the table for him.
Javier stared at me for another long moment, sizing me up. Then he put a hand over mine, where it was still resting on his wrist, and leaned forward. “I hope that’s true,” he murmured. “Because I’ll be watching to make sure.”
Then he got up and left, leaving me sitting behind him and passing someone at the door to the kitchen. Someone with a tray full of food and the promised tea.
I watched him go… and then tucked into the food, my mind on Javier’s visit—and the fact that it was obviously meant for me, and not for Francisco himself.
Not as a warning, I didn’t think. But because Javier wanted to see whether he thought I actually loved his brother. That was what I’d seen in his eyes. The possessiveness of an older brother over his younger sibling.
He wanted to make sure I wasn’t just using Francisco for a title. He wanted to be sure that I actually loved his brother. And he would be, I had no doubt, watching.
I didn’t know how long we would have to prove ourselves for. But I knew that the pressure was most definitely on. If I’d thought that getting here would be the end to this particular journey, I’d been incredibly wrong.
I still had to jump through the right hoops, evidently. And I had to get Francisco to jump with me if we were going to convince his brother and get him on board with the idea of our relationship.
Chapter 29
Erika
Orlo, it turned out, was a fairy-tale city. And Tarana itself was much the same. Though I guessed I shouldn’t have been surprised by that, as this was a nation still ruled by a royal family. Real-live princes, and all that.
That first day, I had a tense discussion with Francisco over breakfast—well, second breakfast for me—where we decided that Javier was evidently more interested in seeing the proof or our relationship than actually talking to either one of us.
After all, he’d barely given me room to make my little speech. And I wasn’t really sure he’d even bothered to listen to it.
“He’s never believed that I would find someone who could entertain me enough to make me want to settle down,” Francisco had told me over his croissant.
I’d reached out and taken his hand. “In that case, I suppose we’ll just have to show him that you have.”
An answering smile from him, a quick question about whether I was ready, and he’d whisked me away from breakfast and out of the house, into a very small, very red sports car.
“Where are we going?” I’d asked.
He’d turned to me with a smile. “You showed me around your city,” he’d said. “Now, it’s my turn to show you around mine.”
And so we’d started a week of touring. That day, we drove down the coast, which was breathtakingly clean and starkly beautiful, in a way I’d always thought the coast of California must be. The ocean was bluer here than I’d ever imagined it could be, the cliffs darker, the rocks tumbling down them… well, tumbling harder, I supposed. We’d driven with the top of the car down, laughing as we tried to shout conversation to each other, and had ended up in a restaurant far from town.
And as we ate, staring out over the expanse of ocean in front of us, we’d talked about all the things we hadn’t really gotten to talk about back in Chicago. His childhood, and mine. My love for music—which he’d brushed up against but had never really heard too much about—and his dreams about starting a charity for orphaned children. When dinner ended, we decided that it was late enough that we didn’t particularly want to drive all the way back to the city.
So we’d stayed in the hotel that was attached the restaurant, using Francisco’s name and stature to guarantee what I thought had to be one of the most highly sought-after hotel rooms in the entire country. We’d made slow, passionate love to each other—several times—and then fallen asleep staring up at the stars from the balcony, and woken to the sunrise the next morning.
And then we’d taken off again.
Francisco had grown up in Orlo, and knew every twist and turn of the place. I saw his favorite bookstores, drank tea in his favorite cafés. We saw a movie in the theater he’d gone to when he was young, with his brother, and we ate in the best restaurants. We did a tour of