by Ella Miles
“Oh, come on, baby! You can do better than that. You need to focus!” Luca shouts from across the net, teasing me.
I smile at him, trying not to let my fear and the fact that my world is crashing down on me noticeable.
“Oh, yeah, I already knew that. But Luca has still been acting weird. Do you know what it could be?” I ask, lying to Troy.
The ball comes over, and this time, I focus long enough to dig the ball up.
Troy thinks. “His ex-girlfriend has been driving him crazy. You know how she can get. Once he’s rid of her, he’ll be more relaxed. You know how he can get when she’s around.”
I nod like I know how he is with his ex-girlfriend, but in all honesty, I have no clue. I have no freaking clue how he acts when his ex-girlfriend is around because I have no idea who she is, and I had no idea that she was around.
“No, I don’t think that’s it. It’s something else,” I say, looking for more information out of Troy. Evidently, there is a lot of information that I don’t have a clue about.
Troy sighs. “Fine. You can’t tell him I said this, but Luca is planning a big surprise for you. We all know it’s your one-year anniversary; that’s why we are here. So, stop worrying. Let’s play volleyball and beat these guys.”
I nod.
We do beat them. We destroy them.
As it turned out, I’m actually pretty good at volleyball, and almost always, whatever team I’m on wins.
But all I could think about the whole time was that Luca had lied to me. About his job. About his ex-girlfriend. And who knows what else?
How can I say yes to marrying a man who has done that to me? How can I be happy tonight, celebrating one year together, when that year has been nothing but a lie, followed by another and another?
Luca runs over to me, giving me a high five and a kiss for a job well done. I try to smile. I try to pretend like nothing is bothering me. But he knows. He always knows how I’m feeling. What I need. I, on the other hand, know nothing about Luca. Nothing. He’s smiling, but I don’t know if that means he’s happy and he loves me or he’s happy that I haven’t discovered the lies yet.
“I have something I need to ask you,” he whispers into my ear before kissing my hair.
“I bet you do.”
He frowns and pulls me aside. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Nothing is wrong whatsoever.”
He studies me closer. “You’re lying to me. What’s wrong?”
I chuckle, but it’s not happy. It’s a chuckle full of sadness and regret. “You, of all people, can’t be mad at me for lying.”
He cocks his head to one side in confusion. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the fact that you have probably lied to me about everything!”
His eyes are wide, frozen. He’s in shock. That much, I can tell. But it’s also very obvious that he knows exactly what I’m talking about.
“Do you want to talk first, or do you want me to?” I ask, crossing my arms, like that is going to protect me.
He thinks for a second while I raise an eyebrow.
“Maybe you should tell me what you know?” he half-asks, half-says.
“Coward.”
He sighs. “I don’t know what you want from me. I don’t know what lies you have been told.”
“That’s exactly the problem. What lies have you told me? What is the truth, and what is a lie?”
“The truth is, I love you. The truth is, I want you in my life forever. I want to marry you. I want to tell you the truth. I want you to know everything about me.”
My heart melts the tiniest bit at his words because they are what I have been waiting for him to say every day since we first met. It’s exactly what I wanted to hear today. He has a ring. He is going to propose. I was right.
“The lies are…everything else.”
Now, it’s my turn for my eyes to pop open. “What do you mean, everything else?”
He sucks in a deep breath. “Basically, everything else is a lie. I lied about my job. I lied about not dating anyone else while dating you. I lied about where I lived. I lied about simple things, too, like my favorite food and drinks.”
I think my heart has stopped. “How could you have lied about everything? Why would you? I mean…” I can’t form words. I can’t process what he is saying. I can’t comprehend how someone could do what he did. How do you lie about fucking everything?
Luca opens his mouth to answer, but I can’t stay here and listen. I don’t want the answers. I can’t be with someone who has lied to me about freaking everything. I don’t want a reason. I don’t want to understand and feel sorry for him. I don’t want to hear a sob story about abuse or how he wasn’t loved as a child. There is no excuse for lying to me. There is no way I can ever trust him again. There is no way I can ever forgive him. No way to be with him.
“Just stop. I don’t want to hear anything else. We’re done.”
I run away, completely broken by a complete stranger. I never thought a stranger would be able to do that to me. I never thought that someone I loved could be a stranger. But they both happened. I’m broken, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fix it.
Present
Luca
“That’s how you remember it happening, huh?” I ask, studying her and waiting for the backlash that is sure to come.
Ivy frowns. “That is what happened.”
“Minus one little important word that you got wrong.”
She folds her arms across her chest, like she does when she is angry. “And what word would that be?”
“You said I had something that I needed to ask you.”
She nods. “That is what you said.”
“No, it wasn’t. I wasn’t going to propose that night, even as much as I wanted to. I hadn’t bought a ring. It wouldn’t have been fair to you if I had. There was too much you didn’t know about.”
“Obviously.”
“I said, I needed to tell you something. That is the key difference.”
