by Sparks, Ana
At that moment, the woman in question walked into my office, a notepad in her arms and a serious look on her face.
“I’ve got your tickets ordered for the ship, under the name you gave me,” she said, her voice all business. “I’ve got more tickets waiting for you at Grand Central in New York. You’ll have to take a cab to get there from the harbor. I could have printed them out for you now, but I came to the conclusion that the less proof you’re carrying on your person, the better.”
I snorted. “If anyone finds me carrying a passport that has a name other than my own on it, I’m going to be in enough trouble that a set of train tickets from New York to Chicago wouldn’t make it any worse.”
Isabelle tipped her head and took the three steps to get from the door to my desk, where she set down another set of tickets and an itinerary. “The passport could be for any number of things. I’m working on that.”
She added the last line with a bit of a smile—which I returned in kind. Because if there was anyone who could come up with a reason for having a fake passport, it was Isabelle. The woman had gotten me out of more scrapes than I could name, and it was really too bad I couldn’t take her with me on my secret adventure. If I could have, I would have been more confident in my success.
As it was, I was going to be taking a two-week boat ride to the US on my own, arriving in New York without an escort, and then making my way to Chicago via train. And I was going to be doing it as David Escobedo rather than Francisco de la Laros. Which meant I also wouldn’t be traveling with the protection of the crown or my brother’s influence.
I was going to be truly on my own for the first time in my entire life.
It was terrifying… and exhilarating.
And I wasn’t about to back out on the trip. Because I knew Erika needed me. Even if she hadn’t been able to admit it.
* * *
The next day, I stood in my bathroom, all the lights on and a frown on my face, and shaved my head.
I know, I know. I had a boat to catch, a fake passport photo to take and then a passport to pick up, a border to smuggle myself over, and a girl to go save (I mean, metaphorically speaking). How the hell did I have time to shave my head?
The truth was, though, that this was an incredibly important part of that whole fake passport thing. Because I could hide most of my face behind sunglasses. Grow a beard to disguise my jawline. Refuse to talk to anyone. But my hair? Those messy chocolate curls that I’d spent my entire life cultivating? Those had become my trademark.
They would, I knew, give me away immediately if anyone was actually looking for me. And once my brother realized I was no longer in the country, it would only be a matter of time before he put another call out to the international community to find me. And those curls would be one of the first things he told people to look for.
So they had to go. Unfortunately. And they had to go before I went to take my picture for the fake passport.
“They’ll grow back, they’ll grow back, they’ll grow back,” I chanted, sweeping my fingers through them one last time… and then putting the clippers to the front of my hairline and pushing them backward before I could think about it again.
The hair fell away quickly. I swallowed heavily and kept going. It was only hair. They were only curls.
An absolutely minuscule price to pay if it meant I got to see Erika.
* * *
Three days later, I stood on the docks of the harbor in Orlo, looking out at the ocean as it sparkled in the early morning light, my heart singing.
I had two bags at my side and my messenger bag strung across my chest. And in that messenger bag, quite a bit of currency, in the form of traveler’s checks—since credit cards were going to be impossible for me, unless I wanted to be caught—my laptop—or rather, the new one I’d bought, which I was sure didn’t have a tracking device on it—and the passport I’d paid so much for.
And that passport had a photo of a man who didn’t look anything like the man Javier de la Laros knew as his brother.
It had taken me until that morning to stop being surprised by the reflection of myself with the buzz cut I was now sporting, but I could say with confidence that I didn’t look anything like myself. Which was both exhilarating and… off-putting, honestly. I felt like a stranger to myself, though that was sort of fitting as well, considering I was doing something I never in a million years would have guessed I’d be doing.
I was going after a girl. I was breaking all my own rules—and the rules my brother had set down for me—to cross the big, blue ocean and find the woman who had stolen my heart. I was doing it without friends or security, which meant I was setting out on my own for the first time in my entire life.
And even for a rebellious prince who has made his mark on the world by refusing to follow the rules, this was daring.
But if I found Erika at the end of this path and fixed whatever was upsetting her, then it was an adventure worth taking.
So I bent down, grabbed my bags, and started walking toward the gangplank that would lead up onto the ship, whistling to myself and letting my mind run forward into New York and then Chicago. Where I hoped I would find her, happy to see me.
Chapter 18
Francisco
It took me about three hours to figure out that crossing the ocean by myself, posing as someone else, was the opposite of romantic or adventurous. It was monotonous and extremely lonely. I had to work hard to keep myself from making friends or being too noticeable so I could stay in disguise, and I never did get used to responding to the name David.
I also never stopped looking over my shoulder. Because I was positive that I would be found at any moment, and if Javier had sent people after me, I wanted to be able to see them coming before they got there. I didn’t think they’d do anything violent to me, of course, but I knew that if they found me, they would have one mission: Take me home. Get me back to my brother.
