Page 17 of Royal Pain (His Royal Hotness 1)

“Tonight.”

Fuck. Of course it is. “Tonight doesn’t work for me.”

“I heard. Those pesky Americans, always getting in the way. Tell the ambassador hello from one of his citizens, will you?”

“I’ll be sure to do that, right after he kicks my ass at billiards.”

“He’s a pool shark?” she asks, incredulous.

“You have no idea. He annihilates me every time we play.”

“So why do you still play with him?”

“Diplomacy, obviously.” I grin. “And because I’m determined to beat him one day, considering I’m a pretty decent pool player myself.”

She laughs then, and it lights up her whole face, makes her even more beautiful than she usually is. “Seriously, when can I take you out?”

“I’m working the rest of the week.”

“Every night?”

“Yeah.”

“How about lunch? We could—”

“How about you call me in a few days and maybe we can work something out.” She arches her brows. “I assume you’ve got my number?”

It’s not the answer I’m expecting or that I want. It’s certainly not the answer I’m used to when I go through the trouble of asking a woman out. “Am I getting the brush-off here?”

“You sound so shocked.”

“More like disgruntled. I—”

She cuts me off. “It’s not the brush-off. It’s the let-me-think-about-it.”

“What’s there to think about?”

Before she can answer there’s another knock at the door. I glance out the window, notice that it’s Lucas who’s missing this time. They sent in the big guns.

“Really?” Savvy follows my gaze with a wry look of her own. “That’s the argument you’re going with?”

I give in then, partly because I don’t have it in me to hassle an unwilling—or even uncertain—woman and partly because she’s right. Dating me is a lot, especially right now, and I owe her the chance to think about it.

“I’m going to call you. Every day until you say yes.”

She smiles. “You can do that.”

; “I am going to do that.” I lean down, drop a fast, hard kiss on her lips. “And I’ll start by texting you right now. Just in case you want to call me.”

Chapter 6

“What do you mean you still have no leads?” the king demands late the next afternoon, his closed fist hitting the thousand-year-old table that fills up most of my father’s private conference room. “It’s been thirteen weeks since the crown prince disappeared and not one of our intelligence agencies has been able to find out anything? Are you all incompetent?”

The heads of our security council and main intelligence agency exchange uneasy looks. Not that I blame them—every day we sit through these damn briefings hoping, praying, that there’s a break in the case and, except for the first week when we were all still in shock—my father has never let any emotion show. This one untethered moment of fury is both unexpected and unsettling to everyone in the room.

Including me.