Driven by her grumbling stomach, Gaby cracked open her bedroom door and peeked out down the hallway. Everything was silent, though small lights were spaced through the halls here and there. Apparently rich people needed nightlights too, Gaby mused.
She crept down the hallway, though she didn’t really know why. From what she had seen the only person who seemed to be living in that enormous house was Luca, and she had no idea where his room was. It had made her sad to see him sitting alone at a table meant to be filled with laughter and love and family. Having been raised surrounded by those things, Gaby could hardly imagine what it was like to be so alone, and whatever Luca had done to earn his parents’ ire didn’t seem to help the matter.
Gaby took a couple of wrong turns before she finally saw the plain hallway to the kitchens. When she peeked inside, the room was pitch black, and she fumbled along the wall until she found a light switch. She hoped that the cook wouldn’t mind her kitchen being rummaged, but Gaby was craving something else—she just didn’t know what.
Heading toward the area Luca had pointed out earlier, Gaby opened the fridge to find a wealth of fresh ingredients perfect for making just about anything her heart desired. She was already reaching for a box of eggs when she heard a sound and swung the door shut, coming face to face with Luca himself.
“Ah!” she cried, jumping back.
Luca reached out and held onto her arms to keep her from falling backward. When she steadied herself, she released her grip on his arms, and he hesitated before pulling away.
“What are you doing here?” she gasped, holding a hand to her pounding heart. Whether it was pounding out of fear or out of her proximity to Luca, she really couldn’t tell at that moment.
“I wanted a glass of water. What are you doing here?”
“I’m hungry. I’m an American, remember? We like big portion sizes.”
Luca broke into a hearty laugh at that. After bending over his knees he rose and wiped a stray tear from his dazzling gold eyes. “And yet somehow you manage to stay nice and trim. Tell me, what’s your secret?”
“A good metabolism and a lot of running around the restaurant,” Gaby replied.
Luca glanced at the closed refrigerator. “What are you going to make? I admit that the meal wasn’t quite filling enough for me either.”
Gaby opened the door again and glanced around, then she pushed it shut and looked at Luca. “Have you ever made pasta before?”
Luca shrugged and looked bashful. “I’ve never made anything myself before.”
Gaby put her hands on her hips. “Oh come on. You’ve never even scrambled your own eggs? Some people like cooking as a hobby, you know. Even the rich ones.”
“I’m not one of those people.”
Luca’s grin was either maddening or endearing. At the moment Gaby had a hard time deciphering which. She looked him over for a moment, pensive, then she pulled a few eggs out of the fridge.
“Well tonight you are getting a cooking lesson, Your Highness,” she said, bustling around the kitchen to find the flour, salt and olive oil she needed.
Luca looked momentarily apprehensive, but he approached the table as Gaby began to mix the ingredients in a large silver bowl. She realized, then, that Luca was wearing an outfit very similar to her own: long, cotton pants and a light T-shirt. He looked beyond handsome, and, dare she say it, normal. It was a good reminder that even though his status placed him above most people, at the end of the day, he was still just a person.
And tonight he was going to learn to make pasta…
I Want You For Christmas: The Prince’s Lost Princess can be found on Amazon by clicking here.
And now, here is the entirety of my previously released book, The Sheikh’s American Baby; a gift to you, my beloved reader.
ONE
Lucie stared at the ceiling, unable to sleep. She wanted to call it excitement, but she knew it wasn’t.
Jet lag. Something she’d never experienced before. Growing up, family vacations had always been trips to the lakeside campground a two-hour drive away. She’d never been far enough from home to have to deal with adjusting to a different time zone.
But now, here she was. On the other side of the planet, and out of her element.
The alarm on her phone went off and she sighed as she reached out to silence it. She pulled back the covers and went to the window. Pulling back the curtains let in the glow of dawn, illuminating the opulent hotel room where she’d spent the night, to try and get some rest before what would be the biggest day of her academic life, and very possibly the beginning of her career.
She’d thought about Al-Brehoni a lot. She’d seen countless pictures of all the towns and all the historical sites, from all sorts of different time periods. Her focus, as a student of archeology writing a PhD dissertation on the small Middle-Eastern nation, had always been on ancient Al-Brehoni. But looking out at the city, still in the cool of the morning before the sun would bake the streets and make life more difficult for everyone below, Lucie couldn’t help but think that she could have stood to spend more time on the modern day Al-Brehoni, as well.
The way the city mixed the old and the new was breathtaking. Harvard, where she’d spent the last four years, had its own kind of history. It had its own traditions, which it called ancient, even though the university had only been founded a few hundred years ago. In Al-Brehoni, history had a whole different scale.
