Page 34 of Royal Icing
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. The, uh, Wi-Fi is particularly good in this hallway.” He extricated himself from the leash and took a step back.
What nonsense was he speaking?
“Right,” she said with a small smile. “The Wi-Fi. Well, I need to let Cooper out. Have a good night…Your Highness,” she added with a small curtsy.
“We talked about this,” he called after her, and she looked over her shoulder to wink at him.
He confidently strode the opposite direction before remembering that it led to a dead end, then had to wait an extra minute to be sure she was outside before hustling out the exit.
He was in trouble.
CHAPTER TWELVE
EMMA
Emma awoketo her phone ringing. She stared blearily at it with one eye. Her mom. It must have been two a.m. at home.
She sat bolt upright and bed and answered. “Hello? Everything okay?”
Her heart pounded full-tilt like she had been woken up by a machete-wielding intruder instead of a phone call.
“No, everything’s not okay,” her mom said. “Why am I finding out from the internet that my daughter went on a date with a prince last night?
“A what?”
Oh, shit. The paparazzi had moved fast. How had they figured out who she was?
“A date. With a prince. You seriously weren’t going to tell me about it? Here, I’m sending you the link.”
Her phone dinged, and she pulled up the article. Oh, hell. There was a picture of the two of them sitting at the bar, and it looked like Leo was stroking her hair when he had really been on a fuzz-retrieving mission.
“‘Prince Leo’s Mystery Date’? Sources say she had an American accent,” she muttered to herself as she scanned the article.
Luckily, no one seemed to have put the pieces together and identified her. What a weird day.
“Well, first of all, it wasn’t a date,” she said to her mom. “I kind of saved his life, and then he lied to me about who he was but then felt bad. He took me to the winter carnival as an apology.”
“I’m gonna need more details than that, sweetie.”
Emma rehashed the story but skipped over the weird part where he had been lurking outside her door after she went inside. What had that meant? Was he reconsidering? Or was he secretly a mega creep who was going to watch her eat pasta through the keyhole?
“How did you even find this story?” Emma asked.
“I followed all the Lynorian tabloids the second you got on that plane. Just in case I spotted you in the background of a royal picture or something. I never imagined I’d find you on a date with one of them.”
“Again, it wasn’t a date.”
“Whatever you say, sweetheart. It’ll be totally worth losing the apartment for you to marry a prince. I better make sure my passport is still valid.”
Emma sputtered and launched herself out of bed, digging through the clothes she’d hastily thrown into her suitcase. “I’m not falling in love, Mother. I’ve known him for twelve minutes, and I’m basically just using him to get information on the queen. Now if you excuse me, I have to go to the damn library because apparently Lynoria can’t be bothered to put their history and customs on the internet. I love you. Go to bed.”
She hung up the phone and let out a frustrated grunt. Her gaze fell on the bouquet of pink roses Leo had given her the day before. For someone who had made such a show about getting to know her, he acted like he’d rather be boiled alive than have dinner in her apartment.
The whole latter half of the evening had been fraught with tension. When Cooper wrapped them up in his leash, she had been seconds away from throwing caution to the wind and kissing him. She had made a fool of herself. She must have been imagining the frisson between them.
And what was she expecting, a tryst with a prince? She didn’t need to be putting her energy into chasing after some guy from a different country who wouldn’t even agree to dinner. He was a colleague. That was all. She would just have to avoid him for the rest of the trip.
Two hours later,after a rejuvenating shower and some breakfast snatched from the royal kitchen, Emma strolled down the road toward town. It was a beautiful morning. The sun was blindingly bright, glancing off the snow. They sometimes went all winter without seeing the sun in Brooklyn.
