by Pippa Grant
Gracie goes stiff as a glacier and twice as white.
June.
When my child is due to arrive in this world.
“This isn’t what it appears,” I say to her, because I cannot possibly explain my betrothal without a map, a history book, a bottle of mead, and clenching my jaw tight enough to crack half my molars.
“It’s exactly as it appears,” Elin counters. “We’re to be wed, therefore you are my fiancé.” She flicks a ring-studded hand at Gracie. Among those rings is a ruby my grandfather gave to her father from the royal collection upon their agreement over our intended marriage, and the sight of it tonight makes my stomach turn.
“Run along now,” Elin says to Gracie. “Surely you can find another unsuspecting benefactor who can afford to keep you in rags and tatters.”
“That is enough, Elin.”
“Clearly not, as it is still here.”
“It would rather be poor than an asshole any day of the week,” Gracie chirps. “Viktor, while these two sort out their problems, would you please be a dear and let me down the elevator?”
“Gracie—” I start, but she pinches me again—and yes, I probably deserve that—and wrenches out of my grasp.
Viktor, because he answers to a power greater than me—possibly my father, possibly God—steps around me, gallantly guides Gracie to the elevator, and hits the secret code on the elevator panel to override my app and allow it down. When I say my father has me on a tight leash, I’m not joking.
Gracie isn’t looking at me when the elevator doors close.
“She took my luggage,” Elin gasps. “That bitch took my luggage. If she harms my luggage—”
“Then perhaps you deserve it.”
Royal breeding dictates I offer an invitation to the woman.
I’m rather tired of royal breeding.
I let myself into my penthouse without holding the door for her. Unfortunately, she’s quite adept at slipping in where she’s not wanted. “Your butler needs to be fired,” she says as she follows me into my home.
“I don’t employ a butler. Nor a chef, nor a daily housekeeper, nor a secretary.” The Thrusters maintain my schedule of public appearances, which works just fine for me.
“We’ll fix that immediately.”
Ares is in the long galley kitchen, tipping a bakery bag back into his mouth. He eyes me. Then Elin. And finally the monkey, chewing all the while.
“Dear god in heaven, what is that?” Elin screeches as she spots him.
“He’s called a friend,” I say as I search through my phone, hoping to avoid calling Ares’s brother if I can help it. Yet I find I don’t have any other contacts who might know Gracie. Who can check on her. Watch after her until I can escape my prison and explain the situation to her. “I dare say you may be unfamiliar with the concept of friends?”
“Don’t be ugly, Man,” she says.
Man.
God above, I despise this woman. No one expects faithfulness of you, my father said the last time we discussed Elin. But we do expect you to be discreet. Austling has been a great ally to the throne, and he’s determined to see his daughter a princess.
You’re the bloody king, I’d shot back. Just make her a bloody princess and leave me out of it.
Sylvie—my stepmother—had stepped into the room when she heard the shouting, my father had turned to a disgusting pile of smitten goo, and my problem was forgotten.
Or more likely, ignored.
Not that he was wrong. One can’t simply hand out princess titles, even if one is the king.
“It’s time for you to go home,” Elin tells Ares.
“Am home,” he says around a mouthful of cookies.
“Not anymore,” she declares.
Ares eyeballs her again as though he’s deciding if he’d rather toss her out by the scruff of her neck, the tie of her coat, or perhaps by gathering up a handful of her hair and swinging her about in a circle until he could launch her off the roof.
I believe I’d vote for the hair off the roof option.
He leans his palms on the wide island separating the kitchen from the living room, spreading his hands so that even as he bends down from his six-foot-nine height, he somehow appears even larger than he is. “Poor monkey.”
Elin reaches for Loki, but the monkey scampers off her shoulder, dashes across the rug, leaps onto a stool on the other side of the island, then scurries across the countertop to climb Ares’s shoulder and sit with his back to all of us.
Ares straightens and leaves the kitchen, heading to his bedroom.
“Give me back my monkey,” Elin gasps.
Ares pauses long enough to give me another look. You’re fucked. He continues down the short hall. I wait for the door to shut, but it doesn’t.
So the monkey can leave of its own free will, I assume.
“Make him give me back my monkey,” Elin orders. “And go fetch my luggage.”
“Elin,” I say calmly—and still with a smile, because I’ll be fucking damned before I let this woman think she’s getting to me, “you’ve clearly had a long day of traveling. I’ll have Viktor pull out the bed beneath the couch for you when he returns, and in the morning, my father’s secretary will be happy to help you in making arrangements for a hotel while you’re visiting Copper Valley. Plenty of wineries in the Blue Ridge foothills. The wine is hardly Stöllandic mead, but it’s passable. And the environmental museum downtown is lovely. If you’ll excuse me, I have commitments I must attend.”
I don’t wait for her to excuse me, and instead stroll to the spiral staircase in the corner leading up to the master suite of rooms. I’ve no idea how the furniture was moved into the suite on the second floor of the apartment, but tonight, I rather don’t care.
I have a phone call to make.
And a door to lock.
And probably several hours’ worth of stress relief to be had in the secret room off my office.
