“No need to hide from people’s curiosity,” I said, trying to make her less nervous. “It’ll only make them more curious.”
She didn’t seem to believe me, so I nodded at a woman seated on a park bench who was especially blatant in her staring. “Look over at the woman in the orange top staring at you and stare back at her.” Iliana looked at me like I’d grown another head, and I simply raised an eyebrow, daring her. “Look at her like she’s the one being rude, and you’re silently calling her out on it. Think of it as defending your boundaries without having to fight.”
Iliana gave me one uncertain look before turning her body and finding the woman I was talking about. I knew the moment they locked eyes because the woman on the bench immediately looked away and pretended to be interested in something on her phone. Iliana turned back to me and smiled.
“I don’t know how you do it,” she said, a little bit of awe in her voice. “It would be overwhelming.”
“I’ve been fortunate. All of my adult life has been in the military, so I’ve been able to avoid this type of thing. That all changed recently, and public interest will soon be brutal.” I looked around, realizing I had a few more minutes before that very thing happened. It was a given that someone was messaging a tip line somewhere. It was how things went. “So, I should probably head back in.”
I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say or what I wanted her to say, but both of us were quiet for an uncomfortable stretch before I cleared my throat.
“It was good seeing you again, Miss Costas,” I said, regretting instantly how stiff and formal I suddenly sounded. But I saw a familiar news van pulling up across the block and knew my time was up. Once they got their claws into Iliana’s identity, they’d probably hound her and her family too.
“Same to you, your…” She smiled, catching herself before finishing the title. “Seb.”
“l hope to see you around.” I realized that I hadn’t hoped for something as strongly in a long time.
She grinned, her dimples winking at me, making me grin back. “Maybe.”
Before the van door opened, I turned away. The guard swept the door open, and I stepped into the palace walls.
Maybe, my ass.
I’d be seeing a lot more of Miss Costas if I had any say in it.
CHAPTER NINE
Iliana
After I’d gotten home and taken a few ibuprofen, the events of the afternoon hit me like a tennis racket to the face.
I’d run into him. Not just run into the man who’d been a major thought in my mind for weeks, he was a freaking duke in the castle where I was an intern.
What planet had I woken up on this morning?
Aunt Hermione was out of town for a few days visiting her friends in Greece, so I basically got to stew about the turn of events in my life alone.
So what was a girl to do?
I looked at the creepy portrait of my great-great-great-grandfather hanging on the wall and muttered, “Google, sir. Yes, Google.”
Pulling out my iPad, I started searching for anything I could find, but was disappointed when most of the photographs I came across looked like they were taken when Seb was a scrawny teenager.
Because in them, he had been a very scrawny teenager, and looked nothing like the man he was today. Seb mentioned the military had protected him from having his picture taken after he’d joined, and that certainly seemed to have been the case.
I closely examined the picture of Seb at what appeared to be his eighteenth birthday party. Then, his hair was buzzed scalp short, making me wonder if he’d already gone to boot camp or whatever they called it out here. But his eyes… yes, those eyes were the same. Even down to the devilish glint.
Seb must have finished a growth spurt because he was all arms and legs, skinny to the point of it looking painful. I sighed at the memory of the man now, fourteen years later. He was still lean, but his muscles appeared to have muscles, and the way he’d just picked me up and carried me as if I weighed nothing was evidence of how strong he now was.
Clicking on a link, a more recent one this time, I was disappointed not to find a current picture. What I did find was a scathing article about Seb, roasting him for his playboy ways. Talking about how he didn’t deserve to take his father’s place in the royal lineage.
That got my attention, and I read more closely.
Then I scoffed. The article calling Seb the Duke of Debauchery was filled with “sources said this” and “sources said that.” Total gossip bullshit.
Or was it?
I remembered the feel of his tongue inside me, the way he’d played with my ass before slipping a finger inside that virgin territory.
The debauchery part might be right.
My entire body tingled as I remembered how much I liked his particular style of debauchery.
“Focus, Silly Illy,” I muttered to myself.
I also found that the Cassian paparazzi referred to Sebastianos Xenakis as the “Runaway Duke.”
I clicked my way through a few rabbit holes to put together enough of a picture to explain the name. And snorted yet again. It spoke of broken hearts and broken engagements, but more to the point of how Seb had run away from his royal responsibilities.
From what I’d been able to gather, that much was true. Heck, he didn’t seem to enjoy being a royal one bit.
Outside the gate, I could tell that he was just waiting for some shoe to drop, and I didn’t miss the news van appearing within moments of our appearance.
How terrible it must be to live like that.
I was very young when Princess Diana died, but it was almost like she lived on even today. I remembered my mother worrying about Kate when she married Prince William, and then Meghan when she married Prince Harry. She spoke of how she hoped the press didn’t hound them like they had the princes’ mother. But from the way the two women’s every dress and hairstyle was henpecked and dissected, I could only imagine the media scrutiny was even worse now, especially given the social media age.
I shuddered at the thought.
