A Prince's Ransom: Kidnapped by the Billionaire (22 page)

Katherine’s heart thundered into her stomach at the queen’s offer. It was a bargain that meant both of their hearts were to be tied on a very flimsy string and then thrown to the dogs. She looked almost desperately to the prince.

He stared at her, his expression absolutely blank, hiding everything he was feeling. Now that the source of his rage had been removed from the room and the arrangement was off, he seemed to have lost some of his fight. “How long do we have?”

“A week.”

His blue eyes darted to her. “
A week
? To determine if she might be able to rule, when she has never had any experience with this sort of thing?!”

“A week is more than fair, Eric, considering how you attempted to keep her a secret from us until you had already managed to propose publicly.” He looked away at the accusation, but Katherine knew that he couldn’t deny it.

“Alright,” she whispered, looking at the queen. “Alright, it’s a deal. One week to see if I can be a queen, or these past two weeks never happened.”

Her voice trembled as she spoke those words, her heart was already threatening to break. She wasn’t queen material. She wouldn’t be able to prove anything in a week. But it was a week she would have with him, a week where she could say goodbye properly, instead of being forced to walk away right now.

Annette nodded slightly, apparently pleased that Katherine had been the one to agree instead of Eric, but it was pretty hard to read the woman. Maybe that was just the fact that Katherine was trying to hold back tears. “Very good. In that case, I believe your day trip is supposed to last for a few more hours, Eric?”

“Yes, we were going to have dinner here before returning to the capital.”

“Very good. Then enjoy the rest of your brief holiday, and be prepared to return home this evening so that tomorrow Katherine might begin learning about court politics properly. Oh, and make certain that other American girl knows she is not to speak of anything which has transpired in these matters. Discretion has always been at the forefront of the way we conduct ourselves.”

“Yes, Mother,” Eric agreed almost despondently, and then the king and queen turned to leave, their footsteps echoing down the hall.

Eric was on Katherine at once, wrapping her in his arms and kissing her with reckless abandon. She returned it desperately, tears sliding down her cheeks.

The darkened train car they returned in was very different than the one they had taken this morning, if only in the sense that everything felt massively different and uncomfortable. It had to be in her head, Katherine decided. It was very possibly the same train since all it did, according to Eric, was travel back and forth from the coast and the capital. Katherine and Eric sat apart from everyone else, though, with just a small light hanging above their booth to illuminate them. The king and queen sat at the other end of the car, where they patiently indulged Tara’s endless questions about the country and what ruling was like. She was probably trying to make the entire situation feel less bleak, but she wasn’t really succeeding. Élise was absolutely silent, sitting ramrod straight next to Tara and likely regretting her involvement in this scheme. She could have told her parents about what Eric was doing before it had gotten this far, and she hadn’t.

Katherine didn’t know where Brigitte was. She didn’t really care; even if she didn’t win, at least the redhead hadn’t either. But her fingers were twined with Eric’s, and she stared out the window at the rushing-by world around them with her head resting on his shoulder. He was tense beside her, his thumb making absent-minded strokes against the back of her hand.

Finally, unable to stand the silence any longer, she forced herself to speak; “Eric…” she murmured, lifting her head to try and catch his blue eyes.

“No,” he stopped her with a hard, almost harsh word, not looking back down at her. “Don’t do it, Kat.”

She sighed, the breath physically painful to her. “I have to, Eric. We both have to. We both know that I can’t prove anything to anyone in a week—especially not
this,
and not to your mother. You know that. This is all we have left to ourselves, and we…” Katherine stopped, blinking at tears.

A few hours ago, she had been determined not to let him change her mind and convince her to stay, but now it felt like a knife was being plunged into her heart at the thought of never seeing him again. She had lost him before of her own choosing, but she hadn’t expected him to follow her, to come and find her. She hadn’t expected him to care enough after she had left.

