Some Like it Secret (Going Royal Book 4) (2 page)

“Perfect.” Alyx surprised him for a third time when she brushed his cheek with a kiss and paused to whisper, “I meant what I said earlier. I want to be your friend. I’ve seen the look in your eyes before on other people. If I can help—at all—please, let me.” She squeezed his forearm once then allowed Daniel and their security team to escort her away.

He watched their exit silently and ran through his options. Switching gears, he glanced at Vidal. “I’m ready to go. Can you have security bring the car?”

“Of course, Your Highness. Destination?”

“The tower.” For the time being, he’d return to his suite at the Petersburg Tower. It would have been readied for him, since his appearance at the event was on his schedule. “One last circuit and we leave.”

“Absolutely, sir.” Vidal and the others fell into step as Sebastian glad-handed his way around the room. A prince had a duty to be seen. He must be remembered as engaged and available, at least while on public display. He’d perfected the part. It took nearly an hour, but he finally made it out and pulled his tie free as soon as the car doors closed.

Leaning his head back against the seat, he retrieved his cell phone from his pocket. The screen was dark, though when he unlocked it, no messages waited for him. It was after eleven in California, which meant after two in the morning on the east coast. She taught an early class and the last thing she needed was to be woken in the middle of the night, but he wanted to hear her voice.

If he took an early flight, he could be there by afternoon—or he could head to the airport immediately and be outside her class when she finished teaching. The car shifted abruptly and Sebastian glanced up at his driver.

“Apologies, sir. We have a couple of tagalongs.” The driver explained and Sebastian sighed.

The press.

He couldn’t go to the airport. Saying nothing, he slid the phone back into his pocket. Tomorrow he would call Meredith and make everything right again.

She was upset by their lack of time together. He understood her position and owed her an apology, but it would be better to let her calm before he confronted her. Anger sparked her declaration that they were through. His chest tightened. With her rejection, she’d thrown a gauntlet down, one he would gladly pick up.

They were not over. He’d protected her—cherished her—for too long to accept any other outcome.

But still, the ache in his heart wasn’t assuaged. She’d never hung up on him before.

Never.

Unsurprisingly, by nine-fifteen, Meredith Blake’s eight a.m. class on the elementary theory of numbers struggled to focus on the whiteboard where she’d scrawled several equations. Other professors made do with only punching in their time in these basic courses, but Meredith liked to challenge her students. If any of them could solve the equation by the end of the lecture period, she gave an automatic grade bump to the assignment of their choice.

Application, after all, was the goal of number theory. Pacing to the front of her lectern, she studied the glassy eyed students arrayed around the room. Normally, she’d go for a joke or a lighthearted story, but she felt like she was dragging worse than they were.

Gravity remained unaltered by physical events, yet depression and disappointment seemingly increased her mass. How else to explain the weight bearing down upon her? Maybe everyone deserved a bit of a break. “Let’s put it this way.” She spoke in a clear tone and knew her voice carried all the way to the back row. With seventy plus students in these classes, projection was everything.

“Numbers are the basic building blocks of every single thing we do. We use numbers to predict the weather, to predict crime, to predict investments—even to predict winners. If you understand numbers and their applications, you have the most essential tools to success.” Pausing, she let them absorb the information. Then pointed to the equation on the board. “Has anyone solved this?”

Not a single hand rose. She forced a conciliatory smile, but instead of letting them off the hook, she said, “How many of you
tried
to solve it?”

Only two hands raised.

Well, two out of seventy-three weren’t the worst statistics. “How many of you would have tried if I told you this formula will very accurately predict your chances of winning the lottery?”

Alertness sparked in her audience. Throw down a gauntlet, most people picked it up. Throw down the promise of money and those numbers increased. “I’ll give you to the end of the week to solve the equation and send me your answer.” But because she couldn’t resist trying to make them smile, she said, “Of course, if you win the lottery with it—I’m sure my free grade bump won’t be nearly as valuable, no matter how fun.”

Laughter erupted and she nodded, satisfied. “See you all next week.” Thumps of books, digital tablet covers snapping closed and the thud of feet on the stairs accompanied the students as they took advantage of their early release to rush out. All save Wes Keating and Rebecca Walsh—they headed straight for her. Holding up a hand, she stopped their questions before they could start.

“No, I didn’t offer any other assignments for extra credit. No, I won’t extend the deadline next week if you haven’t solved it. And unless blood and bone are showing, you better have your assignments turned in.” She raised her brows at their crestfallen expressions. “Any other questions?”

“No,” Wes resettled his backpack “Thank you.”

Rebecca sighed. “I was kind of hoping…maybe we could talk you into a second formula? You know, if we can’t figure out the first.”

Folding her arms, Meredith eyed the students. Every class always possessed at least one student who thought she’d change the rules just for them. “Sure, I can totally give you a second problem, however, you’d have to solve both for it to count.”

The color drained from Rebecca’s face. “I think we can stick to the first one.” Tugging on Wes’ arm, she led him from the lecture hall.

“That’s what I thought. Have a nice day.” She turned away because even what brief amount of amusement she gained from the interlude proved fleeting and she blinked back a fresh wave of tears. Gathering her notes together, Meredith glanced at the schedule on her cell phone. She held office hours in the afternoon and her schedule included two meetings with doctoral candidates to go over their theses.

Retrieving her purse, she felt the vibration of a second phone and sighed. She’d meant to leave it home when she came in for the early class, but some habits were impossible to break.

But I need to break them.
Carrying the private phone, to which only Sebastian knew the number, was one such habit. Her heart twisted and her lungs felt like they’d seized. The hiccup in time couldn’t have lasted more than a bare few seconds and yet she wanted to curl into a ball and cry all over again.

