by Pippa Grant
“We’ve no options beyond sharing this bedroom.”
“There’s always a way, Viktor.”
“Certainly, if you’re offering to sleep on the floor. ‘Twould be quite awkward for the footmen and the guards to tiptoe around you were you to attempt to nap in the corridor.”
I open my mouth, then close it again.
Of course we have to share a bedroom. We’re supposed to be happily married.
I’m apparently still having my nightmare. The one where Joey will kill me when she finds out why I married Viktor, and then there’s the part of my nightmare where I married Viktor, who loves to torment me, and the part where Papaya is running loose through Europe with a pack mule dressed up like a spiritual guide who’s trying to convince her to buy oats from every seedy oats dealer from here to Norway.
“’Twould give me a great deal of relief if you would eat something,” Viktor says cautiously.
“Is it poisoned?”
“Not yet, but I could call down to the kitchens if you’d prefer it to be.”
I gape at him for half a second before a laugh catches me by surprise. I fling a pillow at him. “Shut up.”
He easily avoids the pillow as he stands and moves across the round room toward the opposite window. “Merely trying to be a gentleman and provide for your every wish, my lady.”
“You’re being annoying.”
“’Tis such an easy task with you.”
I’d reply, except my skull squeezes my brain, and I realize he’s right.
I need to eat something.
And possibly also that I’m easily irritated. Which I’m blaming squarely on him, since he likes to taunt me.
I take the other gaudy sitting chair beside the heart-shaped end table adorned with heart-shaped candles sitting on golden heart-shaped candlesticks.
I swear, I’m going to stop talking about the hearts. Just assume everything’s in the shape of a heart, okay? And that the hearts aren’t nearly as charming as the rest of the castle, because can you be more obvious?
I didn’t think so either.
Now let’s talk about the food.
Which is on a heart-shaped—yes, seriously, a heart-shaped plate, and I really am done talking about the hearts. Cross my—you get the point.
The sausage is lumpy with uneven burnt parts on the outside, the potatoes—I think those are potatoes?—are flat and almost runny and look more like a soupy you-know-what shaped pancake than mashed potatoes, and I don’t recognize the vegetable at all. It’s something green and orange and mushy, and that’s about all I’ve got. “Um…thank you.”
“It seems the chef has been here since before my grandfather was exiled,” he muses as he crosses to the window closer to me. He peers out into the darkness and frowns while he continues to unbutton his shirt. “I rather suspect she’s unable to see or taste the food anymore, and ‘tis my understanding her salary has not afforded wiggle room for saving for retirement.”
My first spoonful of mashed potato is halfway to my mouth when he pulls off his dress shirt, exposing miles of rippling arm muscles and tight, round shoulders. The white, sleeveless undershirt accentuates the olive tone of his skin, and I belatedly realize I’m staring when I feel potatoes sliding off my cheek.
I missed my mouth.
Completely.
And I don’t have a napkin.
That’s me. The trailer park girl with no manners, living in a broken down castle in Europe with the only man they could find for the king job.
I really couldn’t have picked a better kingdom if I had to get tangled up with royalty. Hearts aside. Because the state of the castle doesn’t make me feel like I need to be anything better than who I am.
I swipe the potatoes with my palm and lick it clean, which is about the most unrefined thing I could possibly do.
What’s he going to do?
Divorce me?
His lips twitch again as he reaches for his belt, and I wonder if I’m about to get a striptease.
My face flames, and I duck my head over the plate to distract myself.
“Did you know how run-down the castle was when you agreed to the…conditions?” I ask while I saw into the rubber-hard sausage with a knife that’s not even sharp enough to cut melted butter.
“Are you dissatisfied with your lodgings, my lady?”
The swoosh of suit pants hitting the floor makes my throat go dry. I refuse to look up as I force myself to answer, though even I can hear the breathy neediness that I’ll deny to my dying day. “No. I like it. The parts of the castle I saw, I mean. I could do without the heart fest.”
I press harder with the knife, my grip on the sausage slips as I finally manage to chop the thing in two, and my knife clatters against the porcelain heart while half the sausage shoots off the plate and nails Viktor.
Right in the crotch.
Where he’s wearing heart boxers.
There’s a big greasy sausage stain right in the center of his red and white heart boxers.
I gape.
I can’t help myself.
Viktor is wearing heart boxers.
“Holy hammer of Thor,” I whisper.
I shouldn’t keep staring, but I can’t help myself.
And that’s before something long and thick begins to grow beneath the hearts. Long and thick and oh, lordy, it’s going to pop right out of the bottom of his boxers if it doesn’t—I gulp.
This isn’t right. Viktor isn’t supposed to have a penis.
I mean, yes, of course Viktor has a penis.
But I’m not supposed to notice that he has one, because while we’re married, it’s on paper only, a sham to get him a kingdom and me custody of Papaya, and I don’t even like the man, because his entire life’s mission—until this whole king thing happened—was to do nothing more than serve as a lapdog for a man born of privilege and wealth who’s probably never even seen the inside of a trailer park.
And that’s excluding all the times he’s zinged me with subtle zingers that no one else even noticed.
