After I had seen off Aunt Maialen and basked a little beneath her praises, I went in search of Zain, who had retreated back to the cottage an hour before in his own car. He had stood back and allowed me my victorious moment—the pats on the back from the other guardians, from my trainer, and from the Queen herself.
I had seen my aunt to the airport. In the car, we had spoken in concrete terms about my role, how it would change, and how I would spend my time. Given my new powers, a new council would have to be formed for those with only the highest security clearance to determine how semi-permanent revocations of power would be decided. We discussed Zain’s role. He would have to be consulted, of course, but given his experience, I could not imagine his absence from that council.
“Zain!” I called. Lights were on in nearly every room, which was why I couldn’t tell where to look for him first. I had expected to be tired after my trial and after the sleepless night that had preceded it but, at that moment, I felt vital.
“Zain!” I called a second time when I found him neither on the veranda or in the kitchen—not in the living room or even the theater room watching TV. It wasn’t like him to nap during the day, but I found him in the bedroom, not napping but still up to no good. To my utter horror, when I arrived to the bedroom, Zain was packing.
“Where are you going?” I demanded. It took only an instant for my spirits to turn around—an instant to go from elation to alarm.
“Your training is complete.” His voice and his eyes were empty. He exhausted, as if something had erased all of the rest and down time he seemed to have enjoyed that week. Since he had participated as a guardian during my test, was he at some sort of energetic extreme? Had he overworked himself as part of an attempt to muster the strength to help me?
“You didn’t answer my question. Where are you—“ My voice stopped working and I couldn’t get out the thought. Why wouldn’t he look at me?
He stopped packing, but didn’t lift his gaze to meet mine.
“Home for a rest, at first. Then back to work, eventually. I need to just…I need to take some time.”
“And then?” My voice shook because he had told me the answer but I felt that I no longer knew. He had never lied to me since the night that the Queen had told me the truth. It made no sense that I wanted him to repeat it himself.
“And then I will do as I always do…” He finally brought his gaze to mine. “I will finish my project and move on. I will be at the Queen’s disposal to fulfill my duty.”
“Whatever you thought this would be…” My wildly beating heart quickened my breathing. “Whatever you thought you would do when all of this finished…it doesn’t have to hold. You’ve earned your right to anything you want next.”
“I just want a rest.”
“Then take it. But come back to figure it out—what you want with The Ministry, and what you want with me.”
“I can have nothing with you.” He smiled wryly. “As for the Ministry, I’ll go where I am needed so long as it doesn’t interfere with my ability to intervene from time to time.”
I had a rational response to the second part, but I’d barely heard anything after the first.
I can have nothing with you.
“You can have nothing with me? According to whom?”
I didn’t bother to try not to sound offended. In truth, I was deeply hurt.
“According to me. Xabier, you must know that it has to be over.”
But I didn’t know that. And I didn’t expect or understand the hurt and the desperation and the resolve in his eyes as he spoke them.
“What if I needed you?”
I asked the only question that mattered. And then he broke my heart.
“Trust me. You don’t.”
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Zain
For the first time in ever, there was no joy to waking up in my own bed. The fact that Xabi had never visited this place did nothing to lessen the pain of his absence. In place of trying to explain how he felt missing in a place where he had never been, I got up. No lounging. No gazing out my windows, and certainly no lubricated fun. Morning wood had been murdered by my broken heart.
You don’t get to play the victim, my inner critic scolded itself. It was true. I had been the one to do the breaking. But it was pre-emptive breaking—the kind you did to avoid the inevitability of being broken yourself. And it has been strategic breaking. I’d cut it off at a natural ending point. He had come to the end of his training. I had come to the end of a two-plus year assignment—the biggest assignment of my career. I had earned my vacation and didn’t have to be any place, or owe anybody anything, for at least six weeks.
That was just my scheduled time off—the time we had agreed that I would take after this assignment ended. The truth was, I had years of banked vacation time. If I wanted to, I could be away from The Ministry for months. I could ask for a different job completely—ask that I not be reassigned.
Some part of me wanted to leave and never come back. Financially, I could afford to quit. The trouble was, I would wither away from not using my ability. And the piece I couldn’t admit to myself yet was that I had to keep working at The Ministry. If I never went back there, I would never see him.
Two weeks had passed since I’d been at home. I’d given up on cooking. Given up on everything, including myself. The only thing I was confident in anymore was my ability to wallow. Some of it was freshly-needed wallowing. But part of it was pent-up wallowing, I had decided. Falling apart completely was the pendulum swing when you held yourself to my standards of perfection.