Her fingers itched to unzip the inner pocket and pull the phone out. Any other day, she would have rushed to do so and asked him to hold on while she jogged across campus to her office. Once inside, she’d have locked the door, settled down behind her desk and—
Stop it.

Just stop.
Slinging the purse over her shoulder and stuffing the last of her things into her backpack, she refused to answer the phone. It wasn’t any other day. Last night, after blogs broke the news of his ‘secret’ engagement, all the while another news channel featured his arrival at a posh event in Los Angeles, Meredith found she couldn’t do it anymore.

Five years of passionate interludes when he could steal away from his life, of being at his beck and call and never knowing when his security would show up to smuggle her away, it was too much.

Under her arm, the phone kept vibrating. It would pause for a few seconds and then resume. A brisk wind cut through her thin sweater and she cursed herself for forgetting a jacket. This late into autumn, winter a promise delivered at sundown, though today it felt colder than when she’d walked to her class. She was frozen by the time she reached the building housing her office.

Bypassing the elevator, she jogged up the three flights of stairs in a vain attempt to alleviate her shivers. The news forecasted a cold front moving into the area later in the day, but Meredith suspected it already arrived. Exiting the stairwell on the third floor, she spotted Terry O’Connor leaning against the wall outside her office. The retired soldier straightened the moment he caught sight of her and a look, akin to relief, rippled across his face.

“I missed you at your class and you took a different route to the office today.” Meeting her halfway down the hall, he tugged the backpack from her nerveless fingers and held out his hand for her keys.

“I didn’t realize.” Not really. She varied her routes depending on which lecture hall she needed to use, but they were all predetermined so Terry could track her as needed. Trailing him to her office door, Meredith shivered with an unexpected dread. The last time he’d shown up unannounced was after someone plunged a knife into Sebastian… “Did something happen?”

She’d made herself turn off the television the night before. A clean break was better all the way around, but what if something happened afterward? The attempts on Sebastian’s family continued to increase and worsened in recent months and, while he didn’t share the specifics, she was perfectly capable of reading in between the lines of news stories to speculate at what they didn’t say.

Terry unlocked her door and glanced inside her office before allowing her to enter. “Nothing’s happened, though I was instructed to pick up your detail today.”

Instructed?
Meredith deposited her purse on the desk. The crowded room boasted a variety of texts, some stacked ten and twelve deep on the floor next to her desk along with multiple white boards covered in equations. To the untrained eye, it probably looked like a lot of gibberish—a fact Terry pointed out on more than one occasion. Of course, he’d been to her office so many times at this point, the boards didn’t earn more than a brief glance. “By whom?”

Instead of answering, he secured her door and prowled around to the window overlooking the quad below. With two quick twists, he closed the blinds before turning to face her. “By our mutual friend. Did you misplace your cell phone?”

Relief swamped her. Their
mutual friend.
Sebastian sent Terry to check on her—most likely because she wasn’t answering her phone. If he’d called Terry, Sebastian was all right, at least physically. On the heels of her relief came resentment and its cousin, anger.

“No, I didn’t misplace my phone.” After circling her desk, she sat down then pulled her laptop out of the backpack. “I’m sorry he bothered you, but I am not planning on traveling anywhere. You don’t really need to be here.”

“I don’t mind hanging out. You’re good company and, if we’re not traveling, I can catch up on my reading.” He settled in one of her empty office chairs. “But you should check your phone.”

Booting up her laptop, Meredith mulled Terry’s advice, but didn’t respond to it. Oddly, his presence and the crinkling of the newspaper he flipped open offered the most peculiar kind of comfort. Bringing up the college webmail, she skimmed the contents of her inbox without reading it. After several minutes of pretending to work and trying to ignore the insistent vibration in her purse, she retrieved the phone.

Forty-one missed calls and a fresh round of vibration.

She sighed. Bastian wouldn’t stop. “Terry, do you mind?”

“Not at all.” Her bodyguard—despite the years of acquaintance, it still struck her as odd that she had or needed a bodyguard—rose and folded his paper. “I’m going to the coffee cart on the first floor. Do you want anything?”

“A cappuccino would be lovely.” With about three fingers of butterscotch schnapps in it, but she wouldn’t ask no matter how good it sounded.

“You got it. Lock the door behind me. Don’t leave till I come back.” It was a familiar routine, but she nodded obediently and trailed him to the door. The vibration ended and quickly resumed. After locking up, she answered the call.

She couldn’t say anything.

“Meredith?” Pure masculine sweetness poured over honeyed rocks flavored his European accent. Her pulse raced and her hands began to shake. “Meredith? Are you there?”

Falling into old patterns helped no one, least of all her.
Be strong. Don’t tumble down this familiar path
,
no matter how passionate his response
. The man never failed to melt her past reason. A band around her chest squeezed all the air out of her. “I’m here,” she managed to push out past the lump in her throat, then swallowed with difficulty. “What part of ‘we’re over’ are you not understanding?”

Silence and then a whoosh of breath from his end. “All of it.” His words grew more clipped in rebuttal. “I am sending the plane for you. O’Connor will escort you to the airport and travel—”

“No.” She didn’t dare let him finish, since his words already weakened her. Her pulse picked up at the mention of his plane and heat flooded through her body. She couldn’t see him. Maybe it was the coward’s way out, but God knew he was a fantastic lover and when they were together—yes, he focused one hundred and ten percent of his attention on her. No woman could withstand the sheer force of his personality and devotion.

But when they were apart? They were always apart. The time they did have together shortened repeatedly while the time in between visits elongated…