by Emma Lea
We hadn’t stayed long. After the bar I took Clarissa to the markets and she clung to me like she was afraid of being kidnapped, or getting her dress dirty, maybe. She certainly shouldn’t have worn the shoes she was wearing. The uneven cobblestone streets were not friendly to fancy high heels.
Clarissa did not coo over the handmade trinkets and rugs and clothes in the market stalls like Frankie did, and she absolutely refused to eat any of the food from the street vendors. The entire morning was turning out to be a disaster, and it just made me miss Frankie more.
I’d had a fleeting thought that maybe Clarissa and I could make something work between us, but the more time I spent with her, the more I realized I didn’t even like her. Had I changed so much in the time that I’d been in Kalopsia? Or had I never really liked Clarissa but ignored it because I thought she was the type of woman I should be with?
“Oh, what’s that over there?” Clarissa asked, the first bit of excitement I’d heard in her voice since we’d stepped out of the car.
I looked where she was pointing and saw the brightly colored umbrellas from the only resort on the island. Kalopsia hadn’t been much of a tourist attraction in the years past, but since the king had returned, tourism was slowly growing. Someone had resurrected the old resort in the two years since Jamie’s homecoming, and by all accounts it had been steadily increasing business. I hadn’t been there. It wasn’t something Frankie was interested in. Oh, she would have liked to talk to the owner and maybe get his story about how he was going about rebuilding the tourist industry, but actually checking out the resort was not high on her list.
Not the same for Clarissa, or what I assumed from the look of relief and longing on her face.
“That’s a resort,” I said. “The Helios, I believe it’s called.”
“Can we have a look?”
I looked at my watched. I needed to get back to the palace.
“I was hoping to show you the family compound,” I said.
“Oh? Really? I thought your mother said it was unlivable.”
“Yes, it is, but you don’t want to see it?”
Clarissa’s nose crinkled. “I’d much rather visit the resort. Maybe they have a spa.”
I sighed. “Okay, we can have a look.”
I followed Clarissa as she picked her way toward The Helios. It was beautiful, I couldn’t deny that, but it had to be expensive, which meant none of the locals could afford to stay in it. I suppose that was the truth with any resort. It wasn’t built for the locals; it was built for the tourists and to entice their dollars. Having a resort of this caliber was good for the economy of Kalopsia and was doing wonders for the tourist trade, but it left me feeling a little cold.
The thing I loved about Kalopsian architecture was the rustic feel of it. The houses and shops and other buildings were practically carved from the rock of the island and there was something intrinsically beautiful about it. The resort, while beautiful, had lost the same feel of authenticity with its slick lines and modern design. I knew the tourists coming from other parts of the world expected the luxury of the modern design, but for me, it lacked the warmth and community that made Kalopsia what it was.
Clarissa gasped and clapped her hands as we walked into the foyer.
“This is divine,” she said, pulling out her phone to take photos.
We’d been wandering through the village and had seen amazing ocean vistas from some of the most beautiful spots on the island, and not once had Clarissa taken out her phone to take a photo. But she was happily snapping away at the interior of the resort.
I couldn’t help but compare Clarissa to Frankie. In this same situation, Frankie would seek out the people—locals and tourists alike. She’d want to know how the staff liked working in the resort and how the locals felt about the increase in tourism. She’d want to talk to the tourists about their experiences and she’d even suggest places for them to visit. And Clarissa? She was taking photos of generic resort decor and gasping over the spa menu.
“Oh, I think I need to have a treatment,” she cooed as she flipped the page.
“That’s fine,” I said, glad to get rid of her. I needed to work and if I could distract Clarissa with a day at the spa, mores the better.
We approached the front desk and Clarissa booked herself in for the full treatment. I didn’t even listen to the list of things she was having done. When it came time to pay, Clarissa turned and fluttered her eyelashes at me. Of course she expected me to pay. Hadn’t that always been the way our relationship worked?
I pulled out my credit card and handed it to the woman behind the desk. She took it with a smile and then ushered Clarissa toward the spa. I turned and walked out, not looking back.
Chapter 24
Lucas
I walked into my office and slumped into my chair. Clarissa was ensconced in the day spa at the resort and I’d sent the car back into the village to wait for her, although I knew it would be hours before she was ready to come home.
I picked up my phone and scrolled to Frankie’s number, my thumb hovering over the call button, but I just couldn’t do it. I’d called and texted so many times now that continuing on would put me well and truly into the stalking area. Frankie would contact me when she was ready to talk…or she wouldn’t and we’d never see each other ever again.
I rubbed my chest as it burned. Who knew having a broken heart meant you had to deal with physical pain along with the emotional trauma? Not me, that’s for sure, but then I’d never been in love before and I’d never had my heart broken. Zero stars. Would not recommend.
The door opened, and I looked up with a snarl, fully expecting Dorian to walk in the door and give me more grief about letting Frankie go. As if I could ‘let’ Frankie do anything. But it wasn’t Dorian, it was Jamie, and I straightened in my chair and rearranged my features into something less confrontational.
