The Professional Page 17

  I felt a bit sorry for her, even if her undoing was a little funny. She’d arrived in the manor so beautiful and confident only a couple weeks ago. The stress of the visit was obviously taking a toll. It seemed Alex wasn’t the only slightly under-qualified person my mother hired for this visit. Although maybe that was unfair to Jackie. Mother was a lot to handle, even for seasoned pros.

  The situation with Alex was a lot less humorous and it pained me to even think about. When I’d looked up at him in the great hall and had to tell him with my eyes that I was a coward, I thought my heart was going to crumble into pieces. Later, I’d explained to Alex the dilemma I faced, as best I could. But how easily could I describe decades of conditioning to be loyal to the family before all else? How could I admit to him when I barely could to myself that, for all our issues, a small piece of me struggled to alienate my last living parent completely by breaking all ties? Both of Alex’s parents were gone and as sorry as I felt for him, he had the luxury of living without the complications of heritage and debt. He’d said that he understood, of course. He didn’t make me feel guilty, but his kind response somehow made me feel worse. And I didn’t think I imagined the traces of disappointment in his words. Who would want to see their girlfriend on someone else’s arm? Was my inability to stand up to Mother about to drive away the perfect man forever?

  That question dominated my mind through every hour of every day while I waited for Mother to be done networking across the city. By Thursday evening, a combination of exhaustion, irritation, and worry had worked me into the necessary level of insanity required to confront her. I wasn’t sure that I was going to survive this visit and the fear of seeing Alex slip away gave me enough courage to go through with it. I needed to take a stand.

  At eight o’clock, after dinner with two members of Congress, I knocked firmly on Mother’s door and repeated the speech I’d practiced. Stay strong, Cora, I thought. You can do this.

  Mother opened the door. She’d changed into a bathrobe and undone her hair. It added ten years, making her look her age. She didn’t greet me, just waited for me to speak.

  “I need to talk to you,” I said. She waited. I tightened my jaw. “Not out in the hallway?”

  Mother debated letting me into her domain, but finally she stepped aside and let me in. The room was the one I hid from Alex in the day after our kiss. Now it was littered with Mother’s belongings. Had it only been a week since then? It felt like so much longer.

  “I’m tired, Cora,” Mother said. “And I still have a lot to do tonight.”

  I got right to the point. She favored directness. “Malik is humiliating. I won’t keep pretending to see him.”

  “I’m afraid you don’t have much of a choice here,” Mother said. “You insisted on publicly dating. This was your decision.”

  “No it wasn’t,” I said. “I did not ask you to bring some complete stranger here that ignores me whenever the camera isn’t on us. It’s embarrassing in front of your guests. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but nobody cares about me. Certainly not enough to care who I’m dating.”

  Mother scoffed. “Just because you don’t care about other people’s opinions of you doesn’t mean they don’t have them. Did you not notice that you and Malik made page six of All of Us Weekly?

  I was already remembering why I didn’t argue with Mother. We existed in entirely separate worlds. I might as well be speaking Martian.

  “I don’t care if I made the front page of All of Us Weekly. It’s celebrity garbage.”

  Mother stiffened. “That celebrity garbage pays for this manor, if I must remind you.”

  “I’m pretty sure Athea’s economy pays for this place,” I said, “and besides, I don’t even want to live here!”

  Mother turned away and walked to the window. “Oh Lord, not this again. I’ve told you, Cora. There are certain standards that a family of our position must uphold. Those standards include living in this manor and they apply to Malik as well.” She laughed. “Really Cora, what did you expect storming in here like this? That I’d send the Prince home? Make it look like you’ve broken up? The papers need to be singing our praises, not speculating on what’s come between you and your boyfriend. There’s too much riding on this visit.”

  I groaned in frustration. “What does that even mean, Mother? You’ve said it three times now, that this visit is ‘oh so important’ when as far as I can tell, it’s just a way to stay in the public eye lest they dare to forget you.”

  She turned quickly and her eyes flashed. She looked for a moment like she was going to declare something, but then stopped herself. Instead, she switched tactics.

  “I think I might know a little something more about what keeps this country afloat than you, Cora. And I apologize if I’d rather not deal with a scandal. I suppose it never crossed your mind about the potential blowback from your careless words. Yes, Malik isn’t ideal, I’ll admit that, but what was the alternative? Let the press speculate until some clever paparazzo managed to get a picture of you arm-in-arm with your own bodyguard? I bet that would make the cover of All of Us Weekly! I think you’d care about ‘celebrity gossip’ when the entire world is calling you a slut!”

  Her words knocked the wind out of me like a punch to the gut. “Who told you?” I asked, but I already knew. It had to be Jackie.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Mother said. “But I don’t know how you thought you’d be able to keep that a secret from me. And if you can’t keep it from me, you certainly can’t keep it from the press.”

  “I really don’t care!” I said, abandoning all reason. “I don’t want to live my life around what the public thinks of me. Alex is a good man and just because he isn’t rich or has a famous last name doesn’t mean he doesn’t matter.”

