Page 47 of Coaching Prince Charming

“That’s it,” Beckett said as if he scored some win, his grin spilling immediately. “That’s the truth, Uncle.”

“What is?” I asked, hands shaking even as I gripped the edge of the counter.

Beckett’s grin faded and was replaced by a gentle smile. “You love him.”

My heart leaped before crashing again.

“You love Carter, and you don’t want him to get caught in the crossfire. I get it, Uncle, but…is that choice really yours to make?” He frowned in thought, but his lips still curled a little at the edges. He looked deep into my eyes when I met his gaze. “I mean this in the most loving way possible, Uncle Nate. You are an idiot.”

The rusty cogs in my brain ground and turned. My heart fluttered. More regrets than I could face suddenly poured into my consciousness, and a sense of urgency made my stomach tingle.

Had I made a mistake?

Had I made the wrong decision?

Had I broken his heart for nothing?

FOURTEEN

Carter

My dishonorable behavior had driven Dad crazy by the time we had landed. He escorted me to the house, forbade me from leaving, told Mom he had arrangements he’d previously forgotten to mention — as if! — and disappeared for three days straight.

I was certain that Mom knew what Dad’s arrangements meant. There was no doubt in me left. He had all but admitted to whoring around when he was playing, and the way he had raged in the plane at the mention of his cocaine benders confirmed my suspicions. He wasn’t an addict as much as he was a party-going asshole. He wasn’t an employer as much as he was paying people so he could bully them. And he wasn’t a husband and father so much as he was a jailor standing outside our gilded cage.

Mom had taken it with her head held high, but the moment the car glided away, she visited me. Patting my head, she asked, “Couldn’t you talk to him? He needs time to process things, and talking helps.”

I shook my head at that. “He’s a man-child, Mom. I’m not gonna negotiate with him.” And what would I have bargained for? In his absence, I immediately found my piano and poured all my feelings into my music. That was good enough, even if I couldn’t make the music into a career with him watching over me.

And Nate had sent me away. He had sworn to me that his priority was his good name. He had sworn on the funniest gift I had ever gotten and one I had cherished more than the blades Dad had given me. Dad’s gifts had always come with a price attached. Nate’s had simply been to allow me to be a child while I could have been one.

Clearly, it meant more to me than it had meant to him. I had attached meanings to the gift beyond reality. And I had fallen in love with a man who wasn’t at all the knight in shining armor.

On the third day, Mom found me in bed. My drills with a private coach hadn’t been arranged, and Dad was still missing. Mom’s attempts to talk to me often resulted in one-sided conversations where I listened to her tactics for getting what she wanted from her husband. She loved him, she admitted, even though she knew how hard a man he could be. “He values his family,” she said once, sitting on the edge of my bed, her hand holding mine. The sadness in her eyes didn’t match her words, and she knew it. She smoothed her expression after a moment. She was a calm, steady woman with the kind of outward pride that said she would never put up with Dana Prince’s bullshit, yet she still did it.

They had both come from money. They had both been part of the elite machinery that brought their children up to hide their feelings, to hide the truth, and to pretend like their lives were ever so perfect. To leave my father was unimaginable to her, as much as it was impossible from his point of view.

“I know it hurt, baby,” she whispered to me then. In the three days of asking and talking, she had gotten enough of the story out of me to know what had happened. “But it will pass if you give it time.”

Why was she tugging on the stitches, then? Besides, what other answer could I have expected from someone who had been trained to act like nothing at all was wrong in her life? I loved my mother, I did, but she wasn’t the authority on these things. Nobody seemed to know how anything in life worked, including me.

It was possible that I hadn’t completely left my childhood behind until all of this had happened. I hadn’t become an adult at eighteen. I hadn’t grown up the night I’d lost my virginity. And shaving the few dark hairs above my lip once a week hadn’t made me a man. What killed the child in my soul was the realization that adults didn’t have their shit together. The people I had looked up to my entire life were all screw-ups in their own right. Adulthood was a lie told to children to make them behave in not necessarily a better but a more tolerable way.

That evening, I played my piano in the room I had long ago turned into a music room. The sprawling house had way too many empty rooms and never enough warmth, so I had carefully chosen my bedroom and my hobby room. This one was warm, its floor was dark hardwood, and the thick, antique carpet was from Dad’s storage. The piano was a small one, nothing like the concert thing at Nate’s place, and it was pushed against the brown-painted wall with an adjustable desk lamp on top of it to shine its light on my sheet music. I hadn’t used any sheet music in years. Often, I could just crack the code by listening to music intently for a day or two.

I played some tunes from my heart. None were familiar to me from before. And if I had gone over them at some point in my life, I had forgotten all about them. Now, I played the requiem-like melody that fit my dark mood to perfection. And it was appropriate because the person who opened my door around eight in the evening was the death-bringer himself.

“Haven’t I told you to quit this nonsense?” Dad growled.

I stopped playing, but my hands remained on the keys. “You’ll have to cut off my fingers.”

He scoffed. “You still insist on looking at me like I’m the bad guy.”

I would have laughed if there was any laughter left in me.

The silence drove Dad mad more than my music. “I don’t need to cut anything off. I just need to lock this goddamn room.”

I looked at Dad over my shoulder. He was rumpled like he hadn’t slept last night. He had partied, of course. “Don’t you realize that I can hear music in my head? In my dreams? I can tap it out on my desk. I can write it in my mind.”

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