Royal Stripper

by Sienna Valentine

  Clarice raised an eyebrow. “What are you saying?”

  Trudy shrugged. “Maybe none of this is a bad thing, hun. If Harrison makes you so happy that you don’t want to leave this place… and if you make him so happy that he can’t stand the thought of losing you, either… maybe it’s time you guys admitted that and see what happens.”

  Clarice instantly shook her head. “This isn’t a goddamn movie; I can’t just run off with a suave rich guy. There’s no way this is happening. This is just a sick joke.”

  “That’s loser talk,” said Liz. “And you are not a loser.”

  “Remember when we were in high school and they wouldn’t let girls try out for the wrestling team, and you gathered all that attention and support until they did?” said Sophie. “That’s a movie plot, right there, Clarice.”

  “Or that one weekend in the city when we ran into Chaz Mercury at the Snakebite Club, and spent the whole weekend drinking on his tour bus?” said Liz with raised eyebrows and a smile. “That’s definitely a movie plot.”

  “Crazier shit has happened,” agreed Trudy. “The world is a weird, weird place. But you know goddamn well that you are a catch of a woman, and it makes perfect sense to the three of us why Harrison’s head over heels for you. Would it be the end of the world if you believed it, too?”

  Chapter 18

  Harrison

  Harrison spent the next day alone, without even bothering to try and contact Clarice. He knew she was furious at him, and he didn’t want to make things worse by encroaching on her space. But he would be lying if he didn’t admit it was torture for him. All he wanted was to have her back in his arms, and kiss her smiling lips again. He made excuses to his parents about her needing a day in bed to rest, and they were all too happy to provide it. His father took a helicopter to Denpasar to conduct some business, and his mother said she would likely take a spa day to herself.

  The first thing he did when he woke up was hit the waves. Sharks were sometimes a problem in the early morning hours, but he didn’t give a shit. Secretly, he almost hoped one tried to make a meal out of him. Either it would kill him and end this damn misery, or he would get to take down a predator with his bare hands, and something about that felt oddly satisfying at the moment.

  As the afternoon ticked by, and he had still not heard from her, his mood continued to sink. Desperate to make it up to her, Harrison scoured every single damn shop on the resort, and a few on the other side of the island, and he still couldn’t find anything that he thought would help demonstrate how sorry he was for his mistake. Not a single thing felt good enough to give to Clarice to make up for how stupid he acted.

  He had replayed that moment over and over in his mind ever since it happened, because something about it felt like the end of the world; like the floor was falling out from underneath his life and he was hanging on to the cliff’s edge by his fingernails, delaying the inevitable plunge. That was what the whole outburst had really been, hadn’t it? Some pathetic attempt at wielding control over a situation he never controlled to begin with. He acted out like a toddler and even now the thought of it embarrassed him.

  Harrison took the long route back to the resort after striking out in town, letting the hot sun and wind bake his face from the open top of his convertible. He took the winding beach curves faster than he probably should have, and made a few dangerous passes of tourist busses in hasty petulance. When he realized he was behaving like a sullen teen, he let off the gas pedal and sighed to himself.

  Even with paradise in his eyes, all he could see was Clarice, beaming like a goddess in her beautiful gold dress; the happy faces of his parents when he told them they were expecting their first grandchild; and the imaginary years ahead, a life with Clarice and their child, a reality that was never supposed to be. But it was the only one Harrison wanted now.

  He should be happy, he knew. His plan had worked, and his parents would leave without knowing how much of a screw up he really was. His father would return home to England, and a few more lies in the coming months would explain away Clarice’s absence as an unfortunate split. Or would have, if he hadn’t added the baby into the mix. Clarice was right. It would be a lot harder to explain the split with a pregnancy added to the mix. But he really couldn’t even think about that anymore. The plan’s success, or failure, no longer mattered. His goals had completely changed.

  He wanted Clarice to stay. He wanted something real for once in his damn life. And maybe the outburst in the ballroom was his heart trying to get him to admit it.

  Harrison had always been an imaginative person, and even now, he could see it all in a daydream: a future with Clarice, running the resort; watching her glowing and pregnant on the white glittering sand; teaching his son how to surf as soon as he could walk; making sure Clarice never wanted for anything again in her life. That was what this was all for, wasn’t it? Was he just going to drink and party his wealth away, or was he going to use it for something worthwhile?

  He finally knew what he needed to do. Harrison scrambled for his phone as he drove and used the voice command to call the front desk, hoping Bruce was on duty.

  His prayers were answered. “Front desk, this is Bruce. What can I help you with?”

  “It’s me,” said Harrison. “Listen, are you busy?”

  “Hey!” said Bruce happily. “Nope, not at the moment. What’s up?”

  “I need you to find my father—have him paged if you can’t get him by phone. Tell him to meet me in my office in ten minutes. There’s something important we need to discuss.”