  “Please, Cora,” Mother said. “Is he a good man? Can you really say that for sure? With them, you never really know, do you? And even if he is as fantastic as he appears, you don’t want to marry a man just because you get along. You need solid political reasons for staying together, otherwise once all the charm and attraction fades, neither one of you can walk away without a massive, costly inconvenience. You never want to be the one with more to lose. Trust me on this, dear.”

  “Is this supposed to be some kind of jab at Dad?” I asked, aghast. She never spoke of him and to hear her come close after so many years just to insult their marriage was devastating.

  For a moment, Mother looked like she regretted what she said. Then she turned away. “You will not be seen in public with the bodyguard. You will continue dating Malik despite his… unfortunate qualities. And you’ll stop bothering me. Like I said, this is a highly important visit for our family and our future. All this relationship drama is both unbecoming and completely inconsequential.”

  I almost argued, but realized that nothing good could come from it. I turned and headed for the door, letting it slam loudly behind me. Even though it made me feel like a teenager, there was a certain small satisfaction in it.

  I didn’t text Alex letting him know that the coast was clear. Instead, I sat on my bed and stared out the window for a long while. This was why I couldn’t take a stand. I had absolutely no power in this relationship. I was only going to walk away weaker from each confrontation.

  That was okay though. I’d lived with the weight of Mother hanging over me for this long, I could stomach a few more weeks. Then she would be an ocean away again and Malik would return from whence he came and Alex and I could be together again.

  Just not in public.

  I sighed and lay back on my bed. As much as I wanted this to work, I was running out of pictures of the future in which it all did.

  A knock sounded at the door. I answered, expecting Alex and for some reason hoping it was Mother. It wasn’t either of them. It was Colette, Mother’s aid. She handed me a packet of papers in a file.

  “Your mother wanted you to have this,” she said and left.

  I sat back down on the bed and opened it, confused un
til I saw the first page. Alexander Jacob Flynn. It was a file on Alex, probably the background check they’d done before hiring him. I debated shoving it in a drawer and forgetting about it, but then Mother’s words echoed in my mind. With them you never really know for sure…

  She was wrong. Alex was trustworthy and even though this seemed a bit of an invasion of privacy, reading it would only confirm to myself what I already knew. I would prove Mother wrong and any lingering doubts about Alex would be erased.

  With that comforting thought, I opened the first page and began to read.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Alex

  If I were the same man who’d entered the Harmont Manor a week before, I’d have been highly pleased with how events ended up shaping out. The royal family spent most of their time in the city, accompanied by their own personal guard, and, when they weren’t home, the manor was abustle with staff preparing for what Sarina Harmont obviously wanted to be the grandest party ever to hit New York City. That would have left me with plenty of time to plot and scheme and sneak around as, on top of not being expected to actually be with Cora, most everybody in the manor completely ignored me. Whether it was because they were too intent on completing their tasks up to the standard of Princess Sarina or - actually no, that was exactly what it was.

  Over the week I’d come to discover two things about my hopeful future mother-in-law: my first impression of her hadn’t been incorrect nor Cora’s description of her overblown. Sarina Harmont dominated the manor like a stylish ogre and everyone who worked there was terrified of her. Why specifically I hadn’t had the pleasure of seeing firsthand, but it was apparently bad enough to keep everyone on their toes. Other than her rather severe appearance and direct way of speaking it wasn’t readily apparent, but if you looked a little closer, you could see that the staff from Athea quieted the instant she walked into the room. That they never looked her right in the eye. That even when she was far from the manor, nobody verbalized a bad word about her. Instead, it was voiced in an elaborate language of tightened mouths and frightened eyes that all the Atheans seemed to speak. I was quickly deemed a stranger and thus worthy of suspicion as an agent of the Princess’s so if there were voiced complaints, they were always done far from my listening ears.

  Unsurprisingly, the one person who did occasionally crack in front of me was Jackie. Once, I was loitering around the side entrance, wasting time and enjoying the suspicious looks Scott in the security booth kept shooting my way, when she burst through the door like she was escaping from prison. She pulled out a cigarette and angrily tried to get it to light. After six clicks and zero progress, she chucked it at the brick wall. Then she looked over and saw both me and Scott watching her with twin open mouths.

  “Oh fuck off,” she said. I wordlessly handed her my lighter and, after a moment of indecision, she snatched it out of my hand and walked briskly down the alleyway and out of sight.

  I couldn’t blame Jackie for being frustrated with the looming presence of the Princess. I was pretty pissed off myself. Cora was finally mine and all I wanted to do was laze around with her like we had for that one perfect day before the family arrived. I spent most of my lonely days kicking myself for resisting her charm for so long. We could have had so much more time together. Instead it was wasted in alternating bickering and stony silences.

  But you can’t change the past, and my new objective was to prepare for the future. A future that, at some point, would entail telling Cora some things about myself that I wasn’t exactly proud of. How soon in the future we’d have that conversation I wasn’t sure, but I hoped it would be sometime between kids one and two. That conversation was too far away to really think about. Right now, my mission had to be ensuring that Cora’s mother didn’t keep us apart. That meant winning her favor and winning her favor meant protecting the Crown from Midas.

