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“Perfect,” she answered. The reminder of who and what he was cleared the air. He helped to remove the cushions from the big old couch and pull out the bed. They halted once when it let out a loud squeak, but it was silent behind Lexie’s door so they continued. There were clean sheets on the bed, and Toby got a couple of blankets out of the closet.
“Sorry, but you and I share a bathroom,” she said. “Lexie has a private one, but mine opens into this room.”
“I spent three years in the Royal Guard and I shared the baths with hundreds of men.”
“I hope I’m not quite as bad as that,” Toby said.
Graydon’s instinct was to say something flirtatious, flattering, but he didn’t. He didn’t want to ruin this before it started. He’d made promises to his brother and to his aunt Jilly, and he meant to keep them.
“All right,” she said when the bed was ready. “I’ll go first.” She nodded toward the bathroom.
“Of course,” he said politely.
Toby took a shower, washed away all the sprays and foams the hairdresser had put into her hair for the wedding, and scrubbed the layers of makeup off her face. She took longer than she meant to, but it felt good to get clean. She dried off, then put on lots of moisturizer and a freshly laundered nightgown.
She wasn’t sure what to do next. What was the proper way to tell a prince that the bathroom was free? She told herself she was being ridiculous. Prince or not, he was still a human being. She opened the door into the sitting room a bit and looked out.
He was sitting in the old wing chair in a far corner of the room. The reading lamp was on and he had a book open. It was one of Nat Philbrick’s exciting nonfiction accounts of Nantucket.
Toby didn’t say anything, but looked at Graydon. Even when he was alone he sat up very straight, and even though he’d removed his jacket, his shirt was buttoned almost to the collar.
At first glance, he seemed very formal, but there was something about him that made her able to imagine him with a rough fur thrown across his shoulders and wielding a heavy sword. Maybe it was what his brother had said about Graydon doing anything for his country. If saving it meant brandishing a sword, that’s what he’d do.
He looke
d up at her, as though he’d known she was watching him, and smiled.
“Bathroom is yours,” Toby said, and she went into her bedroom before he could see her red face. How awful it must be for him to have people staring, she thought.
She got into bed and was asleep instantly.
In spite of Lexie’s excitement about going to the south of France for the rest of the summer, last night she’d slept like she was half dead. Maybe it was all the champagne and how, when she got home, she’d run up and down the stairs about a hundred times as she packed. Whatever it was, when she fell into bed, she was out of it. She vaguely remembered hearing Toby in the sitting room and the creak of the old sofa bed being pulled open. It looked like someone was spending the night. Lexie didn’t think any more about it and went back to sleep.
This morning, she got out of bed and went into her bathroom. It was barely daylight and she was to meet her boss at the airport at seven. They were flying out on his private jet—her first time on it.
In the summer, the little Nantucket airport looked like a parking lot for private jets.
There were so many smaller ones by the fence that they looked common, like something every family had. The big ones were parked farther back on the tarmac. There was a saying about the two big islands off Cape Cod: The millionaires went to Martha’s Vineyard and the billionaires went to Nantucket. Her boss, Roger Plymouth, fit into the second category.
The upstairs of the small house they rented from her cousin Jared was meant to be three bedrooms, two baths, but Toby and Lexie had scoured Kingsley attics until they found the furniture needed to convert the middle bedroom into a sitting room with an office. Now and then they allowed someone to sleep over on the old couch’s pullout bed.
She heard the shower running in Toby’s bathroom, and Lexie was glad her friend was awake, as she wanted to say goodbye to her. She felt bad about leaving Toby with the garden to take care of, but last night Jared had assured her that he’d find someone to help.
As Lexie put paste on her toothbrush, she thought how she was going to miss Nantucket in the summer. The light, the salt-filled air, the sunsets, cursing at the tourists who never looked where they were going—she would miss it all.
Most of all, she was going to miss Toby. Right now Lexie wanted to hear every word about that private dinner at the wedding. Candles and champagne and Nantucket bay scallops. What little Lexie had seen of it had been beautiful. She wondered if Toby—
Suddenly, she accidentally knocked her drinking glass off the counter. It hit the tile floor and shattered, sending slivers of glass all over her feet. “Damnation!” she said loudly.
“Don’t move,” said a male voice and she looked up to see the most extraordinary sight. The man Toby had dined with last night was standing at her bathroom door—and he was wearing only a small white towel tied above his left hip. On that side he was nude from stem to stern, from foot to head.
“I apologize for my dishabille,” he said, “but if you move you’ll cut your feet.”
Lexie couldn’t have moved if she’d been told a bomb had been planted. Since the man she worked for was considered “beautiful” and often ran around half dressed, she would have said that a nearly naked man wouldn’t affect her. But this man had a body like an Olympic athlete, with lean muscle and no fat on him. And there was something different about him, as though he might do the unexpected at any moment. Throw a woman over his shoulder and carry her off?
Lexie stood there, immobile, toothbrush in hand, and stared down at him as he began to pick up pieces of glass. The open side of the towel showed quite a long stretch of honey-colored skin. His garment made her think of a Native American loincloth.
Looking up through thick dark lashes, he nodded toward the box of tissues beside her. She pulled out a few and handed them to him.
