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She laughed. “Oh Matteo, you’re adorable. Okay, tell me what you sent.”
“I sent a text that I meant sarcastically. I immediately worried that perhaps it wouldn’t be taken as such, so I followed it up with the emoji of the little face winking. My intent was to convey the fact that the previous text had been meant in jest.”
“Sometimes sarcasm doesn’t always come across the way you intend in print, so an emoji can help with that. So it sounds like you handled it perfectly, at least for an old person. A-plus, brother.”
“But then she never replied. So I’m concerned that the spirit of my message wasn’t conveyed.”
“She?”
That was an oversight. He should have left it vague. “The recipient of my message was a woman, yes.”
“Are you texting emojis to Cara?” Martina practically shrieked.
“No,” he said immediately. Even he could hear what a terrible liar he was.
“Matteo.” Her voice had softened. “I wouldn’t worry about it. One of the other norms of texting is that you don’t necessarily have to close out a conversation, especially if you’ve already communicated whatever it was you needed to communicate.”
“I did that. We made arrangements for... a meeting.”
“Great. So don’t worry about it. You’re fine. You can go on your date with Cara without any worries—on the emoji front anyway.”
“It’s not a date!”
Except it was, wasn’t it? Or at least he wanted it to be.
“Yeah, okay, Matteo, I gotta go. Enjoy yourmeeting.”
He hung up feeling marginally cheered about the emoji situation and headed back into the workshop.
“I have to go at two, I’m afraid,” he said to Kai. He had brought most of the things he’d been storing in his apartment over here, and they were mostly done wrapping and packing the nonperishable items into baskets, but he still had piles of books as well as some small items like candles in his living room that needed to be hidden away so Cara didn’t see them.
“Do you ever think you’re getting too busy to keep doing this?” Kai asked.
He did. He thought that all the time. “I can’t abandon the project. Too many people count on these baskets.” He paused. “I’m sorry so much has fallen to you this year.”
Kai shrugged. “I don’t mind. I’m just wondering again whether we might need another body next year.”
Matteo’s first thought was that Kai was right. But then, next year, Cara wouldn’t be here doing... Well, he’d been going to complete that thought with his usual reflexive idea that she was here to destroy Morneau and/or Eldovia. He was no longer sure that was what she was doing—or had ever intended to do.
Regardless, things would be significantly less busy next year, when Cara was not here. When she was on to the next thing.
That would be good.
Right?
Cara didn’t generally get nervous in the line of duty. No matter how harrowing a job became, she was usually able to separate herself from it emotionally, which in turn meant that the stakes never felt high enough to freak her out.
But she had never had to tell a literal king that the CEO of his family’s company might be fleecing him.
She would be a lot less on edge, ironically, if she had hard evidence that Noar was fleecing him. She hadn’t heard back from Tonya yet, so all she had now was the attempted purchase of shares from board members and a hunch that there was more behind it.
When she rounded the corner in the palace that would take her to the king’s library, she found Matteo. He was standing beneath a giant wreath—the palace had even more Christmas décor on display than when she had last been here.
She wondered if they did mistletoe in Eldovia. But then she wondered why she was wondering. It wasn’t as if she was going to be doing any under-the-mistletoe kissing while she was here.
“Hi.” The greeting came out a little breathless.
“Are you nervous?”
