Page 4 of Stay Close
VrouwTiele glances at my pants. “We can have your luggage here in a few minutes,” she says, magicking her phone from an invisible pocket. “You’ll feel like yourself in no time.”
“The lemon pie people have my luggage.” In a feat of inhuman strength, I hold in my tears, but the story comes tumbling out. The yellow sign, the turbulence eyeliner, Montessori preschool, dinnertime spelling bees, Lucas’s abs, and the lost coat.
“Would you prefer to cancel your audience with Her Majesty?” Caroline asks, gripping my hands. She’s Caroline now. You can’t stand on formality after you’ve admitted to going off to college without ever having been on a date.
My stomach churns, but I come to a decision. “Even if I look like a disaster, I can’t blow it right out of the gate,” I say. I owe myself that. I owe it to this bouncy hair and the nights spent at the campus library, cramming for thenext test and the next and the next. I owe it to the years of being the best litigator at Knickerbocker, Gouss, & Astor, accepting every assignment even if it meant my social life has been garbage. I owe it to the reputation I’ve earned for being calm in high stress situations. I’m not going to let a few hippies and a freaking lemon pie mess this up now.
Caroline checks her wristwatch, her mouth set, and she sizes me up. “You will never forgive yourself for meeting Her Majesty like that,” she says, accurately assessing my mood. She points to the rips and stains. “If you’re agreeable, I’ll lend you my clothes.”
The idea is insane, but I can’t afford to dismiss it. I run a quick eye over Caroline, who is shorter but curvier than I am. She looks appropriate. In her clothes, I’ll probably look appropriate.
“Yes, please.”
“Quickly,” she says, wiggling out of her blouse and skirt, leaving herself the reasonable modesty of a silky chemise slip. “I’ll have someone else take you into the queen.”
She taps out a message on her phone and helps me do up the back of the skirt. The clothes are loose but tasteful, and though the queen won’t be awestruck by my professional chic, she won’t have anything to notice, either.
“I can’t do anything about switching shoes, but you shouldn’t worry. Scuffed boots are common in a Sondish winter,” she says, giving me an encouraging smile. “Someone from the secretarial pool will be around to collect you shortly.”
It’s not “someone from the secretarial pool.”
When Crown Prince Noah enters, my jaw drops open. I know who he is—of course I do. American tabloids have a fascination with monarchy, unencumbered by thoughts of how much the whole thing costs the taxpayers. He regularly smolders from the magazine rack, situated next to the two-for-one bins of white cheddar chips.
His smolder evaporates as soon as he sees his mother’s secretary in a thigh-skimming slip. Caroline opens her mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. The woman who greeted me with the warmth and understanding of a friendly fairy godmother has lost her voice.
Somehow her dithering resolves itself, and she fixes a serene expression on her face and dips a curtsey, no less impressive because she’s in her stockinged feet.
“We’ve had a bit of an emergency, Your Royal Highness. Ms. Spencer needs to be escorted to the Queen’s Audience Room,” she says. Nothing from her tone tells me anything about how she feels about being caught in such a state by her future monarch, but her cheeks are awash in pink.
Ordinary Caroline is gone. Sympathetic Caroline is gone. Her expression is confident, her demeanor terrifyingly calm. It’s like she’s daring him to say even one word about the state of her clothes.
I feel like an extra on a film set, witness to the drama but bound to a code of silence.
His Royal Highness swallows, finally taking his eyes off Caroline. He turns to me and says, with extreme politeness, “If you will follow me, ma’am.”
CHAPTER 2
Lucas
“There’s a staff diningroom in the east wing where you’ll be expected to eat when you’re on the grounds,” Nils, the head of palace security, tells me, opening a small private room in the staff dormitory. It’s nothing fancy—window, bed, table, desk. I had it worse during my training as a law enforcement officer and find no reason to complain. “Bathroom is down the hall and the breakroom is to your left.”
He hands me a lanyard with a photo and security strip which allows me through every public door in the palace. “Your client will be setting the schedule, but everyone on the security staff speaks English in one form or another, so if you have any questions—”
“I need a dry cleaner,” I say. “My suit took a hit.”
Nils sighs a sigh of bitter experience. “Lemon? They like lemon. Who knows where they getso many of them.”
He takes the suit and leaves me to unpack my few items—two more black work suits and a couple of “blending in” outfits for when my client needs discretion.
“Edie,” I almost hear her correct.
I grunt a laugh. Even after spending the bulk of my flight poring over the file from my boss, I didn’t expect Edie. The biographical details painted a picture of someone who never lifted her head from a book—whose every word would need to be run through a legal jargon translator. Her passport photo should be flagged by national security for not doing her justice.
I didn’t expect a cute brunette who blushes every time I look at her or a girl breaking her neck to watch me change out of my shirt. I grin, and my phone vibrates.
“Boss,” I answer. “You didn’t tell me she was gorgeous. And her legs—how can we be one of the best private security firms in the world if you’re giving me bad intel?”
“Do not do this to me, Castillo,” Gideon growls. The director of Black Swan Protection softens for his wife and her homemade brownies, but not much else. “I see you already had an incident.”