“So, you are telling me that you were going to confess to me about everything that night? Was that what you were going to tell me? That you had been lying to me for our entire relationship?”
“No. That wasn’t what I was going to say,” I say, looking down at her glass that is empty again.
I don’t think she is drunk. She’s just had enough that what I’m about to say might be a little easier for her to take. Then again, she might slap me and say that I’m lying again. But she needs to know what I wanted to tell her that night. I need to tell her because it has been eating at me every day for the last two years. I thought it was better that she’d just left that night without me telling her. I thought that it was like the stars had aligned and prevented me from revealing one of my deepest, darkest secrets. I thought I had been saved. But, instead of being saved, I’ve been tortured with the fact that the one person I needed to tell this to didn’t know the truth.
“Then, what? What could you have said that would have possibly made me think about you differently? What could you have possibly said that would have made me think twice? That would have gotten me to stay long enough for you to explain anything to me?”
I look into her dark brown eyes, considering what I might see in them after I tell her the truth. Happiness. Anger. Fear. Frustration. Sadness. Understanding. Pain.
I have no idea how she is going to react, and I think that is what I hate the most. I always know what is going on in her head. I always know exactly how she is going to feel when I do something. I knew that night that she expected me to propose, which is the exact reason that I never would have proposed that day.
I lied to her countless times. I told her countless stories. But the words that are about to leave my lips are the hardest words I’ve ever told her. Because how she reacts is going to decide everything.
“I’m a prince.”
9
Ivy
I flutter my eyelashes quickly mult
iple times in a row, like that is going to change what Luca just said. I rub my ears, like it’s going to erase the words I just heard him say. There is no way it is true. There is no way that anything he says is true.
So, why is my heart racing in my chest?
“You’re a prince,” I say slowly, repeating the words he said.
Maybe my mind has gone mad, and I just heard completely different words than what he said. Maybe it’s a defense mechanism that I have developed to prevent me from hearing his bullshit. Maybe? Hopefully?
He nods slowly. “I’m a prince.”
I rapidly blink again, looking at him. He doesn’t look like a prince. He looks like the same beach bum I met three years ago. The only difference between then and now is his hair is a little shorter. Lines around his eyes are a little deeper, showing his age. But that’s it.
“You’re telling me you’re a prince. Like the Prince of England? You know I’m not that gullible. You know that I know that the Prince of England is…” Shit, I know the answer to this.
“I’m not the Prince of England.”
“Obviously. I knew you were lying.”
“You know that more countries have princes than just England though, right?”
I nod. “But that is the only one that still does anything. I mean, even if you are telling me the truth. Even if you are a prince, it doesn’t really matter. It’s just a silly title that means you have people call you that. Like the same way with people who are knighted. You don’t actually rule a country. If you did, you would be living in that country instead of lying to unsuspecting women like me.”
“I’m a prince. Like a real prince who will someday rule a whole country. With responsibilities to a whole country of people.”
I laugh. I can’t help it. This is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. Sure, I’ve read books where the guy is secretly a prince. But this isn’t a fairy tale. This is real life. This is my life. There is no way I dated a prince for a whole year and never figured it out. Someone, somewhere, would have noticed and told me. Tony would have told me if no one else did. Or has Luca lied to everyone in his life about who he is? I wouldn’t put that past him.
Luca raises his eyebrows at me as I laugh.
“This is ridiculous. You know that, right?”
He nods. “It sounds ridiculous. I know that. But it’s the truth.”
I just shake my head, laughing. “There is not enough proof in the world to convince me that you are a prince.”
Luca pulls out his phone. He types something in and then hands it to me. I stare at the screen and scroll quickly. There is article after article talking about him being the Prince of Monaco. About him attending balls. About him living in America to study law and meet a woman before he returns to the country to learn how to govern it.
“This is not possible,” I whisper as I look at the phone and then back to Luca and then back to the phone.
It’s almost like he is two completely different people. If I didn’t know Luca well, I would swear that he is just a good body double. Just someone who looks similar to the prince but isn’t actually him. But I know Luca well. And I know the guy in the pictures. I know the sexy grin, the lips that curl up just a tiny bit more on the right than the left, the tiny mole under his left eye, and the hair that, if you look closely, has just the faintest bit of gray coming through despite not being old enough to have gray hair.
It’s Luca. Yes, he’s a little more polished in the photos than he is in real life. Yes, in half of the pictures, he’s dressed in formal clothing that is so different from anything I’ve ever seen him wear before. Yes, he has a woman in a nice ballgown next to him. But it’s Luca. Charming, beautiful, lying Luca.
“Explain. Now,” I say, needing answers even though I’m still not sure I believe him.
These could be fake. They could have been Photoshopped. I might never date or trust Luca again, but I have to have answers. I have to know why he hid this from me. I just need to know.
Luca takes his phone back and lays it on the end table next to him. He then sits for a second, and I watch his body exhale and then inhale and then exhale again. He’s stalling.
