Chapter 3

THREE

T wo hours later, after a long shower, unpacking, and enjoying the best espresso I’d ever had from an enormous Italian-made contraption in the kitchen, I was ready for my first night out in London.

Just the idea banished all sense of jet lag and had me dancing in my sensible black pumps while I swiped on the last of my mascara.

Here I was, getting ready to explore a city I’d dreamed of visiting since I read my first Jane Austen novel at the tender age of ten. I stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirror in Xavier’s walk-in closet. It was hard to call it my closet too when the things I’d brought from New York occupied approximately one-sixteenth of the space. The rest was filled with rails of designer suits, stacks of bright new denim and impossibly soft T-shirts, and an entire wall of limited edition sneakers that had probably been worn all of once, if at all. It was a far cry from my thin collection of thrifted sweaters and out-of-fashion jeans.

And so I stood in a new-to-me silk frock, borrowed from my sister Kate’s vintage collection, which fluttered around my shoulders and knees as I tried to determine whether I was ready for my first actual date with a restauranteur-cum-duke.

I’d been waiting years for this. Maybe my whole life. How many romances had I devoured on my little landing in Brooklyn? How many times had I watched Bridget Jones or Four Weddings and a Funeral ? How many times had I pretended that I was one of the women picked from obscurity, seen by a gentleman of standing when no one else could?

Maybe I wasn’t exactly getting a happy ending here. Not yet. After all, this was just a date, not a wedding. And yeah, my duke was the filthy-mouthed Arsenal fan, not a genteel Byronic hero.

But my little Anglophile heart was brimming with excitement, anyway. Excitement and nerves.

“We’re going to have a lovely time, aren’t we, Little Miss?” Elsie was saying as I found her sitting with Sofia at the Australia-sized kitchen island. “We’ve made good friends already, you and I.”

“Mm-hmm,” Sofia replied, mouth full of a crumbly treat. “Best friends.”

“That’s a compliment right there,” I said, joining them at the counter. “Not just anyone gets to be best friends with this one. She’s picky.”

My heart skipped a bit, taken back to similar moments I’d had sitting at the bar in my grandmother’s kitchen, helping her make manicotti or roll out cookie dough. Elsie, Xavier had told me, was much more than an assistant. His mother’s best friend, she had been in his life since he was a child himself and had been the only steadfast part of it since Masumi passed when Xavier was just sixteen. Considering my own mother’s less-than-stellar presence in my life, and Nonna’s age, this lovely woman might be the closest Sofia was ever going to get to a grandmother of her own.

“Well, don’t you look nice,” Elsie said, clearly approving of the swishy blue dress. “That color looks just like Miss Sofia’s eyes, doesn’t it?”

“Just like them!” Sofia agreed. “And Daddy’s too!”

She gave me a crumb-wreathed little grin, as if she’d been planning it the whole time.

I tried not to flush. Okay, maybe I had been thinking of Xavier’s bright blues when I’d picked the dress out of Kate’s collection.

“Don’t eat any more of those, baby girl,” I told her. “You don’t want to spoil your dinner with cookies. And Elsie, please try to keep her awake until at least six thirty to get on London time. Otherwise, she’ll be up at four, I’m guessing.”

“Of course, dear. No problem at all. That’s what the sugar’s for, you know.”

“They’re not cookies, Mama. They’re biscuits. Elsie said.”

“She sounds English already.”

I jumped at the sound of Xavier’s deep voice, and we all turned to find him lounging on the sofa across the room, one long arm spread across the back, the other hand busy texting. He had changed too and looked more duke-like than I ever remembered. The sporty clothes and Arsenal paraphernalia had been replaced by a sleek, black three-piece suit that made his shoulders look impossibly broad and his hair shine black as night.

“Look, you match!” Sofia announced with glee, pointing at Xavier’s blue shirt and tie and my dress. “Like a prince and princess!”

I grinned. But Xavier did not, suddenly scowling when his phone buzzed with another message.

“Everything all right?” I wondered, approaching cautiously.

“Fine, yeah. Someone’s…misbehaving.”

My spine tingled. I knew exactly what Xavier was capable of when I “misbehaved.” In the past, we had a tendency to fight that generally evolved into toe-curling kisses and being taken on kitchen counters like this one.

But I didn’t think he was referring to that sort of transgression.

Lord, it had been a long six weeks, I thought as I watched him scowl at his phone. For a second, I had a mind to let Sofia go to bed as early as she wanted, drag Xavier back to the bedroom, and let him take out his frustrations on my hungry body for as long as he needed.

