Playing Dirty (A Bad Boy Sports Romance) (24 page)

Chapter 6

Andrew

It was at a leisurely eleven-fifteen the following morning that I was lulled into full wakefulness by the light coming though my curtains. The previous evening hadn’t been an especially big one, but I’d stayed up pretty late, playing poker with two under-butlers and the stable-boy—who had turned out to be a seventeen year old hustler and had walked off with the pot—and so the opportunity to sleep until a reasonable hour was most welcome, especially in contrast to yesterday when I’d been woken by that bloody vacuum cleaner.

“Good morning, your Highness.”

I blinked my eyes fully open and sat up in bed, somewhat surprised to see Keira, respectfully attendant beside my bed, a feather duster in her hand. If she was still angry about the day before, then she showed no sign if it; her demeanor was cool, calm and collected.

“Good morning.” The absence of antagonism between us made me oddly uncomfortable. I was more at ease when we were scoring points off each other or being thoroughly unpleasant, because I’d found that hot as hell, and I wondered if that said something about me as a person—if it did, then what it said was clearly nothing good. “No vacuum today?”

I couldn’t resist it. I was aiming to get a rise out of her, to remind her of the previous morning, because if I could make the conversation a bit more adversarial, then I was sure I would feel more confident. I wasn’t used to feeling even the slightest bit insecure when I was semi-nude in front of an attractive woman—in fact it was a situation in which I was usually at my most cocky. I didn’t like the tables being turned.

Not one bit.

But Keira didn’t take the bait. Indeed, she didn’t seem to even notice that the bait was there. “I didn’t want to wake your Highness,” she said demurely. She indicated the table by the window. “I laid out breakfast for you. If you would prefer to shower and dress first, I can keep the food warm, or I’ve laid out a robe for you if you would like to eat now.”

Her voice seemed almost devoid of emotion, as if she had consciously surrendered her personality to better deal with my shitty behavior.

“I’ll eat now, thank you,” I said, trying to sound as polite as possible. I went to get out of bed then thought better of it. “Could you pass me the robe, please?”

I couldn’t help it. This was how I woke up every morning, and I didn’t want a repeat of yesterday; flashing my erection for the world to see. Well, if Keira counted as ‘the world’, that is.

Keira complied with the same bland obedience, picking up the royal blue robe and passing it to me, then turning her back so I could put it on without worrying about offending her—something which had not bothered me yesterday at all, but today rather did.

My mother had spoken to me yesterday afternoon in somewhat heated terms, and although she’d made no mention of specifics, I’d assumed that it was a consequence of my conduct with Keira that morning. Now I wasn’t so sure. If Keira had squealed on me to the Queen, then surely her behavior would be cockier—she’d got one over on me. If I’d been in her position then I would’ve flirted outrageously in the knowledge that nothing could be done about it.

But perhaps that was the point: she wasn’t me. Not everyone looked for a way to rub their success at a task in the other person’s face. It was odd, because whether Keira had spoken to my mother or not, her behavior right now was a far more effective chastisement to me than any telling off from my mother could’ve been. The fact that she was acting maturely, and that she had put the events behind her, just went to highlight how childishly I’d been acting. One way or another, Keira had won, and I found myself at a loss as to figuring out how. She was an impressive woman, to be sure.

I realized that was probably the first time I’d thought of her as a ‘woman’ and not merely a ‘girl’.

With my robe tightly secured to avoid any embarrassment, I crossed the room to eat my breakfast while Keira set to work making the bed up with fresh sheets after stripping the others. Try as I might, and though I knew it was partly what had got me into trouble yesterday, I couldn’t stop my gaze from wandering over to her. But today I wasn’t leering, today didn’t feel like voyeurism—I was simply watching a beautiful woman. I wasn’t sure if that distinction would be apparent to a third party, or would be to Keira if she spotted me, but I knew it existed. There was more to Keira than I’d been looking at yesterday, and I found myself thinking back to our first meeting in that bar yet again.

Of course I’d initially approached her because she was an utterly stunning woman with a great body, but there’d been times in the ensuing conversation when I’d found myself genuinely lost in what she was saying to such an extent that I almost forgot what a great body it was. That was really something for a guy like me to say, considering my history. Yesterday I’d certainly been focused on that body, just like my regular old self, but today I looked at the same body and saw something else, and I found my conduct of twenty-four hours ago to be quite contemptible. Not least because it’d made me miss something so much more than sexuality. There was something about Keira. It wasn’t just how she looked, how she acted or what she said—it was something more, something about her, something intangible and indescribable that I’d never seen in any woman before.