I had been dreading this meeting. I knew it was coming, and I was surprised it had taken this long, but it didn’t make it any less anxiety inducing. If anything, waiting for the guillotine to fall had just made me more nervous.
“Your highness,” I said, standing and bowing my head to him.
Jamie waved my gesture away and sat in the chair opposite my desk.
“I suppose you know why I’m here,” he said.
I slowly sat back down in my chair and swallowed. “Yes,” I replied.
“Honestly, Lucas, I was waiting for you to come to me.”
“You were?” I asked, surprised.
“I thought you’d want to explain to me what was going on and why that other woman is here and your fiancée has done a disappearing act.”
I opened my mouth, not even knowing what I would say, but Jamie went on.
“Meredith is not happy, as you can imagine. None of us are happy about the way this all went down, and at the very least I thought you would come to me if you were having problems. I know I’m not that much older than you, but I do have some experience with being in love with an independent and feisty woman.”
My mouth snapped shut, and I tilted my head to look at him curiously. I wasn’t exactly sure what was going on.
“You’re not here to reprimand me for pretending to be engaged to Frankie?” I asked.
Jamie smirked and sat forward in his seat. “You have met Danika, right?”
I nodded slowly, not quite sure what he was getting at.
“And you know how she is my head of security too, right?”
I nodded again.
“So knowing Danika and knowing the position she holds here in the palace, did you really believe we wouldn’t know every single thing about you before I let you anywhere near my wife?”
I swallowed. Right. It was easy to forget that Jamie had been part of the royal guard of Merveille. He held himself like a king, but he was also personable and friendly. The undercurrent of danger I sensed in him now was absent from his everyday dealings, but it was a reminder of the violence he was capable of under
the right circumstances. He would protect the woman he loved with all his resources, and that included doing a thorough background check on me and Frankie before they even invited us to the palace.
“You knew this entire time?” I asked, but it was more of a clarification, rather than a serious question. “So why didn’t you call me out on it? Why did you let us go on pretending?”
If I was honest, I was a little angry. If he’d known and told me he’d known then maybe I wouldn’t have had my heart ripped out of my chest and stomped on.
Jamie shrugged and leaned back in his chair. “I had every intention of doing just that when the two of you arrived, but then I saw you together and I knew.”
“You knew what?”
“That you are in love with her and she is very much in love with you.”
I snorted and shook my head. “Frankie was not in love with me. We’ve been friends for a long time, and she loves me, but it is philia love, not eros.”
“That’s not what I observed,” Jamie said. “And that’s certainly not what Meredith thought either.”
I pushed up from the desk and paced, running a hand through my hair. “Everyone keeps telling me that, but…”
“But?”
“Well, everyone else is telling me that Frankie is in love with me but the woman herself told me to my face she wasn’t.”
“Then she was lying.”
“Why would she lie about something like that?” I asked. “I told her how I felt, I handed my heart to her and she gave it back to me after giving it a thorough beating. Frankie feels nothing for me except friendship, and I’ll be lucky if I even have that from her now.”
“So why did she get so upset when Clarissa turned up? Why did she run?”
“I asked him the same thing,” Dorian said, coming into the office and sitting in the chair beside Jamie.
“I can tell you this,” Jamie said. “If you marry Clarissa, I might need to retract my offer to join the royal court.”
“What?”
Jamie shrugged. “Meredith doesn’t like her, and I don’t much like her either. She’s using you and she has been using you for the entirety of your relationship.”
I fell back into my chair and groaned. “I know, and for the record, I don’t much like her either.”
“So why is she still here?” Dorian asked.
“Because I don’t know how to make her leave,” I admitted.
“I have a solution,” Jamie said.
“Okay,” I replied. “I’m listening.”
“You need to go to Boston and bring Frankie back.”
I rolled my eyes. “And just how do you expect me to do that? And how does that solve the Clarissa issue?”
“If you’re not here, then Clarissa will have no reason to be here,” Jamie said.
“Okay, but why do I need to bring Frankie back? She left of her own accord. I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to drag her kicking and screaming back here. Besides, can’t you just get Danika to get rid of Clarissa? Not like that,” I clarified when they both raised their eyebrows.
“You need to end it with Clarissa and give her no recourse to come back into your life.”
“You’re right, I know,” I said with a sigh. “But why do I need to bring Frankie back here? She doesn’t want me.”
“That’s still up for debate,” Jamie said. “But the reason she needs to come back is so I can give her the interview she needs for her dissertation and I’d like to speak to her in person when I offer her a job.”
“You want to offer Frankie a job?”
Jamie nodded. “I do. We need people like Frankie. We’re rebuilding our nation and we want to do it right and someone like Frankie would be an invaluable asset to have. I want her to consult and liaise. She has this uncanny ability to bridge the gaps between the palace and the village, and we need that. We need her.”
“And,” Dorian added, “it gives you a chance to fix what you broke.”
“I don’t even know what I broke,” I replied glumly.
“What did she say? What reason did she give?” Jamie asked.
“What do you mean?”
