Her Cowboy Prince

by Madeline Ash

  “I can’t believe I’m this close to you right now,” he said, as awareness burned beneath her skin, flashing like fireflies. “Can—can we do this again?”

  “I—” Yes. Her whole body yearned for him. “Time to go.”

  He groaned, and she swore she felt the vibration low inside her.

  As she pried herself off him, smoothing her dress and tugging at the knot of her headscarf, she caught herself thinking in terms of all or nothing. That had always been the shape of her denial. Surrendering to Kris’s chemistry seemed like opening a door to a future they couldn’t have—but perhaps it didn’t need to be that absolute. He now knew the worst of her upbringing and still wanted her. It was possible for them to take the next step, without secrets or lies, and to make sure they never ventured any further. Finally, this prince would know exactly who he was taking to bed.

  And then he could focus on finding a queen.

  She jolted as his hand moved over her lower back. They had no future. But when his eyes clouded like that, the only future in his decision-making was the very, very immediate.

  Perhaps she could handle that.

  “Yes,” she said.

  He flashed her a startled look, wallet half out of his back pocket.

  “We can be close again,” she finished softly.

  His smile was slow and delicious, and flared heat across her face.

  Out on the sidewalk, she stood with her weight pushed onto one hip and drew out her phone to call the security car. She’d positioned them several blocks away. Philip would be livid if he discovered she’d taken Kris out by herself, but no way in hell was she going to risk anyone on her team looking twice at her father. She hated it too, but this had been the only approach to revealing her past to Kris that he would take seriously.

  Although if “it’s not a reason you can’t be with me,” was any indication—he still hadn’t.

  He slid a hand around her wrist with a soft, “Frankie.”

  Lowering the phone, she found herself pulled lightly against him. “I told you not to call me that tonight,” she said, her cheek brushing against his shirt.

  “Show me.” He spoke into her hair. “Don’t stop here.”

  She made a questioning sound while trying to memorize his smell.

  “Show me how you grew up.”

  It wasn’t a small request, but Frankie did her best. Her upbringing stained most of her memories and the entire eastern crest of Kiraly. Unlike the luxury of the lakeside district, these streets were narrower, the houses cheaper, the shops selling only to locals because the tourists didn’t come this way. The people weren’t bad, just doing their best with what little they had. And when she was young, Frankie had relished in the freedom to play messy, loud games with the neighborhood kids without law enforcement keeping the streets clear and quiet for camera-ready travelers.

  Until her dad had made her play his games.

  “I grew up in that apartment,” she said, pointing to a dark third-floor window with potted plants on the tiny balcony. The white glow of the nearby streetlamp cast the building in stark, ugly light, and the memories that clogged her pores were slick like fever-sweat. “It was small, and the walls were thin, but it meant my mother and I could hear when he was coming down the hall.”

  Kris stood, holding her hand, gazing at her old home. “What were the neighbors like?”

  Of course this small-town cowboy would wonder about the community she’d grown up in. “I don’t remember. They didn’t like Dad, so kept to themselves.”

  He kept looking up. “Why didn’t they like him?”

  She almost rolled her eyes. That question proved the efficacy of her father’s disguise this evening. Gentle and genuine, so convincing that despite the change-taking at the counter, Kris struggled to imagine him any other way.

  “Just . . . imagine something bad,” she said, unsure how to put her father into words. “Like a pipe filled with something disgusting. If you block the pipe for hours or even days at a time, the pressure behind that bad stuff is going to build up. Then when you unblock it, say in the comfort of the pipe’s own neighborhood, it’s going to come bursting out. When he was himself, he was moody and unpredictable, made worse for all the hours he’d pretended he wasn’t.”

  “Was he violent?” Kris’s question was quiet.

  “Not to me or mum. But he’d bring men home, accomplices for bigger jobs, and sometimes his fists did the talking. And sometimes . . .”

  Kris tightened his hold on her. “Sometimes?”

  “Come on,” she said, and took him to where it first happened. It looked the same, just with bigger trees around the park’s edges. “I used to cut through here after dark on the way home from the lake district. One night, when I was fourteen, I was in my tidy black and whites after pretending to be a waitress on her break and doing a currency exchange scam on new tourists. Usually the worst thing in the park was a couple of teenagers putting the shadows to use.” She hesitated, finding the memory still too soft to touch without bruising. The blinding pain in her ribs; the blood she hadn’t known how to get out of that white blouse—not with her mother long gone.

  Kris waited, his thumb stroking the back of her hand.

  “That night, two guys were waiting for me. They called me that bastard Harvey’s girl. I was so terrified I didn’t even try to run as they beat me up. It was over quickly, but it felt like forever, and even though I’d never seen the men in my life, I couldn’t stop imagining it was my dad doing it.”

  Kris looked winded as he stared at her, mouth open, hand on his abdomen.

  “After, I was so disoriented, they had to shove me in the right direction to get home, suggesting I tell my dad that’s what he got for skimming their cut.”

  She’d found her way, blind from swelling in one eye, ribs too damaged to cry.

  “That night, he gave me these.” With her free hand, she snapped open her purse—Hanna’s purse—and fished out her brass knuckles. “They ended up coming in handy.”

