The Princess Finds Her Match Read online

  Lexie gingerly touched the long, straight strands of hair. “Seriously? A redhead?” A few days in the States and already she was starting to sound like Blair. Anyone without an eye cataract would spot that her hair was a fake.

  “Hey, I had to work with what was available,” Blair said in defense. “Will you just relax? You are never, ever photographed with your hair down so you’ll be unrecognizable even wearing a red wig.You’ll look totes adorbs, like Julia Roberts minus the skanky outfit. Oh wait, she had a blonde wig in the film. Anyhoo, don’t tell Dad. He hasn’t gotten over turning down the script for Pretty Woman yet. He gets a bad case of hyperacidity whenever anyone mentions the movie.”

  “I’m sure I can refrain from mentioning our little secret in future conversations with Uncle Rob,” Lexie replied dryly.

  Blair pulled on her wig, a beautiful, jet-black bob cut. It was a gleaming piece of work with straight-cut bangs. “Sorry. I’ve got first dibs.” She stood up and made her way to the mirror above the console table on the foyer to preen at her reflection. “I’ve always wanted to look like a china doll. Now all I need is my Pussy Red lipstick and I’m done.” She turned to Lexie and fluttered her eyelashes, coquette style. “Mr. de Mille, I’m so ready for my hook-up,” she uttered breathily.

  Lexie chuckled at Blair’s outrageousness. Then she immediately sobered up. “What about the bodyguards? They’ll never let me near a bar. They’ll report me straight to Stefan.”

  “You leave that little detail to me.” Blair’s eyes had a twinkle Lexie didn’t trust.

  * * *

  ”I can’t believe you managed to pull that off.” Lexie’s mouth felt dry, and her heart was drumming so loud she was sure the cab driver could hear it above the blaring country music playing in the car. Only the chill on her yet-to-be-acclimatized skin prevented her from perspiring.

  “Are you insulting all the hours I spent in drama school?” Her cousin managed to look affronted for all of five seconds. The flickering, dancing neon lights of The Strip illuminated the dark interior in the car and the devilish gleam in Blair’s eyes.

  “Didn’t Housekeeping find it odd you specifically requested for the staff to bring a very big trolley and have them clean your suite at this time of night?”

  “This is Vegas, Lexie,” Blair said breezily. “I’m a ditzy, rich kid. Weird requests are expected.”

  “You have a point.” That shut Lexie up.

  Housekeeping sent up a thin blonde woman, who looked strangely disappointed to find two young women in the suite instead of drugged-out rock stars. Blair commandeered the trolley.

  “I need you to do something for me, Mary Lou,” her cousin said, reading the woman’s nametag.

  “I don’t do threesomes,” the woman snapped. Her face was so gaunt she looked like Mick Jagger.

  Lexie gasped, not sure if she had heard right. “Excuse me?”

  “At least not for less than a hundred bucks,” Mary Lou amended, sizing up Lexie and Blair as rich tourists.

  “This is a reputable hotel,” Lexie said with a hint of frost in her voice.

  Blair rolled her eyes at Lexie and warned her to keep quiet with a look. “I’ll give you two hundred if you cooperate and keep your mouth shut. Step back,” she gestured, making shooing motions directed towards the two bemused women flanking the trolley.

  “Hey,” Mary Lou protested as Blair opened the doors to the central compartment of the trolley. Peering inside, she roughly shoved the linens to one side.

  “Great! The dividers can be removed!”

  Blair’s grand idea was to plop one of her sunhats and dark sunglasses on Lexie and for her to go out and talk to her bodyguards outside for a moment.

  “Why am I wearing a hat and sunglasses at night?” Lexie’s gracefully arched brows drew together.

  “Just do as I say,” groused Blair.

  “What do I tell them?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Blair retorted, flinging a hand in the air. “You’re a princess. You’re not required to explain anything if you’re weird.”

  “She's a princess?” A calculating gleam appeared in Mary Lou’s eyes. “For real?”

  Blair held her index finger and thumb close together. “Tiny, tiny principality. You haven’t heard about it. I doubt it’s even on the map.”

  Lexie bristled indignantly. “I will have you know, since the 1600s, the House of Ligueria−"

  “That’s enough of this history lesson," Blair cut her off. Royalty or not, Lexie was only her cousin, after all.

