Nobody's Princess

by Sarah Hegger

  Thomas had gone through the best sellers one by one, trying to narrow down her preference, with the sort of patience that meant he’d keep at it all day until he found something she liked. In the end she’d let him go with romance. When Daddy had a bug up his ass about something, she’d learned to go along to get along. Thomas threw himself into her choice with enthusiasm.

  “And he’s a Navy SEAL.” Thomas flipped the book over and read the back. “You should get this one.”

  Tiffany took it and concentrated on the description.

  “Whoa.” Thomas snagged another one. “This guy must be able to bench-press over three hundred.” He opened the book. “And he’s a cop. Cops are hot, right?”

  Tiffany ducked her head and kept reading the back of the first book. The words danced around on the cover in front of her. Damn. Her cheeks got hotter and hotter. She mumbled something incoherent.

  Tell him, screamed her gut. Tell him what you really want to read.

  Yeah, right! her brain yelled back. You’ll tell him and he’ll get the look all over his gorgeous face.

  But he didn’t when he explained pi. Her gut wasn’t backing down without a fight.

  “Yeah.” Thomas breathed softly. “Cops are totally hot. I should’ve been a cop.”

  He didn’t need a cop’s uniform to make him hot.

  He nodded and grabbed another book. “What about firemen?”

  “Firemen are good.” Her stomach clenched. “We really don’t have to do this.”

  “Yeah, we do.” He shrugged one big shoulder and grabbed another book. “Reading is great. I know if we get you the right book, you’re going to love it as much as I do.”

  Algebra Made Easy, bold lettering on a bright yellow spine. Her fingers twitched, eager to pluck it from the plastic shelf, but she wrapped them firmly around the books Thomas handed her.

  Thomas would rock those overall things firemen wore. Not pulled up to the top, but folded down low over his hips. A sweaty white T-shirt clinging to his chest and abs. Or skip the T-shirt altogether. Her cheeks burned even hotter. She shifted her legs as the hot thing spread a bit lower. This was so not good. And he was being nice. What the hell was a girl supposed to do with that?

  Thomas frowned down at the book in his hand. “Why is this guy wearing tights?”

  “Those aren’t tights.” She took the book from him. “Those are breeches, and it’s because the book is historical.”

  “Huh.” He opened the book in the middle. A bad-boy grin flipped the corners of his mouth and lit unholy hell in his eyes. “Tights or not, this one you’ve got to get.”

  Her answering grin followed right on its heels. “Are you reading the dirty bits?”

  “Yup.”

  “Such a dog.” She shook her head, but her heart wasn’t really in it. Since they’d had their little talk, things were good between them. Not exactly comfortable, but Thomas was easy company.

  The yellow spine winked at her. For grades ten and up, it said in small writing below the title. Tiffany hesitated, then turned away. She’d had her shot at school and blown it.

  “So.” He stacked the books in his hands. “We get the cop, the fireman, and the hung guy in tights?” His voice carried across the quiet of the store.

  Tiffany snatched the books from his hands and marched over to the salesclerk. She slapped her books down on the counter.

  Thomas ambled after her and added some soft drinks and a few bottles of water.

  The clerk ignored her cash and took the card from Thomas.

  “I can buy my own books.” Her hand fisted around the cash.

  “Sure you can.” He accepted the bag from the clerk. “But this way, you have to read the good bits out loud to me.”

  Tiffany wished the ground would open up and eat her alive. She hadn’t spent this much time in blushing pink since her debutante ball. “Come on.”

  The clerk gave Thomas a coy smile as she waited for the card to process.

  “How you doing?” Thomas smiled back and got chatty. Not flirty, but warm and friendly, and the clerk lit up like it was her birthday.

  God, Tiffany could walk his card all the way to the bank and back in the time it took for the transaction to go through. As soon as it did, she snatched up the bag and slapped open the door to the parking lot.

