The Forbidden Prince. Alison Roberts
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a mass like the people he would very soon be ruling?
He could get himself out of his predicament with a simple phone call.
Or, he could embrace his situation by deciding that fate had provided an opportunity that would have been unthinkable even a few hours ago. He could see if he had the personal fortitude to face being homeless. Penniless and without even the prospect of a job. How many of his own people had faced a challenge like this at some time in their lives?
He’d been silent for so long that Mika was chewing her lip and frowning, as if she was trying to solve the problem of world peace rather than his own immediate future.
‘Have you ever worked in hospo?’
He shook his head. ‘Never.’
‘Oh...it’s just that our café is really busy with the start of the high season. I reckon you could get a job there too.’
‘I could try.’
‘You wouldn’t cope if you’ve never done it before. With no experience, probably the only job you’d get would be washing dishes.’ Her eyes widened. ‘The dishie we’ve got was talking about moving on yesterday. I’ll bet Marco hasn’t found a replacement yet.’
Washing dishes. Had he ever had to wash dishes? Meals away from his residential apartment at university had always been in restaurants, like meals away from the mess during his time with the military. As for the palace...he hadn’t even been near the kitchens since he’d been a small child in search of an extra treat.
Dishwashing was possibly one of the most ordinary jobs there was out here in the real world. And wasn’t ‘ordinary’ exactly what he’d set out to be in this time away from his real world?
‘I... I wouldn’t mind washing dishes.’
Mika’s nod was solemn. It was her turn to be silent for a while now. At last she spoke, and he could see by the way her throat moved as she swallowed first that she was making a huge effort.
‘I owe you one, Rafe...for today. There’s a couch in my room that you can sleep on tonight...as long as...’
She wouldn’t meet his gaze. There was something important that she didn’t want to say. Something about her body language reminded him of the hedgehog again. She was poised to curl into a ball to protect herself. With a flash, he realised what it could be and the thought was horrific. Had she been hurt by a man? Did that explain the way she’d reacted when he’d touched her? How hesitant she’d been to take his hand even when she’d been desperate?
‘Mika...’ He waited until she looked up and, yes, he could see uncertainty. It wasn’t fear, exactly, because there was a fierceness that told him she was well practised in defending herself. But she was clearly offering him something that was well out of her comfort zone.
He resisted the urge to touch her hand. Eye contact was more than enough, and even that he kept as gentle as he could. ‘We’re friends now, yes?’
Mika nodded but she wasn’t quite meeting his gaze.
‘You’re safe with me. I give you my word.’
She looked straight at him, then, and for a heartbeat, and then another, she held his gaze, as if she was searching for confirmation that his word was trustworthy.
That she found what she was looking for was revealed by no more than a softening of her face but Raoul could feel the gift of her trust as if it was solid enough to hold in his hands.
His vow was equally silent.
He would not drop that gift and break it.
WHO KNEW THAT military training would end up being so useful in the daily life of an ordinary person?
It meant that Raoul de Poitier was conditioned well enough that yesterday’s strenuous exercise had been no more than a good workout. It also meant that he’d been able to sleep on a lumpy old couch that was actually a lot more comfortable than sleeping on the ground.
He’d tapped into a bit of initiative in making the best use of available resources, too. Mika had a laptop computer and he’d borrowed it for long enough to send an email to his grandmother to let her know he was safe but not to expect to hear from him for a little while.
Mika had been busy with her technology for a while after that, downloading photographs she had taken that day, her busy tapping suggesting she was adding notes to the images. Her frequent glances away from the screen told him that she wasn’t entirely comfortable having him share this small space; the idea to turn the couch around so that the back of it faced into the small room came to him in a flash of inspiration. The effect of the change had been to create the illusion of a wall and, once he was lying down—with his legs bent and his knees propped on the wall—he couldn’t see Mika in the single bed that was only a few feet away. Any tension ebbed as it became apparent that the arrangement would give her more privacy as she worked and then slept.
The bathroom facilities were shared with all the other occupants of the rooms on that floor of the old boarding house. That had been more of a shock than Raoul had expected after a lifetime of a sparkling clean, private en suite bathroom always having been available but, on the plus side, there was no queue at this early hour of the morning.
Mika wasn’t due to start her shift in the café until eight a.m. but it opened at six a.m. and she was taking him in to meet the owner, Marco, in the hope that there might be some work available for a new dish-washer. She’d used the bathroom first and came out in her uniform of a short black skirt and a fitted short-sleeved black shirt. It was an outfit designed to cloak a member of the army of invisible people and, when Mika tied on a pretty white apron with a frill around its edge, he realised the uniform was probably also intended to make her look demure.
The shirt certainly covered the tattoo on her arm but Raoul doubted that anything would make Mika look demure—not with that aura of feistiness, combined with the impression of intelligence that one glance at her face was enough to discern.
‘It’s a horrible job,’ she warned Raoul. ‘A dishie has to be a food-hand as well and help with the food prep to start the day, with jobs like chopping onions and making sauce, and then he has to keep up with all the dishes as soon as service starts, and that’s not easy.’
‘I’m sure I could get up to speed.’ How hard could it be to do such menial work? This was the twenty-first century. Even a small establishment would have commercial dishwashing machines, surely?
Mika turned a corner as they headed downhill towards the beach. They walked past a series of shops still shuttered and sleeping in the soft light of a new day.
‘Dishies get yelled at by the chefs if they get behind,’ Mika continued. ‘The waitresses hate finding they’ve suddenly run out of cutlery or something and the barista will have a tantrum if he runs out of coffee cups.’
‘Who’s in charge?’
Mika looked up to grin at him. ‘Marco thinks he is but everybody has to keep the head chef happy. A dishie is right at the bottom of the pecking order, though. He has to keep everybody happy.’
Raoul wondered where the waitresses fitted into the pecking order. He would do his best to keep Mika happy if he got this job.
It was a surprise to realise how much he wanted to get this job. It wasn’t simply the opportunity of gaining a different perspective on life—the idea of it was beginning to tap into a yearning that went way back.
Didn’t every kid dream of being invisible at some time? And maybe that fantasy had more meaning to those who grew up under a very public spotlight. He would be visible to the people he worked with here, of course, but it felt like he would be stepping into an alternative reality. Nobody who knew him would expect to see him in this kind of work and that would be enough to make him blend into the background,