“We have to
try
,” he responded earnestly, finally looking back down at her. “Or are we truly just going to give up and let such things happen? Use this week as a goodbye and nothing more? You agreed, you said you wanted to try.”

“I didn’t want that moment in the villa to be the last time I ever saw you!” she countered, her voice a little bit choked as she struggled to keep herself from shouting. “I didn’t want to say goodbye that way. Even if you’re right that maybe I could become queen, a good queen, one who was good enough for you to marry, I… a
week
?”

“My mother is not the sort who would propose a no-win solution for you,” he muttered, as if trying to make himself believe it. “There must be some way to do it, and I won’t just give up. I won’t spend the week thinking I’ve already lost you, because we will surely be parted if I do.” His blue eyes flashed as he looked down at her, and his free hand lifted, catching her cheek and caressing it faintly. “Katherine, ma chérie, please… please don’t just give up now. You’ve only just come back to me and you’ve freed me from Brigitte, and I will be eternally grateful for that, but do you not believe
now
that I do want to be with you? That I do want to marry you? If I cared only for not marrying Brigitte, then it would not even matter to me what comes next.”

“I know,” she whispered, pressing into his touch.

“Then promise me you’ll try. Promise me you’ll give me the chance—yourself the chance,
both of us
the chance—to end up happy in the end. We both deserve that, do we not?” he implored her softly, leaning nearer and pressing his forehead against hers.

Katherine shut her eyes and sobbed softly, some part of her almost hating the earnestness in his voice when it left her feeling so damn vulnerable. How was she supposed to say no to that plea?

“I promise,” she promised, then cried against his chest.

He let go of her hand and moved his other one from her cheek, wrapping both arms around her small, slender frame and pulling her into his lap. She curled up there, still fighting tears and yet making herself breathe.

“Thank you, Katherine,” Eric murmured to her, his face half-buried in her hair.

How she wished that her promise would actually change anything, that they could end up happy, when this was all over. But she knew that was impossible. She knew that she had no chance.

The next morning, she was woken up way earlier than she wanted to be, grumbling into her pillow as Eric pulled away the bedsheets and insisted that she get up and get dressed. Tara had been returned to the hotel before they’d gone back to the palace, with whatever excuse Dr. Walker had been given—something about her being specially selected for an exclusive, private tour, she hadn’t really cared about the details at the time—and Katherine had been awake way too late because of the worried thoughts running though her head. Getting up early was not high on her priority list, but Eric was insistent.

So insistent that she only actually got up once he had resorted to tickling her until she squealed and fought him off at last, firmly awake and glowering at him. He just smirked at her and waited outside her bedroom door for her to get dressed. Something nice and formal, he told her.

She settled on a pretty, butter-yellow dress that went surprisingly well with her hair and complexion, wispy about her knees and with just thin straps on her shoulders. Eric took her downstairs to a smaller dining nook than the several she had already seen—leaving her wondering how many the palace actually had—and they ate breakfast there as he explained his plan for the week. His plan was to convince his parents that she would be able to handle being his queen, but honestly, after a few minutes of not knowing half of what he was talking about, she’d tuned him out a little bit, picking at her breakfast.

“Now, tomorrow,” he continued, having almost abandoned his own food as he spoke with conviction and animation. “There’s going to be a small parade of sorts. It was supposed to be the official announcement of my engagement to Brigitte, but since that will no longer be happening—and it was already scheduled—my parents have come up with some other excuse, since they were not supposed to be attending to begin with. You will ride alongside me to meet the people that way. We will be moving slowly enough for people to speak with us, as is the norm for parades in Montavian, but… Kat?”

The sound of him saying her name, his voice suddenly harder, made her look up again. “Yeah?”

His blue eyes narrowed at her. “What was I just saying?”

She swallowed a little bit and glanced away, still fiddling with a blueberry on her plate. “Something about your engagement to Brigitte?”

“
Katherine
,” he growled, frustrated and running a hand over his face. “You must pay attention and be prepared the next few days if we are to have any chance of succeeding in all of this. You promised you would try!”