“We are not done,” Elin screeches.
She’s unfortunately correct.
But for tonight, I have a more pressing matter to attend to.
Several, in fact.
Starting with finding Gracie and ending with breaking the news to my father that there’s no way in bloody hell I’ll be marrying Elin.
Not when another woman is carrying my child.
6
Gracie
I’m a good person. I’m a good person. I’m a good person.
I stare at Maleficent’s luggage in the private elevator and repeat my mantra as I march in place to get a few extra steps in on my fitness tracker, even though I’m feeling awful damn tired and tempted to have some fun.
I know nothing good can come of booby-trapping her luggage.
It’s such fancy luggage, all brown leather and brass zippers and some logo stamped all over it that must be European. It’s practically begging for a trip to a pasture to be trampled by a few cows.
Or by a few city cabs, since I’m not sure where the nearest pasture is.
But honestly, I’d rather let Manning’s luggage get trampled. I sigh and lean back against the silver wall as the elevator slows.
Of course he’s engaged. He’s a royal heir already in possession of a fiancée, so all he needs is a mistress and a few bastards. And I’m a complete and total fool.
Joey warned me. Men want one thing, Gracie. They want to stick their dicks in any orifice you’ll let them stick it in, and then they’ll walk away and find the next orifice to stick their dicks in. And who knows if the next orifice will even belong to a human?
If Manning’s sticking his dick in Maleficent’s orifice, then Joey has a very good point about that human thing.
The fact that he didn’t seem happy to see her is little consolation.
Because it doesn’t matter that he knows how to kiss me like I’m the only woman in the world. It doesn’t matter that the sight of his bare chest makes me hot and wet. It doesn’t even matter that I’m pregnant with his baby.
&nbs
p; There isn’t now, nor will there ever be, a we where Manning and I are concerned.
The elevator doors open, and I eye the luggage once more.
Can’t buy class, Peach told me once.
She was right.
The question is, do I care if I’m the classy one?
Oh, fuck it.
Who needs class?
“Miss Diamonte?” Manning’s ground-floor guard says. He’s a brick shithouse with dark hair and penetrating eyes, standing at a slender, tall, dark-paneled desk beside the private elevator. He peers at me with an unamused frown. I made a point of introducing myself to both him and Viktor the night I met Manning, because I might not have money or sophistication, but I have manners.
I smile at him as I lean in the elevator doorway, blocking the doors from closing. “Kristofer, do people call you names?”
He doesn’t wince exactly, but his left eyelid definitely twitches. Because people call him names or because he assumes that’s exactly what Maleficent did to me upstairs is anybody’s guess. “Names are child’s play, my lady.”
“But they can still hurt, can’t they? And please, call me Gracie. Though I’m tickled as all get out at the title. You’d fit right in back where I come from.”
His gaze shifts to the luggage.
Maybe it’s the suit, or maybe it’s the clean-shaven square jaw beneath dark hair just beginning to thread with silver, but it strikes me that Kristofer is a handsome gentleman.
Must be something in the air in Stölland. They make beautiful men. And I hope nobody’s calling Kristofer any names, because he was most kind when I showed up here completely unexpectedly and practically lost, asking to see his royal boss.
“It’s rather a pity when kindness is neglected in place of insults,” he says.
“I suppose that’s what karma’s for.” I smile sweetly. “Well, karma and a Southern woman alone in an elevator for thirty seconds with a banshee’s luggage. You enjoy your evening. I hope you don’t have to work too long tonight. And that the monkey knows where to poop.”
I wiggle my fingers at him and take off at a reasonable pace, though I’d love to get as far the hell away from here as I can as fast as humanly possible.
Because my baby isn’t growing up in a world where her fate can be decided by a king who would arrange for his son to marry a woman like that.
Which means I need to contact a lawyer.
Yesterday.
But I need to figure out this cab thing again first.
My phone buzzes. I glance at the screen, and my heart clenches.
Manning.
Of course. Of course he’s calling. Because it’s the right thing to do.
I hit the ignore button and head out of the building.
Not because I want to.
But because I need to. For my sake, and for my baby’s sake.
7
Manning
It’s rather early in Stölland for a phone call, but I know my brother Colden will be up. I waver for a moment, considering calling someone else instead when Gracie refuses my calls.
Five years ago, I didn’t know Willow Honeycutt existed.
Now, I count my stepsister among my dearest friends. Plus, she’s isolated from all the royal shenanigans and rules, which means she’ll most likely have a relevant perspective.
However, she’s rather close to the Berger twins, which means confiding in her may not be the wisest course of action just yet, even though I suspect Zeus will know by morning. Also, Willow works early in the morning, which means she’s probably already in bed.
So I dial Colden.
He answers on the fourth ring. “Your ringtone annoys the sheep.”
“You picked it, old man.” He has me by two years, though if age were judged by grump factor, he’d have one foot in the grave. “Did I interrupt private time with Bessie?”
