Her Royal Daddy

by Maren Smith

  “Mazi,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest and trying my best from my diminutive height to stare him down. It wasn’t working very well. Little girls did not stare down their daddies, not even when they were breaking up. “You’re being ridiculous,” I added for good measure.

  He not only mirrored my stance, he improved on it with stern eyes and a quirked eyebrow. “I’m being ridiculous? I invited you up here to get frisky, and you’re breaking up with me.”

  I closed my eyes and sighed. The man was impossible. We had been going around in circles for ten minutes at least, and he just wouldn’t listen. “In order for me to break up with you, we would have to have some kind of commitment between us first. We don’t. We aren’t even dating.”

  He frowned, his jaw clenching. “Exactly what do you think we have been doing?”

  This morning, when on the phone with my best friend, I had called it dating, but he didn’t need to know that. He was crowned prince today. Whether he wanted to admit it or not, that changed things. I would admit, however, that it did surprise me a little when my eyes started burning and I had to blink back tears as I told him, “We’re nothing. We’re having fun. A fling. Fuck buddies. A one-night stand that got extended. Vacation sex. Take your pick. It didn’t mean anything. It was fun and now it’s over. Time to move on.”

  I watched his frown deepen with every barbed word I threw out there. It nearly killed me to do it, but someone had to. He was a prince, and I was no princess.

  His jaw worked from side to side as he stalked slowly toward me. Refusing to flinch, I willed my feet to stay firmly planted. Mazi was good at breaking down my walls. It was one of his many skills. How many times had he already done this? He’d advance on me until there was no space between our bodies, then close his lips over mine and kiss me until I was breathless with need. It was his signature move, and it always worked. This time I was determined not to give in.

  Maybe he saw it in my eyes, because he walked right past me, stopping literally beside and a little behind me. He looked at me. I stared straight ahead, willing my back not to prickle at how clearly I imagined I could feel his breath on the side of my neck.

  This was just another power play. And damn, but did he have a power over me.

  Right up until he spanked me! His hand swatted the seat of my skirt so hard, my butt stung. He landed three brisk smacks in quick succession before I had time to react.

  I spun around, covering my smarting ass with both hands while he smirked down at me, his face a mask of smug anger. He looked pretty pleased with himself.

  I was not so pleased.

  “You don’t get to get your way all the time,” I blustered. “You particularly don’t get to get it by spanking me every time I say something you don’t like!”

  “I beg to differ. First, I’m a prince, so... yes, I can. And second, you were lying to me.”

  My heart was pounding in my chest.

  “Don’t,” he said, when I opened my mouth to deny it. “Whatever you’re trying to say, just don’t. I can see it in your face, it would be another lie and you’ve just seen how I’ll handle it.”

  I scowled, annoyed at how easily he could see through me.

  And then, of course, like any fairytale prince, he spoke the words my soul longed to hear. “Don’t leave me, Norah. I need you.”

  My will began to crumble. I knew what I had to do, but Mazi just didn’t play fair.

  “I can’t,” I said, begging him to understand. “I am not princess material, Daddy. I can’t date you now and I sure can’t date you when”—when your father dies; I just couldn’t say it—“when you become king. This thing we’ve been doing... it can’t go anywhere. It just can’t. I need it to stop before it’s too late.” Before I fall in love with you. Except that I already have.

  “You’re scared.” Nodding, he took a step closer, closing the last bit of distance between our two bodies. Score one point for his signature move. “I get it. I am too. This is scary, real, life-changing, straight-out-of-a-fairy-tale stuff. But I need you, Norah. I knew it the first time I laid eyes on you. I was going to talk to you that night. I haven’t told you that before, but I was. Only I went backstage first, and that’s when I got the letter. I had to force you out of my mind in order to deal with this, but then I saw you again on the plane, and I knew it was fate. No matter what else happened, with my father, whatever, I knew my life had been forever changed. We were meant to be together. However briefly, our paths were meant to cross that night at the club. Think about all the events that had to line up just so for both our lives to change on the exact same night and then to end up here in Osei. If that’s not fate, I don’t know what is.”

  It was a powerful argument. But the big problem still remained. And despite his talk of fate, it was insurmountable. In a few weeks, he would be a king.

  I should have walked out. I willed my feet to move, and eventually they did. Exactly six steps. The exact number of steps that separated us from Mazi’s bed. All he had to do was take my hand and lead me there. I tried to shake my head, but he stopped everything when he cupped my chin between gentle fingers and tipped my face up to his.

  He kissed me, because of course he did.

  It was his signature move.

  And yes, it always worked.

  Chapter Nine

  Mazi

  The headlines were sensational. It had taken them exactly twenty-four hours to dig into my past and splatter the advertisement photo from the strip club on the front of every rag in several countries, and pretty much every internet gossip site in existence. They put it right next to the photo of my father placing the crown above my head.

  The Crown Jewels and the Crown Jewel. That was one of the smuttier headlines.

  I had expected this to happen at some point. My father, however, was livid.

  He summoned Norah and me to his quarters early the next morning and didn’t even bat an eye when we arrived together.

