“Fine,” she said, sounding almost annoyed. “Tell her yes.”
Mark raised a brow. “I might alter the tone.” He picked up his hat from the end of the desk. “I’ll go and see how she’s feeling.”
Frankie slid a hand in the back pocket of her jeans and stepped back as Mark passed her.
“I’ll leave you to it.” Tommy rose and strode from the room in Mark’s wake, closing the door behind him.
Kris ran a distracted hand through his hair, waiting, knowing the only reason Frankie hadn’t slipped away with the others was because she had more to discuss.
After a good twenty seconds of silence—roughly the time it would take for Tommy to reach the bottom of the spiral staircase—she eyed him. “I don’t suppose either of you mentioned how good Tommy looked behind that desk?”
“I thought about it.” His gaze drifted back to the bruise on her cheekbone. “But then he seemed ready to puke at the idea of Mark’s bachelor party down in the city and it ruined his air of authority.”
She clicked her tongue, then stepped forward to hand him the folder. “We’ve tracked down his attackers.”
His pulse lurched. Already? Throwing it open, he scanned the first page and looked up in disbelief. “They’ve been stuck in immigration detention?”
“Morons didn’t have visas to travel to the U.S. in the first place. They worked on a cruise, jumped ship along the coast and must have made their way to Montana. Three days after the attack, they were picked up for speeding outside of Portland. Evidently, they were buzzed on having taken down an heir and got happy with the accelerator.”
His skin was cold. “That sounds too stupid to be true.”
“How smart did they seem knocking on your door, asking for Erik Jaroka’s son, then beating the shit out of our boys right down the road?” she asked. “It sounds just stupid enough for people acting under orders of someone else. Someone smart enough to have tracked you down like I did—who believed, like I did, that there was only one of you. Whoever was in charge would have stayed in Kiraly and not given a damn when those guys were caught without papers. All they’d have cared about was whether the job was done.”
“I don’t know.” Kris tried to think it through. “Those men wouldn’t have stayed quiet. They’d have named whoever sent them, blurted out the whole plan to bring their boss down with them. It all would have unraveled, surely, and Kiralian authorities would have been alerted.”
Frankie paused, eyeing him. “You think anyone listens to people in immigration detention centers? No papers, no voice. Besides, no one had linked them to the attack. Just speeding. They might be stupid, but they wouldn’t admit to killing a prince.”
Kris blew out a hard breath. “You’re sure it’s really them?”
“Turn the page.”
Flipping over the paper, his blood chilled at identifying photographs of the men who’d knocked on his door three years ago—and gone on to beat his brother and neighbor to near death.
“Exactly as you described,” she murmured.
Anticipation spread through him. While he couldn’t forget his involvement in the attack, he wanted justice. “Can they be charged?”
“It was an act of high treason.” Her frown was grim. “We’ll get them.”
“So, what happens now?”
“I’ve positioned security to monitor the local families and friends of these men. We’ll investigate whether any of them assisted with the renovations of the west wing. We’ve already got all workers and suppliers on file. If the incidents are connected, hopefully there’ll be crossover. If not, it was still a lead worth pursuing.”
“Okay.” Reeling, he closed the folder and handed it back.
Tucking it under her arm, she said, “Do you want to go out tonight?”
He blinked, struggling to switch gears from a murder investigation to a date. Then he stepped closer. “Yes.”
“There’s someone I’ve tracked down,” she said, ignoring his advance. “You have to be discreet. This person can’t know they’re being observed.”
Not a date, then, but a lead. And was it just him or were her lips paler than usual?
“No radiating primal energy like last night. Keep it tucked in, okay?”
Primal energy. He contained his smirk. “Okay.”
“You can’t wear that. I’ll have clothes brought to your room. Meet you in the entrance hall at seven,” she said, turning away. His gaze raked down her figure, but like a thirsty man trying to lick condensation off the wrong side of glass, the sight of her ass in those jeans only intensified his craving.
“Frankie,” he said, stepping after her.
She glanced back, features guarded.
“Why don’t you wear the uniform of the royal guard?”
Confusion tugged on her brows. “Would you prefer that I did?”
“I don’t care how you dress,” he said. “But as head of personal security, you’d wear navy blue with something extra, right? Gold stripes or piping to mark your position.”
“Probably,” she said, looking down and tapping at the ends of the papers that stuck out of the folder. “Why?”
“For someone so determined to remind me that you’re my inferior as a member of palace staff, it seems odd that you wouldn’t use the uniform as a visual reminder of our differences.”
She didn’t react. Just eyed him with a bland expression that seemed to ask, your point?
“You want to know what I think?” he asked.
“Probably not.”
“You don’t believe you deserve to wear it.” As the words left his mouth, the full truth of the theory hit him. If she couldn’t even accept her role in the palace, no wonder she fought being paired with a prince. “You don’t believe you deserve to be here.”
Frankie’s features revealed nothing—but he’d bet her heart was beating with panic.
“When you and Tommy were talking in the car last week,” he said, “you mentioned you didn’t work for the royal guard before you came to Montana. Philip’s thrown you in the deep end, hasn’t he?”
She glanced out the window at the mountains. “So?”
“So why won’t you accept that you’ve risen to the challenge?”
Now he was sure her lips were too pale. “Can we save this conversation until we get back tonight? I have work to do.”
“Swear it,” he said, waiting until she looked at him. “Swear you’ll explain this.”
After a moment of impossibly wide green eyes, she swallowed. Her expression hardened. “I swear.”
“Thank you.”
She left without another word, and he sank back onto the sofa, still wishing he was home again, but with her by his side as they drove through the wild expanse of Montana. Instead of sitting in silence or playing ‘Would You Rather’ as they’d done on past road trips, he would ask her questions about her life, gently nudging her open, because his current ignorance was his fault as much as hers.
He’d always respected her space, steered clear of conversations that caused her silence and stillness. He’d thought that was being a good friend—but as her friend, he should have pushed a little more, trying to understand what caused her to shut down, rather than acting as if her life had begun when she’d moved to Sage Haven.