A Tale of Two Cousins Read online

  “Come on, sexy former bachelor,” I said, urging him forward when I saw Cove pull around to the entrance. “Let’s go home and not have a wedding night.”

  “We couldn’t if we wanted to. It’s morning,” he pointed out with pedantic sense that regardless irritated me. I chalked it up to being so tired I could hardly think straight.

  “I could have one if I wanted,” I said with injured dignity, climbing into the back of the car. “I simply choose not to do so. Despite you flaunting your jaw at me.”

  Dmitri, who had been rubbing his face tiredly again, paused and looked at me.

  “It’s a sexy, sexy jaw,” I told him. “I feel like I’m drunk I’m so tired. How about you?”

  “The same. I was going to drag myself into the shower so I could shave, but now—eh? Oh, Harry’s fine, Cove. Baby is fine. Iakovos is near a mental and emotional breakdown, and swearing he’s not only going to have a repeat vasectomy—he might just go for a full-out gelding just to ensure Harry doesn’t change her mind again and want more kids. Not that I think she will after this one.”

  “They have a boy,” I said, leaning against Dmitri. “A red-faced, splotchy-skinned boy, but they are both happy. Harry said she’s mad because she was certain the baby was a girl, but she looked awfully happy.”

  “Happy,” Dmitri agreed, and sagged into the seat.

  “Yes, we are. Very happy.” I must have drifted off to sleep, because the next thing I knew, Cove was telling us to wake up, and that we were home. There were two men lurking outside the building, but Dmitri glared at them and shoved me through the door to the building before they could do more than get a couple of shots of us.

  Valentino was pleased to see us, and after I checked that Alexis—who had taken him home after the wedding, while the rest of us went to the hospital—had given him food and water, I staggered toward the bedroom.

  Dmitri was behind me when I stopped in front of his door, and did an about-face.

  He frowned at me. “You can’t possibly want to do anything other than sleep. Tell me you don’t expect me to stand with you admiring the sunrise on the Acropolis, because I’m afraid if you did, I might just break down and cry, and I don’t want you seeing me crying over a sunrise. It’ll haunt you forever.”

  I summoned up enough energy to chuckle. “I’m just going to say good-bye to my brother. Go to bed. I’ll be there in five minutes or less.”

  He swayed for a moment, clearly hesitating. “Oh, to hell with it. Sleep is overrated,” he said, and with an arm around me, we staggered through the kitchen to the other wing of the apartment.

  I knocked on the door of the room where Chris was staying. He opened it after a few minutes, half his face covered in shaving cream.

  “You two look like hell,” he said, eyeing us. “I assume you haven’t been off having wild, debauched sex and instead sat up all night to watch your cousin have his baby?”

  “Bingo,” I said, booping his nose, then giggling at the fact that I’d done so.

  “What the hell?” he asked, looking faintly outraged. He sniffed the air. “Have you been drinking?”

  “No,” I said, giving him a haughty look. “We’re just tired.”

  “Actually, I took a couple of pulls on Jake’s flask, but that was hours ago,” Dmitri said, waving a hand vaguely in the air. “Maybe days ago. I can’t remember.”

  “We’re very tired,” I repeated, feeling that point needed to be made.

  “But we wanted to wish Our Serene Highness a bon voyage,” Dmitri added.

  “And not cry at sunrises on the Acropolis,” I added.

  “Yes, that,” Dmitri said, pointing at my mouth. I gently sucked on his fingertip.

  “And that’s about enough for me,” Chris said, making shooing gestures. He paused long enough to hug me, kiss me on both cheeks, and then hold out his hand for Dmitri, who gravely shook it. “Go to bed before you both fall down. My flight leaves in a couple of hours, and assuming your assistant—”

  “Former assistant,” I said, smiling at Dmitri.

  “Assuming Alexis is sober and awake enough to take me to the airport, I’ll be fine. Happy marriage, Tee.”

  “Happy detecting, Cee,” I answered, reverting to our childhood nicknames.

