Page 3 of Prince She Shouldn't Crave
To improve his relatability. One day he’d rule the country. Need to make hard and sometimes impossible decisions. To do that required inner strength…steel. None of it would be helped by him effectively being a ‘nice guy’ about it.
‘Of course. I have a question of my own, if I may?’
His eyebrows rose. She liked to think she could take charge here? Something about the challenge of it all set his pulse rate thumping like he’d just taken a run.
‘Be my guest,’ he said, injecting a warning note of dryness into his voice.
She seemed to ignore his tone as she rummaged about her bag and pulled out a tablet. Flicked through a few screens and drew up some photographs, then slid it across the desktop to him.
‘I think this is who you need to show the world. My question for you is, where is this person?’
Gabe looked at the pictures on the screen. The rapid hum of his heart stilled. Photographs of him a long time ago, from his late teens and into twenty. An ache bloomed deep inside his chest. Holding the world championship cup aloft, yellow and blue confetti in colours of Halrovia’s flag fluttering down over him and his team as they celebrated their win. Shots of him out somewhere, leaving some function. Smiling for the cameras in a way that seemed totally unfamiliar. A young woman on his arm.
That woman… The press speculation had been intense but she’d wanted so much more from him than he could ever have given. A daughter of an aristocrat who clearly had expectations of a royal future, her family too, when all he’d wanted was… Gabe hadn’t been sure. To be seen as something more? His difficulty reading had crippled him at school. For so long Gabehad been thought of as lazy, he’d begun to believe he would never make a decent king when it was his time. Never achieving what his parents or teachers had expected of him.
Then came the diagnosis, yet the only result from the King and Queen was steely silence. His dyslexia barely talked about, efficiently swept under the ancient rugs of the royal palace. And so he talked, not to his family, but to the person he thought of as his girlfriend, even if he hadn’t contemplated any real future with her. Then, when that youthful relationship came to its inevitable end, after her tears, the threats started. That she’d tell everyone he’d be a useless king because he couldn’t read. Had she and her family believed she might be Queen one day and been trying to blackmail him into reversing the break-up? He couldn’t be sure. All he knew was his parents and the royal machine surrounding them took her threats seriously.
He didn’t want to think about the consequences of that time because he and his family were still living them. The steps his parents took to quell the rumours. The prices paid. Some by his family, mostly by him. Forgoing the life he’d wanted for one of duty, so nobody could question his commitment to the crown. Especially if he spent all his time learning from his father how to be King.
In that time, the Proper Prince was born.
Still, these weren’t conversations he would deign to have with a person he hadn’t yet decided to employ.
‘He grew up,’ Gabriel said, pushing the tablet back towards her, dismissing the unwanted memories. ‘Now for my questions.’
Time to bring this interview back under his tight control. Ms Rosetti didn’t seem to be put off. She straightened herself, tugged at her jacket and her jaw firmed, as if preparing for some kind of battle.
He couldn’t help but admire her resolve.
‘You have no university qualifications in marketing, PR or social media. Yet you’re asking me to trust you with what some see as the future of my family in the eyes of its people.’ Lena Rosetti sat perfectly still. The only giveaway? The slender line of her neck convulsed in a swallow. ‘What makes you believe you can provide me with value that’s superior, when I have other candidates who are formally qualified?’
Lena’s heart punched into her ribs. She swallowed, damp palms clutching at the leather of her handbag still sitting on her lap. Questioning some of her life choices. Why had she decided to be forward and show him those photographs of himself? Why had she shown him hershoe? In her defence she was a little overwhelmed because, in the flesh, Prince Gabriel looked too good to be entirely human. Sure, she’d seen plenty of photos of him during her research. But no picture could do him real justice.He was almost supernaturally handsome, in a way that turned her normally quite functional brain to custard. If gods walked the earth, she reckoned they’d look just like Prince Gabriel.
Which was her reminder, he wasn’t a god but a man. Who’d apparently‘grown up’and‘valued punctuality’. He wouldn’t care about her broken heel. It was obvious by the way he’d looked at her when she’d pulled it out of her handbag, as if that would have helped when trying to explain why she was late. The sheer intensity of his gaze had made her go all hot and cold and every temperature in between. That look in his eyes speaking of what?
Disdain.She was sure.
Lena was used to that look, back in her home country of Isolobello. Had fought against it for most of her twenty-three years. It was how so many people at her exclusive private schoolhad looked at her for the temerity of being fatherless. Oh, she’d had a father. An absent one. A high-profile one. A man never named, publicly at least. That had been the arrangement. He’d kept her mother in a lifestyle she’d become accustomed to for all the years of their long-term affair. He’d kept his second family, the illegitimate family, in the shadows. Secret from everybody.
Then he’d died just three months earlier. Suddenly. Shockingly. Soon after, their life had imploded. The half-brother she’d never met had arrived on their doorstep stating that ‘the gravy train’, as he so crudely had put it, was over. Her mother could keep her jewels and whatever gifts she’d been given during her father’s life and that was all. Her father hadn’t recognised her family in his will. As far as the legitimate family was concerned, Lena, her mother and her brother didn’t exist. The sour taste of bile rose to Lena’s throat. He’d said they were a dirty stain on a great man’s legacy.
Which was why sheneededthis role. Lena’s whole future relied on it. To keep her younger brother in education so he could make something of himself. To support her mother so she wouldn’t end up destitute, on the street. And if she didn’t pull herself together, it seemed as if it might slip through her fingers.
‘I’d hoped my references spoke for themselves. Each employer I’ve worked for showed an increase in business due to my efforts.’
Prince Gabriel narrowed his eyes. ‘That may be so, yet your career didn’t start in managing people’s images and PR. You seem to have fallen into the role by chance rather than design.’
‘There is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.’
A quote from Shakespeare, often used by one of her favourite teachers, a woman whose wisdom she missed. Especially when her mother’s idea for solving their current crisis was for Lena to find a wealthy man and either advantageously marry or becomea well-cared-for mistress, just as she’d been, and provide for the family. Her mother had even named possible males who might be in the market.
The prospect of this job had fallen into her lap at exactly the right time. The universe was telling her the role was hers, she just needed to secure it.
‘You’re correct. In my first job I was employed to wait café tables, but my employer asked me to post some pictures on social media. Their page became hugely popular and people started flooding to the café because of the vibe we showed them on the social channels.’
She was only nineteen when she started that job. One her mother said she didn’t need, but Lena had wanted anyhow. To have money and something of her own, not handed to her by an absent father. Lena got a buzz from how big the café’s page had become, how customers came in because they’d seenherposts. But what she’d said didn’t seem to impress Prince Gabriel. He raised one strong, dark eyebrow. A contrast to his hair, which was a magnificent, tamed mane of burnished gold.
‘And yet should you succeed in this interview you’d be managing more than my…vibe.’
