Broken Prince: A New Adult Romance Novel Read online

  "Is that the Danube?" Brynn asked, stepping to the stone railing and looking out over the edge.

  "Sure is," Otto said. "Eliot, they've been asking for you at the club. When are you planning on coming back?"

  Eliot glanced over at Marta, who was pointing out to Brynn all of the historic buildings that were visible from the balcony. The pinpoints of light in the darkness twinkled like stars.

  "Not anytime soon," Eliot said, moving back inside with Otto. The warm light of the apartment bathed the dining room table so that the silverware glowed, and Eliot considered that the entire dinner was a fantasy, the beautiful setting a facade that did its job well but would be taken down at the end of the night.

  "Why not?"

  "You know what they say about me," Eliot said, his voice snapping more than he had intended.

  "If you're talking about the newspaper article, I told them not to run that piece," Otto said, waving one hand in the air.

  "It's not just the paper. Everywhere I go, people stare. They whisper."

  "Ignore them," Otto said. "You have success. You have a beautiful girl at your side. You have your work."

  "Easy for you to say. You're not the one people are staring at."

  "They'll forget," Otto said, his voice falling into apology. "They'll get bored with this scandal once the next young celebrity overdoses on heroin. Give it time."

  "Perhaps," Eliot said. He scratched his cheek, feeling the length of the scar that ran down his face. It had been ten years since he had been in Hungary. That had been plenty of time, he thought, but still the gazes of people on the street followed him around accusingly.

  "Never mind the club," Otto said, putting a cheery face back on. "Tell me what you've been up to!"

  Marta and Brynn came back inside, and they all sat down to dinner. The chef brought out the dishes one by one, starting with a spiced kohlrabi soup and moving on to a dish of sausage and browned pears. Otto poured everybody overfull glasses of wine, and they began their dinner. Brynn ate quietly at first, but as Marta and Otto plied her with questions and food, began to open up and talk about her work on the academy paper, her notions of Budapest, and how her Hungarian was improving.

  Marta and Otto were charming as always, and soon everyone was laughing at Marta's impression of the overblown actress they had seen recently in a stage production of Romeo and Juliet.

  "You should have seen her!" Marta gasped in mirth. "Lisping through all of her lines with such melodrama. 'My bounty ith ath boundlethh ath the thhea'! Oh, it was excruciating to watch."

  "Poor girl," Eliot murmured, but Marta's theatrics brought a smile to his face. He took another bite of the sausage and sighed in satisfaction.

  "Leave space for dessert," Marta said. "I've asked the chef to make apple pie for the American here." She winked at Brynn. "It'll be ready soon from the smell of it."

  "I've never eaten so well, my dear," Otto said, leaning over to kiss Marta on the cheek. She wrinkled her nose as Otto's mustache tickled her.

  "Thank you so much," Brynn said. "This is all so wonderful."

  "I thought we all might need a nice dinner to wind down from yesterday," Marta said.

  "What happened yesterday?" Brynn asked innocently, forking another bite of sausage between her lips.

  "You didn't tell her?" Marta looked over at Eliot. He froze, unsure of what to say. Brynn gulped down a swallow of wine and set her glass back down on the table. Her face was a mask of worry.

  "Tell me what?" Brynn asked.

  "It's nothing," Eliot said, trying to make light of it all. "We got caught in the middle of a riot—"

  "Nothing?" Marta cried out. "Why, we nearly died—"

  "Marta, don't scare the girl," Otto said, seeing Brynn go pale.

  "They destroyed the Ferrari," Marta continued. "If we hadn't gotten out of the salon before the fire started—"

  Brynn stood up, her chair scraping on the floor.

  "I...I need a bit of fresh air," she said, her eyes averted from the table. She fled to the balcony and Eliot stood up.

  "Eliot, I'm sorry," Marta said. "I thought you would have told her already."

  "I hadn't had the chance," Eliot said, keeping his voice calm. "She's already worried sick about everything else."

  "You're both fine now, and that's what matters," Otto said, patting Marta on the hand.