I thought back to our conversation at the bar, and how she’d spoken so passionately about her studies and future plans. She really was a wonderfully determined person, and I admired that a hell of a lot—so many other women I met weren’t at all passionate about their futures and basically had no ambition. But not Keira. In the short time I’d gotten to know her that night, she’d made it clear that she wasn’t the sort of woman who saw men as financial plans and never cared about their own careers. She was independent, and she’d proved that by temporarily moving halfway across the world and getting a menial job, just so she could see all the art she’d always dreamed of before properly pursuing her long-term career. That took real passion, determination and guts, especially seeing as she’d done it alone.

The only thing I’d ever been that passionate about was getting drunk and getting laid...and yet I was apparently the one who came from a higher station in life.

What a load of crap.
Keira was well above me, whether she knew it or not.

Without meaning to, and without even realizing that I was doing it, I’d fallen into staring. As Keira finished making the bed, she looked up and noticed my stare for the first time, and I quickly turned away.
Shit.
Had she thought I was perving again? Trying to see up her skirt? Leering at that admittedly fabulous body? I thought I saw a flicker pass across her face, but it was too quick to identify as a specific expression, so I figured I must’ve imagined it.

“Sorry,” I muttered, my eyes returning to my breakfast. I felt a million miles from the man I’d been yesterday morning. It was utterly bizarre, the effect her quiet humility had on me.

“Will that be all, your Highness?” she asked. If she’d been offended by my stare, then she made no sign of it, and there was no hint that she might run out like she had yesterday. Perhaps, and I wondered if it might be too much to hope, she’d recognized the difference in my gaze this morning to that of the previous morning. Who could say?

“Yes, thank you,” I said, oddly flustered and almost fumbling over my words; something else that’d never happened to me before. “In fact, go. My room is already spotless, and there’s nothing I’ll be needing from you today. Tell Rogers I said you could take the rest of the day off.”

“Oh, thank you, your Highness. That’s kind of you, but I’ve been told to attend to other duties around the residence when I’m not serving you.”

“I see. Well...er…I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” I said, somehow already missing her even though she hadn’t left yet. “Promise I won’t get mad if you vacuum again,” I added in what I thought was a lighthearted joke.

Even that excited no reaction from her, and as Keira headed out the door, I paused to wonder what I’d created.

As I’d been thinking just moments ago, the Keira I’d met in New York was a feisty and independent woman, and that was the woman who’d woken me with a vacuum cleaner yesterday morning. But the woman who’d just left my room was a very different one: deferential and so devoid of personality that I almost worried she’d been replaced with a cyborg. Of course it was possible that this change had been brought about by something else that’d happened to her yesterday, but it was hard for me to think that it was anything other than my arrogant, asshole-ish behavior. She’d clearly made the decision that in order to continue working here, alongside me, she’d have to retreat into herself and present a blank face to the world. She couldn’t be herself in the same room as me, at least not with the master and servant relationship we had as a result of her job.

That
was most likely the larger problem. If it was just ‘me and Keira’ then she would have bit back at me. I was sure of it. But the fact that I was Prince Andrew, the fact that I was her boss now—that made the difference. She couldn’t bite back, so she hid. The curse of being born into royalty had struck again.

None of that particularly excused my conduct, but still…

This wasn’t what I’d planned when I assigned Keira to be my personal maid. I’d thought…oh hell, right now I wasn’t all that sure what I’d been thinking at the time. Something stupid no doubt. I suppose I thought it would be fun, and I’d certainly planned to try and get her into bed. But there was more. Thinking back to that girl who’d batted back my quips and banter in New York, I’d hoped for more of the same; someone I could have a real laugh with. Someone who didn’t take things too seriously, and someone I could have real conversations with. But our current working relationship made that difficult, and then I’d taken advantage of that relationship and acted like a total douchebag yesterday, which had made it utterly impossible. I’d used my status as her employer to put her in a compromising and uncomfortable position for my own pleasure, and that wasn’t cool. I’d acted like a total and utter prick.

