by Geneva Lee
“Not about the household staff. You have more important things to focus on.”
“I looked over your security proposal. There’s only one thing missing.” Norris had drawn up a plan to minimize press interference when Sarah moved from Windmoor House to London. There was no way to avoid it completely, but my old friend had a knack for sneaking people in and out of buildings. It’d been a particularly useful skill when I was hiding my relationship with Clara. Now I wanted to see my sister safely home. Times had changed.
“What did I overlook?” He leaned over my desk, peering down at the memo I’d been reading minutes before.
“Me.”
“That will require more skill than I have.” Norris straightened, crossing his hands behind his back. “It will be impossible to sneak you out of London. The press are practically pitching tents at the exits.”
“I don’t care. She’s been up there, mostly alone, since she woke up. She should have someone in her family by her side when she returns home.” I’d stayed away—to protect her—as long as possible before the announcement. Visiting Windsor without official business would have caught the attention of the press. It was yet another thing I would have to apologize for. Sarah had been briefed on most of the major changes in her family’s lives. She knew our father was dead. She knew I had a wife and child. She knew Edward had married. But knowing and confronting were two entirely different experiences. She shouldn’t have to walk through the doors of her home by herself. It was still a lot to ask of Norris, so I thought it prudent to add, “Please.”
Norris sighed and I knew I’d won. “I will need to redraw this. It will likely take me another few days to get the necessary security procedures in place and plan the timing of it.”
He reached for the memo as the door to my office burst open. We both looked up, startled, before immediately moving into defensive positions. Norris stepped in front of me across the desk even as I rose to my feet, but the intruder was a friendly face—most of the time.
People rarely asked me about my time in Afghanistan. I’d taken a new role as King and that was all they saw. But even in a suit, Brex was a soldier. He still cropped his hair close to his head. The gun he carried in a holster was visible through his jacket. He never tried to hide who he was. It made him the perfect asset to my security team. That’s when I remembered that he shouldn’t be here.
“Why aren’t you at Windsor?” I barked. He’d been reassigned from Silverstone and my illegitimate brother to head of Sarah’s security detail. The move had raised a few eyebrows internally. Brex was a notorious ladies man, and Sarah? Well, Sarah hadn’t seen a man in ten years. I could only hope her taste still skewed towards boy bands and not ex-military. Regardless, I knew I could trust Brex. He would never betray me by making a move on my sister. Plus, his heart was already spoken for, even if the woman in question didn’t return his feelings.
“I’m not needed in Windsor,” he said testily.
“Like hell you aren’t.” I rounded my desk, halfway to the door before Brex called out.
“You might want to hear what I have to say before you go running off to her.”
“I don’t have time for this.” I whipped around to face him. “She shouldn’t be left alone.”
“Don’t worry. She’s got half the staff kneeling before her already,” Brex said dryly.
“What is that, five people?” I snapped. We kept a skeleton staff at Windsmoor. It was difficult to ascertain who could be trusted with such a delicate secret.
“I think your staff is a little bigger here.”
It took a moment for what he was saying to sink in, but when it did, my head fell back and I released a frustrated groan. “How could you?”
“Have you met your sister?”
My head swiveled to glare at him. “We haven’t spent much time together lately.”
“I don’t know what she was like before,” Brex said, stuffing his hands in his pockets, “but she’s more demanding than you are.”
“That hardly matters, since I’m your boss.”
Norris cleared his throat meaningfully. I turned my glare on him and realized I was in danger of losing another staff member—and I couldn’t afford to have Brex walk from this job.
It was a lost cause. I’d wondered what the Sarah who woke up would be like and here was my answer. The same. No, she wouldn’t be exactly the same. She would struggle with everything that had happened. But now? Why would she have changed? To her, she’d fallen asleep and woken up ten years later. From the sound of it, she was still the same bratty hellion I’d dragged out of the club that night.
“I just came to tell you that I delivered your precious sister safely and to ask for reassignment,” he tacked on.
“I’ll look into it. Who do you suggest? Georgia?” I called his bluff. We both knew Georgia would eat Sarah alive—if Sarah didn’t get her first.
“If you two are done with your pissing contest, might I make an observation?” Norris broke in.
“Oh, but Poor Boy and I are just getting started.” Brex’s laugh was always easy, much like the rest of him. He was already over our squabble. “We were just about to get out a yardstick.”
“I’m sorry to put a stop to that.” His mouth only twitched slightly before he looked to me. “But if Sarah is here, might it be prudent to warn your wife?”
“Fuck.” I stomped out the door and the mousy secretary dropped a stack of papers. I didn’t even apologize.
I’d overlooked a number of things about bringing Sarah home. While I’d been concerned with getting her here safely, I’d never considered what I would do when she got here. Clara agreed that Sarah should come back to Buckingham, but to where in Buckingham? Her old room was down the hall from the quarters my family currently occupied. There were other concerns, as well. What would she wear? Should she go back to school? Now that she was here, it was real. Sarah was back. But what exactly did that mean?
Brex and Norris followed behind me, nearly matching my pace. They didn’t have quite the same incentive I did to prevent a spontaneous meeting between my wife and my sister. It was something I’d planned to control. Now that was out of my hands, too.
