One Night with Prince Charming Read online

  He flattened his hand against the swinging kitchen door and pushed his way inside.

  As he strode in, Pia swung around to face him.

  She was unintentionally sexy, just like the first—and last—time they had met. A compact but curvy body was bound in a satin dress that hugged everywhere. Her smooth dark blond hair was caught up in a practical, working-glam chignon. And then there was the smooth-as-satin skin, as well as the bow lips and the eyes that still reminded him of clear amber.

  Her eyes flashed at him now, just as Hawk was doing a quick recovery from being hit with all that stop-and-go sexy at once.

  “C-come to find me?” Pia demanded. “Well, you’re three years too late!”

  Hawk had to admire her feistiness, much as it came at his expense at the moment. “I came to check on how you’re doing. I assure you that if I’d known you’d be here—”

  Her eyes widened dangerously. “You would have what? Run in the opposite direction? Never have accepted the wedding invitation?”

  “This meeting comes as much of a surprise to me as it does to you.”

  A little surprisingly, he hadn’t caught a glimpse of her until she’d come upon him at the reception. Of course, he’d been among the throng of four hundred invited guests—and one decidedly uninvited one—at the church. And then everyone, including him, had been transfixed by the appearance of Easterbridge. Who the hell would have known the bride had a husband stashed away—who was none other than London’s most famous landowning marquess? But that shock had been nothing compared to the surprise of seeing Pia again…and seeing the mingled astonishment and hurt on her face.

  “An unfortunate surprise, I’m sure, Your Grace,” Pia retorted. “I don’t recall you mentioning your title the last time we met.”

  A direct hit, but he tried to deflect it. “I hadn’t succeeded to the dukedom at the time.”

  “But you weren’t simple Mr. James Fielding, either, were you?” she countered.

  He couldn’t argue with her point there, so he judiciously chose to remain silent.

  “I thought so!” she snapped.

  Hell. “My full name is James Fielding Carsdale. I am now the Ninth Duke of Hawkshire. I was formerly entitled to be addressed as Lord James Fielding Carsdale or simply—” his lips twisted in a self-deprecating smile “—Your Lordship, though I usually preferred to dispense with the title and the formality that came with it.”

  The truth was that, back in his playboy days, he had grown used to moving around incognito simply as Mr. James Fielding—thereby avoiding tiresome gold diggers and shaking off the trappings of his position in life—until someone, Pia, had gotten hurt by his charade and his dropping out of sight without a word.

  He hadn’t even been the heir apparent to his father’s ducal title until William, his older brother, had died in a tragic accident, Hawk thought with a twist of the gut. Instead, he’d been Lord James Carsdale, the devil-may-care gadabout younger son who’d dodged the bullet that was the responsibilities of the dukedom—or so he’d thought.

  It had taken three years of shouldering those very responsibilities to understand just how thoughtless, how careless, he had been before, and how much damage he might have done. Especially to Pia. But she was wrong if she thought he’d avoid her. He was glad to see her again—glad to have a chance to make amends.

  Pia’s face drew into a frown. “Are you suggesting that your behavior can somehow be excused because the name you gave me wasn’t a total lie?”

  Hawk gave an inward sigh. “No, but I am trying, belatedly, to come clean, for what it’s worth.”

  “Well, it’s worth nothing,” she informed him. “I’d actually forgotten all about you until this opportunity presented itself to confront you about your disappearing act.”

  They were drawing curious stares from the kitchen staff and even some of the waiters, who were, however, too busy to linger and ogle the latest wedding spectacle.

  “Pia, can we take this conversation elsewhere?” Hawk pointedly glanced around them. “We’re adding to the events of a day that only needs a little push to tip it over into melodrama.”

  “Believe me,” she retorted, “I’ve been to enough weddings to know we’re nowhere near melodrama. Melodrama is the bride fainting at the altar. Melodrama is the groom flying to the honeymoon by himself. Melodrama is not the bridal consultant confronting her loutish one-night stand!”

