“But we can’t—” Toby began.
Graydon put his fingertip on her lips, then, holding her hand, he walked around and put out the candles. When he looked back at her, she was smiling, her eyes dark with the thought of the coming passion. “Come on,” he said, “I have someone I want you to meet.”
“Oh, great!” Toby mumbled in sarcasm. He turned to look at her in question. “Yet again, I get a chance to lose this damned virginity of mine but you want to introduce me to somebody.”
Graydon laughed. “I promise that I’ll rid you of that burden very soon. In fact I just want to add some enthusiasm to it all. If I remember correctly, you like to be on top, and that takes energy derived from happiness.” He began walking back to the wedding tent, still holding Toby’s hand.
“What I remember is a blonde geisha on your back. You wouldn’t consider getting a—”
“No, I would not,” he said firmly.
They’d reached the edge of the woods and Toby saw Millie standing outside the tent, her back to them.
“Come on,” Toby said as she pulled on Graydon’s hand. “I want you to meet my friend.”
When Millie turned around, Graydon abruptly halted and Toby looked at him in puzzlement. His shoulders went back, his head came up, then he gave a low bow. “Carpathia,” he said in a tone that Toby recognized as coming from The Prince. “I would like to present my mother, Her Royal Highness, Millicent Eugenia Jura, Queen of Lanconia.”
Toby looked from Graydon to Millie and back again, and began to hear answers to her questions. Graydon’s mood change from depression to elation was caused by having talked to his mother, the queen. Images went through Toby’s mind of the last weeks: laughter with Millie, girlfriend hugs, confessions, secrets revealed, bottles of wine and pizza shared. All of it hit her at once, whirling into a blur that seemed to take all the light away. “I think—” Toby whispered as she closed her eyes against the dizziness.
Graydon caught her before she hit the ground.
Holding her to him, he looked at his mother and gave a grin that showed his deep, soul-baring happiness. “She said yes.”
One week later
As Toby entered her house, she wiped her sweaty forehead and pushed the hair that had escaped her braid out of her eyes. It was going to take her a while to adjust to the Lanconian ways. All morning she’d been in the garden working out with Graydon and his parents. She was now ready for a shower, then one last lunch with Lexie and Alix. This time tomorrow she’d be on her way to her new life. Millie kept telling her she would be great in all aspects, but Toby still worried. Only when she got there would she be sure that—
She halted because a young man she didn’t know was sitting in her living room reading a newspaper. For a split second she thought of calling for one of the six guardsmen who were outside with the royal family. But then, it was Nantucket. The man could be yet another one of Jared’s cousins.
She started to speak, but then he turned and looked her up and down in a way that seemed to say she had failed some test. She had on her pink yoga top and her old gray sweatpants and some worn-out sneakers.
“Are you Lavidia’s daughter?” he asked in a tone of disbelief.
“Yes, I am.” Toby straightened her shoulders. She didn’t like his attitude. “Who are you?”
“I am Steven Ostrand.” His voice was full of pride. “I’ve been told you can cook. Is that true?”
“I don’t know who you are, but I want you to leave my house this minute.”
He gave a little motion of his eyebrows as though to say it was her loss, then stood up slowly. “Your mother said you have a temper and that I’d have to overlook it. I can see that she was right.”
Toby started to reply to his arrogant statement when her mother burst into the room. Without so much as a greeting to her daughter, she hurried to the young man and clutched his arm in both her hands. “Steven! You aren’t leaving, are you?” She glanced at Toby. “What did you say to him?”
“Mother, I don’t know this man. I told him to leave my house.”
“Oh,” Lavidia said with a wave of her hand. “Is that all? You just need introductions. Steven, this is my daughter, who I told you so much about.”
The young man peeled Lavidia’s hands from his arm and stepped toward the front door. “Lavidia,” he said firmly, “I think I should leave until this is sorted out.” Again, he looked Toby up and down. “However, I’m not at all sure this can be arranged between us.” With that, he went out the door.
