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Or lack thereof, Lili thought, squirming against the restraint of the safety belt as she peered out the window. They were circling the airport now. She was mere minutes away from freedom. Or as close to freedom as she could get with both Amelia Grundy and Rodger Wilhelm, the bodyguard her father had insisted she take along, watching her backside as if it were spun from glass and subject to shatter at the merest touch. Natalia and Annie were better off; they’d been granted permission to travel on their own. As the youngest, Lili was babied more than she liked.
But no more. She was determined about that. This trip would be the start of something tremendous for her. She could sense it.
Peanut butter, M&M’s, hot dogs and hamburgers, Lili chanted to herself. America was so diverse, so raw, so much an adventure-in-waiting. Hip-hop, bebop, shop till you drop. Drive-ins, push-ups, hoedowns and take-outs!
As the plane dropped toward the runway, anticipation rang in Lili’s ears. This was her chance. She would have herself an authentic American experience or her name wasn’t Liliane Marja Mae Graf Brunner.
Why, she wouldn’t even say no to a daring whirlwind fling with a dashing American playboy!
“WITH ALL THAT’S going on at the museum,” Simon Tremayne said as he waited for the first passengers to disembark, “meeting a spoiled princess from some backward little European country no one but us has ever heard of is the last thing I have time for.”
“Take off your glasses,” said Cornelia Applewhite, the mayor of Blue Cloud, who had a tendency to ignore all complaints, which made it easier to bulldoze her constituency. “You’ll look less like a nerd and more like a dignitary.”
Simon did so, pretending there was a smudge. After he’d finished wiping the lenses with the end of his tie, he slipped the glasses into the breast pocket of his suit coat. Who knew why? It couldn’t have been because in photographs the princess was young, blond and cute as a buttercup.
“I suppose I have to kiss her hand?” he said, making sure to sound long-suffering.
“Didn’t you read the protocol report I faxed over to the museum?”
“I intended to.” It was on his list, right after Put On Clean Underwear.
“Si-mon!” the mayor pealed.
He winced. Cornelia—you had to remember to pronounce it Cor-nell-ia, and saints preserve the person who shortened it to Corny—was a short woman with a voice and figure like Foghorn Leghorn. Speaking in a normal tone made her vibrate. When she turned it on full blast to give orders—and she lived to give orders—her entire body swayed with the effort, from the tassels on her pumps to the rooster fringe of her upswept hairdo. Simon wondered if it was considered good protocol to megaphone greetings forceful enough to puncture the princess’s eardrums.
“They’re coming,” Cornelia said to the small group of Blue Cloud VIPs she’d recruited to greet the princess. “Look sharp, people. Pretend you know what you’re doing. And you, Simon, tuck in your tie.” She took a closer look. “King Tut? Couldn’t you have gone for a nice sedate blue or gray?”
“Too late now,” he said, tucking Tut in. The greeters murmured with excitement. The princess and her entourage had naturally been deplaned first. Between the oncoming phalanx of tall, stern people in dark blue suits, all Simon caught of the princess was a flash of pink and a glimpse of ruffled corn-silk hair.
The blond head bobbed. Several times. He chuckled. The petite princess was on springs.
Cornelia said “Shush,” to him in her normal tone—loud—just as the princess’s plaintive voice announced, “But I can’t see anything!”
Everyone hushed.
A small feminine hand appeared on the broad shoulder of the closest bodyguard. Next, a blond head with short hair going in six different directions pushed past the woolen sleeve of a woman who looked as starched as her collar. The princess peeped out at the group from Blue Cloud. She blinked several times. Long spidery lashes curled back from her eyes like stamens.
The greeters returned the stare in complete silence.
“My goodness,” she said. “I do hope you weren’t shushing me. I haven’t been shushed since boarding school, even though I suppose there were plenty who might have liked to.”
She smiled, very prettily.
And Simon’s heartstrings went zing.
Fortunately, Cornelia began booming her practiced welcome speech, and he was able to classify the electric thrumming in his veins as sound-wave reverberation. Corny’s reverb had been known to register on the Richter scale.
He had neither the time nor the inclination for dallying with princesses, even when they were cuddly little blondes built for the boudoir. The very idea was absurd, particularly when he remembered who he was: Simon Stafford Tremayne, boy genius, college egghead, museum wonk. Before he’d learned to keep activities that required tuxedos and courtliness permanently outside of his comfort zone, his greatest success with the opposite sex was slow-dancing with Valerie Wingate at his high school prom, and that had happened only because she was mad at her quarterback boyfriend and had grabbed the nearest nerd at hand for revenge. That one dance had earned Simon a broken nose, and it hadn’t even been worth it. Valerie Wingate had been so vapid, not even the chance to look down her cleavage was compensation. At least, not after the first thousand or so mental slow-motion replays.
