Page 52 of Royal Crush
“Will your chair fit in my car?”
It wasn’t as nice as mine—because of course it wasn’t. Not when his parents stole all of his money and he’d been blackballed from the only job he’d been trained for. But it was larger than my car. “It can fit almost anywhere. It folds.”
“Right. I knew that. Uh…” He frowned, then walked around to the passenger side and opened the door, clearing his throat loudly. “Your Highness?”
“Don’t start.” I rolled closer to him and used my hands to lift my feet off the rests.
He leaned down a few inches and dropped his voice. “Sir.”
My core went hot as magma, and my breath trembled on my exhale. “Aleric,” I warned.
He grinned, and for a moment, I thought he was going to lean down and kiss me. And maybe he was, but there was a bang somewhere in the distance, and he hopped back a few feet, then straightened his shoulders, and the moment passed.
“Where are we going?” I asked as I slid from my chair to his car.
“To fix your childhood neglect,” he said. He pulled his keys out of his pocket, tossed them in the air, then caught them with a whipping motion of his arm. “You trust me, right?”
God help me, but yes, I did.
“I do.”
Fourteen
ALERIC
I was prettysure nothing about this was treasonous, but I was also pretty sure that Camillo was going to get reamed out when he got home. I had no clue how much influence his personal guard, his parents, or his brother had over him. He never talked about the king or queen and rarely spoke about the crown prince.
Cillian was a frequent topic, of course, and a frequent presence. I caught a glimpse of him in the window as we sped off, but I didn’t slow down. We were on a tight timeline. The truck was going to make its rounds near my apartment in the next hour, and I didn’t want to miss it.
The guy who sold ice cream in my neighborhood was old-school. His speaker sat on top of the truck, and the melody was like an old music box. I wasn’t sure he did much business, but I was pretty sure that didn’t matter. He was as old as dirt, and this was probably some sort of retirement hobby for him.
The only thing that did matter was that he had the classics: the cartoon shapes with gumball eyes, the lopsided, chocolate-dipped cones covered in peanut pieces, the rock-hard frozen snow cones with three muddled flavors, and heaps of sweets I hadn’t seen in shops since I was a kid.
He was one of the only places that sold the two-foot-long red licorice shaped like a rope, and God, that thing used to last me a week when I was knee-high. I only ever had enough money for one treat a week back then—back before my commercials were paying us a living wage. I’d hoard anything I got under my pillow and take nibbles of it for six days of the week.
I was currently about as broke as my parents were back then, though my first paycheck had finally hit my account now that the pilot had wrapped. I was able to pay my bills without crying and compromise, which was a nice surprise.
The thought almost made me laugh as we turned the corner near the park, which sat across from my apartment building, and I caught the look on Camillo’s face as he glanced around.
“Where are we?” There he was. The snob. Theprince.
I swallowed heavily. “I live here.”
“I—oh. I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s fine. It’s not like I don’t know it’s total shit, but it’s not as bad as it seems. People are nice here.” I pulled into the parking lot as close to the disabled sidewalk ramp as I could get without Camillo’s tag. Or…didhe have a tag?
He was the prince. He could probably stick his car wherever the fuck he wanted, laws be damned.
Putting the car in park, I turned to face him. “Getting out of the toxic cycle of child acting was humbling. Especially when I finally got access to the trust my parents had set aside for me.”
He stared, unblinking. “The trust?”
“It wasn’t a law when I was a kid, but I think they wanted to make themselves look good by setting it up and depositing a percentage of my pay in there for every film I did.” I bit my lip and glanced away from him. “It had twelve hundred bucks when the judge ruled in my favor.”
“Shit,” he whispered.
“I’m not even sure how much I made back then. According to the internet, I was worth several million. I attempted to sue them, but no lawyer would take my case. They were broke as fuck, so they wouldn’t get paid, and I’d have to prove that the money didn’t benefit me as a child when I was decked out in designer clothes and being jetted off to whatever fucking country we were filming in that month.”
