The Princess (Filthy Trilogy 2)

I return to the kitchen and stir the pot, setting my phone on the island. Eric joins me again and I can’t seem to look at him or ask a question. He walked away for a reason. He didn’t want me to hear that conversation. Eric grabs me and pulls me to him, cupping my face and forcing my gaze to his. “Blake asked me to run a sequence of numbers through my head to see if they matched the messages we were left. Unfortunately, they didn’t.”

“What numbers?”

“He had the idea that the message tied to union case numbers, but he couldn’t make them connect and like I said, I couldn’t either.”

“Blake’s working on that now, this late?”

“He’s obsessed with the message and its meaning.” He strokes my face. “I needed to step away to do that. I wasn’t hiding anything from you.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“I wanted you to know.” His voice softens, eyes warming. “I know how loyal you were to me when my father called. It matters, Harper. You matter to me. And just to be clear, I’m falling in love with you, too, and I have no doubt that began the minute I saw you by that pool six years ago. You and that black dress have haunted me ever since.”

He’s falling in love with me.

I’ve haunted him, like he’s haunted me.

I want to revel in these confessions—I do revel in them—but there’s something in his eyes, a dark certainty I can’t explain, or understand. And I know that this darkness I sense in him, matters, too, and more than I want it to. It’s the Kingston part of him that I told him doesn’t exist and now that he’s opened the door to it, they will own him and divide us if I let them.

I won’t.

The Kingstons will not win.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Eric

The past…

Only half an hour after my father pulls me out of that social worker’s office, I’m at the Kingston mansion. He parks in the garage and calls over his shoulder. “Get out.”

I want to punch the window. I want to scream. I want to hit him. I don’t get out of the car. Meanwhile, my “father” is already walking into the house. I want to turn and leave. Instead, like the puppy dog I am tonight, I relent, and get out of he car. I have no choice. I have nowhere else to go. I close my hand around my mother’s note, and glance around the garage, suddenly aware of the collection of three sports cars and several motorcycles, all more expensive, I’m certain, than the trailer I’ve called home these recent years.

I hate this place already.

“Get in here!” my father grumbles, leaning out into the garage door from inside the house.

I hate him.

He probably thinks I’m planning to steal one of the cars.

I don’t want anything from this man.

I cross the garage and enter what turns out to be a stairwell. My father disappears out some door at the top as I start climbing. Once I’m at the door he’d departed, I exit to a foyer and he’s not even there. A plump older woman wearing an apron greets me.

“Hello, Eric,” she says. “I’m Delia, the housekeeper. I’ll show you to your new room.” There is grief in her—sadness for me. She knows about my mother.

“Thank you,” I say tightly, wondering if the rest of the world feels pity for me. I don’t want pity. My mother didn’t accept it when she was sick. She’d be ashamed if I accepted it now.

Delia heads up a winding wood-railed stairwell, but she doesn’t leave me behind like my father. She waits on me. When I join her, she gives me a warm look. “You can do this. I know you can.”

I don’t want to ask what she means. I see it in her eyes. She’s telling me I can survive because I believe she did at one point as well. Survive what, I don’t know, but she survived. I suddenly like this woman and I’m happy to know her.

At the top of the stairs, we turn right and enter a doorway that leads up again. It’s a loft room, a place where I’m here, but not a part of this house. This works for me. I have to be here, but I don’t want to be a part of this house.

“I’m going to get you some clothes,” Delia says as I sit on the plaid-covered bed, with the low part of the ceiling above me. “Are you hungry?”

“No. I’m not.”