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And Liv wanted it to stay that way. ‘‘It’s not ominous. Not in the least. It’s nothing. I met this, well, this very charming man, in Gullandria. We spent some time together. You know, just casual?’’ Well, okay, not completely casual. But she was hoping Ingrid would never have to know about that. ‘‘We danced. We…talked. We went riding. He gave me a tour of Lysgard. He, um, showed Brit and me around….’’
‘‘Darling, what are you getting at?’’
‘‘Well, his name is Danelaw. Prince Finn Danelaw. And somehow, the press has gotten hold of it. As usual, they’ve made a big deal out of nothing. They seem to think I’m engaged to Finn. It’s not true. There’s nothing between us. And I, well, I just wanted you to hear it from me first, that’s all.’’
Her mother made a noise in her throat.
Liv couldn’t decide what that sound might mean. ‘‘Mom, it’s nothing. I just didn’t want you to read it first in the papers or have somebody tell you before I had a chance to.’’
‘‘Darling.’’
‘‘Mmm?’’
‘‘Don’t give it another thought. I know how the press is.’’ And she did, of course. After all, Ingrid Freyasdahl Thorson had been known for over two decades as the Runaway Gullandrian Queen. She was no stranger to scandal or to lying reporters. ‘‘And look at it this way…’’
‘‘What way?’’
‘‘If they had to pair you with a Gullandrian, at least he’s a Danelaw. It’s a very old family. Very wealthy. And powerful—at least at one time. Dane-laws once sat on the throne of Gullandria, did you know that? For several generations, as a matter of fact.’’
‘‘Mom, that’s not the point.’’
‘‘Of course it’s not, darling. I’m only trying to…look on the bright side.’’
‘‘There is no bright side to nosy reporters making up lies about me.’’
‘‘Sweetheart. Take a bath. Go to bed. We’ll talk tomorrow night.’’
* * *
Liv thought of Simon after she hung up. Tomorrow, she promised herself. Tomorrow she’d make the time to give him a call.
She went to the bathroom and filled the claw-footed tub. She soaked for an hour.
But when she climbed into the big, comfy canopy bed with the fat, luxurious pillow-top mattress, sleep wouldn’t come. Every time she’d relax, she’d find herself thinking sexy thoughts about Finn—the way his hair curled at his nape, the feel of his hand wrapped around hers, the brush of that thumb of his—gently, relentlessly—against her palm.
She’d catch herself and groan in frustration—and realize she was wide-awake.
She got up at seven, ate breakfast and spent a half an hour carefully making up her face, troweling on the concealer in an effort to hide the dark smudges beneath her eyes. Then she dressed for success in a knee-grazing pencil skirt, short jacket to match, with her faux croc pumps and the beautiful single strand of Mikimoto pearls her Granny Birget had presented to her on her graduation from high school, right after she’d given the valedictory speech. Liv always felt good when she wore her valedictory pearls.
Her platinum blue Lexus was waiting in back. When she pulled out of the driveway and onto Thirteenth Street, she spotted a reporter crouched among the rhododendrons beside the house’s wide front porch. The man’s camera was pressed to his face. He pointed the thing at her car as she rolled up to the corner stop sign.
Liv put the passenger window down, leaned across the seat and signaled the man over. She smiled for a couple of close-ups and reassured him that, no, she really was not going to marry Prince Finn Danelaw. ‘‘And I would appreciate it if you’d stay out of the rhododendrons. They break so easily and you know this isn’t even actually my house. A friend of the family’s has let me use it for the summer.’’
Bowing and scraping, the man backed away, promising he’d never get near the flowerbeds again.
At the State Attorney General’s Office, Liv spent the day answering phones, typing letters and researching a few finer points of law. She had no illusions about the complexity of her three-month job. The work she did as an intern was what any junior clerk might do. In terms of job description, she wasn’t much more than a glorified gofer. She got work-study units for it in lieu of a salary.
But the contacts she was making were invaluable. One in every seven Americans lived in California. It was, in terms of the numbers and diversity of its people, by far the biggest state in America. And Liv, at the age of twenty-three, was rubbing elbows with those who ran it.
She left work at a little after six, with plenty of time to stop in at the house on T Street, where she noticed with satisfaction that the rhododendrons were undisturbed. Not a reporter in sight.
She got rid of her panty hose and changed into sandals, a more casual skirt and a comfy embroidered gauze peasant top. She thought of Simon again right before she went back out the door. She was early. She had time to give him a quick call.
But no. What she had to tell him wasn’t something she could explain in a ten-minute call. Later tonight, she promised herself.
She got to her mother’s at twenty of seven. The three-story Tudor where Liv and her sisters had grown up sat on a wide, curving tree-shaded street. The graceful old houses were set far back from the sidewalks, up long sweeps of green lawn, with driveways that led around back, to three-and four-car garages, maids’ quarters above. Not a street of mansions, by any means. But a street that spoke of prosperity, of the very-well-to-do. The sisters had always known that their mother—not only a runaway queen, but an heiress in her own right—could have raised them in a bigger house. They could have lived in San Diego or Beverly Hills. In a Park Avenue town house. In a palace in Timbuktu.
