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"We have a timeline now?” Linnea asks, planting her hands on her hips. “Six months is no time at all! You have to get us out of it, Torin.”
I’m not even going to ask how she already heard about the date of the engagement announcement. She knew about the meeting, and she and I both guessed our “arrangement” would come up, so she’d made sure she was here for tea with my mother and grandmother earlier.
“It’s fine. I’ve got it under control,” I tell her, sitting back in the high-backed leather chair behind my desk. This was my father’s chair.
“How?” she asks. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to…convince him that I’m serious about the title. That Cara is my number one priority and that I’m committed and giving it my whole heart.” I’m staring at the center of my desk.
How the hell am I going to do that? What would convince him of that?
“How are you going to do that?” she asks.
I look up at her. “It would really help if you could stop being amazing. Maybe you could piss him off. Make my grandfather a little less enamored with you.”
She gives me a small smile. “Sorry.”
I roll my eyes, but I smile at her. “It’s really too bad we have no interest in one another.”
She nods. “I know. It’s annoying how much I don’t want you.”
“Not to mention how much I do want her.”
Damn, Jonah’s stealthy for a guy who’s six-four and two hundred and thirty pounds of muscle.
Jonah Greene is the big, sarcastic American who was assigned as my bodyguard when I was only nineteen. He’s been with me for twelve years. He knows me better than anyone.
And about once a week, I feel bad about making him come to Cara and leave everyone else he knows and loves for a tiny, remote, windswept island that is sadly lacking in a social scene, single women our age, American pizza, his favorite coffee, his favorite beer, bowling…okay, lots of things.
Well, I felt bad about it before he confessed that he’d fallen in love with my fiancée.
I’m still glad he’s here, of course, even if he’s not here just for me anymore. And even if I don’t really need his protection. Not only is there full-time security at the palace, but Cara is an island in the north Atlantic halfway between Iceland and Norway. Nobody is getting to me here. If there is anyone who even wants to get to me.
Still, when he’d decided to move to Cara with me after leaving me here alone for a year, I’d nearly wept for joy.
“How’d it go?” he asks.
“I have six months before my grandfather announces my engagement to Linnea,” I say.
Jonah frowns. He looks from me to Linnea and back. “Excuse me?”
“We’re working on a plan,” Linnea says.
Jonah looks at me with an eyebrow up. “Work faster.”
I chuckle. “It’s been ten minutes.”
“Yeah. Exactly. That’s about nine and a half minutes longer than I’m comfortable with people contemplating how to announce that my girl is marrying another man.”
He stops next to Linnea and rests his hand on the back of her neck in a very possessive gesture. He’s still eight inches taller than her even with her heels on. She looks up at him with a grin.
“I’m not marrying anyone else.” Her smile turns sly. “Probably.”
He gives a low growl, and I see his hand tighten on her neck. He leans in and says something in her ear.
Her cheeks get red, she swallows hard, and then she says, “Um, yes, please.”
“Good girl,” he says, kissing the top of her head before straightening.
