Page 11 of Royally Knocked Up (Princes of Passion #1)

HAILEY

“ I can’t believe how quickly this all came together,” Hailey marveled, looking around the event space that was going to serve as a reception area.

The movie would be screened in the local theater down the block from La Fantasia, which had partnered with the resort for the occasion — in fact, that was where all the guests were now.

In about an hour, they would be making their way up the block in their formal gowns and tuxes and taking their places at the tables that currently sat empty around the room.

“You can’t believe it?” Enzo repeated, raising his eyebrows. “Of the two of us, you’re the one with all the experience in events planning. You must have had some idea that it was going to happen the way it did.”

“Oh,” Hailey said. “Yeah. You’re right.”

She had become so comfortable with Enzo that she found herself forgetting, from time to time, that she was supposed to be an experienced events planner.

It wasn’t good. She had never allowed her cover to slip like this before in all her time as a private investigator.

Hailey was usually great at stepping into the roles that were assigned to her and making them her own.

It was unlike her to forget herself while she was on the job.

That was the effect Enzo seemed to have on her.

He made her forget that she was working at all.

When she was with him, she felt as if she was spending time with a friend, not keeping an eye on a target.

And that was a very dangerous thing. She couldn’t afford to take her eye off her mission.

This might be an unusual job — it was hardly a matter of criminal activity — but even so, she had been hired by a king, and she didn’t want to think about what the consequences might be if she were to let him down in any way.

At the very least, she thought, he would be likely to tank her business. He wouldn’t bother trying to hide the fact that he’d hired her and she had failed in the job she’d been hired for. There wouldn’t be any reason for him to keep that to himself.

She cleared her throat. “It actually is surprising that we were able to get Mae Terrington to come do a Q&A here,” she said. “She’s incredibly hard to book. An A-lister.”

“It’ll be fun to meet her,” Enzo said. “I wish we could have gone to see the movie screening. But I saw her in that movie she was in last year — the one about the sisters who went backpacking across Europe together.”

“I never saw that one.”

“You should. It’s pretty good. Maybe you and I could watch it sometime.”

Hailey grinned. “That sounds fun. One of these nights after work.”

No, you idiot! That’s a date! You’re talking about a date! How many times are you going to allow yourself to get into a romantic situation with this man? How many times can it possibly happen before you slip and allow things to go too far?

If they had met under any other circumstances, Hailey knew that she would have crossed the line with Enzo already.

She fell asleep daydreaming about him, and she woke up thinking about him.

Every time he stood too close to her, she felt so powerfully aware of his presence, as if her body was attuned to his.

If this hadn’t been a professional relationship, it would have been immensely enjoyable to have so much chemistry with another person.

As it was, it scared the hell out of her. What if her control slipped? What if she did something she knew she shouldn’t do?

And then there was the fact that she was truly coming to care about Enzo. That had never happened while she was on a job before — certainly not to this extent — and that made it all but impossible to do a job that required her to lie to him.

His worries about what would happen now that his father was going to be king seemed to play on a loop in her head sometimes. He worried that he would lose control of his life. He had confided in her about that.

And here she was, spending every day trying to do the very thing he had confided his fears about. Trying to control him, to keep him away from the things he enjoyed. And lying to him to do it.

She wasn’t supposed to be friends with the subject of her work, and this was the reason why.

She wasn’t supposed to feel this emotionally conflicted about what she had to do.

She should be able to lie to him when it was necessary to do so without feeling as if she was betraying a friend, and it was going to make her worse at her job that she couldn’t do it.

The responsible thing to do would be to step back. To put a distance between the two of them. To end this friendship once and for all.

But Hailey didn’t know whether she could do that either. He simply meant too much to her now.

She pulled out her phone and checked the time. “We should make sure the red carpet is ready,” she said.

“I can’t believe you managed to get a red carpet for this,” Enzo said, beaming at her.

As always, his smile distracted her from all the complex feelings that plagued her. “Sure,” she said, laughing. “It’s not hard to get a red carpet.”

“It’s not?”

“It’s not some elusive thing, Enzo. It’s just a long strip of red velvet. I got it at a fabric store.”

Enzo laughed. “You know what,” he said, “that never even occurred to me. That a person could just go to the fabric store and get a red carpet. I guess, for some reason, I always assumed there was something formal going on there, like you had to have an official Hollywood red carpet or something.”

“Well, maybe you do if you’re hosting the Academy Awards,” Hailey grinned. “But this one will do perfectly well for our purposes. It’s just so that our guests can feel special when they walk in on it, and so that the whole thing will look fancy in pictures.”

