Nobody's Princess

by Sarah Hegger

  The salesman’s eyes grew wide as he turned back to her. “This is Luke’s?”

  “Uh-huh.” Tiffany nodded. “I’ve been … looking after it for him for a little while. Now I’m bringing his best girl home.”

  Luke had always called the Miura his best girl. He used to joke Tiffany was his second best girl. Her eyesight misted suddenly. They used to laugh a lot, she and Luke. She didn’t seem to laugh like that anymore. Until recently.

  With a whir of wheels, Thomas cycled back to them. He looked like a kid, all ruffled hair and shining eyes as he slid his leg over the bike. Thomas could make her laugh, too.

  “Hey,” the clerk called. “Cool shirt.”

  Tiffany rolled her eyes. Everyone seemed to get it but her.

  “I don’t get it.” Dakota sniffed. She wanted to cheer, but could guess how that would go down.

  Thomas looked down at his shirt. “127.0.0.1 is the address of your home computer.”

  Okay, she got it.

  He grinned at her, boyish and endearing.

  Tiffany really tried not to smile. The T-shirt was amusing, but his grin would get anyone smiling.

  “So, like, if that’s Luke’s car,” the salesman said, “I don’t know where he lives, but a lot of bikers end up at Prospectors bar after they ride. You could try to catch him there. He loved that car, man.”

  “Yes, he did.” Tiffany blinked back the moisture. If Luke had loved that car only a tiny bit less, she might not have done what she did. She gave the Miura an apologetic pat on the door panel.

  The salesman gave Thomas directions to the bar.

  “Hey.” A strong hand curled around her waist. She leaned in as she looked up. Thomas’s eyes were kind, but not smiling anymore. “You okay?”

  “Sure.” She managed a smile. His hand around her waist felt nice, like it fit there. She moved out of his light clasp. “So, what’s the plan?”

  “I’m hungry,” Dakota said. As far as she could tell, it was the only time Dakota’s Beats came off.

  “Sure you are,” Thomas said. “Why don’t we go back to the motel? We can off-load the trailer and head out and find something to eat.”

  “Will it be safe?” Tiffany wasn’t sure about letting her girl out of her sight.

  “Sure.” Thomas shrugged. “A car like that is way too easily traceable for anyone to risk stealing it. Besides, we’ll put it somewhere safe. Trust me.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Tiffany handed the car keys to the motel owner, who clutched them to his chest, eyes gleaming with scary fervor. He’d probably spend the afternoon babysitting the Miura in person. “It would be my honor.”

  The car sat like the empress she was amongst some dusty boxes, a garden hose, and a row of trash cans.

  Thomas and Dakota had disappeared into their room earlier. They were all going to meet up later and try to find Luke. The evening got even hotter, and she wanted nothing more than a shower and a change. Her feet ached from hours in heels, and she was seriously considering buying more flats. She strolled down the corridor to her room. And stopped.

  The door to her room hung ajar. Hadn’t she locked it? Sure she had. She toed the motel room door with the edge of her shoe.

  It swung open with a creak.

  She leaped back. Her blood pounded in her neck, reminding her this was a massively stupid idea. This was what happened to girls in movies. They always went into the scary room or house. And everyone knew how that ended. Not her. She trotted over to the next room and rapped on the door. Nothing.

  The shadowy inside of her room gaped at her through the crack in the door. Tiffany banged even harder. Maybe she should find the motel owner?

  Footsteps came from the other side of the door and it was yanked open.

  “Hey, sorry.” Thomas stood in the doorway wearing a scattering of water droplets and a bath towel. “I was in the shower and Dakota is listening to music.”

  Tiffany swallowed. She spent most of her working day around men in various states of undress. There was no need to stare like a tourist. “My door is open.”

  “What?” Thomas glared at Dakota. “Didn’t you hear the door?” Wasted effort, as Dakota kept his focus on his phone.

  “The door to my room is open.”

  Thomas turned back to her with a frown. “Your door is open?”

