Royal Arrangement #2

by Renna Peak

  Finally, Justine speaks. “So you did all of this for your brother?”

  I laugh, trying to lighten the mood. “I wish I could claim to be that selfless. The truth is that I saw the chance to be a hero, to do something useful with my life. Andrew’s the heir and Leo’s the spare, which means I, as the third son, didn’t really have much to do except to show up to formal events and smile in family portraits. This was my chance to do something bigger. And if I helped my brother and Victoria along the way, even better.”

  She’s silent for a long time—so long I start to worry.

  “What about you?” I say. “You agreed to this, too, after you got over the initial shock. You must have seen the value in what we’re doing—we saved our countries from certain war. That’s a very noble choice.”

  “Is that your question?” she says.

  “Yes.”

  Somewhere in the distance, I hear glass break again. Justine flinches, then speaks.

  “I never wanted to be a hero. Honestly, I don’t see the appeal. And if you do something just to be a hero, then the action is kind of empty, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t think so. Why you do something doesn’t matter if the effects are still the same.”

  “But that’s just it—the why is everything. And say what you will, I don’t think wanting to be a hero is reason enough to sacrifice your happiness. It may be a part of it, certainly, but the sort of conviction it takes to marry a stranger…that requires something much more personal.”

  “Are you calling me a liar, Princess? Or are you just avoiding answering my question?”

  “Neither. I’m just thinking out loud.” I can feel her eyes on me in the darkness, even though I know she can’t really see me. “When you spoke of your brother and Victoria, there was something in your voice…something that made me understand, for the first time, why you’d do something like this. I knew you were close to your siblings, but I never imagined you’d give up so much for them.”

  “Give up my own love, you mean?”

  “Among other things.”

  “It’s not that difficult to give up something I never had in the first place.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re one of those men who doesn’t believe in love.”

  “I’m not. But that doesn’t change the fact that I had nothing to lose in that area.” My fingers thread themselves in the carpet again. “I’ve always thought of love, like happiness, as a choice.”

  “That’s depressing.”

  “Is it, though? I don’t think so. You can choose to go through life looking ways to be happy and open your heart, and eventually you’ll find them, no matter what your external circumstances. Or you can choose to go through life looking for reasons to be unhappy and closed off, and you’ll find those instead. No matter what life throws our way, we have a choice—to look for the good or look for the bad. So many people think of happiness and love as things that happen to us, instead of the other way around. I choose to look for happiness, no matter where I end up.”

  “And yet you’ve never chosen to fall in love.”

  I let her words sit with me for a moment before answering. “I guess I just assumed I’d know when it was time to make that choice.”

  Suddenly, abruptly, she pulls away from me. In the darkness, I hear her climb to her feet.

  “I should probably go check on some things,” she says.

  I stand up beside her. “But the storm is still right overhead.”

  “There’s a lot to do.”

  I feel movement near me—she’s trying to walk past me—but I reach out, fumbling for her in the dark. My hand catches her arm, and I pull her toward me, right against my body.

  “You have a choice, too, Princess,” I murmur.

  Her hands are braced against my chest. “I didn’t have a choice when I married you.”

  “But you did—you could have arranged something else with your father. Or run away to America. Or joined a convent. But you chose this. The question is, what will you choose now? To look for ways to be miserable? Or to look for happiness?”

  She’s frozen in my arms, and I take full advantage, dropping my head and kissing her.

  Every time our mouths meet, I seem to lose all sense of control. This time is no different. As my lips join with hers, need throbs through my body, charging through me in an unstoppable current. Her mouth opens beneath mine, and I hear myself growl somewhere in the back of my throat. My arms tighten around her, holding her firmly against my body.

  With a sudden jerk, she pulls away from me. I try to grab her again, but before I can, she stomps her foot down on top of mine, just like she did the night she found out about our engagement.

  I yowl and jump back as pain shoots up my leg.

  “Love isn’t a choice,” she says, and there’s fire in her voice. “If you’d ever actually experienced it, Your Highness, you’d know that.”

  “Everything is a choice, Princess,” I say through my pain. “And I’ve made mine. The question is, have you made yours?”

  Her response is an exasperated noise. I feel a slight breeze as she sweeps by me, but when I reach after her, my hand meets empty air.

  “I have work to do,” she calls back to me. “Stay there.”

  Like hell I will.

  I start to limp after her, but she’s moving too fast to allow me to catch up to her, at least while my foot is throbbing with pain.

  She’s scared, I tell myself. That man from her past broke her heart—it’s no wonder she’s afraid to trust another man again. Especially one who arranged to marry her without consulting her.

  I really bungled that, didn’t I?

  By the time I reach the end of the corridor, I can’t even hear her footsteps any longer. Rain pounds against the roof somewhere high overhead, and the wind sounds like an injured animal as it howls through the palace’s many towers.

  There’s a window along this hallway, and fortunately, it doesn’t appear to have broken. I limp over to it and look outside.

