by Geneva Lee
Clara catches me steps from the door. “You don’t have to go.”
“I have things to do,” I don’t break my stride. I’m nearly gone when I remember that none of this is her fault. She’ll blame herself if I leave like this.
Twisting around, I hook an arm around her waist and yank her to me, covering her lips—claiming her so that there’s no doubt that I’m a man who takes what he wants—and fuck anyone who takes issue with that. Her body softens into mine, stirring dangerous thoughts. I pull away and brush a finger over her swollen lower lip.
“Have fun today,” I murmur. One of us should, and if I had to choose, I’d want it to be her.
She nods and forces a smile. “We will. Notting Hill is my favorite place in London.”
I pause and tuck away that tidbit. I want to know all of Clara’s favorites—places and people and dreams. Now’s not the time for that, though. “See you soon, poppet.”
A door opens as I descend the steps and an older woman with unkempt silver hair peeks out. She looks me up and down, bites back a smile, and retreats into her flat. It’s not been nearly as messy as I feared: staying over. But I can’t help wondering how long that will last. I bypass the front entrance and a herd of paparazzi waiting outside it and turn to exit out a secret entrance Norris discovered after looking at the building plans. There’s enough speculation about Clara and me at the moment. She deserves some peace. Norris is waiting for me as I step out. A few meters away, there’s a bomb shelter—a holdover from the Blitz undoubtedly and the reason there’s the unused door in the first place.
“I need to tell Clara about this,” I inform him as he opens my car door.
“Sir?”
I shoot him a warning look, and he sighs. “Alexander?”
“The door. She shouldn’t have to deal with all those sodding reporters.”
Norris doesn’t speak as he closes the door and circles to the driver’s side. When he shifts into drive, he finally glances over his shoulder at me.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he says.
“What? Why? I can’t leave her to fend for herself.”
“Perhaps, you should speak to your father about a security detail, then,” he suggests, adding a thoughtful, “if you plan to continue your courtship.”
“Courtship? For fuck’s sake.” I bite out a laugh. “We’re well past courtship, and you know what my father will say. The Crown doesn’t protect non-royalty.”
“Perhaps…”
“Perhaps what?” I ask, although I suspect that I know what he’s alluding to.
“The Crown only protects royalty, as you said.”
“I think marriage is a bit premature,” I snap. “Clara doesn’t know me. She doesn’t know my family. She has no idea what she’d be getting into.”
Norris maneuvers through a tight alley, exiting a block from Clara’s building. There are no reporters in sight. As we merge into London morning traffic, he watches me in the rearview mirror. “It’s interesting that your first instinct is to apply royal resources to protect her, though, despite knowing they won’t be made available.”
“They should be. She’s being dissected by every tabloid in the country.” In the world, if I’m being honest.
“Yes, but that won’t stop with a security detail. If you want them to leave her alone, there is a simple solution.”
I lean forward, gripping the shoulders of the front seats. “Which is?”
“Break things off,” he says coolly.
“They’ll still follow her.”
“See another woman. Someone suited to the spotlight. Miss Lockwood seems eager for the opportunity.”
Now he’s just baiting me, but to what end? “I’d rather stick my cock in a light socket,” I say grimly, “but you know that.”
“Well, then you’re at an impasse.”
I retrace the conversation’s twists until I’m back at what started it. “Why shouldn’t she use the door?”
“They’re going to keep coming after her. The more she hides, the more aggressive they’ll become. You can’t lock her away in a tower and take her out to play with her.” He sighs as though all of this should be obvious. “If you want her protected, you have to protect her.”
“We’ll never leave the bedroom if I’m her bodyguard,” I say shortly. He’s got a point, but not a solution.
“Not you, exactly. But you have to decide what you can do to help her and keep her safe,” he advises.
I do have resources—money of my own, holdings, titles, bank accounts. I rarely bother with any of it. Everything at Buckingham is taken care of. There are secretaries to see to most other needs. “A security detail. I’ll need your help…unless you want the job.”
“I’m happy to step in as necessary, but someone has to keep you from your own worst enemy,” he says.
“Who’s that?”
“Yourself,” he says as though this is patently obvious. “I’ll look into it, and once that’s figured out, you need to prepare her.”
Is all romance so complicated? I feel as though I’m coordinating a military attack. “Prepare her for what?”
“For the day, she is royalty,” he says evenly.
I laugh, half-surprised, half-awed by his balls. “That sure of her, are you?”
Norris arches an eyebrow and asks the one question I refuse to ask myself. “Aren’t you?”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Norris’s words stick with me as I stalk into Buckingham. Am I that sure of Clara? I know what taking her to my father’s party signaled. When I’d asked her, I’d been desperate to win her back. Now, I have to consider that I’ve sent a very clear message to her and my family.
A message I didn’t intend to send.
“This is why you don’t do relationships,” I mutter to myself as I force a grim smile at a passing housekeeper.
