Hot Heir: A Royal Bodyguard / Secret Heir / Marriage of Convenience Romantic Comedy

by Pippa Grant

  If you love SEALs and one night stand romances, read on for an excerpt of The Hero and the Hacktivist…

  Rhett Elliott (aka a badass hero suffering in silence)

  You want to know the worst thing about weddings?

  It’s not all the crying—happy, sad, whatever. It’s not the boring-ass ceremony. It’s not the rules—you know, no kidnapping the groom for one last interrogation before he marries your sister, no setting off smoke bombs to interrupt the ceremony, no calling in your team to strip search the guests just for fun.

  No, the worst thing about weddings is that my baby brother always fucking kicks my ass in Wedding Bingo at the reception.

  Exactly like he’s doing now.

  “Ahh, yeah, baby—that’s Knox’s niece puking up too much cake in the corner. And that’s a bingo,” Brooks crows. He tips the whisky bottle at me at our table, where we’re watching all the dancing in the next room of the fancy reception house on Long Island. “Drink up, loser.”

  I knock the bottle away and tip my chair to look around him at the kid behind the gift table. “She’s not puking, asshole. She’s playing with her shoes.”

  “Your commanders know your vision’s going, old man?”

  Fuck, he even beat me to the sight joke. I’ll look like an idiot if I come back asking him how he can see a baseball. Plus, he’s right. She’s puking.

  I punch him in the arm. Baseball season’s over. He doesn’t need it again for a few months. “Fucking sucks you’re not in the playoffs, doesn’t it?”

  He grins. “Fucking sucks you’re on recruitment duty, doesn’t it?”

  I punch him again, then I take the bottle and estimate a shot right off the top.

  Probably got closer to three.

  Not a problem. Would take sixteen to take me down. But there are a few single women of banging age here, so I better not fucking lose one more round of bingo to Brooks.

  I hand him back the bottle and shove to my feet, because I know a thing or seven about puke. Need to determine where this one is on the puke scale. Considering the kid’s probably no more than four, or maybe seven—I don’t really know shit about kids—Brooks is probably right, and it’s probably cake she’s tossing and not alcohol.

  I reach her side, study the mess, and give it a two on a fifty-point scale. This is amateur stuff. You want gross? Try cleaning up after a few Chair Force flying pansies after one of their weenie naming ceremonies. No, I don’t want to talk about how I got roped into that. Don’t really want to clean up this kid’s mess either, but I don’t know where her parents are, and I should at least make sure she’s not going to go all Exorcist here.

  Don’t tell me that shit’s not real. I’ve stared it down on missions before.

  “Hey. You done?” I ask her.

  She looks up at me, her big eyes waver, and she screams. “Mommy!”

  She scampers away, leaving regurgitated wedding cake all over the floor, and Brooks snorts behind me. “Try smiling next time,” he tells me.

  “Fuck smiling. Get me a towel.”

  “Get your own towel. Oh, there’s a granny stealing the leftover champagne. Isn’t that another box in bingo?”

  Dammit, he’s right. I’m losing my touch.

  One of the staff dashes over with a towel. “I have this, Mister…”

  “Grumpypants,” Brooks supplies for me. “We call him Mister Grumpypants.”

  I punch Brooks in the arm again.

  He snickers, then winks at someone across the room.

  There are like four single women here tonight, and he’s just caught the eye of one.

  Only thing worse than losing Wedding Bingo to my brother would be losing my shot at a hot hook-up.

  Although, Parker—that’s my sister, and don’t even fucking think of saying she looks anything less than angelic in her dress today, but you can insult Knox, her new husband, as much as you want—basically threatened me with disembowelment if I slept with any of her bridesmaids.

  But most of them are married, and I don’t fuck with married women. Which means I’ve been eyeing that Lila chick that Knox works for.

  She’s hot—red haired, green eyed hot—independent, career-oriented, and single. Plus, she works in Manhattan, and I’ll be in Brooklyn. Since she’s Knox’s boss, she doesn’t get invited out to Ma and Pa’s place on Long Island for dinner ever.

  It’s basically perfect.

  Unless she falls madly in love with me.

  But that would only suck for Knox.