The older woman with the bulk and the bulging leather satchel was shaking each of their hands, taking names, and introducing them to the princess. “Mrs. Amelia Grundy,” she said to Simon.
He gave his hand. “No, it’s Simon Tremayne, actually.”
Her lips crimped. No sense of humor. She gripped his hand a beat too long, staring straight into his eyes. Damned if he didn’t feel the zing again. Well, that was good. That meant the feeling could be anything—static electricity from the carpet or maybe indigestion. He’d inhaled a spicy burrito at lunch. Give him a Tums and he’d be safe from all manner of embarrassing eruptions. Burps to bolts from the blue.
“Cor-nell-eee-yah,” Princess Buttercup was saying, with an ill-concealed mischievous glitter to her eyes.
“Cornelia Applewhite. My, that’s too long a name. I shall call you…”
She glanced at Simon. He arched a brow.
“Nell,” she said. “You look like a Nell to me, born and bred among the amber waves of grain on a wholesome American farm.”
Simon barely withheld his laugh. Cornelia, for once, was too flustered to bluster. She was hugely and loudly proud of her venerable family background, but contradicting princesses was undoubtedly against protocol.
The stern Englishwoman glanced sidelong, her mouth pinched into a disapproving knot.
The princess saw the look and sobered so suddenly it was comical. She drew herself up, tipping the saucy royal chin into the air and taking on a formal tone. “That is, unless you prefer Mayor? Or would it be Madam Mayor?”
The British battleship returned her attention to Simon. “And you are?”
“Boggled.”
Mrs. Grundy frowned. “Is that a distasteful American slang term?”
“No, it’s the Queen’s English.” He’d never been so irreverent in his life, but there was a certain gaiety in the air and he couldn’t resist. “Its definition is to be overwhelmed with fright or amazement.”
“Ah, that sort of boggled.” She looked him over. “You’re not cowering…”
His gaze strayed to the princess, who’d relaxed as soon as Grundy wasn’t looking. She was charming Corny’s cravat off despite the farm-girl nickname. “Maybe I’m amazed.”
“Wings,” Mrs. Grundy said, surprising him. “Paul McCartney. A Liverpool lad.” Simon tore his attention off the princess and refocused on the Mistress of Starch. Amelia Grundy’s eyes were Atlantic blue, and not nearly as humorless as he’d first assumed.
“I’m the curator of the Princess Adelaide and Horace P. Applewhite Memorial Museum,” he said. It was a terrible mouthful; the townspeople had already shortened the museum’s name to “The Addy-Appy.” “We are most honored to host the debut exhibition of the Brunner family jewels.”
Usually the term family jewels provoked a grin or a snicker—Blue Cloud wasn’t a bastion of sophistication despite Corny’s pretentions—but all he got from Grundy was a stiff nod. “As is the princess to be your guest of honor,” she said.
“Indubitably,” Simon said, because it sounded very British.
Mrs. Grundy’s lips twitched as she passed him over to the princess, introducing him by name and occupation. “Mr. Tremayne,” she continued, “may I introduce Her Serene Highness, Princess Liliane Brunner of the sovereign principality of Grunberg.”
You may indeed.
The princess placed her hand lightly in his, palm down. He found himself succumbing to a deep bow, propelled by some instinct he hadn’t known he possessed, his lips hovering above the smooth skin on her delicate hand. Her scent suited the season—spring fresh, green and sweet as tender rosebuds.
Gather them while ye may, he thought, one hair-breadth away from a courtly kiss when his suit coat gaped. His glasses fell out, landing on the princess’s toes. She trilled a startled “Oh, my!” and gave a little backward hop. Her big, jowly bodyguard moved in swiftly, crunching Simon’s glasses beneath his heel before Grundy could wave him off.
Princess Liliane patted the mastiff’s arm. “It’s quite all right, Rodger.”
The guard swung around to glare at Simon. Crackle.
“Dear me, your glasses,” said the princess.
She and Simon knelt at the same moment. “Please, let me.” She lifted the mangled wire-framed spectacles in both hands as if she were cradling a bird with a broken wing. “I’m afraid they’re ruined.”
He plucked them off her palm. Tiny cracks spider-webbed through one of the lenses. “I have another pair at the museum, Your Royal…uh, Your Serene Princess—”
“Please call me Lili.” She looked into his eyes.
“Lili,” he said, blinking.
“Are you nearsighted?”
