Page 36 of A Princess for Christmas

She didn’t though. She wasn’t the kind of person who expected to get a free ride. Which was a weird thing to say about a princess, but it was true.

“What are you up to this evening?” she asked.

She was changing the subject, and not very subtly.

Which... fine. What did he care about royal politics or Westminster whatever in Eldovia?

“Shoveling.” He snorted. “So much shoveling. Followed by that most gourmet of meals: grilled cheese sandwiches and Campbell’s tomato soup.”

She sighed again, one of those wistful ones. “Sounds lovely.”

“Are you kidding me? Manual labor and grilled cheese? It’s not exactly high tea at the Plaza.”

She performed a little shrug as she turned to look out the window again, one he didn’t think he was supposed to see.

Well. Wasn’t that something? The princess of freaking Eldovia thought grilled cheese in his shitty apartment sounded like a better time than whatever she would order up in her giant luxury suite at the Plaza.

That suite was a lot of space for one person.

A person alone. A person who would eat scrumptious food but probably do it by herself.

Or maybe with that asshole butler—Leo refused to call him anything else, even in his mind—who treated her like a child.

Yeah, Leo might be eating cheese on Wonder Bread this evening, but he wasn’t doing it alone. He’d be doing it with the world’s greatest eleven-year-old. And possibly the world’s greatest thirty-one-year-old, if Dani was around. Which she almost certainly would be on account of her stubborn refusal to move on after Vince.

Well, shit. Before he could overthink it, he just asked her. “You wanna come over for dinner?” After tonight, he would never see her again anyway.

Marie gasped audibly in what he was pretty sure was delight,and shit, that . . . did something to him. So, to keep himself in check, he added, “There’s one condition.”

“And what is that?”

“You have to help me shovel. I bet you’ve never done that.”

“Untrue. I did it... once.”

“Once?”

“It’s a long story.” She frowned. “It’s... not a happy memory.”

What he wanted to say to that was,Tell me. It was an urgent want, to hear about her unhappy memories and store them away in his mind next to his own. What heactuallysaid, was, “Fair enough.” He turned on his blinker and changed lanes so they could head uptown. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

When they parked back at home—one of the perks of being the on-site super was a dedicated space behind the building—he started thinking about how shabby and messy his place was. Shabby he couldn’t do anything about, but... He craned his neck so he could see up to Dani’s apartment. The light was on.

Marie was about to get out of the car. “Sit tight for a minute, if you don’t mind. I just need to... deal with something.” He got out his phone.Can you do me a huge favor and go over to my place and clean up the living room? Get Gabby to help you. Just shove everything into my bedroom.

Marie would never see his bedroom.

Dani:Why?

Leo:We’re having a guest for dinner.

Dani:Are we now? And who might this guest be?

She followed that up with a string of crown emojis. Leo didn’t bother replying, knowing that as much as Dani enjoyed watching him squirm, she would do what he’d asked in this case.

So, okay, onto manual labor with the princess.

“Oh, how unfortunate that there’s only one shovel,” Marie teased when Leo opened a shedlike structure nestled against the back of the building to reveal a variety of garden tools but only one shovel.

---