on what I’d done. Or, as it turned out, what Javier’s contract said.
“Immediate deportation,” the woman who had entered my cell said, her voice monotone, her eyes on the paper in front of her. “The charge is drunk and disorderly, and for that we’d usually leave you in this cell until you sobered up. But the kingdom of Tarana has a contract on you, with specific instructions about what to do if you’re found.”
She looked up and met my eyes, hers looking at least a little bit apologetic for the news she was giving me. “I’m afraid your brother didn’t leave a lot of flexibility on this, Prince Francisco.”
“Don’t call me that,” I told her quickly. “No one calls me that except my mother. Usually when I’m in trouble for something. How long do I have?”
She shook her head once. “No time at all. Your brother has already chartered a flight. You leave for home this afternoon.”
This afternoon. Shit. That definitely didn’t give me enough time to get back to Erika’s apartment and explain to her what was going on.
And though it surprised the hell out of me—mostly because it had never happened before—the thought of leaving her without at least explaining what had happened, or who I was, sent a pain shooting right through my stomach and up into my chest area.
I’d never cared about a girl before, and I wasn’t entirely sure how she’d managed to get under my skin over the space of two days. But there’d been something about her—something that I didn’t have the words to identify—that made the thought of leaving her in the lurch like this…
It made it hurt. Even worse, there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. Because I didn’t have her phone number. I hadn’t bothered to get it yet.
I’d thought I would wake up this morning, make love to her again, and then discuss what we were doing next on our tour of Chicago. And now, instead, I was being flown home without even knowing her last name, or how to contact her again.
Chapter 10
Erika
I watched the door close behind the cops and Francisco, and then rushed to the window to see them shuffling him, rather carefully, into the cop car, and paused for long enough to consider how bad my luck actually was.
It fucking figured. I’d just spent a weekend with a guy that was in trouble with the law.
I mean yeah, he was probably the best-looking man I’d ever laid eyes on, and, surprisingly, one of the most sensitive. Definitely one of the smartest. And he’d been terrific in bed.
What was more, he’d wormed his way into my heart in a way no one else ever had before. He’d gone from being the annoyingly hot guy who had fallen asleep in the bar to someone I’d actually looked forward to waking up to, all in the space of about twenty-four hours. And then I’d spent another twenty-four hours with him, and I’d gotten in over my head even deeper.
And then the cops had shown up to arrest him and dropped the oh-so-subtle detail that he was a freaking prince!
I took one more look at the cop car—now driving away, I assumed headed for the police department—and then darted toward my room for clothes.
I got dressed in a hurry, and then rushed through the process of making coffee. Five minutes later, I was sitting down in front of my computer, my mind already on the first search I was going to run for this guy who was evidently a prince and also a guy who fell asleep in dive bars—after having fired the guy who I now suspected was a whole lot more important than I’d realized.
His brother’s man, indeed. What exactly did that mean?
My first search, which I ran under the pretty simplistic wording of ‘Prince Francisco,’ turned up everything I thought I needed.
Because it turned out this guy was famous. More than that, actually. He was infamous—which was a word I’d always read in luridly exciting articles and never had a reason to use in real life. It was a word reserved for gangsters who stole millions of dollars and did terrible things. Kings who killed all their wives. Soldiers who did insane and completely awful things during battle.
It was also reserved for, it turned out, playboy princes who evidently made entire careers out of international hijinks.
The first article that came up was about Francisco running around Paris, attending every party in town, hooking