“Stop making this about you.” Zara knocked Frankie’s arm with her elbow. “I want the goss.”
Frankie eyed her and Zara gazed back, teasing yet expectant. Weird. Although being caught with a puffy face was top-tier mortification to Frankie, Zara didn’t seem to be judging.
“Fine,” she said, and took a steadying breath. “Kris has this little habit of slipping security sometimes when he’s out in the city.”
Zara snorted, then sobered swiftly at Frankie’s look and said, “Bad prince.”
“Reckless,” Frankie said. “He’s been doing it more often. Tonight, I stopped him.” Her throat thickened and she bit into caramel chocolate. A waste, really, because she couldn’t taste a thing. “He was so happy to see me. Like a kid bursting open a piñata.”
“Oh, honey.” Zara swiped up a bar near Frankie’s foot.
“I told him the truth.” Well, parts of it. “He tried to be angry, but he was devastated.” His desolate glances and fraught movements had gutted her. “I’d hoped he wouldn’t care too much, not after I’d kept my distance since he’d arrived in Kiraly. But he did.” Her voice shook as she remembered his pained confusion, his pleas for her to tell him he was wrong. “Then I pretended our friendship had been part of the job, because I can’t be in his life anymore. Not the way I used to be. This needs to be the end of it.”
“Hang on a second,” Zara said.
Frankie’s stomach balled.
Swiveling, her friend regarded her through narrowed eyes. “This doesn’t sound like the end of a friendship.”
“It sure as shit isn’t the happy middle.”
“No.” She pointed her half-eaten chocolate at Frankie. “This sounds like a breakup.”
Looking away, Frankie said, “Don’t devalue friendship by assuming it can’t hurt like this to lose it.”
Zara hummed, sounding unconvinced, but didn’t push.
They sat in silence, punctuated only by the rustle of wrappers and Frankie’s occasional rapid, jagged intake of breath. A dog barked in the distance. The headlights of a car broke through the buildings below and disappeared again. Moonlight made liquid silver on the surface of the lake far below.
Then Zara spoke softly. “Kris is pretty gorgeous.”
Caught off guard, Frankie glared at her.
“Oh, put it away.” Toeing off her flip-flops, Zara pressed the soles of her feet onto the stone step. “If you were just friends, you’d apologize to him, explain why you did what you did, and eventually he’d come back around.”
Heart tight, Frankie turned back to stare at the city below.
“So when you said this needs to be the end of it,” Zara said, “I assume by it, you mean he thinks you’re pretty gorgeous, too.”
“He’s wanted to get in my pants since we met,” she muttered, unwilling to romanticize the sweet thrum of desire between them.
“Making you the one who got away.”
“He needs to move on.” Frankie didn’t manage to hide the dismay from her voice.
“Because he’s royalty and you’re not?”
“Yes.”
Zara sighed, shaking her head before lowering her forehead into her palm.
“You going to try to convince me that status doesn’t matter?”
“I wish I could.” Zara’s voice was strangely sad. “But royalty is a world above. They’re not made for us. And we’re definitely not made for them.”
Frankie swallowed hard.
“Honestly, what’s with these Jaroka guys falling for women they can’t realistically be with? I swear, next thing I know, I’m going to be sitting at a bar talking coping strategies with some woman in love with Tomas.”
“Pass on my condolences,” Frankie muttered, because if a woman fell for Tommy, it wouldn’t end well for her.
“I guess you just avoid Kris from now on?” Zara wriggled her toes in the warm night air. “And wait for time and distance to make this all go away?”
“Not exactly.” Frankie resisted covering her head with her forearms. “New protocol. Whenever he’s outside palace grounds, I’m going to be his bodyguard.”
“You’re—what?” Her friend sounded startled. “You’re not much bigger than I am.”
“I could take you before you’d seen me move,” she mumbled.
“While that leaves me suitably terrified, I’m not planning on harming your prince.”
“I’m not a full-grown male, but I know how to subdue one.” Not to mention that all members of the royal guard carried a firearm on duty.
“Alright, hang on.” Zara was shaking her head. “I’m lost. Because obviously my first thought is that volunteering to be his bodyguard is the perfect way to ensure he gets over you. You know, spending lots of time together one-on-one really aids separation.”
Frankie pressed her eyes shut, groaning.
“You command a security team, sweetcakes. Lock someone else by his side when he leaves the palace.”
“I can’t.” She couldn’t trust anyone else. “He can be stupid. Only I can tell what he’s going to do before he does it.” Only she could keep him safe.
There was a beat of silence. “Oh my God.”
“What?”
Zara was shaking her head. “This is not going to work.”
“It won’t be forever.” Just until she’d removed any lingering threat to the royal family. “After tonight, he’s cut me out. I’ll just be there in the background to make sure he doesn’t get hurt.”
“Sure, whatever you said to him tonight might be what he needs to get over you,” Zara said. “But this bodyguard gig is the perfect way to make sure you never get over him.”
“I’ll be fine.”
A lie. A bulging, splitting-at-the-seams lie, because Kris wasn’t just gorgeous. He was soul-stealing. And she wanted him to have it, the soul he’d lifted right out of her being, because in all her years before she’d met him, she’d never felt whole alone inside herself. Around him, she felt unbroken.
A mighty lure to resist.
“Okay,” Zara said, and then gave her a glance that was the opposite of reassuring. “But do we want to make this our regular meeting spot for when you realize you’ve made a huge mistake? Or do you want to come to my place next time?”
Frankie glowered at her. “I can focus on the job.”
“Yeah.” Zara gave a little smile and patted her on the leg again. “Let’s do my place.”
4
Kris strode through a palace that in no way reflected the events of the night before. The chaos Frankie had wrecked should be all around him. The pre-dawn summer air should be acrid with her betrayal. The respectful, subdued palace staff should be dashing around, harried and alarmed. The wallpaper should be slashed, antique vases smashed in the corridors and the sound of weeping floating around corners. For all the pain she’d caused, there should be a rift in the damn mountainside.
Outside, Kiraly was oblivious in the early morning shadows.