  Hawk said nothing. He was more concerned for her sake than his, anyway. And she was probably right. What was another scene in a day full of them? Besides, it was clear that Pia was very upset. The wedding disruption had to be troubling her more than she cared to admit, and then there was his presence.

  Pia folded her arms and tapped her foot. “Do you run out on every woman the morning after?”

  No, only on the one and only woman who’d turned out to be a virgin—her. He’d been attracted to her heart-shaped face and compact but shapely body, and the next morning, he’d known he was in too deep.

  Hawk wasn’t proud of his behavior. But his former self seemed aeons removed from his present situation.

  Though even now, he itched to get close to her…to touch her…

  He pushed the thought aside. He reminded himself sternly of his course in life ever since he’d become the duke, and that destiny didn’t involve messing up Pia’s life again. This time, he wanted to make up for what he’d done, for the gift he’d taken from her without realizing…the one she hadn’t bothered to warn him about in advance.

  Hawk bent toward Pia. “You want to talk about secrets?” he said in a low voice. “When had you been planning to tell me you were a virgin?”

  Pia’s chest rose and fell with outrage. Under other circumstances, Hawk thought with the back of his mind, he might have been able to enjoy the show.

  “So I’m somehow responsible for your vanishing act?” Pia demanded.

  He quirked a brow. “No, but let’s agree that we were both putting on an act that night, shall we?”

  Heat stained Pia’s cheeks. “I turned out to be exactly who I said I was!”

  “Hmm,” he said, studying her upturned face. “As I recall, you disclosed that you’d never had unprotected sex—now who was shading the truth?”

  After he’d accompanied her back to her apartment—a little studio on Manhattan’s Upper East Side—they’d done the responsible thing before being intimate. He’d wanted to assure her that he was clean and, in return, she’d…lulled him into unintentionally taking her virginity.

  Damn it. Even in his irresponsible younger days, he’d vowed never to be a woman’s first lover. He didn’t want to be remembered. He didn’t want to remember. It didn’t mesh with his carefree lifestyle.

  But she’d claimed to have forgotten him. Was it pride alone that had made her toss out that put down—or was it true? Because he hadn’t succeeded in getting her out of his mind, much as he’d tried.

  As if in answer to his question, Pia stared at him in mute fury, and then turned on her heel. “Th-this time, I’m the one walking away. Goodbye, Your Grace.”

  She strode away from him and deeper into the recesses of the kitchen, leaving Hawk to brood alone about their chance encounter—the perfect cap to a perfectly awful day. Pia had been nonplussed, to say the least, by his unexpected appearance and her discovery of who he really was.

  But it was also clear that Pia was worried—Belinda’s almost-wedding couldn’t have good consequences for Pia’s wedding planning business. And the fact that Pia herself had given him an unexpected taste of baba ghanoush before some stupefied guests couldn’t have helped matters, either.

  Pia obviously needed help. For, despite tasting eggplant and their angry confrontation, he still felt an overriding and overdue obligation to make amends.

  And with that thought, Hawk contemplated a burgeoning idea.

  Two

  When Pia got home from the reception at The Plaza, she did not conduct an exorcism to banish Hawk from her life again.
She did not create a likeness of him with ice cream sticks to ceremonially take apart.

  Instead, after picking up and removing Mr. Darcy from her computer chair, she went straight to Google and typed in Hawk’s name and title. She told herself it was so she could find a photo to make an Old West sheriff’s poster: WANTED: RENEGADE DUKE MASQUERADING AS MR. RIGHT. In reality, she was thirsty for information now that she had Mr. Wrong’s real name.

  James Fielding Carsdale, Ninth Duke of Hawkshire.

  The internet did not disappoint her. It offered up a bounty of hits in a few seconds.

  Hawk had started Sunhill Investments, a hedge fund, three years ago, shortly after he’d—she let herself think it—taken her virginity and run. The company had done very well, making Hawk and his partners multimillionaires many times over.

