Crush by Crystal Hubbard Read Free Book Online Page A

doll to be dressed up.”
    “Well, I am.” Bernie clutched the satin lapel of his tux with one hand and passed the other over his recently styled hair. “ ‘007 Ken,’ Caribbean style. You likey likey?”
    Miranda smiled in spite of herself. “You look great.”
    He took her hand and set it over his arm. “And you look like a farmhand,” he said tenderly.
    “I’m sorry if I’m ruining your fun, Bernie,” she said as they left her suite and began the long, convoluted route to the Banquet Hall.
    “It’ll take more than your bandanna and blue jeans to ruin this trip for me. I just wish that you would loosen up and enjoy this.”
    Miranda looked up at the colorful banners hanging from the high ceiling of the corridor and she passed her hand along the huge stones that had been laid to form Conwy’s walls centuries ago. “I do appreciate this. Parts of it. I didn’t like being forced into it by Rex, and I don’t like the pampered poodle aspect on this end. I don’t know if Lucas Fletcher is trying to be nice, or if he’s…”
    “Preparing you for the slaughter,” Bernie finished.
    “Nothing like this has ever happened to me before.”
    “That’s exactly why you should give the nerves and suspicion a rest and lap up every morsel of this experience. I’m being treated like a queen—no pun intended—and you know what? I deserve it. So do you.”
    “But you want it, Bernie. That’s the difference.”
    He patted her hand and began leading her down a wide, steep stone staircase. Morgan was at the bottom of it, waiting for them. “You want this, Miranda,” Bernie said. “You just don’t know it yet.”
    * * *
    Told to wait in the solar while Bernie was taken, presumably, to the Banquet Room in the Great Hall, Miranda’s curiosity became impatience, then anger, as she wore a path in the floor. The solar was on the third level of the keep. The windows set in the rounded walls were modernized and as large and deep as the ones in her suite. They were polarized, most likely to cool the glare of the sunrise off the waters of the Irish Sea. The room was luxuriously furnished in subdued leathers and velvet, yet still maintained an inviting coziness. Thick carpeting in muted shades of rust and umber muffled her footsteps and warmed the stone floor. Under different circumstances, she might have taken a leather-bound volume from one of the ceiling-high oak bookcases and snuggled up for a quiet read.
    But Miranda was too mad to read. She placed her palms flat against the wall, and the cool stone made a great sound barrier as she spat out a furious strand of Portuguese curse words.
    “Who does Lucas Fletcher think he is?” she asked the empty room. Just because he has money and celebrity and a frickin’ kingdom, he thinks he can manipulate people! she raged inwardly. She wanted to kick something, but she was afraid of breaking her toe—or worse, damaging Lucas’s furniture, which looked plenty expensive.
    She seethed. On both sides of the ocean, powerful men trapped her, and she resented it. Deeply.
    And Bernie. Her friend, her confidante, her fellow Double D…he was already in the Banquet hall, socializing in the enemy camp. It’s my date , she thought bitterly. Why is Bernie having more fun than I am?
    The answer came to her quickly. He was having fun because no one had forced him to be there.
    “That’s it.” She tossed up her hands. “I’m going home.”
    She marched to the wooden double doors. She would have dramatically thrown them open if they hadn’t been fifteen feet tall and two hundred pounds apiece. She shoved the left door open just enough to slip into the wide stairwell. Careful to keep her feet on the wool runner to mute her footsteps, she made her way down a spiraling stone staircase. She walked for at least a mile it seemed, before she came to the Great Hall, where a few people hung about, talking. No one attempted to intercept her as she headed for Morgan’s office. The Master Steward