Amara Meadows has always placed her job first, but with her journalism career slowly failing, she seems lost.
Although when she ends up spending a month in the palace covering the coronation of White Bridge's prince, she finds more than herself.
F...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
With the pounding continuing, I drag myself to the door. "Would you stop already, I'm coming?" My movements are very groggy as I turn the handle, Marie stands at the other side of the now open door and her eyes barely meet mine as a frantic expression covers her face.
"I need your help." She grabs my arm, pulls me into the room, and shuts the door loud enough for me to be sure that everyone in the palace is now very much awake. Once inside she stuffs the newspaper into my hands and I don't even know what it says, but the fact that she's here isn't good. This is why I look at her instead of the paper because the panic in all her actions thus far is telling me that something is wrong and this something has to do with me. "Does the name Bobby M. sound familiar to you ?"
The sound of his name makes my blood run cold and I'm sure that if Marie hadn't been standing here I would've lost it. Because I know him, well enough to know that trouble is the only thing that his name can bring.
My eyes scan over the page and his initials are the first things I see, right above the picture. The picture of something that not only meant the world to me but could crumble Xavier's world in a second. It's blurry, obviously taken from a very bad angle, but it's not distorting our faces enough for the reality of it to be questioned. A few seconds of weakness, of pleasure, the minute his lips grazed mine and we were so caught up in each other that we didn't even see the camera flashing.
I stare down at the article in disbelief, everything seeming so wrong that it couldn't possibly be real. "This has to be illegal somehow." I shake my head as Marie looks at me and I'm pleading that there has to be some way to get rid of this. Some way that I'm not the one who has to handle this, that I'm not the one who has to make this go away.
"It is, but there isn't much we can do about that." His voice is centered and calm, which I should've expected because this obviously isn't the first time something unwanted was printed.
Xavier walks into the room with one hand in his pants pocket and the other unbuttoning his blazer, the only sign to show he might be just a little nervous, although you'd only know that if you'd actually looked for it. Yet the simple idea of him being here makes me relax. He makes me breathe, for two reasons. One being because I know now that he can handle this with me and secondly because of the way he looks in that damn suit. It's the final dress fitting for tomorrow which is why he looks like some sort of art piece in his coronation suit. The raven black detail of his blazer and trousers contrasts so perfectly with his lilac tie. Needless to say that him looking like that while looking at me like that is one of the main reasons for us being in this situation, to begin with.
"Good morning, Amara." The smile in his voice shows me that my blatant admiration towards him didn't go unnoticed, not that I for one second thought that it did. The smile soon morphs into a wide grin as he places his other hand in his pocket as well, opening up the view of his chest. His very shaped, carved from gold, chest. "Like what you see?" Hands fiddling with the edges of the paper I try to remind myself of the reason we're all in my room. Not for me to get flustered by Xavier, but to get Xavier and I off of the front page.