  "Just let me talk to her," Eliot said. "I'm sure she's shocked."

  "It'll be a few more minutes to dessert anyway," Marta said, her eyes bright with worry.

  Eliot stepped out onto the balcony. Night had fallen fast and the air was cool. Brynn stood watching the Danube flow between the stone riverbanks, and did not move when he came to stand next to her. He could feel the heat radiating off of her skin. He picked up her hand and turned it over to kiss her palm before speaking softly.

  "My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep; the more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite."

  "Eliot—"

  "I'm sorry," he said. "I should have told you."

  "You don't need to protect me from everything," Brynn said, her brows knitting together. "You can't."

  "I can try."

  Brynn shook her head and looked back out at the river.

  "Even now, somebody could be out there watching. Taking pictures of us to put up in a tabloid."

  "I'm sorry. If I could stop them, I would."

  "I don't want a savior. I don't want a...a protector!" Brynn said. "I just want you to love me."

  "Brynn, I love you more than I ever thought possible."

  "Then tell me the truth. Don't try to shield me from the world."

  Eliot's heart twisted inside of his chest.

  "I don't want you to be scared. I don't want these things to get between us. I don't want you to be hurt."

  Brynn lifted her eyes to his face, and in her expression he saw a maturity that belied her age. She reached up to his face and stroked his cheek with the back of her hand, letting her thumb glide over his scar.

  "We all get hurt sometimes," she said. "It's okay."

  "I promise I won't hide anything from you again," Eliot said. He saw a look of worry pass across Brynn's face, and then it disappeared.

  "Thank you," she said, her eyes darting back out to the river. A dinner cruise full of tourists floated by. The wind carried fragments of laughter over to the balcony.

  "About yesterday..."

  "You can tell me when we get home," Brynn said firmly, pushing herself back from the railing. "Right now I think it's time to eat some apple pie."

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Brynn

  I had to tell Eliot about the money I'd been sending to my grandmother. When he promised never to hide anything from me again, I felt so horribly guilty that I couldn't even taste the apple pie for dessert. And the thought of him being in the middle of one of those riots...

  As we rode back through the dark hills of the mountains just outside the city, I looked out of the window at the stars. The lights of Budapest shone dimly below us, but I could still make out the major constellations. My eyes moved to the horizon, where the firs stood like a black fence against the sky. A shooting star fell, the burning line of its path suspended in the night sky for just a moment behind the trees, and I held my breath.

  "Tell me about the riot," I said. I needed some time to collect my thoughts.

  "They broke the glass of the salon. They burned it down. We were inside when the fire started, but we made our way out."

  "And the cut on your hand?"

  "I cut it on the glass there. It's not a deep cut."

  He was so nonchalant. I couldn't tell if he was trying to make it seem like not a big deal just to ease my mind. The car wound through the curves of the hills, the trees growing bigger, denser in this part of the woods. We were getting closer to home, and I had to tell him.

  "Eliot—" I began to say.

  We rounded a curve and a deer darted out from the forest into the middle o
f the road. It jumped right in front of us.

  "Look out!" I screamed, but Eliot was already reacting. The headlights caught its eyes as Eliot slammed on the brakes and twisted the wheel. I held onto the side of the car, bracing myself. The car slid on the road sideways. We clipped the deer on my side with a loud thwack at the rear of the car. Then Eliot wrenched the wheel back and the car swerved to a stop on the shoulder of the other side of the road.

  "Are you okay?" Eliot asked. I turned to look at him. His face was white, his fingers gripping the wheel.

  "I'm fine," I said. "Just a little shaken up."

  Eliot unbuckled his seatbelt and opened the car door. I got out of the car with him.

  "I don't think it made a huge dent," I said, going back to where the deer had hit the rear fender. The deer was nowhere to be found; it had probably escaped back into the forest. I looked up to see Eliot stumbling toward the woods. He leaned against a tree and bent over, vomiting onto the ground.

  "Eliot, are you okay?" I cried. I ran over to him, but he waved me back. He stood up and spit, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. His fingers were shaking.