It was probably to my credit that I recognized the wrongness in what I’d done; in how I’d treated someone who was my employee, but as always, I only recognized these things after the fact, when it was far too late.

My life badly needed an erase and rewind button.

I could now see that if I genuinely wanted a relationship with Keira, then I should’ve assigned her elsewhere in the house and gotten to know her in a different context. Getting to know her via my bedroom already defined the relationship in a certain way.

Wait…stop.
I frowned, stopping with a forkful of bacon frozen on its way to my mouth. Had I just used the word ‘relationship’, even in the space of my own private thoughts?

Yes.

I definitely had.

Of course that word could be misused and had many possible meanings, but in context there was no doubt that I’d been thinking about a romantic relationship—one of those things that forbade casual sex and prefixed settling down, having kids and wearing comfy slippers around the house. That sort of relationship was the sort that I’d spent my life avoiding and had planned to continue doing so for the foreseeable future.

For any heir to the throne there was tremendous pressure to marry, but I’d always hoped that my serial sleeping around habits would make me such an unattractive possibility as a husband that I might avoid such a fate. Now I had, without any pressure or prompting, used the word ‘relationship’ and found myself unavoidably upset that I’d totally screwed up any possibility of it with Keira.

Shit.

What the hell was it about this girl?

Chapter 7

Keira

There’d been a few men in my past of whom my friends had said, ‘
He’s not good enough for you’
. But—and this was important—they’d only ever said that
after
the relationships had ended. This might’ve been polite tact on the part of my friends, but I really didn’t think so. ‘
He’s not good enough for you,
’ was just something that friends said in that situation, because it was so much more comforting than, ‘
Wow, I can’t believe you let him get away, you’ll never do any better’
.

No one wanted to hear that.

The point was, I didn’t think I’d ever been in a relationship—even a short, ill-advised one that seldom left the bedroom—with someone who was genuinely ‘not good enough’ for me. I’d always made sound, sensible choices in who I dated, probably because I’d had a hectic, troubled home life when I was young, so I’d searched for stable relationships to make up for that. I’d always gone for solid, dependable and, above all, decent men. Nice guys. Men who were ‘good enough’ for any woman.

And yet I was single.

Of all those sensible, well-chosen men, I couldn’t think of one who I could’ve seriously imagined spending the rest of my life with. That suggested strongly that the problem was within me; I was attracted to the right sort of men, but, ironically, the right sort of men were apparently the wrong sort of men for me. It was hard to know what to make of that.

Many times, I’d seen couples on the street and thought: ‘
girl,
what the hell are you thinking? Have some self-respect
.’ You didn’t have to be out on the streets of New York for long on a Saturday night to see some beautiful girl, immaculately dressed, hair neatly done, making a real effort, walking alongside a low-browed idiot in a vest and ripped jeans with his hand on her ass, loudly making sexist, demeaning comments and checking out every other woman that walked by, not even realizing what he had in the woman who was already on his arm. I’d always been grateful that I’d ended up living with Sarah during my college years, because Sarah didn’t make mistakes with the men she dated. As she was so fond of saying,
she
was the mistake that men made.

The whole ‘bad boy’ thing—the idea that a man who was lazy, rebellious and disrespectful was in any way attractive—had always completely baffled me, and I wanted no part of it. And so I’d only ever dated men who were sensible, who played by the rules, who were responsible with money and who never tried to sneak a peek down my top when I bent over.

And yet I was single…

There was something very irritating about that, about having done the right thing and seemingly getting no reward for it. What was more irritating was that there was a lingering part of me, a part which I tried hard to deny, which thought that if a man didn’t at least try to sneak a peek down my top, then it was a bit of an insult to my breasts. Sort of like:
why isn’t he trying
?

I was willing to admit that this made me seem very hard to please, but that was probably because I
was
very hard to please in some ways. I was resolute in my desire for a man who respected me, but that didn’t mean that he shouldn’t also be attracted to me and want to get his hands on my goodies. Why wouldn’t he? I wanted a man who played by the rules, but that didn’t mean he shouldn’t stretch them every once in a while. I wanted a man who acted like a grown up, but that didn’t mean he shouldn’t, every once in a while, push a grocery store trolley down an aisle, jump on the back and yell ‘whooo!’