“Right, sorry,” she mumbled. “What were you saying?”

“I was saying that there’s going to be a parade where you will have to address the people in the crowd. You will ride alongside me.”

She frowned. “But I thought you liked keeping things on the down low? Won’t putting me in that sort of public event just attract unwanted attention?”

“You will be given an alias, for the time being, so that people are unaware of your background and so you cannot be identified. I imagine your privacy is just as important to you as it is to us.”

“Okay… what alias?”

“Lady Elizabeth Sutton. A generic enough name, and you should not need to be prepared with a full background, just know the name. This is not a media heavy event so it won’t be reporters that you’re answering questions from. They should be general, about much more generic things. And I will be there to assist with anything you are unable to answer directly.”

She frowned a bit more. “Answer questions? How am I supposed to answer questions about anything? Won’t most of them be in French, and about the country? I don’t know anything about the country.”

“Which is why we’ll be spending the remainder of the day doing a crash course history and politics lesson—with Élise’s tutors.”

Immediately, she made a face. “Oh, yeah, this is going to go well… Eric, I don’t do well at school things. I can never pay attention long enough to get anything down and I’m not going to be able to learn enough to fool people into thinking that I know anything.”

“Certainly not with that attitude,” he agreed with what was almost bemusement. “But I am here to help you now, and you will learn enough for this, I promise. You may even find that you’re better at it than you think you are. Montavian has a fascinating history since we broke from France before the French Revolution, and all the uncouth ilk typically associated with it. You must only give it a chance and truly dedicate yourself to it, alright?”

Katherine sighed. “Alright…” she agreed carefully, only to lift a brow. “So, is that it? Is that the only thing I’ll need to do to prove myself to your parents, or is there more?”

“Sadly, there is more,” Eric shook his head in frustration. “The day after the parade, there is going to be a luncheon with much of the dignitaries who were present at the ball the other day.”

Her eyes widened. “Aren’t I already pretty far out with those people? I mean, I just left in the middle of the ball after getting into a public argument with you…” She trailed off, not imagining she’d really have any luck with this.

“No, because the vast majority of that argument was unheard by those who would gossip about it most strongly. I informed everyone that you left because you had taken ill—a combination of your flight and being unused to our cuisine. Certainly a few might raise some eyebrows, but for the most part, they will accept that explanation in public.”

“But they know who I am. I used my real name to get into the ball, not Elizabeth Sutton. If something goes wrong, they’ll be able to spread the truth to everyone, and…”

“It will be alright, Kat. Much of the reason Montavian broke off from France was because of our desire for some measure of privacy amongst our peers, which we continue to honor even now.”

She lifted a brow at him. “You guys are really different from every other noble court I’ve ever heard of, you know that?”

Eric smirked. “Which ought to give you more incentive to do well the next few days, as it will allow you to stay within our beautiful nation of secret-keepers.”

Anxiously, Katherine paced back and forth in front of the doors to the palace, her hands fidgeting with the satin, cream-colored cowl neck of her dress as she waited. She couldn’t do this. Really, she was pretty sure she couldn’t do this. She felt like she was going to be sick the longer she thought about it. She had stayed up until three in the morning with Eric and Élise’s tutors, trying to learn something about the country, but the most she could ever come up with was that it had been founded sometime in the early 1400s, which really wasn’t a very good array of knowledge. But none of it had
stuck
. None of it ever stuck, even when she was trying. And she had been trying. She had. Even though she didn’t think she would succeed, she had tried, for Eric’s sake.

Right now, though, she was panicking. All she could do was fret because she was waiting for the ball to drop, to make some sort of mistake and totally humiliate herself in front of his parents, ruining any chance of be with him ever again. Would Queen Annette make her leave immediately, once she’d managed that much? She knew the two of them should have just tried to enjoy the week they had been given, instead of attempting to fix this impossible scheme that would never, ever work.