“Could you—put that—away?” My throat is tight and so are my traitorous nipples, and my voice is so strained I’m probably on the verge of popping my vocal cords.
He shifts so that I can’t see the king-size cock behind his hearts. “If you’re uncomfortable, my lady, may I suggest you look elsewhere? We shall, of course, need to adapt somehow to sharing a bedroom.”
He’s right, dammit. I should look somewhere else. While he’s as well-endowed as he should be for his new title, the square footage taken up by his erection is a fraction of the square footage of the entire room.
But it still seems to be the only thing in the room.
And now I want to see if he’s going to poke out of one of the legs of his boxers. And I can’t see it clearly, because he turned away even more to give me a view of the dimples at the small of his back and his tight ass stretching his boxers and I really need to stop gaping at him. “Your underwear has a heart on—”
I stop myself, because I didn’t quite nail that T on the end of the heart, and he just turned back to me, and his hard-on is now tenting his boxers straight out and I’m starting to have some feelings in places I usually only get feelings after digging around Tumblr for some exquisitely dirty gifs before getting myself off.
“And what do your underwear feature, my lady?” His voice is low, with a gravelly quality that sends more pulses of pleasure pinging through my panties.
“Peaches,” I blurt.
Which is a total and complete lie, but it makes his cock bob upward, and this is not good.
“Do they?” he inquires.
There’s something about that piercing gaze that clearly says he knows I’m lying that makes the truth slip out. “No. I’m not wearing underwear.”
He visibly swallows, and his eyes go even darker in the dim bedroom. “Have your clothes not arrived yet either, my lady? Or do you always prefer to go without undergarments?”
Undergarments.
>
Thor help me, he’s made the word undergarments sexy as fuck.
Viktor.
Sexy as fuck.
In heart boxers and a sleeveless white tank top and black socks.
“I shouldn’t answer that question.”
He steps toward me as though he can hear in my voice how heavy and empty and wet I suddenly am where my panties should be.
“No? ‘Twould go a long way toward reinforcing the ruse of our affections were I to suffer frequent untimely afflictions from imagining you sans undergarments.”
“I’m sure you can manage finding reasons to pop a boner on your own.” My voice is thick and unsteady, because I’m picturing Viktor thinking of me sprawled naked across that cheesy bed and having to adjust a hard-on during a meeting with presidents and ambassadors and the freaking pope too.
I wonder how his dick would taste.
He stops just out of reach. Right at the border of close enough for his size and presence to be intimidating, and far enough away to not give any suggestion that he’ll force himself on me.
“For all that you drive me quite mad, you’re still among the most remarkable women I’ve ever known.”
“Don’t flatter me,” I whisper. Ugly, old injuries are seeping to the forefront of my heart and mind, the sewage of my past that I can never fully flush away. “You know our rules.”
“’Tis rather difficult to recall the purpose for those rules when you’re gazing at me as though you, too, would like to break them.”
Oh, god, I would. If we had no history and we were hanging out at a bar and he were some construction worker and we both just needed to blow off steam, I’d be pulling him out the back door to my truck before you could say boo.
I grip the base of my chair and press down hard, as though the flattened cushion could do anything to ease the ache in my clit. “I don’t break rules.”
“Oh, come now, Peach. We both know better.”
That voice is growing on me by the millisecond. This is Viktor. He’s not supposed to be hot and charming and blessed by the god of erections. “I don’t break rules that I make.”
“It disturbs me how attractive I find that about you.”
I should be insulted, but warmth is swelling in my chest.
Viktor finds me attractive.
Me.
I know I’m not easy. I know I push his buttons. On purpose as often as I can.
But he still sees something in me.
Or maybe he just sees a cheap, easy lay.
Like another man or three I’ve known.
I bolt upright, upending the plate, because if I don’t, I’m going to do something I’ll regret every morning for the next year. “Stop it. Just stop. I don’t sleep with men more powerful than me, so this isn’t going to happen.”
He takes a half step back, eyes flaring wide, and says something I don’t catch while I stumble into the round staircase leading to the bathroom.
I realize what I’ve done, backtrack, hand shielding my eyes so I can’t look at Viktor even if I want to, and finally find the door to the other round staircase leading down from the tower bedroom to the sitting room, which leads to a stairway down to the weird-ass something room—don’t ask—which finally leads to the main floor and the apartment’s whatever-they-want-to-call-it room.
I call it the family room, because it has couches—do not ask me about their shape or decoration—and bookshelves and fancy-ass fireplaces and more tapestries of mating farm animals and best of all, the exit to the apartment.
And I left my phone in the bedroom.
My first chance to call Joey, and I left my phone in the bedroom.
I sag against the crumbling plaster wall just outside the apartment, and some of it crumbles off under my butt and falls to the floor.
I’ve just moved Papaya and Meemaw halfway around the world. We know no one. We don’t even speak either of the two official languages. I have no idea if the palace guards here are trained as well as Viktor and Manning’s other guards, which means I have no idea if they’ll actually be effective at helping me keep Papaya contained. And I have no idea if I’ll ever be able to go back to work with Joey again at Weightless.