“Nice of you to join us,” Edward says dryly when I enter our shared quarters. We’d moved into the space when we came of age. At the time, our father had opposed the idea of us taking residences at Kensington or Clarence House. I suspect he wanted to keep an eye on us—or at least pretend to do so. In truth, he never bothers coming to our rooms. We don’t bother going to his. Most of our interactions are conducted in his private offices. Our family is a business. We sell tradition and ceremony and hundreds of years of bullshit.
I scratch my head as he sips a cup of coffee from a wingback in the sitting room. His gaze scans down me, taking in my wrinkled tuxedo, half-buttoned and untucked. Edward, on the other hand, is already dressed for the day in a pair of blue tweed trousers and a crisp Oxford rolled at the wrists. The Omega on his wrist informs me that it’s past ten.
“You left suddenly,” he says. It’s a prompt—his way of asking if I want to talk about it.
“There was no reason to stay.” Our father made his position clear. I made mine.
“It didn’t have anything to do with your date running off before the stroke of midnight?” He’s not going to let this go. For better or worse, my brother’s taken it upon himself to serve as my conscience since I returned to London.
“I expect our father is preparing his lecture,” I say harshly. “I don’t need yours.” I continue toward the hall to grab a shower and brace myself for whatever shit storm I’ve started this time.
“Not everyone is out to get you,” Edward calls. “Sooner or later, you’re going to have to let someone in.”
That seems to be the theme of the day. First, Norris. Now my brother. Clara seems to be the only one not planning our wedding. Still, she’d gone too far last night. And I let her.
I slip off my coat and trousers and toss them onto the bed, my shirt and pants following before I head into my attached bath. I stop there, looking at the man reflected in the mirror.
Most of him is nothing to be ashamed of. Years in the military—living off what they deem food, running drills, and carrying heavy equipment—had shaped him into a powerful man. Biceps, abs, the hewn
V of an Adonis belt narrowing to my cock, legs that could carry him miles through the desert. But as my body transformed into the man before me, the scars from my accident had gotten worse. The pink, ruined flesh had stretched to cover one side of my body, and the harsh, cutting lines of my muscles only highlighted them. If I’d earned them in battle, I might look on them with pride.
But they were a reminder of the worst thing I’d ever done and the lie I kept to protect my family’s darkest secret. I’d lived with both so long that I barely thought of either. I hated when others saw my scars because they only dredged up their existence and all they represent.
And Clara had touched them last night. She claimed them. She claimed me.
It’s not how it’s supposed to work, but still, I couldn’t deny her. And worse? I didn’t want to. Perhaps, that’s why I can’t shake what Norris said, nor Edward’s offhanded remark.
I turn the shower to its hottest setting, but even it can’t scald away the memory of her touch on my skin. My cock gets hard as I recall her touch pushing me past my boundaries. I’d come inside her so long, I thought it might never stop. I lean into the scorching water, planting my hands on the wall, and wait for my erection to wane. But there are only flashes of her. Porcelain skin and freckles. The soft hair curling over her cunt. Her teeth biting into the flesh of her plump, lower lip. Reaching down with one hand, I grip my shaft and stroke roughly—hard enough that it hurts. Unforgiving. Punishing. The water burning the sensitive skin. But I don’t stop. I can’t. Not while she’s in my head. I have to get her out. My mind replays fucking her on a loop as I work myself toward release. When I reach the moment where I asked if she wanted me to stop, when she told me no, her blue eyes are there, wide and afraid and certain—and full of love.
I come at the memory. It roars out of me, and I brace against the wall, pumping it from me as the shower washes away the truth.
I’ll never get Clara out of my system.
She’s inside of me. She’s my blood. She’s my bones. She’s the rotten organ beating in my chest.
Clara is my curse and my salvation. I hate her. I love her. She can never know.
I finish washing up and grab a towel. Wrapping it around my waist, I go to find clothes. After that, I need to figure this out. Maybe I should talk to Edward. He understands the impossibility of our position better than most. But as soon as I set foot inside my bedroom, I stop.
“It’s disgraceful,” my father says, his eyes flickering away from me. He’s in his usual Harris tweed weekend wear. It’s as close as the bastard gets to casual.
I don’t bother to ask him what he finds disgraceful now. My scars? My behavior? Listening to my jack off in the shower? It hardly matters. Where he’s concerned, every breath I take is a disappointment.
I continue to the closet and grab the first clothes I find—a pair of old jeans and a t-shirt. After I’m clothed, I find him standing near the window in my room—the one that overlooks the back gardens.
“You left my party without saying goodnight,” he says, as though I need a reminder of how the evening had gone.
“You had plenty of people there to worship you. You didn’t need me.” I sit on my bed and tug on a pair of black leather lace-ups.
“As though you would ever bow to me,” he says with a laugh. “Nor should you.”
I hesitate, surprised by his response.
“You’re going to be king one day,” he continues. “I won’t live forever.”
I suspect he might do just that purely out of spite. The last thing he wants is to pass me the crown.
“You need a suitable wife.”
“This again?” I say wearily. “I hardly think bringing a date to one party is a proposal of marriage.”
“You know it is,” he snarls. “I don’t care who you date or who you fuck if you do it with discretion. You do not bring girls home. You don’t invite them to the family birthday party. Or Christmas. Or whatever stunt you’re planning next.”