  I have a vague memory of collapsing on the bed after that, minus my mother’s dress, but still in the strapless bra, stockings, and petticoat. When I woke some six hours later, I lay mostly under Dmitri, whose chest and one leg were covering me, and who was snoring into the pillow above my head.

  I thought of waking him up in a manner that I knew he’d enjoy, but decided the poor man needed his sleep, and instead got dressed, fed Valentino, and, once he’d eaten, dragged him away from his new favorite spot (in front of a massive fish tank that sat in the middle of the atrium).

  “You need a walk, cat, and I need to clear my head,” I told him, propping up a note on the kitchen counter that we would be back in half an hour. “I feel like my head is full of fog. Too many life-changing events in the last few days.”

  We toddled downstairs, and were about to exit the building when Spiros, one of the midday concierges, stopped me. “You might not want to do that,” he said, coming around the desk to where I stopped to untwist Valentino’s harness.

  “Do what? Haven’t you seen Valentino before? He likes walks. He’s not an ordinary cat.”

  Spiros pulled me to the side window and pointed. “Pips.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Pips out there. Two of them. There was a third, but he left.”

  “There’re still here? Damn.” I bit my lip, reluctant to call off our walk. Now that Valentino had been removed from his observation perch next to the fish tank, he clearly wanted to have a stroll around the neighborhood. “Is there another exit?”

  “One into the alley, and through the parking garage, but I suspect that the pip who left is watching those.”

  “Great.” My shoulders slumped in defeat. “Now I’m a prisoner.”

  “Not necessarily.” Spiros grinned. “If you would just step into the office ...”

  Six minutes later, I exited the building, a big sun hat hiding my hair, my glasses tucked carefully into the inner pocket of the men’s light jacket that Spiros had lent me from the lost and found box, and Valentino hidden in a large cloth carrier bag.

  Upon Spiros’s advice, I exited the building without glancing toward the photographers, and hurried off until we were clear of the building; then I put my glasses on, and apologized to Valentino as I de-bagged him.

  Since it was almost lunchtime, there were a lot of people out and about, and we had a good wander around the neighborhood, Valentino garnering a few comments of how handsome he was. Just as we were about to head back, my phone rang.

  “There’s something wrong with a wife who leaves her husband on the morning after their wedding,” a warm, delicious voice said into my ear.

  “Not if that husband needed sleep, and you did.”

  “Sadly, that is true. I have a horrible feeling I embarrassed myself with your brother. Did I?”

  “No, although he sent me a text a little bit ago saying he’d landed, and was just going to the bank, and he hoped that you weren’t going to turn out to be a lush.”

  Dmitri made a strangled half laugh, half groan. “I don’t blame him for that. Are you almost done with your walk?”

  “Yes, we’re half a block away. I have to put on my disguise before I get closer in case the paps see me.”

  “The what? Oh, Christ, are they still there? Where are you? I’ll take care of them.”

  “It’s OK. Spiros gave me a disguise. I just have to put Valentino back in the bag, then I’ll—”

  The words stopped dead on my lips when, as I was half a block away from the apartment building, a man veered in from the side and took the phone from my hand, calmly hanging it up before glaring at me. “I might have known you’d do something like this,” Kardom said, his pale gray eyes narrowed and fille
d with ire. “And to think I offered you an honorable solution. Well, you have brought this on your own head.”

  “Give me that back! And what have I brought—” I snatched back my phone before looking at the newspaper he shoved at me. It had been folded back to a page that showed a very unflattering picture of me wearing the Feodorovna crown, a look of horror on my face, while next to me, Dmitri scowled. He, I noticed, looked downright gorgeous. Princess Weds Local Playboy read the headline. “They really have some nerve poking their noses—oh! Princess Juliane, with her empty title and emptier wallet, has wed one of Athens’s most prominent and sought-after businessmen. Sources say the couple met only a few days previous to their marriage, fueling speculation that Dmitri Papaioannou hopes to benefit from the royal connection to the emerging country of Beck. Those bastards! Dmitri is not hoping any such thing! And how did they even find out about us getting married?”

