“The date with Mariana.”
“Oh?” Nate’s voice is carefully neutral. He’s waiting to hear what I think of the situation.
“I’ll have to talk to my father about it. It’s possible that a longer-term arrangement could be very beneficial for—.”
Nate interrupts me with a deep sigh, and I stop speaking abruptly. We’re old friends, but Nate really strives for professionalism.
“Something bothering you?” I say. Did I miss something that happened in traffic? It’s not particularly heavy this evening.
“Listen to you,” Nate says, not taking his eyes from the road. “‘A longer-term arrangement?’ Alec, that’s not you.”
“Oh?” I say, bristling, letting just a hint of irritation underscore the word.
“No,” Nate says, his voice calm and even. He’s not bothering to take the bait, and since I can feel my old habits slipping back, I press my lips together and wait to hear what he has to say. “And you know it, your highness. You’ve become your brother, and I don’t think that’s a good thing.”
“My brother was excellent at what he did.” At the mention of Marcus, my heart jerks painfully in my chest, but I swallow the pain away and resolve again not to lash out at my best friend in the entire fucking world.
“Your brother was a deeply unhappy man,” Nate says, gripping the steering wheel a little tighter, his knuckles turning white. “You must have known that. God knows everyone else did.”
“I’m doing what’s best, Nate.”
“Best for who?”
“Saintland first, obviously. What other choice do I have now that I’m crown prince?” And now that Jessica is gone, I remind myself, a lump rising in my throat.
“First off, you could choose to go get her any time. You chose to flee the country in the first place, remember?”
“I can’t do that, and you know it.”
“What good is it,” Nate says, running a hand over his hair, “of doing any of this if you’re just going to be a shell of yourself?”
“I’m not—.”
He cuts me off again. “You are. And what’s more, it doesn’t have to be like this. Things got hard when your brother died, I know it. We all know it. And I get it.” Nate’s sister Natalie died when we were seventeen. “I also know that she was the one person you wanted to see at the end of every day. You didn’t have to say it. Everyone in the palace knew that you were always going to her, always wanting to be with her. It was clear as day to everybody, Alec. Everybody. And you can’t ignore the fact that you’re the one who brought her here in the first place, despite the risk, and I think you knew that it was a bigger risk than you let on.”
As Nate speaks, something bursts alive in me, somewhere deep in my core, firing an electric energy down my spine.
He’s fucking right.
But what the hell can I do about it now?
I’m the one who fought with her, dismissed her ideas, told her she needed to find a different man. How am I supposed to take all that back?
There is no taking it back. That’s the answer in all of it. There is no undoing what I said. There’s only replacing it with something else.
It’s just that I have no goddamn idea how I’m supposed to go about doing that.
“She’s back in New York, Nate.”
I see him roll his eyes in the rearview mirror. “Again, that didn’t stop you from meeting her in the first place.”
“My schedule—.”
“Are you a crown prince or not?”
“That’s exactly why—.”
Nate pulls the car around in front of Sainthall Palace and shifts it into park before he throws an arm over the seat and turns to look back at me.
“I’m only going to bring this up one more time. Your brother—he let this job eat him alive. If you want something to change, you’re going to have to be the one to change it. The Alec I know would never let something as small as a schedule keep him away from the love of his life.”
My heart pounds against my ribcage. I look at Nate for a long moment in silence, and then he salutes me and opens his door, coming around to open mine. Protocol.
His words thunder in my head as I walk across the terrace to the palace entrance, my mind racing, phone already in hand, plans already in the works. I have to get back to her. It’s my only choice. Because…
“The love of his life. The love of his life. The love of his life.” Nate’s words echo in my head. And in my heart.
Jessica is the love of my life.
Chapter 45
Jessica