She blinked, bit her lip. Quoted, “How do I love thee?”
“Let me count the ways,” he replied softly.
“Why now?”
“I brought you here for a reason.”
“I know.” She scowled. “The drought.”
“That, and other things.”
“What other things?”
“I wanted to introduce you to Edward.”
Okay, so that was strange, Perry thought. Not so she could meet his parents, but his brother?
“Just Edward?” she asked, seeking clarity.
He nodded.
“Why?” came her wary answer.
“I don’t think you’re ready for that answer.”
“You did not just say that!” she shrieked, her hard to rouse temper suddenly stoked.
His nostrils flared, but he murmured softly, “I know I’m throwing you in the deep lane here.”
“More than that,” she snapped. “Jesus, George. All these years, and you wait until today to tell me.” With Xavier in the bedroom, probably listening to every damn word of their argument?
“I didn’t expect you to sleep with Xavier,” he snarled. “Dammit, Perry. I never thought that would happen in a million years.”
A part of her was so damn delighted; she wanted to pull a victory dance. Another part questioned his timing. Why now? Why was he telling her this only when he’d seen that she’d been with his cousin?
“Why because I’m not good enough for him?” she spat.
“Are you insane?” He reared back. “He’s a Duke. I’m a fucking Prince. My brother’s a goddamn Prince and the future King. How can you be not good enough…?”
She held up a hand. “What the hell are you bringing your brother into this for?”
He gritted his teeth. “You dragged my timeline forward by fucking Xavier. That’s why I’m telling you now. I need you to know before you make any decisions about…” His lips curled in disgust. “Him.”
She blinked at him again. Was he being serious?
Shaking her head, she let her shoulders slump so she could press her head to her knees.
This was too much. On the one hand, she was hearing words she’d never expected to hear. A declaration of love. Of intent.
More than that, she heard the hope in his voice which, more than anything, was like a knife through her shaky defenses.
After wanting him for so long, it seemed too good to be true that it was all being handed to her on a plate. A 24ct gold one nonetheless. And because they were royal, undoubtedly studded with freakin’ rubies too.
“I need to think,” she said, her tone calm even though she was feeling anything other than calm.
She had to process everything that had just been said, but the way he kept mentioning Edward was nagging at her.
“Why do you keep talking about your brother?” she demanded, unable to hold the words back.
He clenched his jaw again. “You’re really not going to like the answer.”
“Goddammit, George, don’t prevaricate now. You’ve just spilled out your damn heart, why not round it out?”
His shoulders straightened at that, his back stiffening. “I need to go.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “I’ve loved you for years,” she bit out, the words loaded with an emotion that was bitter, not loaded with the sweetness that should have come naturally with such a declaration. “I’ve pined and hoped and dreamed for way too long. I’ve watched you date other women, I’ve watched you take them home, and knowing that you’re with someone else has been killing me for years. And you’re trying to tell me that you love me? Now? After you put me through all that? I need a lot more than words to suddenly believe this is anything other than a joke, George.
“Men in love act like they’re in love. You’ve never been in love with anyone but your title and what it brings.”
His eyes flared wide. “That’s not fair,” he spat.
“Isn’t it? Granted, you don’t laud your title about and use it for your own good… until it comes time to pick up some stupid bitch who’s only interested in your crown.”
“I don’t wear a crown,” he retorted sullenly.
“I know that, you know that. Tell that to the women you fuck. They’re too stupid to realize that.”
Silence fell between them, but it wasn’t comfortable as it usually was when they debated something, be it gun control or the best way to make ragu. This was heavy, fraught with tension. With emotion.
In fact, she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen George emote so damn much. Hell, when his sister-in-law had died, he’d just looked stoic.
Now?
He looked like his entire world was on a fault line that had just decided to crack open.
“Do you have any idea what it’s like to be different? To want different things from the rest of the world?”
She reared back at that. “You being a prince is hardly a handicap,” she sneered, not willing to listen to him play the pity party over being goddamn royalty.
Boo-hoo, he lived in a palace. Drank the best champagne in the world. Flew on private jets, and used a non-existent crown to get all the pussy he wanted…
Yeah, she felt so bad for him.
But he quelled her thoughts with a single shake of his head. “I’m not talking about my name. I’m talking about my needs.” He closed his fist and rapped it against his chest. “What I want. What fulfills me!”
For some reason, fear flushed through her. “What are you talking about, George?” she asked, hating the quiver in her voice.
He narrowed his eyes at her. “I was seventeen when I knew I was different.”
“Different how?” she demanded, feeling like she’d just been thrown into a twilight zone moment and Rod Serling was about to start lecturing her on weird phenomena.
But he ignored her, carried on talking almost as though she hadn’t spoken. “I saw Edward with a girlfriend. He didn’t always used to be so fucking staid and stoic. He was a wild child. Mother and father despaired of him for a few years, but nothing they said seemed to work.”
