The Princess

by Jones, Lisa Renee

  He has my full attention. “How does this connect to chess?”

  His answer is to offer me his cup of coffee and indicate the chess board in front of me. “Play me.”

  “Just tell me what you want me to figure out.” I sip the warm, sweet beverage that says Eric likes chocolate, and somehow I love him all the more for it. “I’m not playing you.” I hand him his cup. “You’re a genius.”

  “Humor me,” he says, no denial about his ability to win in his response.

  “I don’t even know how to play.”

  “Approach it like checkers.”

  “Fine.” I reach for a piece and make a move.

  He moves next. Then me. Then him. I study his position and jump one of his men. “We both know you let me do that.”

  “What were you thinking with every move?”

  My brow furrows. “Well, I wanted to force your next move, leave you nowhere to go but where I wanted you to go.”

  “Exactly.” He stands up and looks down at me. “Think about what happened. Isaac baited me and I left you there at the warehouse, angry. I did what I’ve done every time with this family. I headed to the airport. I was going to leave. You were attacked. It could have easily looked like I killed you and ran. They set up the reactions, or Isaac did.”

  “It makes perfect sense.”

  “But then I showed back up. I saved you. I left with you. I forced them to make a move. And so, my father did. He came here to take control.”

  “But you’re the one in control now. You didn’t do anything he wanted.”

  “What if I did?”

  My brow furrows again. “What? I get that I’m not a genius, but—”

  “Stop saying that. Stop putting me over here.” He motions to himself and then to me. “And you over there. Don’t treat me like the bastard.”

  It’s then that I realize that the bastard is more to him than I’d ever imagined. It’s the title that makes him an outsider.

  “All right,” I say, moving on rather than commenting directly, my instinct telling me that’s what he wants and needs. “What you just said. That makes no sense, Eric. You didn’t go to his room. You didn’t call him after the attack.”

  “What if that’s not how it happened at all? He came here to get in my head. He sent a man to attack me, a man who was no match to shake me up, to get into my head. And he called you to do the same.” He points to the chess board. “Think about the game. Every move you made was to force my next move. My father took an offensive stand to my defensive position when he responded to our retreat by coming here.”

  I sit on the edge of the cushion. “So he doesn’t want you to retreat. He wants you to engage.”

  “Unless he doesn’t.”

  “Of course he does,” I argue. “He left me a message. He wanted me to respond.”

  “He was testing your loyalty to me.”

  “Right,” I say. “Of course he was, and hoping I failed.”

  “There was no pass or fail. Either way, he got to me. Either way, he knew that I’d know he called you. He knows that would distract me or even trigger me into one of my old attacks.”

  “He still wants to make you the fall guy.”

  “Or he doesn’t,” Eric counters.

  “Eric,” I say, pressing my fingers to my temples. “You’re making my head spin.” I drop my hands to the cushion. “What’s his plan? What’s his endgame?”

  “To keep my focus on him. That man would not try to kill me and sit at arm’s reach where I could just end him. He wouldn’t come at me through you, knowing I just saved your life, when he’s sitting within arm’s reach. Not unless he desperately needed me to stay focused on him.”

  Understanding fills me. “While he buries something he doesn’t want you to find.”

  “While Isaac buries it. Walker saw my father arrive at the plant after we left. He met with Isaac and was furious with him.”

  “For letting me live and you get away,” I say.

  “For digging a grave that wasn’t ours. For digging his grave. My father is all about my father. Make no mistake. He’s protecting no one but himself.”

  “Yes, but you retreated. Your history says that you’ll leave and wash your hands of them. Why come after you?”

  “Because you don’t retreat from what you feel is a part of you because of your father, and because you matter to me. He feels like you’ll influence what I do next. He needs to influence me, not you. He needs to push me to the point that he knows I’m done with them and then I influence you. I convince you to retreat.”

  “They don’t know we’re together.”

  His lips thin. “They know. They sent you after me. Isaac probably knew the baby was mine. I’m guessing he followed you to my cottage that night. Fucker might have even watched us.”

  I shiver and hug myself. “I’m back to being creeped out by this family.” I shake my head. “But why send me after you at all, if they want you out of this?”

  “To frame me and kill you just as we’ve said, but it backfired. This is plan B.” Before I can ask him what plan B means exactly, he grabs his phone and places it on speaker, and in one ring I hear Blake say, “Good fucking morning. You first or me first?”

  “My father is trying to draw the attention to himself. He’s the distraction. Tell me you found whatever he doesn’t want me to find?”

  “Not only did we fail,” Blake says. “All the little Kingston assholes are tucked into bed in Denver, and showing no signs of movement.”

  “That coded message. Anything on it?”

  “Nothing yet. Today. I will get you the answer today.” Eric hangs up on him and turns to the window, crossing the room to stand in front of it.

