There was silence on the other end, and I worried that our call had been cut off somehow. When she finally spoke, her voice was soft but sincere.
“Thank you, Felix. From the bottom of my heart. Lio is a good man, and he deserves a… friend… like you.”
This time her raw emotion was definitely real, and I steeled my jaw against it.
“I might be bringing along some family baggage,” I warned her. “Prepare yourself.”
I wasn’t off the phone ten minutes before the phone rang again with another call from Monaco. This time, it was Arthur.
“If you don’t get your scrawny ass down here, I’m quitting the royal service and he can dress himself. I’d be just as happy dressing the rich and famous at Hermès.”
“Arthur?” I bit my upper lip to keep from laughing. “You’d hate all that pretentious bullshit, and you know it. You’d be dressing more than Monaco’s hoi polloi. You’d be dressing their purse dogs with thousand-dollar silk scarves while offering them Evian in a silver bowl and calling them Madame Buttercup.”
I could hear his wince across the miles. “You might have a point. But it just goes to show how dire things have become here that I’m even voicing the thought. Our young prince has lost his marbles and become some kind of robot prince. Fix it, Felix. Fix it now.”
“I can’t fix it, Arthur,” I said on a sigh. “I wish I could.”
“Please,” he begged. “Come to Monaco, Felix. We need you here.”
“I’m on my way,” I promised.
Silence.
“Well,” he muttered. “That was easier than I expected.”
Chapter 31
Lio
I was in a late-night meeting with my father and his closest council members when I spotted Felix Wilde in the palace. The day had been interminable, and I was at my wits’ end with some of the nonsense my father was pulling in an effort to be done with his responsibilities as soon as possible.
When I saw him wander past the open door of the conference room, looking lost, I blinked. Had my daydreams become hallucinations? Was I seeing things?
I excused myself and bolted out of the room. I had to determine if it was really him. As soon as my steps thundered onto the hardwood floor of the corridor, Felix spun around to face me.
It really was him: my Felix, there in the royal palace.
The sound I made was a cross between a garbled shout of surprise and a strange kind of relieved sob. Felix’s eyes shot wide when he realized it was me, and I immediately noticed how intimidated he looked. I wanted to engulf him in my arms—more than that, I wanted to absorb the man into my body.
“Felix,” I whispered. “Felix.”
His eyes immediately filled and threatened to spill over. Just the sight of him, scared and emotional, made me want to burst into angry tears. Why was he here? Clearly he wasn’t happy about it.
“Lio.” His voice sounded shaky and small. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt you. Hen told me to come find her when I got here.”
My hands still held his upper arms, and I squeezed them to keep from hauling him into my chest there in the public hallways of the royal palace.
“Hen? I don’t understand. Why are you here? What’s going on? Is everything okay?”
Felix looked around as if expecting to be caught doing something wrong.
“I should let you go back to your meeting. I need to find Hen,” he said. He sounded tired and looked as exhausted as I felt.
I couldn’t help but cup his cheek with one hand. “Please tell me what’s going on,” I said in a more gentle voice. My thumb smoothed across the pink apple of his cheek, and his eyelashes fluttered closed at the touch. “Felix, sweetheart, you have no idea how good it is to see your beautiful face,” I whispered.
His eyes opened wide again, as if searching to see if I’d meant what I said. My body ached to hold him, to comfort him, to curl around him and finally sleep the deep sleep that had eluded me since returning to Monaco. But I needed to know why he was here.
A throat cleared behind me, and I jumped apart from Felix. Thank god, it was only Jon, but his presence reminded me I couldn’t touch Felix like that in view of anyone in the palace.
“Come here,” I said, guiding him to my office which was back the way I’d come, past the conference room where my father and his group still convened. Jon followed quietly and remained outside in the hallway while I steered Felix toward my inner office. I was surprised to see Lucas still at his desk.
“Is the meeting over?” he asked, flicking his eyes to Felix and back to me. “I was just leaving you a note about tomorrow. You have an eight-o’clock breakfast with Milane, several phone calls throughout the morning, lunch with your mother and Sabine, a press briefing midafternoon to discuss the additions to the foundation’s new charity distributions, and of course coronation dress rehearsal tomorrow evening—”