Prince Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places, events, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  Prince copyright @ 2017 by Kathryn Thomas and E-Book Publishing World Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PRINCE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  SAVED

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

  OTHER BOOKS BY KATHRYN THOMAS

  PRINCE

  CHAPTER ONE

  To Alyssa Kelley, the world was a horrible place. There was something about the Louisiana heat that did that to people; no matter how used to it you think you are, the heat will stick to you in such a humid, clingy, horrid way that you simply will not be able to think about anything else. You will not enjoy the swampy landscape, because swamps equal heat and, in the Louisiana summer, heat equals misery.

  Alyssa hated everything about it. She hated that her clothes clung to her skin as if she were standing under a downpour—if only! She hated that the hair at the back of her neck was constantly wet with sweat. She hated that her hands were glued to the steering wheel, so much so that her palms would make a syrupy sound whenever she would remove one hand, like peeling a sticky label off a fruit.

  She hated the river and the endless expanse of the moor-like landscape as she drove down the highway towards the last place on Earth she ever wanted to be again.

  Most people would celebrate coming home, but not Alyssa. To Alyssa, home was anywhere but the small Louisiana town she was from. In fact, the farther away she was from there, the better she felt. There was nothing about this unbidden, unplanned trip that even remotely resembled a homecoming. Usually, when people came home, it was to see their families after some time. Alyssa was going to say goodbye to hers.

  On cue, her stomach clenched and her eyes filled with tears that promptly cascaded down her cheeks. Quickly, she wiped them off and blinked rapidly to clear her vision; the last thing she needed right now was to cause a car crash. Her stomach spasmed again. The last thing she needed right now, she reflected on second thought, was also to think about car crashes.

  One often hears about tragedies, but until tragedy strikes in one’s life, one really doesn’t know anything. Alyssa had learned that the hard way, and she was still trying to wrap her mind around the lesson. It wasn’t that she had not tried, over the last twenty-something hours since she had gotten the news. She needed to be rational about it; it was her way of coping. She needed to dissect it and look at it from all angles, and find a way that it could be beaten. But it couldn’t, not this time. This kind of gut-wrenching, all-consuming sorrow was not made to be beaten—not so easily, anyway.

  Alyssa took a few deep breaths and tried to keep herself in check. She couldn’t break down yet. After all, she wasn’t even halfway there. The next few weeks would be hard enough without her succumbing to her pain before this godawful ordeal even began. She needed to be strong in order to take care of everything. Once all was said and done, then she would allow herself the luxury of a complete meltdown.

  Mercifully, the sudden ringing of her phone took her away from her thoughts. It would only be a momentary distraction, of course, but Alyssa welcomed it with open arms.

  She hit the Bluetooth button and took the call eagerly.

  “’lo?” Her voice came out horribly rough with the sound of unshed tears. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Hello?”

  “Hi, sweetie,” Anna’s voice drifted back to her, warm and friendly and familiar. Alyssa clung to it like a safe-line. “Are you nearly there?”

  “Sort of,” Alyssa said, staring hopelessly at the monotonous scenery around and ahead. “I just drove out of the airport. Another 150 kilometers to go.” After eight years spent out of the States, the conversion came as easy to her as breathing.

  “Yikes.”

  “Not nearly as ‘yikes’ as it’s going to be when I actually get there,” Alyssa replied before she could stop herself. She hated feeling sorry for herself, but this time she figured she was entitled.

  “I’m so sorry, Lyssa,” Anna said. Alyssa had lost count of the times her friend
had said it, but she didn’t mind. Anna’s compassion wasn’t pity, and she welcomed it; it made her feel less alone in a world that had gone suddenly, desperately lonely. “Are you absolutely sure you don’t want me to fly over?”

  “No,” Alyssa said quickly. “It’s fine, really. I’ll be fine. But thank you.”

  “Sure,” Anna said, uncertain.

  Alyssa knew her friend didn’t get it. She had refused Anna’s offer to be with her during this difficult time over and over again, as politely and as vaguely as she could. She didn’t have a choice. She had put as much distance between her and the town of Pinebrook as she physically could. It was bad enough that she was being forced to deal once again with the past that lay buried there; the last thing she wanted was to share that past with anyone else, particularly someone from her present.

