by Amelia Wilde
King x2
Amelia Wilde
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Epilogue
More from Flirt Club
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Also by Amelia Wilde
1
Miranda
My family has made it through four generations, three miracle revivals after brush fires run amok, and two near-death experiences.
So it seems fitting that one guy on a bike will be the one to bring our legacy to its knees.
The uniformed guard outside the throne room, perhaps the most opulent room in the entire capitol city of our small but mighty country, stares past me in a practiced nonchalance. I resist the urge to explain to him why I’m standing here empty-handed instead of bearing the ceremonial create of peaches that may family has cultivated for years. Each month, we’re tasked with bringing a crate of Royal Peaches to the kings. They are not regular peaches. They’re sweet and juicy and delicious in a way peculiar to that variety, which the kings paid my great grandfather to cultivate for him. Our family has been allowed to make other varieties cut with Royal Peaches, but only the kings get the real deal. Part of our agreement states that they must get a crate every month, or the deal is rendered null and void. Worse, another family might get granted the rights to grow and sell those peaches.
In other words, I am probably responsible for the destruction of my family’s legacy.
The guard does not care. He’s only counting down the minutes until he can let me through to the meeting, which I arrived a full hour early for. That was even accounting for the disaster.
Oh, god. If I think about it too long, I’ll cry. And I’m not going to be the woman who goes weeping into the king’s throne room and begs him for forgiveness. Pathetic! I am not pathetic. I have raised peaches. Okay, fine—I’ve collected peaches. But I’ve also built websites and taken orders and delivered peaches all over the country. I’ve run into problems before.
Nothing as bad as this, but...
“You may enter,” booms the guard. It’s way too loud. I’m the first one in line, ahead of about fifteen other people, and he’s only about five feet away from me. A wash of anxiety prickles my skin with goose bumps. My mind has gone curiously blank, even though I’ve spent the entire time since the disaster trying to think of what I’m going to say to get the kings to forgive me.
If they’ll forgive me.
Not likely. My father says all the time that the kings are men like him—honorable and righteous. He’s refused to let me make this delivery for my entire life, insisting on doing it himself. I assumed it was because he and the kings were old friends, and I’m not interested in old friends of my father’s. I’ve never been very interested in anything outside our farm. The business was going to be mine someday, so I focused on the business. Always the business. And now the business might be over.
Oh, shit, this is not going to be good.
If I throw myself onto my knees and beg forgiveness, would that be too much? A little thrill races down my spine at the thought of it. No, no, no. I cannot do that. That would shame my family and fall firmly into the category of pathetic.
Right?
The guard takes one measured step to the side, grasps the big iron handle on the door, and pulls it open. Where did the person ahead of me go? It’s only just now occurred to me that nobody came out. I hope there’s a second door and not just a one-way trip to a cell in the basement. Stop it, Miranda. You are living in modern times. There is no trapdoor to the dungeon.
It takes three steps to enter the throne room, but it might as well be a hundred miles. The air shifts and changes, growing still and sanctified. This castle is older than my family’s four generations, older than more generations before that, and it’s seen worse days. And better days. My situation with the bike and the kings is only one of a thousand things these walls have seen. I smooth my dress down as the door closes behind me.
And then...
Then I raise my eyes from the expensive marble of the floor and force myself to look at the thrones.
The gasp that comes out of me is so mortifyingly audible in the cathedral-ceilinged throne room that I want to melt into a puddle and then let that puddle evaporate.
Two men lounge in the double set of thrones, and they are not old men. They’re not my father’s age. I don’t know what made me think they were his age, but the two kings—they’re not. They’re so not. Each one is muscled and lean and so long that they even look tall sitting down, powerful thighs encased in pants look expensive. So expensive. Kingly. White shirts open at the hollow of their throats. They knew I was coming, but it’s as if I’ve caught them in a private moment. Two sets of eyes stare languidly out at me, one blue, one brown. Two families—that’s how this started. Two families, each with half of the kingdom, who wanted to consolidate power, down and down through generations until...
Two kings.
Looking at me.
All chiseled jaws and eyes like polished jewels, hard and bright.
“Your majesty.” The words unstick from my throat and I tumble into a low curtesy, which has the effect of hiking my dress up past my knees. It’s an afternoon dress, as modest as I could stand in the heat, but now that I’m standing in front of these men it feels like lingerie. “Your—majesties.”
“You’re not the man who brings the peaches,” the dark-eyed king drawls. “I see a sundress and a peek of your panties.” He gets up and stalks toward me, and I’m frozen, I’m frozen. My panties? Sweet lord. I probably shouldn’t stand up but I get haltingly to my feet. I cannot be bent over in front of this man. “I even see the white gloves you’re required to bring for delivery.” His eyes sweep up and down my body, burning through my clothes. “But I don’t see a single peach.”
I swallow hard. “Your majesty—”
He waves this off. “I prefer King Augustus.”
“King Augustus.”
A smile curves the corner of his mouth and heat sizzles down my spine. “I like the way she says it, Marcus.”
