by Nora Flite
It didn’t matter that everyone clapped politely when it was over.
I felt every wrong note like it was scratching at the back of my teeth.
Hester’s smug smile stung.
But not as much as the disappointment in my father’s eyes.
I guess he was right. If I’m not good enough by now, I never will be.
Clutching the journal, I started to shake. This was surreal. I’d seen the way he’d looked at me while I’d played at the coronation, and at the time I’d thought he was irritated with me. But had he actually been envious? Reliving a time forty years ago when he’d performed after so many hours of practice, only to go away with his spirits crushed?
Then I’d played . . . and no matter my flaws . . . I’d been elated.
He’d witnessed the joy he’d been denied.
Then he’d had to watch me wear the crown meant for him.
I slammed the book shut. This knowledge was too much for me, making me second-guess my own feelings for the man I’d thought of as cold. Glen had said I reminded him of Maverick . . . I’d denied it because it sounded insane.
After reading these pages, it didn’t seem so far-fetched.
That terrified me.
- CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE -
HAWTHORNE
Torino was under assault by, according to the locals, the worst heat wave in decades. Everyone walked around in a dizzy haze with their hair tied up off their necks, sweat clinging to their bodies.
I wasn’t bothered by it. Yes, it was fucking hot as hell, but it lacked the smothering humidity that was torturing everyone in Rhode Island at the moment. Being on the coast here alleviated the weather with the occasional cool ocean breeze.
“You’re sure you’re not miserable in that?” Nova asked me.
Lifting my arms, I stretched in the long sleeves of my thin Henley shirt. “Sounds like you’re trying to get me naked.”
She tried to hide her smile and failed spectacularly. “I’m only saying that I grew up in New England, too, and I’m dying in this weather.” Nova was in a flowing cotton dress the same color as a swan’s feather. Sweat made it cling to her curves.
Sliding my hand into hers, I leaned close. “Sorry you’re not enjoying it. Meanwhile, I’m enjoying the results it’s having on everything you wear. More sun, more skin, more . . . well, you.”
Nova turned pink. I’d gotten very good at making her blush. She clung to my hand, the two of us strolling down the street with the ocean to our right. The water was flat today. It was easy to imagine you could hop over the stone wall and walk toward the horizon line.
“Isn’t that your dad?” she asked, stopping on the sidewalk. I followed her eyes and spotted the scene in the street. A crowd had gathered, my father standing beside Glen, facing off with some men I didn’t know.
The strangers were dressed in khakis and polo shirts. Each of them looked progressively older than the man beside him, like I was seeing a peek into their future and who they would become. The oldest had thinning hair but a full gray beard. The youngest was probably my age; with a smooth face below his curly blond hair, he was on the heavier side of husky, his chin merging with his neck.
Maverick was saying . . . or yelling . . . something at the men. Glen was watching with his massive arms wound tight over his guard uniform. At their feet, lying in the street, were some pieces of heavy equipment. “Come on,” Nova said, pulling at me. “We should go see what’s going on.”
I resisted for a single second. It had been two weeks since I’d first opened my father’s diary. I had yet to speak a word to him about it. What would I even say? Your friend shared your most personal thoughts with me as a wedding gift! It was way better than the gravy boat Kain got us! Also, funny thing, but I guess you hated your dad, too?
I really had no clue how to begin talking to him. For all I knew, he wouldn’t want to discuss his childhood or his parental relationships. I certainly didn’t jump at the chance to do it. So I’d zipped my lips and gone about acting like things were the same. That nothing in me was tormented by the idea that my father might actually have been anything like me.
“Ridiculous,” Maverick said. “This food bank needs its pipes fixed so it can open again and help people! It’s been closed down, waiting for months for clean water!”
Food bank? Remembering the diary entry, I focused with more interest.
“Now, now,” the oldest man replied. “These things take time.”
“That’s what I’m saying. More than enough time has passed. I looked through the files, and I can’t find any reason why your company hasn’t fixed this yet.”
“Sounds like a red tape problem,” the old man said, shrugging. “We just do the jobs when we get to the jobs. If we didn’t do this one yet, I guarantee you it’s because someone didn’t sign all their paperwork.”
“You know this has nothing to do with paperwork,” Glen said, cutting in.
“You trying to imply something?” asked the youngest of the bunch.
“I don’t need to imply, Kinsey. I’ll say it flat out.” The head of the guards flexed his arms, corded muscle showing through his long sleeves. “Your palms have been greased so hard by whatever politician wants to shut this food bank down, that you couldn’t hold on to your own dignity if you tried.”
Kinsey leaned forward, chest puffing up. “No one calls the Larson family liars.” He turned, kicking one of the shovels that was leaning against the building behind them. It clattered into the street loudly. If people hadn’t been watching before, they were now.
Observing it all with a strange serenity was the man in the middle. He looked at the shovel, then back to my father. “You understand what’s going on here.” He reached up to smooth his thick hair. “What you got is a problem that no one is going to help you solve. You best quit wasting everyone’s time. This place isn’t getting its plumbing fixed. That’s the end of it.”
