Page 19 of Awestruck (Starstruck Love Stories #4)

Chapter Eleven

Elliot

“I can’t believe you talked me into this,” I say through gritted teeth, scanning for threats as our open-air bus trundles through the streets of Windgaard.

I don’t think I have ever been this stressed in my life, and I once had to extract a high-value informant out of a halfway collapsed warehouse while under fire because our cover had been blown.

This is worse.

“And if you look to your right,” a portly gentleman says, his Candoran accent thick through his microphone, “you will see the sea wall where the great Captain Dunholm fended off British invaders for eight straight days with nothing but a small band of fishermen.”

“Fascinating,” I grumble. If I were in any other circumstances, it might actually be an interesting story, but I’m too busy cataloguing all the ways this could go wrong to pay attention.

Freya nudges her elbow into my side, her smile faltering when she hits the gun holstered beneath my jacket, like she didn’t realize it was there. “You are getting on my nerves, Mr. Reid,” she hisses under her breath. “I am trying to listen to our wonderful tour guide.”

Our “wonderful tour guide” has brought up The Great Fish Fry of ’98 six times now, as if a city-wide seafood feast is the most exciting thing to happen in the history of Candora.

“We’re getting off at the next stop,” I say as my leg starts bouncing.

We shouldn’t have gotten on the bus in the first place, but I made the mistake of trusting the princess when she said she wanted to check on something around the corner from our hotel.

Thinking it would be a quick stop, I left the rest of the palace guards to get the event center ready in case Freya decides to continue with the original plan of giving a campaign speech.

Now we’re on a tour bus. In plain sight. Riding around the whole of the city where anyone can get to the princess. If she dies because of this, it’ll be entirely her fault.

But I’ll be the one to take the blame.

“Mr. Reid,” she says again and touches a hand to my bouncing knee. “Please.”

My eyes jump to her warm fingers, stuck there for a long moment because this might be the first time she’s touched me.

Elbowing me in the ribs doesn’t count, and she hit my Glock anyway, so the fact that her pale hand remains on my knee is making it difficult to concentrate.

Maybe it’s the lack of sleep over the last few days jumbling my thoughts, but suddenly the words ‘she’s touching me’ are on repeat in my head.

Only when she moves her hand can I think straight again. “I’m never listening to you again,” I mutter so only she can hear. “You know that, right?”

Despite my low tone, the young couple in front of us glance back like they have multiple times throughout this tour.

I don’t think they heard me, but they’ve clearly recognized Freya.

They look more intrigued than suspicious, which is the only reason I haven’t tucked my hand inside my jacket to be ready to pull my gun at a moment’s notice.

“Elliot,” Freya says, softer this time. “This is a good idea.”

I scoff.

“I know you agree with me because you stepped on the bus to begin with.”

She has me there, but I didn’t count on this tour being four hours.

Seriously, I don’t think there’s a city in the world with enough points of interest to justify a tour this long.

We’re only an hour in, and I can only imagine how much detail I’ll know about the smoked Haddock our guide ate almost thirty years ago by the end of the tour.

He’s already talking about the fish fry again.

“Remind me again why this is necessary,” I say and narrow my eyes at the couple in front of us when they turn around again. They quickly face forward and start whispering to each other. “There are going to be pictures of you everywhere.”

“Yes.”

“Freya.”

“This is necessary,” she says forcefully, “because I have never spent any significant time in this part of Candora, and I wish to rectify that.”

The urge to groan rises with every word she speaks.

If she’s going to start taking public outings like this everywhere we go, and I highly suspect she is, she really needs to work on her speech patterns.

It’s one thing to change the way she talks when she’s giving a practiced speech, but it’s another to do it naturally in conversation when around regular people like we are now.

“Okay, Rapunzel,” I say, shifting in my seat so I’m sort of facing her. My knee bumps into hers, pulling her eyes down for a moment, but she’s back to looking at me a second later.

“What did you call me?”

I eye the blonde hair streaming down her back.

It was in a loose braid when she came to find me and asked me to accompany her out of the hotel, but the hairdo fell apart as soon as the bus started moving.

It’s windy in Windgaard—big surprise—and now her hair is a mess. No wonder she keeps it up all the time.

“You heard me,” I say with a shake of my head. “Here’s the deal.”

She lifts an eyebrow.

“I still think this is a bad idea and that we should get off at the next stop and hightail it back to the hotel before you’re swarmed by people hoping to get a glimpse of you or worse.”

Her eyebrow rises a little higher, giving her a haughty look that stokes the irritation and anxiety burning in my gut. “But?”

“But if I’m going to let you be out like this, you have to try.”

As her expression shifts into confusion, she glances at the tour guide, who is somehow still talking about fish. “Try?” she repeats.

“Try to talk in a way that will make people feel connected to you. In a way that will make people trust you.” I think back to one of my missions in Eastern Europe, when Griff and I had to convince a whole community to trust a wannabe politician who was trying to beat out his tyrannical opponent.

We had to teach him how to talk in a way that didn’t put distance between him and his constituents, as he had grown up in a completely different walk of life from their poverty-stricken area.

Until he learned to match the people he wanted to represent, he had no sway.

Freya’s eyebrows pull low as she watches me. “You are serious about this,” she murmurs.

As if I might have been joking all the other times I suggested it. I thought for sure she would have at least believed her brothers, but they tease her too much for her to realize when they have good ideas. They should work on that if they’re ever going to be anything but ‘The Princes.’