“We should take a picture,” Enzo said suddenly.

Hailey raised her eyebrows. “Should we?”

“Don’t you think? It would be nice,” he said.

“We should give ourselves something to remember this night by. We worked so hard to put it together. You did especially. You’re the one who managed to get Mae Terrington out here.

I’ll never know how you did that. I actually don’t believe that even my father could have done it. You have magic powers.”

“No,” Hailey corrected him. “I have the phone number of Mae Terrington’s agent.

” She had gotten it by reaching out to her handler back in Baltimore.

Another PI in her agency had worked for one of Terrington’s agent’s clients a few years back.

That had been a lucky break and Hailey knew it, but she hadn’t hesitated to take advantage.

“I guess there are benefits to working in the event planning industry,” Enzo said, drawing the wrong conclusion. “You’ve worked with that agent before, have you?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, you’ve got a point about me, I have to admit,” Enzo said. “I got this job because my father put me here, not because I have any qualifications, and I could never have done what you did here.”

“Oh, Enzo, don’t do that,” Hailey said. “You did a lot to prepare for this event. I mean, the whole thing was your idea, for God’s sake. I might’ve had the connections we needed, but you were the one who came up with it, and I hope you’re going to give yourself the credit you deserve for that.”

Enzo smiled. “You’re right,” he said, his ego winning out as it always did. Hailey would have found that irritating when they had first met, but now she saw that there was something charming about it.

Maybe there had always been something charming about it. Maybe she had been trying to resist being charmed.

If that was the case, she had failed extravagantly.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s do a picture.”

They walked over to the red carpet, which had been unrolled from the entryway toward the door that led to the event space.

It was long, giving lots of space for the guests to take a leisurely stroll later.

There were promotional posters from the movie standing in the resort lobby on either side of the carpet, encouraging people to stop and take pictures with stills of the film’s heroes.

And, of course, Mae Terrington would be here posing for pictures too.

Enzo led the way all the way over to the door and stood with his back to it so that the wide oak paneling would serve them as a backdrop. “Right here,” he said. “This is a great spot.”

Hailey joined him as he pulled his phone out of his pocket and hit the button to reverse the camera. He held it at arm’s length. “Go on, give us a smile.”

He put his arm around her.

Hailey’s heart beat double-time as she leaned into him. She was just trying to fit in the frame, she told herself firmly. There was nothing over the line about this. She was just getting close for the picture.

So why did it feel as if she couldn’t quite breathe properly?

She forced herself to inhale, then let it go and hoisted a smile onto her face.

The truth was that she almost felt like crying.

It was such a relief to be close to him — to break through the tension she had been feeling all this time.

She wanted nothing more than to stay right where she was.

And yet, she couldn’t — and who knew if she would ever be able to allow herself this kind of closeness again?

These seconds were exquisite. They were precious.

He took the picture.

“You have to send me that,” she said immediately.

Already, though they hadn’t even separated from one another yet, she was feeling a sense of loss, and she knew that she would return to that picture again and again to remind herself of the way she had felt in the few precious moments when they had been so close.

When his arm had been around her, when they had been celebrating a mutual achievement together.

I can’t let myself feel this now.

Someday in the future, when she had gone back to Baltimore and Enzo was nothing but a memory, she would look at this picture and remember what it had been like to share these days with him.

When that moment arrived, she would allow herself to feel everything to the fullest. But until then, she knew that there was no choice but to keep it under control.

They were friends. And for now, that was all they could be.

Enzo fired off a quick text. Hailey felt her phone vibrate in her pocket and struggled not to reach down and pull it out so that she could look at the picture right then and there. It was so childish of her, needing to stare at her crush, especially when he was standing right next to her.

It was childish of her to have developed a crush at all. She was here to do a job.

She didn’t take out her phone. She also resisted the urge to smile at Enzo. For all she knew, that smile would come across looking flirtatious. She didn’t trust herself to keep things under control.

“We should head back to the event space,” she said. “We need to make sure the tables are set and all the place cards are in order.”

She turned and hurried away, assuming that he would follow, unable to bring herself to turn back and make sure of it. If she had to see him, she wasn’t sure she would be able to bring herself to look away for a second time.

What they had accomplished here was amazing. It was something to be proud of, and Hailey knew that.

But at the same time, she had no idea how she was going to move forward with Enzo when she could hardly look him in the eye without losing all control of herself.