Heartless Hero (Crowne Point 1)

I narrowed my eyes. “Truth?” I asked, trying to use our old game, the one he’d just called upon moments before.

He shook his head. “Promise.”

I watched him a moment longer, as if he would suddenly break and reveal all his motives.

He didn’t.

So I left him in my newly finished en suite—his room.

I turned to shut my double doors, and right before they closed Theo’s black leather shoe slid between them. I stared at it, dumbfounded, and in that second Theo slammed open the left door.

“It stays open,” he said.

“I’m—I’m changing.” The absurdity of having to say it aloud had me stammering over my words. I hated that.

His eyes traveled a slow, cutting path down my body before coming back to me, bored. “And I’m not interested.”

I couldn’t so much as scoff before he turned, giving me his back. My fingers itched with the urge to pelt him with the nearest hard object at his head—a lilac-scented candle.

I didn’t have it raised for a second before Theo said, “Sure you want to do that?”

How did he know? He hadn’t so much as shifte

d. His shoulders were broad, his legs spread, his hands behind his back in the perfect bodyguard position.

I dropped it with a thud to my feathery white carpet.

Theo wasn’t my best friend anymore, that was for sure. He was a bodyguard through and through, and I was beginning to worry he wasn’t like the others I’d scared away.

He looked at his wrist and, like he knew I was still staring, said, “You have forty-five minutes.”

I straightened, going to my walk-in.

When I’d first found Theo, he’d had to sleep with the rest of the servants in the servant wing. No amount of pleading had changed Mom or Grandfather’s mind. It wasn’t proper. It wasn’t right. Now Theo definitely wasn’t the sixteen-year-old I found, and neither was he the eighteen-year-old boy who’d left me. He was a twenty-three-year-old man. Hard. Chiseled.

Dangerous.

And he was just outside my bedroom.

I swallowed, trying to focus on getting dressed.

My dress was truly fit for a princess. A sheer white boned bodice, dipping low with a sweetheart neckline and mother-of-pearls dotting the boned corset and falling like raindrops down the tiered tulle.

They called us royalty in our town, and we couldn’t afford to ruin the image.

I added my finishing touch: a teardrop pearl necklace hanging just above the lace sweetheart. I touched the soft pearl resting just above my cleavage, wondering if Theo still remembered this secret. This piece of myself I’d only ever told him.

I couldn’t completely finish dressing myself. The silky rose laces corseting the back of my dress were impossible to tie. Normally I had someone dress me, a girl who was just a year older than me. She was new to me and her name was Story.

So where the hell was she?

I called down to the servants’ wing.

“Busy?” I all but gasped. “What do you mean she’s busy?” I wasn’t like Gemma or Gray, who had entire legions attending to them.

All I had was this girl.

When it was horrifyingly clear no one was going to help me, I hung up the Crowne Hall house line. A part of me wondered if this was another punishment, and if making a scene would make Mom even more upset with me.