  "I'm fine, I'm fine," he said. It was obvious he wasn't. "It was just—the noise of the car, getting into another accident—I didn't—I couldn't—"

  "It's okay," I said. "We're okay. Do you want me to drive the rest of the way back? We're not far."

  "No, I just need a second," Eliot said. He walked back and leaned against the rear bumper of the car, and I stood next to him, looking up at the sky. Here there were no lights, and I could see thousands of stars overhead, so many that the sky seemed to be a patchwork of blue. I watched for any shooting stars, but none came.

  After a minute, Eliot breathed deeply, exhaling.

  "Let's go," Eliot said. His face was still pale, but I didn't want to press the issue.

  He drove home slowly, taking every curve at half-speed, and I said nothing. We went up to the bedroom and brushed our teeth side by side. I crawled into bed as he washed up, and when he finally slid under the sheets I curled up against his body, my leg over his. He kissed me, and it lingered a moment longer than usual.

  "Good night," he said softly. "Sweet dreams."

  "Good night," I said.

  I ached to tell him to take me, to slide my hands along his chest and farther down, but I did not know how my body would react and I did not want to make a promise that I couldn't keep. Tonight especially, I thought that his mind would be on Clare and the accident, and I did not want to be with him like that when he was thinking about her. My hand rose and fell as he breathed deeply, drifting off to sleep. I kissed his bare shoulder and thought that perhaps tomorrow night I would tell him that I was ready. Tomorrow, too, I would tell him about Nagyi. Tomorrow, tomorrow...

  As I closed my eyes, my lips still pressed against his skin, I thought that maybe tomorrow would make both of us okay.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Eliot

  “To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty of nature. If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in.”

  Richard Feynman

  Eliot woke up from a nightmare. He'd been driving again, through a rocky landscape that burned bright red, and the deer had jumped again in front of his car, and he'd turned the wheel, crashing into trees that sprung up out of nowhere. Turning his head, he saw Clare with the tree branch through her chest, and then he blinked and it was Brynn, Brynn with the drop of blood at the corner of her mouth, Brynn who looked up at him and whispered his name—

  He opened his eyes, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. Beside him, Brynn slept soundly. Her full lips were slightly parted, a few strands of hair stuck to her cheek. A sleeping beauty.

  Eliot pushed back the covers and slipped out of bed quietly. Pulling on his robe, he tiptoed downstairs and went through the kitchen to the back door. It creaked loudly as he opened it, the sound the only noise in the house. Outside the moon shone brightly, high in the sky, and he walked out into the middle of the garden.

  The roses in the garden had lost their color in the light of the moon, and all looked like different shades of blue. The white roses took on a tint of the moonlight, but the red roses looked nearly black under the night sky. He touched one of the red roses and pulled off one of the petals, rubbing it absentmindedly between his fingers. The air was only slightly chilly here at night.

  He thought about Budapest, and why he was staying. He was here for Brynn, to offer her the opportunity to study at the Academy for her final year. She could very well finish without him there, he knew. It would only be a school year, and he would feel horrible asking her to leave Hungary and come with him. Yet he would feel horrible without her.

  It wasn't just Brynn, though. He needed to finish this proof, to prove to himself that he hadn't lost all of his mathematical ability. When Brynn had come here with him, he found a new drive inside of himself that he thought he had lost. But drive wasn't enough—he needed more than that. The spark of genius that had burned brightly through his youthful days as a mathematician now had died to a low ember, and he longed to stoke the fires again, to do the work that he'd once done so easily.

  He had money. It wasn't that. It was the math.

  The problem had taken hold of his mind. Every day now, he found it easier to retreat into the algebra instead of talking to Brynn. She let him immerse himself in work, but it seemed that the more he surrounded himself with the math, the harder the proof became. The numbers tangled up in his head when before they had marched easily into whatever structure he was looking for. He redoubled his efforts but the problem, too, grew twice as thorny, seemed to fight even harder against his attempts to understand. The first results had come in a burst of light and inspiration, and he'd thought that the rest would slide into place easily. Not so. Brynn supported him, worked alongside him, and he tried to draw her closer while still giving her room to heal.

