Page 33 of My Dark Horse Prince

“Something,” he says. “You were practically running, and it looked painful.”

I wince. There he goes again, making it all about my shortcomings. “I just don’t like people to draw attention to my leg.”

He frowns, but says nothing else.

“Let’s go.” Kris breezes past me, her arm hooked through Aleksandr’s, and pushes through the doors. “I think you need a purse first.”

“I did put in some requests for new identification for you,” Aleks says. “We’ll need to have it expedited over from Latvia, because they’ll want it for your surgery.”

Duh. Why haven’t I even been panicking about my passport or EU paperwork? “You can do that?”

“Aleks has some contacts within the Russian government now.” Kris looks proud. I suppose she should be. Her future husband’s connected, rich, and powerful.

“I bought them,” Aleks says. “It’s not really very impressive.”

“Money is its own security.” That’s something rich people don’t often realize.

“That’s true,” Grigoriy says. “Which reminds me. How soon can we get out to those wind turbines?”

I start to laugh—it felt like a joke—but Aleksandr nods. “I knew you’d want to do that right away. They aren’t all wired in yet. I hadn’t been rushing it, since we had no leads on you. I called the electrician today and he’s rushing the job—should be up and running in a few days.”

“You’ll have to explain the design to me in more detail anyway,” Grigoriy says, “so I can be sure I create the wind funnels correctly.”

“Wind what?”

He’s smiling a cocky smile when he turns to answer. “I control the wind. It’s a snap to make air current patterns and fix them in place. Once I do, those wind turbines will put out consistent energy—and apparently that’s something the local grid will pay dearly for.”

“I actually ordered more for my rocky fields,” Aleks says. “The areas that are useless for farming, and now that you’re here. . .”

“Happy to help,” Grigoriy says.

“Oh, I think we should split the profits,” Aleks says. “It’s only fair.”

“Always a pleasure doing business with you,” Grigoriy says.

“I think we should split the profits on our horse farm back home.” I wink at Kris.

“Yes,” Kris says. “I know what you mean. You can jet on by, magically enhance the horse skills, and then I’ll use my magical training powers, and voila. We’ll be rich.” She laughs.

“That’s just what I was thinking.”

“Yeah, yeah, we get it,” Aleks says.

“At least talk about that stuff in Latvian,” Kris says. “The people passing by us think you’re nuts.”

“Or I could shift into a horse right here,” Aleks says. “That would show them we’re not the crazy ones.”

She rolls her eyes, grabs his elbow, and hauls him inside. “Just get your credit card ready, Mr. Hilarious.”

“It’s always ready when you’re around.”

They’re laughing as they walk past racks of clothing, stopping now and again to take a closer look at a few things. Of course, in the past ten or so years that I’ve been dealing with my leg injury, I haven’t done a lot of shopping. Mostly, money has been tight, and I’ve been lucky to buy one or two things here or there. Internet shopping when there are steep sales has been my best bet. If I wanted something to purchase in person, I’d usually go to a thrift store. In all that time, I’ve had plenty of instances when I couldn’t walk very easily, usually before or after some surgery or another. But I never went out shopping, then. Today, I’m learning lots of new things, but one of them is not very exciting.

It’s very hard to shop with crutches.

I can’t exactly reach out and pull clothes off the rack. Nor can I set my crutches down easily anywhere—everywhere I look is full of stands with small things on them or round racks of clothing. None of that even addresses how long it takes me to try new things on. I thought shopping when money was no object might be fun, but this is arduous and depressing.

I sigh heavily, wondering whether I can get by with just an extra pair of pants and a shirt or two.

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