But Ingrid had wanted her daughters to have ‘‘some semblance of a normal childhood.’’ So they attended public schools—not always the safest endeavor in recent years. They played soccer on community teams. And they lived on a nice, wide, oak-shaded street in Land Park.
Liv pulled into the driveway on the side of the house and drove on beneath the porte cochere to the wide parking area with its row of four garages in back. She went in through the back door, the heels of her sandals tapping on the terra-cotta tiles of the service porch floor. She found Hilda, her mother’s housekeeper and cook for as long as Liv could remember, busy chopping herbs at the marble-topped island in the center of the big kitchen.
‘‘Hildy, I’m home!’’ Liv announced in a teasing singsong. She breezed over to the imposing, stern-faced woman with the iron-gray hair and planted a loud kiss on her gaunt cheek. ‘‘Mmm. I smell stuffed pork chops. I think I’m in heaven.’’
‘‘Liv,’’ Hilda said, coming as close to cracking a smile as she ever did. ‘‘It is good to see your face.’’ Her dark eyes met Liv’s.
Liv stepped back. ‘‘What’s wrong?’’
‘‘Excuse me?’’
‘‘You look…I don’t know. Is something wrong?’’
‘‘Why, no. Nothing.’’
Liv studied the housekeeper for a moment and then shrugged. Hilda was Gullandrian—Ingrid had brought her back to California when she left Osrik—and often mysterious or moody for reasons that Liv and her sisters never could figure out.
Hilda had gone back to chopping her herbs.
‘‘Where’s Mom?’’
‘‘In the family room.’’
Liv grabbed an apple from the bowl on the side counter and headed for the central hall. She heard her mother’s throaty, musical laughter as she approached the open doorway.
And then she heard a man’s low, teasing voice. She froze stock-still as she recognized that voice and understood the reason for the strange look in Hilda’s eyes.
Finn Danelaw was in the family room, making her mother laugh.
Chapter Seven
Ingrid laughed again. ‘‘Oh, Finn. I really think you’re a hazard on our highways. Use a driver from now on.’’
Finn chuckled, so charmingly. ‘‘But I love driving, especially with all the windows down, the radio turned up loud. And going very fast. Sadly, here in America, there are so many other cars in the way. Big ones, too. I saw my first Lincoln Navigator today. Amazing. And with a very small, very angry looking woman at the wheel….’’
‘‘Yes,’’ said Ingrid, a lightness in her voice that had been there too seldom of late. ‘‘You ought not to mess with an American woman in an SUV.’’
‘‘Excellent advice, I have no doubt.’’
Liv, still hanging back near the foot of the stairs, straightened her shoulders and stepped proudly into the open doorway.
Her mother, in a chair facing the hall, saw her first. Finn, lounging against the mantel on the outside wall, turned when he caught the direction of his hostess’s gaze.
Ingrid didn’t miss a beat. Her wide mouth spread in a happy, gracious smile. ‘‘Liv darling. You’re early.’’
‘‘Mother,’’ Liv said. She felt like a wire—strung tight, but not yet sprung. ‘‘Finn. How are you?’’
He gave her the most beautiful welcoming smile. ‘‘Better by the moment.’’ Oh, he was good. He was very, very good.
‘‘What a surprise,’’ Liv sneered, ‘‘to see you here.’’
Those amber eyes glittered with challenge, with something Liv couldn’t quite define. ‘‘Her Majesty has graciously invited me to be her guest during my visit to your beautiful city.’’
The wire of Liv’s temper pulled all the tighter. She flashed a furious look at her mother.
Ingrid rose to her feet. ‘‘Finn, I wonder…’’
He nodded. ‘‘I can see the two of you would like a little time alone.’’
Ingrid beamed him a grateful smile. ‘‘Yes, that would be wonderful. Fifteen minutes?’’
‘‘No problem.’’ He bowed over her hand and then he was striding straight for Liv. He wore camel-colored slacks and a polo shirt and he made something inside Liv go silly and hopeless and weak. Oh, why did he have to be so utterly gorgeous?
He reached her. And she was still standing there, rooted to the spot, blocking the doorway. She stared at him and he stared back at her. The air around them seemed to be humming—with her own righteous indignation, she tried to convince herself, as she ordered her foolish, wobbly legs to get her out of his way. With a quick, polite nod, he went on by.
She heard his footsteps going up the stairs. They faded off on the second floor. By then, she’d more or less pulled herself together. She leveled a look of disdain at her mother. ‘‘Well?’’
‘‘Oh, darling.’’ With a long sigh, her mother dropped to her chair again. ‘‘I hope you’re not too upset with me….’’ She looked across at Liv, hoping, no doubt, that Liv would rush in with eager reassurances, vowing she wasn’t angry in the least.
No way.
