Royal Games (The Royals of Monterra) (7 page)

So he’d picked up on the disdain in my voice when I’d said those words. “There’s nothing realistic about them. If you lose your shoe at midnight, you’re just drunk.”

For a second I thought he was going to put his arms around me. I must not have been far off because he put his hands in his pockets instead, like he was making himself not touch me. Or maybe I was wildly conjecturing. It had been known to happen. “You didn’t used to feel that way.”

His voice sounded pained. But he was right. It was unfair that he knew practically everything about me, even my deepest, darkest secret. But the reverse was not true. I hadn’t even known who he really was.

Sarabeth had apparently worked up enough nerve to approach us. She stared at Rafe for a moment, and I couldn’t blame her for her nervousness or her adoration. Finally she blurted out, “I, uh, know, um, who you are.”

“So do I,” Rafe responded, his lips rising up slightly at the corners. I could see from her expression that that was not what she had intended to say or how she’d intended to say it. He so dazzled her that she’d stumbled over her words. I had so much empathy for her, because it still happened to me and I was around him all the time.

“Oh. Okay then.” She appeared flustered. “Uh, Miss Brady sent me over here to get you.” Nicole stood by the balcony set and waved Rafe over.

“Duty calls,” he said, giving my shoulder a squeeze. That sensation traveled down to my heart, squeezing it too.

Stop it,
I told myself for the billionth time.
He hurt me. He humiliated me
. My traitorous heart still sported the scars from his betrayal and lies.

Nicole put Rafe to work on a different set. I saw him pull out his phone, and if I had to guess, I’d have said he was on YouTube looking up how to hammer in a nail. Because there was no way he had ever done that before in his life. Instead he put on some music, plugging in his earbuds. Then he went to work on that scenery like he had been building things his whole life.

My mouth might have been slightly agape. I had a strong temptation to confront him and ask him how exactly he knew how to build things. But Nicole intercepted me as I walked across the stage. “You don’t want to be with him, so let him work. Leave him alone.”

“For your information, he’s the one not leaving me alone.” I ignored the fact that I had been on my way to talk to him.

She ignored it too. “You want him to leave you alone? Then send him a message. Go out with someone else.”

I had grown up with the boys in this town. They were either already involved with someone else or I’d known them for so long it would be like going out with a brother.

Then she managed to land on the one exception. “Isn’t that Tommy Davis back there?”

Tommy Davis. He was that guy from high school who was always called by his first and last name together, mainly because I never knew him very well and we were basically strangers. He was sitting in the back row of the auditorium, texting on his phone. I remembered that he had a younger brother who was still in high school. He must have driven him and was waiting around for the rehearsals to finish.

My sixteen-year-old self had harbored a massive crush on Tommy Davis, but since he was Brooke’s boyfriend, and then her husband, he had always been off-limits. While Whitney was the poster child for a successful young marriage, Brooke and Tommy were the opposite. They’d only been married for six months before they filed for divorce. It was quite the scandal in town, and it had made things awkward for everyone because they’d both stayed in Frog Hollow.

It had never even occurred to me to talk to Tommy because I didn’t think he’d be worth the drama. But considering that I was heavily embroiled in my own personal drama, how could a little more hurt?

He would most likely not be interested, but I wouldn’t know unless I tried, right? Lifting my chin, I left the stage and marched up the aisle. I wished I had a hairbrush. Or Lemon here to do my makeup. Before I could say anything, he glanced up and smiled widely at me. “Hey, Genesis.”

I came to a stop, surprised. I had been carefully constructing a potential line-by-line conversation in my head and he’d disrupted it. “Hi, Tommy. I was just thinking about you yesterday.”

At that, he put his phone down. He looked nothing like Rafe, which right now was in the pros column. He had light brown hair, bright blue eyes, and was just a little taller than me. “Oh? What were you thinking?”

His question had a slightly seductive tone to it, which made my stomach lurch sideways. If Rafe had said it, I probably would have melted into a pile of redheaded goo, but Tommy Davis saying it felt a little squicky.

