Royalty Exposed

Chapter 3

After Zach and I had walked into the kitchen to find Emma sitting close to the prince and Prince Carter looking like he was very uncomfortable in the situation that he was in, I cleared my throat to let them know that there were other people in the room with them. Emma looked disappointed that her time alone with the prince was over for now while Prince Carter looked relieved after they both had looked over in my direction. She'd probably try to get him alone again every time that she came over to my house.

I knew that she was going to increase her visits now that Prince Carter was going to be staying here. Hopefully my parents wouldn't think that much of her coming over more. If they did then I was going to have to tell my best friend that she was going to have to cut back her visits a little bit so my parents didn't get too suspicious about why Emma was coming over so much.

"Did you get him food?" I asked Emma after my brother and I had walked over to her and the prince. Emma nodded her head and then said, "Yeah, he ate it already."

"Good," I said to her before turning to look at the prince. He was already looking over at me so I looked at Zach and then said, "This is my brother Zach. Zach, this is Prince Carter."

"You can call me Carter," he said holding out his hand for Zach to shake. I watched as Zach took the prince's hand and shook it before saying, "Nice to meet you. I hope you know what you're getting yourself into because we're not exactly rich so you're going to be living a lot different than what you're used to."

"I do know what I'm getting myself into," he replied nodding his head. I had a feeling he was lying and that he had no idea what he was getting himself into. He would find out soon though how different our lives were from his.

And then we would see just how well he would adjust to our kind of lifestyle. Prince Carter would either just suck it up and live like us to stay away from his parents or he'd go back home to the lifestyle that he had always known. Right now, I was betting on that he would be going home pretty soon. I don't think he was going to last very long living the kind of life that me and so many others were used to, but we would just have to wait and see what was going to happen.

Because maybe I was wrong. Maybe Prince Carter would stick it out and want to know how we lived this way and were actually happy with it. I knew that my parents wished that we had more money to fix up things around here, but I also knew that they didn't need that kind of money if it was just going to ruin our family.

"We should probably get Prince Carter to where he's going to stay before Mom and Dad get home. We still have no idea if they're going to want to help out or not so until we do, we need to keep him out of sight," I said. Zach looked at me and nodded his head before looking back to the prince and said, "Do you need to go the bathroom? The bathroom in the cottage doesn't work anymore so you should go now while you can. Who knows when we'll be able to sneak you back in here to go to the bathroom again."

"Yeah I do," Prince Carter said nodding his head. If he wasn't thrilled about not having access to a bathroom whenever he wanted, then he didn't say anything about it. But I'm sure that he wasn't thrilled about that at all. Who would be thrilled about not having access to a bathroom all the time? I knew that I sure wouldn't be thrilled.

"Then I'll show you where it is," Zach replied.

Zach led the prince out of the kitchen and to the bathroom that was downstairs. I turned to Emma after they were gone and told her that we should find some clean sheets and blankets that my parents wouldn't miss for the prince to use. We headed out of the kitchen and went upstairs to the cupboards that were in the hallway, opening them up when we reached them to start looking through them. I searched through one section while Emma searched through another until we had found a set of blue and red sheets and some tan blankets that neither of my parents had used in a while.