ROYAL ROMANCE by Victoria Hart

Author:Victoria Hart [Hart, Victoria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Maplewood Publishing
Published: 2017-09-14T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

I didn’t know what to feel. Well, that’s not entirely true – I knew exactly what I should be feeling, what people expected me to feel. There was the hint of revulsion, the overwhelming feeling of betrayal, and the embarrassment of being so stupid. It all cobbled together into anger, which I knew everyone expected me to focus and act on. I should demand that Carlo be arrested, demand that he never enter my presence again, and maybe even demand that they lop off his head.

And I did feel these things. I did have anger bubbling inside me. Carlo had been so close to me; he’d pretended to care so much. I should banish all thought of him. I should never think of him again.

But I still wanted to talk to him.

I couldn’t, I knew. That would be dangerous – but I needed to hear what was happening in his head, from his own mouth. This didn’t feel right. Everything about this reeked of incorrect information; something was missing here.

We did know some things for sure: Carlo had lied to me. He’d been helping those who had been trying to hurt me. He’d come to the party that night with the man who had the gun, and he’d missed school the day of the explosion because he’d known about the homemade bomb. Maybe he’d even helped build it.

But why had he saved me? Why did he protect me the night of the party?

It had been a trick. It had been a way to get me to trust him. Maybe he was deep undercover, deep in his own lies and it was part of the con.

“Ma’am,” said a voice. I turned around. It was the security guard from a few days ago. The new one, Vince. “If you give us the address of the meeting point tonight with Vespasian we can have him arrested.”

Did I want that? I was a little surprised to find that I didn’t, at all. I didn’t want him to be arrested, or charged with anything, or locked away. I wanted to talk to him. If he was arrested, that wouldn’t happen. Not in private, anyway.

“He didn’t tell me,” I said. “Yet.”

“Have you had contact with him?”

I didn’t like this version of Vince. I preferred the scared young man from the car who was just as nervous as I had been about dealing with a bomb and a possible assassination attempt. This man had matured in the days since then. He was turning into one of them, a mindless drone in a suit with a bud in his ear. I didn’t want that. I needed at least one of them to be my friend. I needed one security guard who wasn’t so intent on doing the job he’d been trained to do.

“No,” I said. It was true. Though the phone in my pocket could easily have a text message or voicemail on it, as long as I didn’t know about it, I couldn’t offer it up as evidence against him.

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