Royal Games (The Royals of Monterra) (3 page)

“Oh!” Mrs. Mathison called out. “That’s the nice young man who sent us all those flowers.”

At that, Rafe turned to me, the question in his eyes evident. I looked down, hoping my cheeks weren’t turning red because he had found out. When he was sending me all those apology flowers, I obviously couldn’t accept them. I didn’t want them. I could have sent them back, but I decided he deserved to pay somehow. So instead I told the delivery guy to bring them to the widows in our town. I figured they would get more use out of them than I would.

“I’m afraid I’m going to get second-degree burns on my corneas just from looking at him,” Nicole said.

The counter had never been cleaner, but I needed to keep my hands busy. “Then stop looking at him.”

“I should. He’s a total Jules Verne, anyway.”

That made me stop. “A nineteenth-century science-fiction writer?”

“No, Miss Literal,” she said with a smile. “He’s a good twenty thousand leagues out of my league.”

Whitney brought Rafe a pop without responding to his thanks and rejoined us. “So what is his plan while he’s here? Is he just going to wander around town like some free-range douchebag?”

I could tell she was trying to bring the snark for my benefit, but her heart wasn’t really in it. “I honestly don’t know what he thinks he’s going to accomplish while he’s here.”

The bell rang again, and Max’s daughter Amanda walked in, still in her scrubs. She was a single mom, a nurse, and the owner of the town’s only bed and breakfast. She stopped by my house all the time to check on Aunt Sylvia, and she was one of the nicest people I’d ever met. I saw two massive men behind her. With a start I realized that one of them was Marco, the bodyguard Rafe had had with him on the show. When I first met Marco, I thought he was just a member of the crew’s security. It wasn’t until later I’d found out that he was part of the twins’ personal detail.

Amanda kissed her dad on the top of the head and came over to join us.

“Who are they?” Nicole said, practically pouncing on her as she sat down at the bar. Amanda placed an order for chicken fingers and fries to go. It was the only thing her autistic son would eat. I put it in with the kitchen and stayed close so that I could hear what she said. Why was she with Rafe’s bodyguards?

“Marco and Gianni. They’re here with Prince Rafael. They’re staying at the B&B.”

I knew Amanda didn’t get a lot of business at her B&B, so while part of me was glad that she was making money, I wondered why they weren’t staying closer. I knew Marco in particular wouldn’t like being that many miles away from Rafe every night.

“Are they single?” Nicole asked.

“I don’t know,” Amanda said. “All I do know is that they eat like we’re going to run out of food soon.”

That must have made her happy. Amanda had always loved to cook. Her uncle ran the diner, and I remembered her working in the kitchen with him when she was in high school.

“I’ve been experimenting with Monterran dishes, and they’re nice enough to say they like them and eat every single bite.”

“How long are they staying?” I asked, trying to be as casual as possible. I didn’t want to be irritated that Amanda was another person who could have called or texted to let me know what was going on but didn’t. I knew she had other things to worry about.

“They paid for a year in advance.”

My shoulders sagged in. Now I couldn’t wish for Rafe to go away because Amanda needed the money as much as we did. Her son’s father had left them after they got the diagnosis, and she really struggled. I knew the commute alone killed her. She probably should have moved to Iowa City to be closer to her job, but all of her family was here in Frog Hollow, and her family was her support system. One of her nieces had even learned something called applied behavioral analysis so that she could work with Amanda’s son on a daily basis.

The kitchen finished Rafe’s order, and Whitney retrieved it, bringing it over to him and putting it down so hard the plate rattled. Rafe thanked her anyway.

“This is why I try to stay on your good side,” I said to her when she came back.

“Ha. Joke’s on you. Ask Christopher. All of my sides are bad.”

I knew that wasn’t true and impulsively hugged my friend. She didn’t like hugging people, but she tolerated it for me for a few seconds. Then she took his check over to the table and stood there with her arms folded.

When he looked up she said, “Just so there’s no confusion, we’re all on her side.”

He glanced at the other patrons, and I could see a hint of a smile. “I’m on her side, too. I know I don’t deserve her.”

Every woman in the room sighed as my stomach started back-flipping all over the place. I asked my lungs to function normally and ignored all of the stares that had moved from Rafe to me as people put two and two together.

The kitchen finished up Amanda’s order, and I handed it to her. Then Max called me over, and for the next few minutes I was so busy that I forgot Rafe was even there.

