A/N: Weird how the most emotional stories are the most interesting (and fun) to write! That's why this is done so fast. I've got plans for this family... :)
§ § § - January 16, 2009
"Herregud," Christian muttered when Leslie had finished explaining to him, in pure monotonic shock, what Roarke had told her. "If I didn't know better, I'd say someone at Sundborgs Nyheter was clairvoyant." He tried to pull himself together and went to gather her in his embrace. "So for now you're out of a job, told to stay here till the baby arrives, and given to understand that you must figure out what to do with the remainder of your life once Mr. Roarke has joined this...this tribunal."
She nodded, the movement faint and jerky, her eyes almost fixed like a doll's. "That's what he said."
"I expect you'll want to talk to Rogan about the job," he ruminated, as much to himself as to her, "but it'll be some time, I think. We have to talk, Leslie, I'm sorry—we really need to discuss this now. We haven't even touched on it, and I think it's because you never truly wanted to face up to it." He lifted her head with two fingers under her chin till her stunned gaze met his; she looked so deeply shocked that he softened and kissed her forehead in an attempt to reassure. "I told you you're not alone in this. Whatever happens to you will happen to me, the triplets, and the baby. You have me, Leslie, and I promise you, I'll do all I can to help you, whatever the decision. But you know we must talk about this."
"I don't even know where to start," Leslie whispered, and at last her eyes filled with the tears he'd been expecting. He remembered reflecting to himself once, when he'd been temporarily on the outs with her, that she cried a hell of a lot, even for a woman; but he knew her biological father had violently discouraged her and her sisters from crying, so he'd decided perhaps she was just making up for lost time. But he could understand her reaction now; the job she had with her father had been such an important part of her life that he himself had drastically altered his own life to allow her to keep it. Now there were other forces controlling their destiny, it seemed, and they might just need the full year Roarke had told them he had left to him in order to decide where they would go from here.
Christian smiled at her. "Perhaps the best thing to do is wait for tonight, when everyone else can reasonably be expected to be asleep and we should be able to rely on our not being interrupted. There's no need to actually reach a decision now, you know. We do have that year you said your father mentioned. It's only that this is the time to begin processing the subject, exploring the possibilities."
Leslie nodded in that faint, jerky motion again. "Okay."
Thankfully, she felt a little calmer around ten-thirty that night; she had had a few hours to begin absorbing the astounding revelations Roarke had passed on to her, and while they still made her gut churn like a maelstrom every time she remembered their phone conversation, she didn't feel as though she were hovering on the edge of catatonia anymore. "It's only a job," she told her reflection in the mirror as she squeezed toothpaste onto her brush.
But what a job! her reflection seemed to retort. You'll never find another one even remotely like it! And besides, you never went to college; all you've got is a high-school diploma. It looks like your working days are pretty much over. Lucky for you, you have young children to raise, and a new baby on the way. You'll be preoccupied with that for the next eighteen years or so, and that'll take you well into your sixties. By then you'd be expected to retire anyway, or close to it.
"Oh, really, and that's supposed to make me feel better?" she muttered around a mouthful of toothpaste. "And when this baby is old enough to move out, or at least head off to college...well, then what'll I do?"
Who knows, maybe Christian will be retired. When you send this baby to college, he'll be getting close to his seventieth birthday. He makes more than enough to easily support you and all the kids, and besides, he's a prince...the two of you could always volunteer to represent Lilla Jordsö at formal parties and state functions and that kind of thing.
"He'd hate that," she informed her reflection smugly and spat out her toothpaste hard enough for it to splatter around the bowl of the sink. "Don't you ever tell him you thought of that. So I suppose you think there's a chance that by the time this baby is about to head for college, one of the triplets might be married at least, and I can look forward to grandmotherhood? What a life. I don't mind being a stay-at-home mother, but what in the world would I do...especially once all four children are in school? Even housework goes only so far, and it's not like I have the perfect stay-at-home hobby like writing stories or designing and sewing my own fashions for sale. I have to have something to do besides lie on the sofa and read Myeko's favorite bodice-rippers all day!"
"So we'll talk about that too," said a voice from behind her, and she started violently and dropped the toothbrush before sagging toward the counter and catching herself with both hands on its edge. In the mirror she could see Christian lounging in the doorway, grinning at her with enormous amusement. "My apologies, my nervous mouse of a wife."
She stuck out her tongue at him in the mirror and got a laugh out of him, and rinsed out the toothpaste, holding the brush under the faucet for an extra moment or two. "So how much of my partially inner dialogue did you hear?"