Return me to the position he’d decided I needed to take up. And, most likely, the faceless woman he’d decided was going to be my wife.
So yeah, if they were after me, I wanted to see them coming. I wanted at least a fighting chance at outrunning them.
Two weeks later, though, I got off the cruise ship still a free man, and went through the line at the port without any trouble, even managing to remember what my name was supposed to be when the guy at customs asked me for it. The fake passport worked like a charm, and before I knew it, I was in a cab and on my way to Grand Central.
And there, for just a moment, I let myself sit back and breathe. The streets of New York flew past me, all noise and color and crowds, and I thought for a moment about having the driver go to my favorite hotel in the city so I could check in and spend the night, an anonymous tourist in this city that held more people than my entire country.
Then I remembered the tickets at Grand Central, and the girl I was heading toward, and I kept my mouth shut. I might have been in one of my favorite cities in the world, and I might have felt like I deserved a night of celebration for having successfully crossed the Atlantic by myself—without my brother tracking me down—but that didn’t mean I got to take the night off. I had a destination in mind, and I meant to get there as quickly as possible.
Because the defeat in Erika’s voice when she’d called hadn’t left my mind since she’d hung up and I’d started planning how I was going to get to her. I didn’t know what was wrong, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to rest until I’d reached her and solved the problem.
Oh, and I’d added another thing to my list while I was on that ship.
Once I reached her, I was also going to tell her how I felt about her. Because that feeling had been growing with every passing minute, and I just wasn’t sure I could keep it inside any longer than I already had.
I wasn’t sure I even wanted to try.
* * *
“Twenty-two hours,” the girl at the counter said when I picked up my tickets and asked how long the ride was.
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br /> I actually gasped out loud. “Twenty-two hours on a train?” It seemed so outlandish that I thought she had to be kidding.
The girl gave me a confused stare, like she thought I might not be the sharpest tool in the shed, and tipped her head a bit. “You’re the one who booked these tickets, sir. Surely you knew that it would be a long trip.”
Actually, I wasn’t the one who had booked the tickets, and Isabelle, it seemed, hadn’t thought it necessary to tell me how long I’d be on the train.
Or… Well, she might have, honestly. It was probably all written down on that itinerary that she’d planned out. And which I’d never bothered to read. But that didn’t matter right now. What mattered was how I was going to get through nearly a full day on a train, with nothing to do.
“There will be a TV in your room, and some magazines,” the girl continued—seeking, I assumed, to make me feel better about the whole thing. “As well as a dining car.”
“My room?” I asked, even more confused. Trains had rooms?
The girl gave me another look of disbelief, and I started to think very strongly about just walking away without waiting for the question to be answered. I was supposed to be flying under the radar, traveling without drawing attention to myself. Instead, I was standing here making the ticket girl at Grand Central think I was certifiably insane—and probably not allowed to travel by myself.
“You’ve booked a sleeping compartment, sir,” she said slowly, enunciating each word very carefully.
Maybe she thought I was just having trouble with the language, I realized suddenly. Maybe she thought it wasn’t translating clearly in my head.
The moment I had the thought, I decided to go with it. It was the perfect excuse.
“A sleeping compartment, ah!” I said, making my accent a bit stronger. “I am sorry. I did not understand the word.”
She looked relieved at that, like I’d given her the excuse she needed not to call security, and gave me a friendly smile. “That’s okay, we’re used to language barriers around here. Where are you traveling from?”
“A small nation near Spain,” I said, my accent growing heavier as I fell into the role. “You will never have heard of it, I’m afraid, but it is called Tarana.”
I could tell by the look on her face that she’d definitely never heard of it, but she nodded all the same, and then gestured toward a tunnel to my right. “Your gate is going to be that way, sir. I hope you have a lovely journey to Chicago. You’re going for a vacation?”
I leaned toward her and did my best to turn on the smolder that I’d been told time and time again I had down pat. “I am going for a girl,” I told her, my voice low. “I think she is the love of my life.”
The girl nearly swooned, and I turned and headed out before I said anything else. Because it occurred to me now that it might be just as bad to be remembered as the smolder-machine foreigner as it was to be remembered as the insane guy who didn’t know what a sleeping compartment on a train was.
I still needed to be careful about my identity. But the closer I got to Erika, the harder it was to walk a straight line. I was getting so excited I was nearly jumping out of my skin, and if I wasn’t careful, that excitement was going to get me in trouble.
* * *
When I finally arrived in Chicago, I felt better rested—courtesy of sleeping almost the entire trip—and anxious beyond belief. Partially because this was Erika’s city, and partially because getting off the train meant I was officially at the end of Isabelle’s itinerary.
Even though I hadn’t actually read it.
I was now on my own. In a city I didn’t know well, and without any idea of where I was going. I didn’t remember the name of Erika’s bar. I remembered the outlines of the neighborhood, but I didn’t know how to get there, or even what the street was called.
