The Surprise Princess Read online

  It rang again. Slightly muffled. She looked around, but saw only the attic’s detritus. Automatically, she patted at her hips. In her pocket.

  The display announced Brad as the caller. She drew in a breath and let it out slowly before answering.

  “Hello.”

  “Katie. Are you okay? Did I wake you?”

  “No – I mean, yes, I’m okay. No, you didn’t wake me.”

  There was a pause. “You’re at home? I rang the bell. There was no answer. With your car here, I thought maybe something … but of course you could be out with someone.”

  Could be, but so rarely was. “You’re here? At my house?”

  “Yes. At your front door. And it’s damned cold out here.”

  “I’ll be right down.”

  Swinging the front door wide, she asked, “Is anything wrong?”

  Without waiting for an invitation, Brad stepped in, carrying a large bag. “That’s my line. Here’s dinner. I know you didn’t cook.”

  “Dinner? How could you know I didn’t cook? Why would it be your line?” She knew she’d jumbled the responses but that fit her scrambled brain.

  Brad Spencer walking in her front door like he’d done it a million times. In fact, he’d done it precisely once. When he and a couple players had moved in furniture she’d bought at a university sale. That was not long after her mother died, so it must be eight years ago.

  “Whoa, you’ve done a lot with the place.”

  “You remember?” she asked stupidly. He must have or he wouldn’t have noticed changes.

  “Sure. It looks great. I like the floors.”

  She’d pulled up the old carpeting herself, finding hardwood floors. She’d saved up to have them refinished and now kept them gleaming beneath simple area rugs.

  “Thanks, but—”

  “Like the paint job, too. And the artwork.”

  The walls were off-white, which brightened the small rooms. The artwork she bought from student shows.

  “Thank you, but—”

  “How about showing me the kitchen before this gets cold.” He hefted the bag. “You like Chinese?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Glad to see you don’t wear that gray shroud here. Though those are some interesting accessories. I’ll serve. I don’t I want the extra fiber you might add to our dinner.”

  She glanced down and saw dust and cobwebs festooned across her front. “Oh. I didn’t—”

  “You go wash up. I’ll find plates and stuff. Kitchen’s through here, right?” He was already moving past her, unerringly heading for the kitchen.

  She’d worked with him long enough to know that rousting a determined Brad Spencer was no easy task. Besides, she realized, she was hungry. Why not eat the food he’d brought.

  She ducked into the bathroom, wiped at her clothes, removing evidence of her time in the attic, and washed her hands.

  He’d found the plates and silverware, had glasses of water poured and was setting out the food when she returned.

  “Made a lot of changes in here, too, huh?” he said.

  That started conversation about what she’d done to the house since it became hers. He made it easy and she was proud of the work she’d done on a stingy budget, making the little house’s spare interior bright, open, comfortable.

  “When are you going to start on the outside?”

  “I’m not. I like the outside.”

  He raised his eyebrows as he handed her a fortune cookie, but didn’t argue. “Okay. Then I’ll ask the other question — what are you going to do about this princess stuff?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  She dropped the cookie. “You eavesdropped! I can’t believe—”

  “Nope. But apparently you could believe it or you wouldn’t have said it.”

  “I won’t believe Carolyn or C.J. told—”

  “They didn’t. Not your friend Hunter Pierce, either.”

  “But …”

  He picked up the fortune cookie and put it back in her hand. “If these things are accurate, it should say something about ‘Tall Man isn’t as stupid as you think.’ “

  “I have never thought you were stupid. In fact, you don’t give yourself enough credit…”

  She felt heat rising up from her chest over her throat, into her cheeks.

  He made no attempt to disguise that he was watching what had to be an accompanying surge of color. “I don’t give myself enough credit for what?”

  Defiantly, she unwrapped the cookie with the maximum amount of plastic crinkling. “For your ability as a coach. You should be a head coach somewhere.”

  “Oh, God, not you, too. I hear enough of that from C.J. I’d far rather talk about this princess stuff.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t.” She cracked the cookie in half and chomped down on one piece.

  He reached across and pulled the fortune from the other side. “Before you add some paper fiber to your diet,” he said, letting it drift gently to her plate. “If you don’t want to talk about it, I guess you don’t want to know how I knew about the princess issue.”

  Damn him.

  But she’d never been one to bite off her nose to spite her face. “Fine. Yes, I want to know.”

  “Steph.”

  “What? Stephanie Draper? Carolyn and C.J.’s daughter?”

  He nodded. “She said at New Year’s how much you look like the princess in Washington. So when the story was all over the news before and after the king’s surgery, I paid attention. Not to mention the interns in all the athletic offices were saying you’re a dead ringer for the woman everybody thought was the lost princess.”

  “I’m not,” she said quickly.

  He looked down to pick up his fortune cookie and started to open it. “That Hunter Pierce from the State Department seems to think—”

  “How do you know he’s State—?”

  “Katie, Katie. We already went through this. The news, the magazines. He wasn’t front and center, but he was in enough pictures not to miss him.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this,” she said abruptly.

  “Okay. You want to wash and I’ll dry?”

