Page 32 of Broken Prince

I looked down, pressing my lips together to hide my smile at a grown man pouting.

“We need to start with the red and yellow tulips first.” I pointed my trowel to the big case to my side. “I’ll take care of this side; you can start here with the yellow.” I pointed to my left. “Oh.” I leaned back and grabbed a blue metal box. “I’ve put together a little box of what you’ll need.”

He grabbed the box and settled on the side I told him to. He had yet to say a word and he was clearly surly and annoyed at being here.

I was quite certain he hoped that his behavior would weigh on me until I told him he could go. Ah, he was in for a treat. Being raised by my horrid parents had one advantage—other people's bad attitudes rarely weighed on me.

“You can look on how I’m doing it if you need, and then do the same and—”

“I know how to plant flowers. I’ve done it before,” he replied gruffly, scowling even more fiercely at the box I’d just given him.

I shrugged. “Okay,” I replied as amicably as I could.

I was at my second plant when he spoke again.

“How did you know I’d come?”

I looked up at him. He was staring at the men’s gardening gloves I'd put in his box.

“Because you said you would,” I replied, removing a strand of my hair from my forehead with my bent wrist.

“I know but after what happened to you…” He shrugged. “I suspected a little more doubt.”

“What do you mean?” I asked but went back to work. It was easier for me to talk to him if I was doing something.

“Well, after the thing with your parents broke down, everybody turned their backs on you to the point that you ended up sleeping on the sofa at your old maid’s one-bedroom apartment.”

I was surprised and a little uncomfortable at the amount of information this man had on me but at the same time, I shouldn’t have been surprised. He was Mafia after all.

“I didn’t have many friends,” I admitted, and by not many, I meant none. “With my parents' lives, I was a mother to Jude most of the time so with Jude, school, and everything, socialization took a back seat.”

“Still, nobody offered you any help.”

“Mrs. Broussard did; she offered me a home.” I put a tulip in the ground. “And my cousin in Calgary offered me her home.”

“You have a family?”

I knew what he didn't say.Your record showed none.

“I do. Well, India is my second-degree cousin. She is lovely and asked me to move in with her. It would have been easier to go somewhere where nobody knew me or hated me by association but—”

“But?”

I glanced at him but he was focused on his task too. I was grateful not to be under his scrutinizing dark stare that seemed to see to the depth of my soul.

“It would have been impossible to leave Jude behind. Social services told me it would take forever for India to get custody and even then she is very young, single, and in a foreign country so I said no. I don’t mind the hate and the hardship as long as I’m here for Jude.”

“He’s lucky to have you.”

Was that longing in his voice? I remember the way he’d sat in his sister’s room, holding that unicorn against his chest as if it were a lifeline. He’d lost a part of him when she’d died, and I couldn’t even imagine his pain. The thought of losing Jude made me physically sick.

I felt his loss all the way down to my soul.

“I’m lucky to have him. He is unique, in more ways than one.”

Luca nodded, reaching for a tulip, weirdly twisting his body to grip it as if he was in pain.

I was about to ask him about it when he continued.

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