I couldn’t imagine having every single thing judged about me every time I did something as simple as step out to the mailbox or do a grocery store run.
Have people say things about me, true or false, just to be relative or gain a few bucks. Not know who to trust or who was giddily waiting to stab me in the back.
Have my every word examined along with the intonation and facial expression. Body language experts weighing in on whether my words were true or how they assessed I was feeling at any specific moment.
I shuddered again.
No, thanks. I much preferred to be on the other side of the lens, with animals and the world in my focus.
But even as I thought that, I found myself clicking on additional links, being part of the gossip industry — the hungry reader — that made the gossip industry thrive.
Clicking on additional links, I found photographs of women claiming to have had their hearts broken by the handsome duke, although, again, I found no pictures of Seb with the women to provide evidence of a relationship.
Not that I’d taken a selfie of myself with a sleeping Sebastianos either.
I frowned, wondering how many women running around Riniasa Castle were part of the one-night stand club with the Duke of Becktonas? Heck, not just the palace, but Cassia as a whole? All of Europe? Why stop there? The world.
Rubbing my eyes, I clicked the browser windows shut and tried not to think of it. Of him. At all.
But dammit, it was hard. The way it felt to have him lift me like I weighed nothing at all when he saw my leg bleeding. How he’d insisted on holding my hand while the nurse examined the cuts. How he waited so patiently with me for the doctor to return.
And then? How abrupt and distant he’d seemed at the end, speaking as though we’d never see each other again, despite the fact that I was now working in the very palace he lived in.
What a mess I’d found myself in.
I dialed Jenn and was
just about to give up when she answered. “Hey, Squeaks,” she said, sounding chipper as ever.
I smiled but wasn’t feeling it. “Hey.”
She instantly honed in on the fact that something was wrong. “What is it?”
I swallowed hard and rubbed the heel of my palm against my eyes. One, because I was tired, and two, because I was getting really creeped out by all the dead people staring at me from their ancient portraits.
Standing, I left the library and looked for a cozier place to sit. “Remember that hookup from the night before I left?”
“Mmmm, I sure do. And I remember his friend too.” There was a pause, then a gasp, then, “Oh my god! Did the tall bastard give you the crabs? Something worse?”
I couldn’t help but laugh at that one. “No, Jenn, I don’t have a sexually transmitted disease that I know of. Focus!” I took a deep breath. “It turns out that Seb is… ready for this…?”
When I didn’t say more, she growled at me. “Spill it, sister!”
“My one-night stand is none other than Prince Sebastianos Xenakis, Duke of Becktonas.”
Silence on the other end, and I could practically see my friend’s face. Then the screen went blank, and before I could register that she’d hung up on me, she was video calling me back.
Yep. Her face looked as shocked as I’d imagined.
“You’re kidding.”
I flopped back in the chair that was older than my father. “Second in line for the throne of Cassia, Jenn,” I nearly wailed. “We ran into each other at a photo shoot today, and he had to take me to the medical office.”
“Wait!” All I could see on the screen was her palm. “What? Why did he have to take you there? What the hell happened? Did you pass out from shock?”
I rolled my eyes. “I suck at curtseying, so I knocked over a light bulb and cut myself and then it was time to meet the king and then he introduced me to Seb and then the princess saw the blood, and then he was carrying me to the medical offices where they glued it shut…” I held up my palm as evidence, “and then he walked me out to the bus and poof, he was gone.”
I took in a deep breath after exhaling the torrent of absurd half-sentences and images in a rush. I wasn’t even sure what I was talking about myself, and according to Jenn’s confused face, my friend probably thought I was speaking an entirely different language.
“I cut myself at a photo shoot,” I said, starting again.
“Okay, tracking so far,” Jenn replied.
“They introduced me to the king and the princess,” I said, moving to the simplified version of the next part of the story. “And then the king called Sebastianos over to introduce us, except we already knew each other. But before we could say anything, he saw the blood on me from the cuts, and he took me to the medical office. And he waited there the whole time with me.”
“Got it,” she said. “And then?”
“And then he walked me to the bus stop, and all these people were staring, and a news van appeared out of nowhere, so he left while I stood there like an idiot.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” she said, her brown eyes narrowing into slits. “You were injured, and he let you take a bus home? Seriously?”
I frowned. That was what she wanted to focus on? “He offered to send me home in a car but I didn’t want to,” I explained. “I was already getting a ton of weird looks and didn’t want to draw attention to myself anymore.”
“Well, did he kiss you or shake your hand before he left? Tell you to fuck off? What?”
“He said that he hoped to see me again and then left.”
She just stared at me from seven thousand miles away. “Well, at least he didn’t tell you to fuck off.”
I scowled at her, turning in the chair until my head hung off the end and my legs were straight up in the air. “What should I do?”
She chewed her lip, giving it some thought. “There’s nothing you can do, Squeaks. You just gotta show up for your job every day and pretend it never happened. Be as professional as you can be and try not to think about how banging the booty was when you guys hooked up.”