“Shameful,” Maverick said, scowling. “You came out here with your tools, and you’re seriously refusing to do your job?”
The oldest took a step closer to my father, considering him as the two men behind him looked on expectantly. “We happened to have another job in the area.”
“Bullshit. You’re taunting us, displaying your ability to perform the job, then openly choosing not to!”
Snorting, the old man scanned my father’s face. “Things have changed in Torino. This isn’t the place that you abandoned when things got too tough for you. Not all of us could run, we’ve made the best of what we could with what’s left over.”
My father squeezed his hands so hard that they started to shake. Wordlessly, he snatched a pickax from the pile of tools in the back of a truck parked beside them. The red paint on the side said LARSON PLUMBING.
Ripping it high over his head, he flexed his upper body. The men, all of them, jumped back in surprise. Nova clutched my sleeve, just as shocked. I realized I’d been holding my breath as I watched the scene.
Grunting wildly, Maverick slammed the pickax into the street. “What the hell are you doing?” the youngest man, Kinsey, asked as he started forward. He retreated when my father began frantically chopping at the concrete.
“I’m fixing what you won’t,” he answered.
The man in the middle put his arms out. “Leave him,” he said, his eyebrows drawing low. “He’s a sad old man making a fool of himself in the middle of the street.”
The three of them watched for a few more seconds. Kinsey shook his head angrily. “Fuck him. Let’s go get some lunch.” Together they crossed the street, entering a café, essentially crossing my father out of their minds. His desperate show of force meant nothing to them.
But it did to me.
I was transfixed. My father was a huge man, I knew he was strong. When I was younger he would work out in the private gym on our estate. I’d seen him bench over two hundred pounds with ease. One day, when I couldn’t have been more than thirteen, I’d snuck into the gym after he’d fini
shed. He hadn’t unloaded the bar yet.
Curious, and full of stupid teenage hormones that demanded I prove I was better than my father, I’d stretched out on the bench and tried to lift the weight that he’d finished with. I had to call for help when I became pinned beneath it.
It had been some time since I’d seen my father do anything so physical. Only a few minutes had passed, and while he wasn’t slowing down, sweat was starting to darken parts of his black shirt.
Glen came forward, his face glistening in the raging sun. “Maverick, what the hell are you thinking?”
My father breathed heavily, sticking the pickax into the cement. He stared at his friend while catching his breath. “It’s fucking obvious that those guys aren’t going to help this charity, no matter what we do. The amount of corruption in the city is too much for any one of us to untangle. It will take months to figure out who to remove and who to replace just to get things on track again.” He looked back at the hole he’d created. “In the meantime, I’m not about to let a bunch of locals go hungry.”
His determination fueled me to step forward. “Thorne?” Nova said as I slipped past her and out of the crowd. Most of it had thinned now that the drama was over. Watching my father chop at the street was only interesting for so long.
Maverick saw me coming; Glen followed his eyes. Scooping up a shovel, I flashed a sideways grin. “This job is too big for just one person. Definitely too much for one old man.” Bracing myself, I tossed a scoop of dirt out of the hole and into the truck bed. “Besides, I can’t let my dad get all the good press. How embarrassing would that be for the new king?”
He stared at me. “I’ve never seen you doing any kind of hard labor.”
Flexing my arms, I tossed more broken concrete into the bin. “That’s a weird way to say, ‘Thanks for helping out, son.’”
My dad chuckled, then he went back to work. Glen shook his head. “Do either of you know anything about plumbing?”
“No,” Dad said. “But I think we can figure it out faster than those jackasses would change their minds and do it for us.”
Laughing, Glen snatched up a pickax and joined my father in breaking up the street. Nova’s eyes shone with pride as she looked on. From the truck she grabbed a stack of orange cones, placing them around us. “Using this stuff is fine, right?” she asked. “I mean, we’re the royal family. Public Works like this technically belongs to us, doesn’t it?”
“I’ll assume yes,” I said, wiping my brow.
That was how I spent the rest of my afternoon: tearing up a road, fixing something with my own two hands. It was a new thing for me. I appreciated how my muscles burned, the exertion robbing me of the unease I’d felt earlier as I approached the scene and looked at my father.
Sweltering in the growing hours, I stole glances at Maverick, wondering what was going through his head. Was this the same food bank he’d gone to with his mother all those years ago? Was he thinking about her right now?
The crowd ebbed, and it wasn’t until we’d uncovered the pipes, minutes before the plumbing team returned, that people took notice again. When the Larsons came back, they were genuinely shocked to see what we’d managed to do. But they said nothing. They didn’t try to take back their tools, either.
I think they were actually ashamed. Here we were, doing something good in a city that desperately needed a hint of generosity.
A news crew showed up before the sun went down, speaking to my father as he rubbed dirt from his palms. It wouldn’t be the last time my father showed up in the local news.
Together he and Glen roped in volunteers, going out of their way to fix every labor-intensive project they could. It was very clear that the city needed tons of infrastructure. The number of jobs that had fallen by the wayside thanks to politicians who wanted to force buildings to foreclose so they could tear them down and replace them with things that would fatten their wallets was immense.