  He had never looked so frail as while lying in his bed on that small mountain of pillows, still in his blue and white striped pajamas, pain and anger both etched into every line of his face. I think I hated them for doing this to him—that faceless mass of people who had cheered us in our own conference room and snapped their many pictures.

  “It’s okay,” I tried to tell him. “It’s just today’s news. Tomorrow, something else will happen, some big celebrity will cheat on his wife, and this will be forgotten. Just ignore it. Let’s have breakfast.”

  “It’s not okay!” my father exclaimed, doubling over in the coughing fit that yelling had caused him. “I trusted every single person in that room yesterday, and someone betrayed me. I shall not rest until I find out who, and I will have their job!”

  I frowned at Jax, hoping for help, but he just stood quietly by, watching and worrying.

  I tried again. “I’m a stripper turned prince, about to be made king, and they only learned of my existence yesterday. This was bound to happen. It’ll blow over. Just let it go.”

  Ignoring me, he beckoned to Norah. “You! You must print a retraction!”

  “I...” She looked at me, biting her lip as she searched helplessly for a response. I was the one who answered.

  “A retraction is what a newspaper prints when they report something that ends up being false,” I explained. “This isn’t false, and Norah can’t retract something she didn’t write.”

  Breathing hard, the king frowned deeply, his brow furrowing. When I looked at him this time, I saw beyond the frail, sick old man, and saw a man who was, in more ways than one, an older mirror image of myself.

  “I don’t understand how anybody in that room could have done this to me,” he said softly. “I know those people. I know their spouses, the names of their children. I have worked with them all for years, and nothing like this has ever happened before.”

  I barely held back my soft chuckle at his naiveté. “You’ve probably never dangled a scandal of this magnitude in front of them be
fore, either.” I knew because I’d done my research. Outside of his fling with my mother, the king had led a quiet and unsensational life; the only dirt I’d found on him were in scathing opinion pieces written when he made an unpopular political decision. “You just confessed to a torrid love affair thirty years ago and told them it had resulted in a secret lovechild. This is the age of the internet and social media. Nothing is sacred. All they had to do was a quick Google search of my name, and the fact that I stripped for a living was probably the first thing that popped right up. It can’t be changed. It’s out there for the world to see.”

  “It’s actually the second thing,” my little girl confirmed before clapping a hand over her mouth. She blushed when she realized what she’d just confessed, and I barely kept from chuckling over that too.

  “See?” I told my father. “Norah, does anything else interesting come up? Any prison records or other notable gossip?”

  “Not really. An angry ex-girlfriend venting on an old Yahoo forum, but that’s about it.”

  I nodded. I knew about the forum. “So, they took the first thing they found and made it front-page news. That’s kind of their job. And we don’t know that anyone here yesterday was the one to do it. All they had to do was print the story they were given, and anyone could have Googled it, found out I was a stripper, and run with it.”

  The king settled weakly into his bed as he pondered this information. “I suppose that’s true.” He turned sharply, addressing Norah once more. “I command you to write a better story. Interview Mazi—get to know who he really is. Make him more sympathetic. Dig up everything good you can. You have the advantage, since you can get it all straight from his mouth. An insider’s viewpoint. A real intimate piece.”

  Norah rolled her lips, refusing to crack so much as a smile when he said intimate. I wiggled my eyebrows at her suggestively. I had never been interviewed before, and I suddenly found myself excited at the prospect. Only because of who was going to be doing the interviewing, of course.

  “I will make him the most appealing soon-to-be king the people of Osei could hope for. You have my word,” she promised solemnly. “You rest. Mazi and I will get to work right away, and we’ll take care of everything. In a few hours, we’ll have lunch together and I’ll show you what we’ve come up with thus far.”

  Relaxed by her assurances, he lay back on his pillows and his eyes began to close. Either that, or his mini tirade had just exhausted him that much. It was easy to see where I got my temper, I thought, as I moved in to take his hand. I held it. Once upon a time, my father had had big, powerful hands. They were like mine, blockish with thick fingers. And yet, at the same time they were also frail, thin-skinned, and covered in age spots and wrinkles.

  I found myself wishing I’d known this man back when we were both younger. Before I could stop myself, I leaned over his bed and kissed his forehead.

  He didn’t open his eyes, but he did smile.

  Norah smiled too, and I completely forgot about Jax’s watchful eyes following us as I took her hand and led her from the room. After all, we had an article to write.

  * * *

  “So, how intimate are we going to get with this ‘intimate piece’?” I teased, already kicking off my shoes before tossing myself up onto my back on Norah’s bed. We were in her room for a change, but it had pretty much the same layout as mine. Luxury bathroom, luxury kitchen (to date unused), and luxury king-sized bed not far from the balcony windows. I was not interested in looking outside. To be frank, my day had started way too early and with way too much drama for me to be interested in anything but the blonde woman, with that streak of violet in her hair, dressed in a black-and-white checkered Catholic girl uniform, currently making herself comfortable at the kitchen table.

  She needed to come to bed so I could make love to her.