No, just boggled. “Farsighted.”
“Then I’m too close…” she whispered, bringing her face another millimeter nearer nonetheless.
“For what?”
Her face was youthfully round, her skin like buttermilk. Her smile was generously wide and unaffected, but it was her lips that stole his breath away—they were full and pink and utterly, undeniably kissable. “For you to see me clearly,” she said, suddenly turning her face up and her delectable smile down when Mrs. Grundy reached between them and pulled the princess unceremoniously to her feet, bracing Lili on a protective, sturdy arm as if the young woman were an invalid.
Simon also rose, the glasses dangling from his fingertips. He didn’t need them to see that he was more than boggled. He was enchanted.
What a pain in the patoot.
WITH ALL THE FAWNING and milling around, it took Simon several minutes to sort out that the princess’s entourage, which consisted of a large portion of airline personnel and only two official watchdogs: Amelia Grundy and Rodger Wilhelm, the heavyset middle-aged bodyguard, who kept shooting suspicious glances at Simon, as if museum curators were high on the dangerous-kook list.
Kooks, yes, he conceded, thinking of a colleague who’d paid a cool million for a fake Rembrandt or the poor sot who’d had a scarab stolen out from beneath his nose. Kooks, but not dangerous kooks.
The assemblage moved toward the exit. The princess’s head was on a swivel, as if the small municipal airport was a fascinating tourist site. Simon overheard her telling “Nell” that she’d hadn’t been to America since she was a child. Apparently, her father considered the country an immoral wasteland filled with mobsters, cowboys, homeboys and decadent Hollywood movie stars.
“Well, my goodness, that’s just ridiculous,” Corny said, forgetting that it was bad etiquette to deprecate princely opinions—even those belonging to the ruler of a mostly overlooked sliver of a country that had produced nothing of consequence for the last three or four hundred years of his family’s monarchy. “Your grandmother was an American.”
“Hot dogs!” the princess said.
What a scatterbrain, Simon thought, certain his eyes were glued to her as they’d be to a train wreck. She trotted to the airport restaurant, where a half-dozen shriveled wieners rotated on spits around a feeble warming bulb. They were withered, like an old man’s…finger.
And she was in raptures. “I’ve always wanted to taste a genuine American hot dog, not the pale European imitation. Please, may I have one?”
“Of course,” said Corny, with less than her usual gusto. Doubtless, she was thinking of the tea-and-cake tent reception planned for the princess’s arrival in Blue Cloud.
Simon stepped in. “Trust me, Princess Liliane, you don’t want one of those. We can get better hot dogs at the Blue Cloud drive-in.”
“A drive-in restaurant? Like the one in American Graffiti?” Lili’s eyes widened. They were exotically almond-shaped. Brown, almost black—the color of semisweet chocolate. “Do you promise?”
Before Simon could make the date—protocol demanded it—Grundy interrupted. “We must follow the schedule, Princess.” She literally said “shedjul,” but only Simon seemed to notice. He pressed his lips together, holding back a smile.
“Yes, you’re right.” Lili quickly conceded, allowing them to hustle her away even though she threw a longing glance over her shoulder. At the hot dogs, alas, and not him.
Simon shrugged. There must be hot dogs in Grunberg. The country was a stone’s throw from Germany, home of the bratwurst. In the days of the World Wide Web and supersonic air travel, even a sheltered, pampered princess couldn’t be that naive. Going by the diamonds in her elfin ears, the pale pink designer suit wrapped around her luscious curves and, particularly, her easy charm—well-schooled, perhaps—she had to be more sophisticated than her bubbly personality would have him believe.
It’s because she’s only twenty-two, practically a child, he thought, with all the wisdom and maturity of his twenty-nine years. A bright, enthusiastic child. You can’t have a crush on a child.
Even one packaged in a hoochie-mama body.
“IT LOOKS LIKE a picture postcard,” Lili said as they drove past the rolling green-and-gold fields, quilted by white fences and mounds of trees that grew medievally thick. She was enjoying herself again, after being momentarily distracted by disappointment when only the mayor and a bald, beady-eyed man named Spotsky had accompanied her, Grundy and Rodger in the limousine from the airport. The oddball museum guy with the flashy tie and the quiet chuckle had been left at the curb along with the rest of the greeters.