  “I want a grand.”

  “What?!” Lexie and Blair turned in unison to Mary Lou.

  “I’ll handle this,” Blair said authoritatively. “Go.” She practically shooed Lexie out of the suite, then abruptly paused. “Tell your bodyguards you will be sleeping in. Make sure they notice you are wearing a hat and sunglasses.”

  Lexie knew better than to ask why. “We are way, way bigger than Monaco,” she felt compelled to add for Mary Lou's benefit.

  Blair just rolled her eyes in exasperation.

  The bodyguards stationed outside the suite did not even so much as blink their surprise at why, at ten in the evening, Lexie was wearing a hat and sunglasses. They just nodded at her pronouncement. When she came back inside, it was to find Blair stripping out of her Versace gown.

  “Strip, Your Highness,” Blair ordered succinctly.

  “Hey, we haven’t closed the deal yet on the price for the threesome,” Mary Lou glared at Lexie. Lexie opened her mouth to protest at the housekeeper’s outrageous assumption.

  “Shut up,” a put-upon Blair snapped at the two of them, even if Lexie hadn’t actually managed to voice out her indignation. “This is the plan.”

  And with much, much trepidation, because she was going all carpe diem tonight, Princess Alexandria did as she was told.

  * * *

  Blair, dressed as Lexie in her sedate black ball gown and wearing the broad-brimmed hat suitable for a Kentucky derby and sunglasses she had made her wear a few minutes ago, made a show of coming out of her suite.

  “I need you to change the towels in the bathroom,” Lexie heard Blair saying a bit loudly as she stepped out into the corridor, heading to Lexie’s own suite several rooms down the corridor, with Mary Lou trailing after her with her trolley. She was speaking in an odd manner. Then it hit her. The slightly modulated and strange accent she was hearing was Blair mimicking her!

  As she had been told to do, she waited for her mobile phone to buzz, which took about fifteen minutes from the time Blair left. Peering through the peephole, she saw the corridor was clear but was still careful to check if the bodyguards had indeed followed Blair back to her suite down the corridor.

  She made her way out of the suite casually, her heart in her throat, hoping from afar she managed to walk to like she was “working it” a la Blair. She pressed the elevator button nonchalantly. Couldn't it go any faster? Finally, the muted ping of the doors opening coincided with the sigh she breathed in relief.

  There was another occupant inside the elevator, a man who appeared to be in his sixties with a combed-out fringe to disguise his thinning top. He flashed an interested smile. She smiled back politely, avoiding further eye contact, then froze when she saw her reflection in the mirror. She had forgotten she was wearing Blair’s outfit from the gala. It was a black lace bustier dress that ended mid-thigh, more suited for a night out of town than a charity event, showing more leg and breasts than Lexie was used to. Stepping out of the elevator in a hurry and keeping her head down, she made her way to the back entrance of the lobby.

  She immediately saw Blair, smoking, already with her wig on but still wearing her ball gown.

  “We did it!” she squealed giddily, flicking her cigarette into a nearby metal bin. Several bystanders glanced their way curiously. “I’m a fucking genius! It’s a good thing I’m on a vegan diet or else I wouldn’t have been able to fit in that trolley compartment.” She shuddered, “Got a bit claustrophobic for a
while.”

  Lexie tugged the hemline of the dress down and then had to pull up the bustier again as it threatened to expose her breasts. “Keep your voice down,” she warned her cousin, who was skipping with excitement. “Let’s find a bathroom where we can change back to our outfits.”

  “No time for that, cuz,” Blair replied, hailing a cab and shoving Lexie in. “Here.” She thrust a plastic bag onto Lexie’s lap.

  She stared at it blankly.

  Blair dumped the contents onto her lap impatiently. It was the red hairpiece. “Put it on.”

  With a wrinkle on her pert little nose, Lexie grudgingly adjusted the shockingly red wig on her head. “Could you not have chosen something a little less…” she searched for the right tone to convey her sarcasm, “subtle?”

  She saw the cabbie glance at her cleavage in the rearview mirror as she studied her reflection and fell back onto the seat at once, disconcerted. It was true that she and Blair had the same build but around the bust area, Lexie had an inch or two more going for her, so it was a tight fit.