Xavier continued to look at his phone, oblivious to my thoughts. But eventually, he seemed to feel the intensity of my stare and looked up.

“Sorry,” I murmured. “You, um, ready to go?”

He shoved his phone into his jacket pocket with a huff and then stood up and faced me as I slid off the stool. The scowl fell away, replaced by something equally wild yet deliciously wicked as his eyes scanned up my body, taking in my black heels, bared legs, short skirt, tailored bodice, and the hair I’d washed and curled around my shoulders.

The tingle in my spine returned. I bit my lip.

“Damn,” he said quietly. “You look like a fucking treat.”

“Daddy! Swear jar!”

“What’s a swear jar, love?” Elsie asked.

I grinned at Xavier. “At home, we keep a jar in the house to help my brother with his, er, speech. He has to put a dollar in every time he swears. Sofia thinks Xavi has the same problem. She’s earned a pretty penny off him.”

“Well, I can’t help it, can I?”

Xavier got up and crossed the room in four quick strides. Sofia watched expectantly as he plucked a twenty-pound note from his jacket pocket and dropped it in an empty vase at the end of the counter.

“There’s twenty in there, babe,” he told her. “Mummy’s just too beautiful. She makes me forget my language.”

Sofia just scoffed. “Daddy, that’s ridonk-u-lous. Mommy’s just Mommy. Have some self-control.”

As prim as she sounded, I had to laugh a little when she pronounced “control” without the r or the l , yet managed to sound as imperious as the Queen of England herself.

“Mommy’s a princess.” Xavier slipped a hand around my waist and landed a kiss atop my head, making me glow. “And princesses make men like me act like animals.”

“When the jar fills up at home, we go to Coney Island to ride the Ferris wheel,” Sofia said as she played with a doll on the counter, apparently done with the cookies. Then she frowned, a spitting image of her father’s own scowl. “Dad, do you have a Coney Island in London?”

“No, can’t say we do,” he admitted. For a moment, Xavier looked like he wanted to whip out his phone to have his designer build one right here in the living room.

Sofia’s frown intensified. “Then what the heck are we going to do with all that money? I’m going to earn a lot from you.”

Xavier released me, swept Sofia up from her seat, and carried her to the window in an avalanche of giggles.

“Ah! Daddy! Ahh!” she squealed through her tinkling laughter.

He held her tight, turning her toward the glass. “I don’t have Coney Island, but did you see the Ferris wheel there?”

“Oooh. That’s a big one.”

“That’s the London Eye, my love,” he told her. “Tallest wheel in all of Europe. One of the biggest in the world. You can see everything from up there. You’ll forget all about Coney Island, I promise.”

Sofia’s bright blue eyes blinked furiously, and her mouth quivered. Lord, she was as mercurial as her father, going from laughter to tears in the space of a few seconds. I shook my head. How was I supposed to deal with them both?

“But I like Coney Island,” she was telling him. “I don’t want to forget it.”

Xavier slumped, obviously sensing he’d said the wrong thing. A glance at me told me I was right. I just shrugged, as if to say, your mess, your clean-up .

He turned back. “Well, no. You don’t have to forget it. All I’m saying is that we’re going to have fun. Maybe more than you’ve ever had. What do you think about that?”

Sofia examined him for a long minute, then, as if she planned it, cracked another smile. I shook my head. She knew how to milk those moods, too.

“Let’s go!” Sofia cried, flinging her arms around her father’s neck.

The tip of his long nose pinked with pleasure. Xavier smacked a kiss on her cheek, making her giggle again before releasing her to the floor. “Be good, you little terror. Els, thank you. We’ll be back late.”

“Don’t you worry about a thing, boy. She’s in good hands here. Enjoy yourselves!”

The streetlamps were on now as twilight fell over London, but the city was still crackling with a different kind of life. This wasn’t the hurried crowds of working folks or bumbling tourists making their way through the sites. Instead, it was a mix of those, like us, who came out at night. Women in clothes made to be stared at, men with their chests puffed out like pigeons.

With the windows down, I caught the occasional peals of laughter from pubs or bits of live music dancing out of windows as we made our way through the city. It was a lot like New York that way. Always alert. Always on the move. Always singing with life, in a way.

The ride alone would have been enough for me as the car toured alongside red double-decker buses and hackney carriages. Ben took several detours so that Xavier could point out sites I was eager to find. There was the Tower Bridge. Big Ben. The Houses of Parliament. And so forth.

Soon, I had a list on my phone of too many places to see in a lifetime, much less a few months in one summer. I was jittery and babbling with plans to get to them all when the car finally stopped.

