Morning came with an unfamiliar feeling to it. Nearly every day of the last nine years had involved waking up to one of two things: either Dylan was there, jumping on her bed to wake her, or the alarm clock did the job instead, telling her it was time to get Dylan dressed and out the door, and hurtle towards the always-endless list of things she had to do.

Today, instead, she was woken by a smell that made her mouth water.

Breakfast? Was that bacon and eggs? Did she smell syrup?

She was in the wrong room. She was on the living room couch, and in front of her there was a tray of mostly-eaten food there, and an empty bottle of wine, and…

She sat up straight as it all came rushing back to her. The strange, sudden departure off into the unexpected after nearly a decade of a predictable everyday life. The handsome man and the ski trip. The sunset hike and the cozy evening wrapped in his arms on the couch. It had all just felt so good. All of it. It had felt so right, and so easy, even as each step forward had felt like venturing into the unknown. And that must be him, still in her home, making her breakfast.

She almost laughed at the thought. A doctor was here, in her home, making her breakfast. And not only that, but a wealthy, foreign, absurdly good-looking doctor, who was surprisingly down to earth and refreshingly interested in every little thing she had to say.

And there was something else about him, something bigger he’d told her. She struggled to remember. What was it that he’d said just before she’d drifted off?

“Ah, you’re awake. Good morning.”

Her eyes shot open as she remembered what his admission had been and heard his voice simultaneously.

“Would you like some breakfast?”

She nodded, standing and allowing him to lead her to the table on autopilot. She sat down hard in the chair, looking at the veritable breakfast feast laid out on plates before her.

“You’re a prince,” she blurted out, apparently taking him a little bit by surprise.

“Ah,” he replied, looking a little chagrined for reasons she couldn’t quite understand. “So, you remember.”

She nodded.

“Kind of a hard thing to forget.”

He raised his eyebrows appealingly and then lowered his voice.

“Is it a problem?”

Paige shook her head.

“No, not a problem. Just…unexpected.”

He laughed.

“Well, you’re pretty unexpected yourself.”

He winked at her, and she remembered what had led her down that whole rabbit hole into the unknown yesterday. That face. The way every gesture made everything inside her melt.

“You’ll have to forgive me; I can’t flirt properly until I’ve had my coffee.”

“Right,” he said, a winning smile stretching across his face. “Then I’d better give you this.”

She gratefully received the cup, sipping it tentatively to check the temperature, and then deeply to help her get a handle on everything going on. And as she did, she felt the gentle tug of recognition. She looked down in front of her. She’d been wrong; it wasn’t pancakes. There were waffles in front of her, ringed by bacon and eggs cooked absolutely to perfection.

She did not own a waffle maker. She shot a glance towards her own kitchen, where there was not a dirtied pot or pan to be seen.

As if to answer her realizations in real time, Kehlan spoke.

“I have to admit, I did not make this. I wanted to have it ready for you when you woke up, and I figured what better breakfast could I give you than the best breakfast in town?”

Paige smiled.

“Alvin’s back at work already?”

Kehlan took a sip of his own coffee, then nodded.

“He is. Seems to be doing pretty well, considering. If I were his doctor, I would have insisted on him getting a day of rest. I didn’t see his chart or anything, but…”

“Knowing Alvin, his doctor probably did tell him to stay home and rest. He’s a great chef, but he’s not always great at following other people’s directions.”

“Yeah, I was starting to get that in talking to him. I have to say, though, the other waitress at the Coffee Cup isn’t nearly as pretty as you are.”

Paige nearly spit out her coffee.

“Well, Dale’s a 40-year-old man, so…”

Kehlan shrugged.

“I’m not saying you didn’t have a starting advantage.”

Paige smiled through bites of her breakfast, enjoying the warmth of her kitchen table in the morning as well as the warmth of Kehlan’s presence.

She loved mornings with her son. The rambunctiousness of his love and the flurry of life he brought to everything that he did. But sitting here with Kehlan now, eating in comfortable quiet, Paige felt herself relieved to have found something that, until that moment, she hadn’t realized was missing. There was a peaceful quality to the morning with Kehlan that she knew as soon as she got it that she had been needing for such a long time.

After a few minutes of this welcome peace, Kehlan spoke.

“So, do you have questions? Usually, people have questions.”