  “My, my. Somebody is sounding a little ungrateful,” Blair chided, sounding miffed. “I had to score those wigs from a couple of hookers down the−“

  Lexie raised an imperious hand to silence her. “I don’t want to know.”

  “Suit yourself,” Blair said jauntily as Lexie stared out of the window and they hurtled their way to a wild night in Las Vegas.

  * * *

  Nic Fernandez felt like crap. Getting into a cab, he hightailed it out of the brightly lit mansion, away from one of the many parties he was expected to attend in the middle of what could be touted as polo season in Las Vegas. He wanted to get pissed badly, but not anywhere there was a big chance of being recognized. Before landing a spot on this year’s People’s Sexiest list, Nic was only known to a handful of polo fans and enthusiasts. Due to the publicity surrounding his inclusion in the magazine’s list plus the hype by Team Arion’s PR agent that led to several lucrative endorsements, any chance of anonymity was now limited if not unheard of.

  “Where to?” the cab driver grunted unenthusiastically.

  “Just drive around. I’ll tell you when to stop,” he replied curtly, in no mood to deal with any kind of attitude right now.

  Nic glanced at the rearview mirror and wiped away a smear of red lipstick on the corner of his mouth disgustedly. “Shite,” he muttered, feeling like an absolute fucking dimwit for falling for Tansy Butler’s tricks.

  On the pretense of showing him the newly acquired Arabian, Nic had accompanied his “patron” or team owner’s nubile third wife to the stables. Normally this would have had Nic’s sense of danger tingling, but he had been distracted by the rumor that his ex-girlfriend, California socialite and congressman’s wife Melissa Osgoode-Rathborn was also in Las Vegas. His senses were off-kilter. He was still not completely over his ex-lover’s ambush revelation last year in a party similar to the one he had just left. The betrayal still festered and the loss, though not acute, still lingered. He wouldn’t put it past Tansy to invite her to the party just to create mischief since he had refused, several times, to engage in her own kind of horseplay.

  Upon arriving at the tack room at the back of the mansion, Tansy had immediately started untying the single knot at her nape. It was the only thing holding her scrap of a dress up. Nic let out a string of profanities in Spanish.

  “You sound so sexy when you do that foreign thing, Nicky,” she purred, slightly slurred. She stepped out of her dress, one of her long, lithe Vegas showgirl legs kicking away the crumpled fabric with a stage-worthy flourish. It flew in a graceful arc and landed high up on a saddle mounted to a rack on the wall. “Talk dirty to me in Argentinian.” She started stalking him, wobbling on her heels, her hips undulating provocatively as she approached her prey. She looked so precarious for a second that he almost reached out a hand to steady her.

  But he glimpsed the crazy in her eyes and so Nic took a step back, and another, and another. “Tansy, put your clothes back on,” Nic commanded, his tone that of someone talking to a child. He noted the slightly glazed look in her eyes. Sober, Tansy Butler would not have dared anything to earn the ire of her billionaire husband Rupert Butler and have her means to a lavish lifestyle cut off. But bloody drunk, she was a loose cannon.

  “Don’t you want me, Nicky?” she pouted like a little girl, her lips artificially puffed like a blowfish and her platinum blonde hair framing a face with a strong, almost masculine jaw.

  “I said put your clothes back on,” he repeated coldly.

  “Or what?” she taunted. “You’re goin’ to tell Rupe I was comin’ on to you? Who’d you think he’d believe?”

  Being a polo player meant venturing around the world on tournaments and meeting all sorts of people one would have normally never crossed paths with. Of those, Nic dreaded Tansy’s kind − bored socialites looking for a casual rut in the hay.

  “Maybe the CCTV cameras?” Nic countered, his English icily clipped, the way his British mother sounded when she was not amused with his antics as a little boy.

  Tansy gave an amused laugh. “The workers haven’t had time to install ‘em yet.”

  Realizing it was pointless to argue with someone as drunk as Tansy, he walked past her, heading for the door. But she was not as addled as he thought she was. With a surprising burst of lightning-quick reflexes for someone who was beginning to lose coordination, she had pressed her naked body flush to his and had her hands around his head, pulling him in for a desperate kiss.

