Christmas In The City (Imperfect Match 1.50)

Copyright © 2019 by Kennedy Ryan and Sierra Simone.

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Chapter 1

Noelani, Queen Regent of Manaroa

“Thought I’d find you here.”

I don’t bother looking away from the window at the sound of Hehu’s voice. On the other side of the glass is a glow of white and lavender and gold—snow and twilight and city—and behind me is all the sparkle and glamour of the White House State Dining Room.

Sparkle and glamour is nothing new, and so it barely interests me. But snow?

Snow is new.

“Rua would have loved it,” Hehu says, like the mind reader he is.

I nod, not trusting myself to speak. Rua loved Christmas and snow and everything winter. Every year, he had the palace strewn with garlands and lights and drifts of white fluff, which the warm sea breezes would invariably blow under chairs and into corners, and we’d spend the entire holiday season chasing after random tufts of cotton before they could blow outside into the garden.

He would have loved this snow—real and dizzying and cold. He would have loved the opulent decorations here in the White House, the giant evergreens dripping with glass ornaments and ribbons, the candles flickering and lights twinkling and cheerful Christmas music floating from the quartet in the corner. Even toward the end, when the happy boy I’d grown up alongside had transformed into a bitter, tired man, Christmas still made him happy.

“Noelani,” Hehu says softly. “What’s wrong? You are a million miles away. Is it missing Rua? Missing Ka’eo?”

It’s only the two of us by the window, and so he speaks to me in our native Manaroan.

I finally turn to my advisor and offer him a pinched smile at the mention of my son Ka’eo. I could offer a litany of everything that’s wrong: it’s my first Christmas since my husband died, which means it’s my son’s first Christmas since his father died. I left him with my parents in Manaroa, and I desperately need to get back before the actual holiday in five days so he doesn’t have to experience this first Christmas without his father alone. No matter how strained things were between Rua and me at the end, he was Ka’eo’s father and Ka’eo idolized him. In just seven short years, Ka’eo will turn eighteen and take the crown I’m holding for him. He will walk in his father’s footsteps, and I’m determined that Ka’eo should only remember the best parts of Rua when he does.

Yet I’m here right now, not there with him like I should be. I’m across the world, in the

cold and greedy hustle of Washington, D.C., trying to plead for this council—for anyone—to listen to what’s happening to Manaroa and other islands in the Pacific as the sea levels rise and threaten to swallow us whole.

Which would bring me to the next complaint in my litany: this council. Ostensibly, it was created for leaders to gather and discuss climate change strategy and mitigation, and with the Pacific licking at Manaroa’s shores with increasing hunger, I couldn’t afford not to come. Watching parts of our archipelago dissolve into the sea had crushed Rua—crushed him right into paralyzed denial—and so Manaroa has stayed silent too long about the threat climate change poses to us. No longer. Not while I’m regent. Keeping the crown safe for my son means keeping our people safe, too.

Unfortunately, this council isn’t actually interested in anything more than long meetings, pledging to hold more long meetings, and then hosting self-congratulatory dinners to celebrate all the meetings they had. Everyone listened patiently while I described how my people are being displaced in larger and larger numbers as their homes crumble into the sea, and the poverty, sickness, and suffering that follows, but no one seemed to care enough to actually do anything.

Wouldn’t want to inconvenience the billionaires, I guess. Wouldn’t want anyone to change how they ran their businesses just to save thousands of lives halfway across the world.

And that brings me to my final complaint, and this one I voice aloud to Hehu. “Kimo,” I answer in a low voice. We’re alone and speaking our own tongue, but I’ve learned this last year that I never know when Rua’s brother—my son’s uncle and an official advisor—is listening. I only felt safe leaving Ka’eo at home with my parents because Kimo traveled with us to D. C. Kimo is hungry for his nephew’s throne—hungry enough to propose marriage to me multiple times—and I don’t trust him. I certainly don’t trust him alone with my son.

Hehu sighs and rubs his forehead. “I hear he’s been taking meetings all week. Investors. Shipping conglomerations. Oil companies. He’s eager to approve the proposed drilling site off the western shore, and a refinery on Manaroa to go with it.”

It’s only a lifetime of being groomed to marry a king that keeps me from releasing a creative string of profanity at a White House Christmas party. Instead, I manage to seethe, “Over my dead body will he bring that poison to Manaroa.”

We didn’t resist colonization and industrialization for centuries to pollute our home now. Now when it’s already shrinking and more vulnerable than ever.

“Be careful, Noelani.” Hehu looks around the room at the hobnobbing people in tuxedos and gowns and sparkling jewels. Kimo’s in the decadent crush somewhere, probably trying to glad-hand more energy executives. “After the last marriage proposal of his you refused, I sometimes worry that he might be thinking the same thing.” Then Hehu pauses in that way of his that tells me he knows that I’m not going to like what he says next. “You know, if you did remarry, it would ease a lot of people’s minds.”

“I’m not marrying Kimo.”

“I didn’t mean Kimo,” Hehu says gently. “Anyone. Fall in love again, Noelani. Be happy. The kingdom will thrive for it, and so will Ka’eo.”

His words hurt, and I’m not exactly sure why. “I’m doing everything in my power to help Manaroa thrive already, Hehu. You know that.”

I take a deep breath and force myself to think of something different—not Kimo or my son or the rising sea bent on washing my homeland away. I’ll think of pleasant things, like tomorrow’s meeting with CadeCo, a huge green energy conglomerate, before my flight home. I’ll think of the snow so impossibly beautiful outside, a pure thing covering the corruption of the city underneath. I’ll think about getting another cocktail made with cool, Christmas-y gin.

I’m turning to go hunt down this cocktail, when a gorgeous woman in a white silk dress approaches me, trailed closely by a tall tuxedoed man I recognize as Maxim Cade, the CEO of CadeCo.