Page 36 of Royally Knocked Up
“I’m on your side. I’m agreeing with you here, Enzo. Don’t get angry with me.”
“I’m not angry,” he sighed. “I just… I don’t want to leave, Hailey. I don’t want to leave La Fantasia. I never thought I would feel that way about it, but it’s true. I don’t want to leave this place, and I don’t want to leave you.”
“I don’t want you to go either,” Hailey said. “But you have to be back for the coronation. You know how important that is.”
“I know.”
Hailey took a deep breath. The way this conversation was playing out meant that this might be easier for her than she would have dared to hope. “Enzo?”
“Yeah?” He didn’t turn to face her.
“I was thinking…” she said. “Well, I always said my work here would be temporary. That eventually I would want to leave and go back to the States.”
“You’re thinking of going back to the States now?” His shoulders tightened.
She knew what he was thinking. It was the same thing she was thinking herself.
If he went back to Luria, there might still be hope for the two of them. But ifshewent home, that was it. They would never see each other again. It would just be over.
“I should wrap things up here pretty soon,” she said carefully, knowing that she needed to handle this conversation perfectly. She needed him to feel as if he was on the verge of losing her.
“I can’t believe you’re just going to leave. Just like that.”
“I don’t have to leave yet,” she said. “But I think I need to start thinking about it.”
He nodded slowly.
“But before I go,” she said, “I always said I wanted the chance to see a little bit more of Luria. I always said I’d want to go back to the capital and spend some time there before I left permanently.”
He turned to face her.
His expression was stony. If she hadn’t known him as well as she did, she would have believed that he was angry with her.
He wasn’t angry. He was trying to hide the fact that he was feeling hope. Her heart ached for him. She felt swamped with a surge of guilt, hating the fact that she had to play these games instead of just telling him outright what she wanted and why.
Would he really be so upset if he learned how she had come to be here? That she was doing a job?
Maybe he would be able to forgive her for it.
No. Of course he wouldn’t. What was she thinking? He was so resentful toward his father. Even when he was able toacknowledge that his father’s actions made sense, he wasn’t able to forgive them.
He would never forgive Hailey if he found out what she had been doing all this time.
She couldn’t tell the truth.
“Are you saying that you want to come back to Luria?” Enzo asked. He didn’t saywith me, but Hailey thought he was probably thinking it.
It made her feel both better and worse to realize that he was thinking about things in those terms.
“That’s what I’m saying,” she told him, wishing that she could be saying it the way he was hearing it. Wishing she could just be telling him that she wanted to spend more time with him before she went back home. It was the truth, for God’s sake. If only she could come clean about everything, she could say that to him, and she would be able to mean it, and everything would be aboveboard.
But if she hadn’t been hired by his father, the two of them would never have met. That made it impossible for her to wish that things had happened any differently than they had. She would never have come to Monteverde at all.
“Well, of course you can come with me.” He was beaming, all of a sudden. “I’ll come up with some way to explain it to my father. I’ll say you’re someone I was working with here at La Fantasia, an American, and you wanted to see the capital before you went back home — I mean, that’s the truth. We can’t tell him anything about… you know. About what’s been going on between us. You understand that, right?”
Hailey’s heart was breaking with the weight of everything she couldn’t tell people.
But she just nodded. “Of course I understand,” she said. “We don’t have to tell him anything.”