  “Jesus,” Kris muttered, hand running over his mouth.

  Her father had slid them across the sticky dining table and said, For next time.

  Not, Are you okay?

  Not, I’m so sorry, Frankie.

  Not, I’ll make sure this never happens again.

  “He told me to cut my hair,” she continued, closing the purse again. “Said they’d use it to drag me down. And that I shouldn’t let them get me on the ground, because I was old enough to know what happened next and for them to want to do it.”

  “Fuck. Oh, fuck.” Kris’s eyes were bleak. “I’m so sorry, Frankie.”

  She raised a shoulder, looking away. “He taught me how to fight. Street rules.” Dirty moves and fast relentless strikes. “It only just helped, so I pulled extra jobs after school”—plucking wallets and short-changing cashiers—“and took every self-defense and martial arts class I could find.”

  She’d never taken a beating for her hateful father again.

  “There’s more,” she said, because he needed to know everything a journalist might dig up. Based on the way he held her hand, his elbow tucked around hers to keep her close to his side, his mind was far from royal practicalities. “If you want to see.”

  “Everything. Show me everything.”

  So they kept walking. She took him to her old school, the self-defense studio where she’d got her first legal job as a trainer, and the hostel she’d lived in for the better part of two years.

  “It doesn’t look safe.” Kris eyed the backpackers’ hostel in concern. The kind of place that crawled with young tourists who’d left their decency balled up in a drawer at home.

  “The owners got to know me,” she said. “They looked out for me. Gave me one of the single rooms with a new lock on it. I told them I was in college, not high school, and paid every week, so they pretended to believe me. Besides, I could handle myself.”

  Kris stared at the building for a long time. The downstairs common room was
a mess of hollers and raucous laughter, and a sudden uproar of singing petered out drunkenly when the participants seemed to realize none of them really knew the words. The crash of glass bottles being emptied into a waste container travelled from the back alley, and there were unmistakable groans escaping an open second-level window.

  It wasn’t the place for a sixteen-year-old runaway to put herself through school.

  “Okay,” he said quietly, something broken in his voice.

  They kept walking. It was late now, the dull beat of music travelling along the shadowed streets, the occasional burst of laughter coming from a rear courtyard. The people of Kira City rarely slept, and never all at once. Frankie led him to a traders’ hub, streetlamps illuminating a steep curving road, sidewalk benches, and a strip of stores. Some were closed for the night; others were selling ice cream and kebabs and cocktails.

  “I lifted my first wallet while giving directions out the front of that bakery.”

  He followed her pointing finger. “How old were you?”

  She thought back. “Maybe seven?”

  “Seven.” He gazed at the bakery as if he could picture it. A young Frankie and an older woman bending over, eyes on Frankie’s pointing finger instead of the wallet being slid from her handbag. “How did you feel about it?”

  “Mixed.” Frankie looked down the road, remembering the route she’d taken to get out of sight before the woman realized and shouted after her. Up two shopfronts, left into the back street between the delicatessen and poultry market, and then crouched low and running behind a row of parked cars. But the shouts had never come. No one had chased her. Perhaps the woman hadn’t noticed until she’d reached the end of Frankie’s directions. Perhaps she’d never suspected the little girl at all. “I was scared. Disbelieving that I’d really done it. Exhilarated that I’d gotten away with it and proud to tell my dad. I remember wanting to get better at it so I wouldn’t have to run.”

  And she had. Swallowing shame, she led Kris on.

  “Growing up,” she said as they walked, “my dad would ask if I had my lunch money. But he would ask after school, not before, and I’d hand over the money I’d shortchanged when buying my lunch on the way to class.”

  Then finally, they reached an innocuous street corner on the border of the eastern crest and Kira City center. The place that hurt the most.

  She pressed the knuckle of her thumb into her brow, pushing outward, as if she could swipe the pain aside. “This was where I last saw my mother before she left.”

  There was nothing to see, but Kris looked around anyway.

  “Dad was pulling an all-nighter.” Also known as banging one of his marks. “It was late afternoon. I was walking home from school the long way. I can’t remember why. And I stopped on this street corner, waiting for traffic, and saw that opposite me, Mum was putting a bag in the back of a taxi. She looked pale and scared. She didn’t notice me, and for some reason, I didn’t call out. She got in and the taxi drove away. It took forever to find a gap in traffic to cross, but then I ran home. The apartment looked the same, like maybe she’d gone to get groceries, except her favorite coat was missing and it was the middle of summer. I waited up all night.”

  She paused, her breath uneven, as a car swept past them. It was overloaded with teens and one waved out the window, shouting, “Drinks at mine, butterflies!”

  Frankie stared, dull inside, while Kris raised a hand in return.

  “Dad was so angry when he got home,” she continued, shaking her head at how his fist had put new holes in the plaster walls. “I’ve never . . . He grilled me for days about whether I’d known about it. No joke. He asked me if I’d known my own mother was planning on running away—and what, leaving me behind? Thinking that I might have helped her, but chosen to stay with him? Likelihood of fucking zero.”