It was Saturday night. I should have been somewhere intervening. I wasn’t and I needed to fill the void. Fully committed to an evening plan of drinking my sorrows and eating my feelings, I wasn’t surprised in the least when the doorbell rang. I had called in a delivery service to bring in the very best raw oysters from the coast. I would bathe them in mignonette sauce and—however un-festive I was feeling—would swallow them down with a fine champagne.
I hadn’t gotten fully dressed, but I had put on my best silk robe, a forced display of whatever hope I had left. Binging on romantic Chines dramas had given me the license I had needed to have a little cry. Having moved on to the stage of mourning that required reading The Oprah Magazine and actually taking its advice, I was poised to go out on a date with myself.
I swung open my heavy front door absently, simultaneously leaning over to the key table just inside. I knew what hell service staff endured and I enjoyed tipping. It was a habit I had picked up in the States during my studies abroad. Those had been exciting times. Perhaps I was overdue for a holiday that would take me back to my youth.
“Nice robe.”
My gaze flew up at the sound of the voice that had haunted my every moment, to take in the face that had infiltrated my every thought. He held a heavy takeout bag in his hand—certainly mine, as the bag held a styrofoam chilling chest. He must have intercepted the delivery driver or known somehow of my intentions. But I couldn’t think about the “how.” I had to think about the “what.” My prince was here.
“I’ve been thinking about how you might look in blue and gold…” he trailed off, his eyes washing over the my garment’s design. Blue and gold were also the colors of his house.
“I think this belongs to you?” He held up the bag. I had yet to speak. More accurate, I could not speak. I took the proffered bag, motioned him inside and began to walk toward my kitchen. I walked slowly in a vain attempt to collect myself during the short walk. I scrambled for a notion of what to say. He looked bad—underslept and distraught—for reasons that I could fathom. Should I tell him how I missed him, and how beautiful he still looked to me?
Don’t let him reel you in, commanded my inner voice of self-preservation. It convinced me that smalltalk wouldn’t do. Chatting could lead to flirting, which could lead to kissing. Kissing would lead to something that would throw me down a hold I lacked the strength to escape from for a second time. It would be safer to get to
the point.
“Has something happened?” I thought to ask. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility to ask. Though, The Ministry had operated well for weeks without me.
“No, not at work.” He had gotten my drift.
“Then why have you come?”
His soft, patient look wore at my resolve. “You know why.”
“Let it go, Xabi.”
“You must know that I won’t do that. I’ve never made it easy on you when we didn’t see eye-to-eye. If there’s anything worth locking horns with you on, it’s this.”
When I replied, there was only sadness in my voice. “And I won’t back down just because you like to win.”
“This isn’t about winning, Zain. This is about us.”
“There is no us. We were an illusion—a deception born out of necessity.”
“Are you certain? Because, for me, we were born the second we laid eyes on each other.”
He took a step toward me. I was frozen to my spot.
“We were born again the first time we stood this close, and born again in quiet moments when I dared not voice what I was certain that I was not worthy of. We were born again in our kisses and, wrapped in the sheets of our lovemaking, we were born again a thousand times. Zain.”
I closed my eyes against the ache. It had been weeks now since he’d begun to call me by name and still it gave me joy—the tiniest of gestures that renewed me somehow. It made me want to pull him inside and hide him away and keep him all to myself.
“You must trust me to know my own heart.”
I saw his determination—his conviction in his own words. He was so convinced that his feelings were real but I had to make him doubt himself. We were back where we had started--the prince naive but determined and me wise to knowledge that he did not possess.
“It’s too soon to make big decisions,” I argued. “They say after you’ve been through a big life change, you shouldn’t do anything rash for at least a year.”
The Prince did a full eye roll, which I didn’t think I’d ever seen him do. If I hadn’t been miserable, I might have laughed.
“I didn’t just get out of rehab. We’ve got to stop you watching so much TV.”
“Xabi,” I whispered, begging him now. “Please trust in my experience. You will feel differently—things will be different—in a couple of months.”
“I won’t make it a couple of months.” His voice had quieted. “I’ve barely made it a couple of weeks.”
We stood in silence then, perhaps at an impasse? I had lost all perspective. I didn’t know whether I was wearing him down. But I was afraid that if he didn’t leave soon, that I would ask him to stay. If I asked him, he would. And, if he did, I had no doubt that we would be together for months, or some until he saw that I was right, and broke my heart to let me down.
“Do you not love me?” he whispered, as disconsolate as I had ever seen him as he spoke the words. I had lied to him so many times before—in the name of duty and country. Why couldn’t I lie to him now?