Yes, that was a lie, but I needed the lies to get me through this.

He did finally finish his meal and took some bills out of his wallet, leaving them on the table. He didn’t say anything as he left the diner. When he drove off in his black SUV, I saw Marco and Gianni get into an identical SUV to follow him.

Whitney came over and showed me a twenty-dollar bill. “He left this to pay for his check, and he left this”—she held up a hundred-dollar bill—“as my tip. He gave me
one hundred dollars
even though I was terrible to him. This makes it really hard to be mean to him.” She sounded guilty, and I felt bad because she had done it for me.

She collapsed on a barstool. “You know your plan to have the town be against Rafe? I think that’s going to be an uphill battle.”

I had the sneaking suspicion that she might be right.

Chapter 3

We helped close down the diner, and then I carpooled with Whitney to the town meeting. Whenever there was a meeting, almost everyone came and all the businesses shut down. There were so few forms of entertainment in our town that this constituted a night out.

They held the meetings in the church. Snow had started to fall, and Whitney and I said hello to everyone as we entered. I pasted a bright smile on my face as I watched people whispering to one another and looking at me. The word had definitely spread.

After the show there had been this long period of time where everyone tiptoed around me and acted strangely. Like they didn’t know what to say or how to behave. It was Max and his constant ISU jokes that got everyone back on track. But now with Rafe here . . .

Whitney found her mother and her children. Her mom babysat the kids while Whitney worked.

“My favorite little monsters!” I said as Meredith, Beau, and Gracie all started talking to me at once. They were four, three, and two, and I was devoted to them. As they climbed all over us and fought each other, I was struck with an intense and unfamiliar longing to have a baby of my own.

My biological clock shifting into hyperdrive was so random and unexpected that I wasn’t sure what to blame it on. I mean, I always assumed that someday I would find the right man and we would fill up the farmhouse with little ones. But that was always far in the future.

I worried that my baby-making parts were acting up in response to Rafe’s flawless genes. “You’re so lucky to be their mom,” I said.

Whitney seemed confused at my out-of-the-blue statement. “You know I love them, but nobody told me being a parent would be like that summer after high school when I did an internship for that advertising firm in the city. Most of the time I don’t know what I’m doing, I have to do all the crap work, and I’m not getting paid.”

Gracie had settled into my lap. I never told anyone, but she was my favorite. “You know you’d quit tomorrow and stay home with them if you could.”

“Yes, because they are adorable and precious and I love them more than my own life. But parenting is hard.”

I smoothed down Gracie’s bright blonde hair. “Everything worth having is.”

“Yep. Including your prince.” Whitney was far too smug.

“I wondered how long it would take for you to bring him up again. I had under five minutes in the pool. So I win.”

“If I’d known there was money on the line, I would have waited longer—and I’m not letting you change the subject again. Why won’t you let him explain?”

Gracie reached for my cell phone, and I let her play with it. Having occupied her, I turned to reply to her mother. “In case you were wondering where your nose is, I found it in my business.”

Whit frowned and started to respond, but then Rafe walked in with my aunt, drawing our attention. He was helping her walk down the aisle. Amanda usually picked Aunt Sylvia up for town meetings. I wondered what had changed.

Despite the snow outside, he wasn’t wearing a coat. Just a totally impractical cream cashmere sweater, and the light color of his sweater contrasted starkly with his black hair, tan skin, strong jawline . . . I shook my head, trying to clear it. Not able to help myself, I wondered how cold it got in his homeland. I’d only been to Monterra once, during this past summer. It was such a charming country, with little chalets that looked like gingerbread houses, and green as far as the eye could see. The surrounding mountains were so tall that they still had pockets of snow at each apex.

“All that chivalry is giving me goosebumps,” Whitney whispered, interrupting my memories. “I can’t imagine what it’s doing to you.”

It was making happiness and other unwelcome feelings rise up like a balloon inside me. I had to look away as I felt him seating Aunt Sylvia next to me. “Thank you for bringing me,” she said as she eased into the pew, leaning her cane against the pew in front of us.

I couldn’t help it. I looked.

“I am always happy to be of service,” he said, before raising his gaze to meet mine. “Good evening, Genesis,” he said.

“Um, hey.” Why did he make my skin flush like this?

Gracie peered up at him. “I’m two.” She held up three fingers.

