by Marsh, Anne
And yes, I’m hoping he’ll be my king.
“Come here often?” That’s the brother asking, not the ruler, a small smile playing around his mouth.
I slap my new bar friend on the back, congratulate him on his fine choice in whiskey, and send him on his way. “I’m mingling with my people.”
Nik surveys the growing crowd inside the bar. New patrons are proliferating like pop-ups on a bad website—word must have gotten out that I’m buying. FYI? I totally intend to charge this to Queenie’s black AmEx. “This is your charity of choice?”
“This is fun,” I counter. “Think of it as investing in local small businesses.”
Nik takes a cautious sip of his beer. “Thoughtful of you.”
Not really. I don’t do thoughtful any more than I do feelings or relationships. Or I haven’t.
Talking about me is not part of my nefarious plans, however. What I need is to snap Nik back to a sense of himself and his responsibilities. Or at the very least, I can indulge my curiosity and get to re-know my brother.
So I take a stab. “Tell me about the girl.”
Do you see the color creeping across Nik’s cheeks? The bright, hot red? If this were a game of Battleship, I’d have just sunk his battleship and his destroyer with one-well aimed guess.
Or stumbled across a clear case of guilt.
And since I have the advantage, I go for gold. “When she found you playing Sleeping Beauty at the foot of the mountain, did she kiss you?”
“I could say I don’t remember.” He raises the bottle to his mouth.
“But would you?”
Nik sets the bottle down. “Dee Becks is pretty unforgettable.”
So that’s a no. Queenie might just stroke out when he learns about this. I can’t and won’t pretend that nothing’s changed, but I don’t feel as if I’ve lost Nik anymore. It’s more like parts of him have been misplaced. Hopefully, he finds his missing memories, but even if he doesn’t, I think we’ll be friends and brothers again. It’s just going to take time.
I meet his eyes. “About Dee—”
“No,” he says firmly.
I want to point out that he certainly sounds like a king. Authoritative, certain, determined. Pick an adjective, but Nik hasn’t forgotten how to lead. I open my mouth, but the bartender picks that moment to turn the volume up on the television above the bar.
At first I think it’s a happy coincidence. Bars have TVs and people like to watch them. The place is cheerfully noisy and we’ll all have lung cancer in another year or two from the smoke, but it’s comfortable. One of those gossipy, fun entertainment shows is on.
I love shows, although they’re best enjoyed drunk and with friends. The hosts love to report on models, starlets, and anyone remotely attractive, so it’s the princely version of a seed catalog or furniture porn. You look, you mentally redo the front garden or the living room, and then you go right back to enjoying whatever—or whoever—you’re with.
The male host opens in smooth, velvety fuck-me-now tones as my picture flashes across the screen. “He’s known as the black prince of Vale, a billionaire playboy who has dated some of the world’s most beautiful supermodels . . . ”
Nik nudges me. “You didn’t tell me you were a TV star.”
The female host giggles and promptly picks up the ball. “And he’s earned every inch of his impressive reputation.”
Somebody in the bar catcalls something flattering about the size of my dick. It’s nice to be appreciated and I’ve always been popular here.
The male host stares at the camera with the sort of lugubrious look usually reserved for abandoned puppies or major natural disasters. “But this prince met and married an American woman in a secret wedding ceremony.”
The camera cuts away from Ken Doll and Barbie and pictures flood the screen. These aren’t the usual rehash of my recent peccadillos, either. These are from my time in Vegas with Edee. While picture after picture of our private time together entertains the world, the hosts interview our Elvis, who clearly either doesn’t care that he signed an NDA or figures he can relocate somewhere tropical with his windfall.
Elvis declares that Edee and I make the sweetest couple—and then the bastard mentions that Edee took off just as soon as he’d declared us man and wife. He describes exactly how I ran after her.
Shit.
Nik chuckles and stretches his legs out in front of him. “I wish I remembered her.”
“You haven’t met her.”
Nik raises the bottle to me. “Here’s to the ladies—the ones who pick us up and the ones who knock us off the goddamned mountains in the first place.”