  And speaking of burials…

  Alyssa’s stomach spasmed.

  “It’s hot as balls over here,” she said, blurting out the first thing that came to mind that would allow her not to think about what was waiting at the end of the highway.

  Anna chuckled. “I can imagine.”

  “No, you can’t. You’re from Canada. What’s the temperature over there right now?”

  “About 16 degrees.”

  Alyssa shot a quick glance at the car’s thermometer and groaned at the red numbers spelling out 86 degrees Fahrenheit worth of humid heat. “My point exactly,” she said.

  “So I heard from Mrs. Brooks earlier today,” Anna said after a few moments.

  “You did?” Alyssa grasped happily at the chance to talk about something as concrete and grounding as their job at the veterinary clinic.

  “Yep,” Anna said. “It seems that Buster is doing better.”

  “Oh good,” Alyssa said. “I’m glad. Is he coming in for a post-surgery checkup?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Cool. Let me know how it goes?”

  “Sure.”

  An uncomfortable silence hung in the air after that. Alyssa didn’t remember ever feeling uncomfortable with Anna, but she did now, through the empty statics of the phone line. She didn’t want to talk about what was going on in her life, and it was all too obvious that for all of her best efforts, Anna didn’t know what else to talk about and was tiptoeing around the subject. It was unnerving.

  “I’d better go now,” Alyssa said eventually—when she couldn’t stand it anymore. “I don’t remember these roads very well. I wouldn’t want to miss the exit.”

  “Of course,” Anna said immediately. She sounded almost relieved. Evidently, the conversation wasn’t only languishing on one side. “Take care, sweetie. Let me know when you get there, okay?”

  “I will.”

  Alyssa sighed heavily as she hung up. She wondered if that was what she was going to be from now on to her friends and anyone who knew her: “The girl whose parents just died.”

  *****

  There was something about Pinebrook that made her skin crawl. The whole town gave her a sense of non-belonging that made her feel uncomfortable in her own clothes.

  Alyssa didn’t know much about roots, but she was pretty sure that wasn’t the way your place of birth was supposed to make you feel. Now that her parents were gone, she felt as disconnected from this town as possible. She drove down roads and shops and parks, and it all felt familiar but far from homey. She had barely driven past the first few blocks of the town and already she was itchy to leave

  Why am I even here? she thought dejectedly.

  It was a stupid question to ask, of course. She was there because she had to be. She had to say goodbye. She was there because she was the only person who could take care of her parents’ business and put them to rest.

  She was there because she had no choice.

  It seemed that was the pattern with Pinebrook. The place robbed her of her every happiness and left her with no choice whatsoever but to put as much distance between herself and this godforsaken town as she could—if she ever wanted to have any hope of having a life. Pinebrook sucked the life out of her. The town was her very own vampire—minus all the hotness that seemed to hang around the figure nowadays.

  The Kelleys’ house was a modest but cozy home in the center of the small town. It took Alyssa a very long time to find the strength to leave the car and walk inside. When she finally managed to walk up to the porch and then finally—after another few moments of hesitation spent holding the key inside the lock without finding the courage to turn it—past the front door, she had to stop and breathe.

  She wasn’t prepared for the impact of what she found. Everything looked exactly the same, and yet it didn’t. The house was still filled with the exact same furniture and the exact same memories that she remembered, but it was painfully, unavoidably empty.

  Alyssa stood just inside the doorway and looked around in a daze. Ever since she had gotten the news, she had been telling herself that it would all feel real once she got there. It would all feel real once she was faced with the concrete, material fact of her parents’ absence. But now that she was finally here, the whole thing seemed even more absurd.

  She wandered the rooms one by one, foolishly expecting her parents to pop up at any minute and reveal it had all been a prank in the worst taste ever. She impossibly expected to find her dad in the studio and her mom reading a book in the living room, but she didn’t find either of them. Their absence was real and palpable, and it broke her heart into a million pieces.

