Player's Princess (A Royal Sports Romance)(148)

My starting suggestion is making all that day-care stuff voluntary, and though it sparks a huge argument that only ends when the prince roars enough and commands them to carry out my orders, I make the whole clinic-care-for-sick-kids optional, too. Kids with the sniffles can stay home with their mom now. Before I can say anything about it, Kristoff cuts off a question by decreeing—he can do that, he decrees things—that mothers or fathers who take a day from work to care for their children will be given full compensation.

Most of what I ask for is simple—art supplies, music, more computers.

“If you stay,” Kristoff tells me quietly, “I will place the education minister under your direct authority. The schools will be yours to operate.”

I shake a little when he tells me that. “I’m not ready for that kind of responsibility. You need experts…”

“Then find them and bring them here. I do not ask you to teach the classes, I ask you to set a direction. Leadership is not about doing, it is about finding those who can do and guiding them to your desired results.”

I swallow, hard. I’ve seen what power can do to a person, more intimately than I ever thought possible. It scares me.

So, I tell him.

“I don’t know if I can handle that kind of authority. I don’t know if I want it.”

“That is why you should have it,” he says, giving me a curt nod of respect.

The meeting drags on through the day. Some of the things I want to do will take time and require massive changes. No more assigning people jobs, they can choose. They’ll still take the tests but the results will inform, not command. Art teachers will be hired from abroad and until they arrive the kids will have freeform art and playtime, even the older ones. I like the apprenticeship idea so we’ll keep that.

The sun is low by the time we finish. Kristoff dismisses them all and sags back in his seat once we’re alone in the hall. He runs his fingers through his hair.

I reach over and tug on one of the heavy black locks.

He takes my wrist delicately in his hand.

“You understand that when we are married—”

“If. If we are married.”

“When we are in public we will have to comport ourselves a certain way. We cannot act like smitten children in front of government ministers and foreign dignitaries.”

“What happens if I do?”

“I’ll have to punish you,” he says, running the back of his hand up my arm.

Instead of a pang of fear I feel a little quiver of excitement and grin at him.

“You will learn. They will harry you the way they have harried me. Come.”

He stands and offers me his hand. The prince walks me along the parapet. That’s what it’s called, a parapet. Balconies are for scrubs. This is a castle. This side faces the west, and the setting sun dipping below the mountains. It looks like something out of a cheesy Hammer horror movie; Christopher Lee should come shambling out of the dark as Frankenstein’s vampire mummy or something.

I can’t help but stare. The colors are gorgeous. It’s the end of our first day. It’s Monday, and Thursday afternoon we leave for New York. I have to decide.

This morning Kristoff gave me leave, as he puts it, to call home if I want, and to talk to my parents. I haven’t yet. Instead, before the meeting, I called for a car to take me down to the hospital and sat with Melissa until eleven o’clock.

She was happier and in higher spirits. Her parents weren’t there, but they’re staying at the hotel for foreign dignitaries at the foot of the mountain. I felt an urge to point out to Kristoff how hypocritical it is to keep this nice artsy hotel for foreigners in this drab, dreary place.

“Tomorrow I am giving you a gift,” he says, resting his hands on my hips as he stands behind me.

“What is it?”

He touches his lips to my head. “I cannot spoil the surprise. Come, we must rise early. There is much to do.”

Dinner comes to us in the room he calls his solar, and then it’s time for bed.

For some reason, I feel more nervous stripping down tonight than I did last night, before we had sex. I’m not sure what he expects now. I believe him about it being customary to sleep naked. As he paces around the room bare-assed and lights a big fire in the hearth, I feel more at ease. Shivering against the nighttime chill, I throw myself into the bed and bundle up in blankets and furs until he joins me.

Sleeping on a big featherbed naturally dumps us on top of each other. I relax as I get used to lying with him. I’ve slept with a man before, my fiancé. I don’t mean in the biblical sense, I mean actually slept in the same bed. This is different. Kristoff lights a lamp next to the bed and reads a book propped on his chest.

“Can you read my tongue?”

“Sort of. Street signs, things like that.”

After a while, despite the softness of his skin against mine as I lie curled up against his side, I almost forget that I’m unclothed as he gives me a reading lesson. It seems to amuse him when I struggle over a difficult word. It takes what seems like all night to read one page, and by then I’m yawning and dozing off, my head pillowed on his chest.

When I wake up the next morning from a dreamless sleep, I’m lying on my side, his arms around me, his face buried in my hair.

He’s hard when he wakes up. I can tell when his breathing changes and his hands go from gently resting to caressing, one dipping down under me, between my legs. I hold the other hand as he strokes my *, my arousal clashing with the lazy relaxation I feel. Like a cat sunning myself on a windowsill, I don’t want to move. The warmth and softness of the bed and his breath on my neck are too much.