His brother? They were back on that again? She opened her mouth but closed it when he shot her a frustrated glare.
It was like he knew he had her attention, that she was listening, was as receptive as she’d ever be, and he needed to get this out before the words choked him.
His words weren’t exactly rushed, but they fell swiftly from his lips.
“He was fucking her in father’s study of all the goddamn places. I think he just wanted to rebel, break the rules. I went to see father, came upon them. I stood in the door watching him fuck this woman I’d never seen before, and he saw me. He didn’t tell me to get out, didn’t even stop fucking her. Just carried on, letting me watch. Then, he said, ‘Elizabeth, do you want to suck my brother’s cock?’”
Perry froze. Whatever she’d been expecting him to say, it hadn’t been that.
A smile curved his lips, and his eyes had turned dreamy. She saw that, processed it all, then whispered, “Did you join in?” Perry didn’t know why she asked when she already knew the answer, but he’d fallen silent. Fallen into the memory, it seemed.
He nodded. “That was the first time we shared a woman. But it wasn’t the last.”
“You did it often?” God, how she hated how her voice squeaked.
“Often enough,” he replied, his gaze finally catching hers. There was no shame on his face. If anything, he’d straightened up. His attitude that of ‘accept me as I am or don’t accept me at all.’
“What does this have to do with loving me, George?” she asked, shakily.
“When Edward married Arabella, he said that was it. That we weren’t going to share again. He was thirty-six. Too old to play the role of wild child and family rebel. He was going to settle down, make heirs and become a better prince.” He clenched his jaw, remembered anger flashing on his face in a way that told her how much his brother’s words hurt.
“That’s norma
l, isn’t it, George?” she asked softly, treading carefully because he was quite evidently still pained by his brother’s rejection.
“It might be, but it didn’t stop my feelings.”
“You love… Edward?” she asked, trying not to be hesitant, just trying to understand what the hell he was telling her.
Revulsion marred the perfection of his face. “Good God, no! Hell, Perry. Is that what you were thinking? I had some kind of incestuous love for my brother?” He shuddered. “That’s disgusting.”
“Well, how was I supposed to know! This is the first I’ve heard of anything like this,” she barked, embarrassment whispering through her. She’d read about it in books, but in real life? With royalty of all people?
He narrowed his eyes. “You know me.”
“I thought I did. I never thought you’d be into… that.”
“Sharing?” He cocked a brow. “You can say the word. It’s not poisonous just unorthodox.”
She lifted her chin, refusing to be cowed into saying anything too revealing. “Why are you telling me this moments after you tell me you love me?”
The door opened, making both of them jump. Edward, looking as impeccable as he’d done yesterday, but dressed in a shirt with breeches and riding boots, stepped into the dressing room.
“I think I can answer that, Perry.”
George’s eyes flared wide at his brother’s presence, but that was nothing to Perry’s astonishment, which only grew when Edward murmured, “George has told you about our…” He hesitated. “Tastes because he wants you to love me, too.”
Chapter Seven
Xavier stared at the dressing room door as he watched it close for the second time that morning.
With Edward in riding gear, George in a bedsheet, and Perry dressed in last night’s ballgown, he wasn’t sure what in the hell kind of meeting was going down in there, but he had his suspicions.
Rubbing his chin, he tried not to eavesdrop. Every now and then, one of them would make an outburst he couldn’t avoid hearing, but he hurriedly scribbled a note for Perry with a sheet of paper he found in her bedside cabinet, righted his clothes, and got the hell out of there.
His cousins always had been unusual.
He didn’t think anyone aside from him and their security team knew how unusual and for that, he was grateful. It would do no one any good to learn that the Crown Prince of Veronia and his brother were into threesomes.
Imagining the stink bomb that would cause, he wrinkled his nose as he headed down the corridor on his way out of the private area.
When his Aunt Marianne appeared, she frowned at him. “Xavier? What on Earth are you doing here?”
He cleared his throat. “I drank too much champagne last night.”
“You stayed?” She cocked a brow. “That’s unlike you.” Her confusion turned to glee however as she slipped her arm through his and pulled him close. “Your uncle wants a word with you.”
Xavier groaned. “I want to go home.”
“Then you should have made your escape last night,” she chortled. “This will take the focus off me for the morning. You know last night is the third time you’ve rushed off without talking to any of the cabinet?”
He lifted a hand to rub his nose. “Only the third time? I thought it was more.” When she smacked his arm, he just hid a smile. “Anyway, what have you done now?”
Marianne and Philippe weren’t exactly demonstrative. He couldn’t imagine them rowing, but he knew they had disagreements.
“He isn’t happy about my upcoming visit to Lauverne.”
He frowned. “Why not?”
“Says I’m needed here.”
That was unlike his uncle. “Is it for fun?”
She gave an unladylike snort. “Since when do we travel for fun?”
There was a sad truth to that. Fun was found at home, in private, away from the public eye. “True,” he conceded, narrowing his eyes as he contemplated what that meant.