  Norah, however, had other plans. Ignoring me completely, she was already in workaholic reporter mode as she pulled things from her laptop bag and began to set up a proper workspace. And this right here was why we should have gone to my room. Unfortunately, she had everything she needed.

  I frowned as her laptop buzzed to life and the pages of her notebook flipped open. She had one pen in her hand and one tucked behind her ear. She was so cute with small framed cat-eye reading glasses perched atop her nose that my cock twitched, coming to life as it bulged and strained against the fabric of my slacks. I reached down and undid my zipper, letting the sucker breathe.

  Norah didn’t notice, or if she did, her only reaction was to pull out yet another notebook. One of those pocket-sized ones, which she held in her hand with her pen poised to start writing.

  “Okay, so this needs to be really good,” she told me, getting comfortable in her chair. “We need to dig deep and basically cover any and every good thing you have ever done. What were you like in high school? Did you make the honor roll? Student council? Debate team?”

  I stared at her blankly, and she blushed.

  “Right, um... how were you at sports?”

  I had been on several teams, but I didn’t see how that would suddenly endear me to the public, especially not if they’d already made up their minds. At the moment, I really didn’t care, either. It was kind of ironic that Norah wanted to talk about my teenage self. Like most teenaged boys, right now I had only one thing on my mind and I would do almost anything to get it.

  When she finally glanced over at me, I nodded meaningfully at my bulging package. “You know, this is kind of boring over here all by myself. How about you relocate over here so we can make this more interesting? For instance, you can write down your questions, and I’ll read them out and answer each one while you blow me.”

  “Daddy!” She frowned, perilously close to pouting. She probably didn’t mean that look to be half as sultry as it actually was. “Can you be serious and not think with your dick for just one minute, please?”

  I shook my head, tsking. “Sorry, no can do. I was having the most amazing dream earlier, but instead of being able to make it a reality, my phone summoned us to our first scolding of the morning. So you see, I’ve already been pretty darn patient about this.” I beckoned her to me with my sternest ‘Come to Daddy’ finger.

  Rolling her eyes, she nevertheless set her notebook aside and stood up. Her hips worked that short walk from table to bedside. She was sultry, sexy, ultra-feminine. It was a look she absolutely rocked. My cock thought so too, right up until she sat down on the edge of the mattress beside him, took hold of my dick in her hand, and then stuffed me back into my trousers and zipped me back up.

  I glared at her, unamused. “You’re no fun.”

  She grinned. “I know, but this is important. It will make your father happy.”

  Groaning, I rubbed my face. “Fine. If I give you the abridged version of my life story, then can we play?”

  “If you do a good job and give me the kind of stuff I can actually use, then we’ll see.”

  Oh, she was mean. Still, in the state I was in, I wasn’t prepared to ignore a solid maybe.

  Pulling myself into a sitting position, I slapped a couple of pillows up against the headboard and made myself comfortable while she went to grab her notebook, pen, and voice recorder.

  “I grew up in Harlem,” I began, folding my hands behind my head, crossing my ankles, and doing my best to keep my tone neutral, despite the parts that still bothered me. “My mom worked as a cook and housekeeper for a wealthy family, so I spent a lot of time on the Upper East Side. I was a solid B student, except when it came to math. Algebra, calculus, economics, you name it. I’m good with numbers. I did well on my SATs. At sixteen I got a job as an assistant youth coach at the same gym where I’d played basketball after school. I held that job through high school and saved enough money to pay for my first year at NYU. I was working towards my bachelor’s in economics, and would have gone for my master’s, when my mom got sick. Azid got me a job stripping at the club so I could help with her treatments, but I couldn’t go to school, w
ork, and take care of her all at the same time, so I quit school. What the hell, right? I figured I could go back later, when everything back to normal. Mom’s prognosis was good. The treatments were aggressive and expensive, but they seemed to be working. Right up until she contracted sepsis, an infection that hit harder because of her weakened immune system. Her body shut down rapidly and with no warning. The next thing I knew, I had her home, her mountain of debts, and her funeral to pay for. I... didn’t cope well, but at least I had the club. The money was good, and Ezra runs a tight ship, which helped me get my act together. To be perfectly honest, I know it doesn’t come off all that great on a resume, but that job is probably what saved my life. I don’t know where I would have ended up if Azid and Ezra hadn’t stepped in when they did.”

  Norah was nodding, scribbling furiously as she listened. “This is good, Mazi, I can work with this, for sure. It’s a perfect counter to the stripper angle they are pushing.”

  “Good enough that we can be done now?” I asked hopefully. I really hated talking about myself, especially about the things that happened during that time in my life.

  “Almost,” she promised, not even looking up from the notes she was taking.

  I sighed, pushing myself off the bed. Stalking into the kitchen, I made us both some coffee. A stripper had to be able to read the room, and I was definitely reading this one. My girl was engrossed in creating her story. Sadly, nookie was going to have to take a backseat to making my father happy.

  We were going to be here awhile. Even more sadly, it wasn’t going to be done with her mouth on my cock.