her bed and the coffee table, he crossed his arms. “I’m here to put an end to this.”
An end.
She could have let her legs buckle; could’ve made the sound that broke behind her lips. Instead she let his energy latch onto her. Raging, ravishing in its intensity, it held her up.
She narrowed her eyes and answered coolly, “About time.”
“Here I was,” he said, shaking his head. “Doing my best to accept that you’ve always lied to me. That you convinced Mark to lie to me.” His very presence coiled with insult. “But now I find out you’ve ordered my guards to pretend to be people they’re not around me. It doesn’t—I don’t understand—” He sliced a hand into his hair, a growl in the back of his throat. “What are you playing at?”
“Playing?” Affront pushed her across the old carpet, and she stopped a few feet from him. Days ago, she’d wanted him to believe he’d only been a job to her. Tonight, wrung thin by the whole damn thing, she was offended he’d believe that so easily. “You’re not a game to me.”
“No?” His breath lurched furiously. “Then what am I to you, Frankie? An obligation? An inconvenience? A private joke? A sucker who never—”
“My prince!” Her words cut through the air like a solvent, stripping away her anger and leaving the grain of raw emotion in her throat.
Kris looked like she’d just landed an uppercut to his chin.
Suddenly shaky, she wrapped her arms around her middle. “You’re my prince,” she said again, much quieter. “You don’t seem to realize that yet—that I don’t exist outside of this hierarchy just because we used to be friends. You’re my prince, and everything I’ve done has been to protect you.” She paused. “Your Highness.”
He took a swift, stiff step back.
“It doesn’t make sense to you now.” Her hands pressed harder against her sides. “You accuse me of being cruel, of punishing you, but I’m not. One day you’ll understand that I’m trying to do the right thing.”
His breath was sharp as he shook his head.
“You want to know why I ordered your guards to detach around you?” Damn this lump in her throat, inflamed by the scratch of her words. “Because they have a job to do. They must be prepared to make an objective, snap decision in a potentially life-threatening situation, and your tendency to befriend everyone around you could put that at risk. What could seem like a harmless conversation, a casual laugh, could make them lose focus right when they need it most.”
His lips lifted into a pissed-off-and-superbly-sexy curl.
“You once threw yourself into a bar fight in fear for my safety because we were friends,” she continued, remembering how she’d lost sight of him in that brawl—the prince she’d been hired to protect. Remembered how she’d turned her iced-gut fear into anger in the hours after. “It’s too easy to imagine you doing the same for your guards. They’ll act when your safety is threatened—and you’ll put yourself in harm’s way to help them.”
His sneer had faded into a frown.
“And I knew you’d want them to be your friends,” she said. “You’d want to draw them into your circle. Chat and get to know them. But they aren’t your friends. They aren’t supposed to be. They work for you. A future king can’t be friends with the help.”
His eyes were burning. When he spoke, his voice was so rough it seemed to catch on her skin. “Who are we really talking about here, Frankie?”
She stared him down.
They both knew she didn’t have to answer that.
Cursing, he turned his face aside—and finally seemed to notice her room. His gaze tracked across her unremarkable, unmade bed to her old backpack hanging from a hook beside the closet, then jumped to his other side, where he quickly ran out of things to look at.
Nothing labeled her as lower class as markedly as a room built in a time of the invisible servant.
She supposed she owed her gratitude to the old royal family that the staff quarters weren’t literally underground, but still, Hanna would have led Kris through the lower courtyard to get here, an architectural division between the grander areas of the palace and this sparse servants’ wing.
His mouth pulled down at the corners as he stared at her damp towel, flung over the desk. Then he looked back at her and said, “Explain why I’m deluded to think I’m innocent.”
She shouldn’t have brought that up. “It’s nothing.”