Her Bodyguard Read online

  My eyes fall on another note, and another, and another.

  You're fucking gorgeous

  You're funny as hell

  Your biting wit

  Your driving skills (just kidding, your driving is pretty atrocious)

  This is some kind of joke. This has to be a practical joke, because I was just told that he's gone. But my heart is insisting it's not a joke, doing that beat-skipping thing again and racing a million times faster than it should.

  There must be hundreds of notes, each with something about me written on them – and one in the middle of the bed. I don't see it immediately because I'm too focused on all of the rest of it.

  When I pick it up, I recognize the napkin right away. I take in a sharp breath.

  He saved the napkin.

  The man saved a napkin from the bar where I crashed the car. It was when he used his day off to teach me how to drive.

  Alexandra,

  I didn't mean a lick of the shitty things I said to you, and I never should have said them. I thought I was doing the right thing at the time.

  But I couldn't go without making sure you knew all of the things I love about you.

  I know you hate the L word, but you made me love it. So fuck it, I'm using it.

  Anyway, here's my favorite thing about you:

  You are who you are – unapologetically.

  So that makes three hundred eighty-two things I love about you. There’s only one thing I hate, and that’s that you’re not in South Hollow with me.

  Max

  48

  Max

  I should hate all of it. I should hate the L word and the over-the-top gesture and how fucking schmaltzy and romantic it is. I should hate the way it makes my heart feel like it's going to burst and crack into a thousand pieces at the same time.

  Most of all, I should hate the way I don't hate a single bit of it.

  I thought I was doing the right thing at the time.

  It all hits me at once. My father somehow convinced him to say all of those horrible things to me. Max would only have done that if he thought it was the right thing to do, if he believed that he was protecting me.

  This is my father's doing, and Max's leaving is my father's doing.

  I start pulling sticky notes from the bedposts and the desk and the chair and the walls around my room, yanking them down frantically until my hands are filled with notes. My heart racing, I burst out of my bedroom and run for my father's room.

  I thought I was livid when they brought me back here from the safe house, but that was nothing compared to how angry I am at my father right now.

  At my father's residence, I don't even bother to buzz the intercom. Glaring at the bodyguard by the door, I order him to let me in.

  "Let me see if the king is accepting visitors," he says primly.

  "I'm not a visitor," I snap, elbowing my way inside as soon as he begins to open the door. I shrug off his grasp. "Get your fucking hands off me!"

  My father and Sofia are inside sitting on the sofa. My father looks up at me from his glass of scotch and waves away the security guard behind me. "Hello, Alexandra."

  "You kidnapped me and kept me at a safe house so you could have him sent away!" I yell. I toss the sticky notes at both of them, watching as they scatter everywhere. "That's what he left! You didn't even let me say goodbye!"

  My father gives me a dark look. "You'll kindly remember that you're addressing the King of Protrovia and not one of your peers," he states flatly. "Keeping you for twelve hours at a safe house for your own protection is hardly kidnapping."

  I want to scream.

  "Where is he??" I ask. I want to hear my father say it in his own words.

  Sofia looks at my father and then at me. If it wasn't Sofia, I'd almost say I was seeing sympathy in her eyes, but that can't be true because the woman hates me.

  "I expect that right now he's likely back in America," my father says casually.

  "Why??" I ask, and my voice cracks as I try not to cry. "Why would you send him away?"

  "You're really going to ask me that question?" My father looks at me with no remorse in his eyes. "You are a princess, and this little dalliance could not continue."

  "Because he's a commoner??" I ask in disbelief.

  "He's a commoner and he took advantage of his position," my father replies.

  I point at Sofia. "She's a commoner! You're marrying a commoner! Albie and Belle declared their love publicly, and Belle is a commoner!"

  "They're not you," my father bellows loudly.

  "You're always so disappointed in me," I yell back. "I'm the princess who was never good enough to be a princess, so why do you care who I love?"

  "You're my only daughter!" he yells. "He's not good enough for you!"

  "Not good enough for me? He's too good for me!" I scream back at him, words beginning to overtake me. "He's loyal and stable. He's so fucking stable that I thought he was boring, so boring in the beginning, but he's not. He's real and he's not fucking pretentious and he cares what happens to me and I hated him from the very beginning… except I don't hate him anymore. I love him."

  I stop short, gulping air. I've never spoken that word out loud before, and it hangs in the space in the room, foreign-sounding to my ears. But it's true.

  I love him.

  Sofia interrupts, her hand going to my father's arm. "These are what he left you, Alex?"

  My blood is pounding in my ears as adrenaline races through my veins. It takes me a moment to register that she actually called me Alex for the first time. Not Alexandra.

  "Hundreds of them, all over my room," I choke out. I threw them at my father and Sofia in a fit of rage but I'm now I'm panicking because suddenly they feel much to personal for her to read, too much like I'm baring my soul.

  "These are things …" Sofia's voice drifts off as she looks at the notes. "These are all things about you."

  "Three hundred and eighty two things about me," I say, my voice trembling.

  "Leo," Sofia says, her hand going to her mouth. "These are things you should see."

  "I don't need to see whatever this is," my father blusters, but then he picks up one of the notes and brings it close to his face, reading aloud. "You're so difficult…"

  I bark a laugh. Only Max would list that as something he likes about me.

  "…In the best possible way," my father finishes, his words slowing. He picks up another note and reads it aloud. "You're layered. Wall upon wall upon wall to keep people away, but when you let them in, your heart is incredible."

  Tears well up in my eyes, and I open my mouth to tell my father that he can take my crown and shove it, but then I hear Sofia sniffle.

  Sofia the Ice Queen… sniffles.

  For a second, I completely forget everything else in the world and I just stand there gaping as she dabs the corners of her eyes with her finger. Is she crying??

  "These are true," she says, her voice soft. "The things about you … they're true."

  Um … say what?

  "You're in love with him?" my father interrupts.

  Sofia keeps going. "Do you know how rare that is?" she asks, her expression softer than I've ever seen. "He sees you for who you are. He sees things that other people consider flaws, and to him they're lovely."

  Oh, God. I'm going to start crying in front of Sofia and my father.

  "Are you in love with him?" my father asks again.

  But I'm focused on what Sofia is still saying. "I saw how you'd changed, you know," she tells me. "Since he'd started working here."

  I laugh bitterly. "You mean you noticed how I'd become less of a train wreck?"

  "I noticed that you started to seem happy," she says. "When you confessed that you were sleeping with your bodyguard, I thought that he was the one responsible for all of the ways you'd started to change on the outside, but…"

  "But?"

  "Now I think he just allowed you to show everyone else more of who you always were, the sides of yo