Princess Wanted - The Complete Book Set: An Alpha Billionaire Prince Trilogy (2 page)

“Why would you assume I’ve never heard of it?”

“You’re American, aren’t you?”

Luke’s mannered English made it hard to tell if he was joking or not: everything he said sounded oddly deadpan.

Emma took a moment before answering. “I know the dung pile is gone for now but there will be another one tomorrow.”

“I said the wrong thing?”

Emma nodded firmly. “You seem to make a habit of it, and I’m not convinced by this ‘oh, my English, she is not so good’ routine you use to excuse it. I’m guessing you were educated in England?”

“Yes.”

“Well, the one thing they do know in that country is how to be cripplingly polite at all times, whether they mean it or not. Try that.”

“Actually,” Luke corrected, “What they’re best at is insulting you
whilst
being cripplingly polite at all times.”

“You haven’t mastered it.”

“Sorry.”

Again there was silence, as they listened to the oddly soothing sound of Tosca’s breathing.

“For the record,” Luke spoke again, “you don’t have a stocky frame. You have a very nice frame indeed.”

“And calloused hands?”

“I have an excellent moisturizer, if you would like.” That time Emma could hear that he was making a joke.

Tosca snorted in his sleep and Emma started, instantly on the alert.

“Is he alright?” asked Luke.

“I think so,” said Emma. The elephant’s breathing had settled back into its normal rhythm. “Maybe he was having a bad dream.”

“Why do you have to stay with him?”

Without knowing it, he had asked a question that was really more about Emma than it was about Tosca. “I don’t, I suppose. I just feel better being here. I don’t want him to feel alone.”

“Do you think elephants mind being alone?”

Emma shrugged. “They travel in herds. So… Maybe.”

Luke nodded. “Makes sense. And being alone certainly… No one likes being alone. Especially when there are people around.”

If the question he had asked moments before had been more about Emma than Tosca, then that last sentence had been more about himself. However much of a driving force altruism was, people came to the Bamboo Trust for a reason. If you want to do something good with your life then there are a million and one things you can do in your own country - traipsing to someone else’s usually indicates something else going on. Which wasn’t to say that you didn’t care about the work you were doing, but still.

Certainly Emma recognized the need in herself to get away from stuff back home. She had started to measure her life in bad relationships: a month here, two months there, a single ill-judged dinner one evening. As her friends, paired up, married off and started producing offspring, Emma remained forever single. She had boyfriends - more really than she cared to count - and yet still felt single. She never felt that she was
with
any of the people whom she was dating. There was nothing wrong with them, or at least nothing tangible, and yet… And yet. For a long time she had been willing to write it off as the always tricky search for ‘Mr. Right’ - about which so much is written and so many bad movies are made. But at a certain point you maybe had to stop to wonder: is it just that I’m ‘Miss Wrong’. ‘You’ll know it when you feel it’, all her friends told her, but that sounded to Emma like something people said just to make her feel better. She was an attractive woman, there was no shortage of men interested in her, and it was not that she was not
interested
in them. But no more than that. She could not put a word to what was missing, but something was.

Looking back on it, her twelve-year-old niece announcing that she had a serious boyfriend had probably been the final straw.

It was not that Emma had imagined that she would find whatever was missing from her life out in Thailand, it was just that sitting at home alone in a New York apartment made it easy to brood on such things. Brooding was not an option when an elephant’s life was at stake. It put things in perspective, and it did not give you the time to think.

All of which is by way of saying: Emma knew exactly what Luke meant when he talked of being alone surrounded by people.

“Thanks for the food but you don’t have to stay.” Emma handed the bowl back to Luke.

“You’re not going to bed?”

“I don’t want to leave Tosca.” Or perhaps she didn’t want him to leave her.

There was a brief silence as Luke took this in.

“I’ll stay up with you,” he said finally. “Three is more like a herd than two.”

“If you want,” said Emma.

Luke sat down beside her. He looked down at the elephant that lay between them. “You know, the more I look at him, the more he looks like a Tosca.”

In the days that followed, Emma learnt more about Luke as the two of them nursed the sickly Tosca, but nowhere near as much as he learnt about her. In search of adjectives to describe Luke, Emma would have picked ‘arrogant’ almost unhesitatingly (despite their burgeoning friendship, she was still resolute in not really liking him), and yet, for someone arrogant, he was surprisingly reticent about himself. Oftentimes, Emma would ask some simple question about where he grew up, his family or some such, and half an hour later would realize that she had been talking about herself for all this time, without having learnt a thing about Luke. He had a way of turning questions back upon the asker, but did it so subtly that Emma did not even notice when and how he did it. Or perhaps she just liked talking about herself. That was a disturbing thought: it was all very well calling Luke arrogant when her only subject of conversation was herself.

The more Luke evaded Emma’s questions, the more Emma fired them at him, the more she wheedled, and the more she coaxed. She also began to extrapolate her own theories about him, from whatever mediocre scraps Luke inadvertently let slip, and had by now come up with some pretty wild ideas, mostly revolving around Luke being a fugitive from the law. But the most plausible of those theories was that he was a Hollywood movie star, researching a role (or possibly hiding out from intrusive fans and/or media; she hadn’t made up her mind yet). For herself she was not a big movie-goer - and certainly not a mainstream movie-goer - she did not read tabloids or gossip magazines and so might easily fail to recognize a big star if she met one.

One conversation particularly seemed to lend credence to her theory. They had ventured into a nearby town with some other volunteers to have a beer. It was very important to Emma that they went
with other people
- the two of them going together would have been… well, it would not have been right. But in the event, they ended up at a table by themselves, while the other volunteers sat as a group (Emma was not sure how that had happened) and they found themselves talking about wealth.

