Page 42 of Reign

Liam glanced over before opening the door. “I should warn you, this isn’t the palace….”

“It’s perfect,” Sam assured him, stepping inside.

The living room held a mishmash of secondhand furniture: the coffee table scattered with half-open bags of barbecue potato chips and the remnants of a pizza, scarves and winter coats thrown over the backs of chairs with abandon.

A blanket on the couch moved as the boy who’d been napping beneath it sat up. “Hey, Liam,” he mumbled, rubbing blearily at his eyes. Then his glance drifted to Sam.

“Sorry, have we met?”

She paused for a moment, still not used to the whole not-being-recognized thing. “Nice to meet you. I’m Martha.”

A part of her still expected this stranger to cry out in sudden recognition and snap a picture with his phone, but he just shrugged. “Cool. How long have you guys been…?”

He trailed off meaningfully, and Sam felt her cheeks reddening.

“It’s nothing like that, I’m just—”

“Martha’s crashing here for a while. I told her it was okay,” Liam cut in. “She can take Jesse’s old room, right?”

“You’ll have to clear out Jessica’s second closet,” the guy on the couch warned.

Sam looked from one of them to the other, trying to keep up. “How many people live here, exactly?”

“Aside from me and Ben,” Liam began, nudging the guy on the couch, “there are Amber and Talal—they pay the most rent so they get the biggest room. Then there’s Jessica…Leah, but only sometimes…”

Sam was nodding along, wondering how she would possibly keep track of all these people, when Ben asked, “Where did you guys meet?”

“Martha came to one of our shows, way back before LA,” Liam answered.

“Ahh. A groupie,” Ben teased. Sam rolled her eyes, and he laughed appreciatively. “So, Martha, what do you do?”

It took her a moment to realize that he was asking about work. “Oh…I’m between jobs at the moment,” she said evasively. Some part of her must have wanted to share a real truth, because she heard herself add, “I was living at home before this, but my family kicked me out.”

“Whoa.” Ben sounded impressed by this. “You must be really rebellious.”

I just spent too many years dancing on tables and making trouble, then fled the country and lived under a fake name in Hawaii while my sister was in a coma.

“They don’t really understand me,” Sam said quietly.

Ben was still frowning at her face. “Has anyone ever told you that you look like Princess Samantha?”

Sam shrugged, though her heart had picked up speed. “I’ve heard that before, yeah.”

“Liam totally had a thing for her.” Ben chuckled, and Sam saw Liam’s face redden. “He claims that he actually talked to her once, and she wasn’t nearly as much a spoiled brat as she seemed.”

Liam took a step toward the hall, still carrying her suitcase. “Come on, Martha, I’ll show you Jesse’s old room.”

Sam hurried after him, her mind still spinning from Ben’s words. Liam had told his friends about her? And also—

“Do people really think I’m bratty?”

“Not at all,” Liam said, too quickly. “Or at least, um, not any brattier than any other princess?”

Sam sighed. “It’s okay. I’ve seen the headlines about me.”

They walked in silence for a few moments. Then Liam cleared his throat. “What you said, about your family not understanding you—I know what that’s like. My parents were so upset when I got serious about the band. They wanted me to become an accountant, just like the two of them. They met at their accounting firm thirty years ago, and they bothstill work there.” He sighed in a way that was both amused and frustrated. “Parents, always trying to turn us into little replicas of themselves, ignoring the ways that we are completely different from them.”

“That’s really insightful,” Sam told him.