  For once, it was Harrison who kept his father waiting. Had it been any other day, he would have been abjectly terrified of the consequences, but as he took hard steps from the resort parking lot to the staff offices, Harrison realized he didn’t feel an ounce of fear anymore. It was like he had crossed a threshold into a different, brighter world.

  Head high and shoulders squared, Harrison came into his office to find his father George picking impatiently at the trinkets stacked on his tall curio cabinet. He didn’t turn when Harrison entered.

  “You’re late. You said ten minutes.”

  Harrison refused to take the bait. It was suddenly so obvious to notice, he wondered how stupid he had been to fall for it all these years. “Father, sit down, please,” he said with a gesture.

  George turned, surprised, clearly not expecting the resistance. After just a moment’s hesitation, he obliged and took a seat at Harrison’s desk, hiking one ankle up onto his knee. He checked his watch and said, “Weatherman says a storm is headed this way. Do they often ground flights? Your mother is insistent we depart in the morning on schedule.”

  Harrison sat across from his father in the opposite chair, and again ignored George’s attempts at controlling the conversation. “I have something I have to tell you, father.”

  “Where’s Clarice?” asked George. “You must make sure she is there to see us off.”

  “Father, listen to me,” said Harrison in a firm, loud voice. “Stop interrupting and listen to me.”

  George’s face fell, stunned silent. There was a dark anger brewing behind his eyes that Harrison recognized, but it didn’t faze him now.

  “Father, I haven’t been honest with you,” said Harrison. “And I want to be honest now. When I sent you that email last week, I was lying. I got too drunk; I don’t even recall writing it. I woke up the next morning and was too afraid to tell you the truth when you said you were flying out to meet my wife.”

  The room built with tension as George absorbed his son’s words. He didn’t interrupt, but his silence was just as upsetting.

  Harrison continued. “I’m sorry, father. I know you must be disappointed, but I had to be honest with you.”

  “And Clarice?” said George, his voice cracking. He couldn’t look at his son. “What is she, then? Just a girlfriend?”

  Harrison looked at his father and realized there was pain on his face, and in his voice. Was it because of the lie, or be
cause he was actually upset about the idea that Clarice might no longer be his future daughter, or bear his grandchild. “She arrived last week as a guest with her friends on holiday, and I asked her to work with me to pull this off.”

  “So just a stranger?” George closed his eyes and shook his head softly. “I should have known. I should have known you would never do something like this sincerely. You have always refused to take the gifts I’ve given you.”

  “Father…”

  George stood, angry. “All I’ve ever tried to do, Harrison, is provide the best life for you, and that includes the passing on of my experience so you don’t have to make the same mistakes.”

  Harrison rose to meet his father, almost a good half-meter taller. “You never gave me the chance to figure out what the best life was for me. How is a young man supposed to understand? You hardly gave me the chance to work on my own and make my own mistakes. All it ever felt like was you trying to make a copy of yourself in me, and I didn’t want it, father. I don’t want to be you.”

  George huffed. “How dare you. All I ever tried to give you was love and support.”

  “And your methods left a lot to be desired,” said Harrison. Sweet relief bloomed through his chest as he let out the words he had been holding in since boyhood. “You may think your success at business simply translates to all areas of your life, father, but it doesn’t. I’m not a business partner you can talk into an investment by showing him the data spreadsheets and telling him it’s the logical choice. I’m not a rival who you freeze out with power plays and passive-aggressive fuckery to get him to do what you want. I’m your son! I was a child! What I needed was you to pick me up when I fell, not tie me to a chair to keep me from ever falling. I don’t know how it’s possible that you were both suffocating and distant, but you were.”

  George’s face was beet red, but he only stared in silence at his son.

  “I’m not trying to hurt you by saying these things now, but I need you to understand, father. I need you to see how we’ve gotten here. Don’t you think it’s a sign of a bad relationship between us when my first reaction was to stage an elaborate lie instead of telling you the truth?”

  “That choice is on you, son,” he said. “Do not ask me to be responsible for that. You’re a grown man, your mother and I are not responsible for your choices and we have not been for a very long time.”

  “I made the choice, yes, but you can’t stand here and pretend there aren’t very understandable reasons for the choice I made. You can’t stand here and pretend you don’t see how broken we are, you and I.” Harrison’s voice cracked just a bit. “I lie to you because I know my life disappoints you, and all these years I’ve never found another way to make you happy. You hate who I am, why wouldn’t I lie to you?”

  “I have never said I hate you,” insisted George in a firm voice. “Not once in your life.”

  “You didn’t have to say the words for your meaning to come across, loud and clear,” said Harrison, folding his arms.

  “Wishing you would choose better for yourself is not equivalent to hating you, Harrison. You’re my only son. I could never hate you.”