  It’s a chance I’m willing to take.

  I glance around the rapidly emptying dining room.

  “You’re out of luck if you’re looking for Lila,” Brooks tells me. “Saw her disappear with Jack ten minutes ago.”

  What the fuck?

  Since when am I the chopped liver in the Elliott Brothers sandwich? I’m a fucking SEAL. I eat tuna cans for breakfast—metal and all. I can climb buildings faster than Spider Man. I even got Zeus Berger—yeah, that Zeus Berger, the 350-pound solid muscle hockey brute—in a headlock until he cried uncle last night.

  I’m not the fucking chopped liver.

  I’d beat the shit out of anyone who tried anything with my brothers, but they’re all fucking annoying me today. All four of them.

  Five, if you count Knox.

  Never thought I’d have a brother-in-law. He’s a good enough dude, I guess. So long as I don’t have to hear about that unicorn blanket and so long as he doesn’t hurt my sister, he can live.

  I stalk to the open bar, scowl at the bartender, and he passes me a fresh bottle of tequila. Thirty seconds later, I’m passing through the sliding glass door onto the open patio behind the fancy-ass house. We’re getting the last sun rays of the warm part of autumn in the city tonight. Tomorrow, everything gets cold, and it’ll be slushy and gray and miserable before you know it.

  Brooks doesn’t follow me, so I have the stiff-ass iron chair at the prissy little table all to myself. Got a clear view to watching Parker and Knox dancing, and I have to physically restrain myself from charging inside when I see his hand drift down to her ass.

  Ma would probably kill me if I hurt Knox. She wants grandbabies. It’s like her life goal. And she could probably get Zeus Berger in a headlock too, so I’m not going to piss her off.

  I swig my tequila off the bottle, fully aware of all the white sparkly lights and crepe crap strung up everywhere and the two other tables with people at them, who are debating some shit about the Mets possibly trading Brooks and if Knox’s granny is really a secret romance author. I can still smell the roast beef from dinner mingling with the autumn breeze, and I know there’s nothing but night insects in the thin patch of trees behind me.

  All’s safe in this little part of the world. My sister is madly in love. Two of my brothers are on their way to hook-ups.

  And I’m not getting any tonight.

  This is boring as shit.

  A flash of sparkly color crossing the dance floor catches my eye, and I narrow my focus.

  The lone single bridesmaid.

  Eloise.

  She’s a fucking nutcase. Squirrely, like she’s hiding something. Plays drums in Parker’s girl band. Heard from Brooks, who heard from Jack, who heard from Knox, that Eloise is some heiress wasting her time hacking computers.

  The heiress part, I wouldn’t get from looking at her. The hacker part, though, yeah. Dark spiky hair, more tattoos than me, pale skin, thin like she never eats, glasses that I’m not sure are actually prescription, short like she sat so much at a computer growing up that her body gave up trying to make her tall.

  Zeus and his twin brother, Ares, always give her a wide berth. She asked Brooks last night if he wanted to get out of the rehearsal and go get some tongue action. When he turned her down, she asked both Jack and Gavin if they wanted a two-for-one special.

  Fucking her would probably be like fucking a sugared-up elf from an alternate dimension where Santa was actually a motorcycle riding badass with vigilante t
endencies.

  Notice I’m not talking myself out of the idea of fucking her here.

  She has her sparkly purple dress skirt clenched in her fists while she marches across the dance floor. Her gaze catches mine through the glass, she licks her lips, and she adjusts her course to head straight toward me.

  There’s a familiar sensation tickling my dick. I like it.

  Eloise wiggles her brow, and the piercing in her left brow catches in the light.

  I wonder if her nipples are pierced.

  Parker would kick my ass if she knew I was wondering that.

  But I don’t give two shits. My career’s in the crapper—no, I don’t want to fucking talk about it—I’m losing at wedding bingo to Brooks, and my only sister just got married.

  I’m feeling.

  I don’t like feeling.

  Eloise struts all the way to the door, and—

  And she bounces backward.

  Because the door’s fucking closed, and she tried to walk through the glass.

  I choke on my own spit trying not to laugh.

  She shakes her head, looks left, then right, grabs the door handle, and slides it open. “Fucking doors,” she mutters.