  “Yes, and it was locked when I left.” God, she wished he would go and put on one of his geeky tees before she gave in to the urge and leaned forward to lick water droplets off him.

  He stepped into the open corridor. The back view was as distracting as the front. Lots of muscle and ripply things happening all the way down to his trim waist and tight ass. “Shouldn’t you get dressed first?”

  He approached the open door. Tucking his towel more firmly around his waist, he stepped into the room. Yeah, right. Men could do that. It wasn’t them that got whacked in all those movies. Why was that exactly? She stood at the door and peeked into the interior.

  “Fuck,” Thomas said from within. “Get the owner.”

  “What is it?” Tiffany took a careful step into the room and froze. This couldn’t be her room. There was some mistake. She never flung her clothes around like this. Oh, God, her new D&G dress looked like someone had stamped it into the ground. With a cry, she leaped for it.

  Thomas stepped in front of her.

  Tiffany found herself mashed up against his chest. For once, she didn’t give a crap how hot he was. Her Manolos, one heel broken off, lay wedged under the bureau. Someone needed to pay for doing that, with their life.

  Thomas held her arms, keeping her from moving.

  She struggled against the hold. She’d been violated. Someone had put their hands on her stuff. Even her makeup. A strangled scream stuck in her throat. That was her compact, broken and crumbling all over her ivory La Perla set. “Let go of me.”

  “Tiffany, sweetheart,” he said.

  She wasn’t anyone’s sweetheart. “Oh, God, did you see what they’ve done to my Kate Spade?”

  “No, babe, I didn’t, but you can’t come in here. Go and get the owner and tell him to call the police.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it looks like someone broke in and trashed your hotel room.”

  “I meant, why would anyone do this.”

  He steadily backed her toward the door and she didn’t like that. She dragged her stare over the destruction. Even the mattress had been shoved aside from the bed. It was like a giant hand had come into her room and smashed. It was worse than if they’d stolen everything. This felt a whole lot more personal.

  “Tiffany.” Thomas shook her slightly. “Stay with me. I’m going to wait here and make sure nothing gets disturbed. You need to go and get the owner and tell him to call the police.”

  “Jesus.” Dakota stood in the doorway. “What the fuck happened here?”

  “That’s what we both want to know,” Thomas said. “Tiffany’s in shock. Can you go and get the owner? Tell him to call the cops.”

  Dakota sprinted off toward the reception area.

  “Babe,” Thomas said. “I need to put some pants on before the cops get here. Can you promise not to touch anything?”

  “Why would you destroy a pair of Manolos? Do you know how much they cost? And they’re this season’s.”

  Thomas’s jaw tightened. “Right.” He tugged on her arm. “I think that answers my question. Come with me.”

  And then she saw her book lying in a bright pink tatter, facedown. Oh, God, no. She wrenched out of Thomas’s grasp and flew across the room. They’d ripped open the lock. Tiffany picked it up. Pages fluttered onto the floor at her feet. Her vision swam. She reached out blindly for physical support and found warm skin.

  “What is it?” Thomas’s voice came from right beside her.

  “My book.” The spine was cracked, and it fell open like a bird with its wings broken. Truncated edges of ripped-out pages stared at her accusingly. The one thing that was totally hers, and they�
��d broken it. Tears leaked down her face to drop onto the damaged pages. She tried to wipe them away, but the tears smudged the ink, so she stopped.

  “Sweetheart?” Thomas’s big hand reached for the book.

  She yanked it back and cradled it against her chest. “No.”

  “Was it important?”

  “It’s everything.” Tiffany gave a ragged little laugh. “It’s my book, my thoughts, my everything.”

  “I don’t understand.” His face shadowed with concern as he stooped a little to look at her. “Is it some kind of diary?”

  “They broke it.” It came out on a soft sob.

  “Let me look, maybe I can fix it.” He bent and gathered up all the scattered pages at her feet. Slowly, almost reverently, he smoothed them between his palms. He went still, his head tilted as he read them.

  Tiffany wanted to snatch them back, but it was too late.

  “Babe?” He glanced up at her, his eyes full of questions. “What is this?”

