My Week with the Prince (Fun For the Holiday's Book 3) Read online

  MY WEEK WITH THE PRINCE

  by

  J. Sterling

  MY WEEK WITH THE PRINCE

  Copyright © 2022 by J. Sterling

  All rights reserved.

  Edited by:

  Jovana Shirley

  Unforeseen Editing

  www.unforeseenediting.com

  Cover Design by:

  Michelle Preast

  www.Michelle-Preast.com

  www.facebook.com/IndieBookCovers

  Kindle Edition, License Notes

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Please do not participate or encourage the piracy of copyrighted materials. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-945042-37-9

  Please visit the author’s website

  www.j-sterling.com

  to find out where additional versions may be purchased.

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  Other Books by J. Sterling

  Bitter Rivals- an enemies to lovers romance

  Dear Heart, I Hate You

  10 Years Later- A Second Chance Romance

  In Dreams – a new adult college romance

  Chance Encounters- a coming of age story

  The Game Series

  The Perfect Game - Book One

  The Game Changer - Book Two

  The Sweetest Game - Book Three

  The Other Game (Dean Carter) – Book Four

  The Playboy Serial

  Avoiding the Playboy- Episode #1

  Resisting the Playboy- Episode #2

  Wanting the Playboy- Episode #3

  The Celebrity Series

  Seeing Stars- Madison & Walker

  Breaking Stars- Paige & Tatum

  Losing Stars- Quinn & Ryson

  The Fisher Brothers Series

  No Bad Days – a New Adult, Second Chance Romance

  Guy Hater – an Emotional Love Story

  Adios Pantalones – a Single Mom Romance

  Happy Ending

  The Boys of Baseball

  (the next generation of fullton state baseball players):

  The Ninth Inning – Cole Anders

  Behind the Plate- Chance Carter

  Safe at First – Mac Davies

  Fun for the Holidays

  (a collection of stand-alone novels with holiday based themes)

  Kissing my Co-worker

  Dumped for Valentine’s

  My Week with the Prince

  Spring’s Second Chance

  Table of Contents

  Other Books by J. Sterling

  SHE’S DEAD

  STILL TAKING CARE OF US

  I GUESS WE’RE RICH NOW

  IT COULD BE WORSE

  AMERICANS

  DINNER DATE

  SO … IRELAND’S FUN

  I WANT THIS WOMAN

  A FREAKING PRINCE

  THE CLIFFS OF MOHER

  IRELAND IS INSPIRING

  THE COUNTDOWN IS ON

  CAN’T BELIEVE I HAVE TO LEAVE

  I NEED HER

  I’D KNOW THAT ACCENT ANYWHERE

  EPILOGUE

  Other Books by J. Sterling

  About the Author

  SHE’S DEAD

  CELESTE

  I can’t believe she’s dead.

  I mean, I had known that this was coming, but still … the actual loss of her life was like a shock to the system.

  I’d basically put my own existence on hold after moving back home to the suburbs of Dallas to be with my mom in her final weeks with cancer. Assuming that it would only be for a little while, I had no problem walking away from the life I’d created in Austin. But what started as a leave of absence at my elementary school teaching job quickly turned into my needing to quit altogether. I had no idea when I’d make it back there, if ever.

  Those weeks at home with Mom turned into months, which eventually turned into a year, but truthfully, I never regretted it. Not even during the end, when I watched my once-beautiful mother fade away from being such a bright light into nothing but an empty shell who could barely keep her eyes open. It was heartbreaking to witness, painful on a level that couldn’t be described, but I would have hated myself if I hadn’t done it. I couldn’t have lived with the guilt if I’d let my mom leave this earth alone or with a stranger by her side who was only there because it was their job and we paid them.

  Thankfully, my little sister, Tyra, had come home as well near the end.

  And now that Mom was gone, all we had was each other. It had always been the three of us for as long as we could remember. Our dad had left when we were just kids and apparently never looked back. He ran off with someone from work. At least, that was the story we’d been told. He got remarried and gave all of his money to his new family, forgetting completely about the one he’d already had, leaving us behind to fend for ourselves.

  My mom worked her ass off to take care of two girls by herself and give us a good life.

  And she had.

  She’d deserved so much better than some bullshit disease eating away at her until it killed her. Mom had deserved to be alive for when her daughters got married and gave her grandbabies. Now, she’d never see any of it.

  “I’m so mad,” Tyra said angrily, wiping away at the tears that never seemed to stop falling from either one of our eyes.

  “I know. Me too,” I said, wrapping a protective arm around her and squeezing. “It’s not fair.”

  She exhaled a long breath before turning toward me. “What do we do now?”

