Free Royal Games (The Royals of Monterra) by Sariah Wilson Page B

let him know he couldn’t send me flowers and fix my truck. That it wasn’t okay for him to be living in my guesthouse and to basically be infiltrating my life. That he was turning into a stalker. A gorgeous, tasty, brilliant, charming stalker, but a stalker nonetheless.
    Mostly, I wanted to ignore him, but Sylvia had raised me better than that. “They’re doing scenes from Romeo and Juliet , and some other plays. Love stories and fairy tales, that kind of thing. And it’s not just scenes from plays. It’s a talent show, so there’s singing and dancing and other stuff.”
    He was standing too close. I swear he did that on purpose. “What’s wrong with fairy tales?”
    So he’d picked up on the disdain in my voice when I’d said those words. “There’s nothing realistic about them. If you lose your shoe at midnight, you’re just drunk.”
    For a second I thought he was going to put his arms around me. I must not have been far off because he put his hands in his pockets instead, like he was making himself not touch me. Or maybe I was wildly conjecturing. It had been known to happen. “You didn’t used to feel that way.”
    His voice sounded pained. But he was right. It was unfair that he knew practically everything about me, even my deepest, darkest secret. But the reverse was not true. I hadn’t even known who he really was.
    Sarabeth had apparently worked up enough nerve to approach us. She stared at Rafe for a moment, and I couldn’t blame her for her nervousness or her adoration. Finally she blurted out, “I, uh, know, um, who you are.”
    “So do I,” Rafe responded, his lips rising up slightly at the corners. I could see from her expression that that was not what she had intended to say or how she’d intended to say it. He so dazzled her that she’d stumbled over her words. I had so much empathy for her, because it still happened to me and I was around him all the time.
    “Oh. Okay then.” She appeared flustered. “Uh, Miss Brady sent me over here to get you.” Nicole stood by the balcony set and waved Rafe over.
    “Duty calls,” he said, giving my shoulder a squeeze. That sensation traveled down to my heart, squeezing it too.
    Stop it, I told myself for the billionth time. He hurt me. He humiliated me . My traitorous heart still sported the scars from his betrayal and lies.
    Nicole put Rafe to work on a different set. I saw him pull out his phone, and if I had to guess, I’d have said he was on YouTube looking up how to hammer in a nail. Because there was no way he had ever done that before in his life. Instead he put on some music, plugging in his earbuds. Then he went to work on that scenery like he had been building things his whole life.
    My mouth might have been slightly agape. I had a strong temptation to confront him and ask him how exactly he knew how to build things. But Nicole intercepted me as I walked across the stage. “You don’t want to be with him, so let him work. Leave him alone.”
    “For your information, he’s the one not leaving me alone.” I ignored the fact that I had been on my way to talk to him.
    She ignored it too. “You want him to leave you alone? Then send him a message. Go out with someone else.”
    I had grown up with the boys in this town. They were either already involved with someone else or I’d known them for so long it would be like going out with a brother.
    Then she managed to land on the one exception. “Isn’t that Tommy Davis back there?”
    Tommy Davis. He was that guy from high school who was always called by his first and last name together, mainly because I never knew him very well and we were basically strangers. He was sitting in the back row of the auditorium, texting on his phone. I remembered that he had a younger brother who was still in high school. He must have driven him and was waiting around for the rehearsals to finish.
    My sixteen-year-old self had harbored a massive crush on Tommy Davis, but since he was Brooke’s