One Night with Prince Charming Read Free Page A

demanded.
    He quirked a brow. “No, but let’s agree that we were both putting on an act that night, shall we?”
    Heat stained Pia’s cheeks. “I turned out to be exactly who I said I was!”
    â€œHmm,” he said, studying her upturned face. “As I recall, you disclosed that you’d never had unprotected sex—now who was shading the truth?”
    After he’d accompanied her back to her apartment—a little studio on Manhattan’s Upper East Side—they’d done the responsible thing before being intimate. He’d wanted to assure her that he was clean and, in return, she’d…lulled him into unintentionally taking her virginity.
    Damn it. Even in his irresponsible younger days, he’d vowed never to be a woman’s first lover. He didn’t want to be remembered. He didn’t want to remember. It didn’t mesh with his carefree lifestyle.
    But she’d claimed to have forgotten him. Was it pride alonethat had made her toss out that put down—or was it true? Because he hadn’t succeeded in getting her out of his mind, much as he’d tried.
    As if in answer to his question, Pia stared at him in mute fury, and then turned on her heel. “Th-this time, I’m the one walking away. Goodbye, Your Grace.”
    She strode away from him and deeper into the recesses of the kitchen, leaving Hawk to brood alone about their chance encounter—the perfect cap to a perfectly awful day. Pia had been nonplussed, to say the least, by his unexpected appearance and her discovery of who he really was.
    But it was also clear that Pia was worried—Belinda’s almost-wedding couldn’t have good consequences for Pia’s wedding planning business. And the fact that Pia herself had given him an unexpected taste of baba ghanoush before some stupefied guests couldn’t have helped matters, either.
    Pia obviously needed help. For, despite tasting eggplant and their angry confrontation, he still felt an overriding and overdue obligation to make amends.
    And with that thought, Hawk contemplated a burgeoning idea.

Two
    W hen Pia got home from the reception at The Plaza, she did not conduct an exorcism to banish Hawk from her life again. She did not create a likeness of him with ice cream sticks to ceremonially take apart.
    Instead, after picking up and removing Mr. Darcy from her computer chair, she went straight to Google and typed in Hawk’s name and title. She told herself it was so she could find a photo to make an Old West sheriff’s poster: WANTED: RENEGADE DUKE MASQUERADING AS MR. RIGHT. In reality, she was thirsty for information now that she had Mr. Wrong’s real name.
    James Fielding Carsdale, Ninth Duke of Hawkshire.
    The internet did not disappoint her. It offered up a bounty of hits in a few seconds.
    Hawk had started Sunhill Investments, a hedge fund, three years ago, shortly after he’d—she let herself think it—taken her virginity and run. The company had done verywell, making Hawk and his partners multimillionaires many times over.
    Drat. It was hard to accept that after his dumping of her, he’d been visited with good fortune rather than feeling the wrath of cosmic justice.
    Sunhill Investments was based in London, but had recently opened an office in New York—so Hawk’s presence on this side of the Atlantic might be for more than the Wentworth-Dillingham wedding that wasn’t.
    As Pia delved beyond the first few hits, she absently scratched Mr. Darcy’s ears as he stroked by her legs. She’d adopted the cat from a shelter close to three years ago and taken him back to the two-bedroom apartment that she’d just moved into—still, however, on the less fashionable edge of Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
    The fact that the apartment was rent-stabilized and also served as a tax-deductible office permitted her to afford a place that was on the outer fringes of the world that