  “It’s my thoughts.” She grabbed the pages from him and tried to tuck them back into her book.

  “But these are equations.” He gave her the remaining pages. “Most of this is mathematical equations and statistics and stuff like that.”

  He didn’t understand. She could see it on his face. “It’s mine.”

  “Oh, my God.” The motel manager, a compact man with a large beard, stood in the entrance and stared.

  “The cops are on their way.” Dakota toed her Kate Spade out of his way. “Fuck.”

  “Can you stay and wait for them?” Gently, Thomas encircled her arm with his hand and tugged. “Come on, sweetheart. Bring your book with you.”

  She let him pull her out of the room and into his room next door. She stood as he hauled on a pair of jeans. She wished she could appreciate the fact he went commando. He tugged a tee over his head and grabbed a pair of sneakers.

  Her knees hit the bed. Obediently, she bent them under his gentle backward pressure. She tucked her book safely in her arms. The velvet on the cover was torn and the ragged edges fluttered against her fingertips. Too late. They’d broken it.

  Thomas sat down opposite her. “I’ve seen you with that before. Tell me about the book.”

  “I write stuff in it,” she said in a numb, small voice. “Stuff I want to know about and stuff I need to work out.”

  “Like equations?”

  She nodded. Small sobs caught in her throat and she let out a shuddery breath. Her book was her secret, her piece of sanity in her life. “It’s mine.”

  “Can I ask why you write them in there?”

  “Because of school, I don’t know stuff that I should know,” she said. “I told you before. I didn’t pass high school, and there is so much I don’t know.”

  “You write the stuff you don’t know in your book?”

  “Yes.”

  He leaned forward and wiped the tears from her cheeks with his fingers. “And then you ask somebody? Or do you work it out for yourself?”

  It seemed important to him. She didn’t know why, but she didn’t have any excuses handy. The truth was so much easier. “I don’t ask because this is stuff everybody knows. I look it up or I work it out.”

  He went silent for a long time. More tears welled over her bottom lid and he wiped them away again. “That’s incredible.”

  “No, it’s not.” She shook her head. Unclasping her arms slightly, she let the book fall away from her chest. Everybody knew stuff that she didn’t. Her life had been that way since preschool. Ryan and his friends read The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and all those books on her iPad. Other kids learned this at school. Princess Pearly Perfect smiled and looked pretty instead.

  Thomas took the book from her. His head bent as he sifted through the pages. He stopped on the one with pi and studied it. “Jesus, sweetheart.” He moved more pages to see them. “Look at this mind on you.” He examined a graph she’d drawn. “And you worked all this out with no help?”

  She nodded and tapped the edge of a page. “That’s Newton.”

  “Yeah, I know.” He nodded.

  Of course he knew. She sat back again. Her hands shook and she threaded her fingers together and put them in her lap.

  His big fingers soothed the truncated edges where they’d ripped out the pages. “You have this incredible brain and you hide it away in a Legally Blonde diary?”

  “I got the idea from the movie,” she said. “You know, Elle carries that book. Nobody ever asked me what was in it. They wouldn’t believe me anyway.”

  “Here’s the good news.” He glanced up at her. “Knowledge doesn’t stay in a book. It sticks in your head and then you get to keep it.”

  “But it was mine.” Saying the words opened the wound again and more tears welled up. She had a whole crate of her books at home. Some were pink, others silver, some purple—whatever. She wanted the stuff in them, her fix of everything’s okay.

  “And the knowledge still is.” He cupped her cheek in his palm. “The bad news is that I have just realized you’re a fucking genius. Look at this shit, sweetheart. People spend years in college and don’t get this. And you …” He shook his head. “You look it up and work it out yourself.”

  “Is she okay?” Dakota’s voice made her jump.

  “She will be.” Thomas tucked her book into a drawer beside the bed. He lifted her hand and kissed it. “All this and she’s a geek, too? I must have died and gone to heaven.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Tiffany picked shit up and dropped it again, her best effort as far as tidying went. Whatever the cops did in her room took forever. They jotted down her statement, but there wasn’t a lot she could tell them. Nothing appeared to be missing, just a whole mess of damage. The police took a few things away with them, but left the rest of the room for her to tidy. She barely had the heart to do it. It would be easier to toss a match and move on.