“Fuck off.” There’s a grunt on the other end of the phone, and I assume he’s lifting hay bales or dragging wood or possibly tossing a whole bloody sheep out the door as he takes care of his own self-assigned duties at the palace grounds in Stölland’s early morning. If Colden had been born without royal blood, he’d have moved to the moors, grown a beard down to his belt, taught himself to play the lute, and lived out his days as a shepherd. “Did you break a bone, get yourself kidnapped, need bail money, or knock up a girl?” he asks.
“Because I would only call in one of those cases?”
“Yes.”
Bloody fucker knows me too well. “Elin arrived. If I have to marry that woman, I’ll leap off a bloody cliff.”
There’s another grunt. Elin would’ve been Colden’s problem, had he not been born with bowed legs. No, I don’t want the cripple. I’ll take the third son instead. Braces straightened his legs before he was a decade old, but worry over genetics kept the old earl from wanting his daughter to marry closer to the top of the royal food chain. His daughter will still be named a princess, though with far fewer roles and responsibilities.
All the better for Stölland.
“I’m quite serious about the cliff,” I tell Colden.
“Let me know when you’re ready to jump. I’ll bring flowers.”
“What did that tramp do to my luggage?”
I wince as Elin’s inhuman screech pierces my eardrums from the floor below. At the same time, I find myself smiling. I can’t imagine what Gracie might’ve done to Elin’s luggage, but I dearly hope it’s irreversible.
“What the devil was that?” Colden asks.
“My betrothed,” I reply dryly.
“Bloody hell.”
“You realize if I go over a cliff, you’ll be forced to take her on.”
“Doubtful, as I’m unable to have children.”
My lips part. “Fucking sheep on a platter, Colden. Since when?”
“Since the moment you threatened to saddle me with your betrothed.”
“Fucker.”
“You have two options. Either you can die, or she can. I’m in favor of the latter.”
“Give me back my monkey!”
Earplugs are in my near future. “I can’t marry this woman, Colden. Fuck royal duty. I won’t do it.”
“Don’t have much choice, old chap. Austling paid a hefty sum for you, and he will most likely do everything in his power to ruin our family if you back out.”
I squeeze the bridge of my nose, because I know he’s right about the ruination. “A hefty sum?” I repeat.
There’s silence on the other end of the phone. Silence is fairly typical for Colden, but this silence is heavy.
“What are you talking about?” I ask.
Arranged marriages have been happening in my country for generations. My father’s bride—my mother—was picked by my grandfather as well, who believed it in the family’s best interest to form an alliance with her family, as the Groessens were titled and wealthy, employing a full one percent of Stölland’s population through their farming and fishing conglomerates. My grandfather was betrothed to a princess from Heilsen, further north in the Norwegian Sea, as part of a peace treaty between the two countries as settled on by their fathers.
Land, political advantage, and trade partnerships often come into play. But to the best of my knowledge, none of my family’s arranged marriages have included cash payments.
Not even Gunnar’s, when he wed the second daughter of a Danish prince in order to open up trade routes.
“I know about your secret girlfriend,” I tell my brother. “Talk.”
He grunts. I’ve no idea if he has a secret girlfriend, but it seems a legitimate threat.
“I have no details,” he tells me. “You’ll have to discuss it with Gunnar. As I understand it, the whole situation was so entirely fucked up that Pappa still doesn’t like to acknowledge the truth. In the meantime, you might talk to Sylvie.”
“Because she’s the most level-headed of the lot of us?”
“No, because she’s the most romantic of all of us. Should make for quite
the entertaining dinner to watch her and Pappa argue over the age-old tradition of marrying off the king’s children to keep peace and expand the influence of the kingdom. Not that she’ll be able to change his mind, since Austling has us over a bloody barrel, but I’ll be entertained.”
“You’re being rather unhelpful.”
“I’m up to my elbows in sheep shit with an appointment to visit a preschool, and then a hospital, and then have dinner at the ambassador’s club this evening, while you’re merely annoyed with a woman. I’m rather disinclined to be helpful.”
I sometimes wonder if he truly has the social skills of an uneducated sheep, or if he simply pretends to lack social skills to get himself out of engagements.
Considering his schedule, it’s rather likely his pretending has failed him.
“She stole my scarf! That bloody whore took my Hermes scarf!”
My guards will require a raise if she doesn’t leave soon. “Don’t suppose you know anything about poison,” I mutter.
“Yes. Don’t drink it.”
I sigh.
“You do have one more option,” Colden says.
“Anything.”
“Introduce her to someone richer. Or at least more handsome. Shouldn’t be difficult to find the latter.”
Not a half-bad plan. If she throws me over, her father can hardly fault the Freys for her infidelity. “He’ll have to be half-deaf,” I murmur as another shriek goes up from the floor beneath me. “And rather tolerant.”
“One man’s rubbish is another’s treasure.”
“You’re ridiculous.”
“You’re welcome.”
Something crashes beneath the floor, and my phone buzzes with an incoming message.
From Viktor. This is worrisome, Your Highness.
I’m tempted to tell him to take it up with my father, but it’ll simply come back on me. Handle your woman, Manning. ‘Tis your duty to do so.
Colden’s right. One of us needs to die, or I need to find her a richer, more attractive beau.
I’m fourth in line for a crown. Hardly a prize as far as royalty goes.