“Luca, there is nothing you can say to me anymore that is going to shock me. Nothing that is going to make me hate you any more than I already do.”
He looks up at me with puppy-dog eyes. “You hate me?”
I nod with a small smile. “I thought it was obvious.”
He nods slowly as he leans back in his chair. “I guess it is obvious. I just hope so goddamn much that it isn’t true. That you don’t hate me.”
“And why is that?” I ask, my heart racing in my chest.
He grins. “I thought it was obvious.”
My heart races faster because it is, and as much as I hate Luca, my heart doesn’t. My heart still aches for him. My heart still holds out hope that we can try again.
“Because I still love you, Ivy. I’ve never stopped loving you.”
Luca leans forward, and I feel my body moving forward, leaning into him, needing to hear every word. Needing to see if his heartbeat is beating just as fast.
“I’ve tried to get over you, Ivy. Trust me, I have. I even proposed to someone else. I told her the truth. I tried to make her a princess because I knew she would be good at it. I knew it was exactly what she wanted. It’s what my parents wanted. It’s what the country wanted. But I just couldn’t. I couldn’t stop thinking about you.”
I soak in his words. “You lied to me because you didn’t think I would make a very good princess?”
He stops for a second and looks me straight in the eyes as I prepare for either another lie or a truth that will sting.
“There would be some issues with you being a princess,” he says slowly, honestly.
“Like?”
He sighs and rubs his neck, avoiding eye contact with me for a minute. “Like the fact that you have this amazing job and career that you wouldn’t be able to keep doing—at least, not long-term—once you became a princess.” He pauses. “Like your past.”
I nod, but it doesn’t make any of the facts harder to hear. I already know the main reason that he would never want me as a princess, and it has nothing to do with the fact that I have my own career goals. My career is a challenge that we would have to overcome if I could even still work after the lawsuit, but it isn’t a deal-breaker. The deal-breaker is that, if anyone digs far enough into my history, they will find out what I used to do to pay for vet school.
“You used to like the fact that I’d worked as a stripper,” I say, smiling.
His eyes drop down my body, and I know he is undressing me with his eyes. I know he is imagining the many, many strip shows I used to give him. I know he is imagining how perfect our bodies fit together.
I hear the faintest of growls come from his throat.
“I love that fact. You would make my perfect princess. But you need to know why I lied.”
He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, and I lose it. I’m putty. I don’t care about his lies. I don’t care about the fact that we have absolutely no future together. I don’t care about the pain that I will feel afterward. All I care about is one night.
“I lied to you to protect you. To keep you at bay because, no matter how great my life sounds, it’s not. My life is horrible. I wouldn’t wish my life on anyone. Especially not someone I love.”
His answer is bullshit, and we both know it. But my body is too far gone to back out now. My mind has already made all the rationale I need. The decision has already been made.
I lean forward just an inch closer to Luca. Because, as much as I want this, I want him to make this mistake, not me. He says he still loves me. I’m not sure if that is true or not. But, if he does, I want him to feel just a tiny bit of what it feels like to be hurt by someone you love.
I lick my lips, and then I let my hand slowly trail down my body. I’m only wearing scrubs, so I know that I’m not in anything that is sexy enough to r
eally get his attention, but I do know how to move my body. I do know how to look confidently at a man and tell him exactly what I want.
And the way that Luca is looking at me tells me how badly he wants me.
“Your move,” I say, letting the words fall out of my mouth in a purr.
His eyes widen when he realizes what I’m saying. It’s more to decide whatever we do next. Kiss. Strip. Fuck. It’s all on him. This is not my mistake to make. This is his mistake because the one thing I’ve learned in the last three years since meeting Luca, is how to keep men at a distance. How to guard my heart. I know how to guard my heart, and I don’t plan on letting Luca in.
I see the struggle in his eyes. I feel the tension in his body.
“No. Nothing is going to happen tonight. You’re in pain, and when anything happens, I want it to be because you care about me and want to give us a chance again. Not because you just want to remember what it is like to fuck me.”
“Fair enough. Just know that there is no way that is ever going to happen.” I stand up and grab my empty glass. “Another?” I ask.
Luca shakes his head.
I smile as I walk to the door, making sure that my hips sway. He thinks he’s won. He thinks he can control me, himself, and everything around us. Boy, is he wrong.
I grab the sliding door handle and begin to pull it open when I feel his rough hand on top of mine. It’s hesitant but only for a second, and then his lips are on my neck, kissing up and down my skin, making me shiver every damn time his lips touch my skin.
I grin, and then my lips part when I feel him push up against me. I feel his cock already hard against my ass. I struggle to breathe—not from the pressure of him against me, but because I get to have him again. It’s something I wanted, if I’m being completely honest with myself, for the last three years. Just one fuck. Just one night. Then, I can get over him. I will realize that it isn’t as good as what I thought it was. I will realize that I was just making it better in my mind. That it isn’t any better than with any other guy. Then, I will be able to move on.
I’m getting my chance.