Sarah had barely spoken the day Clara had found her at Windsmoor House. She’s been as confused as my wife. Now that they both knew everything, the dynamics were likely to be a little different.
“By the way, Poor Boy, now would be a good time to tell me if you have any other dead family members stashed away,” Brex called from behind me.
“Brexton,” Norris said his name sharply.
“What? I’d like a little warning if his dad is going to come bursting through those doors next.”
“There’s no one else.” I stopped in my tracks, realizing I’d made another blunder as the two caught up with me.
“I just think it’s best to keep me in the loop on these matters.” Brex masked pain well, but I’d known him long enough to see past it. I trusted him with the secret about Anderson. I’d made him head of my family’s security when I’d moved Norris to my primary advisor. Why hadn’t I shared this?
It was the same reason I hadn’t told Clara. Shame. Guilt. I’d wanted to let that night go, but I never really had—or else I would have been honest with them. I couldn’t do much about it now. “I’m sorry.”
“I suppose you didn’t tell your wife, either, or so she said to the press, which seems like a pretty good punishment for your cock up.“ He shrugged as if this was some comfort. “But, seriously, I need to know about these things. I should have been overseeing the security there.”
Would it have happened differently if he had? Would Clara have ever found her way there? Would I have been given warning my sister had woken up in time to come clean? Did it matter?
It wouldn’t have mattered. Besides, there was no point entertaining hypotheticals. I had real problems to deal with, and I smelled a shit storm brewing.
“Where did you leave her, exactly?” I asked.
“She went straight to the North wing,” Brex told me. “She headed home.”
“Christ.” I started again, speeding my way toward inevitable disaster.
“Don’t have a coronary. Clara and Elizabeth are out for a walk,” Brex said, moving alongside me.
“Walks don’t last forever,” I said through gritted teeth.
“I know you wanted to be there when she got home. But what’s the big deal? It’s not like she doesn’t know the place.”
“She doesn’t know the place,” I reminded him. “Or my wife. Or my daughter. You said it yourself: have you met her?”
In my mother’s absence, Sarah had been queen of the castle. Now, there was a new queen. I didn’t have a clue what to expect when their paths crossed.
Then there was the matter of Clara. I was trying to be more open with her. I was trying to include her in decision-making. If my sister showed up in our front parlour, it was going to look like I’d failed again.
“I’m sure everything’s fine,” Brex said hurriedly, but now he was moving even faster than me.
I walked into my living room and I stopped the moment I saw her. In the hospital bed, she’d been so small and so pale. Her hair had hung around her shoulders as limp and lifeless as her last ten years. She had aged into someone unrecognizable. That wasn’t the woman waiting for me now.
She looked exactly like our mother.
I shook my head, trying to process what I was seeing. My mother was a beautiful woman. Her Greek heritage had combined with my father’s traditional British looks to create something entirely different in Edward and me. But where we shared a mixture of our parents’ traits, Sarah was all our mother. Her dark hair swung around her shoulders, setting off her olive skin and dark eyes. Despite years of being in a hospital bed, she had the full figure of a woman. I’d expected a girl to come home. Only now did it occur to me how unprepared I was.
“Hello, brother,” she said. She lounged back, legs crossed, and spread her arms over the back of the sofa with the air of a queen greeting her court. “I’m home.”
Chapter 11
Clara
After I finished my walk, I discovered my living room wasn’t empty. The doctor suggested I take a “calming walk” when I felt stressed. I’d walked the better part of a marathon around the grounds over the last few days. As soon as I entered the room, I nearly turned around and headed back out for another lap. My pulse sped up as I took in the scene before me. Elizabeth squirmed out of my arms when she saw her father. I let her go without thinking. She toddled over to him and raised her hands in the air. Alexander picked her up, his eyes watching me the whole time.
“Clara,” he said in an unusually calm voice, “meet my sister, Sarah. Sarah, meet–”
“Oh, we’ve met,” Sarah simpered with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes.
Until now, I thought she might not remember the day I found her in Windsor. It was a stupid wish. I’d sat there that day without telling her who I was, and then I’d kept my silence while my husband figured out how to deal with the fallout. But the bomb had finally fallen and she was here. She didn’t seem the least bit aware of the rubble surrounding her. No—she seemed to be enjoying herself.
Her eyes scanned over Elizabeth, narrowing into catlike slits. “And this is your child.”
It wasn’t a question. She’d been updated on major events in her family’s lives. Now, it would be up to us to find the blanks and fill them in. I’d imagined what she’d be like when she returned. I questioned how she would handle the world moving on without her. But seeing her obvious animosity, I had to remind myself that she had every right to be angry and frustrated and annoyed. The Sarah I’d painted in my mind wasn’t a real person. She was a portrait drawn from memories Alexander and Edward had shared over the years. I remembered her accident and had been horrified like the rest of the world. But I hadn’t exactly been a Royal watcher then. It felt morbid to watch media coverage and see photos of the mangled car plastered on newspapers. At the time, I’d been recovering from my first battle with an eating disorder, and I’d turned away from the news, looking for brighter spots in the world. It was like I had known then that it was different for me somehow, as if I’d had a premonition of what this family would come to mean to me. Instead of devouring details about them, I’d somehow known to wait until it was my time. All of which meant I knew very little about the girl in front of me.