  Drat. It was hard to accept that after his dumping of her, he’d been visited with good fortune rather than feeling the wrath of cosmic justice.

  Sunhill Investments was based in London, but had recently opened an office in New York—so Hawk’s presence on this side of the Atlantic might be for more than the Wentworth-Dillingham wedding that wasn’t.

  As Pia delved beyond the first few hits, she absently scratched Mr. Darcy’s ears as he stroked by her legs. She’d adopted the cat from a shelter close to three years ago and taken him back to the two-bedroom apartment that she’d just moved into—still, however, on the less fashionable edge of Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

  The fact that the apartment was rent-stabilized and also served as a tax-deductible office permitted her to afford a place that was on the outer fringes of the world that she wanted to tap into—that of Upper East Side prep school girls and future debutantes with well-heeled parents and with living quarters in cloistered prewar buildings guarded by uniformed and capped doormen standing under ubiquitous green awnings.

  She’d decorated the apartment as a showcase for her creativity and style because she had the occasional visit from a potential client. Mostly, however, she traveled to see brides in their well-appointed and luxurious homes.

  Now, she clicked on her computer mouse. After a few minutes, she brought up a link with an old article about Hawk from the New York Social Diary. He was pictured standing between two blond models, a drink in hand and a devilish glint in his eye. The article made it clear that Hawk had been a regular on the social circuit, mostly in London and somewhat in New York.

  Pia’s lips tightened. Well, at least the article served as some confirmation that she was his physical type—he appeared to have an affinity for blondes. However, at five-foot-four, she was a few inches shorter—not to mention a bit fleshier—than the leggy, skinny catwalkers he’d been photographed with.

  The only saving grace in the whole situation was that Hawk’s detestable behavior three years ago had given her the courage to embark on her own and start her namesake wedding planning business. She’d realized it was time to stop waiting for Prince Charming and take charge of her life. How pathetic would it have been if he’d been scaling the heights of the financial world while she’d been pining away for him, cocooned to this day in the studio apartment where she’d lived three years ago?

  She’d moved on and up, just as he had. And Hawk—the duke or His Grace or however he liked to be referred to—could take a flying leap with his millions.

  Still, she couldn’t help digging for further information online. It was an exercise in self-flagellation to understand the extent to which she’d been a naive virgin who’d given away the goods to a smooth-talking playboy.

  After a half hour of searching, she discovered that Hawk’s reputation didn’t disappoint. He’d dated models, actresses and even a chanteuse or two. He’d been part of the social whirl of people with money to spare even before his recent incarnation as a top financier.

  How unworldly she’d been to expect more than one night with him. How stupidly trusting.

  And yet, she reminded herself, it hadn’t only been naiveté. She’d been tricked—duped—and used by a practiced player.

  She pushed away from the computer screen and padded into her bedroom. Her mind on autopilot, she removed her brown satin dress and slipped into cotton striped pajama bottoms and a peach-colored sleeveless top. In the bathroom, she removed her makeup, moisturized her face and brushed her teeth.

  Walking back into the bedroom again, she began to take the pins from her hair as she moved to her dressing table—bought used at a flea market—and sat down. When her hair was loose, she ran a brush through it and stared at herself in the mirror.

  She’d never been glamorously beautiful, but she’d been able to lay some claim—if the occasional comments she’d received since high school were to be believed—to being a sort of cute pretty. Now, though, she forced herself to be more critical.

  Was there something about her that screamed Take advantage of me? Did her face sing I’m a pushover?

  She sighed as she stood, switched off the bedside lamp and slid into bed. She felt Mr. Darcy spring onto the bed and curl his warm weight next to her leg.

  Pia turned her face to the window, where rain had begun to pelt the glass, blurring the illumination cast by the city lights outside.

  It had been a long, too eventful day, and she was bone-tired. But instead of weariness overtaking her, she found herself awake.

  In the privacy of her bedroom, in her own bed and covered by the shadows of the night, she was surprised by the sudden moisture of tears on her face—a reflection of the rain outside. She hadn’t cried over Hawk in a long time.

