Nowhere Left to Run (The Nowhere Trilogy Book 2)

by Kat Mizera

  The added bonus was that she started dating the guy’s college-age son who was home for the summer and he was a great kid. Well, he was twenty, so not really a kid, but things were looking up for her, and hopefully for the band as well. Jay had suffered laryngitis on and off for months now, so we’d been forced to take a break. It gave me time with the kids and to get caught up at the studio, but it was tedious and I was getting restless.

  I stared at the pile of ledgers in front of me with disgust. I had three months of accounting records to sort through, but after just thirty minutes, my vision was starting to blur. Although I had accountants that handled the day-to-day activity of all of our finances, these ledgers pertained to the recording studio. Jay and I had recently invested in some new equipment and the accountants wanted us to see exactly where the profits were coming from so we could focus our attention on that part of the business. Instead of working solely on recording live bands, we’d branched into all sorts of synthesizers and computerized effects. It was Jay’s side project, and I really didn’t have that much interest in it, but since I was a control freak, I had to have a handle on everything we did.

  I was distracted, though. Not only did we have the summer leg of the tour coming up, we also had more than a dozen dates to make up, which would keep us busier than usual. The three younger kids were gearing up to come with us for the summer, so I was trying to get everything at home in order before we left. Sasha was planning to take online classes this summer, so she wouldn’t be coming with us this year. The plan was for her—and her new boyfriend, Anton—to meet us in Paris at the beginning of August, where we would take a week off from touring and visit Disneyland Paris and a few other places we all enjoyed.

  The struggle to combine a busy career with our family had never gotten any easier. It seemed as though I never had any time to myself, let alone time with Jay, and with all four kids still living at home, we were usually pulled in a dozen different directions. We had all the money and help we could possibly want, but time was a different story. The record company was chomping at the bit for another album after the success of the others, though, so we had one in the works, but that meant another two years or more of touring and we hadn’t even finished this tour yet. As much as I loved it, I knew my kids needed me, especially as they got into their teenage years.

  There was a sound somewhere in the house and I looked up, frowning. It was only noon, and Luke shouldn’t be home from middle school until closer to four. The twins wouldn’t be home until five because they had tennis practice after school and Jay had said he would be at the studio most of the day, updating the computers and making sure the runners were prepared for the sessions they had scheduled for the weekend. This was a three-day weekend, Memorial Day, and all four studios were booked through Monday. It would be busy enough for both of us to be there at least part of the time, so I was trying to get as much as possible done today, before the kids got home.

  Marisol, who was now more housekeeper than nanny, had left to do some grocery shopping less than an hour ago, so it was too soon for her to be home. I frowned again, listening for any other noise, and suddenly I heard a door slam.

  “Mom!” It was Luke’s voice. “Mom, where are you?”

  “In my office, son,” I called out, getting up in alarm. Why was he home and how had he gotten here? Normally the kids rode a bus home from their private schools, unless one of us picked them up, but Luke shouldn’t be home in the middle of the day.

  “Mom, I have to talk to you right now!” Luke rounded the corner, his baseball cap slightly askew and his face red from perspiration.

  “Did you walk home?” I demanded, staring at him.

  “Mom, I need to know what this is.” He threw what appeared to be a stack of copy paper on my desk and folded his arms across his chest.

  I looked at him, then at the papers, and finally back at him. “What did you say?” I asked, a slight crease forming between my eyebrows.

  “Dammit, Mom, this is really important and I think—”

  “Did you just curse at me?” My voice rose an octave.

  “Well, no, I just…” He faltered slightly before lifting his chin just a notch. “You need to answer me about this stuff. I need to know—”

  “Oh, no, you don’t, young man.” I picked up his papers and handed them back to him. “You take your papers, get out of my office, and then knock, very politely, and ask me if you can come in.”

  “Mom!”

  “Do I look like I’m kidding?”

  He snatched the papers from my hand, stomped to the doorway, and then knocked abruptly. “Can I come in?” he demanded.

  “May I come in,” I corrected him blandly.

  “May I come in?” He wasn’t backing down and I started to get an uneasy feeling.

  Pursing my lips, I tried to maintain control of the situation. “Did you cut school?” I asked after a moment.

  “I had to find out what this is about,” he said, thrusting the papers at me again.

  “So you cut school to ask me a question?” I was irritated now. Jay and I ran a pretty relaxed household. We’d never spanked the children, and although we indulged and often spoiled them, all we asked in return was honesty, genuine effort in their school work, and respect. In eleven years, Luke had never spoken to me like this, and I wasn’t sure how to handle it.

  “Mom, stop changing the subject. We’re talking about my life here! You’ve been lying to me my whole life, and—”

  “Whoa there! Wait a minute.” I snatched the papers from him and scanned the first page. My stomach flipped a little as I read the headline of the first news article he’d apparently printed out from some sort of newspaper archive. ROCK GUITAR PRINCESS JILTED AT THE ALTAR.

