Page 41 of Maid for the Alien Prince

I snorted. “Well, that’s really something to look up to, isn’t it?”

He chuckled. “Yes, I suppose it is.”

“But you destroy priceless portraits of your ancestors and let people steal antiques that have belonged to your family for centuries. Is that something the royal family would do?”

“No. But that’s the point. I want to show them that I care nothing for their traditions or ideals, nothing for their antiques or heritage. I want to destroy everything they hold dear.”

“And you think that by letting other people rob you of your inherited wealth, they will realize that?”

“Yes. But I know now I can’t act like them. I care too much. It probably comes from my father. He raised me to be good. I always lived shoulder to shoulder with normal, everyday men and women. I suppose that’s who I will always be.”

His eyes dropped from mine. He seemed sad and disappointed in himself.

I placed my hand on his cheek and raised his face to mine. His golden-purple irises were majestic, powerful and strong; his horns took my breath away.

They were as exotic and as different from me as it was possible to get, and I enjoyed looking at him for that reason.

“That is not something to be ashamed of,” I said. “You are better than the royal family. And you don’t need to let other people steal everything from you to realize that.”

His majestic eyes flickered between mine, but he didn’t smile the way I had hoped after hearing my words.

“I must destroy everything they have given me,” he said.

“Why?”

He turned away from me and lay on his back, staring up at the ceiling.

“Why do you have to throw away everything that has been given to you?” I said. “It’s rightfully yours.”

“Because of what they did!” he snapped, before shutting his eyes and calming himself. “Or, to be more accurate, what they didn’t do.”

Whatever it was, I had touched a nerve, and it was painful for him. There was a depth to him that I had never envisioned.

The way he had cared about how our deal had put me in a precarious position, where he could have taken full advantage of me—as the royal family would doubtless have done—but could not bring himself to do.

And now there was this other aspect, about destroying that part of himself that he had not known had existed even just a few months ago.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

I sensed the poison beneath the surface, but I had no idea how to get at it. Maybe it wasn’t my place to question him, to try to figure out what was affecting him this way, but I couldn’t help scratching at his itch.

“Does it have something to do with your father?” I asked.

His head snapped toward me, glaring and angry, but I knew somehow, on a deep level, that it was not aimed at me.

I didn’t reach out to touch him. I sensed that now was not the time. “It is, isn’t it?” I said softly.

The cords tightened in his neck as he ground his teeth and turned away from me.

I took the risk and placed my hand on his elbow. When he didn’t yank it away from me, I knew he did not identify me as part of the problem.

I gently stroked his arm for two minutes, three minutes, five minutes… And didn’t say a word.

I had pulled at a thread, but I would not be the one to fully unfurl it. He was silent another five minutes before he finally spoke:

“My father. And before him, my mother too.”

I wanted to ask what happened, to push him to tell me it all, but I sensed how sensitive he was on the subject and let him speak at his own pace.

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