“And why is that?” she asked, knowing she shouldn’t.
“Not only are you a mechanic, but you come from a line of blue-collar immigrants. While I know that immigrants grow and strengthen the economy, it’s not generally the population one chooses a princess from. Among his many flaws, my father is also a bigot. He despises Hayat’s immigrant population, who happen to be primarily of South Asian origin, like yourself, and will hate it even more that you come from immigrant American stock, in addition to your plethora of perfectly imperfect traits. The common people of Hayat, however, are going to love you, even as my father seethes!
“I assume,” he said, moving on as if positioning one’s wife in opposition to one’s father was done every day, “that trucking is where your interest in mechanics and engineering came from?”
Nodding, Rita said, “Yeah. Cars, and trucks, and things that go. I was all about them from an early age. Honestly, it was all I was ever interested in. My dad took me on drives with him every summer as soon as I was old enough to not need a car seat. Those were my favorite.”
Examining her, he said, “It is easy to imagine you as a little child in a big truck.”
Rita laughed. “When I was really small, before the drives, I had to sit on a stack of telephone books just to see through the window.”
“Telephone books?” he asked.
Holding back her laugh, she said, “Telephone books were these old things that used to hold the phone numbers of area people and businesses.”
“They just gave that information away for free?” Jag asked, shocked. “That seems like a breach of privacy,” he added.
Laughing now, Rita said, “Things were different back in the Wild West days of America, especially when you were not royal,” she said. “You had to ford rivers and use wired telephones.”
Smiling, he indulged her joke, saying gravely, “The hardships you’ve endured,” before shaking his head as he said again, more to himself, “Long-distance trucking.”
Rita rolled her eyes, relieved more than irritated to be in the safe territory of discussing her family’s trucking history.
In truth, her family was never far from her mind, but as her life as NECTAR had blossomed, she had arrived at a place of balance in which thoughts of them operated in the background rather than as a constant grievance at the forefront.
Dinner tonight with the Prince, however, had pushed them back to the surface, if only because it had reminded her once again of what it was like to be a part of a unit.
Their unit might only be just the two of them, but even with all of the restrictions and stipulations they were operating under, they had still managed to form a team of sorts.
For better or worse, their bond was growing stronger, drifting, if not toward a true marriage, then precariously far from simply being a pair of colleagues involved in a business deal.
But perhaps most dangerous of all, thorny conversations included, tonight’s dinner had forced Rita to recognize what she’d been unwilling to admit over the past week: she wanted more, and she wanted it with Jag.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ten days later
“THISISQUITEthe event you have going on here,” Vincenzo Moretti, the current ruler of the European nation of Arista, said as Jag entered the room where the three men that meant more to him than any other living beings stood.
Pushing aside the image of Rita that filled his mind in contradiction of the idea, Jag opened his arms to Vincenzo, a true smile coming to his face for the first time that day.
“Brutal and monstrous my father may be,” Jag said, “but he has an unfortunate affinity for making money. It is my only joy, then, to spend it lavishly.”
Vin’s father, the former King of Arista, had not been so gifted.
Like Jag’s father, the man had lived as if his pleasure was the only important truth. And, like Jag’s father, cruelty to their wives had been a pleasure that both Jag’s and Vin’s fathers shared.
“You couldn’t have found a little more useful pet project, Jag? A hospital, for instance, seems perhaps more practical than the ‘world’s largest biophilic structure’?” Rafael asked without hope, knowing Jag well enough to know the question to be pointless.
“I’ve completed six state-of-the-art hospitals within the past three years. No one in Hayat City lives more than twenty minutes from a brand-new, fully equipped hospital. I wanted to treat myself, as they say in America.”
With a scoff, Zeus said, “Since when did you begin dabbling in American aphorisms?”
It would be Zeus, Jag thought with a mental sigh, to pinpoint the unconscious revelation in a statement.
When a matter needed to be cut through with a heavy, relentless tool—something powerful enough to shatter and destroy any attempt at obfuscation and illusion—it was always Zeus.
The Aegean Prince was a living broadsword.