. “We have all the time in the world.” Tiffany nodded.

  “It will be a shame if you can’t catch that crook,” Lettie said, looking around her at the beauty of the study. “This house is the beginning of a legacy. Harrison had hoped to leave it to his grandchildren.”

  Tiffany felt King stiffen beside her. Slowly, she unlinked her hand with his and put both hands around her coffee cup.

  “We have years to talk about children,” she told Lettie deliberately. “Some couples don’t ever have them.”

  “Oh, but you will, dear,” Lettie murmured dreamily. “I remember how we used to go shopping, and the nursery department was always the first place you’d stop. You’d touch little gowns and booties and smile and talk about babies…”

  Tiffany got to her feet, hoping her sudden paleness wouldn’t upset Lettie. She had no way of knowing that King didn’t want a child.

  “I’m so tired, Lettie,” she said, and looked it. She smiled apologetically. “I’d like to try to go back to sleep, if you don’t mind.”

  “Of course not, dear. Can you sleep now, do you think?”

  Tiffany reached into the pocket of her robe and produced the two capsules King had given her. She picked up her half-full cup of coffee and swallowed them. “I will now,” she said as she replaced the cup in the saucer. “Thank you, King,” she added without looking directly at him.

  “Will you be all right?” he asked.

  She felt that he was trying to make her look at him. She couldn’t bear to, not yet. She was thinking about the long, lonely years ahead with no babies. She didn’t dare hope that their only night together would produce fruit. That one lapse wasn’t enough to build a dream on. Nobody got pregnant the first time. Well, some people did, but she didn’t have that sort of luck. She wondered if King remembered how careless he’d been.

  “I hope you both sleep well,” she said as she went from the room.

  “You, too, dear,” Lettie called after her. She finished her coffee. “I’ll take the tray back to the kitchen.”

  “I’ll do it,” King murmured. He got up and picked it up, less rocky on his feet now that he’d filled himself full of caffeine.

  “Are you going to try to sleep?”

  He shook his head. “I’ve got too much work to do. It may be the middle of the night here, but I can still do business with half the world. I have to wrap up some loose ends. Tomorrow, I’
m going to have my hands full tracing that accountant.”

  Lettie went with him to the kitchen and sorted out the things that needed washing.

  King paused at the door, his face solemn and thoughtful. “Stay close to Tiffany tomorrow, will you?” he asked. “I don’t want her alone.”

  “Of course, I will.” She glanced at him. “Are you worried about Carla?”

  He nodded. “She’s always been high-strung, but just lately she seems off balance to me. I don’t think she’d try to do anything to Tiffany. But there’s no harm in taking precautions.”

  “I wish…” she began and stopped.

  “Yes. I wish I’d never gotten involved with her, either,” he replied, finishing the thought for her. “Hindsight is a grand thing.”

  “Indeed it is.” She searched his bloodshot eyes. “You aren’t sorry you married Tiffany?”

  “I’m sorry I waited so long,” he countered.

  “But there are still problems?” she probed gently.

  He drew in a long breath. “She wants babies and I don’t.”

  “Oh, King!”

  He winced. “I’ve been a bachelor all my life,” he said shortly. “Marriage was hard enough. I haven’t started adjusting to it yet. Fatherhood…” His broad shoulders rose and fell jerkily. “I can’t cope with that. Not for a long time, if ever. It’s something Tiffany will have to learn to live with.”

  Lettie bit down on harsh words. She sighed worriedly. “Tiffany’s still very young, of course,” she said pointedly.

  “Young and full of dreams,” King agreed. He stared at the sink. “Impossible dreams.”

  Outside the door, the object of their conversation turned and made her way slowly back upstairs, no longer thirsty for the glass of milk she’d come to take to bed with her. So there it was. King would never want a child. If she wanted him, it seemed that she’d have to give up any hopes of becoming a mother. Some women didn’t want children. It was a pity that Tiffany did.

  She didn’t have to avoid King in the days that followed. He simply wasn’t home. Business had become overwhelming in the wake of Harrison Blair’s death. There were all sorts of legalities to deal with, and King had a new secretary who had to learn her job the hard way. He was very seldom home, and when he was, he seemed to stay on the telephone.