Total pages in book: 88
Estimated words: 82317 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 412(@200wpm)___ 329(@250wpm)___ 274(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 82317 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 412(@200wpm)___ 329(@250wpm)___ 274(@300wpm)
“What is this going to be?” I ask, breaking the quiet and staring from my cheek’s perch on his chest across the room to a horrid piece of wall art I hadn’t noticed before. And because my words are blunt, they seem to boom around us.
Jackson doesn’t even flinch. Quite the opposite, he gives me a slight squeeze. He doesn’t shift so that we might look each other in the eye, but I don’t sense withholding in his tone. “It’s just this, Camille. Amazing sex for the rest of this trip. You in my bed every night. The same conversation and laughter we’ve had. Discussion about your life and mine. A friendship but with benefits for the rest of the trip, and then we return to Bretaria.”
It sounds so simple, so many things we don’t say but that are obvious. We have an expiration. Seven more nights together and then I go back to being a full-time princess and I take another step toward my sealed destiny. Jackson returns to the United States and goes on with his life.
We can be nothing more—we are from vastly different worlds. I can’t give up my destiny and what’s expected of me. Jackson is an American with a career he loves. There’s no way he’d ever give that up to stay in Bretaria and become a prince. Besides that, my father would never approve of the match. Jackson, while an amazing man, isn’t up to royal snuff, or at least I can hear my father saying so.
I hold my sigh of disappointment and try for my cheeriest voice. “It’s like a summer fling … but in the winter.”
“Technically, it’s summer in Bretaria,” Jackson comments.
“But we’re in the States where it’s winter,” I reply, and just that simple banter between us means neither of us is going to talk about this further.
Jackson made clear what this is. I agreed by accepting it as a fling.
Now I know what to expect. Now I can operate within those bounds, and I’m going to lock my heart behind a wall of stone and steel and concentrate on the physical pleasure we can give each other.
Seven more days.
CHAPTER 17
Jackson
This is it … Camille’s last day in the States, and then we’ll head back to Bretaria tonight at 6:30 p.m. via San Francisco, Sydney, and then to her home island.
I’d thought about not even making the return flight. Once in the air and with stops only for refueling and to change pilots at the airports with private, protected tarmacs, my services aren’t quite needed. I thought of broaching the subject with Dmitri a few days ago, but fuck if I could bring myself to do it.
I simply wasn’t willing to let go of those last twenty-four hours of flight time with her. It may only be sitting in a chair across from her, discussing politics or society or the Kama Sutra.
It could be spent in that private bedroom of hers, but that’s probably not going to happen with Paul on the flight. While we’ve managed to keep our affair secret, acting aloof with each other by day and tearing up the sheets in her bed by night, sex on the plane again is just too risky.
Unless Paul were to fall asleep. The man does go under hard. I could sneak in a quickie.
I shake my head, pushing those thoughts away. I’m on fucking duty right now watching Camille, and I can’t let my focus falter.
Granted… we’re alone, and she’s surrounded by no fewer than five security agents both in this room and just outside the exit points.
We’re in the Holocaust Museum in DC, and Camille is slowly moving through the last few exhibits. She studies each one carefully. When she watches video footage, she cries.
There are no other tourists in here with her, and that’s because we had to do some last-minute scrambling to arrange a private tour. Yesterday, Dmitri called me with some disturbing information.
Interpol has been picking up more chatter about the assassination plot on King Thomas. Not with necessarily details as to when and where, but the frequency of talk is alarming, occurring daily now for the last week. Within all the coded words, a phrase was decrypted that seemed to indicate Camille could be a target. It was veiled in what would appear a benign conversation to an ordinary person listening in, but those who’d been tracking the conversations between these men for weeks knew they weren’t gardeners.
The call originated in Turkey where two men who had been under surveillance discussed gardening—particularly trees. They discussed how to handle a diseased tree, and that the root must be left intact but that you had to take out the main diseased branches and even those surrounding it that might not actually be diseased but had to go nonetheless so the rest of the tree could flourish. Their conversations discussed hiring a gardener to handle the issue.