“I just don’t understand it,” Emma said. “How can a person with that much money sleep at night? Knowing what poverty there is elsewhere in the world (and you can’t live in the world today and not be aware of that), how can they be comfortable with that much money? How do they sleep at night?”

Luke shrugged. “How do you sleep at night?”

“Under a mosquito net surrounded by the faint smell of elephant that I can’t seem to wash off.”

Luke laughed. “Yeah;
this
month. But next month you’ll sleep in a New York apartment, in a bed that cost more than the houses of everyone in this bar.”

Emma stared at him in disbelief. “Are you seriously trying to compare me to some Russian Oligarch or multi-millionaire?”

“Why not?”

“Why not?! Okay, I’m not impoverished, but they’ve got an
obscene
amount of money.”

Luke swirled his beer in its bottle, “‘Obscene’ is a word, the definition of which changes depending on who you talk to. You have a bed that costs more than a house. You want to ask around here and find out if anyone thinks that’s obscene?”

“But…”

“You are wealthier than anyone here by the same order of magnitude by which that Russian Oligarch is wealthier than you. You’re just as bad. The only difference is scale. It’s not your fault: you were born in a country where that sort of wealth is commonplace and there really is very little sense in beating yourself up about it, you just thank your lucky stars and do something. You came here: great. But you don’t know what the oligarch is doing. When you’re done here, you’ll go back to your life in New York and the fact that you came here will not have harmed your life one iota. You’ve given nothing up.” He took another gulp of beer. “The truth is that yeah; the oligarch, the uber-wealthy in general, should do more - of course they should. But so should I, so should you, so should we all, and that being the case I think that criticizing other people looks… actually, it’s not that it
looks
hypocritical - it
is
hypocritical.”

Emma took all this in for a moment before speaking. “That was a pretty snotty speech for someone who has a crush on me.”

Had she not been drinking - more pointedly, had she not been drinking for the last two hours - she would never have said it. She had never said anything like that to Luke before; it had never been an issue, there had never been anything but animosity between them. She had not even thought about the statement before saying it. Was it true? Did she really think that? Well, it was out there now.

Luke looked across the table at her with a small smile on his face. He finished his beer and placed the empty glass down on the table with purpose before speaking. “Yes. I suppose it is.”

Which seemed an awful lot like confirmation.

But the point was: someone who argued so eloquently (and with such frustrating logic) for the point-of-view of the rich, presumably had a certain amount of money themselves, and movie stars numbered among the uber-rich. It was somewhat specious reasoning, but it was possible; even plausible.

Still, the thing that made the movie star theory most plausible was Luke himself. His quietly understated charisma had an old Hollywood, Cary Grant-ish quality. And of course he had movie star good-looks. It was easy for Emma to imagine him striding across a screen in some historical blockbuster, stripped to the waist, his bronzed muscles gleaming… At this point she usually shook her head clear of the image and reminded herself that she did not like this man. Whether he had a crush on her or not (and despite his telling response in the bar that remained unproven), she categorically did not have one on him. What brought them together was no more than proximity, and a shared interest in the fortunes of a baby elephant.

Tosca remained the focus of their relationship, but not for the best of reasons. In an ideal world he would have swiftly got better, and perhaps then Emma and Luke would have gone their separate ways to work on other projects within the Bamboo Trust compound. There was something more than a little sad about the fact that their friendship had grown only because a baby elephant was dying. As things stood, Tosca was not getting better.

“It’ll be tonight,” said Mike McGill, and even Mike had the empathy to say it with a measure of gravity. “Make or break.”

Emma looked down at the little elephant. “Tonight.”

“One way or the other,” Mike continued. “The fever will peak or break.”

“Fifty-fifty?” asked Emma.

“More like seventy-five - twenty-five.”

Emma tried to force a smile. “You couldn’t have sugar-coated it for me?”

“I did.” It was tough, but Mike knew from experience that giving false hope was no kindness. He had seen this happen enough times to know that preparing a person for the worst was the best way. “I’m sorry,” he added.

Emma looked down at Tosca. She hand known him barely two weeks and yet now his survival seemed the most important thing in her world. “Shouldn’t have named him.”

“Probably not,” Mike agreed. “But, it’s a hard way to learn the lesson.” He looked around. “Where’s Luke?”

Emma gave an exasperated snort. “We’re not joined at the hip.”

“Not yet,” said Mike. “If I was placing a bet (and I have – there’s a pool. If you’d like to tweak it my way that’d be great.), I’d say tomorrow.”

“I have already made my feelings on this subject clear,” said Emma. “And what do you mean there’s a pool?!”

“I told you: things get dull around here,” Mike explained. “People will gamble on anything. Livens things up. I mean, I’ve no idea who started the pool…”

“It was you, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. Like I said: tomorrow would suit me. If you two can manage to keep it in your pants until then.”

As he tended to, Mike turned and strode off without allowing Emma to give the angry reply on the tip of her tongue. She was sorry to see him go: an argument about Luke was just what she needed to keep her mind off Tosca. Poor Tosca.

“What’s the word?” Luke hurried up.

“Tonight,” said Emma.

“One way or the other?”

“Yeah.”

Luke nodded grimly. “He’s a fighter. He’ll pull though.”

“His odds aren’t good.”

Luke frowned, his acquired English temporarily failing him. “People are betting on this?”

Emma shook her head. “No. Not on this. They’re… well it doesn’t matter what people are betting on. Bunch of idiots who don’t know what they’re talking about. Bunch of… It doesn’t…” The words subsided, and without meaning to Emma found herself in tears.