by Lili Valente
“Oh…yes. I do.” She loops her arms around my neck as her head tips back. “But can you stay in good shape from sex alone?”
“I don’t know, but we’re sure as hell going to try.”
Scooping a giggling Lizzy into my arms, I carry her back to the car, kissing her against the passenger’s side before jogging around to get behind the wheel and circle back to our side of the campground. I kiss her from the car to our tent and as we roll out our sleeping bags.
The kissing makes everything take longer, but I’m in no rush. I don’t need sleep. I just need this woman—her taste, her sighs and moans and the sexy catch in her voice as she calls my name just as I slide inside her.
“Yes, oh yes,” she says, wrapping her arms and legs around me while my cock pulses in her tight heat, the happiest he’s been since the last time we were this close. “Why is it so good?”
“I don’t know,” I say as I pull back and glide inside her again, my heart stuttering in my chest. “Maybe magic is real.”
She moans, her hands stroking down my back as her hips rock forward to meet me. “Yes. And maybe your penis is enchanted.”
I smile against her lips as I kiss her. “Or your pussy is sprinkled with fairy dust.”
She giggles. “Can it fly, you think?”
“Very possibly,” I say. “If it thinks happy thoughts.”
“Oh, it’s thinking happy thoughts.” Her breath hitches as I reach between us, circling her clit with my fingers as we continue to move. “And getting happier with every passing second.”
“God, I love you,” I say, jaw clenching as I feel her body tighten.
“And I love you,” she says, clinging to my shoulders. “Let’s never put on clothes again.”
“Never,” I promise, groaning as her body locks down around me and she makes the sweet, sexy, coming sounds that are my favorite in the world.
Well, maybe my second favorite.
“Tell me again,” I say as we’re lying together afterward, catching our breath. “Tell me you love me.”
She tilts her head back to whisper in my ear. “I love you, Jeffrey Von Bergen, but I meant what I said. No clothes. You have to stay naked and willing from now on.”
“Might make leaving the tent difficult.”
“We don’t need to leave the tent,” she says, snuggling against me with a sniff. “Hmm…you were right.”
“About what?”
“Your armpits don’t always smell nice.”
“What a brat you are,” I say mildly. “Someone ought to teach you some manners.”
“Yes, they should.” I feel her grinning against my chest as she adds, “Preferably from behind.”
She’s giggling as I roll on top of her, swatting her bottom, but soon neither of us is laughing. We’re moaning and sighing, kissing and coming, falling even deeper into the kind of love that makes its own magic.
My favorite kind, I decide, as the sex fiend in my sleeping bag finally allows me to drift off with her in my arms and dreams of our bright—long—and happy future filling my head.
Epilogue
Elizabeth
Six months later…
“Hurry! Blow them out before the ceiling catches fire.” Andrew, the orchestrator of our triple birthday surprise—three cakes, with twenty-six candles each, all delivered to our ski lodge suite after dinner—motions urgently my way. “You first, Lizzy. First out of the vagina, first blowing out the candles. These are the rules.”
“Ew, gross,” Sabrina says, rolling her eyes at her husband, “Don’t talk about my mother’s vagina. What’s wrong with you?”
“So many things. As you well know.” Andrew winks, Sabrina blushes, and Zan makes a disgusted sound from her chair on my right.
“Stop. We don’t want to talk about Sabrina’s vagina, either.” Zan sniffs. “And we were born via C-section, so…”
“Either way, Lizzy came first,” Nick says with a good-natured laugh. He claps his hands. “Come on, Lizzy, you’ve got this. Big breath!”
Zan glares at him. “Don’t rush her.”
I squeeze her leg under the table, reminding her of her promise to play nice for the weekend. Not long after Jeffrey and I returned home from our camping trip last summer, she discovered she was wrong about whatever she thought Nick was involved with, but for some reason, she still can’t stand the man.
I honestly have no idea why. Nick is the friendliest of the Von Bergen brothers, kind and delightful, a natural-born charmer with a gift for putting people at ease.
Everyone but Zan.