She’d been subjected to Nell’s running discourse on the history of the town ever since. If the oddball had come along, he would have smirked, devilishly. His eyes would have twinkled and one brow would have arched high on his even higher forehead, and Lili might have gotten the little hitch in her throat again. He wasn’t knock-your-socks-off handsome, not in that awful tie and the terribly wrinkled suit, but there were his intelligent eyes to consider, and the cowlick that distracted from his receding hairline, and the adorable way the two sides of his face didn’t quite match up…
Simon Tremayne, she thought. Not a solid All-American name like Chip or Hank or Dave, but it suited him. She liked him instinctively, even if he wasn’t what she’d expected. Or hoped for.
Lili tuned in to the mayor, who was saying, “My esteemed grandfather, Horace P. Applewhite, founded the Society of Concerned Citizens, putting into action the preservation of the…”
She tuned her out again, careful to maintain a wide-eyed look of interest. It was a talent she’d developed when stuffy state dinners became de rigeur, quickly followed by de trop. Mrs. Grundy would fill her in on the highlights later. If there were any.
Lili let her gaze stray to the window. Despite her longing to emulate her sisters and quit trying to conform to her father’s expectations, it seemed to her that she was always looking at the world out of windows, from a distance. Was it so wrong of her to want to experience her life instead of only observing it in a dull and stately manner? She wasn’t blunt like Annie, nor gutsy like Natalia. All she wanted was a bit of fun now and then.
The limo was entering the town. Lili was delighted by what she saw, even if it was through a pane of glass. Blue Cloud appeared to be the quintessential small American town. There was a spare white church with a steeple on one corner, a stone post office with an American flag on the other. The car passed through a bustling downtown—with parking meters!—populated by gift shops and tourists, who pointed and took photos of the limo. She glimpsed something called a Freezee Treat, a redoubtable bank with pillars and stone lions and an old-fashioned brick schoolhouse—with a crossing guard!—and then they were cruising through tree-lined streets of quaint bungalows and wood-frame houses as upright as Puritans.
Lili pressed the toggle to roll down the window. “Prin-cess,” cautioned Mrs. Grundy, but Lili went ahead anyway and thrust her face into the wind, not caring a whit that she would probably be mistaken for a Pomeranian with its head hanging out the car window. Her hair fluttered against her cheeks and forehead, just like the little flags at the front of the car. Wonderful!
Bright sun, the rush of wind, the smell of blacktop and hot brick and—
Rodger tugged her back inside. The occupants of the car stared at her, smiles wavering. Nell had actually stopped talking. So it hadn’t been the wind in Lili’s ears drowning her out. Good, she thought. Good. I don’t want to be a jewel, refined and polished to perfection. There was nothing more boring than perfection.
An immense sea of cars shining in the sun caught Lili’s eye. “Oh,” she cried, “I want to shop there.” The limo had passed through town and was cruising along a busy boulevard. Cars surrounded a building that looked like a cement bunker. A plasticky sign in primary colors—so American—read: Salemart.
“But that’s the Salemart,” the mayor said, aghast. “It’s cheap and tacky.”
Lili beamed. “Perfect.” She wanted a pair of flip-flops, a T-shirt with a silly slogan and one of those fluorescent-colored beverage concoctions that was so giant, it looked as if you’d stuck your straw in a bucket.
The limo was slowing to turn into a glade of green so emerald it made Lili squint and miss what the discreet signpost read. A mass of trees shimmered against the blue and white of the sky. The razor-edged curve of lawn was as plush as carpeting. She would dance on it in her bare feet, given the chance….
Suddenly there were people everywhere, scattered across the tarmac road, parting to make way for the limo, then moving in to surround them as they cruised to a stop. A red-and-white striped tent was set up on the lawn, against the backdrop of shade trees. There was also the museum building, but Lili didn’t have time to look at it. She was smoothing and rebuttoning, preparing herself for display.
Showtime.
“This is it! The Princess Adelaide and Horace P. Applewhite Memorial Museum,” the mayor announced proudly, before Rodger extended an arm and pulled her out of the car, along with the town’s car repair-shop owner, Rockford Spotsky, who hadn’t said a word the entire trip, only stared bug-eyed at Lili until she’d wanted to hand him a magnifying glass.
Mrs. Grundy pulled a handkerchief out of the breast pocket of her woolen traveling suit and dabbed at a spot on Lili’s cheek. “Now, remember, my girl. You are representing not only the royal family, but your country, as well.”
Suddenly Lili was nervous. “Are there reporters? Cameras?” What if she tripped or stammered or peed in her fancy silk drawers the way she had when she was six and invited to take part in the Assumption Day pageant?
“There are always cameras.”
Not always, thought Lili. She’d escaped on occasion, sometimes tagging along after Annie and Natalia and sometimes completely on her own. Brief, memorable occasions.
With a murmur of reassurance, Mrs. Grundy left the car.