He crouched down to be eye level with her. “I’m twenty-three. That’s too many fingers.” Gracie just smiled and then stared at him through her lashes. Even she wasn’t immune.

Did he seriously have to be adorable right now? I was trying to be strong. I reminded myself that he had younger sisters. He was good with kids because he grew up around them, not because of some natural and overwhelming charisma.

Meredith spoke up. “That’s almost the same as Jen-sis! She’s old too!” I loved how all the kids pronounced my name—“Jen-sis” instead of Genesis.

Slanders to my age aside, I’d forgotten that Rafe and Dante had a birthday in October. It was weird to think that at one point I had hoped that we would celebrate it together.

Rafe smiled at the kids. He didn’t smile the same way his twin did. When Dante smiled, he did it with his whole body. There was never a question whether or not he was happy. Rafe’s smiles were slower and harder to come by. You had to earn his smiles, and you had to be paying attention to catch them before they were gone. Dante gave his smile away to everyone, but Rafe’s meant something. It made me feel even stupider for not figuring out their deception earlier.

Although, when we were together, he used to smile at me all the time.

Meredith wiggled with delight at having captured his attention. “Gwandma says you’re a pwince.”

Whitney and her mother tried to shush Meredith at the same time. They had correctly guessed that I was dying inside and wanted him to go away. This close proximity was affecting my ability to properly inhale and exhale.

“Your grandma is right,” Rafe told her.

This seemed to embolden Meredith, and she ignored the adults trying to quiet her. “Do you have a castle?”

“I do.”

“And a pwincess?”

“Someday.” His gaze was intense, burning, and directed at me. Stupid smoldering eyes.

My baby-making parts swung back into full force, letting me know they thought I was an idiot.

“I could mawwy you. Or Jen-sis! She doesn’t have a husband. She could mawwy you.”

All the blood drained from my face. Whitney’s mom picked Meredith up and carried her to the back of the room, effectively ending the conversation. Meredith protested the whole way, apparently wanting to stay and finalize suitable marriages for both of us.

“What do you think, Genesis?” he asked. He was teasing me. I could hear it in his voice, see it in the way his eyes gleamed and how he tilted his head to one side.

But I couldn’t think. Couldn’t move, couldn’t respond. I wanted to shrug off his flirting the way I’d seen Lemon do a thousand times with Dante, but I couldn’t.

When I caught my breath, I finally managed, “I could never marry you. I can’t be Princess Genesis. Think of how stupid that would sound.”

“I’ll abdicate. You don’t have to be a princess if you don’t want to be.”

“You would do that?” I forgot that I was mad. Forgot that he had hurt me. Forgot his lie. Forgot that we were sitting in a roomful of people who would gossip about this interaction for at least the next year. “Are you being serious right now?”

He must have been encouraged by my lack of animosity, because he reached out to put his hand on top of mine. Warmth flooded my hand, sending sparkling tingles up my arm and tiny shivers down my back. “Have I done anything to indicate that I’m not? I’d do anything you ask.”

Fortunately, before I could shove Gracie off of my lap like a sack of potatoes and launch myself at him, Brooke Cooper called the room to order, banging a gavel on a wooden podium. He stood up and walked toward the back of the room, leaving me.

“I’d marry him tomorrow,” I heard Nicole murmur behind me, squashing any hopes I had that our interaction hadn’t been the most entertaining thing to happen in this town since Myrtle Williams got drunk and ran over her cheating husband’s collection of stuffed moose heads with their riding lawn mower.

“You and me both,” Whitney whispered back.

“Calm down,” I told them. “He didn’t ask me to marry him. He was joking.” They exchanged amused glances, but they did stop talking.

I’m mad,
I had to remind myself.
I’m hurt. He lied to me. He humiliated me on national television. He doesn’t have the right to make me feel the things he makes me feel
.

But it wasn’t doing me a lick of good.

No, instead I watched him out of the corner of my eye. He leaned against a large wooden pillar with his arms crossed over his chest. He was the only person I’d ever met who managed to look both devastatingly elegant and completely relaxed at the same time. He had always been clean-shaven on the show, but now he had a five-o’clock shadow, which served to make him even hotter and more masculine than before, if such a thing were possible. Something about him tugged at my heart.

I might be in trouble.

Brooke’s imperious tone managed to drown out my thoughts as she directed the town council’s secretary to run through the minutes from the last town meeting. I focused on the kids and helping to keep them quiet. Brooke didn’t like being interrupted.