The more he tries to win her over, the more she shoots daggers at him with her eyes and says she wishes she’d drowned him in the lake when we were children.
But then, Zan is Zan. Once she makes up her mind about someone, it’s very hard to change it. It might take an act of God to knock the chip off her shoulder and give Nick a fair shot. Or, maybe, an act of magic.
Just like that, I know what to wish for.
Pulling in a deep breath, I lean in, silently wishing for Zan and Nick to become good friends, happy to invest my birthday magic in my sister.
I don’t have anything else left to wish for personally.
All my wishes have already come true.
I look up, finding Jeffrey across the room as Sabrina blows out her candles, admiring how handsome he looks in a thick, cabled sweater the same shade of murky green as his eyes. My skin flushes beneath my dress when I find him watching me with that look in his eyes.
The look that means he’s thinking about my little red suitcase and the fresh-off-the-production-line lingerie I brought to model for him this weekend.
My collection has already sold out online—in barely forty-eight hours, in fact, the fastest any Princess Intimates line has ever sold out after launch—but being the designer has its perks. I have corsets in every color, panties in every style, and a nearly transparent robe I wore to wake Jeffrey up this morning.
I’d brought coffee, but by the time he’d finished unwrapping me, it had been stone-cold.
I can’t wait to wake him up again tomorrow, this time with see-through panties and a tiny pot of honey I stole from our room service tray this morning.
“Your turn, Zan,” Andrew calls. “Feel free to wish for a transfer to Baden Bergen. I have it on good authority the King of Gallantia can make your immigration process an absolute breeze.”
Andrew was sworn in as king three months ago, after he and Sabrina renewed their vows to each other at a lovely church in the capital city.
Jeffrey and I were in the front row. I cried and so did he, a little, though he swears it was just the dust in the church curtains that made him sniffle. And then we went back to the castle for a big party and danced until midnight before retreating to the library to read excerpts from sexy books aloud to each other and make love against the bookshelves.
He proposed to me a few minutes after, with both of us naked on the floor with books lying open on the carpet around us.
It was perfect.
I said yes, and have been saying yes every day since.
In the past six months, I’ve grown very good at saying yes. So good, in fact, that I’ve barely worried at all today. Yes, it’s my twenty-sixth birthday. Yes, for years, I assumed this day would also be my last day. But things are different now—Rafe is alive, we’ve become good friends, and all the darkness of the curse is behind me.
I believe that. I have faith.
So much faith that even when Nick says, “Better hurry up, Alexandra. It’s bad luck to let the candles go out on their own,” my pulse doesn’t speed a bit.
I make my own luck now.
“Thanks for the warning,” Zan says wryly, shooting Nick another glare before she inhales. Thankfully, it’s impossible to shoot eye daggers and blow out candles at the same time, and then Zan’s distracted as we get busy pulling the candles off the cakes and licking the icing from the ends.
Zan can be sour at times, but she’s got a sof
t spot for sweet things.
“Hell, yes,” she moans, stealing another candle from my cake. “Yours is the best, Lizzy. I need a big sloppy piece of that caramel buttercream.”
“I’ll cut it for you,” I say, reaching for one of the plates room service left behind and cutting Zan a hefty chunk of my cake. “I’m good at sloppy. Especially when it comes to food.”
Sabrina breaks into peals of laughter. “Oh my God. Did you tell Zan that you set the royal kitchen on fire again?”
“No, she didn’t,” Zan says, grinning. “What was it this time? Boiling water?”
“No, that was the first time,” Sabrina says. “The second time it was a grilled cheese. The curtains caught fire. The poor cook had to air out the place for a week after.”
“I needed a midnight snack,” I grumble. “And I didn’t want to wake anyone. I was trying to be considerate.”
“Cooking classes,” Zan says, sagely. “Enroll yourself. That’s what I did. As soon as I got to boarding school, I made myself sign up for Mastering Culinary Basics instead of the advanced French class I wanted to take. Our parents did nothing to prepare us for the real world. It’s up to us to prepare ourselves.”