  This side of the palace is mostly protected from the wind and the rain, but the damage outside is still startling. The sky is dark enough to be mistaken for night, and several of the clouds overhead have a disturbing orange-red tone to their undersides. The gardens below are a mess—plants have been flattened against the grass, bits of debris from the city litter the grounds, and both of the decorative ponds I can see from here have already overflowed. As I stand here, the heavy rain begins to shift. At first I don’t even notice the small plinks against the window—they’re easily ignored among the general roar of the storm—but after a few minutes, they get louder. And bigger.

  Hail.

  It bounces against the window and against the eaves just above. Some of the pieces are too tiny to see, but others are the size of my thumbnail—and then others fall, as big across as coins.

  Something flickers at the corner of my eye, catching my attention—orange, dancing light. I turn my head, and my stomach seizes.

  Fire.

  One of the palace’s outbuildings, just barely visible from my vantage point, has caught fire. It may have been hit by lightning, but in these circumstances, it just as easily could have been caused by an overturned candle or some electrical malfunction. Hopefully the rain will put it out quickly.

  As I watch, though, the doors to the building burst open, and a man stumbles out, a couple of horses at his heels.

  Fuck—it’s the stables.

  The man has a couple of cats in one arm, and though I can see him shout something—to whom, I don’t know—his words are lost beneath the storm. He raises his free arm above his head, trying to protect himself from the hail. The horses startle—one of them rears the moment a piece of hail hits its flank, and the other lunges out of the way, galloping across the grounds. The man takes a handful of running steps after it, then turns back to the stable and appears to shout again.

  A second man stumbles out of the building with more horses. Men and animals both are panick
ing, trapped between the fire and the elements. Horses scream and run in every direction, running loose about the gardens. I grew up with horses—in that terrified state, they’re dangerous to both themselves and to anyone they might encounter. If the fire or the storm don’t get them, they may very well fall and break their own legs.

  The second man turns and runs back into the stable.

  There must still be animals—or people—inside. And despite the pouring rain and hail, the fire still rages. Billowing black smoke rises from the building, joining the dark clouds overhead.

  And I can’t just stand here any longer.

  I run down the corridor. I still don’t know my way around the palace very well, but I manage to find a door that leads outside.

  The wind smacks me in the face the moment I open the door. Pellets of hail rain down on me, but I lift my jacket up over my head and run out into the gardens. I’ll probably have some bruises later, but I’m not about to stand by and watch these men and animals suffer without help.

  Justine will be pissed when she finds out you didn’t stay where she left you, I think wryly. But I’ll worry about my wife’s reaction later. Right now, I just hope she’s somewhere safe.

  Horses are everywhere when I reach the stable, and I spot a cat and several kittens huddling in fear under a bush nearby, but neither of the men I saw before is anywhere to be found. Then I hear a shout from inside the stable—at least one of them is still inside. The smoke is thick in the air, and this close, the rain does little to help. Pulling the collar of my soaked shirt up over my mouth, I offer a silent prayer up to whatever God is watching over me, and run inside.

  Justine

  My father gave me Bathsheba when I was only nine years old. I had never been very fond of horses before then, but after…I could hardly part with her for the better part of three years.

  When I saw lightning strike the stable, there was no question about what I needed to do. As great as our stable grooms are, I have no doubt they’ll rescue Bathsheba last, if they rescue her at all. She’s one of the oldest horses we have now—my family has sold off most of the once great stable we’d owned.

  I arrive at the stable, and it is chaos. The grooms are running around, grabbing whatever they can, opening stable doors, and letting the horses run for their lives.

  And Bathsheba stands alone in the back, still locked in her stall.

  The air is thick with smoke already, though the flames seem to be only on the roof right now. I rush past one of the men as he runs again for the door. “Princess Justine!”

  I can barely hear the man over the pelting of the hail on the roof, but I give him a glance over my shoulder that says I’m not leaving the burning building.

  “Princess! We tried! Her door…”

  I don’t wait for another word from him. I tear down the aisle to the back of the building and pull with every bit of strength I have on the sliding lock that secures my horse’s stall.

  It doesn’t budge.

  I pound at it with my fist, and it still doesn’t move. The lock is frozen in place—I’ve complained to the staff about it sticking for the past few years, but nothing has been done. It’s a low priority, and when budgets are tight, fixing the sticky lock of a stable stall is at the bottom of the list.

  Unlike the other horses around us, Bathsheba is very calm. Her chocolate brown eyes stare at me, almost as though she’s begging me to help her.

  And I try. I kick at the door—I’m sure William can probably hear my shouts from inside the palace.

  It’s at that moment I realize I’m alone. The other men are gone. And the smoke is getting thick—way too thick for it to be safe. I pull my shirt up over my face, hoping it will keep me from being overwhelmed by smoke.

  There’s a loud cracking above me, and a moment later a burning chunk of the roof lands in the stall just behind me.

  I shout and kick harder at the stall, but it doesn’t move—it doesn’t even budge the smallest bit.