  “Is it true? Was he my real father? Am I really a prince?” Luke was firing questions at me faster than I could formulate answers. This wasn’t supposed to be happening. I’d planned to tell him someday, when he was an adult, and I would have Jay and Nick with me to help explain everything. He wasn’t supposed to find out on his own—how had he found out? The newspapers didn’t know the truth about his paternity.

  “You need to tell me what this is all about,” I said as mildly as I could. “I know you’ve heard bits and pieces about what happened on that day, but why are you suddenly jumping to conclusions?”

  “We had an assignment this week,” he said, pacing back and forth in front of me. “Everyone had to do research on someone else in the class and find out something about them no one else knew. It was for my investigative journalism class. We had some guidelines, and of course all the kids in our school have a lot of celebrities and famous athletes for parents, so we couldn’t go digging around for celebrity gossip like affairs and stuff like that. It had to be stuff like who’s a sixth cousin of Bill Clinton or someone who was born in a different country or something like that. So Ariel McDuff comes in with all this stuff about me—and she says that I’m the son of that prince you were engaged to.”

  “And you just took her word for it?” I demanded, flipping through a few more pages. “This is all gossip. I was, and still am, a platinum-selling rock star who was once engaged to a prince, who dumped me at the altar. I was pregnant at the time, but it was your father—Nick’s—baby. Not Prince Erik’s.”

  He folded his arms across his chest. “Your eyes are blue.”

  “Yes.” I raised my eyebrows.

  “Dad’s eyes are blue.”

  “Yes.”

  “Two blue-eyed parents can’t have a green-eyed child, and my eyes are undoubtedly green.”

  “That’s ridiculous—your eyes change, depending on what you’re wearing.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Lucas!” The deep voice behind him startled us both and Luke spun around, coming face-to-face with Jay.

  “Jay…you’re home.” I inadvertently let out a sigh of relief.

  “You will not speak to your mother like that—do you understand me? I may not be your b
iological father, but I’m pretty sure if I get him on the phone right now, he won’t think twice about grounding you for the rest of the summer once I tell him you just cursed at your mother.” Jay rarely raised his voice, especially not in front of the children, but he’d also never heard one of them talk to us that way.

  “I’m sorry about that, but she lied to me. It’s all right there! Ariel did the research! My eyes are green, and there’s no way—”

  “Okay, stop right there.” Jay held up a hand. “First of all, there are a lot of factors involved in genetics. What most of us learned in biology twenty-five years ago isn’t completely accurate anymore. There are all kinds of distinguishing factors, including the strength of the eye-color gene that’s being passed down, as well as familial history. Your father’s mother, your Grandma Tricia, has green eyes. Obviously, that’s where you got yours.”

  “I read all these articles,” Luke continued. “I see too many disparities. I know my dad isn’t really my father—I look just like this guy.” He threw a five-by-seven picture onto the desk and I nearly collapsed. The picture of Erik had been taken when he was probably around fourteen years old, on a trip to a beach somewhere. Luke had obviously used some type of computer software to superimpose a picture of himself, taken at the beach in Hawaii last year, next to Erik. There was no mistaking the resemblance. They could be brothers. Good lord, I thought to myself, what was I going to tell him?

  Jay must have caught the look of horror on my face and seemed to be trying to formulate a response. Things hadn’t been great between us, but we loved and respected each other, so there was no way he was going to let the past come back to haunt me. Not after we’d sacrificed so much to protect everyone involved. Especially Luke.

  “Listen to me, son,” Jay said quietly.

  “No. You guys have been lying to me all of my life! You’re, like, trying to deny me my birthright or something. And that means that Skye is really my aunt, and Grandma Kari is really my grandmother! And—”

  “That’s enough.” Jay yanked Luke by the arm and pushed him into the nearest chair. “You listen to me, and you listen good. Your mother has done nothing but love and take care of you since the day you were born. She and your father have worked really hard to make your life easier, despite having divorced parents, and all of us do everything we can to make you and your sisters happy. You have money, love, fun, and a great family—would it really make a difference if that man was the one who fertilized the egg that became you?”

  “Yes!” Luke stared at us as if we were nuts. “It means I’m royalty. I could be running a whole country and—”

  “You’re eleven,” Jay said dryly. “Even if he is your father, you wouldn’t be running anything except maybe the drama club. Second, think about something else: What kind of man would walk away from his child and not even claim him? There are really only two reasons a man would do that. You have any idea what they are?”

  Luke suddenly looked very young and unsure of himself. His shoulders sagged slightly, and he looked at me. “Well, I guess if he was a jerk who wasn’t willing to live up to his responsibilities.”

  “That’s one reason. Would you think your mother did a terrible thing by protecting you from that kind of information? Do you really want that irresponsible jerk to be your father?”

  Luke shook his head slowly. “I guess not.”

  “So, what might the other reason be? Think about this, Luke. Think about what you know about the prince. How he died, what was going on when he died, and what you know about his sister—who just happens to be your stepmother.”