I cursed under my breath. That was an impossible task, and she knew it.
“I did some digging on him now that I know his name,” I said. “And they call him the ‘Runaway Duke’ and the ‘Duke of Debauchery.’ The gossip sites are brutal.”
She wiggled her eyebrows. “Debauchery, huh. Nice.”
“Not nice,” I bite, knowing it made me sound unreasonably jealous. But part of me was insanely, irrationally jealous. “How many women in that palace do you suppose he’s hooked up with? I’m guessing a ton because there are a lot of tall, leggy, gorgeous model types in that palace. It’s like Cassians are genetically inclined to be slender, blonde, and stunning. It’s not fair.”
Jenn had the gall to laugh at me. “You sound jealous.”
I turned right side up in the chair, unable to stay in one place for long. “I’m not jealous. I’m just…”
“Jealous.”
“Okay, maybe a little.”
Standing, I walked over to a window. Up on the hillside far, far away, I could see the palace if I squinted really hard.
“I wish you were here,” I said, my voice small.
“I will be,” she promised. “Three sleeps, remember?”
It wasn’t soon enough.
“Hurry, I’ve not even gone to the shopping galleria yet. I’ve been waiting for you.”
She batted her lashes at me. “Thanks for that. I really can’t wait to see you and visit all those places. Get in the ocean.”
Three sleeps.
I just needed to stay busy, do my job, and then Jenn would be here by the weekend, providing the best distraction.
“You have to promise me something,” I said, putting the phone close to my face so she was forced to look into my eyes.
“What’s that?”
“You can’t tease me about Seb. I’m really embarrassed about it, and it’s going to make working there really awkward.”
She rolled her eyes. “Of course I’m going to tease you about it. It’s my job. Besides, if I tease you until you’re over it, it won’t be awkward anymore.”
I examined her reasoning and couldn’t argue with it. But that didn’t mean I had to like it.
“Besides,” she went on, “you’re a grown ass woman, and he is a grown ass man. These things happen all the time, and they’re usually fun. Own it, girl.”
Own it.
“And…” Jenn’s voice and eyes softened. “It was kind of him to take care of you, so focus on that and not on the way he left at the end. Okay?”
I snorted, but the sound didn’t come across as strong as I’d intended. “You sound like Mom.”
She smiled. “Since your mom is awesome, I’ll take that as a compliment.”
The sound of someone clearing their throat startled me, and I whirled from the window to find Nigel standing in the doorway. “Pardon me, miss. I didn’t intend to give you a fright.”
On my screen, Jenn looked frightened too. I held up a finger to Nigel and said to Jenn, “Two sleeps.”
She kissed her fingers and flew it at me. “See you soon.”
Cancelling the call, I turned to Nigel again. “Sorry. Did you need me?”
He was too polite to say something like I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t. Instead, nodded slowly. “Indeed, Miss Costas. I’m inquiring as to your preference on dining arrangements this evening.”
The proper speech was already growing tiring, and I missed the way Americans said “Let’s grab a bite,” but I held it together. Well, sort of. “A sandwich is fine with me. Please don’t go through any trouble.”
“Dinner is already prepared. My inquiry is whether you would prefer to dine in your room or more formally in the dining room.”
“My room is fine, but please don’t go to any trouble just for me.”
He blinked. “No trouble at all.”
I smiled, forcing my shoulders to rel
ax. “Then I’m happy with my room. When should I come down and get my tray?”
Nigel looked downright scandalized. “It shall be delivered to you, miss. Six o’clock suit your schedule?”
I bit back a smartass reply about letting me check my calendar and nodded. “That’s perfect, thank you.”
He bowed his head, then turned on his heel and left.
I heaved out a breath. Whew, having good manners was exhausting.
Since it was only three, I looked around, wondering what I should do. I didn’t want to go back to the library, where I’d be tempted to comb the gossip columns, and I didn’t want to sit in my room where I’d be tempted to rub one out while thinking of the sexy duke.
Twirling in a slow circle, I took in all the hallways leading in different directions. While I’d been given the formal tour of the manor, I’d not yet investigated the nooks and crannies on my own.
Passing the library I was already familiar with, I headed down a long hallway that ended in a room that was three times the size of my old apartment. The gallery. The walls were covered in family portraits from over the years, and they seemed to go in chronological order as I went further down the wall. Goose bumps raised on my skin as all the eyes seemed to follow my every move.
“These are relatives,” I reminded myself. “Friendly ghosts.”
Eventually, I came to a portrait that I swore I’d seen before.
“Wilhem Costas,” a little gold plate read, and I stopped and stared. The man was my grandfather, yet another relative I’d never met. He died a couple years after my father left, and his wife just a few years after that. Neither had been alive by the time I was born, though my father had shared a few stories of his father and mother over the years.
A few portraits down, and there he was — my dad. He was young in the picture. Maybe eighteen or nineteen. I knew he hadn’t returned to Cassia since leaving all those years ago, so this was likely the last portrait they had of him, and he was nearly fifty now.
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