And I just pulled a total chickenshit move and ran away from Viktor.
I hate being a chickenshit.
But I’d hate myself more if I’d slept with one more man who could crush me simply because of his last name.
“Mmmmmmmaawww,” a voice says to my left.
Fred stops beside me, right there in the palace hallway beside a woven tapestry featuring some sort of Robin Hood figure proposing to a horse—what?—and the llama nudges my shoulder.
I reach a hesitant hand to his head and push his fluffy bangs back so I can look in his brown eyes.
It’ll be okay, the llama’s soft eyes say.
“You think?” I whisper.
He doesn’t answer.
But he does drop a load right there in the hallway.
I heave a sigh. “Thanks, Fred. You’ve been a big help.”
He hums his weird moo sound again and licks my face.
And I let him, because what else am I going to do?
13
Viktor
If I’m to share a bedroom with Peach—which we must, because palace staff always talks regardless of the palace—then I desperately need to reattach my head straight, because the last thing I need is to become attracted to my wife.
The bulge in my boxers would suggest I’ve already failed at my mission.
The country is in the midst of a financial crisis, the Parliament is incapable of reaching a compromise on anything—I daresay they’d take up a resolution to declare if dogs or cats made better pets, just to have something else to argue over—and I’ve at least twenty heads of state to meet within the next month, on top of language lessons and law lessons and public appearances. I’ve no time to be a good husband to anyone, which was supposed to make Peach an ideal choice of a wife.
I grunt to myself as I do my best to mop the mess of her dinner with a bath towel.
Which is doing nothing to calm the pulsing in my knob.
Her eyes—have a woman’s eyes ever held such a mix of brazen sass, undisguised interest, and palpable vulnerability?
Quite the guard dog, isn’t she? Manning Frey once said to me.
You’re too kind, Your Highness, I’d replied.
Yet I know a thing or two about protective natures. About love of family. About the lengths one will go to and the sacrifices one will make for the betterment of those who mean the most to them.
I finish with the dinner mess and stand, eyeing the heart-shaped mattress.
That will be most uncomfortable for sharing with another person.
Peach is correct. A simple complaint about a back ailment or snoring, and we could have the bed replaced. Or perhaps she should have a sleep abnormality. Insomnia. Sleep apnea. Narcolepsy.
However, the solution shall actually be much simpler.
Whoever thought putting a monarch’s bedroom in a tower was a good idea was a fool.
Anyone with a grudge and half the ingenuity Papaya Maloney possesses in just her navel could manufacture a weapon to damage the entire tower. There’s no secondary escape route.
And I also have no desire to live in a tasteless bedroom decorated wholly by the man who stole and nearly broke my grandfather’s kingdom.
It appears I do have some preferences for my living quarters after all. And whilst I detest the idea of making demands merely because of a title, I shall be moving our bedroom to a more appropriate location. With a more appropriately-sized bed.
Once I’ve cleaned the dinner mess as best I can without access to traditional cleaning tools, I email Leonie that I expect palace staff to move Her Majesty and myself to a safer location within the apartment tomorrow.
And I feel like quite the pompous arse as I do so, but I believe it necessary for Peach’s comfort and my peace of mind.
That task complet
e, I pull up my text messages and hesitate only briefly before sending yet another note that still leaves me mildly uncomfortable.
For many reasons.
My phone rings almost instantly.
“Your Highness,” I say by way of greeting.
Habit, I fear.
“Your Majesty,” Manning Frey drawls. He’s almost picked up some American Southern in his accent, which should be quite comical, but little amuses me tonight. “How may I be of service?”
“I’ve a personal question, and I wish for Miss Gracie to not know I’ve asked.”
He chuckles. “Might as well hang up now. Troubles with the missus?”
The missus. America has had quite the impact on his vocabulary. I pick my words carefully as I inspect the sleeve of condoms I’ve discovered in the bedside drawer. “Our short courtship has left me without sufficient knowledge of her past.”
“You want me to ask Gracie why Peach is so very prickly.”
“It does seem a question I would not get a straight answer to were I to go directly to the source.” Yes, I’ve become a ninny, calling up my friends to gossip about what could possibly be going through the mind of a woman. “And as our marriage vows were so necessarily hasty…”
“Say no more, old chap.”
“Thank you, Your—”
“Viktor, if you complete that sentence, I shall be forced to tell Gracie why I’m inquiring about the prickly Peach.”
I hold the strip of condoms to the light, and—just as I suspected.
Pinholes.
Of course the palace staff wishes to not have a lack-of-heir problem again. Someone shall be sacked as soon as I discover the person responsible. And I doubt it will be the maid.
“Miss Gracie is already aware, isn’t she?” I say.
“She’s a quick study in royalty. She’s also not said a word. She wishes to not worry Joey. Or put you in danger, of course. She’s rather fond of you and would be put out if her sister should murder you in your sleep.”
“As would I,” I agree dryly.
“Is there anything else I can do to assist the kingdom of Amoria?”
“No, you’ve done more than enough already.”
“I wish you luck, my friend. Call again anytime. I’ll drop an email.”