“When you told her how you felt, what did she say?”
“She said I didn’t need her anymore, and that I was just afraid of losing everything I’d gained if she left.”
“I don’t understand,” Dorian said with a frown.
“I have always been able to be myself around Frankie. She was the only person who I ever let in. My parents were continually disappointed in me and my sister treats me like a five-year-old. I disappointed everyone in my life until I met Frankie. She was the only person who didn’t want to change me or expect more from me.”
“Until now,” Jamie said.
I nodded. “Until now. Until I came here and found…myself.”
“So if Frankie thinks you don’t need her anymore, why don’t you just show her you do?” Dorian said.
I shook my head and Jamie said, “No, that’s not the answer.”
“Frankie needs to know that I want her for her, not just because of what she thinks she does for me.”
Jamie nodded. “Exactly. So that’s what you need to tell her. Yes, you have found a place here on Kalopsia and within the palace, but that doesn’t mean Frankie doesn’t still have a place in your life.”
“And just how am I supposed to make her believe me?”
“You just need to be honest,” Jamie said. “Which is why you need to do it in Boston, away from here. You need to show her how you feel about her in the one place that always caused you so much heartache.”
“So I need to go to Boston.”
“You need to go to Boston.”
“I don’t understand,” Clarissa said as she watched me pack.
Maddox stood by watching with a grimace on his face. He wanted to be the one packing my bag, but I needed to do something. Now that I’d decided to try to win Frankie back, I was eager to get going.
“The king is sending me to Boston,” I replied. “And you’re coming with me.”
“We’re coming back, right?” she asked warily.
I stopped what I was doing, much to Maddox’s relief, and turned to her.
“I’m coming back,” I said. “But you won’t be, not unless you intend to visit as a tourist.”
“What does that mean?”
“Come on, Clarissa, you know exactly what it means. Our relationship was over months ago. If we’re both honest, we never really had a relationship, not in the true sense.”
“I love you, Lucas,” she cried.
“No, you don’t,” I said with a sigh. “I know what you see when you look at me and it’s not the man you want to spend the rest of your life with. You see a means to an end. If we had gotten married, I know it would have ended in divorce within a couple of years and I know I would be as much to blame as you. I don’t love you, Clarissa, and I never did. We were both using each other, and it’s time for it to stop.”
“You’re serious.”
“As a heart attack,” I said.
Clarissa huffed out a breath and folded her arms. “So that’s it? We’re done?”
“We were done the minute you walked out on my original proposal. Thank you, by the way. If you hadn’t done that, then we would have been tied together in an unhappy marriage and I would never have been brave enough to admit how I really feel about Frankie.”
“I knew it,” Clarissa spat. “You always had a thing for her, even when we were together.”
“No,” I said. “I can promise you there was nothing more than friendship between Frankie and me when you and I were together. But when you broke up with me and Frankie and I started this whole charade, I realized something. I realized I’d been fooling myself for a long time. Now I’m ready to stop pretending and go after what I really want. I’m so sick of letting other people steer my life. I’m so sick of trying to be the person everyone else wants me to be. It’s time I fought for myself and for what I want in m
y life.”
“And you want Frankie?”
I nodded and grinned. “I want Frankie.”
Clarissa rolled her eyes. “I honestly don’t know what you see in her.”
I shrugged. “I don’t care what you think of her. I love her.”
Clarissa snorted. “And you think she’s going to be any good at all this?” she asked, raising her arms to indicate the palace.
“I actually think she will be an amazing markissia,” I said.
“I doubt that very much. What is she going to do? Wow everyone with her cocktail making skills?”
“That’s really mean,” I said with a shake of my head. “You know how you sound, right?”
“You think other people aren’t going to be thinking the same things about her? She is hardly royalty material.”
“And you are?”
“I come from a respectable family and I at least know which knife and fork to use at dinner.”
“Do you know anything about Frankie at all?”
“Why would I?”
I shook my head. “Seriously, Clarissa. Frankie is studying sociology and psychology and anthropology. In fact, she’s doing her Ph.D. and yes, she might work in a bar but so what? It’s honest work, and she enjoys it. As for her family, not that it has any bearing whatsoever on the caliber of Frankie’s character, but her mother is the leading neurosurgeon at Mass General and her father works in the grant department at Harvard. But even if her mother worked in a diner and her father worked in sanitation, it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference to me or to the king and queen. Frankie is an amazing person and not only do I love her but so does nearly every other person she comes into contact with.”
“Not me.”
“Yeah well maybe that has more to do with you than with Frankie.” I stopped and took a breath, running my hand through my hair. “Look, I don’t want this to denigrate into slinging match. You don’t have to love Frankie, you don’t even have to like her. The only thing that concerns me is how I feel about her and how she feels about me. As for you and me? We’re done. Your opinion of me no longer concerns me. I know you came here to try to resurrect our relationship, but even you have to admit it was a long shot. I don’t feel any ill will toward you, in fact I don’t really feel anything toward you. I’m grateful for that night you broke up with me because it gave me a chance with Frankie. So thank you.”
