Royal Indiscretion, chapter 15 (Patreon)

Waiting in the castle ruins sounded romantic and epic and a dozen other words that would have fit on a movie poster. Instead Doug was sore from sitting on the cold rock, his hip ached as bruising set in, and his ankle throbbed every time he jarred it. He had done his best to elevate it, wrapped it in Yves’s jacket and the rock was as cold as ice, but he couldn’t do anything to treat the worry. 

Maybe a sprained ankle wasn’t a major issue in the life of a teacher or a royal or a secretary, but Doug had seen professional athletes brought down by one. They were off the field a few weeks and then a younger player with good stats and a hunger to claw his way to the top took their position. Doug was lucky this happened in the off season, but if the sprain was bad enough to have lingering effects, he would be more prone to hurting it again when the pre-seasons started.

Hell, he could end up having to baby it through spring training, and that’s when the sharks started sniffing for blood on the water. 

By the time Doug finally heard the roar of an engine, he had worried himself half to death over the state of his career, cursed the duke and his son, and questioned the sanity of living somewhere that was this damn cold even in summer. He doubted it was even sixty degrees. On the good side, no one had air conditioning bills.

Doug lifted himself up onto one elbow and watched the gap in the stone near the guard house. After a few minutes, a grizzled old man appeared. Nick. Doug recognized him from yesterday when Yves had gone out to meet him. At the time, Doug had the impression Yves was trying to keep them apart, but not only had Nick come, but Yves didn’t seem to be with him.

Before Doug could greet him or introduce himself, Nick asked brusquely, “What did you do?”

That sort of question just begged for a sarcastic response. “The castle attacked me.”

Nick stopped dead half way across the grassy center courtyard. “Excuse me?” He appeared genuinely confused, and Doug felt a little bad about screwing with someone who evidently didn’t understand English well enough to interpret pissy.

“The stair broke.” Doug gestured to the culprit. The bottom three steps of the aging gray staircase were in splintered ruins. Before Doug had tried to climb up to the rim near the top of the castle wall, he would have said the stairs looked like the most stable part of the building—and the newest. Apparently at least one of those conclusions was wrong.

Nick came over and put a duffle down on the rock next to Doug’s leg. “Why did you try to climb those old things?”

“Because I’m an idiot.”

Nick snorted and notably did not disagree. Instead he unwound Yves’s jacket and started palpitating Doug’s ankle. Doug winced a few times as Nick rotated it, but he didn’t protest since Nick’s handling of the ankle was the same as any number of trainers who had handled minor injuries. Besides, Nick had the only transportation back to the farm, so Doug figured he had an incentive to play nice.

“Where’s Yves?” Doug asked.

Nick frowned and all his wrinkles turned into deep grooves that made him look about a hundred and twenty. “He is not your concern.” His voice was thick with anger, which made no sense. Doug had been nothing but polite to Yves. Then again, rich people could be assholes for very little cause, so maybe Yves had taken offense at something Doug said and had complained. If that was the case, Doug was going to have to patch over any hurt feelings if he wanted to complete the duke’s favor.

“I never said he was. I was just curious about why he didn’t come back.”

Nick put Doug’s leg back down on the rock and crossed his arms. “What are you doing here?”

“Sitting on a rock.”

Nick didn’t answer immediately. He glared at Doug. “Either my English is weak or your manners are,” Nick finally said.

“Or both,” Doug tried joking. It went over like a fart in church. Doug sighed and changed tactics. “If you’re asking what I’m doing in this castle, I followed Yves. If you’re asking why I’m on a farm near the arctic circle, the duke asked me to come out here to avoid the press.”

“And yet when the press comes onto the estate, you make humor with them.” Nick raised his eyebrows and kept right on glaring. The man had a talent for it.

He was also testing Doug’s temper. “I was trying to distract them from Yves.”

“I thought they had come to see you. Did you not say the duke wished to keep you away from those who report?” Nick might be a cranky old bastard, but he wasn’t dumb. Doug wondered if he should explain the duke’s concern, but if Duke Gerard had wanted Nick involved, he would have talked to him. Which immediately made Doug wonder why he had avoided involving the one person Yves seemed to trust. When Doug watched Yves the night before, he couldn’t miss the way the tension went out of Yves’s shoulders as soon as Nick got out of the truck. This was someone whose advice Yves would take. Doug definitely needed to poke around a little, not that he would easily give up on his plan to help the duke. The gratitude of a potential future king, was not a prize to give away easily.

“I can handle the press better than Yves,” Doug said with a shrug.

“That says little given that he is most—” Nick cut himself off with a grunt. “What do you hope to get from Yves?”

Doug held his hands out in surrender. “Nothing.”

Nick leaned closer, and Doug was reminded of the old guys who played chess in the park and threatened kids in the park. “You lie poorly.”

“I’m not the only one with questionable manners,” Doug said. He wasn’t about to back down to an old guy with a nasty bark. “First, I’m not lying. Second, you’re an asshole.”

“I am not the one who spends time with young Lord Sava entertaining young women of title. That would be you.” Nick crossed his arms over his chest and glared murder.

“I don’t need your approval to have dinner with…” Doug sighed as he realized he had been about to call Rudy a friend. That was a bad move, and it was untrue. At this point, Doug had fantasies of throat punching the punk. “I can’t call Sava a friend because I have learned enough about him to know I don’t like him. But at the time, he was a man who had invited me to a friendly dinner. Nothing more.”

“And his guests were all young women of title and no husbands.”

