Sophie Weston - The Prince's Proposal

Jazz could not think of anything to say.

Francesca stood up and squared her shoulders. She even managed a lopsided smile.

‘So that means I’d better concentrate on a career, right? So lead me to this damned party.’

Conrad Domitio shook his head at the hundredth canapé and thought wistfully about fresh air.

‘How long will this go on?’ he yelled at the publicity assistant.

She stepped a little closer to the tanned god in front of her. Tall, hazel-eyed, with an athlete’s frame and philosopher’s formidable brow, Conrad Domitio had everything. Even his voice was sexy. It made her shiver in spite of the competition from a heavy drumbeat. Her and every other woman at Gavron and Blake, his publishers. Probably every other woman in the room, now she came to think about it.

‘Another hour,’ she yelled back.

She knew, of course, that it would be longer than that. But Conrad Domitio was impatient with publicity. In her dealings with him she had learned to undersell the full extent of their campaign. So she was not telling him that tonight, after the party, she was under strict instructions to bring him to dinner with the girls. After all, he was not only a hero and handsome as hell, he was a prince. A prince.

The publicity department had hardly believed their luck when they found out. ‘He’s a heck of a good writer, too,’ his editor had reminded them. But they had waved that aside. They knew what was important in selling books. And Ash on the Wind was going to be their spring number-one seller. She could feel it in her bones.

‘An hour?’ Conrad looked at his watch. He could take an hour. Just. ‘OK.’

It would not be so bad if the walls were not plastered with huge photographs of him, looking like a movie star, he thought. He had never wanted to have those photographs taken. To be honest, he had not really wanted to write the book at all. But the expedition’s photographer had taken some amazing footage of the erupting volcano and even more telling photographs of the escaping crater party. Always fair, Conrad acknowledged that they deserved a book. Conrad, an inveterate diarist, had more than half of the story already written.

So he had agreed. He did not regret it. He was even quite proud of the book now that it was done. But he was unprepared for the circus that the publishers seemed to fancy.

So far they had come up with wheezes guaranteed to strike cold horror into the heart of a serious seismologist who wanted to work again. Tonight’s publicity handout, for example. It made him sound like an ego-driven control freak. That or a comic-book super-hero. Conrad shuddered inwardly and told himself that he could get through an hour of anything if he had to. And the profits from the book were going to a really good cause.

Which was why, nine months after he had led six weary men out of the dust-filled darkness of the erupting volcano, they were standing here drinking Gavron and Blake’s cabernet sauvignon surrounded by six-foot-high photographs of steaming mountains and multi-eyed grasshoppers. The lighting was halfway between a disco and a forest thunderstorm, and the music was frankly jungle drums along the river. There were tables piled with copies of glossy books, Ash on the Wind, among them, but it would take infrared binoculars to find them, as Conrad had already pointed out.

He looked at his watch again. He could just about see it in the gloom.

‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked the publicity assistant.

She waved a hand at the seething, chattering crowd. ‘Circulate. Circulate.’

Conrad’s mouth twitched. For a moment there, she sounded just like his grandfather, ex-King Felix of Montassurro. He did not say so. Instead he gave one of his expressive shrugs.

‘The sooner we’ve spread the word, the sooner I can get my train back to normality, I suppose,’ he said with resignation. ‘You go that way, I’ll go this.’

They turned their backs on each other and he plunged back into the cavernous lighting to do his duty.

The disco lighting shook Francesca out of her shell-shock. Well, a little.

‘I should have changed,’ she said, watching a woman in a strappy silver top flit past, waving.

Jazz grinned after the woman. ‘Party organiser,’ she diagnosed. ‘Don’t worry about it. Half the people here will have come straight from work like us. The only people in combat gear will be authors and the younger editors.’ She surveyed Francesca and made an unwelcome discovery. ‘Oh, no. Not the first-aid-box glasses.’

Francesca was defiant. ‘They’re all I could find.’

Jazz held out her hand. ‘Give them here.’

‘But I’m as blind as a bat without them. You don’t know what it’s like to be as short-sighted as I am.’

‘I’ll read the instructions to you,’ said Jazz without sympathy. ‘Try to get a drink and not bump into the furniture. That’s all you need tonight. Get a business card off anyone who sounds worth following up.’

‘But—’

‘No serious businesswoman is going to work a room like this with bandaged glasses.’ And, as Francesca muttered rebelliously, ‘You’re going all out for the career, remember?’

‘I’d still like to be able to see.’

‘No,’ said Jazz with finality. ‘You’re representing The Buzz tonight. We’re hip. We’re cool. Bandaged glasses aren’t.’

Francesca gave in and surrendered her glasses. Jazz picked up a glossy bag and handed it to her.

‘Publicity handouts and party favours. Take what you want. Lose the rest.’

Francesca was rueful. ‘I’ve got a lot to learn.’

Jazz was already flicking through the bag’s contents. ‘Chocolates,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘Keep them. Party programme. Need that. Now, what books have we? Spot the Whale. Nah. Five Thousand Years of Refuse. The definitive story of trash by Professor Somebody. That will pull the punters in. Not. Ash on the Wind. Two authors. I don’t like that. Still, they both look quite tasty. Let’s see.’