  The Miura had a new batch of fans. The rest of the parking lot was empty. “Where’s Dakota?”

  Thomas came up behind her. “Bathroom?”

  The door to the men’s room opened and Dakota wandered out, attention locked on his phone. Miraculously, he didn’t walk into something as he wound his way toward Thomas’s truck. He jerked his chin at the two of them and climbed into the back of the truck. On went the Beats and shortly thereafter more frenetic, tinny noises.

  Thomas quietly maneuvered them back onto the highway.

  Tiffany dug in the bag and took out one of the books he’d bought her. She sat with it in her lap, waiting for the comment.

  His attention stayed on the road.

  The muted beat of Dakota’s music was the only sound above the purr of the truck.

  Tiffany opened the book. She liked romance, but it wasn’t the algebra book. Her chance to fill in some gaps disappeared as the convenience store grew smaller and smaller in the side mirror. She probably couldn’t do that math in that book anyhow. But you could learn, insisted a stubborn, little voice in her brain.

  “I have a question for you.” Thomas broke into her thoughts.

  “Okay.” She could think of any number of questions he might have that she didn’t want to answer. Beginning with why she hadn’t bothered to get a divorce before.

  “We’ve traveled sixty miles so far.”

  “Okay.”

  “We have another, maybe, two hundred and thirty to go.”

  “Okay.”

  “At an average speed of fifty-five miles per hour, because of the trailer, how long will it take us?”

  “Four hours and eleven minutes, if we don’t stop.”

  He thought about it for a second. “Fucking amazing.” He shook his head. “You’re a human calculator.”

  Tiffany’s chest warmed. Nobody had ever called her a human calculator before.

  “Here’s another one for you.”

  She looked up from her novel.

  “How come a smart girl like you is working for that prick of a photographer?”

  Tiffany squirmed in her seat. Her face burned as she tried to think of a clever answer for him. She couldn’t. And the reason she couldn’t. Because with no education worth spit, working for Piers was the only job a girl like her could get. She might be able to do a bit of math, but that was her only item in the smarts department. A bit of modeling had made her some contacts. A friend of a friend had introduced her to Piers.

  She didn’t like to think about it, so she shrugged and opened the book. After a while, she sensed him look over at her. She braced for more questions, but he started an annoying tuneless whistling beneath his breath. Slapping her book shut, she glared at him. “I’m not smart.”

  He stopped whistling and snapped his head toward her. “Sure you are.”

  Was he faking the look of surprise on his face? She wished she’d kept her big mouth shut, because now she’d have to keep talking. She stared at the picture of the fireman in her lap. What she should have done was put her ear buds in and carried on reading. “No.” She gritted her teeth together so hard her nerves tingled. “I don’t know smart stuff. I never went to college.”

  “Why not?”

  The flash of hurt around the college thing caught her by surprise. She thought she’d made peace with that years ago. Some people had the smarts for college and others didn’t. People like Thomas could probably pick and choose which college they went to. He probably had a pile of letters after high school, begging him to come and study with them. Just like Ryan had. She’d seen them one day when Patti had brought every single one out to show her. “Not everyone is college material.”<
br />
  He made a noncommittal sound.

  What the hell did that stupid little grunt mean? It was like he didn’t believe her. “Not everyone gets good grades in high school.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “You didn’t get good grades?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  She waved her hand down and up again to circle her face. “I have this.”

  He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye.

  “I did not get this.” She tapped her finger against the side of her head.

  “Wow.” He shook his head slowly from side to side. “That is so fucked up.”

  “No, it’s not.” She crossed her arms over her chest and sat back in her chair. “It’s life. Nobody gets everything.”

  “Not that.” She caught the harshness in his voice. What the hell? “It’s fucked up that you believe that.” He thumped the steering wheel with his palm. “Why would you even think that way?”

  “Because I didn’t pass high school, okay?”

  That showed him. His head jerked. He opened his mouth, shut it again, and glanced in her direction. “What?”