  Looking at the softness on his father’s face, Harrison sighed. Standing up for himself felt wonderful after all these years, but this had to mean more than just simple childish comeuppance, or their future would be bleak. “I wish we weren’t broken, father, because I need your advice now. I need my father’s advice to fix a problem I don’t know how to fix. But I’m afraid he won’t help me because he’s too ashamed I have a problem in the first place.”

  George looked away, emotional, and put one hand on the desk. He blinked back tears as he processed Harrison’s words. He was still looking down when he said, “I’m always here for you, son. I never intended for you to feel I wasn’t.”

  Harrison waited a few moments, and then he sat down. His father followed suit, and Harrison could see wetness in his father’s eyes he had never seen before, not even when his grandparents died.

  “I understand how disappointed you must be, and you have every right to be. I acted shamefully and not at all like a man should, let alone a Moore. I realize that now. I realized that this week as… as I spent time with Clarice. Father, even…” He felt emotion welling up. “Even acting as though I had a loving woman and a child coming into my life has made me feel more fulfilled than I ever have before. It’s made me realize how right you were, all these years.”

  George blinked. “Harrison…”

  “Anastasia destroyed my heart, father. You were right when you said that she had made me cold. I couldn’t deal with how dreadful she made the world look, so I ran and tried to party it away. But something different has happened with Clarice, and suddenly I… suddenly I feel very differently. Every other woman I’ve had in my life has had an expiration date, so obvious that it was as if I could see it stamped on her forehead. But Clarice, she… she feels as if she’s always been here. As if she’s just returned from some very long holiday to the place she always belonged: here with me.”

  His father took a long, deep breath, and for the first time, Harrison recognized loving emotion in his father’s eyes. He put two big hands on Harrison’s shoulders and shook him until Harrison was looking at him.

  “You say you needed me to help you develop your instincts. Let me help you now by saying that you have just clearly stated to yourself, and to me, everything you know and needed to hear.”

  “Father?”

  “Clarice is home. She has always belonged here with you. Is that what you feel, deep in your heart?”

  “Yes,” said Harrison. “Yes, absolutely.”

  “Follow it, son. If that is what your heart is telling you, you must trust it. Throw away the past and throw away any fears you have about what might stand in the way of your happiness, and trust.”

  Chapter 19

  Clarice

  As she had requested after their blow-up, Harrison left Clarice alone in the penthouse, and she hadn’t seen him since. They had not even exchanged a text between them since. She woke up in a lonely, cold, daze that even the morning birds couldn’t lift and spent over an hour just lying in bed, staring out the window at the fast-moving clouds in the bright blue sky.

  She missed Harrison. And she only had another day before she had to head back to New York, back to the real world, where he didn’t exist at all.

  She had been a fool to think she could pull this off without breaking her own heart. She should have known it the minute she saw Harrison’s smile, that nothing good could come of making a devil’s bargain with a man like him. He was used to this fast-paced life where emotions didn’t matter and everything was a short-term investment. Clarice hadn’t lived that impulsively in a long time—not until Harrison relit her fuse, anyway.

  But the idea of Harrison being a short-term investment made her heart crack in her chest. And now she had wrecked her last chance to spend time with him by getting upset about his lie. Sure, he shouldn’t have added the bit about the baby, or at the very least he should have warned her, first. But did it really matter? A lie was a lie, and it was his story and scheme to begin with. What did the details really matter?

  She cried herself into a short nap. When she woke up, she found missed calls from Trudy that made her feel too guilty to continue wallowing in bed, so she shuffled off for a quick shower and ordered a late room service lunch before sending a quick reply to let Trudy know she was okay and would meet the ladies for drinks before dinner. As she picked at the sandwich brought to the room, Clarice slowly packed her things for the return trip home.

  By the end, the gold dress from the night before hung lonely in the big closet, and Clarice couldn’t bring herself to decide whether she would take it home or not. She loved the way it made her feel, and the way it made Harrison look at her. But she wasn’t sure she wanted to take any remnants of Harrison home with her. She would already be carrying the weight of memories, and she knew all too well how heavy those alone
could get when the nights got dark.

  Everything felt far away. She was simply spent. The ladies noticed it immediately when she arrived at the martini bar near the boutiques, and all their attempts to cheer her up with fruity drinks and sexy stories didn’t make a dent in the armor of depression that draped over her so completely.

  Being around them was too much, so she excused herself with firm apologies and promises to call Trudy later if she needed to talk. “I just need to be alone and think,” she excused, leaving them at the martini bar and, with no destination in mind, wandering out towards the sea. She only stopped when she found a cozy spot on the beach that wasn’t particularly busy.

  Clarice sank down into the sand and made herself content watching the tide drift in and out. The sun was on its way towards the horizon, and already its dying rays were cut in pieces by the towering jungle mountains that surrounded the crystal blue bay. Birds and insects sparkled in the light. From somewhere down the beach, a loud party was happening, the beat of reggae music pulsing just underneath the breeze.