Page 89 of A Princess for Christmas

“I thought you could use one.”

“For what?”

“Do you really want me to answer that? Or should I just say that I stopped by yesterday afternoon intending to put in a couple hours of work but ended up finding the cabin occupied.”

Leo winced. Not that he minded being caught, but he didn’t want Marie’s private business broadcast all over the place. “Listen. Whatever you think was going on—”

“None of my business.”

He could trust Kai. Leo didn’t quite know how he knew that, but he knew. “Thanks, man.” He started toward the cart to help unload it, but the horse made a... horse noise at him. He didn’t know the word. It did, however, cause him to jump like a soft city boy.

“You just happen to have spare wood-burning stoves lying around?” he asked Kai as the horse did some kind of aggressive snorting thing again. Whinnied, maybe?

“Hey,” Kai said mildly, “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

Gabby chattered the whole way to the cabin. Marie had to interrupt her as they turned off the main path to the smaller one that would take them to the clearing. She stopped walking. “I need to ask you a favor.”

“Oh, anything!”

“What I’m about to show you is a secret. No one can know. Especially not my father.” Gabby’s eyes widened. “Or Mr.Benz.”

“I do solemnly swear to keep whatever you are about to show me a secret,” Gabby intoned with exaggerated seriousness.

“Thank you.” As they cut through the brush, Marie told Gabby an abbreviated version of the history of the cabin.

“And my brother is helping you?”

“He is.”

“Yeah. He does stuff like that.”

Gabby was lucky to have Leo. Hediddo stuff like that. All the time, in big ways like cabins but also in small ways. Marie thought back to the cardboard mantel in the siblings’ apartment. She wished Leo could see himself the way his sister did.

“How do you know when a boy likes you?” Gabby suddenly asked. The question alarmed Marie a bit. Could Gabby tell what was going on between Marie and Leo? Marie felt herself flush. She’d never had the poker face required to inoculate her against the Lucrecia von Bachenheims of the world.

“Because I like this boy at school.”

Right. Marie had forgotten how handy the self-absorption of youth could be. “I’m not sure I’m the best person to ask.”

“Well, I can’t ask Leo.”

She probably could, but Marie didn’t say that. “Dani?”

“She just tells me that boys are no good and that I should wait until I’m thirty to date.”

Marie wanted to laugh. “Well, some people say that when a boy likes you, he’s mean to you, which seems counterintuitive.”

“Some people say that. Doyousay that?”

“It’s hard for me to speak from experience. People don’t act normally around me. People aren’t generally mean to princesses.” Lucrecia von Bachenheim excepted.

“I see your point. But, like, say you’re not a princess. What does ‘mean’ actually look like, if a boy is being mean to you because he likes you? Like, he might put humiliating pictures of you on Instagram?”

“No!” That had not been at all what she’d meant. But then, she’d been thinking more along the lines of hair pulling, but this wasn’t the 1950s, was it? “I think more like he teases you. Gives you a hard time. Maybe he has a nickname for you.”

Princess.

Hmm.

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