“Nothing’s foolproof, especially if our father is involved.”
Kian snorts. “Isn’t that the truth. But that’s why I’m in charge of this op. I’m totally circumventing him. He’ll know nothing about it until it’s too late.”
Part of me wants to correct him, to tell him the King always knows, but I figure he’ll find out soon enough. Some things can’t be taught, anyway. They have to be experienced.
Because this isn’t my first time around the block, and because I know the King a lot better than Kian since I’ve spent my whole adult life working closely with him, I also know that I should walk away right now. No matter how intriguing I find Lola—no matter how much fun I had with her once we left that god-awful restaurant—now isn’t the time for me to try to get involved with a woman. Especially one who made it pretty clear last night that she wasn’t interested in getting involved with me and all the hoopla that entails.
But as another text from Samuel comes in—this one saying that she’s not answering her phone or any of the texts he sent—I know I’m not going to be able to just leave her like this. The press is all over her because of me. The gossip sites are digging up everything they can on her past because of me. The least I can do is make sure that I can keep her safe until the story dies down. Which it will, as long as we don’t give it any fuel.
Kian may think the whole Beauty and the Beast thing will work, but that’s only if I’m willing to throw Lola to the wolves. Which I’m not. Too many people have already sacrificed their lives to keep me safe—my bodyguards who were murdered when I was kidnapped and the soldiers who were wounded or killed rescuing me months later. No way am I asking anyone else to sacrifice anything for me. Especially not Lola.
“Look,” I say, breaking into a long-winded treatise from Kian that I won’t even pretend to have been hearing. “I’ve got to go. Lola needs help.”
“See? That’s what I’m talking about. Go ride to her rescue on your white steed.”
“I’m driving a black SUV, not riding a white horse.”
“Potato, po-tah-toh. Just make sure you make it look good. Women eat that shit up—”
“I’m hanging up now.”
“I’m serious, bro. Just do what I’m telling you and—”
I swipe the phone off before he can finish. I may have needed his advice on where the best parties were when this whole shiftless existence of mine came into being, but rescuing a damsel in distress? I’ve totally got that. And not because I want to use her to make my life easier.
Chapter 12
Lola
I’m in hell. There’s no other explanation for the photographers and news people camped on my front lawn. No other explanation for my smartphone ringing off the hook with calls and texts from reporters all over the damn world. Certainly no other explanation for my second-in-command calling me to ask if Garrett’s eyes are really as dreamy in person as they are on the covers of magazines.
How the hell did I get here? One tiny date with a prince in one tiny village in Wildemar and suddenly TMZ is covering my very brief stint in a sorority in college—complete with pictures of me puking into a potted plant at a Sig Ep party my freshman year.
It’s madness. Total, absolute, and complete madness.
I’m supposed to be doing a photo shoot in two hours, but considering I can’t even get out my front door, I have no idea how that’s supposed to happen. No idea how anything I have planned for the next few days is supposed to happen. Not when I’ve got the sick feeling I’ll be trailing paparazzi wherever I go.
No one was supposed to see us. I mean, sure, at the restaurant in town there were a ton of people who noticed Garrett. But we’re in a small village at the back of fucking beyond. Yes, it’s a huge vacation destination during the winter because of the mountains, but we’re six months from peak tourist time. No one but locals are around, and while they might have smartphones and social media accounts, they’re a long way away from being able to identify me off a pic in a dark restaurant.
I mean, seriously, what are the odds that some news photographer would be wandering the streets late at night, enjoying his vacation in the back of beyond, and just happen upon Garrett and me hopping that damn fence into the park? It seems far-fetched, but that’s exactly what happened, and now…now I am in hell.
My computer dings with a DM from my assistant—the only way she can reach me since I turned my damn phone off to avoid reporters—and I pull it up, expecting the worst. I had her start pulling traffic numbers on the site, figuring we might have to do something about our servers if we have a sudden influx of hits. Not that anyone will be buying anything. But this is a huge story and even if no one else checks out Va Voom Vintag
e, every gossip/feature reporter on the planet is going to be looking into my business. I don’t know if our servers can handle that kind of traffic.
But as I look at the numbers Nora sends—not just the hits, but the merchandise sale numbers—my mouth nearly falls open. On a normal day, we move between fifteen and twenty thousand dollars of merchandise. In the last six hours, we’ve moved more than triple that. The hits are out of control, but so are the sales. People are buying our clothes, both the vintage stuff and our own designs, at a rate that’s going to have us out of merchandise in less than two weeks. Not that I expect it to continue, but still…what if it does?
I go into instant crisis mode—a good crisis is still a crisis—ordering Nora to contact the IT guys and make sure they do whatever they need to do to keep our site from crashing. Then I get on Marissa, my head product manager, to make sure she’s ready to start posting the merch we have lined up for next month.
Finally, I contact Sienna, my head retail buyer, and tell her to start tracking down more cute ready-to-wear stuff while I start pulling up estate sales and vintage shops all over Wildemar and France. I had planned on hitting one more here in Wildemar and then a few in France, but if this windfall keeps up for even a week, I’m going to need to get my hands on a whole lot of product in not a lot of time.
I need to cancel the photo shoot today, but I can’t afford to. I need to get these clothes photographed and then shipped back to the States, ASAP. Which means I need to figure out how to get the hell out of here without tipping off the reporters to where I’m going. Piece of cake.
Not.
Ugh. With a grimace, I get up from the small dining table where I’ve been working and make my way to the front window. I pulled the curtains the moment the first paparazzo showed up—well, the second one, considering I never even saw the guy who got the money shot of the kiss—but I can’t help peeking out occasionally, just to see if they’ve left. So far, no one has.
I stay to the side of the window, shifting the edge of the curtain aside instead of the center. And nearly gasp when I see that the crowd at the end of the driveway has grown. There have to be at least fifty there now, up from the twenty that were there the last time I checked.