And she was a girl. I didn’t doubt that. She looked like a woman. She was gorgeous—the feminine equivalent of her brothers. But where Alexander was strong, sharp angles, she was soft and willowy. She looked like photos I’d seen of their mother. Still, she wasn’t a woman. She’d missed the moments that would carry her into womanhood. Was she aware of it yet?
Sarah was born a Royal, so she had an armor she wore at all times. I saw it shrouding her. It was reminded me of when I’d met her brothers. To most, Alexander had hidden behind the cocky playboy reputation the world had assigned him and shown very little to anyone else. It had taken a lot to chip away his shell. Edward was the charming spare to the heir. They’d been hiding so many secrets for so long, both of them were more comfortable with illusion than reality. But they’d had the opportunity to grow into themselves. Sometimes, I saw them slip into that comfortable, old skin. Sometimes, it was easier for all of us to take a place on the board—the solitary King, the protective Queen, the loyal knight—than to face the truth that our true enemies weren’t opposite us, but inside us all along.
“We have a room ready for you—Edward and I,” I blurted, unable to stop the nervous chatter. “Or you can use your old room. We left it the way it was.”
“Like a tomb?” She laughed, as if this was a ridiculous notion, but she stood up immediately. “This I have to see.”
I left Alexander holding Elizabeth, looking to Norris and Brex for guidance, and followed her down the hallway to the room at its end.
“You weren’t joking.” She stepped inside and looked around. “I never thought I’d be back here.”
“Were you…did you…” I didn’t know how to ask what I was wondering. She spoke like time had passed. I’d wondered if it would be like coming home after a long night out. “I was in a coma—only for a few days—but I heard some of what was going on around me. Was it like that for you?”
“I guess we have something in common.” She looked at me as though she was seeing me for the first time. “Something like that, I guess.”
I wanted to ask more questions, but I held them back, staying near the door to give her some privacy. She walked to her bedside table and picked up her mobile. “Do you think my boyfriend’s number has changed?”
I searched for an answer, wondering if I should laugh or comfort her.
“Relax.” She rolled her eyes and dropped it. “I mean, I’m fantastic in bed, but I doubt he waited around.” Her gaze fell on the book and she grabbed it, thumbing through until she reached a bookmark. “Does she wind up with the vampire or the werewolf?”
“Um, the vampire, I think.” I couldn’t believe we were having this conversation.
“That’s a shame.” She set it down and grimaced as she surveyed the space. “For fuck’s sake, clear this out. I don’t have to sleep here, right?”
“No, we have a space for you upstairs.” I bit my lip. “I thought you might want some space.”
“I wouldn’t want to disturb your happy little family.” She continued to act cool but her words sliced through me, cutting with a sharpness that I barely felt until air hit the wound.
“I’ll show you.”
Edward and I had spent the last few days sending off for fresh bedding and curtains. We’d settled on a blush color scheme that left the suite feeling light and open. It was neutral enough that she could add her own touches—if she decided to stay.
“I hope you like it. Edward thought you’d want light after…” I trailed away. Maybe I should have kept our reasoning to myself.
“Thanks.” B
ut she sounded anything but grateful. “It’s cool if I change it, right? I’m rather accustomed to something darker.”
“Of c-c-course,” I stammered. “Whatever you want.”
“You’re sweet,” she said, and I felt her making a mental note.
She thought I was sweet. She thought she could use that. She didn’t know there was a lot more to me than that—yet.
Alexander joined us, passing Elizabeth to me when she held her arms out.
“I can’t get over how weird it is to see you as a dad.” Instead of sounding amused, she seemed disturbed. Something was off. Sarah’s physical recovery might have been miraculous, but she had a long way to go before she was okay again.
“Thanks.” Alexander grinned, completely unaware of the strange undercurrent to her behavior. “Do you like your room?”
She shrugged. “It’s fine. Not like I’ll stay. I’m old now. Don’t you have to gift me a house or something?”
“One step at a time,” he suggested. “Will you stay for dinner tonight?”
“I assumed I was. I invited a friend,” she said, flashing her teeth. “I hope that’s okay.”
My eyes flickered to my husband as I set my shoulders and forced a benevolent nod. “Any friend of yours…”
* * *
After putting Elizabeth down for a nap, I sought the sanctuary of my bedroom. I was flustered, completely overwhelmed by Sarah’s sudden appearance, but if I was being honest, being around Alexander had more to do with how wound up I felt. He’d avoided our family’s private quarters entirely since I’d agreed to let Sarah come home. For all I knew, he’d taken up residence in another wing of the palace. Seeing him had its usual effect. It was hard to be strong and gracious and fucking regal when the person who made my knees buckle was in the room.
“I’m sorry.” His smooth voice startled me, and I whirled around to see him sitting in a chair by the fireplace. The curtains were drawn against the afternoon light, and Alexander had found the shadows in the corner—his natural habitat.