  “Bloody hell!” Nic yanked her hands away roughly and shoved her as far away from him in disgust, storming out of the stable, his face like a thundercloud.

  “Fuck you, Nicky! You’ll regret this!” He could hear her screaming like a virago as he made his way to the groom’s quarters beside the stable. Nic could imagine her furiously scrambling for her dress so she could bring her diatribe outside.

  “Idiota!” he cursed under his breath. Her yelling would unnerve the horses.

  Butler’s live-in groom, Facundo, was alerted by the commotion. He appeared from the direction of the adjacent stables. “Nicolas, what’s going on? The horses sound spooked.”

  “Tansy,” Nic answered curtly.

  “Papafrita!” Facundo swore, his expression clearly indicating what he thought of the woman.

  ”I’ve got to get out of here. Rapida!” Even though he wanted to check on his string of polo ponies housed at the stable, he didn’t want to risk Tansy anywhere near him.

  “You can use the back gate for the staff. There is a telephone in the quarters. I can call you a taxi,” the groom offered in Spanish.

  “Gracias, amigo.” Nic slapped his shoulder, grateful. He had left his rental car in the hotel and had hitched a ride to the party with one of his team mates

  In fifteen minutes, Nic was on his way to the hotel where Team Arion had been booked for a month. It was a close match with Team El Dorado yesterday, but with a final goal from Nic on the last seven-minute period play or “chukker” breaking the tie, Team Arion would be playing for the championship the day after tomorrow.

  Fiercely competitive, Rupert Butler had been insanely tense and short-tempered back at the party. The previous year, Arion had lost to Black Cavalier, a team owned by British Duke Julian Walkden. Butler hated the man and Nic didn’t know or care about their history. The one thing he did know was in a fit of rage, Butler fired the previous team captain, who had led Arion to numerous victories before, and had hired him instead. It was enough that he had shown his face at the party tonight. Nic wanted to steer clear of the Butlers and have a short respite. He would see them none too soon tomorrow at practice.

  The taxi was nearing the hotel entrance when Nic’s perfect visual acuity, an ability which served him well in spotting a small white ball flying as fast as a hundred miles per hour in a polo field, narrowed in on a group of photographers clustered at a clump of bushes several meters away, lurking. Until a year ago, he would have marched
straight into the foyer without igniting a single flash, but some ingenious reporter had dug up his name and had connected it with his ex, the now infamous reality star Melissa Osgoode-Rathborn, one of the wives on the hit show Political Housewives. Apparently she was on the brink of a divorce and speculations were rife, hinting at third party involvements for both husband and wife.

  And so at the last minute, Nic had told the driver to turn around.

  “Bring me to a local pub.” At the driver’s blank look, he amended, “A bar. Nothing swanky.” Still a blanker look, if that was even possible. “Low-key.”

  The driver didn’t acknowledge him and returned his eyes on the road. Somewhere, a police siren went off. Nic stared out the window with unseeing eyes. His thoughts were back at the estancia where his horse breeding farm was now recovering slowly from an equine virus that had killed three of his prized studs. He hated being away for long, but the matches afforded him the chance to mingle with prospective horse buyers. And he had to admit, there was nothing more exhilarating than being on a gifted polo pony, galloping at breakneck speed in single-minded pursuit of a goal. During a match, everything in the universe ceased to matter for Nic. Every atom of his being was present at the now of the game. It gave him an unbelievable rush, but it also gave him peace.

  The driver stomped on the brakes abruptly, jerking him forward. He swore and got out of the cab. Slamming the door, he stared at the façade of a run-down looking establishment. The flickering neon green signage read “Space”. The words before and after “Space” were unlit. Turning to the cabbie so he could find another place − he wanted low-key, not derelict, he watched in irritation as the taxi suddenly sped off. Just great. What the hell, he thought, I’ll just grab a couple of beers and then be out in a flash. Just enough so that when he went back to his hotel room, he could flop on the bed and go straight to sleep. He didn’t imbibe at the party; with Tansy around, he had to keep his wits about him. Even though he had abstained, look where it had almost gotten him back at the stables. He stared at the unpromising façade morosely, and deciding that the night couldn’t probably turn any worse, he grasped the doorknob, a glow in the dark planetary orb, and stepped inside the black hole.