Basically, I wanted a man who was a mass of contradictions in just the right amount. Was that really too much to ask?

Even as I thought it, I knew it was. I was definitely too hard to please, and I needed to lower my standards.

The reason that these issues were currently on my mind was, of course, because of Prince Andrew. Although I’d preferred him as Drew Ellis, I had to admit that Drew had no more been my usual ‘type’ than Prince Andrew himself had proved to be. Drew Ellis wasn’t the sensible, stay-at-home type, he was the bad boy, and that made me the type of silly girl who hooked up with someone because of his rebellious attitude, rather than because he was good husband material. It was a stupid thing to do, and yet when I thought back on it, I couldn’t help thinking that the brief time I’d spent with Drew was more exciting than the time I’d spent with pretty much every other boyfriend I’d ever had. In my search for someone dependable and stable, I’d perhaps gone too far the other way. Did dependable and stable have to mean boring? Could a person not be dependable, stable and dangerously exciting?

There was that desire for contradiction again…but was it really such a contradiction?

For a moment there, in a bar in New York, I’d really thought that Drew Ellis might be that elusive contradiction, that he could be sensible and stay-at-home, while at the same time being thrilling and unpredictable. Perhaps it had only ever been a dream, and Drew Ellis was nothing more than a construct in my head, extrapolated from an hour’s casual conversation into my ideal man.

With a strange shock, I realized that I missed him. This man who’d never really existed but had been a baited hook to get me into the sack had been the closest thing I’d ever met to my dream guy.

Jeez, wasn’t that just a bit depressing?

Perhaps that was why I’d taken a vacuum cleaner to the Prince’s hangover on my first morning here, and why I’d done so with such vengeful glee. He’d robbed me of something that had only previously existed as a shining idea in my mind. He’d robbed me of a perfect man, and of a future with that man. He’d robbed me of Drew Ellis. For that, he had to be punished, and it’d been petty as hell, but he totally deserved it.

I couldn’t help thinking back to a conversation I’d once had with Sarah, not long after we’d met. I’d asked if there’d ever been anyone special in Sarah’s life, assuming that there couldn’t have been, given her man-eating ways. But Sarah had become strangely quiet and answered in a few awkward words: ‘
Yes. He got away. I guess I never really got over that. Hence...
.’

That ‘hence’ said a lot. In the absence of the man she’d loved, any man would do, and that was Sarah’s life. Don’t get me wrong; she loved her life…but that one loss blighted it, and I wondered if that was how I might end up, following the loss of a man who’d never even existed.

I’d been thinking these things whilst strolling down the servants’ staircase, and I emerged, if my memory of this part of the house served me correctly, near the Long Gallery.

There it was.

I beamed—I was actually starting to settle into this thoroughly intimidating place. I was a little early for my meeting with the Queen, but given our meeting yesterday, I knew that the genial monarch wouldn’t mind if I let myself in to look at the paintings for a few minutes before she arrived, so I strolled over to the door and opened it.

“What do you think you are doing?” Prince Michael had a voice that cut through the air like a diamond through glass.

“I was just…” My earlier confidence rattled by Michael’s sudden shout, I found myself floundering.

“You shouldn’t be here. You have a job to do.”

“I—”

“Don’t answer back! Don’t you know who I am?”

“Yes, but I—”

“You just don’t know when to leave it alone, do you? Now tell me, what are you doing here?”

“So you do want me to answer?” I asked.

In hindsight, that was probably not the smartest thing I could’ve said. On the other hand, I’d done nothing wrong. Prince Michael was behaving like a grade-A jerk, and the sight of his face turning red as he sputtered with over-boiling anger was worth whatever consequences might result.

I guess I’d recovered some of that lost confidence.

“How dare you speak to me like that!” he snapped, not waiting for an answer before continuing. “What are you doing here?”

“Her Majesty said that I could see the pictures in the Long Gallery.”

“Poppycock!” he said. It was hard to make the word ‘poppycock’ sound threatening, but Prince Michael more or less managed it. “Sneaking around in places where you shouldn’t be, then telling lies about it. I suppose I shouldn’t expect any different from my brother’s little plaything.”

Whatever sharply witty rejoinder I might have planned, it died on my tongue at those words.
His brother’s little plaything
? What the hell was he talking about?

