Page 70 of The Thing About My Prince

“I said don’t worry about it.” His hand settles on my thigh. It’s warm. And tingles are radiating from it. And those tingles are ending up in places that no prince should be making me tingle. “But all you’re doing is looking more worried.”

I need to remember what I’m here for.

I swing my legs out from under his touch and jump off the bed to grab my laptop from the desk.

Despite my insistence earlier that our interviews need to be recorded, because I can’t take notes and ask good questions at the same time, right now I need to occupy my hands with something that isn’t clawing them through Oliver’s hair. Or pulling his shirt out of his jeans. Or running my fingers across the stubble on his jawline.

Returning, I sit up at the head of the bed—farther away from him—prop pillows behind me, extend my legs, and open the computer on my thighs.

Opening the “Oliver Notes” folder I created this morning, I find the solitary file that resides in there—a document named “Mother”, which contains everything I could remember of what he told me last night about how she thought that because she’d had to tolerate the ravages of the press it wouldn’t do him any harm to follow suit.

I don’t doubt that particular document will end up with a lot more notes in it—she seems like quite the psychological goldmine.

“Okay.” I create a new document and call it Good Things. “The manuscript you’d already written was mainly sad stuff about the bad side of being born into this family. And last night we talked about the awful things your mom went through.” I lower my voice lest the bug in the bathroom or anyone passing by the door might hear us talking. “So now how about you tell me a couple of good memories.”

“Oh God.” He groans and rolls onto his side to look up at me over my feet. “That’s way harder to remember than the bad stuff.”

“There must be something. A happy family memory?” Surely, he has at least one. “Or an opportunity to do something that made you feel good, an opportunity that no normal person would have?”

Maybe he has a secret habit of doing special things for strangers, like sending Kirsty and her dad to see the polar bears, that he could tell me about. That would certainly help to rehab his public image.

“Ha.” He shakes his head, then gets to his hands and knees and crawls up the bed toward me, exactly like he did last night—but this time with clothes on. Which is more disappointing than I’d like it to be.

When he sits beside me, the bed shakes and sends an inexplicable little shiver of pleasure through me.

Then he shifts onto his hip, digs an elbow into a pillow, rests his head in his hand, and looks at me.

The remaining light from the almost-set sun coming through the window catches his face, highlighting the coppery flecks in his sandy hair and stubble and making his eyes glow with the brightness of fresh spring leaves.

Dammit, he looks good. In a rugged, unkempt, and completely un-royal kind of way.

“You think I’m not normal then.” His tone is soft, almost a little hurt.

“Why would I think that?”

“You asked if I’d had an opportunity to do good that nonormalperson would have. Which means you think I’m not normal.”

“Oh, Oliver, come on.” I gesture to our surroundings. “We’re sitting on a four-poster bed that might date back centuries, in a castle that definitely does, on multiple acres of land that your family owns. Some of which is carved out into formal gardens that must take God knows how many people for upkeep. The gardens and castle are open to the public for part of the year. And the building itself is like a museum of royal artifacts. It has an armory, for God’s sake. This is demonstrably not what any reasonable person would describe asnormal.”

He snorts and looks down, rubbing his finger over the raised scroll pattern embroidered on the weighty bedspread.

My heart goes out to him. “But you,you—not your surroundings, not your circumstances, not your destiny, justyou—I’d say you are as grounded as anyone raised in this weird environment, with these pressures, could hope to be.”

He lets out a whistle of air. “I guess that’s a huge compliment coming from you, the rich-person-hater.”

“I don’t hate rich people.”

A loud laugh throws his head back.

“Not all,” I protest. “I can only judge by my own experiences. And let’s say the hit rate isn’t good.”

“And I sense there’s a story behind that.” His words are soft and full of concern.

My shoulders hitch, as if pulling me away from him, at the same time my stomach flips at the thought that he can see the things I’m always trying to hide.

“A sense?” I ask. “What’s given you a sense of that?”

He lifts his finger from the bedspread and slowly drags it down the pants seam at my outer thigh. “I think you have a reason for everything. You really don’t want to write this book, but you’re doing it because it will get you the job youwant. So, I reckon there’s a deeper reason you want that job than solely for the glory of it.”