  One of the men must hear me, and a moment later, he’s kicking at the door with me. We work together, kicking together at the door, and finally, finally, there’s a sound of shearing metal as the lock breaks and the stall door swings open.

  Bathsheba, princess that she is, strides around us, not breaking into a gallop until she’s midway down the corridor. I can no longer see her when she gets there—the smoke is too thick.

  And I’ve breathed in too much of it. The adrenaline rush from trying to save my horse fades quickly and I realize my lungs are burning. And that isn’t the only thing burning—the side of the barn behind me is now on fire.

  The smoke is black now—too thick to see. I drop to my hands and knees, hoping to crawl out. “Get down!” I shout for the man beside me to do as I have, but my voice is barely a croak.

  He grabs me around my waist, throwing me over his shoulder as he begins to run for the exit. But before we get there, he must be overcome by the smoke, too. He stumbles, dropping me on my back.

  I hit the ground with a thud, knocking what little air was left in my lungs out of me. I turn and grab the man under his arms, sliding him along the ground until we’re near the exit. At least there is fresh air here—not much, but some. I stay low to the ground—the air is still thick with smoke above us. And it is dark as night—the only light is from the fire crackling over us.

  Samuel, one of the other grooms, comes over to help, grabbing the man by his other shoulder, and we both work together to slide him out of the building and onto the grass, far away from the burning stable.

  “You and your husband should not be out here!” Samuel calls to me over the howling wind and pelting hail.

  “My husband isn’t out here!” I call back to him. “I left him in the…” It isn’t until that moment I realize the man who came to help me was William. He never spoke a word to me in the stable.

  I didn’t recognize my own husband. My chest tightens and my stomach does a strange flip. He has to wake up. He has to…

  Samuel slaps William and he sputters and coughs a few times before sitting up. He looks over at me, his face masked with soot.

  “Did it get out?”

  My mouth falls open for a moment. I’m still stunned that I didn’t recognize him, but I suppose I’m even more stunned that William came to help at all. “Yes.”

  “Did they all get out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” He coughs again. “We should all get inside. It isn’t safe out here.” He holds his hand out and catches one of the coin sized hail pellets in his hand before tossing it to the ground.

  I help him to his feet and I motion for the men to follow us into the palace. As soon as we’re safely inside I turn to them. “Thank you for your bravery today. I—”

  “It was nothing, Your Highness,” Samuel says.

  His partner nods. “We were only doing our jobs.”

  “You can find shelter in the common area, just like last time. There will be food and water—you can wait out the storm there.”

  “Thank you, Your Highness. I think we’ll wait a bit, though. We’ll need to go back out as soon as the hail lets up. But as soon as the horses are rounded up, we’ll head inside.” The two men give me a small bow before they head down the corridor to watch the storm.

  I turn to William. “That was stupid.”

  “What was stupid? I—”

  “I told you to stay in the corridor. It was safe there. There was no reason—”

  “You would have died, Justine. There was no way you were leaving that stable without that horse. And you weren’t going to break down that door alone.”

  It isn’t lost on me that he’s called me by my given name for only the second time. “I would have been fine. I—”

  “You would have given your life? For a horse?”

  “For my horse. Yes. I would have died trying to save her.”

  He shakes his head. “It’s a horse—”

  “A horse I love. And I didn’t make some choic
e to love her. I grew to love her over time. It wasn’t some random decision I made one day—Oh, I think I’ll decide to love this horse today.”

  “That is the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard, Princess.”

  Ah, I see we’re back to that. I glare at him for a moment. “You need to be checked by the medical staff. You were overcome by smoke—”

  “I’m fine.” He returns the glare. “Your voice sounds a hell of a lot worse than mine. Maybe you should go be checked by the doctors.”

  “You need a shower. You’re covered in soot—”

  “Seen a mirror lately, Princess? You’re not looking so great yourself.”

  “Thank you for helping me.”

  “Maybe you should…” He pauses, his mouth falling open. “What?”

  “I said, thank you for helping me.” I arch a brow. “If your hearing has been affected, too, you really should—”

  I’m interrupted by his lips crashing against mine. He slides his hands around my waist, pulling me close to him.

  I moan as his tongue meets mine, wrapping my arms around him. My hand finds the back of his neck and my fingers weave into his hair, pulling him as tightly to me as I can.

  He backs me against the wall. His hand slides up the side of my waist, and much as it did last night, finds my breast. He brushes his thumb across my shirt, and my nipple tightens in a hard bud, sending a pulse of need right to my core.

  I want to wrap my legs around him. I want to let him fuck me right here in the hallway…

  I break our kiss and his lips drop immediately to my neck, causing another moan to escape me.

  “William, we can’t. Not here—”

  “Not here is right.” A voice interrupts me.

  William drops his hands and turns to the man standing behind him. Reginald.

  “I come to check on the staff—to make sure the people who serve us are safe, and I find…this? Again?” Reginald arches a brow. “I realize this is the honeymoon and all, but you two should stay in your suite. Your constant pawing at each other is a bit…disgusting.”