The Outlaw Prince's Captive - Holly Rayner Page 0,32

know how much I drink,” he said. “You hardly know anything about me.”

“I know you were drunk last night,” she said.

“So what?”

“I’m an FBI agent, Viggo,” she said. “I know more about you than you probably realize.”

He frowned and said nothing.

“Besides,” she added, “you’re a public figure. You’re in the press all the time. Your life isn’t exactly full of secrets.”

He downed his second glass of brännvin in a single swallow and glared over at her. “What are you getting at?” he asked.

She hesitated. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You’re saying you think I’m a drunk, is that it?”

“No,” she said. “I just…well, you do seem to drink a lot.”

“And let me guess,” he went on. “You’ve got some armchair-psychology theory as to why that is. It means I have a guilty conscience, right? It means I’ve been obsessing about the hit-and-run accident you think I caused. That’s what you’re going to say.”

“I wasn’t going to say that,” Francesca said, feeling annoyed. “But it sounds like that’s what you want to say. Is there something you want to confess to?”

He glowered at her.

She waited.

Then he sighed and set his glass down on the table beside his chair.

“I probably do drink too much,” he said.

Francesca started to object, to say that she had never said anything about too much, but then she closed her mouth again. If he was feeling up to sharing, she wasn’t going to discourage that. He made it so hard for her to find out anything about him, and she was going to make the most of this opportunity.

“It’s just…it’s what you said,” Viggo said. “I’m a public figure. I’m always being watched. People seem to think that being in the public eye ought to make you behave better, but what they forget is that you never get a break from it. I can’t be on my best behavior all the time. No matter how hard I try, I always get caught doing something that doesn’t reflect well on me.”

“That does sound hard,” she said.

“It’s different for my parents and my brother,” he said. “Living in the palace, they’re protected from the paparazzi in a way I’m not.”

“You don’t do yourself any favors by going out to different pubs and clubs every night,” she said. “Always with a different girl on your arm.”

He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter what I do,” he said. “Once, when I had first moved to New York, I went to a pharmacy near my apartment to pick up a few things, and while I was there, I helped a woman reach something she needed from a high shelf. You should have seen the articles. Who was she? Were we an item? Were we shopping for her needs or mine? There was even speculation as to whether she was pregnant with my child.” He sighed. “It was awful. And I can only imagine how awful it was for her. Her only crime was being short.”

Francesca was surprised to see him empathizing so strongly with someone else.

“I guess I started to figure that since I was going to get trashy stories written about me no matter what, I might as well have some fun,” Viggo said. “That’s when I started clubbing. At least at the club, I don’t give the paparazzi anything interesting to say. ‘Oh, another picture of him drinking and dancing!’” He snorted. “Not much they can make of that, is there?”

“I suppose not,” Francesca agreed.

“But then this hit-and-run thing happened,” Viggo said. “And it was everything the tabloids had been waiting for. Finally, a chance to smear my name again. It’s probably all over the news by now.”

Francesca waited quietly, hardly able to believe her luck. He had been so adamant that he didn’t want to talk about this. Now, seemingly without even realizing it, he had wandered right onto the subject.

She knew that if she called his attention to what they were discussing, he was likely to shut down. The best thing she could do was to sit quietly, listen to what he had to say, and hope that something useful would be revealed.

He shook his head, cradling his forehead in his hands. “I’ve been advised, in the past, to avoid reading about myself online,” he said. “But that morning, it was still very early, and I hadn’t even gone to bed yet. I’d been out clubbing and…something had happened. I checked on my computer to see if any tabloid had written about me. To see if I could