I can drink to that. The news program runs through Edee’s life story and they make her sound awful. According to them, she’s an American gold digger and the eldest daughter of Satan. Okay. So I made that last one up, but they’ve got nothing nice to say about her. They’ve acquired high school pictures of her and an endearingly awkward picture of Edee in a bikini at a Vegas foam party. She’s just standing there, foam dripping off her tits and swirled on top of her head like she’s some kind of fancy ice-cream cone.
Welcome to my world, where nothing is private.
And it just gets worse. Not only did Elvis apparently snap a picture of my royal ass chasing Edee, someone has pictures of us in the pool at the house. Yes, we’re naked and we’re getting it on. There are a couple of cheers from some of my fellow drinkers before their wiser companions slap them on the back of the head. The network’s slapped black bars over the parts they can’t actually broadcast, but it’s clear we’re getting it on in the water.
How did they get those?
Could Edee have—
No.
Trust is a funny thing. It’s an all or nothing proposition, right? You do—or you don’t. Kind of like platform diving, HALO jumping, luge. It’s a high-impact gamble that you’ve mastered the technique and your equipment won’t fail you—because once you’re out the gate, you’re all in. There’s no going back, no magic rewind button. You succeed or you crash and burn. It’s a thrill, it’s nauseating . . . it’s what I have to do.
I have to trust that Edee didn’t betray me.
And I really hate trusting.
Nik takes one look at my face and hands me the rest of his beer. “Not remembering can be a blessing.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Edee
You want to know what happens next? How we get our happily-ever-after? It’s not that simple. It never is, is it? After Dare leaves me for Vale, I mope. I hide in our dream house, Barbie missing a Ken, and pretend there is no outside world. He’s a prince. And I’m not. Not a prince, not a princess, not royal in any way. I just thought he was mine. But I’m not a moper—I’m a doer.
So Dare leaves and time flies by just as fast without him as it did when I had him by my side. Someday soon, on a day that feels like tomorrow but that is decades in the future, I’ll be old and alone and telling all the aides in the nursing home about the prince I loved and lost. I thought watching him walk away was hard, but the hardest part is not knowing what kind of memories we could have made together. We’d have had good days—and bad. There’s a reason, I realize, why so many wedding ceremonies talk about in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad. Dare and I, we were supposed to be ever after.
And now we’re nothing.
He’s gone like I knew he would be, and somehow I can’t get on with my life. The paparazzi don’t help. Even though there are fewer and fewer every day, those few still camp outside the house, waiting for me to leave. They jostle me on my way to my car and they try to crash the weddings I shoot. And while eventually I know it will get better and they’ll disappear altogether—there will be another story, another scandal—it’s hard.
I can’t leave, I can’t work. I just hide in my pool house and try to pretend that
I’m not a prisoner in my own house. Part of me can’t wait for the reporters to move on—and part of me is sad. When they go, I’ll know for certain that Dare is never, ever coming back. I do way too much crying, which I hate. Rima promises me that everything will be okay. She says she cried, too, when her husband dumped her and that I’d feel better. Then she volunteered to fly straight to Vale and murder Dare for me.
God, I love my friends.
And maybe I love . . . no.
Don’t go there. I’ll admit it. I’m jealous of everyone who gets to spend time with Dare while I’m stuck here in exile. Or I guess I could keep living in the ridiculous twelve-million-dollar mansion he bought, but I need a fresh start. Or at least a restart. So I sit and stew and twist my blinged-out rings on my finger. A stick of Crisco did the trick and they come off but . . . I’m not ready to give them up.
I worry about Dare constantly and I haunt the gossip sites, hoping for Dare sightings but he lays low. At first I don’t pay attention to what they’re saying about me. Dare warned me to not to read my press, and I’ve tried. But it’s hard to ignore my own picture, hard enough that at first I don’t even process the new headlines.