“Mother!” Toby began but Lavidia didn’t give her time to say any more.
“Look what you’ve done! Do you know how long it took me to get that man to come here?! Your father and I met him on board the cruise ship. He owns a dozen supermarkets.”
Toby was at last beginning to understand what this was about. “You tried to talk that man into marrying me?” She took a breath. “For your information I have met someone who—”
“One of those Kingsley men!” Lavidia half spat at her daughter. “I told your father when you ran off with that Jared that nothing good would come of it, but no one would listen to me. And now I hear that you’re living in sin with one of them. What does he do for a living? Run a fishing boat? Really, Carpathia! Can’t you have some pride in yourself?” Lavidia threw up her hands. “You’ll just have to get rid of him, that’s all there is to it.”
“Toby,” Graydon said from behind her.
She didn’t turn but stepped back to be closer to him. She was having a strong sense of déjà vu. The night when she had been Tabitha and her mother had tried to force her to marry a young, grocery-owning man named Silas Osborne came rushing through her mind. Could this Steven Ostrand be Silas Osborne in another time?
When Lavidia looked at Graydon, her face went pale, as though from shock. Her eyes seemed to glaze over and her hand went to her heart. “I’ve seen you before. You want to take my daughter away but you … you can’t take care of her. She will be in misery for all her short life.” She said the words under her breath, as though she didn’t hear herself.
Suddenly, Toby understood it all. For all the changes she and Graydon had made to the past, they hadn’t taken away her mother’s very deep fear of the future. Toby stepped away from Graydon, and for the first time in many years, she put her arm around her mother’s shoulders.
“It’s all right,” Toby said softly. “He won’t go to sea, and he won’t leave us to fend for ourselves. Remember? Garrett stayed with us.”
For the flash of a second, Lavidia’s angry, worried face showed relief, then she frowned and stepped away from her daughter. “Whatever are you talking about? The sea? What does the ocean have to do with anything? Carpathia, I offered you a man who has an excellent future.” She looked Graydon up and down. He had on a sweat-drenched T-shirt and ratty old sweatpants. “What can this man offer you?”
“A crown, a palace,” Millie said from beside her son.
“Lavidia!” Toby’s father said as he burst into the room, Steven Ostrand close behind him. “What on earth are you doing?” Turning, he looked at his daughter, the tall dark young man behind her, and the older woman beside them. His eyes nearly bugged out of his head. He was a man who kept up with world news and he recognized the people he saw. “By all that’s holy, you are …” He couldn’t finish his sentence.
In the next moment six tall young men wearing suits and earpieces entered the room. They were surrounding an equally tall older man who even in his workout clothes looked distinguished.
Toby’s father was staring, eyes wide. He looked at his daughter. “Is he—? Are you and he going to—?” he managed to gasp out.
“Yes,” Toby said. She and her father had always been able to understand each other.
“I don’t like any of this,” Lavidia said angrily. “Steven, would you please—?”
She cut off because her husband put his arm tightly around her shoulders. “They are the King and Queen of Lanconia, and this young man is
the prince. He’s going to marry our daughter and Toby is going to be a princess.”
It took Lavidia a full minute to understand what her husband had said to her. Her lifelong job had been to make sure her only child would be taken care of and now she was seeing that it was going to be done. Decades of worry were released from her in one giant gush.
She looked at her husband. “I—” She didn’t finish, as she fainted in his arms. With laughter in his eyes, Toby’s father looked up. “I think she’s very happy.”
Acknowledgments
As always, I’d like to thank my readers on Facebook, where I post about the daily process of writing. The ups and downs, the good and bad, it’s all there. The very kind comments and answers to my many questions encourage me to keep going. Thank you.
ALSO BY JUDE DEVERAUX
True Love
About the Author
JUDE DEVERAUX is the author of forty-one New York Times bestsellers to date, including Moonlight in the Morning and A Knight in Shining Armor. There are more than sixty million copies of her work in print worldwide.
judedeveraux.com
Facebook.com/JudeDeveraux
@JudeDeveraux1