I have no words for that. Alex’s death traumatized me and yet here was Maggie and her brothers and sisters having to lose both parents in such a way. I just can’t fathom it.

Suddenly I’m more confident in what I have to do.

“So are you dating her or what? You her boyfriend?” he asks me.

I shake my head. “No. Just a friend. Just passing through.”

“Ah, that’s too bad,” he says. “She’s such a pretty girl. Funny with a smart mouth on her. I like her. It would be nice to see her get some support. I know her brother helps out from what I hear but even so, you know, how tough that’s gotta be.”

I nod, and we lapse into a silence for the rest of the ride until we’re pulling up the street of her house.

“Hey, do you mind parking here and waiting? I’ll pay for your time.”

“How much time?” he asks, the light from the streetlamp glinting off his balding head.

I hand him fifty bucks. “As much time as this buys me.”

He looks at it, his eyes narrowing. “Ten minutes?”

I glare at him. Give me a break.

My look changes his mind. “Okay, however long you need.”

I get out and walk over to her house. The lights are all out and the way the moonlight is hitting it, accentuating the peeling paint and missing boards, makes it look like a haunted house. In fact, now that I know her parents were actually murdered in the house, it only adds to the feeling.

I shouldn’t knock on the door because I don’t want to wake everyone up, and unfortunately, she has her window closed.

I stoop down and scoop up some pebbles, stand underneath her window, trampling over some weeds, and start tossing them at the glass.

Shit, I hope this is her window. If I get her sister April’s, I’m in for one hell of a tongue-lashing.

I wait and look around, feeling like a stalker. The street is quiet, sleeping, no sign of life except for the cab driver sitting in his car, pretending not to watch me. After a minute, when nothing happens, I throw the pebbles up again.

Finally, I see Maggie’s face in the window, her skin pale, eyes darker than the night, looking ghostly in the faded frame.

I wave for her to come down, hoping that she will.

She disappears from sight and my chest tightens. I wait.

The front door slowly creaks open and she steps out onto the porch. She’s barefoot wearing a white robe that hits her mid-thigh and nothing else. She still has this aura around her, pale, fragile, cautious as she takes me in, her dark hair drifting around her shoulders on a soft breeze. I yearn to reach out and run it through my fingers.

It’s only then that I notice the emblem on her robe is the La Quinta logo.

“Present from work?” I say in a low voice, nodding to it.

She looks down and then wraps her robe around her tighter. “Why are you here?” she whispers, frowning.

“Because I wanted to apologize.”

She looks even more puzzled, her lower lip pouting slightly. The sight of it is forcing my brain to go in a different direction, my skin to feel hot and tight.

“What would you need to apologize for?” she asks, incredulous. “I’m the one who betrayed your trust.”

I nod. “You did. But I betrayed it first, by starting out with a lie. And I could have ended things better instead of being so stubborn and sending you home in the cab like that. I wasn’t raised to act that way.”

She seems to relax at that, eyeing me with sympathy. “You’re only human,” she says softly, sticking out her leg so the robe falls away from her white, creamy thigh, and she points her slender foot at me, tapping me on the side of the knee. “You’re allowed to be human, to be angry, to react.”

I swallow hard, trying not to stare at her thigh as she retracts her leg. I don’t know if it’s the moonlight, the fact that it’s just the two of us talking in whispers, the fact that I don’t know what’s underneath that robe, but I have a sudden urge to reach down and grab her under her thighs. Feel the smoothness of her skin squeezed between my hands then pick her up and press her up against the house, letting that robe fall open, sliding to the ground, leaving her breasts bare. I bet under the moonlight she would glow.

“What?” she asks me in a furtive hush.

I blink up at her, aware that I’ve been staring at her hungrily. My heart beats loudly in my head, sabotaging my ability to think, and I’m forgetting the whole speech I had prepared on the ride up here.

She cocks her head, studying me, still a wary look on her brow but her eyes are curious now, waiting for what I have to say.

“Anyway.” I cough. “I should have handled everything better than I did. And for that I’m sorry. But I have to know, and please be honest with me, did you know from the very start who I was?”