  In between thoughts of Cora, I tried to come up with a way to do so without going down for the crime myself. Unfortunately, I only knew two things for certain: that Midas was after the Crown and I had to get there before him. Everything else was up in the air until the Crown itself was finally brought over from Athea.

  Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait much longer.

  On Wednesday morning, Cora and the rest of the Harmonts were already gone by the time I rolled out of bed and made my way downstairs. I grabbed a roll from the catered breakfast station set up in the dining room and wandered around the house, watching movers bring in about a hundred tables to line the ballroom as decorators paced the floor, debating silverware placement and linen color. As usual, everyone ignored me, even Jackie, who was standing on a table overseeing and looking very much like Washington crossing the Delaware.

  I tried to imagine what Cora might be doing. I pictured her on the set of some crap morning show, trying her best to look like she cared. She had a lot more control than me. As evidenced by this very job, I had an almost innate inability to fake gravity.

  I was in the great hall, lounging behind the curve of the spiral and watching the activity when the front doors opened and a tall, thin man with a sharp face and gray, receding hair entered. Behind him, two burly men carried a large metal box between them. Behind them were two more men. All of them, including their leader, were visibly armed.

  A tense excitement bubbled in my chest as I instantly realized what was going on. The Crown of Athea was in that box. It had finally touched down in the manor and that meant my work could really begin.

  I was true to my word to myself; I would not be stealing the Crown. But still I felt a magnetic pull toward the box, the result of a lifetime of chasing rare artifacts. I was like an addict staring down a bottle of vodka and my skin was starting to itch. Some habits can’t be so easily shaken. I pictured Cora and fought the urge. I was sober now and I needed to keep a clear head if I was to stop Midas and win Sarina Harmont’s approval.

  The thin man scanned the room and I felt his eyes briefly rest on me before moving on to other potential threats. Then he nodded his head toward the parlor and moved ahead. The men behind him followed and, after a moment to give them a head start, so did I.

  I’d been correct in my initial assumption. They were going to keep the Crown in the chapel. I was just leaving the medium-sized parlor and entering the great-big parlor when I heard sounds of dissent echoing out of the chapel. This should be good.

  “What do you mean you don’t have any security cameras?” It was coming from the thin man. He was towering over some poor staffer who looked panicked in the face of the man’s obvious ire. I stood in the doorway and watched the show.

  “The room hasn’t been outfitted with them,” the staffer muttered.

  “And can you give me a reason why other than utter incompetence?” Tall and Thin demanded.

  I felt a presence at my side and turned to see Jackie. I moved for her to pass. This was definitely going to be good.

  “Micah, I believe?” Jackie asked, silhouetted in the door of the chapel. She’d most definitely been tipped off about the man’s arrival, but her timing made it look as though she had a sixth sense. She could make an entrance, I’d give her that.

  Micah turned from the cowering staffer and realized that his real opponent had entered the room. “I suppose you’re the one responsible for this?” he demanded.

  “I’m responsible for nothing,” Jackie said coolly. “All of my actions come right from the Princess. So I believe she’s the one you just called ‘utterly incompetent’.”

  Micah hesitated. “Don’t twist my words,” he said. “I was merely under the impression that this room would be adequately outfitted for the Crown. This isn’t just some fancy headpiece. This is one of the most valuable pieces of history in the world and the Princess should be glad that I take my job as seriously as I do.”

  Jackie smiled and walked down the aisle. “If you do take your job as seriously as you say, I would avoid commenting on what the Princess should or should not be feeling. To answer your rather rudely s
tated question, there are no security cameras because the Princess deemed the installation to be potentially damaging to the architecture of this chapel. Instead, security personnel will be stationed on the Crown at all times in rotating shifts. This was recommended by the manor’s head of security, Scott Henson.”

  Micah stiffened. “And who is that? I’ve never heard of him and I will not be having him make security decisions about my Crown.”

  “If I must remind you,” Jackie said, “it’s the Princess’s Crown and she has finalized the decision. If you wish to speak with her about changing things, you must arrange an appointment.”

  “You better believe I will,” Micah growled.

  Jackie smiled. “I’ll try to fit you into her schedule. But I’ll warn you, the Princess is incredibly busy so it might take a moment for her to get to you.”

  Micah glared daggers at her, but must have realized that he wasn’t going to win. He nodded stiffly and turned back toward his guards.

  Sensing victory, Jackie turned and left. She shot me a wink right before passing me in the doorway and I couldn’t help but feel a little impressed. Much like a fire hose or nuclear warfare, Jackie was easier to appreciate when not directed at me.

  Micah, on the other hand, looked furious. He glared at his guards, all of whom looked a little uncomfortable at having just seen their boss eviscerated. “Two of you on the door at all times. When the public is in there, two on each wall and don’t you even think about taking your eyes off it.” He stormed down the aisle, shaking his head. “Thank God they at least have cameras on the windows outside,” he muttered as he passed me.