  “You showed it who’s boss,” I tell her.

  She flips me off.

  I grin and tip the tequila bottle toward her. “Drink?”

  “Screw that. Let’s go fuck.”

  The bottle goes back on the table and my chair almost tips, I stand up so fast. “Your place or mine?”

  Her blue eyes bulge behind her cats-eye glasses. “Seriously?”

  Fuck, didn’t she mean it? Mr. Winky in my pants droops as he starts to lose more hope. “Are you a fucking damsel in distress or not?”

  “If I say yes, will you bang me in the bathroom?”

  CLICK HERE to order THE HERO AND THE HACKTIVIST…

  Books by Pippa Grant

  Mister McHottie (Chase & Ambrosia)

  Stud in the Stacks (Parker & Knox)

  The Pilot and the Puck-Up (Zeus and Joey)

  Royally Pucked (Manning and Gracie)

  Beauty and the Beefcake (Ares and Felicity)

  Rockaway Bride (Willow and Dax)

  Hot Heir (Viktor and Peach)

  The Hero and the Hacktivist (Rhett and Eloise)

  Charming as Puck (Nick and…)

  Exes and Ho Ho Hos (Jake and Kaitlyn)

  And more…

  Keep in touch with Pippa Grant!

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  ROYALLY PUCKED TEASER

  If you love royalty, filthy cookies, and accidental pregnancies (in your romances, of course), read on for an excerpt of Royally Pucked…

  Chapter One

  Manning Frey (aka a royal heir so spare he’s been donated to the NHL for a year, and the fourth in line behind his brothers and nephew for the crown of Stölland, a Viking country in the Norwegian sea)

  Spare heirs are rarely well behaved. Causing scandal is practically an extension of our otherwise stodgy and superfluous royal duties. Dress the part, kiss the king’s knuckles, get caught with your trousers around your ankles to give the world some juicy gossip.

  Hockey may be my first love outside the palace walls—and sometimes inside as well, though it’s been years since I pulled off icing over the throne room floor—but enjoying myself comes in a close second. So it’s safe to say I’ve seen a variety of interesting things in a variety of interesting places.

  An eight-foot-tall inflated Tyrannosaurus Rex holding a bakery bag and walking in place in the tunnel leading out of a hockey arena?

  This is a new one. So is the stirring in my royal jewels at the sight of said T-Rex.

  I lift a finger to tell my royal guard to halt. In principle, were I nearer the top of the list to inherit the crown one day, I might agree that a suspiciously cloaked—or dinosaured—figure in a secured part of a hockey arena should be investigated. However, I’m fourth in line to the crown, destined only to a small dukedom created solely to provide the youngest son of the king a dukedom. I’ve also been banished to America for a year on the pretense of drumming up interest in my country by playing professional hockey with the Copper Valley Thrusters, when in fact, my father is smoothing things over with all the politicians, royal ass-wipers, and the father of my betrothed—not my choice, believe me—all of whom are appalled by my lack of judgment in, shall we say, keeping appropriate company.

  In other words, I’m rather expendable at the moment.

  My teammates and I have just finished a pre-season game in Nashville. Neither team uses dinosaurs for mascots or crowd entertainment, which is one more reason my guard has reason for concern.

  But this particular T-Rex is sporting the most brilliant platform trainers I’ve ever seen.

  There’s a whole bloody rainbow under those casual shoes. Six layers of colors, each thick as a normal sole, so that the T-Rex is literally walking on half a foot of rainbow.

  I know a lovely young woman who would favor such a pair of shoes, and who also cannot stand still for the life of her, a fact which amused me beyond reason when we first met at a charity fundraiser a month ago.

  And as luck would have it, I have plans to rendezvous with said young woman after the game tonight.

  For cookies that, in theory, could be delivered in exactly such a bag.

  Hence the stirring in the royal jewels.

  If someone’s stolen her shoes—and her bakery bag, and I suppose her unexpected dinosaur costume—well, as we say back home in Stölland, the sheep shall bleed tonight.

  “Pleasant night for a raw leg of lamb,” I say to the dinosaur. “Or perhaps a meaty bite off a hockey player.”