“No!” she says emphatically, then glances up at the windows and quickly lowers her voice. “No, I didn’t. I swear. I saw you in the hotel room and I thought you were just an average guest.” I raise my brow. She smiles. “I mean, above average, obviously. We’ve already talked about the size of your, uh…”

“Cock,” I fill in.

“Yeah,” she says, and fuck do I want to hear her say it. But I bite my lip and let her continue. “But still, a guest. Then I saw you at the bar and I don’t know. Maybe I was already drawn to you in ways I couldn’t explain, maybe it was because I’d already seen you naked, but there you were. And it was like fate was bringing us together or something. Okay, not as lame as that sounds, but you know what I mean. And I just knew I had to help you. So I did. I didn’t know who you were until I looked at your wallet.”

She’s talking a mile a minute and waving her hands around but in her eyes I see her truth and in her voice I hear her honesty and I know she had no idea.

She continues, “I can’t say that everything I did for you was because I was selfless. I think in some way, I just wanted to get to know you.”

“It worked.”

“Kind of,” she says, scrunching up her face. “Except I only got to know you as Johan. I never got a chance to know Viktor.”

“Would you like a chance?”

Her eyes narrow. “What do you mean?”

“Why don’t we start all over again?”

She stares at me.

I stick out my hand. “Hello, I’m Viktor.”

A shy smile lifts the corner of her mouth and she extends her hand. “Hello, I’m Maggie.”

I grasp it, giving it a firm but warm shake. “And now we start again.”

I know what I want to do, how I want to start. I want to keep holding her hand and then slide my palm up her arm, to her neck, wrap my fingers around the back of it and hold her tight. I want to pull her into me, suck that pouting lower lip of hers into my mouth until she blushes. I want to see if she tastes like vanilla ice cream, the creaminess of her skin makes me believe she does.

It takes a lot of self-control to keep myself in check, to focus on my plan.

I take in a deep breath and hope she doesn’t notice how badly she affects me.

“Maggie, I’ve been thinking that despite the last twenty-four hours, we don’t really know each other. You definitely don’t know me. So I’m offering you a chance to get to know me and to make some money at the same time.”

This whole time I’ve been speaking she’s been nodding attentively but now that I’ve mentioned money, she immediately tenses up.

“What are you talking about?” And the way she says it makes me realize she might think I’m talking about prostitution.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to pay you to have sex with me.”

Her eyes widen. “Uh, I wasn’t thinking that. But now I am.”

“Look, what if you still did the article you were going to do. But this time you have my permission. This time we’re doing it on my terms, all out in the open.”

“The article?”

I look over my shoulder to see if the cab is still there and it is. I look back to her. “Yes. What you were recording. You were going to write that up weren’t you?”

She gnaws on her lip, doesn’t say anything.

“So just do it again. Officially. You can take pictures, whatever. As long as I get to approve what you write before it’s sent wherever you were going to send it. We can even send it to the Swedish tabloids, you know they would pay top kroner for it.”

“How many kroners?” she asks.

I laugh. “Enough. Enough to get all those things you need for your family. More than that. I’d say fifteen or sixteen thousand kroners.”

“Oh my god, that much!” Her eyes nearly bug out of her head.

“It’s about two thousand American dollars,” I explain. “Still good though.”

Her shoulders slump a little as she tries to grapple the idea. “But…why would you do this?”

“Because you helped me. Now I’m helping you. That’s how these things work.”

“You think I’m charity.”

“No Maggie,” I tell her, grabbing hold of both her hands, “I think you’re beautiful.”

Her stare lingers on my mouth for a long, agonizing moment until she blinks up to my eyes. She looks scared, unsure, a tiny line forming between her brows. I can’t tell if it’s because of what I just proposed to her or if it’s because I called her beautiful, but I’m not willing to rock the boat.

“Look,” I say, letting go of her and taking a step backward. “You can call it My One Week with the Prince. Everyone will eat it up.”

“I just…” she looks away, her eyes searching the darkness of her front yard as if she’ll find something lurking there.

“Or call it whatever you want,” I say quickly. “I just want to help, and I think it would be fun. For both of us.”

“I work so much this week. Every week. And you’re leaving.”

“I don’t have to leave. I’ll go to LA and fly out as promised but I can spend the rest of my time here until that happens.”