The Prince's Devious Proposal - Holly Rayner Page 0,3

to call him?” Betty asked.

“If you do, do it on your own time,” Rick said. “I don’t want any more company minutes wasted on your love life, Naomi.” He gave the flowers such a withering look that Naomi was surprised their leaves didn’t turn brown. “Make sure you take those home with you when you go. I don’t want them cluttering up the office.”

Much to Naomi’s relief, he turned and walked away again.

“You’re going to call this guy, right?” Betty prodded her. “You need to get out, Naomi.”

“I don’t know,” Naomi said. “Something about this feels sketchy.”

But she slid the card into her pocket anyway. There was no need to make up her mind right now.

Chapter 2

She did her best to put the strange message out of her mind, but by the end of the day, she was forced to concede that that was a hopeless endeavor. There was no way she could forget about it.

The card seemed to be burning a hole in her pocket. Petr. Who was Petr? The name sounded foreign. She wasn’t even sure how it ought to be pronounced. Maybe the person’s name was really Peter and the flower shop had just spelled it wrong when making out the card?

But Naomi didn’t know any Peters, so that hardly solved the mystery.

When she left work for the day, she sat in her car for a while, not turning the engine on. She pulled the card out of her pocket and looked at the message.

Call me?

Whatever it was all about, he was completely wrong—she didn’t “get this all the time.” Nothing like this had ever happened to her before. She wasn’t even sure what this was.

And the request to call him…

She stood by what she had said to Betty. It did feel strange, sketchy. Flowers arriving at her office from a man she didn’t know. A request for her to call him. She didn’t like feeling so uncertain of what was going on.

But on the other hand, it wasn’t as if it was a mystery how he knew her. The reference to her song, “Starlight Boy,” made that pretty obvious. And he had said himself that he was a fan.

The question was, how had he come to learn where she worked?

Naomi had fallen into the habit of thinking of her music career and her current life as two completely separate things, with nothing to connect them. The things that had been everyday occurrences when she’d been younger and on tour would be completely out of place in her world now. For example, once she and the Desert Flowers had been as close as family. But if any members of the band had shown up at her office today and asked to take her out to lunch, she would have been floored.

Hearing from a fan was exactly as surreal as that was. It didn’t seem like something that should be possible. Not anymore.

Naomi West, the musician, was someone who had fans. She had gotten used to the small pocket of people who had come to every show specifically to see her, the way they would push to the front of the crowd during her set, the way the Desert Flowers’ fans would fade back to let the Naomi West fans through. She had gotten used to signing autographs at the end of the night and hearing people gush over her as if she had done something superhuman, something much more remarkable than simply playing a few of her songs.

Naomi West, the office worker, was someone different. She was someone who could hardly even be considered a fan of herself. She didn’t stand up for herself with her boss, and she felt trapped in and suffocated by a job she hated.

Suddenly, her mind was made up. She pulled out her phone.

This message was weird; it was true. But it seemed to be offering her a chance to have just a little bit, just a taste, of that old life back.

It was as if her life had been in black and white for the past six years, and now somebody had given Naomi the switch that would turn on the color.

She dialed the number on the card and waited as the phone rang.

“Hello?” a voice answered.

The speaker was definitely foreign. Naomi didn’t recognize the accent. Could it be German? It seemed a little more fluid than that, but she couldn’t place it.

“Is this…Peter?” she asked.

“Yes, this is Petr.” The way the man pronounced his own name sounded more like the