“Oh! That reminds me!” Sabrina leaps to her feet, circling the table to Andrew, who’s still filming the festivities on his phone to send to our parents later.
After all the repairs they’ve been supervising lately, Mom and Dad weren’t feeling up to a ski weekend, but they’re eager to watch the triple-birthday celebration footage later. Chamomile is going to hook up her laptop to the big screen in the no-longer-leaky armory. Andrew has been more than generous with my parents, ensuring our childhood home slowly returns to its former glory.
Or at least crumbles in on itself at a much slower pace.
Sabrina fishes in the pocket of Andrew’s gray slacks, summoning a happy sound from low in his throat that makes Zan gag again.
I slap her under the table as Sabrina, giggling like the lovesick newlywed she is, pulls out a zip drive, holding it up in the air with a gleam in her eye. “Taxes! We’re going to learn to do our own this year. If we start now, we should be done by Valentine’s Day.”
Zan snorts. “Ha ha. What’s really on there? Baby pictures or something?”
Sabrina’s lips turn down and her shoulders slump. “How did you know?”
“Dad told me you were ‘scannering in the attic’ for hours when you visited last month.” Zan shrugs. “I figured you were making a birthday montage.”
I clap my hands. “Oh, yes! We haven’t had one of those since our sweet sixteen! Oh, Sabrina, you’re amazing.” I tumble out of my chair and hurry across the room to fold her into my arms.
She grunts as I squeeze her tight. “Geez, you’ve gotten a lot stronger. Jeffrey, what are you doing to her in the gym every morning?”
I laugh as I let her go. “Interval training. Mostly.”
And sex.
Lots and lots of sex.
Oodles of making-up-for-lost-time sex. Sex in our bedroom, sex in the library, sex in the kitchen and the pantry and the attic and the storm shelter and the stables and the clubhouse in the woods where Jeffrey insisted on carrying me down the stairs because he refuses to let me anywhere near a deathly situation until we’re sure.
And now, the moment of truth is nearly here.
By tomorrow morning, the day after my twenty-sixth birthday, we’ll finally know I’m curse-free for life.
I can’t wait to celebrate with him tomorrow morning. I glance his way to see him fighting a grin, realize he’s thinking about all the sex, too, and laugh.
God, I love him.
His hands and his mouth and his magical penis and every part in between.
“So, let’s watch it,” Zan says, grabbing her plate and a fork and heading for the sofa in front of the big-screen television.
We haven’t watched much TV in the two days since we arrived—we’ve been too busy watching the snow fall outside our picture windows or soaking in the hot tub with glasses of champagne—but Sabrina has no trouble getting the zip drive plugged into the DVD player or whatever contraption is hidden in the cabinet beneath the set.
Soon, we’ve all claimed a slice of our favorite cake—caramel, dark chocolate, or carrot—and settled in to watch Sabrina, Zan, and I grow up in pictures. But this time, in addition to shots I’ve seen before, there are images from our summer trip with the Von Bergen boys, when we were all children.
“I hope you feel ashamed, Andrew.” Sabrina punches her husband lightly on the arm. “Look at yourself! You were two feet taller than Lizzy. She was so tiny. What kind of monster would put snakes in that sweet angel baby’s bed?”
“I know, I know,” Andrew says, flinching away when Sabrina smacks him on the other arm. He shoots puppy dog eyes my way. “I’m so sorry, Lizzy.”
“It’s fine,” I say, easily. Truly. “Snakes under the bridge. Oh, look! Zan, I forgot you dressed as Godzilla for the festival that year. You’re adorably ferocious.”
“Cutest deadly lizard I’ve ever met,” Nick says congenially, somehow still oblivious to the fact that Zan wants to murder him. Slowly.
Probably with that fork she has poised over his bent head as he sits cross-legged at the coffee table in front of her, shoveling cake into his mouth.
Kicking her foot, I mouth, “Stop it,” waiting until I’m sure she’s going to spare Nick’s life before turning back to the screen in time to see a shot of Jeffrey, Andrew, and I as teens, all dressed up for their parents anniversary celebration.