I was probably just reacting to the residual Brooke on him. “About how nice you were to me when I started high school.”

He blinked a couple of times, as if trying to remember. I could see the moment when he did. “Oh! Right! I showed you around.”

And then his ex-wife had tried to ruin my life, but I left that part out.

I couldn’t help but peer over my shoulder, back at the stage. Rafe had stopped what he was doing and was staring directly at us. He had his arms crossed across his chest, and his face had gone from fallen angel to avenging angel. I was a little scared. I knew he’d never hurt me, but right then he might have done some bodily harm to Tommy Davis. I stepped into his line of sight so that the two men couldn’t see each other.

Having never asked a guy out before, I didn’t know the right way to go about it. Aunt Sylvia enjoyed lecturing about letting a man chase me, but I never had the heart to tell her that men did not do much chasing as far as I was concerned.

Well, excepting whatever nonsense Rafe was up to right now.

I started to clear my throat, but then Tommy Davis spoke up. “Hey, are you doing anything tomorrow night?”

Chapter 7

Tommy Davis surprised me by asking me first. Like he’d been able to read my mind. Or he could understand my awkwardness and took one for the team to spare me further embarrassment.

“Doing?” I repeated.

“Yeah. We should hang out.”

Hang out? What did that mean? I didn’t speak guy. Was that the word in his native tongue for a date?

I guessed if I wanted this to be a date, I was going to have to lock it down. “Where and when?”

He stood then, and I saw his younger brother coming toward us. He was like an emo version of Tommy. He walked past us without slowing. “I’ll come by your house at seven. We’ll figure something out. See ya later!”

He went after his brother, and the teenage girl still living inside me was giddy. When I returned to Nicole’s side, that teen part of me practically shrieked, “Tommy Davis just asked me out!”

The rest of me wasn’t too sure about it. I worried that my behavior was some combination of a teenage dream finally realized and wanting to make Rafe jealous.

Which I should not have wanted to do. Why did I care what Rafe thought? Why would I want to make him jealous? Wanting him to be jealous implied something deeper and more emotional that I didn’t want to examine.

“Of course he did,” she replied. She was watching Rafe work, and he was currently engrossed in what he was doing. The part of me that wanted him to be jealous was miffed that he was basically ignoring me after I had gone to so much trouble to get his attention.

But when I considered Nicole’s words, they didn’t make sense. “What do you mean by that?” Had she bribed him to do it or something? Was she so worried about my self-esteem that she had somehow talked Tommy Davis into it?

“His caveman genes couldn’t help it.”

Now I was even more confused. “Again, what?”

“A dominant alpha has moved to town and wants you, so the only way the other eligible men can respond to the threat to their masculinity is to try to get you first.”

The thought of Rafe wanting me did inexplicable things to my ability to breathe. “That makes no sense.”

“It’s all instinct and genetics. It doesn’t have to make sense. But I minored in anthropology, so I totally know what I’m talking about. It’s the same thing where the women in the town will either try to mean girl you out of the way or befriend you to get closer to that magnificent specimen of man.” She looked startled, as if she realized what she had just said. “But not me. Because I’m totally your friend.”

Should I be more concerned that she’d felt the need to tack on that last sentence? I decided not to analyze it. Instead I told Nicole I had to go. I had plans to do some PvP with my guild later on and I wanted to get home.

I did not want to think any more about caveman or cavewoman impulses. I particularly did not want to think about what my personal ones were urging me to do.

I stayed up later than I probably should have and thwarted my master plan of getting up before he did. I got up at my regular time (a time that should be banned from all clocks) and looked out my window before I got dressed. Sure enough, Rafe was out back bringing hay and feed into the barn. Aunt Sylvia would be up soon to make breakfast.

I decided to do the most sensible thing that I could: go back to bed. That would mean forgoing my favorite meal of the day, but it would also mean I could avoid Rafe.