“I’m always serious,” I say and smirk, which makes her chuckle, but I let my smile drop because I am serious and need her to know as much.

“I can admit you’ve gotten better in the last two days, but do you really think Mr. Halevik up there thinks he’s your equal when you talk about rectifying your insignificant time spent in his birthplace? ”

“Here is the infamous Colgrave Square!” Halevik, our tour guide, says brightly. The last two words distort over the speakers in his enthusiasm. “It was here in 1803 that a local Windgaard legend once protested a royal edict by running through the square stark naked.”

Honestly, I’m not sure he’s even noticed Freya here at the back.

That, or he doesn’t care that there’s a princess on his tour.

From the way he’s been talking, I’m guessing he has given this tour hundreds of times, and the nine people on this bus are just a few of thousands that he will forget as soon as we step off the bus.

But then Freya raises her hand.

Halevik is about to keep speaking, but he stumbles over his words when he catches sight of her hand in the air. “A question?” he asks in pure shock, as if no one has ever had a question for him. Maybe his constant talking has put off anyone who might have.

Six pairs of eyes turn back to us as the other members of the tour look back, and my muscles tense.

We’ve been pretty lucky in terms of attention from our fellow tourists, except for the one couple, but now I’m clocking recognition from almost all of them.

Even the bored-looking teen who was probably dragged along by his parents.

“Yes,” Freya says loudly, to be heard over the wind. “What was the edict he was protesting?”

Halevik frowns. “Oh, well, it was the change in who is allowed to inherit titles.”

At some point I should read up on Candoran history. I have the last century pretty solid, but anything before that? “What was the change?” I ask.

“Titles were once passed through only the male line,” Freya answers before Halevik can, “but the change made it possible for women to inherit.”

“Exactly that,” Halevik confirms, and he sounds impressed. Does he really not know who Freya is?

“That sounds like a good thing,” I say.

“Many would agree with you,” Halevik replies.

“What’s your opinion?” Freya asks.

The other tourists keep looking back and forth from the front to the back as we speak, and I wonder if Freya’s question has completely derailed the tour. We’re still driving, passing landmarks we might have heard about if Freya hadn’t interrupted.

Halevik shrugs. “I am nowhere close to being noble, so it means nothing to me.” For a second, I think that’s all he’s going to say on the subject, but then he adds, “It left things more chaotic, not knowing who would have power and influence, particularly when a single woman was to inherit a title.”

Freya’s shoulders grow tense. “What’s wrong with a woman having influence?”

“Nothing,” Halevik answers without hesitation. “But they are more likely to be seen as a means to an end, which was why Colgrave was protesting. He thought the change left women vulnerable if they were titled and unmarried.”

“Progressive,” I mutter as I start tapping my fingers on my knees.

It’s been more than two hundred years since this law went into effect, but do any Candorans today share Colgrave’s worries?

Are they afraid to vote for Freya because they think she’ll leave the throne vulnerable?

As far as I know, the ruling monarch has more power than their spouse regardless of gender, but whoever marries the monarch still has influence.

And as much as I hate it, most men still think they have power over their female counterparts.

Anyone who courts Freya, assuming she even allows it, will likely be after the throne rather than truly interested in her.

“I see your thoughts,” Freya murmurs, her eyes on my drumming fingers. “I suspect my marital status may be one of the issues with my popularity, yes.”

“If you look at the white-stoned building up ahead…” Halevik says, continuing with the tour.

After doing a sweep of the street we turn onto, I shift some of my focus back to the princess. “It’s a common problem with royalty. Did you ever…” I stop, knowing better than to ask about Freya’s dating life.

She scoffs and sits up straighter. “While I have had many prospects, no one has ever caught my interest.”

“No arranged marriages I should know about?”

“None that I agreed to.”

“But there have been attempts?”

She smirks. “I am quite a catch, you know, the future queen of Candora. Luckily for me, as queen I will have the law on my side. Outside of someone with power in their own country equal to mine and with the intent of forming a political alliance, only a Candoran can wed a Candoran monarch.”

That doesn’t sound lucky to me. I can’t imagine someone telling me who to marry, in part because dating has never been high on my list of pursuits.

Not a lot of time for romance when I enlisted straight out of high school and was recruited to the Special Forces as early as I could be.

My knack for languages and being a quick learner made me an ideal candidate, and I never hesitated.

My shoulder throbs, and I can’t stop my thoughts from drifting to Griff and the way he always ribbed me for being single.

He adored his wife and his two little girls, and his love for them pushed him to do everything he could to return to them after every mission.

He was the only one in our ODA with a family, and yet he was the only one to lose his life.

Nora, his wife, told me more than once that his death wasn’t my fault, just like she told me more than once after my dad died that I couldn’t spend the rest of my life alone because it was easier to spare myself the pain of more loss.

Whether she’s right, I managed to find a job where being on my own is pretty much guaranteed.

Unless Freya doesn’t get elected, in which case I’ll…

do something. I don’t know what. This job was a lifeline when I needed it most, and if I end up being unnecessary, I’ll have to find something else to keep me busy.

Something to challenge me so I don’t get lost again like I did after leaving my detachment.

“Elliot? What is wrong?”

When Freya flinches the moment my gaze turns to her, I realize I’m scowling and relax my features. “Nothing.”

Amusement lights up her eyes. “I would have thought you would be a better liar.” She turns her attention to Halevik once more, and I have a feeling we’re going to do the whole tour whether I want to or not.

At least Freya is certainly presenting a challenge, but this isn’t exactly what I had in mind.