King Marcus. Marcus. I must have known their names before, at some point, but maybe it was their last names—their coronation names. These names—they are names of men. Strong, proud men who smell spicy and clean and utterly intoxicating and he’s still five feet away.
“What else do you think she’ll say?” Marcus studies his fingernails and slings one leg over the arm of his throne.
King Augustus steps forward and puts firm fingertips under my chin, lifting it so I have to look into eyes that glitter with anticipation. Anticipation for what? He doesn’t have the peaches he wants. “I think you’ll explain why you’re standing here empty-handed. Won’t you?”
He drops his hand, and I feel the loss of his touch so keenly. It was warmth in this cool room. Almost an anchor, only I know that anchors drag you down as much as they keep you in place.
“I—I’m here to represent my father. My name is Miranda, and I’m here on behalf of the Perzic family. We have a long-standing agreement with the royal household to supply them—you—with—”
“We’re aware of our contracts,” King Marcus cuts in. “I’m assuming you’re here to inform us that the contract is now rendered null and void. Broken by your own actions.”
“It wasn’t me,” I blurt out. “I had the crate, I—I parked as close as I could. I was walking here so carefully, your majesty—”
“Call him King Marcus,” prompts King Augustus. “He won’t admit it, but he’d like the sound of it coming from those lips.”
I brush my fingertips over my lips as if that will do anything
to hide them from these kings. “King Marcus.” Blue eyes meet mine with such an intensity that I have to look away. But there’s nowhere to look but Augustus’ dark eyes. “King Augustus.” Get through it, Miranda, just say it. “A guy on a bike decided not to stop at the corner by the palace and he knocked the crate onto the ground. All of them spilled out into the street and then—” A big, gulping sob rises up and threatens to spill out of my mouth just like a bunch of lost peaches. “Then a truck ran over them. And anyway, I wouldn’t have brought you dirty peaches anyway, but I couldn’t—I couldn’t even scrape them off the ground as proof. It was too gross.” There. It’s done. It’s explained. “I know I’m breaking the contract. I know it’s all over for me, and for my family, but I thought I should still come in and tell you why there aren’t any peaches.” My heart is about to burst, and I need to go outside the palace and sob, so I bob the world’s most awkward curtesy and reach blindly for the door.
“The contact doesn’t specify the number of peaches.” King Marcus’s voice rings across the throne room and slices apart my whirling thoughts.
I stop with my hand on the double doors. Why hasn’t the guy opened it yet? Does he not know there’s nothing in here for me? “What?”
King Augustus is the one who steps forward. “The contract. An old document. Probably one you haven’t seen in person. It doesn’t specify the number of peaches. It only says that your family will supply them each month.” Lips that full and gorgeous should be illegal on a man. “We could honor the terms with any number.”
I lift my white-gloved hands, still empty. “I don’t have any peaches to give.”
He slips his hands into his pockets and once again his eyes burn, they burn. “You have one.”a
2
Marcus
What—you think we didn’t know the old man wasn’t coming? The guard at the gate called ahead with the information as soon as he saw her. Good man. He’s getting a bonus this week, and a hefty one. No, you don’t need to bribe people to keep them loyal—not if you run a decent household. But he’ll stay loyal after this. Of course he will. See? Even the man at the gate knows what we want.
But honestly, I wasn’t sure she’d be worth it until she walked in the door.
Oh my fuck, this woman.
Miranda.
Her name means worthy of admiration. Not many people live up to the promise of their names, but she does. She stands in a sunbeam in a dress that’s so demure as to be vulgar. The sunlight plays with honey-blonde hair, spilling down over her shoulders. I’m seized with the urge to know what those shoulders look like when her dress slips off. And the dress, the dress. It hits just at her knees, so low that I’m dying to inch it up over her thighs.
Augustus is, too. He might be able to hide it from the world at large by staying behind closed doors in the palace, but he can’t hide it from me. The bulge in his pants is obvious.
Miranda lets go of the handle of the door and tugs at the hem of her dress. Her throat moves with her swallow. “I didn’t bring any peaches,” she whispers, and the acoustics of the room carry her voice to me.
“No need to be coy.” I stand up from the throne and do what my body wants me to do—get closer to her. I’ll get as close as Augustus and not a step further. That’s how we do things. Together. It’s what keeps both halves of the country from falling into civil unrest. It’s what keeps the palace running smoothly. And it’s how I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that we’re going to have this woman.
I also know that because I saw his face when an usher came in with Miranda’s picture from just outside, captured on the security cameras for the future. I heard his choked whisper: That’s not the father. That’s the daughter.
That’s right—the daughter that Miranda’s father was always mentioning obliquely, as if he never wanted to dwell on her too long. Smart man. He was right to keep her hidden. Because now she’s going to be ours.
Green-eyed Miranda worries at her lip with her teeth and waits for one of us to speak, her gaze going back and forth between me and Augustus like she’s in her own personal tennis match.
“Our agreement says you’re to supply peaches and we’re to claim them. So I’m laying claim to yours.”
