Royal Games (The Royals of Monterra) (6 page)

Stepping out into the cold winter morning, I ran over to Amanda’s idling truck and let myself in.

“Thanks for the ride.”

I must have said it more gruffly than I intended to because she glanced over at me as she backed out of the driveway and said, “I know it’s none of my business, but there’s something I want to ask you.”

None of her business. Like that ever stopped anyone here from constantly giving their opinions about everything.

“Why are you trying so hard to make yourself mad at him?”

I opened my mouth to respond and couldn’t. Amanda had always been someone I admired and respected. I couldn’t lie to her. Because if I was being at all honest with myself, it was an effort to stay mad at him. It didn’t feel natural at all.

“Since I’ve known you, you’ve always been this happy and mellow person. Which you haven’t really been since you got back. And especially not since he got here.”

She flipped her brights on, given that we were the only ones on the back road this early in the morning.

“I’m not sure what to say,” I finally admitted.

She shrugged. “There’s probably not much to say. I think it says a lot about Rafe that he has this kind of effect on you.”

Amanda reached over and turned on a radio station, leaving me to my thoughts. Had I really changed that much? And why was I working so hard to be angry with Rafe?

I knew why. Because it was the only way to keep myself safe from him. I ran through my list. He knew too much. He’d made me feel too much. He’d betrayed me and humiliated me.

Maybe you should let him explain why,
something inside me said. The voice sounded a lot like my aunt.

I told her to be quiet and closed my eyes, trying to get some sleep on the way into the city.

Whitney had asked to take my shift at the diner, and I couldn’t say no. According to Rafe, I never said no. But in this instance it was justified, because she needed the money more than I did.

It should have given me time to study, but instead I drifted off. Facedown, on my keyboard.

Which I discovered because the smoke alarm started going off. I awoke with a start, my face throbbing from all the places where the keys had poked it. “Sylvia!” I called out, racing downstairs. I didn’t smell any smoke.

She was taking a nap on the couch, oblivious to the sound.

I burst into the kitchen, but there was no smoke there either. The oven wasn’t even on. It was then I realized that the alarm wasn’t coming from inside the farmhouse.

It was coming from the guesthouse.

That was seriously all I needed. I was pretty sure that we had no insurance on the farm, so if the whole place burned down, we’d have no way to replace anything, and then we really would lose it all.

I knocked on his door, but I didn’t think he could hear me over the alarm. So I let myself in and saw the kitchen was full of smoke. Rafe was reaching out for the burning pan on the stove.

“Wait, don’t!” I said, but I was too late.

He dropped the pan on the floor as he realized he was burning his fingers. I rushed over, grabbing the pan with a spare dishtowel and putting it in the sink. I hit it with the towel until the flames went out. I opened the window over the sink to let the room ventilate.

Without thinking what I was doing, I took Rafe’s hand and put it under the faucet. I turned on cold water and held him in place, letting the water take away the sting. It didn’t look too bad. I didn’t typically deal with burns because animals didn’t have a tendency to burn themselves.

I was about to tell Rafe that when I suddenly became very aware of the physical situation I had put myself in.

He was pressed against my back. He must have bent his head, because I could feel his lips very close to my neck. He was breathing on that sensitive spot right behind my ear. His arm was against my waist as I kept his hand under the water, and he just seemed to radiate this warmth that I wanted to sink into.

This was not good.

Chapter 6

Correction—it was very, very good. So good I didn’t want to move. Which was the bad part.

“Trying to cook for yourself?” My voice sounded shaky. That connection between us, the one I’d felt when I met him for the first time, was still there. And so strong. Stronger than I had expected. Like a million ropes tethered us to one another.

“Trying. Not succeeding,” he murmured, and he must have moved his head because now I could feel his breath in my hair and it sent sparkly shivers all through me. I was so painfully and achingly aware of him pressed against me. How strong he was, and how amazing this felt. His heart pounded quickly against my back. My own heart was matching him beat for beat.

“Why don’t you get Marco or Gianni to help you?”

“They aren’t here to cook for me. They’re here to protect me,” he said, and I could feel the words against my skin.

I accidentally sighed. “The smoke alarm didn’t concern them?”

He reached over to the sink with his other hand, which pressed us even closer together. My heart ricocheted around in my chest. He turned the water off.

“That happened a lot while you were gone. I think they got used to it.” He was saying the most innocuous things, but every word felt like a physical caress. I should have moved. He should have moved. Neither one of us did.

I had to close my eyes against the emotional and physical onslaught when he put his hands on my upper arms. My palms were damp. Not from the water. He literally made my palms sweat. I gripped the edge of the sink.