Francesca knew it was hopeless to try and read anything without her glasses. In that dark party room she was going to do quite well if she managed not to walk into something.

‘I’m going to be a hazard to shipping tonight,’ she said drily. ‘Curse all serious businesswomen and their image problems.’

But Jazz was not paying attention.

‘Hey. Look at this,’ she said excitedly. She stuffed a shiny sheet into Francesca’s hand, scanning the entrance hall avidly.

Francesca squinted at a moody black and white photograph. There seemed to be a face in there somewhere. She gave it back. ‘Sorry.’

‘He’s yummy,’ said Jazz, seizing the handout impatiently. ‘But he’s a lot more than that. Listen.’

She read the publicity blurb aloud.

“‘Conrad Domitio is one of the best seismologists of the age. But he is not a vulcanologist. When he went along on Professor Roy Blackland’s expedition to Salaman Kao it was his first venture into a volcano’s crater.”’

‘Oh, not another volcano book!’

‘Listen,’ said Jazz, rapidly skimming the handout. ‘This is the good bit.

“‘For Conrad Domitio is also known as Crown Prince Conrad of Montassurro. He is heir to his grandfather, the seventy-five-year-old ex-King Felix. Felix himself fled to London via Italy, having spent his teenage years fighting assorted invaders from the Domitios’ impregnable fortress in the mountains. Ex-King Felix has no doubts. ‘My grandson is a born leader,’ he says.

“‘To Conrad Domitio himself the answer is simple. ‘I was doing everything by the book because I was new,’ he said. ‘The others were just too used to the conditions. But I’d only just finished reading up everything about volcano eruptions. So I still remembered the Idiots’ Survival Guide.’

“‘Six men are alive today because he did. This is their story.”’

She looked up.

‘Montassurro?’ said Francesca. She pulled a face.

Jazz ignored that. ‘Body of Apollo, and he saves lives too,’ she said with relish. ‘Cool, huh?’

Francesca shrugged. ‘I should think he took charge because he expects people to jump when he says jump. They were a hard lot, the Montassurran royals.’ She did a double take. ‘How do you know what sort of body he has?’

‘I looked,’ said Jazz calmly. ‘He’s over there. Tall guy, navy shirt, buns to die for. You’re probably the only woman here who didn’t clock him the moment she got here.’

Francesca flung up her hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘All right. All right. I’m sorry about the glasses. What else can I say?’

‘It’s not just the way he looks,’ said Jazz throatily. She cast a languorous look across the room. ‘I want him. Get him for me.’

Francesca shook her short brown hair vigorously. ‘Get him yourself,’ she retorted. ‘What am I? A retriever?’

‘You’re the one in charge of book signings and evening talks,’ pointed out Jazz smugly. ‘And this is your subject. Go and make him an offer he can’t refuse. The man’s a dish.’

Francesca gave her a wicked grin. ‘Dishes are your department. I just do figures and boring science books. And I can’t even see the man.’

‘At least that means you’ll keep your hands off him. By the look of it, that will have rarity appeal tonight,’ said Jazz drily.

Francesca tried not to wince. ‘You want him, you do the luring,’ she said firmly.

Jazz laughed aloud and stopped smouldering in the man’s direction. ‘I wish. That man is going to be hot, hot, hot. The publishers wouldn’t be interested in a new independent like us. They’ll concentrate on the big book chains.’

‘Well, he doesn’t have to do everything exactly as his publisher says, does he?’ demanded Francesca, revolted. ‘Is he a man or a mouse?’

‘He’s a writer who wants to sell his book,’ said Jazz practically. ‘If the publisher’s PR people tell him to paint himself green and juggle babies, he’ll do it. He wouldn’t look at us. It’s hopeless.’

Francesca was not a pushy person. But she was sufficiently her father’s daughter to dislike being told anything was hopeless. And Barry had dented her ego as well as her heart.

Well, there was not much she could do about a broken heart, she thought. It would just have to heal in its own time. But all the ego needed was to go all out for something—and get it, of course. Tonight was not her night for being a good loser.

‘Oh, won’t he?’ she said militantly.

Jazz watched with well-disguised satisfaction as she plunged into the crowd in the general direction of the Crown Prince of Montassurro. Even without her glasses, there was a reasonable chance that she would connect with him, thought Jazz. Three months of working together had taught her that Francesca on a mission was nearly unstoppable. She smiled, well-pleased with her strategy.

Francesca set off on a spurt of pure adrenalin. It took barely three steps for it to wear off.

She was too small for this sort of crowd, she thought wryly. She tried to suppress the urge to keep jumping for air. It felt as if everyone was twice as tall as she was. Taller and more confident and a whole lot more knowledgeable. And all talking over the top of her head.

‘So what else is new?’ muttered Francesca, unheard. She pinned on a bright, impervious smile.

Exit adrenalin. Enter pure will power. I can do this thing. And then maybe, just maybe, this won’t be the worse day of my life after all.

She plunged into the drum-filled darkness.

It was like searching for extraterrestrial intelligence. Of those that managed to hear her shouted enquiry, no one knew where Conrad Domitio was, even if they recognised the name. Most of them were having too good a time even to pretend that they were interested.