  I waste no time joining him. “If I go to your father—”

  “No,” he says, turning to face me. “You will not go to him.” His tone is absolute, a steel wall, but it’s a wall that I have to bust through. I’m the one who can buy time for us to do what we need to do to end this. I’m the one who can make his father feel that he’s got the power he craves, the power to distract Eric. I’m the one who has to go stick my hand in a tiger’s cage and pray it doesn’t get bitten off because I'm the one who won't kill the tiger. You don't come back from murder. I'm not putting Eric in a position yet again to have to remember that. Not when even he sees the way his father pulls his strings.

  “I have to do this,” I say. “I’m going to do this.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Harper

  “You will not go to see my father.” Eric’s words are just as hard as moments before, pure steel and determination. A command I pretend doesn’t exist.

  “I’ll let him think that he’s bought time to hide his secrets,” I say, reaching for the reason I know a man of his genius can’t ignore. “I’ll call my mother. I’ll use her to convince him I really have turned.”

  Eric pulls me to him, his body as hard as his words. “Now I say to you what I wasn’t going to say to you. Plan B could very well be another place and time that you die, and I get blamed.”

  “I get that. Believe me, that possibility is screaming in my head right now but if I don’t go and see him, we drive him to plan C. What is plan C?”

  “The same as plan B. Get to me. I’m the bastard who was forced on him and ultimately that he couldn’t control. Even you, he chose to bring into his life, through your mother.”

  “You just said it’s likely to kill me again and you get blamed for the murder.”

  “And then I lose everything.” His hand comes down on my head, fingers closing around my hair. “I lose you. I’m locked away where I can’t get revenge. I just got smart enough to hold onto you, Harper. I’m not losing you.”

  I realize now, some part of me, until this moment, didn’t believe this man, this brilliant, talented, gorgeous man could feel as intensely about me as I do about him, but he does. I know that he does, and I have no wall with him. I
have no way to protect myself, and I don’t care. I don’t care. “And I’m not losing you,” I vow.

  “Then I need you to trust me, really trust me.”

  “I do. Didn’t me coming to you about the message from my mother tell you that?”

  “You tell me that. Tell me now.”

  “I trust you, Eric.”

  And then his mouth is closing down on mine, a hard slant, a possession that I feel through every part of me; a lick, a stroke, a command. Yes. It’s another command. I will not leave him, it says. He won’t let me, he says. And I’m already doing what I said I would not do, submission softening my resolve, weakening my knees, but it doesn’t shut down my mind. It doesn’t make me forget what I want, and that’s him. I pull back, tearing my mouth from his.

  “I can’t lose you,” I repeat. “I won’t. Stop trying to make me bend.”

  “I’m protecting you.”

  “I’m protecting you,” I counter.

  “I protect you,” he counters. “That’s just how it is.”

  I laugh. “Really? Did you just take that caveman attitude with me? Because you dictating and controlling me doesn’t work for me. That’s not the kind of relationship I want to be in. If that’s the one you want, you’ve got the wrong girl. We protect each other or not at all. I’m the way we buy time. With time, you’ll figure out the message, just like you figured out your father this morning. You’ll take them down. You’ll do it right, so once again, I say: You need time that I can buy us.”

  “I need to buy us time.”

  I push against him, stepping away, my hands slashing through the air. “He gave me twenty-four hours to make contact, and nearly eight are gone. He’ll have a move planned when I don’t show up.”

  “He probably has a move already in play and it won’t take twenty-four hours for us to find that out. You haven’t called him. You haven’t called your mother. That tells him that you’re talking to me, not them.”

  “Then I need to call him now.”

  “What you need to do is listen to me.”

  “Okay. Then I’m listening. What are you going to do, right now, to distract him?”

  “What he doesn’t expect. What I never give him.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Me. He wants me, Harper. I already told you that. I’m going to give him me. I’m going to have coffee with my father, up close and personal in his hotel room, in my Kingston Motors shirt. Like fathers and sons should do.”

  “Not this father and son.”

  “Today we do.”

  He turns away and starts to walk.

  I plant myself in front of him, hands flattening on the hard muscles of his chest. “So you can walk into a trap and end up dead? I forbid it. I told you. I’m not losing you. How many times do I have to say that?”

  He drags me to him again, that spicy dominant scent of him teasing my nostrils and wrapping me in the almighty force that is this man. “Princess, you’re not getting rid of me today, or this easily. I told you that if you run, I’ll run after you.”

  “You can’t do that if you’re dead. I forbid you to do this.”

  “If you want to forbid me, do it while you’re naked. I’ll listen a whole lot better.”

  “Fine. Yes. Let’s get naked. Am I supposed to complain about getting naked with you?”

  “No. You’re not.”

  “Then let’s get naked.”

  “Not now, sweetheart. When I get back.” He kisses me, his hand on my head, a deep, passionate kiss, a promise on his tongue that lands on mine. He’ll come back. He’s not leaving me. With those promises, he parts our lips, and for long moments, seems to just breathe me in before he releases me and turns away. He starts for the door, but no one can keep a promise like that. No one.

  I can’t let him go.

  I won’t.

  Not without me.

  I dart for the door and reach the foyer as he sticks a gun in the back of his pants, and then grabs a jacket from the coatrack. He exits the apartment and I run the rest of the way toward it, open it and jolt, finding Eric standing there, waiting for me. “What are you doing, Harper?”

