Free The Surprise Princess by Patricia McLinn

going on.”
    “I don’t admit anything. You’re being— Where are you going, C.J.?”
    “Gotta call Carolyn. Got a question to ask her.”
    ****
    He asked about the kids first, as always. They were fine.
    “How’d you like a set of wooden salad servers from the gift shop, Carolyn?”
    “You didn’t call to ask about wooden salad servers. Why are you distracted, C.J.?”
    “I’m not distracted.”
    “You’re calling me
before
a game.”
    He conceded the point by dropping it. “I, uh, I had the strangest notion today.”
    “Oh?”
    “Yeah. Sitting with Katie talking. And Brad came up.”
    “Yes.”
    “Yes, what? Yes, as in yes you heard me and want to know what comes next? Or yes as in confirming what I was thinking but hadn’t said yet so you had to be reading my mind again?”
    “The latter.” Only then did she chuckle a little.
    “That’s a hell of a complication, isn’t it? I mean if she is, you know, what Hunter Pierce thinks she is, what the hell happens then?”
    “I suppose that’s up to them.”
    ****
    They ate Sunday breakfast with the team – happy after last night’s last-second victory in a game they hadn’t been expected to win. The team boarded the bus for the return to Ashton, while Katie and Brad headed to the early matinee game of a junior college tournament.
    She read stats to Brad as he drove.
    “That’s the last one,” she concluded.
    “There’s no reason you shouldn’t want to be noticed more, Katie.”
    She should have made up players to keep him from switching to this topic. “Not again—”
    But she was too late. He was already going on. “Want to know the first time I noticed you?”
    “No.”
    “I mean really noticed you. Of course I’d noticed you the way any man notices the new girl in his environment the day you started, but—”
    “I was not a girl. I was—”
    “Girl.” His firmness overrode any argument. “With that sweater you always wore.”
    “It gets cold in the office.”
    “The gray shroud. You might as well add some fruit or birds and it’d be what a grandmother—”
    “
Grandmother?
” Though to tell the truth, she’d heard that before.
    “—would wear. Not
my
grandmother. But some grandmothers. Though Andy might be hurt to hear your tone of outrage at being likened to her.”
    She glared. He returned it with an expression of blue-eyed, guileless innocence. Lying with a look. The man was a bald-faced look-liar.
    “Anyway,” he said evenly, “what we were discussing before you derailed my train of thought was when I first noticed you.”
    Dignified silence might be her best option.
    “It was a couple months after you started in the basketball office. You’d smoothed out that mess with the travel office, and we already knew we couldn’t function without you. And—”
    He made a turn, and she hoped they were getting close to the tournament site.
    “—I saw you out walking on campus. On the paths.”
    “I’m on campus a lot. Especially then, since I was taking classes.”
    Another turn, this time into a crowded parking lot.
    He nodded, cruising aisles for a spot. “So now you’re wondering what about you being on the campus paths made you so noticeable, right? Has you worried, huh? Well, I won’t keep you in suspense. It was how much you didn’t want to be noticed. Stood out like a neon sign in the middle of a park. There were all these other students and staff and faculty streaming along, each one perfectly willing to be noticed and some of them doing their damnedest to grab attention.” He pulled into a space. “And then there was Katie Davis, working so hard to not be noticed that she barely let herself even be
on
the paths. I think if you could have melted into the grass you would have.”
    She felt the strangest urge to laugh.
Don’t draw attention
. Her parents had drilled that into her … And perversely it drew the attention of Brad Spencer.
    She closed her purse, unhooked her seat belt. “Fine. I’m an