  Since she’d switched apartments, Hawk had never invaded this sanctum. But he’d slept in this bed.

  Drat Hawk.

  With any luck, she’d never have to see him again. She was over him, and this would be the absolute last time that she’d shed tears about him.

  Déjà vu. Hawk looked around him at Melton’s picturesque Gloucestershire estate, which wasn’t so different from his own family seat in Oxford. The centuries-old limestone estate was surrounded by acres of pastoral countryside, which was in full greenery in the August warmth. They could and did set period movies in places like this.

  Except his friend Sawyer Langsford, Earl of Melton, was going to have a very real wedding to The Honorable Tamara Kincaid, a woman who could barely be persuaded to dance with him at the Wentworth-Dillingham near-miss of a wedding two months ago.

  At the thought of weddings, Hawk admitted to himself that he’d reached a point in his life when his professional life had quieted down a bit, and at age thirty-six, the responsibility to beget an heir for the dukedom had begun to weigh on him.

  In his younger, more carefree days, he’d dated a lot of women. In fact, he’d reveled in distinguishing himself as the bon vivant younger son—in spite of his steady job in finance—in contrast to his more responsible older brother, the heir.

  And now one of his closest friends was getting married. Hawk had come at Sawyer’s request for what was to be a small wedding in the presence of family and close friends. Easterbridge would also be present, and heaven help them, at the bride’s invitation, so would his wife, Belinda Wentworth—without, however, her almost-husband, Tod Dillingham.

  And Hawk had it on good authority that none other than Pia Lumley would be the wedding planner today. He’d been forewarned by Sawyer. For, as circumstances would have it, Tamara Kincaid was another good friend of Pia’s.

  As if conjured by his thoughts, Pia walked out from the French doors leading to the stone terrace at the back of the house, and then down to the grassy lawn where Hawk stood.

  She looked young, fresh and innocent, and Hawk felt a sudden pang. She’d been all those things three years ago when he’d first met her—and left her.

  She was wearing a white shirt with cuffs rolled back beyond her elbows and lime-green cotton pants paired with pink ballet flats. The pants hugged her curves, and just a hint of cleavage was visible at the open collar of her shirt. Her smooth blond hair was caught in a ponytail, a
nd her lips looked shiny and full.

  Hawk felt a tightening in his gut.

  Despite having been plastered with eggplant at their last meeting, he felt drawn to her. She had sex appeal without being contrived—so different from many of the women in his social circle.

  She was everything he wanted, and everything he couldn’t have. It would throw him off track from the life that he was supposed to be living now if he got involved with her again. He had put his playboy days behind him.

  He was thirty-six, and he’d never been more aware of his responsibilities than since he’d succeeded to the dukedom. Among other things, he had a duty to produce an heir to secure a centuries-old title. And in the normal course of events, he would be expected to marry someone of his class and social station—certainly his mother expected that of him.

  In the past year, his mother had taken it upon herself to bring him into contact with eligible women, including, particularly, Michelene Ward-Fombley—a woman whom some had speculated would have made a wonderful duchess for his older brother, before William’s untimely death.

  He pushed aside thoughts about his most recent transatlantic phone conversation with his mother, and the unspoken expectations that had been alluded to…

  Instead, Hawk couldn’t help noting now that Pia resembled an enticing wood sprite. She was clearly unafraid to wear flats with her petite frame for a working casual look on a tepidly warm August day typical for this part of England. In his own nod to the weather, he had dispensed with anything but a white shirt and tan pants.

  Pia looked up and spotted him as she walked across the lawn.

  He watched as she hesitated.

  After a moment, she continued to move toward him, but with obvious reluctance. He was clearly standing in the direct path of her intended destination—very likely, the pavilion on the property that would serve as one of the backdrops for the wedding.

  He tried to break the ice. “I know what you’re thinking.”

  She gave him a haughty, disbelieving look.