  “Saving you.”

  His eyes burn with amber flecks, emotions radiating from their depths that I want to know and understand, that I believe one day he’ll allow me to understand, if he’s alive.

  “Saving you,” I say again, earnestly.

  He reaches up and brushes his fingers over my cheek, his touch shivering through me. “You already have, Harper. You just don’t know it yet.”

  I suck in a breath at what is an unexpected confession of which I do not believe this man makes many. His hand falls away. “Walker is watching. They’ll stop you again. Don’t make them. Trust me.”

  “Says the man who has my trust, but gives me none by having guards at the door. I’m not a captive.”

  “Says the man who guards what matters to him and protects what’s his to protect.”

  What’s his? Once again he speaks of me like I’m his, and I don’t fight those words. I revel in them. I want to crawl inside them and live and love and endure. I want to be his woman. I want to be his everything. I want so much with this man that I can’t just let him go.

  “What if it’s a trap?”

  “Traps are puzzles. I excel at puzzles. I need to go. I need to make my move before he makes his next.”

  “He’s driving your moves, remember?”

  “Not this one. Of that, I’m certain.”

  I don’t know what that means. “Are you going to kill him?”

  He cuts his stare, his expression all hard lines and shadows, his jaw hard before he casts me in an even harder stare that sends chills down my spine. “When my mother died, the very night she died, he told me to get over it. People die. I’ve hated him since that day. I hate myself for ever forgetting that. For ever hungering for his approval.”

  His words crawl around in my chest, stirring anger at his father, at this family, and leaves me speechless, unable to press for my answer, but he gives it to me anyway. “Am I going to kill him?” he asks. “No. If I kill him, he can’t suffer.”

  It’s exactly where Grayson said Eric would land, with a need to punish his father, not kill him.

  He brushes a strand of hair from my eyes, tenderness in his touch, that defies the words he’s just spoken. “Stay here. We’ll go shopping when I get back, after you make good on all of those promises to get naked.” He turns and starts walking.

  I ignore Smith standing quietly to my left and call after Eric. “I’ll be running around your house naked waiting on you, so hurry up. It’s cold in this apartment.”

  He turns around and winks. “I’m officially motivated to hurry back.” And then he’s walking away again. He’s leaving. I shut the door and lock it. He’s gone and it feels bad. It feels like he’s not coming back.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Eric

  The past…

  It’s one day until I turn twenty-one. There’s days before Christmas. Three weeks before I join Isaac in law school, and I know he’s hating that shit. Younger brother tested out of high school, fast-tracked through college, to jump right into law school, years before he can escape my term. Then again, he hates my job at Kingston, my role that grows while he’s off turning pages in a book.

  Despite my preference to stay at my own place for Christmas and just eat a damn frozen pizza, my father has demanded my presence, so I’m here. I enter the house and I can hear Isaac and my father speaking in muffled tones, too muffled for me to make out the words. And I don’t want to make them out. The best days of my life are those where Isaac is gone and so the fuck am I. Every time he comes home, we have issues.

  The voices seem to be coming from the den and that’s exactly why I head toward the kitchen where Delia will be making the mac n cheese that I love. I make it a few more steps when I hear, “Eric.”

  At the sound of my fath
er’s voice to the left, I halt, and for a moment I fight the wave of darkness inside me. These are the days I hate him all over again. These are the days that I forget our working relationship. I forget our bloodline. I remember the man who told me to “get over” my mother dying.

  “Son,” he bites out, and I don’t like that word. Not most days. Never when Isaac is here. Never on a holiday when my mom is gone.

  Nevertheless, I rotate to find him standing in the doorway of his den, only slightly underdressed for a day of fucking with our heads. His dark hair sprinkled with gray, his jaw shaved clean, because that is all that’s acceptable. He’s in a dinner jacket, a button-down shirt starched as crisply as his spine is stiff, and of course, dress pants.

  My jaw is not shaved clean. It’s sporting a three-day stubble I embrace. And I’m damn sure dressed like my mother had us dress for every holiday: comfortable in jeans and a blue sweater, because comfortable, she’d said, is how a holiday is supposed to feel.

  “Join us for a smoke and the whiskey your brother brought me,” my father orders.

  I brought him nothing. I figure the games he’ll play today are his gift. I start walking in his direction and he disappears into the room.

  In too few steps, I enter the den, which by most standards is a welcoming room with walls of books so high a ladder rolls across one wall. Brown leather couches and chairs rest on top of a heavy oriental rug that decorates a dark wooden floor.

  Isaac’s standing by the fireplace, a smoke in one hand, a glass in the other, and holy fuck, he’s dressed like my father. A little clone boy. Clown boy is more like it.

  “Celebrating my national chess win,” he greets me like it’s not been months since we last saw each other, “by kicking father’s ass in chess.”

  “Smoke, son?” my father asks, and the way he emphasizes “son” isn’t to ensure Isaac knows that’s what I am. It’s to piss him off and it works. His eyes glint hard steel.

  “I’ll pass on the smoke,” I say, walking to the couch that faces Isaac and sitting down.