"Enough to realize you're feeling a bit adrift in the wake of finding that you've been shoved out of your job and it's been handed to your cousin on a silver platter. It's too bad you never turned out to be a writer, even of diaries. The life you've lived thus far is the stuff of novellas. If you decided to publish your autobiography, you might have a bestseller on your hands." He laughed at the face she made. "Easy, my Rose. It's not as if we were given a mere three days to decide all this. Something tells me this will merely be the first of many discussions we'll have about this topic until we reach some sort of conclusion, so don't fret over it. It'll take many discussions to work it out, I'm certain."
"I was thinking that too," Leslie agreed a little glumly. "Well...let's see if we can get the kids down to sleep, and then I guess we have that first talk."
The children were fortunately worn out after the anniversary party the family had thrown for Christian and Leslie, and it didn't take long to get them tucked in and snoozing away. They put out the lights, crawled into bed and settled down, and let a few uneasy minutes elapse before Christian murmured, "There's no point in procrastinating, my Rose." He rolled over toward her. "Tell me, where do we begin?"
She settled on her side to face him so they could talk without awakening the children. "Well...since you caught me talking to myself in the bathroom, we might as well begin there. If I'm out of a job, then what happens next?"
"That's a good question. Has there ever been any sort of job you thought you might like to try doing, simply to see if you liked it or turned out to be good at it?"
"No," Leslie admitted at reluctant length. "Nothing I think I'd be any good at, anyway. I don't exactly have a skill set that has potential employers beating down my door begging on their knees to hire me. I just knew, almost from the time I first started going to the plane dock with Father and Tattoo, that I wanted to have some part in the fantasy-granting business, even if it was only tenth-class go-fer and errand girl and messenger." She grunted to herself. "As in the sort of messenger people kill in lieu of the sender."
Christian snorted with mirth and had to stifle it with one hand. "You exhibit more self-deprecation than anyone else I've ever known. So when you received your completion certificate, you went directly into business with Mr. Roarke, then?"
"Yeah, that's about it. Well, more or less. I mean, I was already part of it; graduation just meant I could do it full-time. I never gave so much as a fleeting thought to ever doing anything else. For all the good it's doing me now."
"So what you mean is that, since you supposedly have no marketable skills—and you can be assured I'll address that misconception later—you'd best not leave Fantasy Island. Which tells me that you don't want to leave it, do you?"
"No, I don't. But what would we do then? Or more correctly, what will I do?"
Christian quietly cleared his throat. "All right...let's work from that angle. Tell me first, exactly what is your father planning to do before he's forced to join this tribunal, whatever that is?"
"He has to train his replacement, naturally. And it has to be Rogan, because he and Rory are the only other ones on the island who're capable—and Rory's only nine years old. There'll probably have to be a fairly lengthy training period, if Rogan has questions or some situation he isn't sure how to get out of..."
When her voice trailed off, Christian prompted, "So then Mr. Roarke would be there as a consultant of sorts, perhaps?"
"Well, I don't know...that wasn't what I was thinking. When Father contracted the bone-eating disease, and Rogan showed up out of the blue and got Julie and me out of a pair of deteriorating fantasies, he just jumped right in and took charge, as if he knew all along exactly what he was supposed to do. I just told him what the situation was, and he went in and solved our problems like they were nothing. So it's possible that Rogan wouldn't need much of a training period. That'd free Father to do whatever he liked till it was time for him to be part of that tribunal."
"Yes—golfing, fishing, sailing, whatever," Christian kidded. "But no more fantasy-granting, one presumes. Now, would Rogan still need you as his assistant?"
"That's another question I don't know about," Leslie admitted. "Rogan might offer me the option. But then again, he might be uncomfortable with my being his assistant because, while he'd be in charge of the fantasies, I'd be owner of the island, and that's a weird arrangement, to say the least. It would be like you answering to Anton or one of your other managers."
"Wait a moment here...you wouldn't own the island yet. Mr. Roarke will be retired, my Rose, not deceased," Christian reminded her.
Leslie sighed. "Well, Father wouldn't have retired, not voluntarily at least. If it were his choice, he'd keep on going till he was either physically incapable, or just outright dead. I'll have to ask him about this tribunal business, but my impression is that being part of that would mean he'd leave the island somehow. So that'd mean that the island would revert to my ownership and I'd have Rogan running the place."
"Hmm. Well enough. That would place quite the burden on your shoulders, you know. Whether Rogan needed an assistant or not, you would suddenly find yourself in your father's administrative position as owner, honorary lord—or, forgive me, lady—mayor, and the ultimate law authority. I don't think he's ever considered training you in the day-to-day operations of the mundanities of life."
"True," Leslie murmured, frowning to herself; it had never occurred to her that this would be the case, simply because she'd never thought of it. "Well..."
After a few seconds he chuckled briefly again. "All right...presuming you don't want stewardship and ownership responsibilities, you would do...what?"
She released a long sigh. "I guess I'd end up selling the island to Rogan."
