Nobody's Princess

by Sarah Hegger

  Up went Blondie’s eyebrow. “Um, not according to—”

  “He’s my ex because I say he is.” Her breath sawed through her mouth. She forced it to slow down. Nobody but Lola knew she and Luke were still married.

  “O-kay.” Blondie held up his hands in surrender. “Whatever, but I still need to talk to you about Luke.”

  “Well, hello.” Piers slithered up beside her. His gaze fixed over her head. “And who might you be?”

  This was all she needed, Piers asking questions.

  “Thomas.” He held out his hand to Piers. “Thomas Hunter.” The name suited him, direct and no-nonsense.

  Piers slid his fingers into Blondie’s—Thomas’s—and leered over his slow hand squeeze. “Are you a model?”

  “No.” Thomas gave a rumble of laughter. “I’m an engineer.”

  “A real man, then?” Piers sidled a bit closer. “You should consider modeling. You have fabulous bone structure.”

  “My mother will be pleased to hear it.” Thomas slid his hands into the back pockets of his jeans and smiled down easily at Piers. “Actually, I just needed Tiffany.”

  The way he said that made her belly tighten. Her phone pinged. And right on time, Lola crashed the party. At least she’d given up calling and was sending texts. Tiffany had a thing or two to say to Lola about sending hot blond men to her place of work. Men who knew Luke and knew he was still her husband.

  “We all need Tiffany.” Piers put his arm around her shoulders and tugged her closer. Tiffany almost lost her balance. “I need her now and you can have her later.”

  “Um, no.” Tiffany wriggled out from beneath Piers’s arm. God, she could smack him. His little display of affection was only to impress on Thomas that he wasn’t really a screaming bitch. But then, she only had a few more hours to put up with him. “I can’t see him later. I have a date.”

  Piers threw her a look that said he didn’t give a shit.

  “Why don’t I take your number and I can call you later,” Thomas said.

  “Look.” She needed to shake him off before he screwed up everything. “I—”

  “Here.” Piers grabbed the phone out of Thomas’s hand. His fingers flew across the touchpad. “This is Tiffany’s cell and I put mine in there as well. Just in case. You can call me anytime for anything.”

  “Um, thanks.” Thomas peered down at his phone.

  Tiffany twitched to snatch it and start deleting. Piers really shouldn’t be handing out her number to anyone, particularly not Luke’s friends. Luke was out of her life, gone, over, except for the car. And the divorce.

  “I’ll call you later,” Thomas said.

  “Don’t.” Tiffany stepped away from him. “I have nothing to say about Luke.”

  “Yeah.” He pulled a rueful face. “That’s not going to work for me. I can see you’re busy, so I’ll call you later.”

  He turned and strolled his very fine ass away from her.

  Tiffany smirked at his broad back. Not if I see you first.

  *

  Tiffany barely stopped herself from running as she crossed the parking lot to her car. As it was she did a quick scan to check that no big blonds lurked in the shadows waiting to spill her secrets to the world. That exit line of his had a bit of a threat hanging off the end of it.

  Thank God, the shoot was over. Piers had grown steadily more toxic as the afternoon progressed. A last-minute idea change from the client had turned him feral. She hated her job. Correction, she hated working for Piers, but her options weren’t exactly overwhelming with no qualifications and a high school diploma Daddy had fixed for her. Still, her job had paid for the repairs to her girl.

  And there she was. Her girl. Sitting in the middle of the nearly empty parking lot, reducing the cars around her to rolling tin cans. The Lamborghini Miura, with its come fuck me lines and parking-lot hustle. Mee-you-ra: even the sound of it made her tingle.

  Except the Miura wasn’t really hers. First, she’d belonged to Luke. The three of them had been twined together—her, Luke, and the Miura—in a fast, wild ride that took your breath away. God, they had laughed and laughed as Luke opened the Miura up and let her eat the highways. Young, beautiful, carefree, and in love. A pang shot through her chest. She wasn’t that Tiffany anymore. She was this Tiffany, the one who was going to do the right thing, marry the perfect man, and love the life she should have lived all along.

