Page 17 of That Prince is Mine
“Fuck you,” Gabriel muttered, dropping back down on the sofa. “Just delete the damn thing.”
“I will… as soon as you agree to stake out the café on the afternoons I have lectures,” he bartered.
Michel wasn’t about to allow this mortifying faux pas to derail his plans to get to know Emma. Not when the brief conversations he’d had with her enchanted him. She was refreshingly frank, unquestionably intelligent, and funny as hell. And the contradiction between her confidence and shyness intrigued him, enough to make him forget everything but the need to spend more time with her.
He’d never met anyone like her. She made him feel like a different man—maybe the man he would be without the weight of the crown. He had to get his first date with her. If his intuition proved correct, he would do everything in his power to secure the next date with her, then the next, until he convinced her to spend a lifetime with him.
“Christ.” His cousin shook his head. “Why do I have to suffer because you’re an utter failure at dating?”
“I’ll make an excuse to send Sophie over to you.” Michel swirled his drink, observing his cousin from the corner of his eyes.
Gabriel went eerily still for a moment, then gave him a firm nod. “I can take next Wednesday.”
Sophie and Gabriel? Michel slowly lowered himself onto an armchair next to his cousin. Very interesting. Perhaps there was more than one happy ending on the horizon. Filled with hope and determination, he raised his glass, and his cousin mirrored his movement before they both downed their drinks.
Michel cracked one eye open at the insistent nudging against his arm. He promptly squeezed his eye shut when the sunlight streaming into his bedroom pierced his brain like a white-hot laser.
“The least you could have done was bring Antoine with you,” Sophie said. “I am not your personal assistant. It isn’t my job to wake you up for school.”
Michel sat up with a start, then grabbed his head with both hands. “God. What in the…”
Sophie picked up the empty cognac bottle from the floor with a grimace. “You boys have outdone yourselves.”
“Where is Gabriel?” he rasped.
He reached for the water decanter on his nightstand and drank straight from it. He wasn’t at the palace. No one would be horrified by his poor manners. As for Sophie, she was made of sterner stuff.
“He left as soon as the sun came up.” Sophie scoffed. “At least he had the sense not to leave in the dead of night.”
“You don’t have to worry about him.” Michel gingerly swung his feet off the bed. “He’s smart. He can take care of himself.”
Without responding, Sophie walked out of his room and returned, pushing a room service cart. She removed the lids off the plates, revealing piles of soft scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast.
“You can pour your own coffee, Your Highness,” she said, pushing a thermal carafe toward him. “If you didn’t refuse the butler assigned to your suite, I wouldn’t have to serve you food at all.”
“And risk him catching you call me Your Highness?” He massaged his pounding temples. “This—my time here, my anonymity—is important to me, Sophie. More than you know.”
“I do know,” she said, her face softening with sympathy. With an awkward cough, she made a show of checking her watch. “If we leave here in an hour, you’ll make it to your lecture on time.”
“Thank you.”
His royal guard responded with a grunt and stepped out to the living room with long, confident strides. Alone with his breakfast, Michel poured himself some strong, dark coffee and gulped it down like the nectar of life. Then he dug into his breakfast like he hadn’t eaten in a fortnight.
Once the coffee cleared his head and the hearty food settled his stomach, Michel took a hot shower to wash off the last traces of hard drinking. Other than a faint headache behind his eyes, nothing remained of his hangover as he pulled on a white dress shirt and cinched his sleeves with the cuff links he’d tossed on the nightstand.
Dressed in a pale gray suit with a burgundy tie, Michel headed for USC with Sophie. Once they arrived on campus, she melted away into the crowd of students and staff, and he got to be just your average visiting professor—someone who blended in with everyone else. It wasn’t real and it wouldn’t last, but he’d be damned if he didn’t enjoy every minute of his reprieve.
He smiled at some wide-eyed students who recognized him—as Professor Chevalier, of course—and nodded at a familiar faculty member as he passed her on his way to the Center for International and Public Affairs. But for the most part, he walked through the sunlit campus without notice. It was fucking glorious.
And after his lecture, Michel intended to enjoy his glorious reprieve by blending in at the hotel café until Emma showed up again.
CHAPTER NINE
“Everyone is talking about him,” Sarah said, tugging Emma into the crowded auditorium. “Even the coldest cynic will be singing about global harmony by the time they leave one of his lectures.”
“Are all visiting professors such big deals?” Emma managed not to get elbowed in the ribs by a group of eager college students racing for the last empty seats. As curious as she was to see what all the fuss was about, being trampled by a swarm of overexcited undergraduates wasn’t her idea of a fun time.
“Not all of them. But this one is so passionate about international relations.” Sarah wiggled her eyebrows.