"Selling it!" Christian repeated, so astonished that he spoke almost loudly enough to awaken the children.
"Well, what else should I do?" she demanded in a half-whisper, as if trying to make up for his high volume. "If I can't run it in any of Father's capacities, then what good am I? And do you really think I'd just hand it over, like a trinket?"
"Leslie, Leslie," he broke in, squeezing her arm near the shoulder. "Of course that isn't what I mean. It's only that...well, it's not that small an island. Even if it were—think of it, my Rose: selling an entire island like that? What would you charge for it, for fate's sake? And Rogan would probably never be able to pay off the mortgage, no matter how well he ran your father's business. You can't honestly expect such a thing to work out and not radically change Fantasy Island and its denizens, and probably for the worse. I say that because the only entities that would be likely to meet the selling price would be enormous multinational corporations, or other governments. You'll find exceptionally few islands, tropical or otherwise, that are owned by a single individual nowadays."
She sighed deeply. "Oh boy. I'm starting to wish we'd never waded into this. I just never realized what this kind of thing entails. People dream about being rich enough to buy their own island, but when you get into all the logistics, it doesn't seem worth it."
Christian laughed softly and teased, "Undoubtedly those same people might wish they had your problems. Perhaps what you could do is simply turn over your father's business and administrative functions to Rogan, and remain owner of the island, whether in residence or absence. And that brings us around to the question Carl Johan brought up last month: moving here to Lilla Jordsö."
"Oh...fate have mercy," she breathed, and he grinned at her use of the jordisk expression. "I never...we treated it like it was hardly an option."
"Perhaps we did, but it is an option nonetheless. What would you prefer to do?"
"Huh," she grunted. "Let's see—all our friends are on Fantasy Island; we have much more privacy; we have our own home; the island has controlled access. Gee, I don't know, what do you think you'd do?"
Laughing softly, Christian conceded, "You make several good points there—and, as luck would have it, you appealed to me with my own complaints as well. All right, let's try approaching this from another angle. Suppose for some reason, we didn't have the choice: we must return here to Lilla Jordsö. Tell me how you would feel, and what you would prefer, whether to live here in the castle or have our own home as we do now."
It took some time before she could respond; Christian waited in patient silence, his hand drifting caresses along her shoulder, cheek and hair. Finally she admitted, "Well, to be perfectly honest with you, I think I'd vote for moving here, into the castle. We have this suite set up for us already for when we visit, so we could just take permanent occupancy, and we could have rooms assigned to the kids. Since I don't have friends here outside of the family, I'd have company if we lived in the castle; I could talk to Anna-Laura and Amalia, and maybe I'd end up being advice guru for Louisa and Adriana and Liselotta, and possibly even Anna-Kristina and Margareta, the way you are for Rudolf and Roald and Gerhard." He snorted with amusement at that, but let her go on. "You could still go in to work at your office in Sundborg whenever you wanted; and together I guess we'd be doing assorted charity appearances and maybe the occasional state visit to other countries. We wouldn't have to go through all the red tape of buying a place to live somewhere and thus probably having to get a car on top of that, and there'd be built-in babysitters, housekeepers, cooks... And if we moved here, we wouldn't have to worry about the children's education, would we? I think you've told me that college in Scandinavia is free, so tuition wouldn't be a concern, and money we set aside for that now could go toward buying a house."
Christian noted, "We actually don't have to live here to take advantage of that. Because they're part of the royal family, the triplets are jordiska citizens, even though they weren't born here. That means they're automatically entitled to a tuition-free university education here."
"I see," she murmured. "Well, it looks to me as if it's more to our advantage to stay on Fantasy Island than to move here."
"Does it?" he queried, amused again.
"Well, what would you want to do?" she tried to press him.
He laughed a little. "My darling, you forget one thing. For me, home is less a place than a concept. Wherever you are, that's my home."
She found his hand in the dark and wrapped hers around it. "That's right...you said as much at that press conference. I wanted to show you how beautiful I thought that was, but since we were in a roomful of nosy press types, that would've made headlines for a month." He let out a soft laugh of appreciation and squeezed her hand.
"I almost wish you'd done it now, whatever it may have been," he teased. "Well, I suppose at least we've dipped our toes in the water on this. There's a great deal yet to talk over, but it's quite late and we'll think better after some sleep." He drew her hand to his lips and kissed the back of it. "I love you, my Leslie Rose. Get some rest now."
But it took her a long time to doze off; every time she reflected on what an enormous change had just been suspended over her head, she was afraid she would be physically sick. She still had doubts, too, that Christian could possibly be as content living so far from his home country as he made out to be. It's gonna be one very long year, Leslie thought gloomily, her eyes drooping in spite of herself, but her subsequent dreams filled with dark clouds and foreboding images.