  Tiffany had started the repairs with the idea of giving her back to Luke. She’d broken the Miura, another victim in the wreckage she and Luke left behind. It seemed right to fix it. That had been the plan, anyway. So why, when the car was all fixed and beautiful again, did she still have it? Daddy asked her that all the time. Even Ryan wanted to know.

  Sweat broke out over her skin. Lola, Luke, and that Thomas guy all converging on her and threatening to topple her stack of lies. Oh, God, she had to keep this from Daddy and Ryan. She needed to calm down. It was bad, but not quite hopeless. Yet. What she needed was a plan.

  The weight of her book in her tote hung reassuringly heavy against her shoulder. If she got home fast enough, she would have ten minutes before she got ready. Some girls did chocolate, others took long bubble baths, but she had her pink book filled with wonderful numbers. From panic to poised in a few neat calculations.

  Nothing could get in the way of her marrying Ryan. She’d been ready for this since the day they met. Ready to settle down and help Ryan grow his career. Raise a few children together, throw fabulous parties for beautiful people, and live the life she was born for.

  Tiffany slid the key into the lock and turned. The door rose to stand, as designed, like the horns of a bull. She didn’t want to think about that time in her life. Mostly, she didn’t want to think about Luke. Her secret was still safe. She had kept it for seven years. This was just a minor hiccup, a bump in the road. Well, she would flatten it. A quick call to Lola, and her plan was in motion.

  Tonight was going to be one of the biggest nights of her life. She was getting engaged, for real this time. Not two kids, crazy in love with each other and not thinking past what they had in their pants. With Ryan, she had the real thing: a mature relationship, based on mutual respect and friendship. And the sex was comfortable, satisfying, and frequent enough for both of them to feel good about it.

  Okay, Ryan didn’t turn her hormones inside out, but that was good. She wasn’t twenty anymore, but staring down the barrel of her thirtieth birthday. At this point in her life, sex wasn’t a two-backed beast that gobbled up everything in its path. It was supposed to be an extension of her intimate and caring bond with her partner. That was how Ryan put it.

  The Miura crackled and popped into life beneath her. It licked along her nerve endings like the rasp of a cat’s tongue. Almost four hundred pounds of torque in a decadent V-12 engine, and it was all hers. At least for now.

  Light traffic saw her home quickly, and it was still early as she let herself into her Gold Coast condo. Her cleaning lady had been there and left the huge shutters open.

  Tiffany poured a glass of a crisp Sauvignon Blanc and stepped out onto the enclosed deck. Fold-down glass shutters ran the length of the room, open to admit the evening breeze. A gentle Latin beat floated in from her neighbors’ apartment. She’d never met them, but she liked their music. Not so much the couple on the other side of her. They liked to party and they liked to fight, and they did all of this loudly.

  She looked around the airy, sleek lines of her home. It had been a gift from Daddy after she’d split from Luke. Cool hardwood eased the ache of her bare feet as she carried her shoes into her bedroom. The other bedroom stayed empty for the most part. All dressed up and ready for a guest. But she didn’t have guests here much. Most of her friends were married, some of them even on their second and third marriages. Which brought her right back to Luke.

  On her deck, she eased onto the daybed and sipped her wine. Her book sat on her lap. Pink so hot it made you blink with tiny rhinestones swirling and dancin
g across the cover. She cracked it open and found a blank page. The familiar weight of the glittering pen rested in her hands as she wrote. Numbers. Neat, precise, ordered. No guesswork and no room for error. From the first moment she had learned to count, numbers had been her friends. Of course, Daddy didn’t think much of her interest in numbers, so she kept it to herself.

  “Everybody has a gift, Princess. Your gift is to be beautiful.”

  And she was, on the outside, but inside she hugged her numbers to her until she got the chance to write them down in her book. If you looked for them, every day was full of small calculations and examples of numbers in action. Carefully she recalled all those instances throughout the day when she’d wanted to reach for her book. When the world swirled into chaos, numbers were the way out. Simple calculations, more complex concepts, they all broke down to the basic relationship between one number and the other. Addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication; predictable, constant, reliable.