  It was such a loaded question, one that held far too many answers, options, and responsibility. Neither one of us lived in Dallas anymore. I’d moved to Austin years ago, and Tyra had headed to Houston right after high school. We were both spreading our wings, so to speak, seeking the kind of independence that only moving out could provide. Granted, there was no need to move so many hours away from home, but it’d seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

  Now, nothing seemed right.

  Everything was discombobulated. Messy. Wrong.

  Even though we’d both been here for months, in this house, it was almost like we’d been sleepwalking the whole time. Our bodies were here, but the rest of us wasn’t fully present. We had been so focused on Mom, what she needed and how we could help her, that everything else was just a blur of colors and shapes.

  I suddenly felt like I was opening my eyes for the first time in over a year, and I could finally see what lay before us. Our childhood home, filled to the gills with years of
belongings and memories, all seemed so overwhelming now instead of comforting. Maybe it had only felt that way before because she was still living.

  But Mom wasn’t here anymore. And we both knew it. Her spirit wasn’t sticking around in this old house, waiting for us to decide how to move on and what to do next.

  “I’m sure Mom had a will,” I said, my head already going into organization mode.

  My mother was nothing if not organized. I knew that she would have done whatever she could to make this the easiest on us. She was always putting us first.

  Tyra reared her blonde head back. The two of us couldn’t have looked more opposite if we’d purposely tried. Me, at five foot eight with dark hair and brown eyes. Her, a tiny, petite thing, barely reaching five foot two, with blonde hair and blue eyes, which we always assumed had come from our absentee father since our mother had brown eyes like mine.

  “A will? Who cares about a will, Celeste?” she snapped, and I knew it was because she was emotionally overloaded. We both were.

  We’d been holding our feelings in for so long, trying to be strong while Mom was still here with us, that the second she inhaled her last breath, we broke down, exhaustion taking over. That had been a little over a week ago, and we still looked like zombies who had barely survived the apocalypse. Mom hadn’t wanted a funeral. That was the one thing she’d made crystal clear and forced me to not only listen to, but repeat back to her. She wanted to be cremated and said that if we felt up to having a celebration of life, she’d like that but that we didn’t need to feel obligated to do anything.

  “I just meant that maybe Mom had some requests she put in there that we don’t know about. Like what she wanted us to do with the house.”

  “You never asked her?”

  I shook my head, feeling stupid. I should have thought about these kinds of things, so I could have at least talked to my mom about it all before she died. But I’d been too caught up in simply being present with her that I pushed the painful details off to the side to discuss some other day. Even when she tried to bring it up, I’d force her to stop. It was cowardly and classic avoidance syndrome, but it’d seemed easier at the time to pretend like maybe she’d make some miraculous recovery and I’d never have to think about things like what to do with the home we grew up in ever again.

  I watched as my sister plopped down in one of the seats at our old kitchen table, the one we’d had since we were kids, her head in her hands as she sobbed. I felt helpless, unable to ease her pain. I had my own. Plus, there was nothing I could say or do to bring back our mom.

  And when you sat there and thought about what losing her meant—that we had no parents anymore—it was incredibly lonely and scary, to say the least. I shoved all of that out of my head, refusing to feel sorry for myself any more than necessary.

  Tyra sniffed loudly, wiping her nose with the back of her arm before she looked at me, her eyes swollen and red. “Are we supposed to sell it? The house, I mean?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Neither one of us lives here anymore. But, Tyra, if you want the house, I’ll make sure we can keep it, okay?”

  I was officially in big-sister mode now. Being four years older wasn’t much, but it sometimes felt like a lifetime in terms of experience. Not to mention the fact that even though there was only the two of us, we’d fallen into the societal roles like they had been made for us. Me, the ever-dutiful older sister, who always watched out for Tyra and tried to keep her out of trouble, responsible at all times. And then there was Tyra, the baby of the family, the favorite who could do no wrong even though that was all she ever did.

  She pushed the limits while I stayed in bounds.

  “Don’t you want to keep it?” she asked, almost sounding hopeful.

  I’d almost forgotten that Tyra was the more sentimental of us two. She had a really hard time with letting go of things. I only imagined what giving up this house would do to her. I wasn’t actually sure she’d survive it, the loss of one more thing.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it,” I admitted, angry again for not planning better and being more on the ball when I’d had the chance.

  “You don’t have your apartment in Austin anymore,” Tyra added, like I couldn’t go back there and get a new one as soon as I left here.

  But I knew what she meant. Technically, neither one of us had anywhere to live. We’d both packed up our apartments and broken our respective leases to come back home. And now, we were here … Mom-less.

  “I need a drink.” Tyra shoved up from the chair, the sound of it scratching against the wood surface, making me shiver.

