Chapter Fifteen
Konnor gave me twenty minutes of “privacy” in the bathroom. I knew he’d be a gentleman like that.
And when he pounded on the door, I had expected that, too. “Caroline!” No more Your Highness. I smirked at myself in the mirror facing the deep, tiled bathtub where I was currently perched. “Are you…okay?”
I saw a low-battery icon flash on my tablet. Then the bell of an incoming message. I knew it wouldn’t take long to get a response and now I had only a few minutes to charge it before we needed to leave.
I flung open the door to the bathroom, promptly handed over Konnor’s phone and side-stepped around him. “I need to go and plug this in,” I said, as nonchalantly as I could, even as I mentally counted down the seconds…one…two…three…
“What did you do!?” I didn’t turn around. What was the point? I knew he’d follow up with, “It’s not working!”
“I flushed the memory card down the toilet,” I informed him crisply. “That way, no one can track us without us knowing.”
I hadn’t flushed the card down the toilet. I’m not a complete idiot. It was safely stashed in my bra—another place Hugh Konnor wouldn’t deign to root around in, stupid man that he was. But I knew he’d buy my story.
“Track us?” Konnor said, in a voice composed of ground-up nails and gravel. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Us, Hugh. Collective pronoun. Come on now. Since you said you wouldn’t leave my side, we’ll just get my usefulness out of the way.”
I plugged my tablet into the charger and went to pack my few belongings back into my small bag. There was no reason to leave without my hairbrush, after all.
Konnor snatched the tablet and read what I had left open on the screen. I mentally counted down the seconds…one…two…three…
Konnor’s dark eyes were bright with anger and I automatically took a step back. “I’m giving you what you want. What you’ve been searching for. He’ll meet us tonight, and you can nab him then and this will all be over. You’ll never have to spend another tortuous moment in my presence again.” He was still a seething knot of emotion, but he hadn’t blown up. He was listening. He was considering what I was saying.
“What am I supposed to do with you, then?” Konnor ground out the words between a clenched jaw. An image of his hard body pinning me down on cool marble jumped to mind.
I swallowed hard and mentally shoved the almost-dirty thought back into my overactive subconscious. “There’s the village a short distance away. After I meet with Christian, you can drop me off there. I’ll catch a bus, head to my next destination.” Wherever that was. “You get what you want, I get what I want. We’re all good.” I swiped my hands together. Pfft, pfft. “Done.”
Konnor looked at me for a long moment. Maybe he was weighing up his options. Maybe he was wishing he’d never turned me away when I was a nubile innocent, before I’d gone mad and cynical besides. Hey—a woman could fantasize about a man regretting his choices.
“What did he ask you in Varenna?”
I avoided his eyes, went to double-check the zip on my bag. “Exactly what I told you. He wants me to help him talk to Thea,” I lied.
“And your London friends? At The Times?”
Crap. I’d forgotten about Christian’s oblique references to Clémence and Cordelia. “Royal reporters,” I said. “Reputable ones. I think anything with Christian should be kept out of the papers, don’t you?”
“He’s not a good man,” Hugh said softly. “He tried to take the Queen down.”
“I’m not calling you a liar,” I said evenly. “But whatever damage Christian did to the realm, it’s clearly been dealt with.” I waved a hand. “My grandmother still reigns and statues are still being erected.”
“He’s done terrible things to your family.”
His mention of my family was like an uncomfortable bedspring popping into my back. “They’re no longer my family,” I reminded him, trying hard for breezy and unconcerned. “It’s in the first chapter of the disownment manual. Now. Are we going back to Felice’s or not?”
Finally, he nodded, and my knees softened like melted butter. I had to reach out and grab the poster of bed to steady myself. I hadn’t realized I had locked them into place while I was confronting him and acting oh-so-tough.
“We’ll leave in thirty,” he said. Then he gave me a pointed look. “And I’ll take this,” he said, snapping the tablet’s cord from the wall and slipping the tablet underneath his arm.
Several hours later, we were on the dark road leading to my mother’s villa. Hugh was driving, and pulled off into a dirt lane that seemed to go nowhere.
“What are you doing?” I asked as he got out of the car. “We’re not there yet?!”
He popped the trunk and withdrew something from it. “Konnor?” I asked in vain, somehow knowing that his plans and mine were probably not going to align. “What are you doing?”