They discussed the upcoming holiday talent showcase for the town’s children. Nicole, who headed up the high school’s drama club, had taken it over from me this year, and I had offered to help her. She stood up to announce that rehearsals would start tomorrow night.

“Report on the church bazaar?” Brooke called out. She knew I was in charge, but she scanned the room as if she couldn’t remember which one of us peons was running it. I handed Gracie back to Whitney. I took my notebook out of my purse and flipped to the right page. I waited for her to call on me, but she didn’t.

So I stood up and cleared my throat, feeling every eye in the room on me. Correction: feeling every eye looking at me and then looking at Rafe and then looking at me again. Like they were watching a tennis match. I didn’t know what they thought was going to happen other than me telling them about the current plans and how things were coming along.

Although I couldn’t see him, I could feel him staring at me. Like he had gained heat vision as a super power and was pointing it directly at me. Suddenly sweaty and more than a little nervous, I tucked the end of my ponytail into the rubber band, getting it off of my neck.

I wasn’t going to think about Rafe. I was focused solely on my report. Our church had been built in the mid-nineteenth century and currently was in dire need of a new roof. Somehow we had to raise thirty thousand dollars.

We had planned to have a ticketed dinner, a bake sale, and a silent auction, and Nicole had recently added a bachelor auction. I had put her in charge of it, hoping she wouldn’t wreak too much havoc.

“Do you have any other ideas about how to make the event more profitable?” one of the council members asked.

I opened my mouth, but Whitney suddenly popped up alongside me. “What about a kissing booth?”

It was quite possibly the stupidest thing Whitney had ever said. Because I knew why she’d said it and what her plan was. She was going to get Rafe to volunteer for it and get us to work together.

I had to put a stop to that.

“What is this, eighth grade? And who is going to staff it? Genesis the Giraffe?” Brooke asked, lapsing out of her mayoral role and back into the high school mean girl she’d been. There were a couple of laughs, and I could feel my face turning bright red. In addition to teasing me about my height all through school, my inexperience with men was another insecure spot of mine that she poked at relentlessly.

“Why not?” Rafe’s voice stopped the tittering and Brooke’s preening at her own cleverness. Her face fell as he said, “I happen to know that Genesis is an excellent kisser.”

“That is so, so romantic,” Nicole immediately whispered. The room was so quiet I was sure everyone else had heard her.

Unwanted images and feelings flooded into me as I remembered exactly what it had felt like to have his lips against mine, how he had pressed me against him and wrapped his arms around me. How wanted he’d made me feel. How much I’d loved it every time we touched.

Then I remembered that everyone in here had seen us kiss. Repeatedly. My cheeks actually hurt from the flaming humiliation. I wanted to die. I prayed for a personal sinkhole to form under the floorboards and suck me into it.

Instead I just sank into my chair and felt thankful to Brooke for the very first time in my life as she banged her gavel and moved on to another issue.

When I could talk again, I leaned over and asked Whitney, “What is wrong with you? Where did you even come up with that?”

“I was rewatching that episode last night when Dante went to Lemon’s house and her mom talked about making him run a kissing booth and how much money her charity would make. And I thought that was totally true and we should do it given that we have his identical twin.”

“Why were you rewatching the show?”

“Um . . . er . . . uh . . .” She made little soft sounds without actually responding to my question. And I knew she wouldn’t.

“Fine. Don’t answer. But there’s no way we’re doing a kissing booth.”

She shifted Gracie from one side of her lap to the other. “Why not?”

“Because what if Brooke . . .” I trailed off, realizing what I’d nearly said. I might be mad and hurt, but I didn’t want to share him with anyone else. Especially not her.

This was the curse of an overactive imagination. I could see him, all suave and sexy, bestowing kisses on the enthusiastic women of Frog Hollow. Could just imagine Brooke waiting for her turn. And as she puckered up, I imagined that I would run over and grab her by the hair to jerk her out of line.

I put my hands on the sides of my still-warm face. I was upset about fictional Brooke and pretend Rafe.

What was wrong with me?

“You’re jealous,” Whit crowed.

Sometimes I wished she couldn’t read me so easily. I shrugged one shoulder, trying to act like I didn’t care. “It’s not jealousy. I just have all these old, bad feelings about Brooke.” Bad feelings and a rabid desire to keep her away from Rafe.