The first post-breakup stories are simply embarrassing. The press has already dug up all my childhood photos. You know the ones—me at five years old in a wedding dress and a plastic Disney tiara, me vowing with a baby lisp that I’ll marry a prince or no one, me sporting acres of sparkly tulle in what the reporters dub a dress rehearsal for the real deal with Dare. They imply that I’ve always wanted to be a princess and I figure it can’t possibly get worse.
But I’m wrong. The universe almost has a seizure laughing at my naïveté.
A week after Dare leaves, somebody gets copies of our real estate documents—and they have a field day with his having gifted me our house. Overnight I go from being Apple Pie Princess and the all-American girl made over into a fairy-tale heroine to Greedy Edee. None of the photographers camped out outside the house call me that to my face, but the cruel nickname’s splashed all over the Internet. Worse, they revisit every photo that they’ve ever snapped or bought, circling anything they think might have been a present from Dare or bought with his money.
I’m officially a royal gold digger.
The articles insinuate I was a drunken fling, an expensive Vegas antic that he’ll be paying for for years. If they knew how much he’d promised to pay me for my participation in this marriage, they’d crucify me. And then come the pictures that I really regret—pictures of us getting it on, first by the pool and then on the grass after we broke the lounger. It’s creepy and disturbing, but the worst is still to come because there’s a shot of Dare asleep. A gorgeous, heartbreakingly sexy picture of him relaxed and trusting. His hair tumbles over his face and he’s smiling in his sleep, my very own Sleeping Beauty. The aerial shots of us having sex aren’t my work, but this picture? This picture totally is and I have no idea how it got out into the wild.
At first I worried that he’d be upset or angry. The huge fight we had after I took his picture when he was asleep makes that seem most likely. I text him and get no answer. His phone could be off. Or maybe the Internet in Vale is broken. Or he dropped his phone in the toilet. I have a thousand excuses for his silence, a thousand reasons why I’m pathetic.
A fancy, scary-sounding lawyer with a multipart name that sounds like it belongs on the side of an English villa sends me a check two days after Dare leaves. The check has an obscene number of zeroes and it promises to Magic Eraser away all of life’s pesky little problems. Student loan debt? Gone. Uncomfortable living situation in pool cabana behind my stepmother’s house? Replaced by the new house and an obscenely generous allowance. Paparazzi dogging my footsteps? Relocate to Fiji until the money runs out. There’s a lot I could do with a quarter million dollars.
And while cashing the check is tempting—no matter what horrible nicknames the press calls me, I’m only human after all—I won’t do it. He doesn’t get to fob me off with presents, no matter how big and ostentatious. We’ve had this conversation before.
Still, I’m not a big fan of Mopey Me. I know it’s okay to take some time to get over the public humiliation and curiosity. It’s okay to hide inside with my sweats and a pint or six of my new boyfriends, Ben and Jerry, having a ménage à trois with their sweet, sugary goodness. But the bottom line is that those news pieces aren’t wrong. I did marry a man I’d known for all of an hour, and I agreed to get paid. I am Greedy Edee, and even if I’m greedy for the man, it’s too late
And while I don’t entirely like myself, I’m not sure I would undo it, either. Before Dare, I slipped through life unseen, incognito. I don’t need the paparazzi audience to feel good about myself, but I loved the way Dare saw me. He saw someone sexy, bold, funny, worth spending time and twelve million dollars on. And me? I saw a guy who could be the world’s biggest bastard—but who was also secretly a good man even if he is a prince. I liked that man.
This has to be why I thumb through the pictures on my phone on an hourly basis. I also pay way too many visits to the DailyDare.com. It’s a fan site dedicated to tracking Dare’s movements with stalker-like intensity and I can’t resist. From my couch I can span the ocean and various landmasses between us and watch over his shoulder as he goes about his life in Vale. State functions, training with the military, and then . . . the picture I’ve been secretly dreading.
Dating Dare.
The picture isn’t one of the stolen shots of us. In fact, I’m not in the shot at all. The woman is the picture is taller, better groomed, more poised. A sheath of black, impossibly glossy hair cascades down her bare back. In the photo, Dare has his thumb beneath one strap, nudging it down as he leans in. To talk? To kiss her? To stab me in the fucking heart?
