“Yes. I…I also asked him a very important question.”
She felt her heart thumping when she gazed up at him. She wanted to grab him and plant a huge kiss on his soft-looking lips. But she couldn’t do that. How inappropriate would that be!
“I asked him for your hand in marriage, Helen.”
She almost fainted but held her own. “Oh?” The question came out shaky. She cleared her throat.
“Would you like to go for a walk with me sometime? Perhaps we could get to know each other better before taking a step that large?”
“What did my father say?”
Eric smiled. “He gave his approval.”
She chewed on her bottom lip. She was supposed to go home. She thought about her grandmother.
When she looked back up at Eric, she knew what her decision would be.
“Will I be able to talk on this walk?” She asked.
He laughed. “You will be able to talk all you like, my lady.”
“Then yes. I will stay with you.”
“Stay?” He tilted his head.
“Yes. A walk would be lovely. So very lovely.”
He took her hand and brought it to his lips, kissing it softly. “That makes me very happy.”
She could only smile at him. She was about to change her family’s history books.
*****
THE END
Big Bad Royal: A Bad Boy Billionaire Romance
CHAPTER ONE: Rebecca Monroe
I glanced at the neon Budweiser clock hanging over the bar and saw it was almost nine, just about time for Carl Wilson to come in the door. Carl was as regular and dependable as that old clock. Nine o’clock on the dot was the time he had come in every night for twenty-five years.
Carl was one of a handful of locals left who frequented the Snowcap Bar & Grill on a basis so regular that you could set your watch by it.
The Snowcap, as it was called (because saying bar & grill required too much effort, I supposed), was a little dive bar/greasy spoon my dad opened here in Snowcap, New York, the year before I was born.
Dad told everyone that Mom gave birth to me behind the bar. It wasn’t true, of course. I was born at the Snowcap Clinic, the only medical facility within a hundred miles at the time. But telling everyone I was born inside the bar made my dad happy, so I never said otherwise.
I started helping out in the kitchen when I was just ten, flipping burgers that contained more cracker crumbs than hamburger meat. Over the years I bussed tables, washed dishes, swept the floor, cleaned the only bathroom (DISGUSTING!), and started tending bar when I was eighteen.
I grew up in the bar business. It was all I knew. I had even planned to go to community college to study hotel management after high school, but that thing with Charlie happened, and then my dad died the day after my twentieth birthday.
My world suddenly became the ten-by-three-foot stretch of floor behind the bar. All thoughts of going to college were laid to rest with my dad.
Dad had a massive heart attack and died on the very spot where I now stood swiping a damp rag over the bar.
His pals said he died doing what he loved: pouring drinks for the locals and shooting the shit about Jets football. That was bullshit, plain and pure.
He died doing what he had to do to keep food on the table and the lights on in the little apartment where he and I had lived upstairs. Mom left us when I was just two. Ralph Monroe was the only parent I ever knew. That was why I’d never left Snowcap and would never close this ratty old bar. This bar was the only thing of my dad’s that I had left.
Carl was going to come in for his nightly three mugs of beer come hell or high water. Not even an early winter snowstorm like the one that was kicking up out there now would keep Carl away. I looked through the big front window that had Snowcap Bar & Grill painted on it in fading letters. The window was starting to ice over. The weatherman was predicting a foot of snow. It would be an early night, and that was just fine with me.
I filled a cold mug to the rim with draft and set it on the bar in Carl’s spot so it would be waiting when he got there. Carl didn’t move too fast these days. He’d been an old man when I was a young girl. I had no idea how old he was now, because he had looked the same for years.
He had been driving his snow plow and pulling people out of ditches in these mountains for thirty years. Storms like this didn’t frighten Carl. He said every snowflake sounded like money falling from the sky.
Carl stood at the door for a moment to stomp the thick snow off his rubber boots. He took hold of the lapels of his hooded parka and shook off the heavy flakes that had gathered there. He tugged the thick mittens from his gnarled hands and shoved them into the parka’s pockets. Then he hung the parka on the wall to dry.