  Thomas dove right in, sifting through her stuff with a huge black garbage bag in one hand. Even Dakota helped, taking the stuff Thomas handed him and piling it to go to a dry cleaner. He did a great job of sorting through her shoes.

  Any embarrassment she might have felt about the two of them handling her underwear vanished beneath a big layer of numb. The entire thing was so random. As she halfheartedly sifted through her things, it pissed her off more and more. She felt grubby knowing someone had their hands all over her stuff.

  It took most of the afternoon to get the room sorted.

  The manager found her another room, two doors down, because she sure as hell wasn’t sleeping in this one tonight. Her handful of wearable stuff sat in a crumpled heap on her bed. She had to find something to wear in that, because these assholes were not stopping her from going to find Luke tonight.

  Her phone rang and she checked it. Ryan again, that made it call number six, and she hit Ignore. Ryan could damn well wait until she was ready to speak to him. What would she say to him anyway? She’d pretty much said it all that morning.

  And Ryan might be a dickhead, but he was a sharp dickhead, and she couldn’t take the chance he’d pick up that something other than their fight that morning was wrong. The questions would start and go on and on until he dug out the truth.

  Dakota’s voice came through the paper-thin motel wall from their room next door. The kid kept arguing and arguing until all of them were ready to scream. She didn’t know where Thomas found the patience to deal.

  They’d hit a bit of a snag with Dakota and the plan for tonight. They couldn’t take an underage kid to a bar, and leaving him alone at the motel didn’t look like a great option, either. In the end, they had to trust him, because time was running out and if Luke found out who was looking for him, Tiffany didn’t put it past him to pull another disappearing act. God, Tiffany wanted to rip every hair from Lola’s pampered head. Dakota needed help and he needed the people around him to give him that help. Luke also had some stepping up to do.

  She poked through the clothes the
assholes hadn’t touched. They’d whittled her four suitcases down to barely enough to fill one. Slim pickings for a girl wanting to look her best. She settled on a new pair of skinny jeans, a knockout pair of heels, and a flirty little blouse that left her shoulders bare and showed a hint of cleavage. She took extra care with her hair and makeup. It took a bit longer to achieve effortless.

  A knock on the door interrupted her as she finished up. She opened the door to find Thomas outside. He’d replaced his tee with a white button-down. Holy shit, he cleaned up nice.

  “Here.” He handed her a bag.

  “What’s this?”

  He shrugged and shifted uncomfortably. “Just something I picked up at the store down the road.”

  In the bag was a book like the one she’d lost, but this one had huge multicolored polka dots all over it. Her belly flopped and she got a bit squishy inside. It was the best gift ever. Tears prickled under her lids and she blinked rapidly. If she cried now, she’d totally ruin her makeup.

  “There wasn’t much to choose from,” he said.

  “It’s perfect.” And it was. Tiffany tucked the plastic around the book and hugged it to her chest. Turning back into her room, she laid it carefully on her bed. She ran her fingers over one of the dots. Later.

  Thomas waited by the door. Raising herself onto the very tips of her toes, she kissed his cheek. He smelled like slightly spicy cologne, and the touch of his cheek tingled against her lips. She may have lingered there a moment more than strictly necessary. “Thank you.”

  He curled his hand around her hip and kept her close to him. “You’re welcome.” His voice deepened. “But there’s a catch with this one.” His beautiful eyes grew solemn and the look on his face implacable. “You can’t keep hiding all the stuff away and pretending it’s a dirty secret. You want to know something, you ask me. Deal?”

  “Deal,” she said. “But you’re not allowed to laugh at me when I say something dumb.”

  “Babe.” His face softened.

  She got it. He didn’t think she was dumb. Could he get any more perfect? She probably looked like a total idiot grinning up at him right now, but who gave a shit.