For a moment, Megan sat on a stone bench and inhaled the scent of June roses washed clean by the early morning fog. The worry subsided in the tranquillity of the garden.
Finally, drawn irresistibly by the sea, she rose, slipped through another locked gate and walked along the shore path. The trail dropped from a height of forty feet at the knoll, where the original palace had been built nearly four hundred years ago, to the shore in gently rolling swells as if the ocean had etched its restless nature on the land aeons ago. Here, a secluded cove embraced a beach of sand and shells and scattered rocks. Farther out, huge boulders formed a curving breakwater shielding a tiny island in the middle of the bay.
Megan stood on the shore and watched the waves rush in ripples from the Atlantic to break on the shores of Penwyck and its neighbors, Drogheda and Majorco. To the east lay England, Ireland and Wales. Fed by currents that arose in the Caribbean, the ocean brought both cooling breezes and the warmth of the equator to temper their climate. In some sheltered coves, palm trees grew.
Pressing her hands against her heart, she tried to still the great restless longing that rose there. She’d held her worries at bay by dint of will, but her defenses crumbled all at once like a cliff face that could bear the pounding of the waves no longer.
She remembered another night, another sea…
The evening reception was dull. Elegantly dressed dignitaries and their wives, or husbands, as the case may be, moved about the ballroom of the hotel in an ever-changing kaleidoscope of faces, the topics of conversation as varied as the countries represented at the International Trade Conference in Monte Carlo. She was there representing Penwyck in lieu of her older sister—Meredith, the Intelligent One, as the eldest Penwyck princess was known affectionately by their countrymen—who’d been called to other, more urgent, duties at the last minute.
Megan was bored, tired after a week of endless speeches and diatribes, not to mention lunches, dinners and cocktail parties every night. She really preferred her own silent company to all this noise.
Grimacing at how terribly vain that sounded, she glanced around as if looking for an escape route.
At the back corner of the room, she spied a tall masculine figure slipping into the shadows of the terrace. Another soul who needed to escape. She knew who he was.
On impulse, she followed.
Bolted was more like it, she admitted with a carefree laugh as she ducked through the door, which was slightly ajar, and into the star-glazed Mediterranean night. The casinos of Monte Carlo were brightly lit and doing a bustling business. The moon was huge. Its light silvered everything in its glow.
She spotted the lithe frame of Jean-Paul Augustuve as he strolled purposefully toward the marina. She knew he kept a sailboat there, an oceangoing ketch that he could sail alone. She’d never been invited on it, although she’d seen photos of other royal offspring or world-famous models smiling from its teak decks in newspapers from time to time.
Beautiful, competent women who knew their place in the world. Or forged one for themselves.
Megan hesitated, for those traits didn’t describe her at all, then hurried to keep up with his long strides. They arrived at the boat slip, with her not more than ten feet behind him.
“What do you want?” he asked, swinging around to face her after he stepped aboard.
She started in surprise, sure he hadn’t known she was near. “I wondered if you were going for a sail.”
Hearing the uncertainty in her voice, she groaned internally. He would never mistake her for one of those confident women he favored.
His eyes, dark now but a brilliant blue in daylight, studied her for a long, nerve-racking moment, then his teeth flashed in a smile. “Yes.”
She gripped the material at each side of her silk gown. “I want to go with you.”
“No.”
The refusal didn’t surprise her—she’d never expected him to notice her—but it did hurt a bit. The hot press of tears stung her eyes. She was suddenly angry, with herself for the weakness of weeping and with him for his cruel indifference to her feelings.
“Why?” she demanded, surprising both of them.
“I want to be alone.”
“So do I.”
“Then find your own boat.”
“I won’t get in your way,” she promised. “I know how to sail. You might need my help.”
Again the white flash that appeared almost ghostly in the silvery light. He unfastened one of the mooring lines.
“She’s a true lady,” he said of his ship. “She responds to only one hand—mine.”
The sure arrogance along with a second rebuff dissolved the unusual anger. The odd pain flowed over her again.
Megan thought of cold things, of icy fjords and glaciers, of herself as the Ice Princess, remote, cold, untouchable. It was a device she’d used since she was a child—to simply remove her emotions from the situation and lock them in ice. It worked this time, too.
She took one step back on the dock, away from the sailboat and the handsome, arrogant Earl of Silvershire and his wish to be alone.
He moved about the deck effortlessly, fluidly, seemingly one with the night, a fairy prince spawned of something as insubstantial as sea foam and moondust. Nourished by sea and moonlight, he needed nothing from one as mortal as she. Lifting her chin, she turned away.
“Cast off the other line,” he ordered softly and stepped toward the tiller.
Surprised, she spun and caught a flash of silver from his eyes as he glanced her way. She slipped the line from the mooring, took two running steps as the ship swung away from the dock and leaped to the deck.
The action would have been a small step for Jean-Paul Augustuve; it was a giant leap for Megan Penelope Penwyck. Would she land in a safe harbor? Or in a foreign port amidst the gravest danger?
An engine throbbed to life and the ship eased from the slip and into the black-and-pewter waters of the sea. Once away from the marina and the crowded shoreline, Jean-Paul cut the engine and hoisted the sail. They sailed silently on the silver path where the moon met the sea.
“Out here like this,” he said in a voice that murmured over her like the sound of the sea and the night wind, “I sometimes imagine that I’ll sail right off the end of the earth.”
“What will you find?” she asked, intensely curious about his fantasy.
“Never-never land, perhaps. I always wanted to be Peter Pan and sail the heavens on great adventures.”
His soft laughter, aimed at himself and a boy’s foolish dreams, broke through the ice dam and touched her heart.
Jean-Paul was known as something of a rebel and one of the world’s most sought after bachelors, but here was another side to him that was usually hidden, one that was whimsical and tender with dreams that could never be realized.
She’d sometimes felt like that.
A bond, she realized, and wondered if he felt it, too, and if that had prompted his confidence. His next words dispelled that notion.
“Sit down before you fall overboard,” he ordered, his tone sardonic, as if it wouldn’t bother him at all if that should happen.
She ducked as the wind grabbed the sail and the boom shifted. Jean-Paul swung them around so that they ran with the wind. He motioned