  “No need. Dishwasher.” She stopped chewing on the edge of her thumbnail. “I’ll clean up. You don’t need to stay to do that.”

  “In other words I don’t need to stay,” he said wryly. “You don’t think you’re any good at having friends do you?”

  Thoughts fought for precedence. She’d never had friends. She didn’t want him to be a friend. She closed her mouth.

  “When Carolyn described herself as your friend you changed it to mentor.” Brad snagged his jacket from the back of a chair. “Not the first time I’ve heard you do that.”

  She hadn’t even taken his coat. Not that she had much practice at those sorts of hostess gestures.

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “That’s okay. Carolyn’s your friend whether you call her that or not. As for me,” he said with exaggerated martyrdom as he headed for the front door, “I can take a hint.”

  She trailed after him once again. “Thank you for dinner.”

  With one hand on the doorknob, he grinned at her. Her insides felt like their elevator dropped a dozen floors in a second. His other hand came up and for a fraction of a second, she thought —.

  He touched his fingertip to her forehead, then traced it down the bridge of her nose and on to the tip, where he gave it an extra tap. “You’re welcome, Squirt.”

  He hadn’t called her that since she’d gone full-time in the office and told him she expected to be treated with respect and being called “Squirt” didn’t qualify. So why did she feel now as if her knees had turned to goo?

  He was about to step off the small, square of concrete that counted as the house’s front porch, when she pushed past the gooey knees to say, “Brad?”

  He turned back, the dim light managing to glint highlights in his blond hair. “Yeah?”

  “How did you know I hadn’t cooked dinner?
”

  “I was outside watching. Light never went on in the kitchen. No light anywhere except a faint one up there.” He gestured toward the gable at the end of the house, where a small window provided ventilation. “So I ordered Chinese and had it delivered to my car. Goodnight, Katie.”

  Before she could absorb the idea of Brad Spencer sitting outside her house waiting for a light to go on, he was out the door, sliding down the snow-slicked walk, and muttering a curse when the Norway spruces dumped on him.

  ****

  Brad’s fortune said, “Truth surfaces in the end.”

  Thank heavens he got that one. Unless the same one was in both cookies? No. Hers said, “What cannot be undone must be considered many times.”

  The doorbell rang as she gave the counter a final wipe.

  Her heartbeat thundered. For absolutely no good reason.

  She flipped on the light and jerked open the front door with unnecessary force, then stopped dead. “Carolyn.”

  “I hope it’s not too late, especially to drop by unannounced.”

  “Of course not, come in.”

  “We had a homework crisis. Finally got the kids settled.” Carolyn’s explanations continued as Katie took her coat and hung it in the closet. Something she hadn’t done for Brad. Both unexpected visitors, but then he had brought her dinner, so by rights she should have—. Carolyn’s next words stopped that mental meandering. “C.J. and I are both concerned about you, Katie. He would have come, too, but with the kids… He lost the coin toss.”

  Carolyn took the new overstuffed chair Katie indicated. She took the old, lumpy couch, which was the next item on her list to replace.

  “There’s no reason for you to be concerned, Carolyn. I’m fine.”

  “You reacted quite strongly to what that Hunter Pierce said.”

  “Wouldn’t you? I’m not even a very good Katie Davis,” she said with a dry laugh, “so the idea of being a princess… It’s ridiculous.”

  Carolyn looked even more solemn. “You shouldn’t say you aren’t a good Katie Davis, even in jest.”

  She hadn’t been jesting. She kept her eyes down, because if Carolyn saw that answer in her face …

  “I realized that even knowing you all these years I know nothing about your parents, except your mom’s death. Will you tell me about them?” her visitor asked.

  “They worked hard. Kept to themselves. They weren’t terribly social. I take after them, so that should show how insane this idea is.”

  With Carolyn silent, she gathered steam. “Without my mother’s financial help I wouldn’t have been able start at Ashton. Without her support I wouldn’t have had the grades to qualify for Ashton. She truly did look out for me. Personal things like my hand…”

  Only after it was out did she think that bringing up the so-called Bariavak Hand might not bolster her argument that Hunter Pierce’s position was laughable.

  “What about your hand?”

  “Oh, it’s silly. Childhood stuff. I used to hide my hand all the time. I’d been teased as a child as long as I can remember – before I can remember – about it being strange to have such a long little finger. She always tried to protect me.”

  Carolyn looked thoughtful, but said only, “They must have been very proud of you.”

  Proud of her? She’d never considered that. They’d been mostly concerned that she not draw attention, not cause trouble, not rock the boat.

  “They worked so hard, there wasn’t time for pride.”

  “You said your mother looked after you. What about your father?”

  “My father died when I was ten. I don’t believe he left her anything but this house. She was so worried we’d lose the house. She worked two jobs and, as soon as I could work, I helped out. If I hadn’t gotten the scholarships…” She looked up. “And if you hadn’t stepped in after my mother died, I would have had to leave school. I’m so grateful to you and C.J.”

  “You’ve more than thanked us over the years, especially with all you’ve done for C.J.” She sounded almost absent-minded, then her tone became crisp. “Katie, I’m going to say something … I was struck a bit ago when you said you’d been teased about your hand from before you could remember. So how could you have known?”