“Married women generally don’t go to dinners for singles,” Doug countered, although he knew full well that Rudy had gotten that guest list together to impress Doug. Either that or he hoped to impress the girls he liked with his ability to get a famous American football player to the dinner. Doug wasn’t entirely sure what Sava’s motives were.

“You also had a lack of unmarried men at this dinner.”

Doug shrugged without denying it. “I didn’t arrange the invitations. If you have a problem with something Rudy Sava did, hunt him down and call him a liar.”

“At least he is honest about being selfish.  You lie to Lord Yves.” Nick seemed entirely too convinced of that.

“I haven’t lied. In fact, the worst thing I’ve done to him is be painfully honest about the fact that he’s an idiot who doesn’t recognize the potential in this place.” Doug still thought this castle was a gold mine. If Yves could get a few notable royals to sleep in it, the property would be a platinum mine. He wondered if Harry and Megan would like a free vacation under the northern lights.

“Potential?” Nick’s voice had a deadly warning to it.

“Potential money. Potential profit. This place is beautiful.” 

“Ah, so you would hope to gain from his demesne.” Nick seemed confident of his conclusion, which was ironic because it was utterly wrong. “You should know that this land costs more to maintain that it earns in profit. You will not find wealth here.”

Doug laid back down on the rock again. This conversation was wearing him out. “I’m not looking for any. Hell, if Yves wanted to make this place profitable, it would take several million in investment money to get the castle to a place where it could bring in several hundred thousand a year. It might start turning a profit years down the road, but I’m not some idiot that assumes anyone with ‘lord’ before his name has money.”

“He has nothing you want.”

“He has a guest room, and right now I’m hoping to rest in it while you call for transportation or an ambulance or whatever passes for medical care around here,” Doug said.

Maybe that request finally broke through Nick’s wall of rudeness because he uncrossed his arms. “I brought the tractor and I have a trailer on the back with bedding. Let me get supplies to stabilize the ankle first.” That said, Nick turned and left. Hopefully he was getting the first aid kit and not abandoning Doug in some misguided effort to protect Yves.

At least if he tried that, Yves would come back up. Doug didn’t doubt that. If Yves renounced his titles, Doug wondered what would happen to the land. Would he keep it, or was the land attached to the royal title? If the two were linked, then stealing Yves land would be an alternative motive for Duke Gerard’s request.

The problem was that Doug couldn’t imagine Gerard or Yves or even Anne ever recognizing the value in place. Maybe they had considered its historical value and had thought about preserving it—not that these massive stones needed human intervention to survive a few ice ages. However, Doug didn’t think creativity or imagination ran deep in the Stenbock blood. If it did, Yves’s aunt or sister would have found a way to kill Rudy Sava and make it look like an accident.

Nick came back with a leg brace. He moved quickly to splint the leg and then he pulled strips of cloth out of the duffle to stabilize it further. By the time he was done, the leg was wrapped in a cocoon, which was fine because Doug was going to have to bounce around in the back of a trailer over rough terrain. Yves might be right about not diverting a medical helicopter needed for emergencies, but that didn’t mean Doug worried any less about the danger of long-term weakness in the limb.

“How does it look?” Doug asked.

“It’s a sprain. Stay off it for two or three days and then slowly build up to full physical activity over three weeks and it will be as if it never happened.” Nick packed his supplied back into his bag, and slung it over his shoulder.

“I would prefer to hear a doctor say that,” Doug said softly. “No offense.”

“I don’t care what you want.” Nick moved to the side of the rock and held out his arm to assist Doug. “I would like you to go see a doctor far, far south.” Doug scooted to the edge of the block and draped his arm over Nick’s shoulders.

“Well, I’m sure the duke will be happy to send someone to drive me back up after I’m done in town.” Doug swung his good leg down to the ground and went to take a hop forward, but Nick grabbed his waist and pulled him close enough that Nick was actually bearing almost all Doug’s weight. The man was terrifyingly strong.

“Would he?” Nick asked as he essentially swung in a short arc before Doug put his good foot on the ground. Doug was far from the largest player on the team, but he sure hadn’t expected anyone to be able to manhandle him.

“He is still trying to hide me from the press, or at least keep me away from the limelight so I can’t feed the rumor mill,” Doug said, sticking to the duke’s cover story. “If I’m here, no one can say I’m romancing Lady Anne. You remember her, right? I’m fairly sure Yves doesn’t want to put his aunt in danger of any more bad press.”

“Don’t assume you know what’s going on in this family,” Nick said. He swung Doug forward again with little more than a grunt.

“I don’t even understand which fork to use or how you guys can stomach eating brains on a cracker. I have no hope of understanding why any of these royals do what they do.”

“Good. Don’t try,” Nick said. 

“Trust me, I don’t pretend to understand any of this,” Doug said seriously, but he suspected he needed to try. 

Maybe the effort to help Doug out of the ruins was straining Nick more than he wanted to admit because he didn’t respond. He half carried, half supported Doug all the way out to a trailer hitched to the back of a two person tractor. The flat wooden surface was covered with multicolored quilts and old horse blankets. Clearly someone had grabbed any padding they could and flung it up there.

Doug sat on the end and scooted back into the trailer, grateful for the padding.

He was also grateful that he didn’t have to sit up the whole trip back. An hour or two of bouncing around on bad shocks would be bad enough with his leg elevated. If he sat up, he would have problems for sure.

Nick silently arranged some of the bedding under Doug’s leg and then brought the ATV over and used chains to attach it to the back of the trailer so they had a train of vehicles attached to the back of the tractor. Yep. This was going to be a long ride. Doug wiggled a little and pulled on a quilt so it covered the edge of a scratchy horse blanket before he laid back and studied the blue sky. This is not how he’d planned to spend the day.