Free To Dance with a Prince by Cara Colter Page A

money.
    Both things had given her a little bit of motivation to keep going on those dark days when it felt like she could live no more.
    Tonight, when she opened the door to the apartment that had given her both solace and sanctuary, she was taken aback by how fresh her wounds suddenly felt.
    It had been six years since it had happened.
    A grandmother who had just picked up her granddaughter from day care walking a stroller across a street. Who could know why Meredith’s mother, Millicent, had not heard the sirens? Tired from working so hard? Mulling over the dreams that had been shattered? A stolen vehicle the police were chasing went through the crosswalk. Meredith’s mother, Millicent, had died at the scene, after valiantly throwing her body in front of the stroller. Carly had succumbed to herinjuries a few days later, God deaf to the pleas and prayers of Meredith.
    Now, the apartment seemed extra empty and quiet tonight, no doubt because today, for the first time in so long, Meredith had allowed herself to feel connected to another human being.
    Meredith set her bag inside the door, and went straight to the bookshelf, where there were so many pictures of her baby, Carly. She chose her favorite, took it to the couch, and traced the lines of her daughter’s chubby cheeks with her fingertips.
    With tears sliding down her cheeks, she fell asleep.
    When she awoke she was clutching the photo to her breast. But instead of feeling the sadness she always felt when she awoke with a photo of her daughter, she remembered the laughter, and the happiness she had felt today.
    And felt oddly guilty. How could she? She was not ready to be happy again. Nor could she trust it. Happiness came, and then when it went, as it inevitably did, the emptiness was nearly unbearable.
    Meredith considered herself strong. But not strong enough to hope. Certainly not strong enough to sustain more loss. She was not going to embrace the happiness she had felt today. No, not at all. In fact, she was going to steel herself against it.
    But the next morning she was aware she was not the only one who had steeled herself against what had happened yesterday.
    If Meredith thought they had made a breakthrough yesterday when she had ridden the horse and Kiernan had danced in the courtyard with her, she now saw she was sadly mistaken.
    He had arrived this morning in armor. And he dancedlike it, too! Was the kiss what had done it? Or the whole day they had experienced together? No matter, he was as stiffly formal as though he had never placed his hand on her rump to sling her into the saddle of his horse, as if he had never walked in front of her, chatting about his childhood on the palace grounds.
    Meredith tried to shrug her sense of loss at his aloofness away and focus on the job at hand.
    She had put together a modified version of the newlyweds’ dance from the internet and Prince Kiernan had reluctantly approved the routine for An Evening to Remember. She had hoped to have some startling, almost gymnastic, moves in it, which would show off the prince’s amazing athletic ability.
    But the prince, though quite capable of the moves, was resistant.
    â€œDoes the word sexy mean anything to you?”
    Something burned through his eyes, a fire, but it was quickly snuffed. “I’m doing my best,” he told her with cool reserve, not rattled in the least.
    But he wasn’t. Because she had glimpsed his best. This did not even seem like the same man she had danced with yesterday in the courtyard, so take-charge, so breathtakingly masculine, so sure.
    The stern line of his lip was taking on a faintly rebellious downward curve. Pretty soon, he would announce enough and another day of practice would be lost.
    Not that yesterday had been lost.
    She sighed. “You know the steps. You know the rudiments of each move. But you’re like a schoolboy reciting math tables by rote. Something in you holds back.”
    â€œThat’s my