Rags To Riches: A Desire To Serve: The Paternity Promise / Stolen Kiss From a Prince / The Maid's Daughter

Her head dropped. Her cheek thumped his chest. She tried to drift back into sleep but laughter rumbled annoyingly under her ear.

“Not a morning person, I take it.”

“Not a 6:00 a.m. person,” she mumbled, sounding sulky even to herself.

“I’ll keep that in mind for future reference.”

It took a few moments for that to penetrate her sleepy fog. When it did, she pushed up on an elbow and shoved her hair out of her eyes. She wasn’t awake enough to address the subject of the future head-on. Or maybe she just didn’t have the nerve. Still a little grumpy, she went at it sideways.

“Are you? A morning person, I mean?”

“Pretty much.” An apologetic smile creased his whiskery cheeks. “I’ve been awake for an hour or so.”

She groaned and would have made a dive for the pillows, but he shifted again. She ended up lying on her side, facing him, with her head propped on a hand and her thoughts hijacked by a worry about morning breath. She ran a quick tongue over her teeth. They didn’t feel too fuzzy. And her lips weren’t caked with drool, thank God! She refused to think about her uncombed hair and unwashed face. Or how much she needed to pee.

Blake, of course, looked totally gorgeous in the dim light. A lazy smile lit his wide-awake blue eyes, and he was tantalizingly naked above the rumpled sheets. He even smelled good. Sort of musky and masculine and warm.

When she finished inspecting the little swirl of dark gold hair around his navel and brought her gaze back to his face, she saw his smile had taken on a different slant. Less lazy. More serious.

“I did some thinking while I was lying here waiting for you to rejoin the living.”

She guessed from his expression what he’d been cogitating over but asked anyway. “About?”

“Us.”

The arm propping her up suddenly felt shaky. Did he want to alter their still-evolving relationship? Renegotiate the contract? After last night, she was certainly open to different terms and conditions. Still, she had to work to keep her voice steady.

“And what did you conclude, counselor?”

“I want to make this work, Grace. You, me, our marriage.”

“I thought we were making it work.”

“Bad word choice. I meant make it real.”

He reached over to tuck a tangled strand behind her ear. She held her breath until he’d positioned it to his satisfaction.

“I want to spend the rest of my life with you. You and Molly and the children we might have together.”

Oh, God! Were they really having this discussion with her teeth unbrushed and her face crumpled into sleep lines? She couldn’t fall on his chest again, lock her mouth on his and show him how much she wanted the exact same things.

“Hold on.”

Surprise blanked his face at the terse order. A swift frown followed almost instantly as she threw off the sheet.

“I’ll be right back.”

She spent all of three minutes in the bathroom. When she emerged, he was sitting with his back against the padded silk headboard. The scowl remained, but the fact that she was still naked seemed to reassure him. That, and the joy she didn’t try to disguise when she scrambled onto the bed and knelt facing him.

“Okay, I can respond properly now. Repeat what you said, word for word.”

He hooked a brow and repeated obediently, “I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

“Me and…” she prompted.

“You and Molly and the children we might have together.”

A giddy happiness gathered in her throat, but she had to make sure. “And you can live with the fact that I won’t…can’t tell you Anne’s secrets?”

“I don’t like it,” he admitted honestly, “but I can live with it.”

“Then I say we go for it. Molly, more babies, the whole deal.”

The laughter came back, and with it a tenderness that made her heart hurt.

“Whew! You had me worried there for a moment.”

“Yes, well, for future reference, you probably want to wait until I’ve brushed my teeth to spring something like that on me.”

“I’ll add that to the list,” he said as she framed his face with both hands.

She reveled in the scrape of his whiskery cheeks, amazed and humbled at the prospect of sharing the months and years ahead with this smart, handsome, incredible man. Every tumultuous hope for their future filled her heart as she leaned in and sealed their new contract.