Paige felt her eyebrows involuntarily raise.

“Oh, definitely. I’m just not sure what they are yet.”

“That’s fair. I’m here when you want to ask them. Although it’s really not as big of a deal as most people think it is. It’s just a title, more than anything.”

Paige struggled to cut through the satisfied haze that surrounded her feelings of last night.

“Supporting role?”

He nodded.

“My presence is required for things. Grand openings, social occasions. But it’s nothing to do with me. It’s all just status, just…” he paused, as though he weren’t sure he wanted to get into it. But then he pushed onward.

“Have you ever heard of wasta?” he asked.

“Is that some kind of food?”

“No, it’s an Arabic word that’s…hmm, hard to translate exactly. It means something like social standing, or clout. It’s a mixture of who you know and what you do. Reputation, as well as family reputation.”

Paige poured syrup over her perfect waffle as she replied.

“I think I understand.”

“Right. So, just by virtue of being born who I am, I automatically have a large amount of wasta. And that’s useful to people. To anyone. It doesn’t matter that I don’t hold any actual power—just being able to credibly say you know me makes it easier to get things done in my country. So, people get to know me, and are always trying to get a piece of my time. Not because of anything I do, or anything actually about me, but just because I’m a walking wellspring of wasta.”

“That sounds…tiring.”

Was she actually sympathizing with a prince? It seemed as though she was. If anyone had asked her a day ago, she wouldn’t have thought it possible, but here she was, listening to him talk about his impossibly remote life while sitting in her cluttered dining room, and seeing the genuine regret for his own position in his expression. Kehlan wasn’t complaining. He was just explaining. But the explanation struck Paige as horribly sad, and horribly tiring.

“That’s why I’ve spent so much time in other countries. To some extent, that may be why I became a doctor. I wanted to actually do something, rather than just be something. You understand?”

“I understand. But you went back? You live there now.”

He nodded.

“It was a compromise. My family would allow me to practice, so long as they also got to loan me out for ceremonial events and parties for people who the crown wants to favor. I feel used, sometimes, but it’s a truce. And it lets me do what I need to do to feel like I’m making a difference with my life, while still making my family not feel as though I’m a waste of a privileged upbringing.”

“That feels…” Paige searched for the word she meant, but couldn’t quite find it. “Harsh.”

He shrugged.

“It may sound that way to you, but that’s mostly culture, I think. We found a way to get on with things and keep everyone happy. Or equally unhappy. On the whole, it’s worked out.”

Her breakfast temporarily forgotten, Paige leaned back with her hands wrapped around her coffee cup. There was something sad in the way he said things had worked out. Something worrying him. She pressed him gently.

“Doesn’t seem like it worked out if you’re stuck living somewhere you don’t want to live, always feeling used.”

“To be honest, I never minded being stuck there so much before I met you.”

The same feeling of stunned disbelief that had hit Paige when she first realized he was flirting with her at the Coffee Cup hit her again. He’d been a distraction. A completely impossible distraction when she’d met him yesterday. Telling him about Dylan had brought him closer to her real life—to the real world where she lived—but then the news that he was a prince had just pushed him further out of it again.

To have him talk like this now felt like new territory. It was a threshold that Paige both wanted to cross and felt that she couldn’t. So, she stepped back over to the safe, distant side of it and changed the subject.

“Well, you’ve still got two more days, don’t you?”

If it bothered him that she redirected them to less emotionally charged ground, he didn’t show it.

“I do. I was rather hoping my official Stockton tour guide would have another great day in store for me.”

A smile. More butterflies. This man was the best distraction ever.

“As a matter of fact,” she said with a grin, “I do.”

They finished breakfast with nothing but light, flirty conversation, though the thought of how good it had felt to fall asleep in Kehlan’s strong arms the night before kept surfacing in Paige’s mind when she least expected it. After that, he waited while she took a shower, and changed her clothes, and desperately tried to corral her wild, unpredictable emotions, and stop them from running away from her the way they had the day before.

Today would be different. Today, she would keep it under control, and not forget who he was. She would not forget that he was just a tourist. He was just passing through. And she’d known for a long time that there was too much she was responsible for to let herself get all bent out of shape over a man who wouldn’t stick around.

But she knew, as soon as she saw Kehlan’s excited face waiting for her in the living room, that that was going to be easier said than done.