Cinderella's Prince Under The Mistletoe. Cara Colter

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       CHAPTER TWO

      IMOGEN APPROACHED THE two men. Both swung around to look at her. Both were frowning. This was not the usual reaction of vacationers arriving to the pristine beauty of the mountainside lodge! A bit flustered, she managed to paste a smile on her face.

      “Prince Luca?” she said. “I’m sorry, we were expecting Prince Antonio.”

      Both men looked at her as if it wasn’t up to her to tell them who she was expecting.

      “Welcome to the Crystal Lake Lodge,” she stammered, resisting an impulse to touch her hand to her forehead and bow away!

      She extended her hand. Too late, she thought maybe she was not supposed to extend her hand. The soldier type looked at her, dismayed, and as if he might block her from touching the Prince with his own body.

      But the Prince stopped him with a barely discernible motion of his head. He took her proffered hand.

      His touch was warm and dry and exquisitely strong, subtly but unarguably sensual. His eyes, so dark and deliciously brown, met hers squarely.

      Something about his eyes increased that thought that tickled the back of her brain: I know him.

      But of course she did not know him. And for someone who had met dozens of celebrities, her next reaction was startling. Ridiculously, she felt like a starstruck teen who had gotten way too close to her rock idol. With all the grace she could muster, she extracted her hand from his grip before she fell under some kind of enchantment. She reminded herself, sternly, that enchantments were over for her.

      As if a prince would ever look to a woman like her to be a partner in his enchantment, anyway. Life was not a fairy tale! Fairy tales ended with happily-ever-after. And beyond the final line of the story—beyond the “the end”—was the unwritten expectation of babies. She guessed this was probably even truer for royal families. Weren’t they highly focused on heirs? On the continuation of their line?

      “Prince Luca,” she managed to say. “Or Prince Antonio?”

      Neither men offered to clarify who he was, so regaining her composure as quickly as possible, she said, “I’m Imogen Albright. I’m the Lodge manager.”

      “My pleasure, Miss Albright,” he said. “It is Miss?”

      The words were said with the deep composure of a man who was very used to meeting people in a variety of circumstances.

      There was no need to feel as if his voice—deep, faintly accented, husky—was a caress on the back of her neck.

      “Yes, it is,” she said, blushing as though it were a failure of some sort. She turned quickly and offered her hand to the other man.

      “Cristiano,” he said briefly, taking her hand and bowing slightly.

      She didn’t feel any jolt of electricity from his hand!

      For a moment there was silence, and she rushed to fill it. “Obviously, you wouldn’t have flown from Casavalle in it, so how does one customize a helicopter with an insignia in such a short time?”

      The Prince lifted a shoulder, but Cristiano answered.

      “It was on order, anyway, from a North American company. We asked the delivery date be pushed up and changed the city of delivery.”

      It made her very aware of the kind of power and wealth the Prince casually wielded—no wish too great to be granted—and made her even more aware, suddenly, of her own appearance. She was in faded jeans, the lumberjack-style shirt she favored for days with no clients and sneakers with bright pink laces! She didn’t have on a speck of makeup and her hair not only wasn’t up, but now it was windblown to boot.

      She had planned an outfit suited to greeting royalty: a pale blue suit with a tailored jacket and pencil-thin pants, paired with a white silk blouse. She had planned to have her hair up and her makeup done.

      “It’s a magnificent place,” Prince Luca said, glancing at the Lodge.

      The two-story building was timber framed and stone fronted, and had a beautifully complicated roofline that made it fit in perfectly with the landscape of towering peaks around it. It was magnificent, and coming from someone who was no doubt surrounded with magnificence all the time, it was indeed a compliment.

      And yet, even as he said it, she sensed, not insincerity, but a fine tension in him, as if the Prince was preoccupied with matters of significance. Again, his reaction to his surroundings made it seem as if he were not here for a relaxing holiday in the mountains.

      When his eyes left the Lodge and returned to her, she glimpsed something in them that took her aback. He didn’t just look preoccupied. There was a shadow of something there. Distress?