  Last night he had put his arm around her and it had been wonderful. He wanted her so badly, but he'd taken pains to hide his desire. After all that had happened, he couldn't rush her into anything. Oh, but the touch of her skin under his fingers!

  The sound of the kitchen door made him spin around.

  "You left." Brynn closed the door behind her and pulled her robe tightly around her deliciously curvy body. In the moonlight, her red hair looked dark. He wanted to run his hands through it, pull her hot mouth to his...

  "I needed to think," he said.

  "I saw you out here," she said, coming closer to him. "But I can go back if you want to be alone."

  "No, no," he said quickly. "We can go inside if you'd like."

  "I like it here." She looked out toward the woods. "At night, anyway. They wouldn't come around to take pictures at night, would they?" Her eyebrows knitted together.

  "It's too dark," Eliot said. Her shoulders relaxed slightly and she breathed out. So beautiful. He remembered her body, naked and pale. His hands caressing her skin.

  "So what are you thinking about?" she asked, looking up at the stars.

  "The story I told you about before," he said. He did not want to talk with her about his misgivings. She was already under enough pressure; she didn't need to deal with his insecurities. "The Little Prince."

  "I'd like to read it," she said. "Maybe we can read it together. I want to know if the prince gets back to his rose."

  Eliot bent and picked a rose from the bush, breaking the stalk with his fingers. The bud had just started to blossom, its petals slightly revealed at the sides. The center still hidden in the middle, dark silk readying itself for the outside world.

  "He finds another rose bush," Eliot said. He held out the rose to Brynn and she took it, her fingers brushing his and causing his nerves to spark—for a second, he thought he might see lightning flash between their hands, the feeling was so strong. "It's full of roses, just like his ros
e. But his rose is special."

  "How?" Brynn asked.

  "Because it's his rose," Eliot said, remembering the story as his mother had told it to him. He should reread the book with Brynn. It had been too long. "Because he loves it."

  Brynn put the flower up to her nose and inhaled, closing her eyes. Her lashes fluttered against her cheeks.

  "I miss my grandmother," she said. Her voice was so quiet that Eliot leaned forward, not understanding at first.

  "Your grandmother?"

  Brynn looked up at him, her eyes shimmering. Was it the moonlight or tears pooling in her eyes? He could not tell until her voice caught and choked.

  "I don't know...I don't know how to say..."

  "It's okay," he said, pulling her to his body in a bear hug. His arms wrapped around her completely. She was so warm against his chest. He felt himself becoming aroused, and fought the sensation. "Let's go to sleep. We'll talk about it tomorrow morning." Perhaps it would be alright. Perhaps she would want to leave Hungary as well.

  "Okay," she said, and the way she looked up at him so gratefully caused his guilt to rise up again. He was not good enough for her.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Brynn

  Back in bed, Eliot took me in his arms, and I kissed him. He kissed me back so tenderly that my skin flushed hot. I was glad that it was dark and he could not see me redden.

  I paused, and he sensed my hesitation. He drew me close to his chest and pressed his lips to the top of my forehead.

  "It's late, princess," he said. "Let's go to sleep."

  "Yes," I murmured. I would talk with him tomorrow about Nagyi. Relief flooded through me, and I let my body snuggle up against his. His breathing was slow and even, and soon I found myself drifting off to sleep.

  The dream started off so realistically I could not tell that I was dreaming. We were in bed and Eliot kissed me hard, so hard that I could not breathe. He rolled over on top of me, began to thrust himself inside of me. Slowly at first, then harder and harder. As he thrust, he kissed me again and I gasped, all of the oxygen torn from my body. The air in the room was like fire in my lungs and we moved together. My legs wrapped around his thighs and we moved together and it was fire, fire everywhere, every square inch of me burning up in a frenzy of passionate lovemaking. Even in my dream I knew that it was not real, for I had never been so brash in bed.