His hands moved slowly from the top of my arms down toward my wrists, and then he trailed them over to my waist. I could feel his breath again on the back of my neck. He was going to kiss me there, and then I was going to lose all control and reason and maul him.

I’d had all that I could take. I pulled away and walked across the room, grabbing an extra dishtowel to dry my sweaty palms.

“You could teach me.”

I blinked rapidly. “Teach you what?”

He didn’t miss how high my voice had become, and he gave me a slight smile. “Cooking. So I don’t keep catching things on fire.”

I was so glad he was talking about cooking and not about anything else that I stupidly agreed. “Okay. But just know that what you were doing was not cooking. That’s called burning.”

And he already knew a lot about making things burn. Me, in particular.

He headed toward his bathroom, brushing past me, getting me all riled up again. He reached under the sink and pulled out a tube of ointment.

“I can’t believe you want to stay here,” I blurted out nervously. “This whole place is smaller than your bathroom in your palace.”

He finished putting the ointment on his burn and put the tube back down. “It is small, but there are other benefits to being here.”

He was talking about me. Did he have to have such a sexy voice? I leaned against his table and mentally pleaded with my knees to not give way. I was going to properly freak out now.

But then I saw his laptop. He had been playing
World of Warcraft
, and he was in an unfamiliar area.

Which wasn’t possible, because I had been everywhere and done everything in that game. “Wait, is that the new expansion?”

“It is,” he said, coming closer than I was comfortable with. There were some papers on the table, and he hurriedly shuffled them together and put them into a folder.

“How do you have that? It doesn’t even come out for another two months.” I couldn’t help it. I reached over and pulled up the map to see the names of the new lands. So unfair! I had been dying for this expansion and the new playing class it was going to introduce.

“A perk of being a prince, I guess. Do you want me to get you a copy?”

I did. I really, really, really did.

And I wasn’t doing a very good job of hiding my response. Because he suddenly looked way too self-satisfied. He knew how badly I wanted it. He was the only person I’d ever met who truly understood my gaming addiction. It helped that he had one of his own. We had instantly bonded over our mutual obsession while we were on the show. I almost smiled as I remembered the night he had snuck a laptop into my room so that we could play
Mortal Kombat X
. I usually felt like an oddball, because most girls weren’t into those kinds of games, but Rafe acted like it was the coolest thing in the entire world. He loved that I got something so important and basic about him. I’d felt the same.

“If not, I understand. I do have the new
Call of Duty
, if you’d like to play that instead.”

He turned on his big-screen TV and showed me the paused game. I never got to play console video games anymore—just the ones I could play on my computer. My fingers itched to pick up one of the controllers.

If he suddenly whipped out a plate of candy bars and a chocolate cake, there was a strong possibility I might never leave the guesthouse again.

No wonder he didn’t mind staying here.

“I actually have to finish studying, and then I have this rehearsal thing tonight at the school.”

“Speaking of which,” he said as he walked around the couch and grabbed something off the kitchen counter. It was only when he tossed it to me that I realized it was a set of keys.

My keys.

“I had your truck fixed.”

That brought me crashing back to reality. “I asked you not to do that.”

“No, you told me not to do that, and I did it anyway because it needed to be done.”

While part of me was outraged that he’d done something I’d asked, okay,
told,
him not to do, another part of me was touched and grateful. I didn’t know which face to show. I was floundering. If I was nice, he’d think he had a chance still. But If I was mean, I’d be acting like an ungrateful, spoiled brat.

So instead I asked, “What are you doing? What kind of game are you playing?”

“Game? I’m not here to play a game.” Then he came and stood right in front of me. He couldn’t possibly have missed my sharp intake of breath. He stood so close we could have kissed if either one of us moved forward just an inch. Then I stopped breathing completely while he said, “The only games I play are of the video game variety. But if this were a game, I would win. I don’t lose.”

The rest of my day consisted of unkind thoughts about arrogant, conceited men who believed they could do whatever they wanted. It was like real life was some video game and Rafe thought he had a god mode cheat. It got worse when I started up my truck. The engine purred, and I realized he had done a lot more than just replacing the battery.

“I’ll pay him back,” I told myself, as a way to make things okay. He would be very far down the list, though, given that some of the other debtors had the ability to make us homeless.

He only had the ability to make me insane.

While working at the diner, I thought of what Amanda had said about how I was trying to make myself angry at him. Logically, he had done something nice and thoughtful. And I was mad at him for it? I couldn’t rationalize that he was implying I was too weak or was unable to do it myself. I was sure that never even entered his mind. He saw something that needed to be done, and he did it. That’s how Rafe was.

Part of me expected him to show up at the diner again, but he didn’t. Instead, just before my shift was supposed to end, I got a visit from Stuart.

