Chapter 20

The sun is barely up when Lola rolls out of bed and starts cleaning up the room in a swirl of activity that has me spinning just looking at her.

“Sweetheart, what are you doing? Come back to bed.” I reach for her when she whirls by me, but she spins away before I can get a grip on her and I’m left holding nothing but air.

“I can’t. My flight is in six hours and I have to get everything packed—plus I have to have the boxes ready to go in three hours when the shipping service is scheduled to get here.”

“Shipping service? Flight?” The last vestiges of sleepiness vanish. “Where are you going?”

She gives me a strange look. “Paris, remember? I told you that first night that it was my next destination.”

“Yes, but…” I trail off, my brain screaming DANGER even before her eyes narrow. Still, I’m in it already, so I might as well spit it out. “I thought we were doing this thing.” I gesture between her and me.

“Seriously? You’re angling to be king and that’s the most eloquent thing you can drum up? ‘I thought we were doing this thing?’ ”

“It’s early. I haven’t had my coffee yet.” I shoot her a winning grin. “And my brain is still addled from the three most fantastic rounds of sex I’ve ever had.”

She rolls her eyes. “Vacuous compliments might get you somewhere with all those bimbos you’ve been hanging around lately, but I’m made of sterner stuff.”

“Are you saying it wasn’t fantastic sex?” I ask her as I roll out of bed. “Because if you are, I’m totally calling bullshit on that.”

“Sex—fantastic, earth-shattering, mind-blowing, or otherwise—won’t stock my website. I’ve already got my merchandise buyer on high alert back home, but I need to step up my game here as well or we’re going to be screwed.”

There’s a lot in that sentence, but I choose to start the day by focusing on the positive. Especially since I think an argument might be brewing about the rest, and God knows I’ve got enough negativity to deal with right now.

“You think the sex was earth-shattering?” I ask, wrapping my arms around her waist from behind and pulling her back against my chest.

“You know exactly how good the sex was,” she tells me, pushing at my arms in an effort to get away. I hold tight, partly to mess with her and partly because she feels too good to let go.

“Maybe I don’t remember,” I tease, sweeping her gorgeous mass of hair out of the way as I bend down to kiss the back of her neck. “Maybe we should crawl back into bed and you should remind me.”

She laughs and shoots me a look over her shoulder. “Yeah, like that’s going to work.”

“It was worth a shot.” I send her the most smoldering look I can manage without cracking up. “Just give me fifteen minutes. I’ll make you come twice.”

She pauses, considers, then shoots me a wicked look of her own. “Make it three times and you’ve got yourself a deal.”

“Why stop at three?” I ask as I walk her back toward the bed. “An extra few minutes and I can—”

“Fifteen minutes is all you’ve got,” she tells me as I toss her onto the bed. “Do your worst.”

I climb on top of her, stripping off her robe as I go. “Don’t you mean my best?”

“You’re at fourteen and a half minutes. Don’t you think you should be putting that mouth of yours to better use right about now?”

“I’ll get right on it,” I tell her, right before I do.

---

“So, how many was that again?” I ask from where I’m lying in bed, propped up on an elbow watching Lola pack.

“Five.” She fires a pair of jean cut-offs at my face. “But the last two don’t count because they were overtime.”

“You could crawl back in here. I could try again—see if I can get my time down. Practice makes perfect, or so they say.”

“And here the gossip rags always say Kian’s the sex maniac. I think they’ve had the wrong brother all along.”

“Yeah, well, he’s settled down quite a bit since falling for Savvy and taking on the mantle of leadership. Someone’s got to give the gossip rags something to write about.”

“Yes, God forbid they don’t have the exploits of at least one of Wildemar’s Royal Hotnesses to write about. Whatever would they do?”

“Start making up shit about how Savvy and Kian’s relationship is in trouble, probably. Publish pics of him and some random women that were taken years ago and attribute them to the present. The paps excel at shit like that.”

“Wow. Bitter much?”

I think about all the stories they ran about my abduction, about the conjecture regarding what kind of torture I suffered and how a soft guy like myself probably gave up all the state secrets without much of a fight. After all, who can trust royalty? All that inbreeding makes us dodgy. I’m pretty sure it was the Daily Inquirer that ran that last story…“Maybe a little bitter.”

“Just maybe, huh?” She picks up the last piece of clothing on the floor and folds it neatly into her suitcase.

As she snatches back the cut-offs and shoves it in with the rest, I reluctantly roll out of bed and start to get dressed. If we’re going to argue, I’d prefer to be dressed when we do it.