Unfortunately, I was one of those people that when I was up, I was up, no matter how tired I was. I wanted to sleep more, but my internal clock wouldn’t allow it. I stayed in bed defiantly, even when the smell of Belgian waffles and bacon wafted upstairs. My stomach gurgled and protested, miserable to be missing out.

I turned over, opened up the top drawer of my desk, and pulled out a Snickers bar from my candy stash. It wouldn’t fill me up, but it’d have to do until I could get to school.

It was a Saturday, but I had labs to make up that I’d missed earlier in the week. The hours seemed to fly by faster than an Internet startup, and I was surprised when it was time to go home.

Trying to delay the inevitable, I stopped by the library to get the list for the book drive. Our librarian was extremely ambitious and wanted to create a world-class library on a small-town budget. While I applauded her drive, we didn’t have the money to get it done. She sent me out to beg people and companies to donate their old books, and I typically ended up with romances and thrillers. I’d never gotten even a fraction of her massive list completed.

You can imagine my surprise when I walked in to see the floor covered with opened and unopened boxes. “What’s all this?”

Bonnie was prancing around the library like some kind of demented sprite. “It’s all the books from my wish list! Every single one of them!” She unpacked several books, laying them out on the table and smiling at them like they were the children she’d never had.

“But . . . how?”

“Prince Rafael. He talked to me after the town meeting and got the list. They arrived this morning.”

I shouldn’t have asked. I should have known. That must have been what he had to talk to the town council about, since Bonnie also served as a councilperson.

I drove away faster than normal, because I was trying to decide what I was going to do to Rafe when I saw him. He couldn’t just hijack my entire life. He didn’t get to make these kinds of decisions for me. He couldn’t wave his money around and do whatever he wanted. There had to be repercussions for his actions.

I went inside, calling out for Aunt Sylvia. She didn’t respond, and I remembered that she and some of her friends had planned a shopping trip in Iowa City. She wouldn’t spend any money, but she enjoyed it as a social activity. I went into the kitchen, intending to go to the guesthouse and give Rafe a piece of my mind.

A rhythmic sound outside made me stop, and I went to the kitchen window that overlooked the backyard to see what it was.

Rafe was outside chopping wood. At first, I shook my head at the ridiculousness of it. He was actually chopping wood. Back in Monterra he probably had a servant just for wood chopping. And the wood-chopping servant would have some underling to do most of the work. I expected him to get the axe stuck or to aim for a knot that might glance his blade the wrong direction.

But he wasn’t doing it wrong. No, he was swinging that axe with strength, precision, and the perfect amount of momentum—and it was obvious he had done it before. I couldn’t even make fun of his outfit. He had on the right kind of boots and gloves, as well as dark jeans and a button-down shirt.

Even his stance was right. He stood square to the wood and had his legs spread a little wider than his shoulders. I had seen wood chopped before, but there was something different about watching him do it. The power he wielded, the satisfying thunk as his blade neatly split the pieces, the way he engaged his entire body on that one repetitive and intriguing task.

He must have been doing it awhile, because beads of sweat clung to the ends of his black hair. He stopped, leaving the axe in the stump. My stomach hollowed out and all my anger fled when he took his shirt off, laying it on the snowy ground. He had a white tank top on underneath, and he retrieved the axe to keep chopping. I didn’t know whether I should feel quite that much disappointment over a tank top.

I watched as he swung and hit, swung and hit. Over and over again. Like he was a machine with only one program to run. The wood was no match for his strength. The muscles in his arms flexed and rested with each swing. I liked the way they tightened and stretched his skin. I knew he was strong, but I was impressed by how strong he really was. It was so . . . masculine. And thrilling.

He would stop every once in a while to push over the wood that didn’t automatically fall into the large pile he had created.

My mouth went completely dry, like somebody had shoved it full of cotton balls, when he lifted up the end of his tank to dry the sweat on his face. I got a good peek at his abdomen, which looked like somebody had airbrushed it on. My skin went hot as I remembered the last time I’d seen him without his shirt on, how he had kissed me and held me, how I had touched him . . .