That would be Stuart, the flower delivery guy, with whom I was on a first-name basis thanks to Rafe.

“Stuart! What are you doing here?”

He held a large bouquet of sunflowers. He didn’t have to say anything. I knew they were for me. I’d told Rafe once how much I liked sunflowers and how I missed them in the winter. And somewhere in his royal bloodline he had an ancestor who must have been part elephant, because he never forgot anything.

“You know the drill, Genesis.” He set the flowers down on the counter. “Enjoy!”

I did know the drill. The drill was he told me I had flowers, and I would tell him to bring them to one of the widows in Frog Hollow. “Wait!” I called after him. But apparently he had forgotten the drill himself, as he was already out the door and climbing back into his delivery truck. Stuck, I took the note out and read it.

Thank you for saving me today and preventing me from burning the house down.

—Rafe

P.S. I had Stuart deliver flowers to all the women on your list, so you can keep these.

Then I had to deal with dueling desires—I wanted to strangle him and kiss him at the same time. He needed to stop sending me flowers, but how could I not be touched that he’d had flowers delivered to all of the widows in our town? He had gone out of his way to make a lot of people happy. That kind of thing probably wouldn’t even have occurred to most men. They would have just been mad that I didn’t accept their gifts and then punished me by not giving me more.

Not Rafe. He had to go and be twice as thoughtful and considerate.

We technically weren’t supposed to use our phones while at work, but this required some feminine backup. I texted Whitney.

FLOWERS!!!!

She immediately responded, but she didn’t say what I had expected.

Send me a picture because Christopher hasn’t brought me flowers since we got married. I’m pretty sure I’ve forgotten what they look like.

Where was my female solidarity? I glanced around before I answered.

That’s not what you’re supposed to say.

My phone buzzed with her quick reply.

Sorry, just overwhelmed—and on top of everything else, I have to take Mere to a birthday party tomorrow morning at 7:00 that’s apparently being hosted by the devil.

After apologizing and telling her that we would talk soon, I put my phone back in my pocket. Laura came in to relieve me so that I could head over to the high school. I left the flowers at the diner. I’d let the customers enjoy them.

I didn’t want to admit that part of me wanted to take them home and keep them in my room. I knew that if I did that, though, Rafe would know somehow (even if I was sneaky) and then he’d misinterpret my actions to mean something that they didn’t.

And I needed to keep the lines between us very clear.

When I got to the school, Nicole picked up on my not-so-great mood. “What happened now?”

“He fixed my car.”

“The nerve of that jerk! Want me to lay into him?” Her sarcasm implied that I was overreacting. She didn’t have all the details about my past.

I was usually the one doing things for other people. So I probably should have been fine with Rafe doing stuff for me. But I had worked so hard to be independent. To stand on my own two feet after having every moment of my life controlled by someone else. I understood that Rafe wasn’t trying to control me. He was just being kind. But something inside me instinctively reacted negatively whenever he did things after I told him not to.

We were standing on the stage where they had just finished putting together the balcony for the
Romeo and Juliet
scenes. Sarabeth was in the process of climbing up the back side of the scenery to get onto the balcony, though the set appeared wobbly.

“Is that safe?” I asked Nicole.

“Technically speaking? Maybe. But it’s okay. We’ve got someone coming to help out with building scenery.”

From her evasive tone I knew who she was talking about. “He’s a prince. He doesn’t know how to build sets.”

“You know I can’t turn anyone away. We need all the help we can get.” She walked off with her clipboard, telling Sarabeth to come down until they could get it properly tested. Sarabeth looked crushed. She was performing a scene with Malcolm Schroeder, and he was the most popular boy in the entire county. She looked at him the way I used to look at Rafe.

And speaking of Prince Fibbing, my entire body knew the second he entered the auditorium. Like I was attuned to his presence and every piece of me stood at attention when he came into a room. All of the teen girls on stage turned to watch him walk down the aisle. He jumped up onto the stage, greeted everyone, and came to stand next to me. “What play are you doing?” he asked. He seemed oblivious to his newly formed fan club.

There were so many things I wanted to say to him. I wanted to let him know he couldn’t send me flowers and fix my truck. That it wasn’t okay for him to be living in my guesthouse and to basically be infiltrating my life. That he was turning into a stalker. A gorgeous, tasty, brilliant, charming stalker, but a stalker nonetheless.

Mostly, I wanted to ignore him, but Sylvia had raised me better than that. “They’re doing scenes from
Romeo and Juliet
, and some other plays. Love stories and fairy tales, that kind of thing. And it’s not just scenes from plays. It’s a talent show, so there’s singing and dancing and other stuff.”

He was standing too close. I swear he did that on purpose. “What’s wrong with fairy tales?”