  It was when she got to her old bedroom upstairs that it really hit her. Her dad always joked about turning it into a home gym, sometimes so convincingly that Alyssa had begun to think he might just be starting to be serious about it. But he wasn’t.

  As she stepped into the room now, she saw that her parents never touched it. It was exactly how Alyssa had left it when she finally left Pinebrook for college and a life that would be worth living. Not even the littlest detail had changed.

  Alyssa wished that were true. She wished nothing at all had changed. She wished the house wasn’t empty. She wished Pinebrook had not just been made into an even more horrible place than it already was. She wished the weather wasn’t so intolerably hot. She wished she didn’t feel so impossibly cold inside.

  Over the past twenty-something hours, she had gone from feeling numb to devastated, and then back to numb again countless times. That alone was exhausting, not to mention disconcerting. If only she could have a proper meltdown and cry for hours on end like normal people, then maybe she could then meet all of this face-on and with a clearer mind. Instead, she found herself swinging hopelessly between overwhelming emotions and lack thereof.

  As if on autopilot, she walked to her old bed and let herself fall down on it, face down on the pillow. And that was when she discovered that she could, after all, have a proper meltdown like a normal person. It was the smell of fresh sheets that undid her. Her mom still changed the sheets regularly, as if Alyssa was still there.

  “I’m here,” she mumbled into the pillow as the tears resumed. “I’m here, mom.”

  But her mom wasn’t. Her mom was never going to be there again, and neither was her dad.

  For the first time since receiving the worst news of her life, Alyssa cried herself to sleep.

  CHAPTER TWO

  She awoke to pounding. At first, she thought it was her head. Her temples pulsated in a way that made it feel like her brain was trying to bust out of her skull.

  Alyssa sat up, disoriented. It took her a while to finally figure out that the noise was coming from downstairs. She glanced at the clock on the nightstand and groaned; she had missed her appointment with the undertaker. For a moment, she wondered if that was Mr. Shanks down there, pounding on the front door, but then she came to figure that undertakers probably didn’t waste their time seeking out the living.

  Shaking her head at the way her thoughts were slipping away from her, Alyssa dragged herself out of bed and down the stairs.

  The pounding—which she now realized w
as really nothing more than insistent knocking amplified tenfold by the mother of all headaches—resumed. For some irrational reason, that fact infuriated her.

  “I’m coming!” Alyssa cried sharply, annoyed that someone would have the audacity to demand such insistent access into her pain.

  She threw the front door open and blinked, first at the harsh light of the Louisiana sunset, and then at the figure that stood there.

  It was a young woman. She wore her long blonde hair up in a ponytail, a few errant locks framing her round and clean face. Her figure was curvy but fit, as evidenced by the mid-thigh shorts and white t-shirt she wore. Her blue eyes stared at Alyssa with a combination of excitement and sadness; it was an odd mix, but it fit the situation perfectly.

  “Lynn?”

  It wasn’t that Alyssa didn’t recognize her high school friend; it was just that, after eight years of not seeing and barely hearing from each other, it seemed like the right thing to say.

  “Who else?” the woman replied.

  The thing was, Alyssa had been expecting someone, anyone else. Before she knew it, she was pulled into a fierce hug. She froze for an instant, surprised at the outburst of warmth from someone she had not been in contact with for so long, but then she let go. For the first time since her ordeal began, she realized just how bad she needed human contact.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked once they finally pulled back.

  “I was driving by and saw the car outside,” Lynn said. “I didn’t recognize it; I figured it had to be yours.”

  “It’s a rental,” Alyssa said, unnecessarily. The shock of the last twenty-four hours seemed to have robbed her of any social skills she might have possessed.

  “I’m so sorry, Alyssa,” Lynn said after a moment. “The whole town is in shock.”

  Alyssa nodded numbly. “Would you like to come in? I think there’s ice tea in the kitchen.” If she knew her mom—and she did—there would be a nice cool pitcher in the fridge.

  Lynn hesitated for a moment. “Sure,” she said then, shrugging off whatever feeling of unease might have crawled over her. She walked past Alyssa and she, too, stopped short right in the hallway, looking around as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. “Wow,” she said quietly. “Remember all the days we spent in this house after school?”