“I…I’m not…”

“Don’t play dumb with me,” Michael said, delighted to have regained the initiative and found my weak spot. “You think it’s a secret? Why else would my brother hire some clueless American bitch as his personal maid? It’s not like it’s the first time he’s done it. You’re not from here, and as a result you obviously haven’t got a clue how to do the job you were hired for, but you’re happy enough to give him the ‘job’ he really hired you for. That’s my brother all over, too lazy to go into town to visit his latest whore, so he installs her under the same roof.”

Browbeaten, shell-shocked and with no idea what to say, I could only suffer through the Prince’s words. For all I knew, it could be true—or at least, that could’ve been Andrew’s intention at some point.

“So I ask again,” Michael continued in acid tones. “What are you doing here? Are you meeting him? Got bored of his room, did you? Is that it?”

“She’s meeting me.”

The sound of the Queen’s voice, redolent with regal authority, made both Michael and I jump. Her Majesty really did have a way of creeping up on people unheard. Prince Michael’s mouth first hung open, then snapped shut, then yo-yoed up and down with uncertainty of what to say next.

“Keira and I had an appointment to view the paintings in the Long Gallery,” Queen Constance continued in level tones. “She may be a maid, but she just so happens to have a degree in fine arts, as I discovered yesterday, and I wanted her to educate me on a few things…if that’s quite all right with you, Michael.”

Prince Michael’s face turned scarlet. “Yes. Yes. Gosh. Quite all right.”

“Oh, good,” the Queen said, her voice now thick with sarcasm. “I’m glad. Now perhaps you’d like to apologize to her?”

“Er…of course.” Michael turned to me, his expression a mixture of anger and forced congeniality that made him look as if unseen hands were pulling his face in different directions. “Sorry,” he muttered through clenched teeth.

“That didn’t strike me as particularly heartfelt,” the Queen said.

He gritted his teeth. “I’m
very
sorry.”

“Nor did that, but I suppose it will have to do. Now, Keira and I are already running late and I don’t wish to deny her the tour any longer, so we’ll be getting along.”

“Yes, of course,” said Michael, clearly relieved that this was apparently the end of the matter.

“But you and I will be discussing this later.”

“Yes, of course.” Suddenly Michael looked a whole lot less relieved. “How—if you don’t mind me asking—how long were you standing there?”

The Queen didn’t answer but merely walked past him to the door of the Long Gallery. “Come, Keira.”

I followed her, and the door closed behind us.

“Thank you,” I said.

“I apologize for my son,” she replied, looking quite irritable.

“It’s fine. He didn’t know I had permission to be here.”

“You didn’t tell him?” asked the Queen.

“I…how long were you standing there, your Majesty?”

The Queen arched an eyebrow. It wasn’t quite as effective as Rogers doing it, but still made its point well. “I’d like to know why both you and my son seem so keen to know the answer to that. And I suspect that when I find out I would rather wish that I hadn’t asked. Are you going to tell me why it’s so important?”

“I think I’d rather not,” I replied quietly, not wanting to lose an ally in the Queen but not wanting to report rumors about Andrew either.

“And if I ordered you?”

“Are you ordering me?” I asked, tentative and anxious.

“No,” she replied. “I think I trust you. I also think that you are protecting my son. Although why you’re doing so, I cannot imagine—he won’t thank you for it.”

“I think he said some things in the heat of the moment that he didn’t mean and shouldn’t get in trouble for that.”

It seemed as good an explanation as any.

The Queen inclined her head. “He’s in trouble anyway. Makes me wonder what worse things he might have said. But I will respect your wishes. We all have to live together after all, and it is nicer if we can do so in harmony. We all say foolish things from time to time. God knows I wouldn’t want to be judged for what I’ve said in anger. Anyway, shall we return to a more pleasant subject?”

We began to look at the paintings. Like so many art lovers and students before me, I’d always been fascinated by the ‘below stairs’ pictures of Velazquez. Great artists painting status symbols for the great and good, and particularly the monarchy, was all very common, but they so rarely used their gifts to portray the under-classes of their time—presumably because there wasn’t much money in it . Velazquez’s paintings of some of the servants of the Hapsburg dynasty in Spain were well known, but these similar paintings of servants working for the British monarchy of the time were fantastic, and I hadn’t even known they existed until now.