  “I didn’t get through high school.” It came out with barbs on it. “Daddy made sure I got my diploma and graduated with the rest of my class, but I didn’t pass.”

  “Jesus,” he said so low she nearly didn’t catch it. “How did that happen?”

  “I missed a lot of school. Most of my junior and senior years.” Her stomach twisted. She could count on one hand the number of people who knew that about her. It wasn’t the sort of thing you went yelling your head off about. Shit. What sort of person couldn’t even get their high school diploma? Not many, that’s for sure. She bet she was the only one he knew. “People who don’t pass high school don’t go to college.”

  He frowned and narrowed his eyes in thought. The silence in the car oozed like mud.

  Tiffany opened the novel, but the words kept dancing across the page. Not because she was dyslexic or anything. That would have been an excuse. She couldn’t concentrate with all that silent fuming coming from the driver’s side of the car.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Can I stop you?”

  “What would you have done? If you had made it to college, I mean. What would you have chosen to do?”

  Tiffany stared out the window at the endless black tarmac in front of them. Nobody had ever asked her that question. “Economics.” The confession left her naked.

  “Economics?”

  “I like numbers.”

  “You certainly have a gift for them,” he said. “I can see you doing well at something like that.”

  Her eyes stung and she blinked them rapidly. There he went with the nice thing again. “No, I wouldn’t.” She wanted to believe him, but she wasn’t that dumb. “You have to be smart to be an economist.”

  “Who told you you weren’t smart?”

  Tiffany wanted to stamp her foot. She didn’t need anyone to tell her that, her grades said it all. Hadn’t he even been listening? “I just know.”

  “Nobody wakes up in the morning and just knows they’re dumb.”

  Tiffany clenched her fists. “Okay then, people have always told me I’m dumb. And even if they don’t say it, I can see them thinking it.”

  “And you always take what someone says about you as the truth?”

  Who was he to be getting all judgy on her? Was judgy even a word? Judgmental, that was a word. This conversation pissed her off. Therefore, she wasn’t going to have it.

  “Do you?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know.” Shit, did he have to be this persistent? “People see you a certain way and you are that way. That’s it.”

  He snorted. “Do you even like those books we bought?”

  Busted. Tiffany swung her head to hide her expression. “What?”

  “The books we bought. Do you even like those sorts of books?”

  “They’re romance novels. Who doesn’t like a love story?” Her throat closed up. If she told him she didn’t like them, he would be mad for sure. Madder than he already was.

  “But I’m asking you.” His eyes got deep cold.

  “No.”

  “Then don’t read them.” His hands tightened on the steering wheel. “Read the books you want to read. And next time someone says you’re dumb, kick them in the nuts.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Tiffany mulled their conversation over in the silence. People didn’t decide they were dumb. Thomas called that right. So where had she gotten the idea? And her book? If she was really dumb, would she have the book? Thinking about this made her head ache. “Tell me about Zambia?”

  Thomas glanced over. “What do you want to know?”

  “What it’s like?” Talking about him seemed a better option than digging around in her head.

  “It’s …” Thomas tapped his long finger on the wheel. “It’s Africa, and like nowhere else on earth.” The quiet passion in his voice hooked her. His strong face softened as if he had gone to his happy place.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “Zambia has this immediacy. Life and death are right there, so close you can touch them on a daily basis. When I’m there, I feel alive, really alive. The colors are brighter, somehow.” He gave a soft, half-shy laugh. “I love it and it drives me crazy at the same time. It gets under your skin.”

  Tiffany didn’t think she’d ever felt that kind of connection to a place. She could picture him there, Big, blond, and tanned, striding through his own National Geographic feature. He belonged someplace like that, and she’d like to see it.

  “Hey, does anyone want to play a game?” Dakota leaned over the back of her seat.

  “Sure.” Thomas’s gaze flitted to Dakota’s reflection in the rearview mirror. “How about I Am Botticelli?”