  “So,” Kris said, and then stopped to pull off his cap and rake fingers through his hair. “She just left you with him?”

  Frankie stared at the street sign where the taxi had idled. “Yes.”

  “But she’s . . .”

  “My mother? Yeah. But apparently I was too much like my dad.” A truth Frankie had forced herself to swallow, and even now, it cut like fish bones in her throat. “She clearly didn’t trust me to keep it secret—not to tell him in the lead up or contact him once we were gone. So she left me behind.” She paused. “Put that back on.”

  Kris slid his cap over his head and used his hold on the brim to tip his face down.

  “I did everything he told me, and I did it well. I had a temper, just like him.” Frankie had had so many years to think it through, her mother’s defense almost made sense. “She was scared of me.”

  The problem was that her mother had been scared of Frankie for longer than she’d had any cause to be—which had meant she’d always kept Frankie at a distance. There’d been no opportunity to see that beneath it all, they were as scared as each other.

  “And she never came back for you?” Kris’s question was hushed.

  Frankie considered him. The concern in his eyes, the dismay pulling at the corners of his mouth. The hand that continued to grip hers. He’d asked for her to share everything. Why should she stop here?

  “No,” she answered. “So I went to her.”

  Frankie’s focus glazed in the direction of that street sign as she told him the painful details.

  She’d been twenty. After high school and working for a few years, renting her very own shithole of an apartment, she’d finally felt ready. She had her mother’s last-known whereabouts—on a train destined for Paris. Frankie had noted the taxi’s license plate that fateful afternoon and the driver had later accepted the crisp bill a ten-year-old Frankie had offered to tell her where his passenger had been bound.

  She’d never passed on that information to her father. He could have used it to track her—Frankie could have got her mother back. But despite her abandonment, Frankie still felt like she and her mother were on the same side, and she’d wanted to protect her from him.

  Ten years on, she’d finally used the lead herself.

  It had taken time. Internet searches that went nowhere, deep dives that spat out nothing more than an old record, but determination had eventually led her to an upper-class home in the west of Paris. In the years that had passed, her mother had married a man who earned his wealth as honestly as a banker could, and with him, she’d had two children. Foolishly, Frankie had imagined shock upon her arrival, sobbing apologies in the warmth of her mother’s arms, and long-awaited introductions to her little brother and sister.

  No such fantasy had awaited her.

  Her mother had physically staggered when she’d answered the bell to find Frankie on the doorstep. Frankie’s jeans and best red jacket had been worlds beneath the beautiful cut and dye of her mother’s hair, the form-flattering outfit, the gigantic ring on her finger.

  Sick with nerves, Frankie had adjusted the backpack over her shoulder and scuffed her boot on the welcome mat.

  “Hi, Mum.”

  “How did you find me?” Wild-eyed, the woman had scanned the street behind her. “Is he here?”

  “No.” Frankie had eased her weight back, non-threatening, heart thundering. “I haven’t seen him for years. I just—I wanted to see you.”

  “Why?” Her mother’s eyes had snapped to her, pupils wide. “What do you want?”

  “I . . .” What did she want from the mother who’d left her in the care of a criminal? Far too much, she was about to discover. “It’s been ten years.”

  “What does that mean? My time is up? I get ten years, and then you come for me?”

  “What?” Frankie had shoved a hand in her pocket, trying not to let her alarm become defensive anger. “No. I mean it’s been a long time. I—I thought we could talk. Reconnect, maybe.” At her mother’s silence, she’d gestured vaguely to the gorgeous home. “This is nice.”

  “So that’s it.” Her mother had nodded too fast. “You’ve finally figured out t
hat I have something worth taking.”

  Frankie had taken a step back, the accusation like a gut punch. “No. I—no.”

  She’d spent months on this search—years anticipating this very moment. Not once, in all her imaginings, had she considered that this woman had wanted to abandon her.

  “I don’t want anything.” Frankie had been queasy with shame. “I have a better life now, too. I just thought . . .”

  Her mother had stared at her from where she’d half hidden behind the front door. Conveying, without saying a word, that Frankie had thought wrong.

  “Can I come in?” Frankie had asked, voice small. “Or we could go out somewhere? Or I could come back at a better time?”

  “There is no better time. I know what you’re doing. The pity angle, trying to put me off guard. Well, it won’t work on me. You’re even more like him now than you were back then.”

  “This isn’t an angle.” Helpless, Frankie had taken another step back. She’d never wanted to be like her father. “You’re my mum.”

  The woman shook her head. “How can I trust you?”

  “How can I trust you? You left me.” Frankie’s voice had trembled with a decade of pain. “You’re my mother and you left me with him.”

  “Of course I left you. It was always the two of you.” The woman had darted another look down the quiet suburban street. “I don’t want you here.”

  “But Mum—”

  The door had slammed shut.

  Frankie swore she could still feel it—the impact of that rejection inches from her face.

  Kris was shaking his head beside her. He hadn’t said a word as she’d spoken.

  “That was our big reunion.” She raised a shoulder as if it didn’t matter. “Bit of a letdown, am I right?”

  After a long silence, Kris said, “This is all so sad,” and looked off down the road.