I didn’t know where her apartment was. I’d never had to memorize the streets when I was here before, because I’d had Roger, and then Erika, to tell me where to go. And now that I was here by myself, we got to the enormous, gaping hole in my plan.
I knew I needed to get to Erika. I just had no idea how I was going to do it.
I wheeled my suitcases up out of the tunnel and onto the streets, though, and looked around, trying to figure out the easiest, most straightforward way to get to Erika. I had plenty of money, but no idea where to start looking. I knew only that she worked in a dive bar in a rough area of Chicago. A bar that had allowed the customers to eat peanuts and throw the shells on the floor. And a bar that had looked, based on the stage I’d seen, like they sometimes hosted live music.
Furrowing my brow, I forced my brain to wake up and move into action. A dive bar on the rough side of Chicago. Peanut shells.
I pulled out my phone—a burner, and one of the other things I’d bought specifically for this trip—and started searching the web. A quick bit of typing, a moment of waiting, and I grinned down at the phone.
Because right there, fifth from the top, was a name I recognized. I never would have thought of it on my own, but now that I was looking at it, I could actually see the picture of it flashing above a barred wooden door.
The Nifty Peanut. It was a stupid name for a bar, I thought, though I supposed it probably meant something to the person who owned it. And, given the peanuts, it did check out.
But the name didn’t matter. What mattered was the address. Because once I was there, I knew, I’d be able to find someone who would give me Erika’s address.
Yes, I know what you’re thinking. I had her number. I could have called and asked for her address. But I couldn’t be sure that her phone wasn’t bugged. After all, the cops had found me at her apartment.
It stood to reason that Javier had decided to bug her phone, just in case. And I couldn’t take the chance of calling her if it meant it was going to blow my cover.
Besides, I wanted to surprise her with my presence on her doorstep. I wanted to see the look on her face when she realized I was there. I wanted to see the moment when she learned that I’d come to her side, without her having to ask for it.
Chapter 19
Erika
It was Saturday morning and I was sitting at the breakfast table, taking advantage of having called in last night due to not feeling well—a relatively common occurrence at this point, unfortunately—and trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do.
About everything.
You know those times when adulting suddenly gets to be too much, and you look up and realize that no, you don’t know what the hell you’re doing or how you’re going to do it anymore, and on top of that, you don’t actually even know how you’re going to get through the next hour, let alone the next week or the next month?
Yeah, I was at that point. Because not only was I drowning in student debt, but I was also stuck in a job that I… didn’t hate, but definitely didn’t want to do anymore. And it was going to get even more difficult to keep doing it because of the next thing on the list.
I was pregnant.
Yep, it was confirmed. I’d been to the doctor and she’d done the tests. All of them came back positive, and I’d seen it all over her face before she even said anything anyway.
And in that moment, my entire life changed. Everything that had sucked before started to suck even more, and if I’d thought things were complicated in the past, I’d had no freaking idea.
Because now I was drowning in student debt, with a job I didn’t particularly want to keep and no way forward, and I was pregnant. Even worse, the father of my baby lived in a country I’d never even heard of before, and was essentially off-limits due to the fact that he was some kind of international royal outlaw.
I mean, when it comes to fucked-up situations, you really can’t top that one.
I’d called him, because of course I had. But when it came down to it, I hadn’t been able to actually get the words out. I’d known I needed to, since he had every right to know that he was going to be a dad. Saying those words out l
oud was a whole lot different than thinking them, though. No matter how much I wanted to get them out, I just hadn’t been able to do it.
So now here I was, sitting at my table on a Saturday morning, drinking tea (ugh) because I couldn’t have coffee anymore, and generally wondering how the hell I was doing to get through the day.
Then someone knocked on my door.
“Terrific,” I muttered, dragging myself to my feet. That was exactly what I wanted right now. Company. I didn’t know if I had it in me to put on a brave face.
When I got to the door, I took a breath before I opened it, trying to collect myself and get ready to actually be nice to the person on the other side. Maybe it was a delivery or something, I told myself. Maybe someone—Beth?—had sent flowers.
That at least brought a bit of a smile to my face, so when I swung the door open and saw Francisco standing there, bags in hand and looking like he might have actually walked the entire way to Chicago, I wasn’t scowling the way I’d been doing all morning.
Of course, seeing him made the smile even bigger. In fact, it stretched so big that I thought my face might break with the force of it.
I flew into his arms, laughing and crying at the same time—something that had to have come from being pregnant, because I’d never done it before—and threw my arms around his neck, holding him so tight that a smaller man might have actually broken in two from the force, my heart screeching in my chest, singing to the heavens above about how things might actually be okay.
“What are you doing here?” I managed to get out between sobs. “I thought you weren’t allowed in the country!”
