Alpha Squad. Suzanne Brockmann

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ more like Tedric, you seem more different from him than when we started. I look at you, Joe, and you don’t even look like the prince anymore.”

      Joe smiled as he sat next to her on the couch. “Lucky for us, most people won’t look beneath the surface. They’ll expect to see Ted, so…they’ll see Ted.”

      “I need this thing to work,” Veronica said, smoothing her skirt over her knees. “If this doesn’t work…”

      “Why?” Joe asked. “Mortgage payment coming due on the castle?”

      Veronica turned and looked at him. “Very funny.”

      “Sorry.”

      “You don’t really want to hear this.”

      Joe was watching her, studying her face. His dark eyes were fathomless, and as mysterious as the deepest ocean. “Yes, I do.”

      “Tedric’s sister has been my best friend since boarding school,” Veronica said. “Even though Tedric is unconcerned with Ustanzia’s financial state, Wila has been working hard to make her country more solvent. It matters to her—so it matters to me.” She smiled. “When oil was discovered, Wila actually did cartwheels right across the Capital lawn. I thought poor Jules was going to have a heart attack. But then she found out how much it would cost to drill. She’s counting on getting U.S. aid.”

      Jules.

      Be a dear, Jules, and ring the office. Veronica had murmured those words in her sleep, and since then, Joe had been wondering, not without a sliver of jealousy, exactly who this Jules was.

      “Who’s Jules?” Joe asked.

      “Jules,” Veronica repeated. “My brother. He conveniently married my best friend. It’s quite cozy, really, and very sweet. They’re expecting a baby any moment.”

      Her brother. Jules was her brother. Why did that make Joe feel so damned good? He and Veronica were going to be friends, nothing more, so why should he care whether Jules was her brother or her lover or her pet monkey?

      But he did care, damn it.

      Joe leaned forward. “So that’s why Wila didn’t come on this tour instead of Brain-dead Ted? Because she’s pregnant?”

      Veronica tried not to smile, but failed. “Don’t call Prince Tedric that,” she said.

      He smiled at her, struck by the way her eyes were the exact shade of blue as her dress. “You know, you look pretty in blue.”

      Her smile vanished and she stood. “We should really get started,” she said, crossing to the dining table. “The food’s getting cold.”

      Joe didn’t move. “So where did you and Jules grow up? London?”

      Veronica turned to look back at him. “No,” she replied. “At first we traveled with our parents, and when we were old enough, we went away to school. The closest thing we had to a permanent home was Huntsgate Manor, where our Great-Aunt Rosamond lived.”

      “Huntsgate Manor,” Joe mused. “It sounds like something out of a fairy tale.”

      Veronica’s eyes grew dreamy and out of focus as she gazed out the window. “It was so wonderful. This big, old, moldy, ancient house with gardens and grounds that went on forever and ever and ever.” She looked up at Joe with a spark of humor in her eyes. “Not really,” she added. “I think the property is only about four or five acres, but when we were little, it seemed to go to the edge of the world and back.”

      Night and day, Joe thought. Their two upbringings were as different as night and day. He wondered what she would do, how she would react if she knew about the rock he’d crawled out from under.

      Veronica laughed, embarrassed. “I don’t know why I just told you all that,” she said. “It’s hardly interesting.”

      But it was interesting. It was fascinating. As fascinating as those gigantic houses he’d gone into with his mother, the houses that she’d cleaned when he was a kid. Veronica’s words were another porthole to that same world of “Look but don’t touch.” It was fascinating. And depressing as hell. Veronica had been raised like a little princess. No doubt she’d only be content to spend her life “happily ever after,” with a prince.

      And he sure as hell didn’t fit that bill.

      Except, what was he doing, thinking about things like happily ever after?

      “How about you, Joe?” she asked, interrupting his thoughts. “Where did you grow up?”

      “Near New York City. We really should get to work,” he said, half hoping she’d let the subject of his childhood drop—and half hoping that she wouldn’t.

      She wouldn’t. “New York City,” she said. “I’ve never lived there, I’ve only visited. I remember the first time I was there as a child. It all seemed to be lights and music and Broadway plays and marvelous food and…people, people everywhere.”

      “I didn’t see any plays on Broadway,” Joe said dryly. “Although when I was ten, I snuck out of the house at night and hung around the theater district, trying to spot celebrities. I’d get their autograph and then sell it, make a quick buck.”

      “Your parents probably loved that,” Veronica said. “A ten-year-old, all alone in New York City…?”

      “My mother was usually too drunk to notice I was gone,” Joe said. “And even if she had, she wouldn’t have given a damn.”

      Veronica looked away from him, down at the floor. “Oh,” she said.

      “Yeah,” Joe said. “Oh.”

      She fiddled with her hair for a moment, and then she surprised him. She looked up and directly into his eyes and smiled—a smile not without sorrow for the boy he’d once been. “I guess that’s where you learned to be so self-reliant. And self-confident.”

      “Self-reliant, maybe. But I grew up with everyone always telling me I wasn’t good enough,” Joe said. “No, that’s not true. Not everyone. Not Frank O’Riley.” He shook his head and laughed. “He was this mean old guy who lived in this grungy basement apartment in one of the tenements over by the river. He had a wooden leg and a glass eye and his arms were covered with tattoos and all the kids were scared sh—Scared to death of him. Except me, because I was the toughest, coolest kid in the neighborhood—at least among the under-twelve set.

      “O’Riley had this garden—really just a patch of land. It couldn’t have been more than twelve by four feet. He always had something growing—flowers, vegetables—it was always something. So I went in there, over his rusty fence, just to prove I wasn’t scared of the old man.

      “I’d been planning to trample his flowers, but once I got into the garden, I couldn’t do it,” Joe said. “They were just too damn pretty. All those colors. Shades I’d never even imagined. Instead, I sat down and just looked at them.

      “Old Frank came out and told me he’d loaded his gun and was ready to shoot me in my sorry butt, but since I was obviously another nature lover, he’d brought me a glass of СКАЧАТЬ