The Trouble with Mojitos Read Online Free Page B

being able to introduce her to the mayor. Even disinherited, he probably had the kind of connections that could open a lot of doors for her.
    Her heart skittered with excitement. She’d known she was on the verge of something big. Neil had sent her here to fail. But with Rik’s help, she could get the job done and prove to him, and to herself, that she was more than just the poor choices she’d made a decade ago.
    You see.
Things always work out in the end
.
    Rik lay on his stomach, one leg over the arm of the sofa, the other trailing on the floor. One arm hung at an odd angle and his face was crushed into the cushions. He was going to have an interesting pattern on his face when he woke.
    Oh heavens – when he woke … !
    What the hell was she going to say?
Good morning, your highness, would you like your pillows fluffed?
    Stuff that. She’d had enough of that with the second in her long line of exes. Charlie had expected her to bow to his every whim because he had money and a title, and she’d been so awed by the world he’d introduced her to that she’d done it. She’d gone along with every stupid, hare-brained scheme of his, until she’d been hung out to dry in full public view. The memory rose like bile in her throat. Never again!
    It seemed all these rich boys were the same; too much money and nothing better to do with their time than party and get wasted. Though to be fair, those with very little money still had the same tendency, as Brett had proved.
    It had all seemed so glam when she’d been in her heady twenties, young and impressionable, but she was older and wiser now. There was nothing glamorous about having a man passed out on one’s sofa, no matter who he was.
    Tomorrow she’d pretend she knew nothing more than what Rik had told her. He could carry on playing Mystery Man, for all she cared. She wasn’t going to bow and scrape, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to let herself be seduced. She was just one bad relationship away from getting thirty cats and calling it quits with men.
    She folded up the letter and crossed the room to slide it back into his pocket. Which was definitely not as easy as pulling it out had been.
    Job done, she surveyed the sleeping beauty on her sofa. There was a hint of vulnerability in his face that definitely wasn’t there when he was awake. It tugged at something inside her, and she swallowed hard. No, she wasn’t going to try to fix this one. She had to have learned that lesson by now, right?
    But she couldn’t in good conscience leave a prince to sleep like a pretzel on the sofa, no matter how much of a pain in the butt he was, or how much he deserved it.
    The first and easiest thing she could do for him was to remove his shoes. She unlaced his trainers, braced her knees on the edge of the sofa, and pulled. His shoe slid off, quicker than she expected, the momentum driving her straight onto him, with her knee in his groin.
    “Ooph.” Rik’s eyes fluttered, and her heart stopped beating.
    His eyelids settled, and she laid a hand over her heart and started to breathe again. He was seriously out of it not to be woken by
that
.
    With much more care, she removed his other trainer, then stood back to survey the scene.
    She’d move him to the bed, and she’d take the sofa. She had more chance of fitting on it anyway. Who knew there’d be a perk to being only five foot three?
    But getting him onto the bed was an altogether different matter. It had taken two grown men to get him to her room, so how the hell was she going to get him from the sofa to the bed on her own?
    She started by wrestling the sofa closer to the bed.
    Deep breath in and shove. Deep breath in and shove.
    Sweat beaded on her forehead as the sofa inched slowly forwards until, with a jolt, it connected with the side of the bed.
    Great. Now what?
    She had to climb over the back of the sofa to roll Rik onto the bed. Except he didn’t want to roll. He snuggled back into the sofa cushions.
    “Give