My heart squeezes in my chest. “Aw. That’s the night I knew.”
“That you were going to send your twin sister to marry me in your place?” Andrew teases, making Sabrina laugh.
“No.” I turn to Jeffrey, who’s already finished his cake and sitting in the armchair beside the couch, his hands folded together. “That I had a thing for the wrong brother.”
Jeffrey winks. “The right brother. Nine out of ten reasonable adults agree I’m the superior specimen.”
“I don’t know where you got that polling data,” Andrew says around a bite of cake. “Because my approval rating is through the roof these days. I told you all from the beginning, the people can’t stay mad at me for long. They’ve totally forgotten I was stupid enough to be tricked by my fiancée’s twin sister.”
“I’m sure seeing firsthand how much they look alike has helped.” Nick glances between Sabrina and me as he licks chocolate icing from his fork. “Seriously. I still sometimes get confused, and I’ve been living with you creepy, matching people for months now.”
“Then you’re an idiot.” Zan snorts. “There are literally dozens of differences, all obvious to anyone with eyes.”
Nick laughs. “Sure, if you’ve grown up with them your entire life.”
“I could always tell them apart,” Jeffrey says, nodding subtly toward the door when I glance his way. I nod and point to the screen, signaling that we’ll make our escape as soon as the montage is over.
When it is, I stand, brushing a few stray crumbs from my dress. “Jeffrey and I are going downstairs for classic movie night in the lobby. Anyone need anything while we’re out?”
“More champagne from the hotel shop,” Sabrina says, narrowing her eyes at the room service cart. “We’ll be through the first two bottles by then and ready for reinforcements. I’m not going to bed until sunrise. It’s been too long since I’ve stayed up all night and had too much to drink.”
“Same,” Andrew says, holding up a finger that he points Jeffrey’s way. “Get another bottle of white wine, too. And some of that electrolyte water for hangover treatment tomorrow. Just in case.”
“And popcorn,” Nick adds. “If they have any left at the end of the movie. A big bucket, lots of butter.”
“All you do is eat,” Zan grumbles beneath her breath as she cuts herself a second slice of cake.
“Pot, have you met kettle?” Sabrina asks. Then she wiggles her fingers my way. “
Goodbye, you two. Have fun. We’ll keep the babies of the family from killing each other while you’re gone.”
“We don’t want to kill each other,” Nick says at the same time Zan grunts, “That’s what you think.”
“Do you want us to stay?” I ask, wondering if my buzzed sister is up for the challenge of keeping our other sister from murdering her brother-in-law.
Sabrina laughs and waves us on. “It’s fine. Go. Enjoy.”
Jeffrey takes my hand, murmuring as we turn to go, “Don’t worry. Nick isn’t as innocent as he pretends to be.”
“What do you mean?” I whisper outside the hotel room door.
“He’s well aware that ignoring your sister’s attitude is driving her round the bend. He’s got his eye on her.” He shrugs, starting the long trek toward the elevator. There are only four suites on this floor—all as massive as ours—so the hallway is almost always quiet. “And she wouldn’t really hurt him.”
I arch a brow his way, muttering, “I wouldn’t be so sure about that.”
I haven’t told Jeffrey about my strange call with Zan that night last summer—she made it clear I’m still sworn to secrecy—but I have told him that I’m worried about my littlest sister. She hasn’t been herself lately.
Or rather, she’s been more of herself. More intense, more short-tempered, more likely to tell you exactly what she thinks of you first and worry about hurt feelings later.
But even the crankiest version of Zan thinks Jeffrey and I are a brilliant match.
And we are.
I lean into him. “So, what masterpiece are we going to be enjoying tonight?”
“The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” he says. “The one from the thirties. Black and white.”
I wrinkle my nose. “Sounds amazing.”
He laughs and kisses my forehead as we stop beside the elevator bay and he presses the down button. “Thank you for humoring me. I know movies aren’t your favorite.”
“But I love popcorn. And you.” I’m rising up on tiptoe to steal a proper kiss when a small voice shouts, “No! No, Mommy!” behind me.
