A Hero and a Prince

by Merrie Haskell

Gregor wore a plain tan overcoat with a matching hat pulled low over his eyes. He felt like Humphrey Bogart, or rather, a shady, unhappy character played by Bogart. He did not feel like either a prince or a hero. He felt--awful.

The air was gentle from a fine mist, and the city streets shined as though coated in black ice. Gregor stopped at a newsstand to buy a paper and some matches. The vendor didn't have enough change, and went into the back to look for some. Gregor waited, idly looking over the magazines. All the women's magazines, and some of the men's, were plastered with her picture. "Royal bride," jumped out from every cover, and Holly's green eyes stared him down. He turned away and walked off without his change.

The rain spat harder. He went to his flat, let Alex take his coat, and went into the living room by the fire. He sat in a wing-backed chair, feet propped on the fender, reading his paper and smoking his pipe.

It was even in the paper, on the front page. He looked at the picture, of both them this time. He studied the couple depicted there: the pale oval face of his fiancée, his own dark, hooded eyes. There was an exclusive with the dressmaker; Holly's dress was to be ivory, and embroidered with blue cornflowers. The couple was happy. Yes, the reserved prince was very much in love with the American author, that was the expert opinion of the seamstress. Yes...

Gregor threw the paper on the fire, stalked out of the flat without his coat or hat. Alexi's worried voice called after him in Russian, but he pretended not to hear.

He showed up an hour later, dripping and grim, on Holly's doorstep. The impassive butler, Reeve, admitted him into the narrow, elegant townhouse.

Reeve's only acknowledgement of Gregor's odd appearance was to guide him into a small bathroom, where he handed the prince first a towel, then a comb, to adjust his appearance. Gregor barely managed not to bat the articles of grooming out of Reeve's hands, but years of training from his mother insisted he remain civil to a servant.

When Reeve guided him upstairs to the drawing room, Gregor was quite certain he caught the butler in a nervous twitch. Perhaps he had disguised his irritation less well than he thought.

"Prince Gregor," Reeve announced. That twitch again. Holly said nothing, Gregor said nothing, and Reeve, well-trained butler that he was, withdrew and closed the door behind him.

Holly sat folded over herself on the ottoman in front of a banked fire, wearing soft cotton sweats. When she turned her head to look at him, her hair fell around her face like a sweep of flame. His chest tightened. He had never known the complexities of brown hair before Holly; before, the girls had always been blonde. But now he knew, now he finally he understood brown hair: it could be a golden corona in sunlight, and auburn in firelight. He tried not to dwell on the intimacies of brown hair, though. He had come here to talk.

"You've been redecorating," he said, standing stiffly in the center of the room, not looking at the furniture or paintings at all. Damn. That was not a good start.

Holly looked at him with tears in her green eyes. He looked away. He had never seen her cry before, and he was--charmed--by the luminous sheen the wetness gave to her expression. He felt immediately chagrin that even her tears turned him on, but that's the way it was.

"Sit down, Gregor," she said, her voice only slightly shaky.

He moved forward mechanically, and sat on the edge of an armchair near her.

She shifted uncomfortably beneath his gaze, so he turned to look at the fire instead. There were no words between them until she said, "I was having cold feet, but I couldn't think why."

Gregor's heart chilled. Adrift, he waited, staring at her.

Holly went on.

"Then you came in and stood there. Tomorrow morning we are going to be married, and you came into this house that your own mother bought for me and stood there like--ice. Like wood."

Like ice. Like wood. That was exactly what he was at this moment. He dared not move. He stared at her, uncertain what to do or say. So he stayed still.

"I'm American! I'm not royalty! And I cannot stand this!" She folded her arms on her knees and buried her head. Brown hair tumbled down over her legs.

"What are you saying, Holly?" he asked, trying not to strangle on the words.

She mumbled, "I don't know."
For a time, there was only the snap and roar of the fire, as an unburned log caught. Gregor thought and remembered.

They had met before the war. She was a foreign correspondent for a paper in New York. They danced at some reception, and found each other agreeable. He admired her quiet prettiness and quick wit. He was engaged at the time, to a Duchess who later died in the embassy bombing. It wasn't until after the war, after Holly had returned to the States and made a name for herself with her novels, after Gregor returned home with a few scars and a handful of medals, after all that, that they met again.

His mother the Princess held a dinner every year for all of her intellectuals, and as usual, asked Gregor to be there.

He did not mind. He rather enjoyed his mother's attempts at pretending to be a deep thinker. He greeted Holly by name amidst a sea of other friendly acquaintances, but did not notice or feel deprived when they were not seated anywhere near each other.

But later, in the library, where they had a cool debate over Tolstoy, his mother noticed that the pretty, affable young American had made taciturn Gregor laugh and smile. The Princess, in fact, noticed the attraction between them many months before the summer; it was summer when the pair found themselves one evening in the rose-garden with his arms about her and her head on his shoulder. She'd worn her hair long and loose, and when they embraced, it tumbled down his back. The kisses

But Gregor, a prince in exile and a war veteran, was not going to be foolish. He had foolish ancestors and foolish soldiers, all dead, to remind him of the necessity of caution.