“There’s a new children’s charity opening there. They want me to be a patron.” She sighed. “How could I say no? It focuses on treating trauma. PTSD and the like.”
Xavier winced. Considering Edward fit that bill as a child, there was no way Marianne wouldn’t take a huge interest in such an organization. Philippe too. Which made it stranger that the King wasn’t happy about his wife’s visiting the charity in person.
Before he could pepper her for more information however, he found himself in front of Philippe’s office. “Are you really going to throw me to the sharks?” he demanded of his aunt, even though he knew the answer.
“Without a doubt,” she told him cheerfully.
As she opened the door and led him to his doom—an hour lecture on why they had to make nice with the politicians—only one thing made it worth his while.
Sure, he could have sneaked off last night and avoided this conversation in its entirety. But if he had, he’d never have met Perry. And that was something he would never regret.
“Philippe, look who I found sneaking out of a bedroom…”
When his uncle’s raptor-like gaze caught his, Xavier just sighed and slumped into the chair opposite Philippe’s desk.
Time to pay the price for a fabulous evening, he supposed.
Perry stared at Edward. Then she gawked at George. Her gaze flashed between the two of them for so long, her mouth was dry because it was hanging open.
“Are you guys for real?” she asked, her voice a croak when she could eventually speak.
Edward sighed. “I know it might seem a little unorthodox.”
“A little?”
He firmed his lips. “A lot.”
His correction had her narrowing her eyes at him, but otherwise, she relaxed. His concession soothed her. He wasn’t going to just blanket over her reactions.
She was allowed to have a damn opinion, after all. Especially on a matter such as this
Because, even though it seemed laughable, they were being serious. Deadly, so.
She’d never seen George so tense outside of work, and Edward, though she barely knew him, looked like he was the proverbial cat on a hot tin roof.
She blinked. “So, what? You just want me for my body?” Her derisive snort had both men glaring at her, a look she caught when she shot an equally derisive glance down her body.
A Victoria’s Secret Angel she most definitely was not.
It had been outside of the realm of her understanding to have landed Xavier. A fucking Duke. Now these two were saying she was hot enough to attract a Prince and a Crown Prince.
And said Princes wanted to double team her?
“My life is a porn flick, isn’t it? Why didn’t you just come in with a pizza box? Tell me you had a delivery?”
Edward frowned, confused, but George snorted. The heaviness that had overcome him in the last few moments dissipating somewhat.
“You’re nuts,” he told her with a sigh, and she eyed him cautiously as he stepped away from the dressing table he’d been leaning against and headed to the chaise where she was seated.
He made no move to come close to her. Sat at the foot while she was at the head, but his proximity made every part of her stand to attention. She wasn’t sure she’d ever been so hyper sensitive, and that was after a night like last night where she’d experienced things she’d never experienced before!
The atmosphere was so turbocharged, the air seemed to be draining of all oxygen. It felt curiously suffocating but not enough to make her panic—a contradiction in itself.
How could she be starved for air but not scared? He wasn’t the air she breathed… even if some nights, at her most fanciful, she felt certain he was.
“Explain this to me, dammit,” she burst out finally when neither man seemed like they were going to say another word. “I need to understand this. You can’t just throw shit like this at me and expect it to stick.”
Edward stiffened. “I suppose not.”
George snorted. “Ignore him. He has a st
ick up his ass when he’s not happy about something.”
“What isn’t he happy about?”
“I sprung you on him?”
Her eyes widened, and she pointed to herself. “I was sprung on him?” she squeaked, umbrage flushing through her with enough force to make her turn pink with it.
George leaned forward and grabbed the finger she was pointing at herself. “You’ll poke yourself in the damn eye if you’re not careful,” he chided, then sheepishly looked at his brother. “I explained the situation to you, Perry.”
Her head whipped from side to side so fast, almost like it didn’t belong on her fool neck. “No, you didn’t.”
He sighed. “I did. Edward decided when he married we weren’t going to… do the things we’d done in the past. We haven’t done them since.”
She frowned. “So what? What’s changed?”
“You changed everything,” George admitted, sitting forward so he could rest his elbows on his knees. “I knew you’d be perfect for both of us.”
“As what? A sex toy?” she squeaked again. “What would you do? Shove me in the background to keep me out of the press’s gaze?”
“Of course not. People don’t have to know about that, but they’ll know about your relationship with one of us.”
The way he hedged his words had her scowling. “One of you?” She covered her face with her hands. “Why am I even entertaining this crazy topic of conversation?”
“Because you want me as much as I want you,” George said softly, sinfully. His voice like silk and with the power to completely decimate her control.
She shuddered because he wasn’t wrong. She did want him. Desperately.
Pressing her fingers against her eyes, she whispered, “This can’t be real. Am I still asleep?”
“You know how I feel, Perry,” Edward said softly.
Perry and Her Princes (Kingdom of Veronia Book 1) Page 8