Chapter Twenty-Two

The first rule was simple: Don’t tell Thea anything.

Hugh didn’t like this rule, but he didn’t like anything I suggested. Ever. I could suggest getting some chocolate cake for his mother’s birthday and he’d probably tell me his mother would die from an acute chocolate allergy and I was a horrible person for even suggesting it.

“Once Thea finds out, she’ll have her creepy security detail all over me,” I explained. And that would make it much harder for me to get close to Christian. Astrid had agreed with my theory that Christian had approached me because I was the one outside of the palace walls—metaphorically and literally. I was easier to approach if I was all alone.

“I’m her creepy security detail,” Hugh said evenly.

“Exactly.” I smiled sweetly. He did not seem won over by my charm. Strange.

And so the lying began. I shook off any vague discomfort that was creeping up on me. Like I said, my hunch was that I could lure Christian in if I was more accessible, but every time I told Hugh that I was offering myself up as bait, he got all weird about it. And if he got weird about it, then I could just imagine Thea getting equally weird and protective about it.

But my older sister was the intelligent one in the family and she immediately guessed I was hiding something when I found her to tell her that I would be accompanying her on her flight back to Drieden.

“What are you not telling me?” Her eyes focused on Hugh, correctly identifying him as the weak link. He’d probably crumble under her skillful and adept interrogation, which is why I wasn’t telling him anything of my plan.

“Don’t speak to him like that,” I snapped at her.

She looked shocked. “He works for me.”

“Are you saying I don’t deserve a bodyguard?”

“No,” she said instantly. “Of course you do.”

“Are you asking him to betray my confidence?”

“No, but—”

“You and I both know that a good security officer has to also have a certain trust with the person they’re charged with protecting.”

My plan was working perfectly. Thea was completely distracted from pressing Hugh on details and was not totally focused on me. “Yes, I agree,” she said reasonably. “But I found him on top of you, with his hands under your shirt and his tongue down your throat. That’s a level of trust that I’ve never reached with my security staff.”

For some reason, Hugh coughed just then, and Thea’s cheeks colored in response. “Wait,” I said abruptly. “Have you two…”

“No!” they said in unison.

“Good,” I mumbled uncomfortably.

“You two…” Thea looked between us, shaking her head. “I’m worried. I heard about Mother’s house. What happened with the team there was a horrible shame. And Grandmama said you were wounded…” She said this to Hugh, but once again I jumped in. To save him from my sister’s tricks.

“A different incident,” I told her. “I did it to him.”

“You?” She looked confused, for some reason.

“Yes,” I said. “He keeps jumping out of the dark and surprising me. I had to protect myself.”

“You. You shot Hugh?” she asked.

“Is it so hard to believe a princess might carry a gun?”

She looked discomfited by that question and I realized my mistake. “Of course, my apologies. I didn’t mean to presume. It’s simply a habit to refer to myself as a princess in such a way. Especially when I’m around my family.” I was embarrassed. Even though I had been liberated from my royal family, a breach of protocol inferring that I had a title which I did not have was awkward, to say the least. Would I ever get used to it? Not being a princess? Feeling like an outsider?

I was scared I wouldn’t.

“It’s all right…” Thea paused, started again. “We should probably talk about that. There have been…developments.”

Her cagey way of describing insider family matters only made it worse, underlining that I had not been in the inner circle for the past six months, nor would I ever be again.

“It’s fine,” I said, trying to cut her off before either of us said something we would regret. “It’s fine,” I repeated, in case she didn’t believe me the first time. “I’m going back to Drieden City. Tonight, I think. I have some old friends to meet.”

Thea’s smile was one of relief and delight. “Oh Caroline, I’m so glad to hear it. We’ve been worried about you, all by yourself, alone, with no one around.”

“You don’t need to make it sound so pathetic,” I said. “It’s what I wanted. What I still want. I just need to take care of a few things, that’s all.”

My response was curt enough to make her press her lips together for a moment. She looked at Hugh and for a brief instant I wondered if something more passed between them than an innocent glance. But then she spoke again. “And Hugh will be going back with you? To Drieden City?”

It felt like a trap. It smelled like a trap. But for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to sidestep it.

The best I could do was, “If he likes.”

It was not a good way out of whatever trap Thea had just laid for me. She turned to him then, a funny little smile on her face. “Hugh? Will you be accompanying my sister to Drieden City?”

Hugh must have smelled the smell of trap, too, because his jaw tightened and he just nodded in response.

Thea smiled broadly. “Excellent.”

Even if I was going back to Drieden, Hugh wasn’t going to get his wish of tossing me behind the palace gates and throwing away the key.

He’d been working for the royal family long enough to realize that wasn’t quite how it worked.

A person had to be invited into a palace, after all. And as I was not officially part of the royal family, I couldn’t simply walk up to the door and use the key hidden under the fake rock in the garden.

(Just kidding. Officially, THERE IS NO PALACE KEY HIDDEN UNDER ANY FAKE ROCKS IN THE GARDEN.)

(It’s hidden in a fake soda can.)

So when we landed at the private airport outside Drieden City and the pilot asked us where the limousine should take us, Hugh was only half frustrated when I told him, “The Hotel Ilysium.”

Hugh got that look on his face that said he was about to argue with me, and I had to shut that down quickly. “It’s where my mother always stays when she is in the city. They have excellent security—you probably know it well yourself.”

“Caroline.” He used my name to make me stop blabbering on. I complied. “I’m on sabbatical.”

“On leave?” I clarified. “From palace security? Since when? You didn’t tell me this before.”

He shrugged. “You’re not the only one who can keep secrets.”

I put my fingers on the window as the fields and houses of Drieden flashed by. How long had it been since I’d seen my native land? The last time I’d driven this route I was on my way out of the country, catching a plane to meet Stavros, tears streaming down my face.

“I don’t have so many secrets,” I sighed. “All I did was fail to give the world a change of address card after Stavros died.” And a few other things. But really, in the grand scheme of things, my secrets were few. Ish.

When Hugh didn’t reply, I turned to him. “But you found me. In Varenna. I wasn’t such a good secret-keeper after all.”

His face was still and serious. “I didn’t find you.”

“Right.” I leaned back into the seat, closed my eyes, embarrassed again that I had inferred that Hugh had cared for me at all, or had bothered himself with a search for me. “That’s right. You were just following Christian, who supposedly stumbled into my path.”

Hugh’s eyes flicked toward the soundproof glass between us and the driver then back at me. “I still don’t feel like you are taking this seriously.”

If he only knew.

Hugh’s jaw flinched. “I tried to find you.”

I felt frozen. “When?”

“A few weeks after the funeral, when no one had seen or heard from you.”

“I don’t understand…”

“Whatever accounts you set up, your holding corporations, they worked. I couldn’t get through. I couldn’t trace your steps.”

A lovely liquid warmth starting melting my ice. He had looked for me.

“So when I tell you again that Christian had the ability to find you and I did not, please get it into your head that this means that Christian Fraser-Campbell has the contacts and a network to uncover more than I, a member of the Driedish national police with the full authority of the Royal family, do.”

My lovely warmth curdled in my stomach. “Oh.”

“He has friends in high places. If he found you in Varenna, he can certainly find you at the Hotel Ilysium.”

“Fine,” I said dismissively, because wasn’t that the whole point of me coming back here? To lure Christian in? To find who his friends in high places were? “If he finds me in my suite, it’ll make it that much easier for you catch him. You could always stay with me.” I smiled guilelessly. “Unless you don’t think you’re up for the job.”

A glint of gold flashed in his eyes. “I think I could handle the challenge, my lady.”