I opened the car door, scrambled out and saw exactly what I feared—the glint of a gun barrel in the last rays of sunset. “Konnor—we had this worked out. I told Christian in the email that I was going to meet with him…alone.”
He looked at me like I had suggested that the Driedish national football team retire en masse and take up ballet dancing. “In what world do you think that’s going to happen? Let me remind you, Your Highness, that I don’t have to do anything Christian Fraser-Campbell suggests.” He gave me a pointed glare. “Or you.”
“Wait.” I was confused. Was he conceding that I was no longer royal—and thus it was no longer his duty to protect me? Or was he simply saying that he could ignore me if he wished?
I had to admit, I found that I did not care for either possibility, which was a tad concerning, if I thought about it too long.
Which I wouldn’t. Because I had yet another battle of wills to win with Hugh “Tough Stubborn Guy out of a Fifties Hollywood Movie” Konnor.
“I don’t want you to use a gun,” I said, thinking that was fairly diplomatic of me. A nice starting point for negotiations, really.
“Too bad,” he snarled.
“No guns.” I added extra emphasis this time, for clarity’s sake.
Konnor made a show of looking down the barrel, off into the distance, checking…something…out. What, I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t the sportsman that my father was, nor the royal marine that my brother was. Guns were completely foreign to me.
“Please.” My voice broke. “Just—”
Konnor didn’t let me finish. “This is how it’s going to be. You made this arrangement your way, so I’m going to take it from here and do it my way. Against my instincts, training and plain good common sense, I brought you here to meet with Christian. But there’s no way you’re taking one step on to your mother’s property without me checking it out first”—he waved the gun in his hand—“my way.”
I swallowed. Of course, I had always known that my bodyguards were experts, had always respected their training and acumen, but there was also always a tension in the relationship. They were in charge of my safety, yes, but I was in charge of…well, had it been the eighteenth century, I would have been in charge of their country. The power balance always tended to tilt in the royal family’s favor.
And here we were. This is what it felt like when the power tilted back. When the employee refused to defer. When the subject refused to bow.
There was nothing to be done about it. How many times had I insisted to Konnor that I wasn’t a princess anymore? Wasn’t even a royal? Now, I would demand his obedience?
It would be ludicrous, and I wouldn’t be so pig-headed. No, if I wanted him to treat me like an independent adult, I had to return the favor. We were a team.
…a team.
Hugh Konnor and I.
What the hell had happened here?
He was glaring at me with a gun in his hand. A man who was ready to do violence, who wasn’t buying any of my bullshit. Well, not tonight. Maybe I should have been intimidated by him, by the threat he could represent.
But…
The word “team” had quickly planted roots in my mind. It seemed as solid and true as a hundred-year-old oak. And I liked the idea of Hugh and me joining forces. Fighting crime. Building something together.
“Okay,” I said softly. “You go in first. Tell me what I need to do.”
He cocked his head. His eyebrows scraped together. “No fucking around, Caroline. I’m serious. You stay where I tell you, when I tell you, until I tell you to move.”
Caroline.
First-name basis. Like partners.
I nodded. “I got it. I want this to work, truly I do. I’ll listen to you, I promise.”
There was a deep disbelief in Hugh’s expression, so of course I had to address it. “Look, I don’t know why you don’t believe me—”
“It’s hard to figure that one out,” he scoffed.
“Your sarcasm is unnecessary,” I informed him. “I’m not a willful child. I’m a grown woman who can make her own decisions—”
“Like eloping with a man-child race car driver.”
Huh. Someone had an opinion on my marriage. Join the club with ten thousand members. “I make my own decisions,” I repeated. “And tonight I’m deciding to do as you wish.”
He tilted his head, as if trying to comprehend the strange words coming out of my mouth.
“Call it a…truce.” I crossed my arms, as if that could protect my heart from further rejection by Hugh Konnor. “Let’s try it. One night where I listen to you and you don’t despise me.”
“What…” He stopped, then started again. “Whatever gave you the idea that I hate you?” His voice was a low burr and his expression was indecipherable. “Because I…” Another pause, a brief press of his lips. “I don’t.”
“Oh.” I said, more of a breath than a sound.
A flash of something bright crossed his face—something like the interest of the opposite sex—and then it was gone. Which meant it was surely a trick of the fading light or lingering echoes of my own teenaged delusions. “Good,” he said shortly, then he motioned at the car. “Get in and lock the door.”
“Where are you going?”
His eyes were defiant. “To kill Christian Fraser-Campbell.”