  “Oh, my mother said—” She bit it off.

  Carolyn nodded and went on in her calm voice. “If it happened before you remembered, the only way you could know is if someone told you that you’d been teased about your hand. That would have been an effective way to encourage a child to keep a betraying characteristic out of sight.”

  Carolyn went on as if this were a common conversation. “When you started my class, you would keep your sweater sleeve pulled down over that hand. After you mother died you slowly stoppeds. I wondered at the time if it was because you weren’t being reminded to cover your hand.”

  Was that true? Had her mother urged her to hide her hand? She honestly couldn’t remember.

  “She was good to me,” she said.

  Carolyn nodded, but it was more as if she were acknowledging that Katie had said the words than that she believed them. “There’s something else, Katie. Your reaction to what Hunter Pierce said was so out of character. Not at all like you.”

  She tried to laugh. “You mean all the other times you’ve seen me react to a crazy story about me not being who I am?”

  Carolyn remained serious.

  Katie pushed her hair back. “I needed time to process what he’d said. Wouldn’t you if someone said crazy things like that?”

  Carolyn frowned. “I’d certainly be shocked. But maybe that’s part of it. I had the feeling you didn’t want to hear what he was saying but you weren’t as shocked as you tried to make us think.”

  “Of course I was. How could I not be?”

  She gave a small shrug. “I don’t know. But what matters is where you go from here. What are you going to do, Katie?”

  This she felt confident answering.

  “I’m going to get up and go to the office in the morning. I’m going to work on organizing the trip to Europe this summer along with all the usual tasks for the end of the season, recruiting, and summer camps. That’s what I’m going to do.”

  Just the way she had since a magazine article had sent her up to search the attic.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  She got to the office early, which allowed her to be deep into the routine of handling whatever came up … which so seldom followed a routine.

  C.J., Carolyn, and Brad came in together. Had they been talking about yesterday? About her? No. She wasn’t going to indulge in paranoia.

  She offered a breezy hello, but kept her focus on the computer screen, which meant she only felt all of them looking at her then exchanging concerned looks, instead of actually seeing it, so it could have been her imagination.

  “Heard anything from that Hunter Pierce today?” C.J. asked.

  “Not a word.” Her cheer felt forced. “I don’t expect to. It’ll all blow over.”

  “Didn’t get the feeling he’s a man to let something blow over,” Carolyn said mildly.

  C.J. leaned on her desk. “Katie, maybe you should consider—”

  “Don’t push her around, C.J.” Brad’s sharpness made Katie blink, which is why it took an extra moment for her to realize C.J. and Carolyn were also staring at Brad. His next words were closer to his usual easy style. “She’s so used to taking orders from you, she’d do what you said automatically. You wouldn’t want that, Coach. That’s not your style.”

  “Didn’t know I had a style,” the older man drawled. “But I’m still trying to get over you saying Katie’s used to taking orders from me. She runs this place, and we all know it.”

  Carolyn said peaceably, “That’s true. She’ll have you all sailing through Europe like clockwork this summer.”

  “Not me.” Katie practically wanted to sing with relief that the subject had changed. “The company we’ve hired to handle all the arrangements will do that. The final papers
are in the system with printouts in the folder at the top right of your desk.” C.J. still liked to read some papers at home.

  “Of course they are.” Carolyn smiled. “What a great trip that’s going to be.”

  “You and the kids could still come,” C.J. said.

  “You’re going to be so busy bouncing around the continent having fun with your boys and Katie, you’d never have time for us.”

  Katie needed to deliver the news that she wasn’t going on the trip, but this was not the time.

  “We’re going to have an educational trip. We’ll study culture, politics, and history, as well as play basketball,” Brad said primly.

  “See, I knew I’d get through to you eventually, Spence. Couldn’t have said it better myself. You’d think there was a reporter lurking around,” C.J. said.

  “Or somebody from the administration or the NCAA,” Brad said.

  C.J. nodded. “Suppose you’ll get some of those questions when you go to Chicago tomorrow. Isn’t that red-headed TV reporter still chasing you? Not that I have to worry about you putting your foot in your mouth. In fact, you’re so good at it, your talent is wasted as a mere assistant coach. It’s time you have your own program.”

  As Brad had indicated last night, they had this conversation frequently. She knew it was because C.J. wanted the best for Brad, wanted him to succeed in his career. He was a great coach. Technically, yes, but even more in his handling of players, both those on the team and the prospects.

  Still, she didn’t look forward to Brad leaving. After all, he was an integral part of the program.

  “No way. I don’t want those headaches. The hassles. The media. You keep being the front man and I’ll sit at the master’s feet.”

  C.J. frowned. It was a mock frown, yet Katie saw concern. “Am I going to have to use one of these big feet to kick you out of the nest?”

  Brad grinned. “I’d cling to the edge and climb back in. So we might as well go hit the court to see if you can use those big – and slow — feet to block out that play I was telling you about, Coach.”

  C.J. cuffed his shoulder. “These big, slow feet can still get around you. Don’t think they can’t.”