  “Say what?” Dakota blinked back.

  “It’s really easy,” Thomas said. “You pick a famous person and we have twenty questions to guess who it is. Only the answers have to be yes or no, it can’t be a long explanation.”

  “That’s called Twenty Questions.” Dakota curled his lip.

  “Not in my family.” Thomas’s jaw clenched. “Now, do you want to play or not?”

  The familiar knot tightened in Tiffany’s stomach. The only person she could name was Britney Spears. Thomas and Dakota would die laughing at her. “You play,” she said. “I’m going to read my book.”

  Thomas shot her a glance.

  “I am.”

  He raised his brow. Whatever.

  “How can you read that shit?” Dakota spoke from over her shoulder and made kissy noises in her ear. “It’s so stupid.”

  “You know what’s stupid?” Thomas cut in before she could say anything. “Stupid is when you put someone else down.”

  “Yeah, but they’re romance novels.” Dakota added tongue action to his kissing noises.

  Her cheeks burned. Dakota majored in mean sometimes.

  “And you play music that shakes your brain cells to death,” Thomas said. “But nobody is calling you stupid.”

  “Jeez.” Dakota rolled his eyes. “I was just saying.”

  “Don’t.” Thomas didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to.

  Dakota dropped his chin onto his chest and shrugged.

  “Okay,” Thomas said. “I’ve got someone, ask your questions.”

  Tiffany kept her focus on the book, but listened to the game.

  Dakota fired questions at Thomas. His high-pitched laugh jarred her. She gave up pretending to read her book and watched him surreptitiously. Something was a bit off with him. Then again, how would she know? She had only seen him in bits and pieces since her “divorce,” and he’d sneered at her and called her Barbie ever since.

  Dirt and stones kicked against the wheel well as Thomas suddenly pulled over to the side of the road.

  Tiffany looked up at him in surprise.

  A muscle jumped in the rigid line of
his jaw. He hopped out of the truck and wrenched open the back door. “Out.”

  Dakota jolted back and opened his mouth to argue.

  “Get. Out.”

  Tiffany stared. A whole new Thomas stood beside the truck with Dakota locked in his crosshairs. Uh-oh! Thomas looked ready to rip Dakota a new one. He was a difficult little shit, but he was still just a kid. “Thomas—”

  “Don’t.” His eyes blazed.

  Tiffany shut up. Damn, Thomas got scary when he was mad.

  Dakota hopped from the truck.

  “Stay there.” Thomas nodded at her and stalked off into the brush at the side of the road.

  Dakota followed him, dragging his feet in the dust.

  *

  Thomas breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth. For all the good that did. He was so pissed off right now he ached to punch something. Tiffany and her dumb thing got him mad enough, but Dakota pushed him right over the edge.

  Dakota’s feet scuffed the dirt behind him.

  When they were far enough away from the truck not to be overheard he turned. “What are you on?”

  Dakota’s eyes widened and he swallowed. “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t bullshit me.” Thomas took a step closer. “I know you’re on something and I want to know what it is.”

  “You’re crazy.” Dakota glanced to the side. He swung around and headed for the truck.

  “Don’t do it.” Thomas didn’t know what he would do if the kid took one more fucking step, but it was not going to be pretty. The little shit was high as a kite. His best guess would be cocaine. Whatever it was, he must have taken it in the bathroom before they left the rest stop. Like he’d taken it the other day when he and Tiffany were at the Grand Canyon.

  Dakota’s eyes bugged out and his dilated pupils almost swallowed any eye color. It would be better to wait until he came down before he attempted another conversation. So be it, but this getting high shit stopped now. Thomas knew Luke well enough to know the other man would freak out if he found out his kid brother was taking drugs.

  Dakota stopped. The first smart move he’d shown in days. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Cocaine?” he asked.

  Tiffany peered through the window at them, her forehead puckered in a frown.