  “There was a revolution going on,” Luke said quietly. “He was killed when the revolutionaries found him at some safe house somewhere in Limaj. Or something like that.”

  “That’s right.” Jay leaned up against the office door, his broad shoulders somehow making me feel a little safer, though I wasn’t sure why. “And why did they kill him?”

  “Because they wanted to eliminate the men in the royal family, so they could take over.”

  “Right again. And what would happen if they thought he had a son?”

  “They would have him killed too. Probably.” Luke looked from me to Jay and back again. “So is that what happened? Did he break up with you so no one would know he had a son?”

  I sighed because the time wasn’t right to tell him but I wasn’t sure I had a choice anymore. “Nick is your father in every sense of the word.”

  “Seriously?” The look on his face would have been comical had this situation not been so deadly serious.

  I didn’t dare look at Jay and just reached out a hand to Luke. He took it grudgingly, and I pulled him closer to me. “Your dad, the one who raised you, loves you just as much as his biological daughters. When I asked him to be your father, he said yes without any hesitation.”

  “Casey.” Jay looked as nervous as I felt, but there was no going back now.

  “Your biological father, Prince Erik, was afraid something might happen to him because his country, Limaj, was on the verge of civil war. His cousin, King Anwar, had threatened to get rid of anyone who might have a right to the throne and Erik wanted to protect us. You probably know that Limaj has been in a state of war for more than a decade now. It’s a sad, oppressed place and nothing good would come out of anyone knowing that it’s your bloodline. Your father died to protect you—he loved you very much and he left it to me and Nick to make sure you grew up healthy and happy. I was going to tell you in a few years, when I thought you could handle it, but it doesn’t make any of us love you any less. And I hope it doesn’t make you love us any less.”

  Luke shifted uncomfortably. “No, I guess not. I just wish I’d known him. Or something.”

  “I know that.” I pulled him closer to me, still somewhat amazed at how big he’d gotten. He was only eleven but he was already tall for his age and still growing. He had sandy brown hair, incredible green eyes, and a strong, square chin. He looked more like his father every day, and sometimes my heart constricted painfully when I looked at him. In the weeks before Erik had left me, we’d made so many plans for the unborn child I’d been carrying. Our love had been so strong I’d never imagined anything could ever come between us. Of course, we hadn’t counted on Anwar murdering almost all of the royal heirs in order to secure the throne. The country had been in a civil war for a decade now and had steadily grown more and more unstable.

  “Do you understand now?” Jay asked softly. “Do you understand how dangerous this information can be? The fact that your father is dead doesn’t protect you if word gets out that he has an heir. That makes you the heir to the throne because King Anwar doesn’t have a son, which could start an entirely new revolution—but it could also put a target on your forehead. The leaders that are in power now would do anything to get rid of you. This isn’t a small thing, Luke.”

  I suddenly saw maturity in Luke I wouldn’t have expected from someone his age, but it was written all over his face as he nodded. “I know.” He looked at us. “If my father died to protect me, I’m not going to do anything stupid. At least not now. Maybe in ten years or something, when I’m grown up, but I’m not dumb. I wouldn’t do anything like that, even though I wasn’t acting very smart today.” He looked at me. “I’m sorry I acted like a jerk, Mom. I was just so embarrassed at school and then I got mad at you for not telling me.”

  “It’s all right, honey.” I smiled at him. “I was planning to tell you, but not this soon and not like this.”

  “I think you need to be prepared when you go back to class, to talk about all the reasons why two blue-eyed parents can have a green-eyed child,” Jay said lightly. “There’s tons of research on the internet—take a look at it.”

  “I will.”

  “And I don’t ever want to hear you talk to your mother like that again. Are we clear?”

  “We’re clear.” Luke lowered his eyes. “I didn’t mean it, Mom. Really.”

  “I know that.” I motioned with my hea
d. “Now, I think you need to go back to school. Would you like me to drive you?”

  “I’ll take him,” Jay offered. “Why don’t you finish what you were doing and I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  “Are you sure?” I looked at him. “Didn’t you have a lot to do at the studio?”

  “I got most of it done. I came home early because I wanted to talk to you about something, but it’ll just take ten minutes to take him to school and come back.”

  “I’ll see if I can make us some lunch,” I said.

  “Great.” He winked at me and then followed Luke down the hall, leaving me completely flabbergasted.

  39

  Casey

  I watched them go and then sank down into my chair. What had just happened? I’d been completely unprepared for the conversation we’d just had. How long had he been thinking about the fact that his two blue-eyed parents should not have given birth to a green-eyed child? And when had he taken the picture of Erik from his father and stepmother’s house so he could scan it and then alter it to add his own photo to it? It was too much at once, and I suddenly ran upstairs to my room. I went into the closet and pulled out some photo boxes where I kept memorabilia. Pictures, ticket stubs, performance programs, plane tickets, and all kinds of newspaper clippings—some about my music career, but many about other things. One of the things I’d kept was the engagement announcement that had gone out to all the newspapers when Erik and I had decided to get married.