After only a few days of their efforts, no one heckled my father. The media attention when they reopened the food bank was especially effective for his image. My father even managed to smile in the photo.
What a world.
- CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR -
HAWTHORNE
Nova and I left the castle more often than not. I didn’t want to be around her family; her brothers and sister spent too much time skulking through the hallways. I could recognize the greed in their eyes whenever I caught them staring hungrily at the locked cases on display full of old jewels and other expensive bits and bobs.
As for me, I hadn’t even looked in the royal vault yet. I like money, don’t get me wrong. But I’d had plenty of it before I became king. What I wanted was to spend time with the woman who was curling ever closer around my heart.
Whenever I grazed my wedding ring with my thumb, I started to smile. It was an absentminded thing that I caught myself doing. But that little metal band was a constant reminder that I was connected to her.
Nova was fun. She had a drive for adventure, always taking me to some new location in the country that I had to see. Or so she said. She was usually right. Today it had been an old staircase cut into the cliff east of the city. There were some giant statues there, their faces eroded by years of salt and surf.
It had been a quick drive, and we’d probably spent more time kissing than looking at the stone figures. Either way, I’d worked up an appetite and was looking forward to dinner with her.
Walking hand in hand through a part of the city I hadn’t explored yet, our goal was to find a restaurant with a name I couldn’t pronounce. My French was getting better—or Nova had gotten better at not laughing at me when I tried my hand at it.
Her purse buzzed loudly. She reached in, checking her cell phone. “What’s wrong?” I asked, reading her face as it fell.
“Nothing. Just my mom.” She typed something back. We both waited for whatever the response was. When it came, Nova sighed. “She wants me to come back. There’s some meeting she wants me to be there for, some dignitary Dad arranged to get together with.”
“And I wasn’t invited? Their brand-new son-in-law that they positively adore?” I feigned offense.
She bit her lip, holding her phone between us. “Dad never stops moving forward. Thorne . . . I can’t go to dinner with you.”
“Sure you can. Blow your mom off.”
“I seriously can’t.”
Running my fingers through my hair, I groaned. “I’m pretty sure that being king and queen means we can do whatever we want. I swear I saw that in the contract.”
Her lips didn’t twitch upward, not even a bit. “I’m sorry. Really, I just . . . have to go.”
“Why do you do what they tell you?” I asked, losing some of my cool. “I’ve seen how you are around them. Half the time you look ready to spit in your dad’s face.”
“They’re family,” she said, gauging me.
“That shouldn’t excuse anything.”
“I figured you would understand.”
“Sorry, but have you paid attention to me at all?” I asked, laughing bitterly. “All I do is complain about my father and all the ways they’ve hurt me.” The words came out in a long string, and when I grabbed for them, they kept unspooling.
Nova stared at me with too much interest. “How did they hurt you?”
“He. My father.”
“You said they.”
“I know what I said, it wasn’t what I meant.” The pulsing in my eye sockets was severe, like tiny fists were punching the backs of my eyeballs. I rubbed at them in a desperate attempt to relieve the discomfort.
Nova placed her hands on mine. Her presence was soothing. “Talk to me, I want to understand.”
“There’s not much to talk about.” That was false. I could have given a daylong speech about all the tiny wounds my father had left on my psyche. She kept staring at me; I took a breath. “It’s not important. Every kid thinks his dad is an asshole, right?”
“Thorne . . .”
“Don’t look at me like you think I’m some sob story. I’m not, my older brother gets that trophy.” I tried to chuckle and it hurt my throat. There was so much tension in my body that every part of me felt like it was straining . . . working at capacity to hold me together. “Costello’s the angsty tragedy, my older sister’s the wunderkind. And Kain and Francesca—who can compete with twins? Even when they grew up, they were still the spoiled stars. All of them were so perfect . . . so much more promise than me.”
Standing inches from my chest, she held still, as if moving would make me realize what the hell I was saying and I’d cut off before I was finished. What she didn’t know was that I couldn’t stop. Not after going this far.
“I guess when I said ‘they’ hurt me, I did mean it.” My voice was a wry whisper. “Nova, I never had a chance.”
She’d wrapped her fingers around my wrists. “At what?”
“Being more than the forgotten middle child.” Fuck, why was my mouth so dry? Was it because I was spilling everything I had, all of my essence, out onto the ground? Lifting my head, I looked down on her. “All I was ever good at was being the funny one. I’m definitely a damn joke.”
“You’re not. Not to me.” Her fingertips braced on my cheek. “Hawthorne—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to drag this out of you and cause you pain.”
“I’m not in pain,” I said, trying to make myself smile.
“Don’t.” She tapped my jaw. “No fake smiles. Not for me, you’re better than that.”
My mask slid. I felt naked without it. “You’re right. You deserve more than a bunch of cheap grins. I’m just not used to letting people see me like this.”
Wrapping her arms around me, Nova placed her forehead on my chest. “Being vulnerable, needing people, isn’t easy.” She said it like she knew it personally. Maybe I should have pushed, digging out what she was keeping from me. But . . . I couldn’t. Not with her pressed so warmly in my grasp.