  She let the numbers work their magic. The panic subsided and peace moved in. This was all doable. First, the special dinner Ryan had called and reminded her about that morning. Tomorrow, she would call Lola and find out where Luke was hiding. Lola had to know where he was. Then she would track down Luke and get her divorce.

  Tiffany tossed back the last of her wine. She debated pouring another one. What the hell, she deserved it after the shock she’d had. Her phone blinked with a missed call from an out-of-town number. She listened briefly to the message. Then had to listen again because she’d paid more attention to the voice than the words. Thomas had called. He said it was urgent. It all sounded a bit dirty in that killer voice of his. He wanted to set up a time to see her.

  Delete.

  She got to her feet and padded through to her open-plan kitchen that faced Lake Michigan. Everything in the condo faced that incredible view. She found the wine and topped off her glass. The last she’d heard from Luke, he was working in an ashram in India. Luke in an ashram! She’d pay good money to see Luke getting up with the sun and meditating. Or even better, Luke doing communal chores like cleaning toilets. She could have had the papers served to him there, but decided against it. Actually, she’d been deciding against it for the past seven and a half years.

  The Tiffany who married Luke wriggled and squirmed, not ready to be tucked away forever. Tough shit. Wild Tiffany had run out of time. She took a huge gulp of her wine. It went down the wrong way and she came up for air coughing and spluttering. The problem with her divorce—other than she didn’t have one—was that nobody else knew. Daddy, Ryan, and all her friends assumed she was divorced. Most of the time she thought of herself as divorced. They could all go right on thinking she was divorced, because she sure as hell wasn’t going to tell them.

  Why hadn’t she filed for divorce? She didn’t really know, or want to know. Maybe it had something to do with that piece of her that questioned if marrying Ryan really was the right thing for her. She didn’t trust that part, though, because that was the part that ended up married to Luke.

  But she missed her sometimes. At times it felt like she had two Tiffanys wrestling for space inside her. One Tiffany knew Daddy was right, her future lay with Ryan. The other one craved the speed of the Miura, top down, wind whipping through her hair, and screaming her defiance at the top of her lungs.

  The whole thing made her head hurt. Perhaps if she charted it all out on a graph, she would see it more clearly. She almost opened her book again.

  Her phone rang. Thomas. She hit Ignore and checked the time.

  Time to get beautiful.

  Chapter Three

  Tiffany rocked her Versace halter stretch dress that cleaved to her like they were conjoined. Opaque from above her cleavage to well above her knee, it provided enough peek-a-boo leg to smoke a pair of silver Jimmy Choo sandals.

  A quick spritz of the Joy Daddy gave her every birthday and she was unstoppable. The subtle perfume lingered in the air, and Tiffany breathed it in. It was the same perfume her mother had worn, one of Tiffany’s few memories of her. It was like having a tiny part of her mother with her tonight.

  The doorbell interrupted her last-minute check. Ryan must have sent the car early, eager to get their evening under way. She checked her reflection one more time. Everything as it should be for a perfect daughter, soon to be perfect wife.

  Are you ready for this? Ready to be this Tiffany?

  The doorbell pealed again. Of course she was ready. Lingering tendrils of her crappy day were upsetting her balance. Taking one more sniff of Joy for good luck, she opened the door.

  Lola barreled through like a small force of nature, swathed in white fox despite the heat of June and hiding behind a large pair of bejeweled sunglasses.

  Tiffany gaped at her, frozen in place for a minute. She hadn’t seen Lola in years. The woman looked good. Great, actually.

  “Precious.” Lola dropped the fur over the kitchen counter and tossed her dark, gleaming hair over her shoulder. “I have been trying to get you forever.”

  “Yes.” Tiffany lifted the fur out of a small ring of condensation left by her wineglass. Lola here, now, was definitely not in the plan. The car was due any minute. A wave of panic threatened as her past and her future headed toward each other at warp speed. “I was working today.”

  “All day?” Lola gaped. She wore a figure-clenching scarlet bandage dress that stopped just short of her crotch. Perfectly toned, tanned legs ended in a towering pair of Manolos.

  “Since about one thirty.”

