Royal Surrender - chapter seventeen

Noe flew home from Brussels, pleasantly exhausted.

It had been a good idea to take the job abroad because it had been immersive and nearly round the clock. Including a great many after-hours negotiations that often dragged on halfway to morning.

There was almost no time at all to think about anything or anyone else.

It was perfect, in other words, for someone trying her best not to think about a certain amber-eyed prince.

The plane landed at Heathrow and soon enough she was on the Tube, racing beneath the streets of London and straight back into her life. Back to her empty flat. Back to sitting about, waiting to see Cajetan’s imminent engagement splashed across every tabloid and every screen there was.

Because surely that would happen at any moment.

She’d half expected it every day while she’d been abroad. Every time she’d seen anyone seemingly invested in what was on their screens, she’d braced herself for the news. In the airport, she’d succumbed at last and looked.

But no engagement was mentioned. And during the weeks she’d been away, Cajetan had not been seen out and about with anyone, not even his princess. She’d had to suffer an unbearable surge of hope. And then she’d had to confront herself over the disappointment she felt that she couldn’t even look at him in terrible tabloid renditions of the life he was leading without her.

“You are going to have to get over this,” she told herself sternly as she walked the ten minutes from the Tube to her flat in an appropriately gloomy evening to match her mood. “You’re going to have to get over him.”

People got over love affairs all the time. The world was built on broken hearts. Every song and every book delved into the complications of the human heart. There was no emotion she could possibly have that someone else hadn’t recorded for posterity.

She would live. That was the main thing.

There had been a few nights there when she thought she might not.

Noe would live and, hopefully, she would learn. It had been better when she’d thought herself incapable of feeling such things.

Well, she amended as she walked, not better. But safer.

She reached the front door of her building as a light bit of rain began to fall. Noe stuck her key in the lock, then glanced reflexively over her shoulder when she heard a car door slam behind her.

Her first thought was that she had finally gone over the edge. Her second reaction was another surge of that terrible hope—

But she turned fully anyway and faced the man stalking toward her with an intense look on his beautiful face.

“Shouldn’t you be off getting married?” she made herself ask, just in case this was real. Just in case he was truly here.

But Cajetan did not smile. He only stared at her, a smoldering intensity written all over him. “Noe. Let me in. It is time we talked.”