“Come on, you,” Xavier said as he helped me out and onto the sidewalk at the corner of Euston Road and what a street sign said was St. Pancras. “Text you later, Ben.”

“Right around the corner, sir.”

“I think it would take at least a full morning to tour the Tower of London, don’t you think?” I asked as he guided me down the pavement. “Then we can walk the Tower Bridge too, and maybe go across the river to explore Maltby Market. Or is that too much in one day?”

Xavier tucked my hand into the crook of his elbow, then escorted me to a crosswalk. “I think,” he said, “you’ll have time enough to see everything you want.”

“Easy for you to say,” I told him. “You’ve lived here your whole life. I only have a single summer. There’s too much!”

“Well, right now, there’s just this. Look.”

He turned me to face the opposite side of the busy street, and it was then I finally stopped jabbering when I realized just where we were.

King’s Cross was famous. Anyone who had watched any kind of modern movie about London would know its arched windows and the clock tower, not to mention the gothic spires and romantic arches of the St. Pancras Station alongside it. Down the street, I saw a sign waving for Platform 9 ?; people shuffled by us, many carrying luggage on their way to catch a train, others finishing their commutes home via the Tube.

There was only one reason Xavier would have taken me to a train station. We were going somewhere—or at least he wanted to.

My heart deflated. Yet again, I was going to have to play the wet rag. But did he really think I would fly six hours to a strange country only to get on a train and leave Sofia? Elsie was nice, but she was still a relative stranger. There was no way I could go anywhere outside the city.

It was like the mishap with the car seat—meant in good faith, but horribly, disappointingly, wrong. And I had to be the one to spoil all the fun.

“No, Ces.” Xavier took my shoulder and rotated me gently away from the station. “This way.”

After we crossed Euston, he pulled me to the left, then turned briskly down a different, slightly quieter street curving north, lined with brick row houses on one side and an enormous building on the other that extended down the entire block.

My breath caught in my chest.

No. It couldn’t be.

Compared to the winding towers of St. Pancras or the relative grandeur of some of the other sites we’d seen on our way here, the building in front of me was staid and dull—a colossal box of red brick that extended for what seemed like miles. No fuss. No beauty. No decorations but the bright flag bearing its name, waving above us like a standard calling me to arms.

I couldn’t have been more impressed.

“You didn’t,” I breathed.

Xavier grinned down at me, the dimple on his left cheek making a rare appearance. “Didn’t what?”

I couldn’t stop staring. Not because anything I was looking at through the black iron gates was particularly interesting. The utterly normal set of steel-bound double doors wouldn’t have impressed anyone, nor would the basic steps or the blasé sidewalk out front.

But none of that mattered. It was the promise of what was inside that already had me spellbound.

“I thought a lot about where I’d want to take you on your first night in London,” Xavier said, standing behind me and placing his hands gently on my shoulders. “Buckingham Palace. Victoria and Albert. Maybe just dinner and a walk down St. Martin’s. But then it occurred to me there really isn’t anywhere else you’d rather see than this.”

“The British Library,” I whispered.

Xavier looked like he’d just won an Olympic medal. “The one and only.”

I turned, and without thinking, flung myself at him with utter joy. Xavier caught me with a laugh, his deep voice echoing off the brick as he lifted me by the waist and spun me in a circle on the cooling summer night. Several passersby looked at us curiously, but we only had eyes for each other.

“Like it?” he asked, lips just an inch from mine.

I clasped his face between my palms. “I love it. You couldn’t have done better.”

“Is that a challenge, then?”

His mouth found mine, daring me to resist a thorough, breath-stealing, mouth-plundering kiss, right there on one of the busiest streets of London. We had no real audience—yet. No press, no cameras, no intrusive questions. But it was clear that Xavier couldn’t have cared less if we had.

Seconds passed. Maybe minutes. But oh, I had missed this over the past several weeks. I spent most of my time hyper-aware of everything, tracking the children in my classroom, whether or not Sofia had forgotten her jacket, thinking about bills or work or family, or any of the other minutia I’d carried my whole life.

This man’s magic kiss, though, had always managed to make everything fade away.

Xavier kissed me until my breath was gone, and I barely remembered where we were. Only that I was in his arms, carried and desired. Wanted beyond measure.

“Welcome to London, my little bookworm,” Xavier whispered, brushing my cheeks with his broad thumbs as he gently deposited me back on the ground.

For no apparent reason at all, tears pricked my eyes. I was here, in the city that had beckoned my entire life, in the arms of the man I’d only dared hope could love me. The world was still big and scary, and the future was unknown. But it had him in it.

And right now, that was all I could ask for.