in the same city.
When I arrived in Orlo, I was even more exhausted than I had been when I sat down in my seat. I hadn’t been able to sleep a wink on the flight, though everyone had told me that I should—as if it was the simplest thing in the entire world to just close my eyes and drift off to sleep while I was thousands of miles above the ground I usually walked on. Plus, I was also feeling incredibly nauseous again.
Thank God my seat was right next to the bathroom. I felt like I’d spent about half of the flight in it, never quite getting sick but feeling like I might be at any given moment, and not trusting the walk back to my row.
Come to think of it, that might have been the reason I didn’t get much sleep.
When I walked off the plane and into the airport, though, I started to feel a bit better. It was a small airport—for a small nation, I assumed—but it was incredibly bright. The whole thing was painted in reds and yellows and greens, and there was festive music playing throughout the place. This must have been a popular destination in Europe, because as I walked through the crowds, I could hear people speaking not only Spanish (which I assumed they spoke here, given how close it was to that nation), but French, English, and German.
I made my way to customs where the guy glanced at my passport, then lifted an eyebrow.
“American?” he asked, in accented but very clear English.
“Yes,” I said, relieved. “Sorry, I don’t speak any Spanish.”
He gave me a mostly comforting smile. “You will be fine. Orlo is a hub of international import. Most people here speak English as well.”
“Thank God,” I muttered, feeling some of the tension in my stomach ease.
That was just the language tension, though. The finding-Francisco tension was definitely still there. As was the figuring-out-what-we’re-going-to-do-about-our-relationship-and-baby tension.
As it turned out, the whole finding-Francisco part was easier than I’d anticipated. All I did was jump into the first cab I found at the curb of the airport and thrust the tabloid at the driver, folded open to the picture of the house where Francisco lived.
“Do you know this place?” I asked.
The cabbie gave me a look that would have been, in Chicago, accompanied by a question about whether I was actually insane.
“Sí, señora. That is the royal palace.”
My mouth fell open. “What?”
Another look from the cabbie, and those looks were getting more and more narrow in the eyes. “The royal palace. Where Francisco and Javier de la Laros live. Our prince and king. You… do know that we have a prince and a king here, correct?”
Well, of course I did. I was having a kid with one of them. I just hadn’t thought that he actually lived at the royal palace.
The truth was, though I’d had the picture right there in front of me, with an article below it, I hadn’t actually read it. I’d been in too much of a hurry, and too anxious by the time I was on the plane. So I’d come here under the assumption that Francisco had a house of his own, and it was really big and impressive.
It had never occurred to me that he might still live in the royal residence. With his brother.
“Yes, of course I know,” I said weakly. “Can you… Can you drive me there, please?”
The driver nodded, cast one more suspicious look at me in the rearview mirror, and then took off, proving that no matter what country you were in, the cabbies drove the same way: Fast and reckless.
Thankfully, it only took us about ten minutes of that sort of driving to reach what I assumed was our destination.
“This is where I drop you off,” the cabbie said firmly.
I looked out the window, surprised that we were already there, and saw that we weren’t actually there. Not at all. In reality, we were in front of some sort of ticket booth on the road. I glanced past it and could see the palace in the distance.
“You can’t drive me all the way to the house?” I asked, knowing it was going to be hard for me to walk that far with how I was feeling.
Another doubtful look from the driver. “It is the royal residence, señora. We do not exactly drive up the circle and drop tourists off at the front door.”
Tourists. Of course. He had no way of knowing that