Page 17 of Her Royal Daddy
* * *
I thought I would see Norah later that night. I have no idea exactly what her job was or what she was doing for my father, but whatever it was, it kept her late into that first night and I didn’t see her again for three damn days. Daddy was not a happy camper.
After my disaster of a breakfast, I waited all day as if on tenterhooks for her to come, dare I say, home? We’d shared an awesome night, but I was painfully aware that that didn’t exactly put us on ‘relationship’ terms. The last thing I wanted to do was jump on her—well, okay... that was actually the first thing I wanted to do to her, but I didn’t want to unload all my messed-up bullshit on her and possibly drive her out of my life. I’d have to confess who I really was, and I was not ready for that any more than I was ready to talk to my father.
Fortunately for me (or not), I never got the chance, because she never came over.
The next morning, bright and early, I got up and knocked on her door. My thought was coffee and fruit, and maybe some raw, hot sex to take the edge off, since I’d pretty much walked the floor all night long, but she didn’t answer.
She didn’t answer that night either. I posted a vigil on the balcony, so I knew someone came into her room at around midnight, Osei time, but she never came out onto the balcony and the lights never stayed on long enough even for me to cut back through my room and walk over to hers. She must have been exhausted (or just that desperate to avoid me) if she went to bed that quickly. I let her sleep and went back to walking the floor until exhaustion finally put me to bed too, somewhere around two or three a.m.
After two days of receiving food trays in my apartment because I refused to leave it, Jax paid me a call. I ignored most of the lecture that followed, but between words like ‘sullen, sulking brat’ and ‘act your damn age,’ I began to realize I needed to do something different. The last time I’d felt this way, I was thirteen years old and my mother had grounded me for sass.
So fine, I decided I’d sulked enough and I began to explore—the palace, the grounds, the village. I found a lovely little shop that sold condoms and the man behind the counter had a great time poking fun at me to his buddies in another language as he rang me up, but that was fine. Everywhere I went, I found myself watching for her and constantly finding reasons to wander in different areas on the off chance that I might catch a glimpse. Now that I had condoms, I was even hoping I might catch more.
On morning number three, immediately after an exciting breakfast of fish, porridge, puffed coconut breads, and Jax’s most recent insight on what he thought of my behavior, I decided I’d had time enough to try to wrap my brain around all this. I decided it was time I met with my father and, maybe this time, give him a chance. So, I decided to go in search of my father, the king.
I wasn’t sure which part of that I was having a harder time getting used to. My whole childhood, I’d never known what it was like to have a father, and now that I was on the wrong side of thirty, it seemed a little late in the game to be learning this particular trick. He seemed nice enough, especially for a king. And, he was trying. So, I tried to let him try. It wasn’t much, but it was a start, and frankly, it was all we had.
After walking the corridors for what felt like an hour, I finally found the man in his own conference room. He wasn’t alone either. Norah was with him.
I startled when I saw her, and I’m not so macho that I won’t admit my breath caught in my chest. She glanced up when I walked in, then did an abrupt double-take when she recognized me. Surprise took a sharp backseat to her professionalism, however. Though her brows knit quizzically, she returned her attention back to the notebook in front of her and finished copying down whatever it was my father had just told her.
“Mazi,” my father said, pleasantly surprised. “Come in, come in. Please, sit down.”
Seated at the head of the table, he gestured for me to take the empty chair beside him. It was directly across the table from Norah, and I took it just as the door opened and a maid wheeled in a cart well-stocked with coffee, tea, water, and assorted pastries. We had all just had breakfast, but my father was nothing if not a proper host.
“I’m so glad to see you,” he whispered, as if Norah were not right there and perfectly capable of hearing us.
I flushed, a little uncomfortable that he would be that happy. “I thought maybe we could talk,” I said, striving hard to keep myself in a nonjudgmental mood. Gesturing to both him and Norah, I quickly added, “After your meeting, of course. In fact, I should probably leave—”
“No, no, no,” my father assured me. “These are things you should know about the place that is your home.”
Norah’s eyebrows quirked together, but she quickly went back to all business note-taking when my father turned back to her and, apparently, continued talking where they’d left off.
“So, after seven generations, now my kingdom is failing,” he said, and it seemed Norah took down every word. “Our economy is struggling to remain self-sufficient. Tourism has declined. After a few isolated terror attacks in the village last year, it seems people have forgotten about the beauty our country holds.”
I listened, trying to feel nothing about the verbal picture he was painting. Two weeks ago, this place had been nothing more to me than a picture my mother had painted out of a magazine. It surprised me to find I was already growing a little more emotionally involved than I wanted to admit.
Osei was a beautiful place. It was peaceful. So far, I’d enjoyed every walk I’ve taken around the grounds and down in the village. Before I left, I had every intention of strolling the entire island. I had a month to commit this place to memory before I returned to my home in New York. Angry as I was—well, more hurt now, I supposed, than angry—regardless, it hardly made me happy to know it would all fall apart after I left.
Norah was all business. She just wrote it all down. I was starting to wonder if my father wasn’t dictating his life story and perhaps Norah’s job was to ghost write it, when the king suddenly turned to me and said, “Were there something you could do to stop all that, my son, would you?”
Norah’s pen stopped scratching out words immediately. My stomach sank at her sharp intake of breath when he called me his son. She looked at both of us, her violet eyes ricocheting back and forth while all I could do was rub my face with both hands and regret whatever impulse had brought me down here in the first place. I’d been naïve to think I could keep who I was a secret. Especially if she really was writing out his life’s story. Hell, we were all probably lucky it wasn’t headlining in the local newspapers: Long Lost Prince New York City Stripper.
Sighing, I let my hands fall into my lap. I looked at her, wishing we’d had a little more time before the truth fouled it all up. But then, she’d been ignoring me for three days now anyway. So really, how important could ‘Daddy’ be?
“I’m only here for a month,” I said, one eye on the king’s reaction and one eye on her. “But, I suppose, if there was something I could do...”
My father smiled. “I was hoping you would say that.” It wasn’t until he peered over the top of both me and my chair that I noticed Jax quietly standing beside me. The elderly assistant gave my elderly father a nod of encouragement, something that filled me with unease. What the hell was going on here? And why did it feel like I was about to have a bomb dropped in my lap, right here in front of Norah?
I looked at my father and in that instant as he opened his mouth, I suddenly noticed a half a dozen tiny things I’d been too angry to care about before now. Like the thinness of him. The frailty. The way his hands trembled and the slightly hunched posture that spoke of weariness more than any degenerative condition of his back. I knew this hollow-eyed look. I’d seen it before, on the face of my mother when her battery of treatments came to their reluctant end.
“I’m sick, Mazi,” my father said.
Don’t react, I told myself even as I lost all my breath in a single, deflating whoosh. I opened my mouth, searching for some kind of sympathetic response, but I just sat there feeling sucker punched instead.
“It’s cancer.”