  Mom had hated that sound. She’d always cock her head to one side and narrow her eyes, making sure Tyra knew she disapproved without ever saying a word.

  “Crap. Mom would have been giving me the look right now,” she said as she shuffled toward the kitchen cabinets and started pulling the right one open. “Please tell me you didn’t throw out all the good shit.”

  “I didn’t throw out anything. Why would I?” I balked, feeling somewhat disrespected that my sister thought so little of me.

  I was never one to throw out alcohol, and one look on that shelf would tell anyone that. Some of it was really old—so old that the liquor wasn’t made anymore—but there it sat, in our cabinet, just waiting for its chance. It had to be undrinkable by this point.

  I watched as Tyra maneuvered the bottles around, pulling them out one at a time to see what was hidden behind them. Most people had a liquor cabinet, all pretty and on display, but not us. Nope. We just had an old-fashioned cupboard filled with whatever we’d accumulated over the years.

  “Thank God,” Tyra exclaimed as she pulled out a bottle of Belvedere Vodka.

  I wondered where that had come from and how long it had been in there. Belvedere wasn’t expensive, but it wasn’t necessarily cheap either. Mom didn’t usually splurge on the good stuff, as she used to call it.

  “There’s orange juice and cranberry in the garage,” I said, like Tyra didn’t know that already.

  Was this what someone dying did to your brain? Made you tell people useless information that they already knew, like the fact that there was juice in the garage when she had been the one to pick it out at the grocery store with me just the other day?

  I started pacing with no idea of what I was supposed to do—begin packing or go through things and decide what to get rid of. Even if we somehow kept the house, it would still need to be cleaned out.

  Mom’s room had basically been turned into hospice care. Long gone were the times when we’d sat as kids on her bed as she read to us until we fell asleep. Or nights when we’d run into her room during a storm. Or cried in her arms over boys who had broken our hearts while she told us they’d mean nothing someday.

  Now, it was a room filled with memories of pain, medication, tears, and labored breaths. It needed to be aired out and covered up with a fresh coat of paint. My thoughts were racing when I heard my cell phone ringing from somewhere in the house.

  “It’s in here,” Tyra shouted, and I turned to see her waving my phone in her hand as she glanced at it. “No name. Just a local number,” she said as she handed it to me.

  I answered tentatively. It was usually a spam caller whenever it was a number I didn’t recognize or have programmed in my phone. “Hello?”

  “Is this Celeste Finnegan?” the older male–sounding voice asked from across the line, but I wasn’t falling that easily.

  “Maybe,” I said, my response clipped and unfriendly.

  “Okay, maybe Miss Celeste Finnegan. This is Charles Edwin. I handled your mother’s will. She requested that you come in and meet with me. Not your younger sister, however. Just you.”

  “Why just me?” I asked.

  “Because you’re the executor of the will. Can you be at my office anytime soon?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, being difficult for no other reason than I felt like it.

  “Celeste, this is a
very time-sensitive matter. I need to urge you to make time to come in. As soon as possible.”

  Jeez. Can this guy turn the melodramatics down a notch?

  “Fine. I can come right now.”

  “Sounds great. I have your email address, so I’ll have my assistant send you our physical address and any additional details that we require.”

  The call ended as abruptly as it had started, and I turned to find Tyra staring at me as she mixed together her vodka and cranberry drink. Well, it had to be mostly vodka because the concoction was only tinted light pink, which meant she’d only put a splash of the cranberry in.

  “Who was that?”

  “Mom’s lawyer, I think. He needs me to come into the office and go over the will.”

  Tyra placed the glass down on top of the counter. “I’ll get my things.”

  “No, Ty,” I said, stopping her short. “He asked for just me to come in. Something about being the executor.”

  She looked perturbed, and I almost thought she was going to argue with me about it, but she reached for her glass again and took a giant gulp without flinching.

  “Go then,” she said, sending me away with a wave of her hand.

  I hurried into my bedroom, grabbed my purse along with my car keys, and headed out the door.

  STILL TAKING CARE OF US

  CELESTE

  I sat down in the driver’s seat of my car and blew out a long breath. Pulling up the email app on my phone, I loaded it, hoping that Mr. Charles Edwin’s email had come through. Mom’s will was actually something that I was super curious about, but I also wanted to get this over with as soon as possible. The fewer legal things we had to get through, the better.

  The email was waiting in my inbox, just like I’d hoped, letting me know the address and to bring a picture ID for identification purposes. I copied and pasted the address into my navigation app and carefully backed out of the driveway. Mr. Edwin’s office was only a few minutes away, and even though this was a small town, in my opinion, it wasn’t so tiny that everyone knew everyone else. I’d never heard of Charles Edwin before in my life, and I wondered how Mom had found him.