“What do you say you stick around Wildemar for a few more days instead of going to Paris this afternoon?” I ask as I shrug into my shirt.

“I thought we already covered this.” Her answer is mild as she zips up her behemoth of a suitcase, like she thinks I’m still joking around.

“I’m serious. I want you to stay and I can make it worth your while.”

That gets her attention. “Are you offering to pay me to stay here and sleep with you?” She still sounds amused.

“Not exactly. I was just thinking that—”

“Not…exactly?” she interrupts. And now the amusement has faded significantly, her blue eyes clouding up with annoyance and something else as she narrows them at me. “Which part?”

“Which…part?” It’s beginning to sound like there’s an echo in here.

“Which part didn’t you mean, exactly?” Lola asks, her tone so syrupy sweet I have to fight the urge to check for a knife between my ribs. “The paying me to stay here or the paying me to sleep with you?”

The DANGER signs are big and loud and blinking bright red behind my eyes now, but it’s too late to walk away. Besides, I may be a lot of things, but a coward isn’t one of them. “Both. Neither.”

“Well? Which one is it?” Her eyes are nothing but slits at this point. “Both? Or neither?”

“I really don’t want you to go to Paris. I want you to stay here so we can see what this thing between us is.” The words come out before I know I’m going to say them, which almost never happens to me. I was taught at an early age to always think before I speak—one of those necessary traits in a future king—and I’ve never had a problem with it before.

But there’s something about Lola that loosens my tongue, that makes me say what I really feel. Then again, I do a lot of things around Lola that I don’t do with anyone else.

“You…don’t want me to go?” Her eyes are wide, which is far from unexpected considering this thing between us is supposed to be just for publicity. And considering the way my heart just started beating like a jackhammer.

Which, okay. Maybe there’s a little coward buried deep…I start to backtrack. “I mean, if you run off to Paris, how are we going to sell our new relationship to the press?”

“Like it’s a real relationship? One where both people have work commitments and other responsibilities and parts of their lives that exist separate from each other?”

I can’t help laughing. “You obviously don’t get how this paparazzi thing works.”

“If you think pointing out my lack of knowledge is going to upset me, you’re barking up the wrong tree. I was fine living my whole life without attracting the attention of overzealous paps.”

“And then you met me.”

She inclines her head. “And then I met you.”

Fuck, this is so not going the way I wanted it to. I mean, seriously, what woman in her right mind (who isn’t a gold digger) would stay? It’s not like I have anything but more headaches to offer her.

“Seriously, though. This whole story we’ve spent the last twenty-four hours concocting isn’t going to work if you go running off to Paris.”

“Well, then, it’s not going to work.” She shoves a frustrated hand through her hair and starts to pace the room. I feel bad about upsetting her, but everything inside me is screaming to keep her off that plane. Warning me that if she flies to Paris, the whole jig is up. “My flight leaves in a little over three hours, Garrett, and I am going to be on it.”

“Don’t you understand? No one will believe a woman in the first stages of a relationship goes running off to another city.”

“Maybe not in your rarified world where half of everyone’s job is learning how to manipulate the press and the public. But in the real world where I live, nearly everyone will believe it. People have relationships and manage to go to work all over the world.”

I think of the months of being chained up, of sleeping sitting up with my arms above my head while my body screamed from pain and exhaustion. “My world’s not that rarefied.”

“Dude, your world is as rarefied as it gets. And you’ve got three security guards sitting outside to make sure it stays that way.” Lola swings her suitcase off the bed with a roll of her eyes. “And I get it. I understand that you were raised to believe the sun rises and sets on you, and that every time you so much as breathe it’s national news. But really. You aren’t that special.”

Things are getting tense between us and I know I’ve got two choices. Continue down the road to a full-blown fight that will get me nothing or try to defuse the situation.

I settle for the latter as I raise my brows at her. “That’s not what you were saying an hour ago.”

Surprise flickers in her eyes, then is gone as quickly as it came. “An hour ago I was under duress,” she answers with a sniff.

I waggle my brows at her. “And here I thought you were under me.”

She snort-laughs, then slaps a hand over her mouth like she wants to pull the sound back in. But it’s so unexpected that I kind of love it. The same way I love that she talks in her sleep and has a star-shaped cluster of freckles on her left hip. The same way—

And fuck. Just fuck. I really am falling for this woman and, apparently, there’s not a damn thing I can do to keep her from walking away in three hours. It shouldn’t matter, but it does.