  “That would probably be my fault,” Maggie said with an arch simper as she arrived next to Kardom. She made a show of examining a fingernail. “It seems your two friends—the ones I met at the party the first night we were here—were most happy to tell me everything they knew about you and your rich new husband. I may have told Kardom, who may have let it slip to Beck. ...”

  My blood seemed to turn to ice in my veins. “What did you tell them?” I asked Kardom, pulling back when he tried to take my arm. “What lies have you convinced them are true now?”

  “I didn’t have to lie, as a matter of fact,” he said with injured dignity. “I simply told them the truth—that Papaioannou International would be taking advantage of your position to secure lucrative deals and develop land to be sold away from the residents of Beck.”

  My heart sank. I closed my eyes for a few seconds, feeling every last shred of hope evaporating into nothing. “They’ll never have me now. Not if they believe that complete and utter bullshit, and I have no doubt they will.”

  “Of course they will. It’s the truth, after all,” Kardom said smoothly.

  I opened my eyes, too beat down to even argue with him.

  “As for this Greek you married—” Kardom latched on to my arm as he tried to haul me over to a car. “Your marriage to him isn’t legal. The one to me will be.”

  “Oh, for the love of all that’s holy, give it up!” I yelled, anger giving me the strength to jerk my arm back. “Of course my marriage to him is legal!”

  “Ah, but it turns out that the marriage license you took from me was false and, thus, illegal to use.”

  I gawked at him in outright disbelief. “Wait, you’re admitting that you faked a marriage license in my name?”

  “I didn’t, no. However, your cousin in a dark wig and pair of glasses makes for a convincing impostor.”

  I stared in horror at him. I’d had a vague idea that Maggie had something to do with the license, but to have Kardom stand right there in front of me and confirm it took my breath away. “Why? You’ve evidently already bought off the entire Beck council. Why do you want to marry me so badly?”

  His jaw tightened for a moment. “Insurance, my dear. I don’t believe in risks without having ample safeguards in place. There are one or two ... irregularities ... in my current situation that cause me to believe it would be better for Beck to see our lines joined.”

  That made absolutely no sense to me. He had done what he’d set about to do—blackened my name until Beck would name him to the position that by rights should be mine. How was marrying me insurance?

  “I don’t understand what you want from me, but you aren’t going to get anything,” I said glumly. I wanted to sit right down and cry about what he’d done to my reputation. “I’m married. Legally married. So nothing you or Maggie can do will have an impact on that.”

  “Wanna bet?” Maggie asked archly.

  I shook my head. “Not particularly. Not that I understand how you could betray me like that. I trusted you. I asked you for help with the magazine job.”

  “And you were thrilled to always keep me in your shadow, weren’t you?”

  My heart wept at the anger in her eyes.

  “You moaned and groaned about being born a princess, and how horrible it was that people paid you attention and wanted to be around you. You even whined for years about how awful it was that Kardom wanted to marry you, and yet, all that time, you made sure I was kept in my place, just a lowly little cousin who didn’t matter.”

  “Maggie!” I said on a gasp, stung by the accusations she flung at me. “I never treated you that way!”

  “You wouldn’t even let me have a few days in the limelight! You had to go and tell everyone who I really was just so I wouldn’t get more than a tiny little taste of the preferential treatment you get every single day.”

  Was she mad? How could she say such things when she knew full well my life was not even remotely like that? “I trusted you,” I said again, betrayal leaving a bad taste in my mouth. “You’re my family.”

  “The wrong side of the family, though, aren’t I? Not the royal side. Well, I’ve had it up to here with your bullshit,” she said.

  “Maggie, now is not the time for this,” Kardom said, frowning at her. “You are deviating from my plan, and that I will not have.”

  “Your plan, your plan! You know what? You can shove your plan right up your ass,” she snapped at him before pinning me back with a glare. “I’m just about as sick of you as I am of her. She’s not going to marry you, all right?”