I bypass the accusation and opt to point out his hypocrisy. “Inviting the woman you’re fucking means wedding bells? Well, Pepper will be thrilled.”
“Pepper is part of our inner circle,” he interjects distastefully, “and our relationship is none of your business.”
My control slips, and I take one menacing step forward. One move. One swing. He’d crumble. I force my fist to stay by my side. “Neither is mine.”
“I’m a widower. I’m King. No one expects me to marry.” He tugs on his suit cuff, showing no sign that he’s concerned. “The whole world is watching you. Consider that before you invite her in the future.”
“I don’t care what the world thinks,” I tell him as he walks to my bedroom door.
He opens it before turning back just enough to give me an amused look. “That’s your problem. It’s how I know she can never be a queen. Well, one of the reasons. You’re so concerned with proving something to me—to the world. You haven’t even stopped to think of what you’re doing to her. You’ll ruin her. You’ll hurt her. In the end, you’ll lose her. If you care about her, you’ll let her go.”
He steps through the door, closing it behind him, leaving me alone to deal with my choices and demons.
“You’re avoiding her,” Edward tells me the next morning when I go out to grab a mug of tea.
I stalk back to my room, adding him to the list of people I’m avoiding under my father. Clara is at the top of the list. But my brother isn’t so easily dismissed. He follows behind me.
I give up and sink into a seat by my bedroom’s hearth. He takes the one opposite.
“Go on,” I encourage him. “Keep telling me all the ways I’m cocking this up.”
“I think you already know,” he says.
“Then why do I keep making the same fucking choices?” I ask him miserably. I’d known what I was getting Clara into, and I did it anyway. Edward’s right. I am avoiding her—for her own sake.
“Because we don’t know any better.” He sighs, a half-smile on his face. “We hardly had a normal upbringing, and, as for relationships…”
He has no memories with our mother. She died when he was born. My own can’t be trusted given how young I was when she was alive. I remember a caring, beautiful woman. I remember how my father looked at her.
I remember how sad she seemed.
Locked up in a palace and taken out for special occasions on the arm of the King. There are other memories, fleeting and conflicting ones I never mention to Edward or anyone else, but especially not to my father.
“You know we can’t do this to them,” I say distantly, thinking of a memory that sticks out like a page in a photo album.
She was crying in her room. Again. I climbed onto her lap, and she held me close. I patted her smooth cheek.
“I love you, my precious boy,” she whispered into my hair. “Always remember that first.”
“I love you, Mummy.” My own small voice is foreign and unfamiliar. How could I have ever been so little? So vulnerable?
“Someday, you will meet a girl,” she says, “and you will love her. She will be your princess.”
I looked at Sarah, playing on the floor with blocks, then gazed at my mother with a doubtful shake of the head. “I don’t like girls.”
“You will.” This made her laugh. My heart swelled. I liked to hear her laugh. It felt like a reward, especially on the days she cried.
“What am I going to do?” she murmured, stroking a lock of hair that had fallen over my forehead. She wasn’t really talking to me. She did that a lot. Ever since she told me she was having another baby.
“Will this baby be a boy?” I asked hopefully.
“I don’t know.” More tears then.
“I’m sorry!” I squeaked, wishing I hadn’t asked the question. “I’ll be nice to it, even if it’s another girl!”
“I know you will,” she said softly, hugging me closer. “You’re the big brother. You have to protect them.”
“I will.” I
peeked up at her, breathing in her scent, which reminded me of walks in the garden.
“And someday, when you meet that girl, protect her, too.”
I nodded, laying my head on her shoulder. I would protect my sister and the baby, and when I was old enough, I would protect mummy, too.
I would take care of her so she didn’t cry.
“Why are you sad?” I asked. I needed to know if I was going to help her.
“Sometimes, it’s lonely here. All these people rushing about, but no time to live.” She shook her head when I gave her a funny look. She wasn’t making any sense. “Sometimes I wish I could sweep you away to a different life where you could just be Alexander.”
“I am just Alexander,” I said seriously, but now I knew what she wanted. Someday when I was old enough, I would take her somewhere she could be happy. I might even bring Sarah and the baby.
“Of course, you are, poppet.” She kissed my forehead, and I scrambled off to do something that had faded with time.
The memory fades until all I’m left with is her words.
“I think David knows that,” Edward said glumly. “He’s not returning my calls. At least, you’re in love with a woman.”
“I don’t think that means much to him,” I mused, still thinking of my mother’s words.
“I’ve asked David to the country along with the usual group,” Edward told me. “He’ll come, but not to be with me.”
“You have to let him be with you,” I say, finishing the last of my tea.
Edward arches a brow. “You should take your own advice. Maybe you should invite Clara to the country.”
“Trial by fire? Lovely.” I can not imagine putting her through another moment with our father. “They’d make her miserable.”
Edward stands. “Then be the one that makes her happy.”
I mimic his expression. “You should take your own advice.”
He holds up his hands in surrender. “We both know it’s easier to give advice than take it.”
“So what do we do?” I ask. We should walk away from them both. We should protect them. It’s the only way.