Outside her hotel, she could see from her window, was the ancient part of the city. She knew from historical artifacts that had been recovered there that it had been continuously occupied since before there was recorded history. The things that ground had seen…
And yet, right next to it stood a cluster of skyscrapers; a testament to the strides Al-Brehoni had been making in recent years.
Lucie might have stayed there, captivated by the view, for another hour or more. But she was interrupted by the ringing of the hotel phone.
She walked over to it, simultaneously curious and a little afraid that something might have gone wrong. For all the hard work that she’d done to get here, sometimes she couldn’t help but feel like an imposter, afraid that at any moment she’d be chucked out of this opulent suite and sent back to the blue-collar neighborhood where she grew up.
“Hello?”
Her voice was groggy from the disturbed sleep she’d slipped in and out of during the night, but the voice on the other end of the line didn’t seem to notice.
“Lucie! Are you awake?”
Lucie rolled her eyes and bit her tongue to avoid saying something sarcastic.
Ah, Zach. She’d been delighted when she’d heard that another of the Harvard PhD students was the son of none other than the esteemed Millard husband-and-wife archaeology team. But her excitement at having such a prestigious name as one of her peers had expired only a few minutes after actually meeting him.
“Yeah, I just woke up. We leave in an hour, right?”
She could practically hear Zach sighing over the phone. She could picture the face he was doubtlessly making: playful, patronizing, and well-rehearsed.
“The plane leaves in an hour. We’re supposed to be leaving the hotel now.”
Lucie’s heartbeat immediately accelerated. She pulled out her phone and looked at it.
“But it’s five-thirty. I thought—”
“It’s six-thirty. You haven’t taken your phone out of airplane mode since the last layover, have you?”
Lucie’s heart sank. She hadn’t thought about it when they’d landed and checked into their rooms here. She’d just been so tired from the journey, and ready for some peace and quiet.
But then, this was Zach’s world. He’d never make a mistake like that.
“Don’t worry about it,” he was saying. Comforting words, if it weren’t for the condescension he’d managed to pack into them.
Lucie didn’t want to hear it. This was the biggest day of her life, and she was already running behind.
She hung up
the phone and gathered her things at lightning speed. Then she rushed downstairs, right past Zach to the car that was waiting for them outside the hotel.
“Hey sleepyhead,” he said, touching her shoulder as he slid in beside her and closed the door.
She hated when he did that.
When Lucie had been applying for her PhD, one of the things that had concerned her was how little she would get to work with other students. Previously, having classes in common had always allowed her to make friends, and what she had learned for certain was that making friends was a must when you were trying to make your way in a world you were not born into. But the more time she spent with Zach, the more she realized that spending time with other students could be very overrated.
“I wasn’t sleeping,” she said, trying to defend herself as the car pulled out of the parking lot and into traffic.
Again, the same playful glance from Zach, though Lucie hardly saw it. Her eyes were drawn to the city flying by through the windows.
It looked different than it had from the high story window, and much different than it did when they were coming in last night in the dark. Last night it had been a mad rush of people. Like most countries in the region, Al-Brehoni had a shifted time-schedule in relation to westerners. People tended to rise much later, and stay out much later, too.
This time of the morning, the streets were filled with tradesmen. Roving packs of uniformed men picked up litter and trimmed the topiary on the landscaped medians.
Lucie was dimly aware of Zach saying something—she’d been too mesmerized by the world they were being whisked through to actually listen.
“What is it?” she asked, perhaps a little too testily.
“Oh, wow. I wouldn’t have pegged you for someone who had such a hard time with mornings.”
He was mock offended. He was turning her annoyance into a game. Everything she said was just an excuse for him to create some little inside joke, like he was trying to build up a cache of shared memories that he could parade out in front of strangers to prove they had a connection.
Lucie sighed. This was an important trip. She was so close to finishing her PhD that she could practically taste it. She couldn’t let her annoyance with her fellow student ruin it all.
She turned to him, calling on the strategies she’d perfected to survive their run-ins over the years. She had to stay neutral. Give nothing away.
She smiled graciously, but not too graciously.
“Sorry, I guess I can be a bit tense in the mornings sometimes.”
A lie, but a necessary one. If she admitted she was nervous, or that she’d been flustered by her mistake, he’d grab on to that.
“What is it you were saying?” she continued. “I was a bit distracted.”
“Distracted?” he asked playfully. “By what, the worker men? Is that what you go for?”
Joking, presumptive, and just a tiny little bit crude—that phrase had Zach written all over it.
She shot him back her best no-nonsense, not-amused face. “By the architecture.”
And then, since she knew it was likely his next move to tease her about her lack of travel experience, she headed him off at the pass.