Trust.
It’s in shorter supply than water in the desert.
A knock on the bedroom door yanks me back into the present. Rima has been checking on me ever since Dare went back to Vale, partly because she’s afraid someone may need to stage an intervention but mostly because she loves me. Friends don’t let friends mope alone and she swears she’s gained five sympathy pounds already. My pain is her gain. But since I’m still carrying her divorce around on my hips, I refuse to feel too bad.
“Since I’m not sure what flavor you’re feeling tonight, I brought all the favorites.” She hands me a plastic shopping bag.
Peanut Butter Cup, Chunky Monkey, Chubby Hubby . . . hail, hail, the gang’s all here. I grab two spoons and turn to hand her one, but she’s busy hauling an enormous, glossy box into the room.
“You had a little something on the porch, too,” she says, pointing to the monster box she just delivered.
How did I not notice something the size of a small appliance? And how did the UPS guy get past the gate?
Rima tucks her arm around me, plucking a spoon from my hand. “Who’s it from? Should I take your credit card away?”
It seems a little weird, but that’s definitely my name on the front. There’s no return address however—or any kind of barcode mailing label thingie. It’s like the box just dropped out of the sky and landed on my doorstep. Maybe Amazon is test-piloting that drone delivery service?
“I should probably cut back on the retail therapy.” I don’t remember buying this many shoes, but maybe sleep shopping is a thing?
Rima pops the top on her ice cream and digs in. “Just try to use his card, okay? Because then your therapy is his revenge. Trust me—you’ll enjoy it far more when someone else has to pay the bills.”
The top of the box is filled with tissue paper. Underneath it, however, is a suitcase. A fancy, bright purple roller bag with a plain manila envelope taped to its shiny front.
“I bought a suitcase?”
“An ugly one,” Rima says.
She’s not wrong. Maybe I can return it?
While Rima examines the suitcase,
I rip open the envelope, searching for the receipt—and find an elegant Kate Spade passport holder, a plane ticket, and an invitation.
Rima whistles. “I really hope you used Dare’s card.”
I look up. She’s got the suitcase open, and it’s not empty. It’s full of the most magical dress I’ve ever seen. Rima pulls it free from its tissue paper nest and holds it up.
“Versace.” She hands it over, a covetous note in her voice.
God, it’s gorgeous. Satiny ribbons crisscross the bodice and tie in a sexy bow low on the hip. The skirt is the flirtiest bit of tulle and, thanks to the slit that goes right up to that bow, it will be ridiculously sexy on. The whole thing screams look at me.
I love it.
I look down at the plane ticket in my hand. Someone has booked me a one-way, first class ticket to Vale—and that same someone has sent me a dress and the invitation to a betrothal ball given by Their Royal Highnesses the Princes Nikoloz, Darejan, and Luca.
“Edee—” Rima slides the papers out of my hand and rifles through them. “I’m not sure—”
I’m sure of only one thing. Someone thinks I should attend the ball.
“Someone wants to help me.” I hold the dress up to my boobs and twirl. The dress floats out around me. It’s so beautiful.
“Maybe.” Rima stabs a finger at the ticket. “But this ticket is one-way. And His Royal Dickishness is hosting an engagement party. Is that really the party you want to crash?”
I set the dress down on the bed and take the ticket from her. “This is for tonight.”
“That decides it,” she says. “There’s no way you could go. It’s impossible.”
But . . . why can’t I?
Alice has to believe in six impossible things before breakfast, so why can’t I believe that some lovely fairy godmother has sent me a dress and a magic all-access pass to the ball this year in Vale? And I wait for that little voice—the one that’s skeptical and has been around the block about a hundred billion times—to speak up. To remind me that trusting any guy is stupid, and that I know better. I wait for the sensation of doubt, shame. Do you remember the scene in Princess Bride? The one where Inigo Montoya promises humiliations galore? That sums up my love life and yet . . .