Falling for the Heiress

Tess Kendrick balanced her three-year-old son on her hip and descended the steps from her grandmother's private jet. A hot summer breeze whipped the whine of aircraft engines around her, causing little Mikey to bury his head against her shoulder at the noise. At the base of the stairs, a member of her grandmother's elite security service gave her a defe-rential nod while a uniformed steward quickly moved her luggage from the cargo bay to the trunk of a waiting black Lincoln SUV. It had been over a year since the bottom had fallen from her world, a year since the scandal of her divorce had forced her into exile. Granted, that exile had been in a royal palace on the Mediterranean and her maternal grandmother, the queen of the tiny jewel-like kingdom of Luzandria, had been most gracious offering Tess and Mikey accommodation, but Tess couldn't continue to live in those gilded confines. Isolation, homesickness and a desperate need to get on with her life had finally brought her back to Camelot, Virginia. The family estate outside the picturesque little town was where she had been born and raised. It was where her parents still lived, for part of the year, anyway. But most important of all, it was home. "Do you require help with the child, ma'am?" "Thank you, but I have him." She hoisted the towheaded boy clinging to her neck a little higher, adjusted the oversize bag hanging over her other shoulder. A massive case of nerves remained hidden by her soft smile. "And thank you for the escort. You've all been most kind." The solemn soldier with the heavy French accent dipped his head in a deferential bow. "It was our pleasure to be of service, madam." He motioned her ahead of him. "I will see you to the car." He hadn't smiled back. It was almost as if it were against the rules, the code or whatever it was the men trained to serve Her Majesty followed. Even as a child on summer visits to her grandmother with her siblings, it had seemed to Tess that smiles were allowed only by personnel in closest service to the royal family and their guests. Even then, any ex-pression of friendliness had seemed subdued. As much as she loved her grandmother, the for-mality of the palace was one of the reasons she'd become so restless to return. Though her basic nature yearned for less structure, she'd learned to live with propriety. Her energetic and endlessly curious little boy didn't need to suffer such constraints, though. His enthusiasm had been suppressed enough before they'd more or less been forced to leave the country. His father--her now ex-husband--had not only pre-ferred that the child not be heard, most of the time he hadn't wanted him in his sight. She hugged her precious son more tightly, her narrow heels clicking on the tarmac as she moved quickly toward the waiting vehicle. Her prince had turned into a frog, her charmed life into a nightmare and her personal reputation had been totally de-stroyed in the process, but there wasn't a thing she could do to change that harrowing bit of history. She could only remind herself of the phoenix that rose from the ashes and hope that her singed wings would be strong enough to lift her back up. All she wanted was to forget the past few years, to buy a house and to go back to work on her project for the Kendrick Foundation. If she'd had any idea how to restore her reputation, that would have been on her to-do list, too, but she couldn't figure out how to counter all the lies told about her without causing greater problems. The best she could do on that score was hope that people would remember her as they had known her, not as her ex and her silence had portrayed her to be, and that time would have healed the worst of the damage. Certain time would never heal some wounds, she picked up her pace. What people didn't know was that her marriage to Bradley Michael Ashworth III had disintegrated within the first yeFlynn, Christine is the author of 'Falling for the Heiress ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780373280643 and ISBN 0373280645.