  Kardom straightened his shoulders, giving Maggie a look of mingled hauteur and disgust. “It has become apparent that she is legally married to the Greek man she’s been sleeping with, thank you. However, my plans allow for that contingency.”

  Maggie made a face at him before turning back to me. “Just so you know, cousin, Kardom was planning on threatening your boyfriend in order to force you to sign a statement giving up all claims to Beck, and telling them he had your blessing to become crown prince. That’s about as lame an idea as forcing you to marry him, but that’s the sort of mentality I’ve been forced to bear the last month.”

  “I will thank you to not speak of my plans in such disparaging—” Kardom stopped speaking when Maggie rounded on him.

  “Shut it! You are done here, got it? Even as self-centered and stupid as Thyra is, she’s not going to be afraid of some has-been who spent his whole life trying to make himself something he’s not. And her rich husband certainly isn’t going to worry about someone as insignificant as you.”

  Kardom took the insult well, I’ll give him that. He adopted an even haughtier mien, and looked down his nose to say, “I have tolerated your insults because you have been a useful tool in the execution of my plans, but the time for you has passed.”

  “Blow it out your piehole,” she snapped. Maggie slid her gaze my way, and my stomach tightened in response. “As for you, I should have known you would make sure the fact that you got married to that rich Greek was in all the papers. For someone who claims she hates attention, you sure seem to be right in front when the cameras come out.”

  It was my turn to straighten my shoulders. “That is the basest slander! I don’t seek attention from anyone. Well, other than Dmitri, and I love him, so that is completely reasonable. But not the press!”

  “And yet it was your friend who told the press. She told everyone, including me.”

  I shook my head, confused.

  “Patricia something-or-other,” Maggie said before I could protest.

  “Patricia and Audrey are most certainly not friends,” I told her, glancing around, wondering if I could make a dash for the safety of the lobby, even with the paparazzi lurking about the entrance.

  “Oh, sure, you just happened to tell the mouthy Patricia about it, and she just happened to spill the details to the press. Uh-huh. I’m sure it was just like that. Christ, you can’t even be honest about something so simple, can you?”

  That made the decision for me. I edged away, saying, “I don’t know why you’ve turned o
n me, or why you would throw away so many years of friendship, but I’m not going to stand here and listen to it any longer.”

  She grabbed my arm when I tried to walk away. “Oh, you’re going to listen to everything I have to say. You owe that to me, just like you owe me all the money you’ve done me out of.”

  “I must protest—” Kardom started to say, but she spat a very rude word at him that had him sucking in his breath in outrage.

  “Exactly what money do I owe you?” I inquired as politely as I could. Valentino, who had pressed close to my ankle, opened his mouth in a silent hiss at Maggie.

  “Let’s start with the money from the magazine article. I suppose you didn’t bother turning it in now that you’re rich.”

  “I’m not rich,” I said, hurt that she’d think I’d take advantage of Dmitri that way. It was like she didn’t know me at all ... or maybe it was that I didn’t know who she was anymore. “And I will give you half of the money I make from the article about Dmitri just as we agreed. I won’t get paid until I turn it in, though. I planned on working on it on the weekend, since Dmitri and I wanted to have a few days as sort of a mini honeymoon.”

  “Of course you need a honeymoon with the man you’ve known less than a week,” she said with sickening sweetness. “While the rest of us have to scrape and beg and put up with the most insufferably conceited of men just to get by, you are having a grand time with your rich husband.”

  “I object to being called conceited,” Kardom said with a sniff. “I am a direct descendant of princes! Regardless of your lack of royal ancestry, if you are so unhappy taking advantage of my better nature, you are welcome to vacate the hotel room for which I am paying, not to mention cease charging food and other expenses to my account.”

  “You really are hung up on money, aren’t you?” I asked Maggie, ignoring Kardom.

  “If by ‘hung up’ you mean I want some? Yes, yes I do want money. I want what’s mine. And you can stop pretending you like living like a pauper, because the truth is you sure as hell made sure you snapped up a rich, handsome bachelor as soon as you set eyes on him.”