Her face goes even redder as understanding fills her from her feet to the top of her head. She digs her toes into the marble floor and shifts her weight in her hips in an unconscious little dance. “You can’t—you can’t possibly mean—”
“I do mean it.” I raise my hands, palms up. “Of course, the choice is yours. You can break the agreement, if you wish. Go out that door and it’s done.”
Her hand lifts, hovers, and down at the floor her feet turn in. She’s pressing her thighs together. Years of being king have given me the restraint necessary to keep my own needs off my face, but I want to be between those thighs. The security footage was a pale imitation of the real thing.
Miranda’s eyes swing back and forth one more time. “Which—which one of you would I have to—” Her face has never been redder. It trends into a sunset on fire, a strawberry splash. “Which one of you would I have to show my peach to?”
“Show?” Augustus scoffs. “Miranda, we wait all month for a bite of those peaches. You think showing us would be enough?”
She gasps and her hand falls down to cover up her private bits, never mind that she’s wearing a dress. “I couldn’t,” she murmurs. “My father would be so angry. He’s never let me come here before.”
Augustus and I move as one unit, both of us unable to stay in our places another agonizing second. Miranda’s eyes go wide at our approach and she backs up until her back hits the door with a whisper of her dress and there we are, caging her in. Her panting breath is so sweet and warm that I want to bottle it up.
“We want you, Miranda. Both of us.” I’m the one who says it because I can tell from the look on Augustus’ face that he’s lost for words, being so close to her. “Show us what you brought, and you can save your family. We’ll even be generous. We’ll consider it payment for the fruit you lost on your way here.”
Her green eyes, wide and hungry, are framed by full eyelashes as she looks up at us. From this angle, I can see down her sundress to lush breasts and damn it, I know her body would be even more so. A queen. She’s a queen. The thought comes to me unbidden and I try to brush it away. We’ve never considered a queen before, and here I am, my mind running wild.
“I want to.” She pouts, and my cock is so hard it’s in danger of shredding my pants. “Does that make me naughty? I feel like it does.” Those eyelashes settle onto her cheeks. “This can’t be right,” she whispers.
“It’s wrong of you to tease us.” I put my fingers under her chin and lift her face to mine. “It’s wrong of you to deny the kings what they want.”
The tip of her tongue peeks out to wet her bottom lip, and the desire to nip at it is so strong I almost close the last few inches and kiss her. But no, no—that’s not on the table, not now. Not yet.
“Okay.” Miranda lets out a deep, shuddering breath. “I’ll do it. I’ll save my family. What—what exactly do you want me to do?”
I can’t hide my smile. I can’t stop it. My pulse hammers at my veins, twisting and thundering at the thought of her thighs, of getting that dress off her thighs and her panties, too.
“I want you to be a good girl for us, Miranda.”
“Oh—” A soft, fluttering sound. She’ll have to be told, of course. She’ll have to be led. Miranda is the kind of woman who keeps to herself, never escaping her father’s farm for any illicit visits with men. It’s written all over her in her sweet scent and pink cheeks. An animal desire to mark her, to own her, roars to life in my chest. Augustus’ dark eyes reflect the same fire when he meets my eyes.
“Go stand in front of the throne,” he says. Miranda won’t know the difference, but I can hear the heated rasp in his voice. “And remove your panties.”
It forces Miranda to brush past us, and of course we don’t mo
ve—of course we make her sweet body press between ours as she goes. I get a lungful of her shampoo—coconut—and have to stifle a groan. It wouldn’t be kingly to pull her back by her hair and wrap it around my fist. It’s not, after all, part of our bargain.
Yet. Yet.
“Shoes,” calls Augustus.
Miranda stops a few feet from the throne. Her shoulders rise and fall with an enormous breath. She trembles, actually trembles, and it’s all I can do to stay by the door. Until I can’t stay anymore. Augustus matches my measured footsteps until we’re in the center of the throne room, giving her more space than I ever want to give her.
Slowly, carefully, she steps out of her shoes. Miranda is now barefoot on the marble floor, her toenails painted a bright pink that wrenches at the middle of my chest. It seems to take quite a bit of effort to catch the hem of her dress in her hands, but then it goes up and up and up...
“Miranda,” scolds Augustus. “Turn around.”
She obeys instantly—how responsive. “Yes, of course, your majesty.” Her face has gone red from her hairline to her neck. A certain desperation rises. Her nipples have peaked beneath the dress and the bra—I can see, but I can’t see, I can’t touch, and it’s driving me mad.
Miranda reaches underneath the dress and tugs down—you wouldn’t fucking believe it—a pair of white panties. Her eyes flick up to meet mine as she steps out of them. “I’m not allowed to buy colors from the catalogue.”
Oh my fuck. Her father keeps that tight a rein on her, and it’s no wonder—any man would be head over heels with her. The white panties only drive me closer to the edge of taking her, taking her now, taking all of her now.
“Drop them.”
She does.
And then I’m there, backing her up toward the throne, making a barrier with my arms, touching lightly at her hips. Her knees hit first and her ass goes down hard, the dress hiking up...but it’s not far enough.