“Of course I love you,” came my choked whisper. “That isn’t the point.”
He took another step toward me. “Love is always the point. It’s the point of everything.”
His gaze was so soft as he looked down at me then that I thought that I might break, dissolve into sobs and fall into his arms. I had been so alone for so long, so selfless, that I had ignored my own basic need: for somebody, just once, to care for me. I knew in my heart that he loved me. He needn’t have said it out loud. I knew that he wanted—and intended—to care for me.
“I have always wanted you, Zain. You don’t know how sorely I regret every day that I let you believe otherwise. I’m begging you now. Please give us a chance. You’ve seen the fate of lovelorn men with powers run amok. I shudder to think of what might become of me were I to commit crimes of passion in the name of love.”
“You can break up with me if I snore too loudly or cook too badly or mess up the wine we grow.”
“The wine we grow?” I repeated.
He motioned past me. “I couldn’t help but notice your vineyards out back.”
“You would want to live here?”
Xabi finally touched me, taking my hand in one of his and bringing the other to smooth over my hair and down my neck. His eyes were as clear and beautiful as ever.
“I want to live wherever you are. And, thanks to my unfathomable privilege, the logistics will work out. Wherever you’re working, wherever I’m working, the Queen has delivered a biplane and a jet, just for us.”
“Queen Maialen?” I nearly squawked, as if there were any other.
“The most prescient of us all,” he murmured. “She saw this coming all along. Gave me a good scolding, too, for not having moved sooner. We will be quite a powerful couple, you know, I as a direct power and you as a sixteenth…“
“Yes,” I whispered from nowhere, though he hadn’t posed the question in quite some time.
“Yes?” His eyes searched mine with cautious hope.
He let out a tiny sob I didn’t know he had been holding and leaned forward until our foreheads touched.
The next thing I knew, our arms were around one another’s back and we were fused together at the waist and I was poised to be on the receiving end of a sweet and hungry kiss that I desperately wanted to taste. My stomach chose that very instant to let out a ferocious growl.
I groaned in response. Xabi chuckled and jutted his chin down at the forgotten takeout bag.
“What’s for dinner, love?” he asked, kissing me on my chin instead and gazing down at me in humor.
“Oysters and mignonette.”
He leaned in again, looking as if he intended to kiss me anyway.
“Perfect. An aphrodisiac.”
I hoped you loved Xabier and Zain’s story! I truly loved writing it. I used to live in the Basque Country and I really loved thinking about a fictional place in that region of the world. I hope to write more books for this series, but that hasn’t happened as yet. Check out our series page for more Royal Powers fun. And if you like my writing, check out Adam Bomb, another gay contemporary romance!
And after you pick up Adam Bomb, don’t forget to subscribe to the Kenzie Blades newsletter. I give away a LOT of freebies and we have a lot of fun.
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Kenzie Blades is a queer author of romantic LGBTQIA+ fiction and is the alter ego of a multi-award winning author who writes other fiction under a different name.
Kenzie lives in San Francisco and enjoys lots of things that start with the letter B, like bacon, bourbon and books. Boys, too. Because—come on—they’re beautiful.
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Huge, enormous thanks to Chris Cox for organizing this fun collection. I kind of want to live in Abarra now. Don’t you? Also, a special thanks to EJ Russell for having the kind of brain who can keep a universe like this organized. I’ll also shout-out to Renae Kaye, Lynn Lorenz, Sara York and Jackie North, all of who added super-fun elements to the universe and who have been fun to hang out with online. I can’t wait to write more for this series. Abarra has been a great place to escape to during troubled times.
Along those lines, I have to acknowledge my extended team, who are the people who keep me motivated every day and who are with me through the vicissitudes of writing (and life). Rebecca Kimmel of the Writing Refinery fixes all of my copy and is a stellar sort of all-around person. Edward Giordano is my assistant and keeps me organized in all sorts of ways. R.L. Merrill, my Tuesday night Chez Shannon crew, and my plotting ladies, Eva Moore and Wendy Goodman. Thank you, thank you, and thank you.
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#1 Duking it Out by E.J. Russell
#2 The Hero and the Hidden Royal by Renae Kaye
#3 The Marquis of Secret Doors by Lynn Lorenz
#4 The Lost Prince by Sara York
#5 Pauper Prince Saves the Posh Pullet by Chris Cox
#6 The Duke of Hand to Hart by Jackie North
#7 The Prince and the Pencil Pusher by Ke
nzie Blades
#8 Our Gay Au Pair by Chris Cox
The Prince and the Pencil Pusher: A M/M Superhero Romance (Royal Powers Book 7) Page 10