As if he sensed he was being watched and fantasized about, he chose that moment to look up.

I dropped to the floor like a sack of potatoes. I tried to hold my breath and not make any sound at all. Maybe he hadn’t seen me. Maybe I had gotten down fast enough.

There was a knock at the kitchen door. My heartbeat pounded in my ears
. Go away! Please just go away and don’t make this worse!

But not being able to read my mind, and showing that he wasn’t averse to doing things that embarrassed me, he called out, “Genesis?”

I stayed put. The door wasn’t locked. If he walked in, the jig would definitely be up. Would he come inside? It didn’t seem like something he would do. Given my luck, though . . .

As I considered my options, I was starting to edge my way along the floor. Then there was a knock at the window. There stood Rafe, still in his tank top, looking down. He raised one eyebrow at me. I had a flush that I could feel all the way to my toes.

Getting up, I went over to the door to let him in. He came inside with an amused expression on his face, chilly air rushing in behind him. It did little to cool me off. My body swayed toward him, and I forced myself to take a step back. I knew my face had gone so red it probably matched my hair, but I remembered why I had gone searching for him in the first place. It wasn’t to admire his many assets. It was to confront him about the library books.

So before he could say or do something that might make me forget my intentions, I said, “No more gifts. Can I make myself any clearer than that?”

Even I flinched at the sound of my voice. There was a flash of hurt in his face that was so brief I nearly missed it. Then he asked, “Which gift are you talking about?”

“All of them. But especially the library books.”

It was then that I noticed he had brought his shirt in, because he chose that moment to put it back on. I was glad I didn’t have to worry about being distracted by more rippling muscles when I was trying to be mad.

“That wasn’t a gift for you. It was a gift for the library. And now you don’t have to worry about finishing up the book drive. It’s finished.” He said this like he couldn’t understand what my objection might possibly be.

“That’s
so
not the point!”

“What is the point?” His demeanor was calm, but I could tell I had provoked him. “For you to spend hours working on something you don’t need to work on? You have too many other things on your plate. I’ve taken this off.”

I couldn’t be bought and paid for. A voice whispered,
That’s not what he’s doing
, but I ignored it. Six months ago I would have thought it was romantic. Now, it was just too much.

“Send them back.” Petulant and sulking, party of one. I didn’t want to act this way, but it was literally the only thing I had to keep him at bay. He wouldn’t leave. He wouldn’t stop pursuing me and insinuating himself into my life. He wouldn’t stop making gestures and being sweet. I had to put a stop to it, but other than being angry, I didn’t know how.

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not sending them back.”

“You should. They must have cost you a fortune.”

He sat down at the kitchen table. “It’s just money.”

Just money. How I could use that “just money” right now! I thought of how much we needed it. But I couldn’t be upset over how he chose to spend it, because I knew all I had to do was ask and he would give me whatever I wanted. Happily. Cheerfully.

But it would be like he owned me. Like I had to forgive him for everything that he’d done because he’d thrown around enough money to make my life better. It made our relationship totally unequal. I didn’t know how to explain to him how small it made me feel. How inadequate. It was one of the many reasons I needed him to leave me alone and let me get on with my life. I wasn’t going to become a princess, and he wasn’t going to become an Iowa farmer.

I let out a long sigh while flexing and unflexing my hands. “I can’t do this right now. I have to get ready.”

“For your date?” His eyes flashed with such force, I felt taken aback.

How did he know? “Not that it’s any of your business, but yes, I have a date. So if you’ll excuse me, you can see yourself out.”

He got up so quickly from the chair that it nearly tipped backward. “Is that what you want? For me to leave?” He was usually so even-keeled with his emotions I didn’t know how to react to his raised voice.

“Yes, that’s what I want.”

As he slammed the kitchen door shut behind him, I had to ask myself whether or not that was actually true.