  “Precious.” Lola’s voice quivered. “They could not pay you enough for that.” Her hands flashed scarlet polish and diamonds as she whipped off her sunglasses. “Is that the new Versace line?” Her brown eyes homed in like a scalpel on Tiffany’s dress. “It’s simply divine. What are you now? An eight? Did you see it in a smaller size?”

  She needed to get Lola out of there. Now. “I was going to call you in the morning.”

  “I saved you the trouble.” Lola tossed a red-gloss-and-white-teeth smile at her. “Did you get my present today?”

  Present? Tiffany didn’t like the sound of that.

  Lola shimmied her skin glittered cleavage. “I sent a big, blond hunk of muscle your way.”

  Thomas Hunter. “Yes, I wanted to speak to you about that—”

  “Muy guapo, sí. And so manly.” Lola growled the last word.

  Spanish, seriously? How much Spanish could Lola have picked up when she was still Debbie Wilson from Iowa? Tiffany shook her head and concentrated on the main part of her gripe. “You shouldn’t have told him where to find me.”

  “Really?” Lola blinked at her. “I thought you’d love him.”

  “He’s a stranger and you told him where I worked.” Tiffany stared at Lola. How could she not be getting the point here? “And you told him about Luke.”

  Lola waved her hand in a nose-searing draft of Poison. “He already knew about that. Apparently Luke told him.”

  That rocked Tiffany back a bit. Her secret was turning out to be not so secret after all. “Anyway, I can’t help him. I don’t know where Luke is. That’s why I was calling you.”

  “That’s what I thought.” Lola raised a hand to her head and pressed her forefingers into the skin between her brows. Not a line marred her forehead. She flung a hand toward the door. “And I have solved the problem for everyone.”

  Tiffany turned to look behind her. And stopped.

  A figure, possibly male, dressed in unrelenting black broken by the pasty white of skin for a face and hands.

  “Dakota?” Tiffany took a step closer. Her last memory of Luke’s half brother was as a cute ten-year-old, all gap-toothed grins and tousled hair.

  Dakota peered at her from beneath the inky swath of his hair. His face stayed in a rigid mask of teen scorn.

  “You don’t know where Luke is. Hot man doesn’t know where Luke is, but he does.” Diamonds flashed as Lola jabbed her finger at her son.

  “Weren’t you a
way at school?” Lola shuffled the poor kid from one boarding school to another. At least when she and Luke had been married, that had stopped for a while. If she was still married to Luke, did that still make her Dakota’s guardian? She should have sent him a birthday gift every year, a card at the very least. He’d been such a sweet kid. With Lola for a mother, God help him.

  Dakota blinked at her. Light played over the row of piercings that went from mid-brow to the end.

  “He is expelled.” Lola tottered into the kitchen. Wrenching open the fridge, she grabbed the bottle of wine Tiffany had opened earlier. Lola hauled open cupboards until she found the wineglasses and grabbed one.

  “Expelled?” Make yourself at home. Tiffany shrugged off the thought. That was Lola for you. Why take a hand when she could grab the whole arm.

  “God, I needed this.” Lola took a slug of her wine. “Which brings me to how we can help each other.”

  Tiffany struggled to align this dark, brooding ghost with the bouncing ten-year-old she’d last seen. Shit. He must be seventeen by now.

  “This is the sixth school, and I can’t deal with it anymore,” Lola said from the inside of her wineglass. “Then you called and it all became clear.”

  It took a while for Lola’s words to penetrate. Tiffany whirled about. “What?” This had all kinds of trouble scrawled all over it. The Lola she remembered had no problem making her needs other people’s problem. And Lola had a lot of needs. Calling Lola had been a huge mistake. Time to end this. “I’m not sure I can help you. I’ll call you in the morning and we can talk then. Right now, I have a date.”

  Like hell she’d call in the morning. In fact, she would change her cell number in the morning. It would be a pain in the ass, but getting rid of Lola had shifted to the top of her priority list. After getting to her date. She checked the time. Shit.

  “A date?” Lola’s eyes narrowed speculatively. Tiffany knew she was close to mid-forties, but she looked not a day over thirty. “Are you still seeing that man your father set you up with? Roland? Ronald? Randy?”