* * *

Given the rocky start to her marriage, Grace would never have believed her honeymoon would turn into the stuff that dreams are made of.

Last-minute negotiations averted the threatened strike, so no further business issues intruded and Grace had her husband’s undivided attention. As she’d already discovered, he woke early and disgustingly energized. She wasn’t exactly a sloth, but she did prefer to open her eyes to sunshine versus a dark, shadowy dawn. They compromised by making love late into the night, every night, and in the morning only after she’d come fully alert. Afternoons and early evenings were up for grabs.

They also spent long hours learning about the person they’d married. Grace already knew Blake liked to read but until now had only seen him buried behind The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times or the latest nonfiction bestseller. She raided the library on one of Provence’s rare rainy afternoons and wooed him away from the real world by curling up with a copy of one of her all-time favorites. He didn’t exactly go into raptures over Jane Eyre but agreed the heroine did develop some backbone toward the end of the story.

Grace returned the favor by digging into the bestseller he’d picked up at a store in town that stocked books in English as well as French. Although she had a good grasp of American history, she never expected to lose herself in a biography of James Garfield. But historian Candace Millard packed high drama and nail-biting suspense into her riveting Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President.

Aside from that one rainy afternoon, they spent most of the daylight hours outside in the pool or in town or exploring Provence. The Roman ruins of Glanum had fired Grace’s interest in the area’s other sights. The coliseum at Arles and arch of ramparts in Orange more than lived up to her expectations. The undisputed highlight of their journey into the far-distant past, however, was the gastronomical masterpiece of a picnic Auguste had prepared for their jaunt to the three-tiered Pont du Gard aqueduct. They consumed truffle-stuffed breast of capon and julienne carrots with baby pearl onions in great style on the pebbly banks of the river meandering under the ancient aqueduct.

They jumped more than a dozen centuries when they toured the popes’ palace at Avignon. Constructed when a feud between Rome and the French King Philip IV resulted in two competing papacies, the palace was a sprawling city of stone battlements and turrets that dominated a rocky outcropping overlooking the Rhône. From there the natural next step was a visit to Châteauneuf du Pape, another palace erected by the wine-loving French popes to promote the area’s viticulture. It was set on a hilltop surrounded by vineyards and olive groves and offered a private, prearranged tasting of rich red blends made from grenache, counoise, Syrah and muscadine grapes.

Each day brought a new experience. And each day Grace fell a little more in love with her husband. The nights only added to the intensity of her feelings. The unabashed romantic in her wanted to spin out indefinitely this time when she had Blake all to herself. Her more practical self kept interrupting that idyllic daydream with questions. Like where they would live. And whether she would transfer her teaching certificate from Texas to Oklahoma. And how Delilah would react to the altered relationship between her son and Grace.

Her two sides came into direct conflict the bright, sunny morning they drove to the open-air market in a small town some twenty miles away. L’Isle sur la Sorgue’s market was much larger than Saint-Rémy’s and jam-packed with tourists in addition to serious shoppers laying in the day’s provisions, but the exuberant atmosphere and lovely old town bisected by the Sorgue River made browsing the colorful stalls a delight.

For a late breakfast they shared a cup of cappuccino and a waffle cone of succulent strawberries capped with real whipped cream. They followed that with samples of countless varieties of cheese and sausage and fresh-baked pastries. So many that when Blake suggested lunch at one of the little bistros lining the town’s main street, Grace shook her head and held up the paper bag containing the wrapped leek-and-goat-cheese tarts they’d just purchased.

“One of these is enough for me. All I need is something to wash it down with.”

He pointed her to the benches set amid the weeping willows gracing the riverbank. The trees’ leafy ribbons trailed in the gently flowing water and threw a welcome blanket of shade over the grassy bank.

“Sit tight,” Blake instructed. “We passed a fresh-fruit stand a few stalls back. They mix up smoothies like you wouldn’t believe. Any flavor favorites?”