  “Shove it,” comes the muffled voice of one Gracie Diamonte. Her order is colored with that subtle Southern dialect of hers, as though even telling someone to shove it cannot possibly be done without a relaxed tongue and take-your-time drawl.

  I’m fond of smiling—it’s my fourth favorite pastime behind hockey, sex, and tormenting the hell out of nearly everyone I meet—and her voice, which I’ve missed these last few weeks, prompts my lips to spread wide enough to make my damned bloody nose ache.

  In the best possible way, of course. I earned that bloody nose fair and square on the ice by insulting Zeus Berger’s girlfriend when the brute tried to stop me from scoring.

  “This is literally the only thing I have in my closet that my sister wouldn’t recognize,” Gracie continues, “and she’d shit a brick if she knew I was meeting you here to swap cookies.”

  She makes our plans sound so wonderfully filthy. I’d happily swap cookies with this woman if I weren’t on such a tight leash. My royal guards have been instructed to keep me from causing any more scandal while I’m abroad.

  Alas, a lack of opportunity—and, unfortunately, a lack of interest on her part—have waylaid my fantasies. Last month when we met at the charity event, during a delightful stroll across a golf course under a starry sky, she confessed to her interest in me being a ruse to irritate that dear sister of hers.

  And a fact I may have lied about on the ice tonight, since her sister is Zeus Berger’s girlfriend.

  Both of whom are so very, very easy to bait.

  Gracie, however, seems to be the only woman in the world immune to my charms. She refused all suggestions of meeting me here tonight until I ordered four dozen cookies and asked for delivery.

  Yes, delivery of pastries. How far I’ve fallen in my quest for fun.

  Damn bloody leash.

  I nod to the bag and wonder if Gracie can actually see me. “Let’s have a taste then.”

  She tries to grasp a door handle off the hallway with her adorable little Tyrannosaurus arms and fails with a sweet combination of grace and muttered profanities. The grace, I’m certain she’s gotten from her name. Having spent a fair amo
unt of time with her sister, I have strong suspicions about the origins of the profanity as well.

  “Allow me, my lady.” I easily turn the knob and gesture the dinosaur into an empty locker room. It smells of sweat, sticks, and bloody noses—no, wait, that’s mine again.

  The locker room also smells of my royal guard not being allowed to join us. Viktor’s a decent man, and it’s hardly his fault my father insists he shadow me everywhere—no, that would be my own bloody doing—but our relationship has its limits.

  I shut the door in his face and lock the door, which I’ll undoubtedly hear about later. The man can pick a lock, I’m certain, but I have it on good authority he’s missing the multi-tool he carries everywhere.

  Because I myself relieved him of it not twenty minutes ago when we were being bustled about the dressing room, getting ready for loading onto the bus that will take us to the hotel.

  “I must say, you are by far the most dashing Tyrannosaurus Rex with whom I’ve ever had the pleasure of sharing cookies,” I tell Gracie.

  She tosses the bag onto a bench near the door, then pats up and down her chest with her short little hand. Or tries her best, I should say.

  “Cut the flattery and help me get out of this blasted thing,” she says. “I can’t find the zipper.”

  Her proposition—and my memory of what her chest looks like outside of a dinosaur costume—makes my royal jewels ache. The lady has no idea how much I’d like to help her get out of all of her clothing. Those delectable curves hiding inside that T-Rex have haunted my memories and kept my hand occupied on several occasions since we first met.

  I’m nearly certain my fascination with her isn’t merely because she’s the only woman I’ve managed to spend more than two minutes with alone since I arrived in America two months ago.

  Bloody crown. Bloody royal orders for how I’m to live my life.

  Bloody Prime Minister and his bloody minx of a daughter.

  And bloody Earl of Austling laying claim to me before my sixth birthday for his barely-tolerable, title-hungry daughter.

  I oblige and tug down the dinosaur’s zipper. Gracie’s pretty face peeks through the dinosaur’s chest. Her thick dark hair is tangled, her round cheeks flushed, her full lips parted as she takes a deep breath. Her pure cocoa eyes are alight with a natural glow that would make her the belle of any ball even if she showed up coated in mud and dressed as a pauper.