Ingrid became very absorbed with crossing her long legs and smoothing her bronze-colored linen skirt over her knees. ‘‘Oh, all right,’’ she finally admitted, ‘‘I should have said something earlier.’’
‘‘Now there’s a thought. Maybe you could have mentioned it last night, while I was stumbling all over myself trying to make sure you wouldn’t worry if you heard any rumors about my ‘engagement’ to that man.’’
‘‘I wanted you to get a good night’s sleep, be fresh for your job today. I knew you’d be angry, whenever I told you. And last night it simply seemed…wiser, just to wait until this evening.’’
Liv still held the apple she’d carried from the kitchen. Her appetite for it had vanished. She set it on the counter in the built-in bar area and moved nearer the chair where her mother sat. ‘‘Finn was here last night when you called me, wasn’t he?’’
Her mother sighed again and nodded.
‘‘Then you know about what happened between us?’’
‘‘Yes, darling. I do.’’
Did the humiliation never end? One night’s indiscretion and everybody had to know about it, her mother included. ‘‘How did you find out?’’
‘‘I spoke with your father. He called yesterday. We had a long talk.’’
Liv wondered if she’d heard right. ‘‘Wait a minute. The way you say that, you seem to be implying that you and Father had an actual conversation.’’
‘‘Yes. I would say the word ‘conversation’ pretty much describes what took place between us.’’
‘‘But…you never have conversations with Father.’’ The two had barely spoken in over twenty years.
Her mother was smoothing her skirt again. ‘‘Well, sweetheart, I’ve been doing some thinking. And I’ve come to the brilliant deduction that things change. If we want to survive in life, we have to adapt.’’ Ingrid looked up. A rueful gleam lit those sea-blue eyes. ‘‘With Elli married and living in Gullandria, and with Brit suddenly deciding to—oh, how should I put it?—explore her Gullandrian roots—I can see I’ll have to be willing to talk to Osrik now and then if I want to have any idea of what’s going on in my daughters’ lives.’’
‘‘You could try asking us.’’
Ingrid made a sound of frustration low in her throat. ‘‘I have. I don’t get a lot of answers—and what are you saying? That you’d rather your father and I went back to not speaking?’’
Maybe she would. Especially if they were going to discuss things like her sex life. ‘‘Whether you speak to him or not is completely up to you.’’
‘‘Thank you, darling.’’ There was a definite note of sarcasm.
Liv decided to ignore it. ‘‘So Father called and he told you…’’
‘‘About how you spent Midsummer’s Eve, about how you experienced the Freyasdahl symptoms the following night, about Finn’s offer of marriage and your refusal. Your father said Finn had decided to come here, to Sacramento, for a few weeks, to see if he might somehow manage to change your mind.’’
Liv felt her anger rising again. ‘‘And you want that to happen, right? You want him to change my mind. That’s why you invited him to stay here, in the house where I grew up—to show your support for him. You actually think that I ought to marry him.’’
Ingrid reached out. ‘‘Oh, Livvy…’’
Liv stepped back and sat in the chair across from her mother. ‘‘Just say it. You think I ought to marry him—marry a man I hardly know, a man with whom I have absolutely nothing in common, a man who’s been under just about every skirt in Gullandria.’’
Ingrid said nothing. For a moment, they sat in silence, mother and daughter, at odds.
Then Ingrid was leaning forward again, a wild, warm light in her eyes. ‘‘Oh, Livvy. I like him. I do. And he’s from a good family. And if you give it a chance, you might find the two of you have more in common than you realize. And besides, I saw the way he looked at you just now.’’
‘‘Mom.’’ Liv leaned forward, too. She spoke softly, taking care that no one but Ingrid would hear. ‘‘He’s a…playboy. Flirting to him is like breathing. He does it without having to give it a thought. He looks at all the women as if they’re the only one.’’
‘‘No, he does not. I’d bet a huge sum of money on that,’’ said Ingrid firmly. ‘‘And please don’t scowl. I do understand exactly what you mean when you speak of his flirting skills. He’s flirted with me, for heaven’s sake, and I loved it.’’
‘‘Well, at least you admit it.’’
‘‘Why shouldn’t I? He’s a joy to flirt with. But the way he looked at you…it was an altogether different thing.’’
Absurd, but Liv felt her heart lift a fraction. ‘‘Oh, I don’t think so.’’
‘‘You’re so bright, Liv. So strong and sure. Focused and determined, way beyond your years. And you’re also domineering. And overbearing. And it wouldn’t hurt you to stop and smell the flowers now and then.’’
Liv tried to keep from rolling her eyes. ‘‘Your point being?’’
‘‘That I think Finn sees your value, as a person, as a woman he could love. And you have to admit—’’ her mother dared a naughty grin ‘‘—he’s certainly experienced enough with the fairer sex to know a special woman when he meets her.’’
Liv did roll her eyes then. ‘‘That’s an interesting way of looking at it.’’
‘‘It’s merely the truth.’’
‘‘Mom. You are working on me.’’
