Little did they know they were looking the wrong way.
If Hugo hadn’t yet discovered his bride was missing, he soon would. Search plans would be afoot. Containment plans.
Will was forced to admit that his immediate plans would need to become fluid for the moment as well. But first...
As the engine’s throaty growl gave him away, Sadie sat upright. “What are you doing? Why are you slowing?”
“We need petrol,” he said as he pulled off the road and up to a tank wrapped in rose-gold tinsel that flapped in the light breeze.
He used the collective noun very much on purpose. He’d read enough books to know that, in hostage negotiations, making the hostage-taker feel they were on the same side was paramount. Though which one of them was the hostage here was debatable.
He pulled over and jumped from the car. But not before surreptitiously sliding his phone into his pocket.
Meanwhile, Sadie had slunk down so far in the seat she was practically in the footwell. All he could see was acres of crinkled pink and a few auburn curls.
“Can you breathe down there?”
A muffled voice professed, “Most of the dress is organically grown Australian cotton. Very breathable.”
“And yet I’m not sure it was intended to be worn over the face.”
Two hands curled around the fabric and a small face poked out. “Point made.”
She blinked at him through huge red-rimmed eyes above a pink-tipped nose. Her full lower lip was shiny from nibbling. When she wasn’t acting so bolshie and stubborn she was rather pretty.
Will pushed the thought away. He turned his back and splashed a nominal amount of petrol into the tank before heading for the shop. Inside, he gave the guy behind the counter a wave. Then, finding a private corner, he made the call, using a phone number he could only hope still worked.
It answered on the second ring.
“Yes?” came the voice from Will’s past. The voice of the Prince.
Will leaned against a shelf. “Hey, mate, how’s things?”
A beat. “Darcy? Look, I can’t—”
“You can’t talk because you’re meant to be getting married but your bride seems to have gone missing.”
The silence was deafening. Then footsteps echoed through the phone as Hugo obviously set to finding himself a private corner of his own.
“How the hell can you possibly—?”
“She’s with me.”
Will gave a very quick rundown of the events. Leading to his decision to keep her close.
Hugo’s voice was uncommonly hoarse, even a little cracked, as he said, “I was given a note just before you rang by a maid refusing to leave my doorway. Written in lipstick, on the torn-out page of a hymnal no less, telling me she couldn’t go through with it. I didn’t believe it until just now. Yet at the same time it felt like I’d been waiting for that note all my life. I—Dammit. Excuse me a moment.”
Hugo’s voice was muffled. Will imagined him covering the mouthpiece of the phone. His tension was palpable in his short, sharp responses to whomever had disrupted their conversation.
It had been years since he’d seen Hugo in person. Even as a teenager there’d been gravitas about the Prince, the weight of the world sitting easily on his shoulders. Until his own father had died in a car crash and that world had collapsed.
Will had born Hugo through that horrendous time. Hugo had tried to return the favour after Clair’s death only a few months later, putting aside his own grief, but Will had rejected Hugo’s counsel out of hand.
Will had been mistaken then. He would not turn his back on the Prince now.
Will waited, glancing around the petrol station. Pink and gold streamers hung limply from the ceiling to the cash register. The guy behind the counter hunched over a small TV while sipping pink milk through a straw. The vision showed a variety of invited guests smiling and waving as they walked up the gravel path to the palace gates.
A frisson of tension pulled tight across Will’s shoulders. Everything had happened so fast—the near crash, the rescue, the discovery, the uncommon decision to get involved—the repercussions that went far beyond his inconvenience didn’t hit him until that moment.
An entire country held its breath in anticipation, clueless as to the axe that had already begun to swing, while Hugo sat somewhere in the palace, looking into the face of an emotional ruination that he did not deserve. Again.
“Apologies,” said Hugo as he came back on the line.
“Mate,” said Will, his own voice a little rough. “What the hell happened?”
The silence was thick. Distant. Elongating the miles and years between them.
Hugo’s voice was cool as he asked, “Is she injured? Is she distressed?”
“She’s shaky but unhurt.”
“I’d very much like to talk to her.”
Will thought he’d very much like to kick her out of his rental car, and dump her on the side of the road; force her to face the bedlam she had unleashed. But it was clear Hugo was not of the same mind.
If Will’s intention in coming to Vallemont had truly been to put things to rights with his oldest friend, then it seemed he’d been gifted the opportunity to do just that. The fact it would not be easy was ironically just.
“In full disclosure, she doesn’t know I’m talking to you. In fact, she doesn’t know that I’m aware of who she is at all. I believe that’s the only reason she agreed to let me give her a lift.”
He let that sit. When Hugo made no demur, Will went on.
“I can give her the phone or I can keep her with me until you send someone to collect her. Unless, of course, you want me to bring her back right now so you can work your magic and marry the girl.”
He half hoped Hugo would say Bring back my girl—then Will could deliver her and tell himself he’d achieved what he’d come to Vallemont to do.
“If you could stay with her I would very much appreciate it,” was Hugo’s eventual response. “I’ll send for her when I can. Till then, keep her safe.”
Will nodded before saying, “Of course. And you? Where do you go from here?”
“That, my friend, would be the question of the hour.”
“As opposed to, Do you take this woman?” Will imagined a wry smile filling the silence. And suddenly the miles and years contracted to nothing.
“Yes,” was Hugo’s dry response. “As opposed to that.”
The Prince rang off first. No doubt plenty on his to-do list.
It left Will to stare at the picture he’d linked to Hugo’s private line; the two of them at seventeen in climbing gear, grins wide, arms slung around one another’s shoulders, mountains at their backs. Clair had taken that picture the day before Will had broken his leg.
By the end of that summer Clair had been taken ill. A week later she’d been diagnosed with an incurable brain disease. Mere months after she’d taken that photo she’d left them for ever.
Will slid his phone into his pocket. He tucked the memories away too before they started to feed on him rather than the other way around.
Hugo wasn’t the only one with things to do.
Only, while Hugo would no doubt be fending off a buffet of advisors as he determined the best way forward, Will had to go it alone.
It was a concept that didn’t come easily to a twin, a concept