Page 77 of Royal Games (The Royals of Monterra)

He set me down. “Ready?”

“Yes.” Nervousness bounced along my veins, cranking up my excitement.

He took off my blindfold.

In front of me, in her stall, stood Marigold.

I blinked a couple of times, not sure of what I was seeing. It was my horse. My wonderful, beautiful, lazy horse. She came to the front of the stall as I walked over, her ears forward and alert, her eyes bright and wide as she nickered at me.

When my hand went flat against the side of her soft coat, I started to cry. Marigold nudged me with her nose, and I wrapped my arms around her neck, sobbing against it.

After my tears had slowed, I turned to him. “How did you ... where did you ... I don’t understand ...”

Rafe wore the world’s biggest grin. “You’re not going to make me send her back, are you?”

I tightened my arms around her. “I can’t afford to keep her.”

“That won’t be an issue. It’s already taken care of.”

This time, I wouldn’t argue with him. I wouldn’t fight or tell him to return her. I didn’t care that it was too extravagant or too expensive. I would accept his gift and not complain. I loved her too much for that.

Marigold tugged her head away, heading over to her feeding trough. She’d had enough reuniting for one night.

So I went over to Rafe and hugged him tightly instead. “Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he murmured into the top of my hair as his arms held me close. I loved this. Loved the way it felt when he held me. Even in the past when I had been upset with him, I still craved his touch. That had to mean something.

Maybe Whitney was right. Maybe I was already at a hundred percent.

Chapter 23

I was sorely tempted to tell Rafe he could kiss me. But I didn’t want to kiss him just because he’d bought me a horse. When I kissed him, and by now I knew that would happen again, and soon, it would be because I wanted to more than anything else. And there would be no extenuating circumstances.

We walked hand in hand back to his car, where we started to unload my presents. A card slipped out of the pile I had been carrying, and I stopped to pick it up.

When I got into the kitchen, I opened the envelope. But there wasn’t a birthday card inside. It was a folded up piece of paper.

I unfolded it and gasped, and it felt like hot liquid silver filled my mouth. Rafe was immediately by my side. “What is it?”

With a shaky hand, I gave him the paper. It was a black-and-white picture of me on campus, on my way to class. “I’ll see you soon, Mary-Pauline,” was written across the top. I couldn’t tell if it was a recent photo or not. For all I knew he had taken the picture years ago. Rafe took one look at it and got on the phone. First he called his team to come over, and then he called the sheriff.

The picture was blurry, but there was no mistaking that it was me. “He’s messing with me,” I told Rafe.

“Why would he do that?” he said. He had just finished his calls and hung up his phone.

“It’s hard to explain, but that was one of the ways he kept control over everyone. He kept us off balance all the time. We never knew what he would do next.”

My knees didn’t work, and I fell hard onto one of the kitchen chairs. “The worst part of this is that he didn’t mail it. It was with my other presents. Which means either he or someone who follows him came here to Frog Hollow”—here my voice started to tremble—“and left that with my other presents.”

The thought that John-Paul could have been standing next to me, close enough to touch me, made me nauseous. Bile burned in my stomach as I thought of what he could have done to Aunt Sylvia. Or Whitney. Or Nicole.

Or Rafe.

He crouched down next to me. “I swear to you, on my life, I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

Then he held me until the sheriff, his bodyguards, and Max and Aunt Sylvia all arrived at the same time.

Rafe told his men to hire even more security. This being the most exciting thing that had happened to the sheriff’s department in the last ten years, the sheriff promised again to increase their patrols and keep a closer eye on who was coming and going. They promised to contact everyone at the party to see if anybody had any footage on their phone that they could look at.

---