I just wish I knew how I got here. Lola was supposed to be a distraction, a fun means to the ends I’ve been working toward my entire life. She sure as hell wasn’t supposed to be something more for me to care about. Something more for me to lose.

What the hell am I supposed to do now?

The doorbell rings before I can figure it out, and seconds later my phone buzzes with a text. I pick it up and read the message from Samuel. Then say, “The shipping service is at the end of the driveway. Are you ready for them?”

“Yeah, send them up.” She grins, as if she doesn’t have a care in the world. Lucky her. “I can totally get used to this security thing. I love the idea of them stopping solicitors before they ever get to the door. I mean, sure, making them do it every time is probably an abuse of power, but—”

“It’s their job to do it every time. One man’s solicitor is another man’s terrorist.” The words—and my voice—are harsher than I mean them to be, but I can’t help it. Not when I’m talking about this stuff.

She shoots me an alarmed look. “That’s a strange way of looking at it.”

“Not really.”

“Why do I think there’s a story there?” She studies me with thoughtful eyes that see just a little too much. I turn away, making a show of reaching for my socks, before she sees everything I don’t want to say. Everything I can’t say.

Because there is a story there, but I’m not going to tell it to Lola—and not just because it’s classified.

It’s how they got me all those months ago. A guy and his kid selling popcorn for a local scout troop. When they’d tried to get my attention, my guys stopped them cold. I’m the one who told them to let the kid through. And I’m the one who ended up getting my whole detail murdered, guys who had been with me since I was a teenager. Men with families and children of their own. I made a mistake and they all ended up dead.

I can hear Lola in the living room, talking to Bastian as they wait for the delivery guy to make it up the driveway. They’re talking about places to eat in Paris—just a casual conversation, no big deal.

But it hits me hard, because it’s significantly more than I’ve allowed myself to have with my new detail. Not because I don’t like them, but because I do. They seem like decent enough guys. I can’t get close to them, though, can’t go through again what happened last time.

I learned my lesson when I was abducted. No way am I going to lower my guard or get so close to my detail that I end up best man at their weddings or godfather to one of their daughters. Not when one mistaken order from me can get them all killed in an instant.

Samuel recommends one of my favorite bistros, just off the Champs-Élysées, but before Lola can answer, the conversation gets cut off by the arrival of the shipping driver. I stay in the bedroom—experience has long taught me that everything is easier if I don’t show my face at unexpected times in unexpected places. As I wait, I try to come up with a solution that will keep Lola with me for just a little while longer, a solution that will let me figure out the confusing maelstrom of feelings whipping through me.

I understand that her business is important to her, understand that the whole reason she entered into this little charade with me is because it helps boost her business. But the more time I spend with her, the more I come to realize I’m in this thing for way more than another shot at the throne. I just wish she felt the same way, wish that I weren’t alone and sinking fast.

It takes about ten minutes for the guy to load up all the fancy wardrobe boxes of clothes, and I wait impatiently for him to finish. I’m determined to find a way to be with Lola long enough to figure out exactly what it is I feel for her—and if she feels anything for me.

The minute the door closes behind him, and Samuel, I’m in the living room. “Let me come with you to Paris.”

She turns to me wide-eyed. “You want to come to Paris?”

“I want to be with you. You need to be in Paris. Therefore, I’ll go to Paris too. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner.”

“But what will you do there?”

“Does it really matter? The only other thing I have scheduled for this week is a party in Ibiza, and I’d much rather be in Paris with you than on some movie star’s yacht.”

She narrows her eyes at me. “Which movie star?”

“Let me come to Paris with you and maybe I’ll tell you.”

She studies me for long seconds. “Is this for the story?”

I have a policy of being honest in all my relationships, but I’m not quite masochistic enough to answer that question with the whole truth—at least not until I have some inkling of what Lola is thinking and feeling. So I do the only thing I can. I hedge. “It’s partly about the story. But it’s also about me wanting to spend more time with you.”

She narrows her eyes at me. “Don’t you mean more time in bed with me?”

I can hear the capitulation in her voice and relief sweeps through me. “Not going to lie. That’s a nice side benefit.” I reach for her, relishing the feel of her soft, curvy body as I pull her against me.

She grins up at me, a wicked light in her eyes. “It is, isn’t it?”

“Does that mean you’ll let me come to Paris with you?”

“It means I would love for you to come to Paris with me. If we’re lucky, maybe we can even get you a seat on my flight.”

I can’t help it. I laugh. “Oh, sweetheart, you really do have a lot to learn about dating a prince.”