Royally Claimed - By Marie Donovan Page 0,2

with us.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

He pointed a thick finger at her. “But we expect you to have some common sense. Carry your cell phone with you and stay away from cliffs and those rodeos they call bullfights around here.”

“And call Dr. da Silva if you start feeling funny.” Her mother rummaged in the papers on the table. “Here’s his number. But I don’t know…”

“I’ll be fine,” she assured her mother. “I’m just not…ready to go back to Boston yet.”

“Understood,” Dad said. “But just say the word and I’ll hop a flight back to São Miguel to collect you.”

“Thanks.” She smiled at him. Master Sergeant Robert Cooper, United States Air Force (ret.), was an expert at hopping flights and collecting people.

The rest of the evening was spent helping her parents pack, mostly her mother since Dad could pack anything into a small duffel bag and proclaim himself well supplied.

When Julia brushed her teeth that night, the memory of that dark-haired man in the plaza popped to mind. Was she staying behind just in case he was Frank? And what on earth would she do if it was her former lover? Her first lover, she mentally corrected herself. The first man she’d loved.

FRANCISCO DUARTE DAS Aguas Santas stared at a wall of paint chips until spots formed in front of his eyes. Yes, he knew the villa needed a fresh coat of paint, but why was he the one picking out colors? He glanced at Benedito, whose dark brown eyes were rheumy with age. Ah, that was why he was the one picking out colors. He supposed his mother or one of his sisters could have done it, but he had offered to get the villa ready for Stefania’s honeymoon and this was little enough he could do for her.

“What do you think, Benedito? What color for the kitchen walls? Does that yellow have too much green in it?”

The old man looked at him as if he had grown two heads, or more likely, lost both testicles. “Don Franco, this is a job for women. Women choose paint, men paint it on the walls. We are not supposed to know these kinds of things. And why do you think yellow has green in it? Yellow is yellow, green is green.”

Frank grunted. “We don’t have any women handy.”

“And whose fault is that? I am not a young, handsome duke who owns a huge ranch in Portugal and a private island here in the Azores. No, I am a poor, ugly old man whose devoted wife is far away.”

“And she’s probably glad to have you several thousand miles away, you old reprobate.”

“She is grateful for the rest. I am an insatiable man,” Benedito leered.

Frank rolled his eyes but didn’t doubt the bandy-legged old coot. After lifetimes of hard manual labor and plenty of olive oil and red wine, elderly Portuguese men were as hearty as men half their age.

“You should be so insatiable,” Benedito scolded him. An elderly lady picking out pink chips the color of a stomach remedy gave them an interested look.

Frank ducked around to the next aisle, filled with bolts and screws. Benedito followed him. “Enough about my personal life. Besides, I am thinking of asking Paulinha to start accompanying me to social functions.”

Benedito made a phlegmy sound of dismay. “Don Franco, you know that is as good as becoming engaged to her. She has been chasing you since she was old enough to walk.”

Frank shrugged. Paulinha was his sister’s best friend and had been unofficially matched with him, like the princes of Portugal who became engaged to French princesses at the age of six. A dynastic merger, rather than a matter of love. “I am thirty. It is past time for me to settle down.” He’d had enough of the hardware section and turned into the garden aisle. Everything grew well in the fertile, volcanic soil here, so all they had to do was weed and trim the grounds.

“If you had gone wild like some of the other lazy noblemen, drinking, womanizing and acting like an idiot, then I would welcome you settling down. But you have never done anything to settle down from.” Benedito shook his head. “Bah, you have wasted your youth.”

“What, working on the family estate with you, your wife, my mother and four younger sisters all looking over my shoulder?” Once he was finished with his education, he’d returned home to the family estate, or fazenda, as it was called in Portuguese. The fazenda, named Aguas Santas after