And Holly was different. She did not pursue Gregor; she refused to contemplate expensive gifts, like his other girlfriends had. She was unimpressed by his title or his war record. She talked earnestly about the country his great-grandfather had lost, and even more earnestly about the war his adopted country had barely won. She let him rest on neither the laurels of his bloodlines or his war medals.

While Gregor liked Holly, possibly even loved her, he found her unsettling, because he never fully fathomed how she felt about him.

The one time he had broached the subject of marriage, in fact, it had gone terribly. He blamed himself for his approach.

They had been discussing Holly's newest cousin; back in the Midwest of America, apparently, there were passels and passels of Cutlers, some with red hair and some with black, ready to take over the world.

"My cousin's husband is glad it's a boy," Holly said, "But my cousin, and the rest of us, are just glad he's got ten fingers and ten toes."

"Well, naturally your cousin's husband is glad to have a boy," he said. "To carry on the family name."

"That's ridiculous," she said, animated but nonetheless casual. "I used to argue this all the time with people in college. I say, the way things are now, you can carry on the family name regardless of your gender."

Gregor raised an eyebrow. "Perhaps. But regardless of family names, I must have a son."

She took a bite of salad. "Because you lose all claim on your country, otherwise?"

He nodded. "My mother has been hounding me for an heir since I was seventeen."

"Gaugh," Holly said. "Fifteen years? And you didn't cave yet? You're very stubborn."

"I come from a long line of stubborn people, true... but my mother is right. I can't ignore my duty."

Holly pushed her plate back. "Duty," she said. "I appreciate the--loyalty--you feel towards your country. But your family has been expatriate for generations. Do you really think it's going to happen?"

He couldn't resent the question, because he'd asked it of himself and his parents for years. What he resented was the fact that he had, in Holly's words, caved, sometime since the war.

"No," he said, "But I can't give up just because I don't believe. I owe it to past generations as well as future ones."

"And your creditors," she said cynically.

"What?"

"Do you actually have any wealth, or are you borrowing against your great expectations?"

Gregor knew the answer to that, and didn't like it. "That's my mother's business, currently," he said shortly.

"It'll be your business some day, though," Holly pointed out.

"Some day it will be mine, and my wife's, until I pass it on to my children," he agreed.

They had finished the dinner in uncomfortable silence.

It all came eventually to an odd proposal, rendered by the Princess to both Holly and Gregor. Gregor remembered the moment in the drawing room of his mother's house with hatred and embarrassment. Gregor had stared at his mother with disbelief, then looked toward Holly with hope. Holly had been scandalized, but she had accepted.

"I felt like a prostitute," Holly said, drawing him back to the present. "When your mother asked me to marry you, then offered me this house and the money, I felt like your prostitute."

Gregor looked at her. She was right. His mother had been terrible.

Holly went on. "I saw a magazine today. It said, 'The fairy-tale maker lives one of her own stories.' I never wrote anything like this."

Gregor got up and paced around the room, hoping to distract her from movement. Any second now, she was going to tell him how it was not worth it, how he was not worth it. Surely he wasn't: half a man, with half a country. He had no idea how to say it, no idea how to make her believe in him. To make her believe that their love was worth it all: the duty, the eyes that would always be on them and their children.

He stood looking into the fire for a long moment, resting his hand on the mantle.

"Your seamstress sold the details of your dress to the Globe," he said finally. "And I'm sorry for that. I'm sorry for that, and for my mother, and for the fact that I never asked you to marry me."

Now it was Holly's turn to sit in silence. Gregor dared not look at her; he couldn't watch her cry anymore.

"If you want to cry off..."

"No."

He turned to her, half-hoping, half-afraid.

"No, what?"

"I don't want to cry off," she said, and she was looking at him, steadily. "I want you."

Holly crept off the ottoman, abandoning her odd position, and came to sit on the floor beside him, leaning her head against his knee, as though too tired to stand up. Gregor's heart flared with hope. He dropped one hand to her hair, and gently stroked it.

"Gregor, I don't know if I can be married to someone who doesn't want to marry me." She touched his ankle, and the gentleness of his love filled him.

"Rest assured, my dear," he said, slipping to the floor beside her and taking her into his arms. "I love you. I love you far more than our poor courtship would suggest. I love you more than myself. And I want more than anything to be married to you."

Holly buried her face into his shoulder and wept a little. "I love you, too," she said. "I have for so long."

"Will you, then?" he said.

"Will I what?"

"Will you marry me?"

She pulled back from him then, surprise lighting her eyes. "I've had a ring for ten months, we have a caterer, a carriage and a cathedral all hired, and you're asking me now?"

"I'm asking you now," he agreed.

Her eyes filled with tears. "Yes," she said softly, and wrapped her arms around his neck, which promptly grew wet with her tears.

As she wept on, Gregor thought perhaps a little seduction might be in order, as a distraction. As for impropriety, well, in less than twelve hours, they would be married.

That brought a thought to his mind. "When we are married, I shall be as American as you are." He paused, stroking her hair.

She turned to look into his face. He saw that her eyes were slightly red, and he thought the greenness of them was made more intense because of her tears.

"That means," he said, unbuttoning the throat of her shirt and pressing his lips to the soft skin above her breasts, "that you won't be as lonely for other Americans."

She swallowed her tears and laughed softly. He pushed the shirt back off her shoulders and openly admired her. Her eyes gleamed with humor and love. He began to feel more like a prince and a hero.