Page 15 of A Princess for Christmas

He was in earnest. “Isn’t that rather hard in your line of work? To boycott a major intersection?”

Leo’s face remained utterly unchanged as he said, “My parents died in a car accident on that intersection two Christmases ago.”

He might as well have slapped her. Tears—they were still so close to the surface after the evening she’d had—gathered in her throat. She opened her mouth, and closed it.

But why not just tell him? She had told him a great deal alreadytoday, including that her mother had died, just not when or how. “Mymother diedthreeChristmases ago. On December twenty-second. Breast cancer.”

That got his attention. He looked at her sharply. “That’s why your father’s sad.”

She nodded. “Though it doesn’t look like sadness from the outside. I’m not sure why I called it that before.”

“What does it look like?”

“Anger.”Paralysis.

He nodded like her answer made sense to him. “Is he going to be angry at you about what happened tonight?”

“Probably. Or disappointed, which is actually worse.”

“You want to talk about it?”

She started to say no, she didn’t want to talk about it. But to her shock, that wasn’t exactly true. So she found herself telling him about the meeting gone bad. About how much Eldovia needed the Gregory account.

He listened and asked nonsnarky questions. “So this Philip Gregory guy owns a big watch store chain?”

“He owns twenty shops nationwide, which perhaps doesn’t sound big, but the luxury watch industry isn’t like others. It’s so expensive to produce these watches that we rely on orders from retailers to fund production runs.”

“So you download the risk onto the little guy.”

His grin showed he was jesting, but he wasn’t wrong. “You could say that, except Philip Gregory is not a little guy. When we had his account, it was seventeenpercent of our GDP. We’ll lose a thousand jobs without it. And that’s out of a population of two hundred and twelve thousand.”

Leo whistled.

“Indeed. He didn’t want to meet to discuss his decision, so I was supposed to... ambush him, if you will. He was not pleased about it. Not only did I not get to talk to him, he made a bit of a scene.”

“How did you know he’d even be at the party?”

“There’s a Euros-in-New-York crowd. Everyone knows one another. He’s not European, but he’s Euro-adjacent, and the hostess of the party—that would be the Lucrecia the boat was named after—is a major society figure within the New York scene.”

“Lucrecia. That’s not a name you hear much on this side of the pond.”

“Lucrecia von Bachenheim. Her father is a cousin to the Austrian archduke. Also, she’s a total bitch.”

Marie almost laughed with glee. A day ago, she would never have uttered those words in front of another human being. She wouldn’t even have allowed herself tothinkthem. But there was something about being with Mr.Leonardo Ricci in a taxi in the middle of the night that inspired boldness.

“Lucrecia von Bachenheim?” he echoed. “Does she have one hundred and one Dalmatians?”

“Excuse me?” That must be a pop culture reference she wasn’t getting.

He shook his head. “So this Gregory guy snubbed you, Lucrecia von Bachenheim is a bitch, and you were stuck on a boat where everyone was being horrible to you.”

She laughed. “Yes, that about sums it up.”

Marie didn’t feel so bad about it all anymore, though. Talking to Leo, an outsider who wasn’t tied up in either her mission orwhat was or wasn’t proper for her to be doing or saying, had been therapeutic.

When the hotel was in sight, he slowed down. “This pizza place is good. Let me get you a slice.”

“Let me getyoua slice. It’s the least I can do.”

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