by Pippa Grant
“A praying whore? Are you fucking kidding me?”
“What?” Gracie says. “We’ve got sexual predators in Congress who pray. Why can’t a whore pray? Not that I’m a whore, mind you. Like I said, I don’t take anybody’s money.”
My cock has gone into full golden retriever mode, panting and waving and leaping and wishing for some petting by his favorite person.
My brain, however, is veering into panic mode.
I honestly don’t trust Elin to not harm Gracie.
Ares appears in the hallway, Elin’s monkey on his shoulder. “Quiet,” he orders. He points at Gracie. “Cookies.”
“Chocolate chip, snickerdoodle, or peanut butter?” she asks.
He grunts and nods. Loki the monkey picks at something in Ares’s hair and then nibbles on whatever he’s found. Most likely cookie crumbs—I haven’t dared enter Ares’s room for fear the mess I’ll find, though I’ll bloody kill him if he moves out—but you never know what’s in a locker room, airplane, or planted by a dickhead of a teammate.
Bloody hell, what I wouldn’t give to be able to stay in the States with these teammates for another five or six years. They can be assholes, but they’re goodhearted assholes who don’t pretend to be anything they’re not.
And they’re fucking good athletes to boot. I’ve never played for a team this strong. Not even Stölland’s Olympic team.
“Loki, come,” Elin orders. “Quit eating off that thing.”
The monkey flips her the bird while Gracie bustles to the kitchen. She’s in black leggings that accentuate every curve in her delicious legs and rear end, a white tank that lands mid-hips and is covered by a bright pink denim jacket, a simple gold locket about her slender neck, her hair twisted into a messy bun atop her head.
I’d very much like to release her hair from its trappings while kissing the hell out of those plump lips and smiling mouth.
“Viktor, do you have any favorite cookies?” she asks. “Ares paid for me for the week. Might as well keep busy, and I have this feeling you haven’t had homemade cookies in far too long.”
I find I’m once again nearly speechless.
Viktor’s gaze meets mine.
“That means I’m Ares’s whore, if you’re going to keep insisting on calling me names,” Gracie says to Elin from the kitchen. “Though I prefer baker of the night. So much more mysterious and fun, don’t you think, Your Highness?”
She flashes a smile at me that’s not as easy as the smiles she gave me before she found out about my betrothal and catches her eyes before they drift below my chin.
Loki screeches
“Miss Diamonte—”
“Oh, no, we’re past all those formalities.” She pulls measuring scoops from the top drawer. “See? Now I’ve gone snooping in your drawers. I’m sorry, sugar-pie. You. Who keeps calling me a whore, bless your heart. What’s your name? You like cookies?”
In all my time with Gracie, I’ve never once heard her call anyone a sugar-pie, and I’m quite certain bless your heart is not the kindness the words would imply. Her dialect and accent are so thick, I can barely keep up with half her sentences. “Miss Diamonte—” I start again.
“Gracie,” she corrects as she rummages about, opening white cabinet door after white cabinet door until she discovers a bag of flour. “I got Zeus’s cookie recipe since it’ll be another few weeks before Ares can see him. Won’t be the same—I think he left out an ingredient, because all the best bakers do when they share recipes—but don’t you think Ares deserves a little bit of home?”
“That thing needs to leave,” Elin declares.
“Good gracious, I guess they don’t teach manners in princess school. Ares, hon, you are just perfect the way you are.”
“Gracie,” I say quietly.
When she lifts her eyes to stare at me, for a moment, I see her sister.
Stubborn, take-no-shit, go ahead and try me, you asshole radiating out of those dark as sin eyes.
But I see something more too.
Barely-masked vulnerability in the waver of her chin. Fear in the subtle wideness of her eyes. Complete and utter bravado.
I’ve only left Goat’s Tit for maybe four weeks of my entire life, she told me the night we met. It’s not always exciting, but it’s home.
Yet here she is. Traveling alone. Again. To a big city with only Ares to fill the role of the friends who surround her and adore her.
“You need to leave,” I say, though my voice is thick. Her bravery and determination are admirable, but she needs to fucking run away from the pile of shit into which my life will be crumbling very soon.
In all the world, Gunnar and I have been able to track down exactly four men rich and titled enough to tempt Austling. Three are over fifty, and the fourth has just won the right to marry his boyfriend in his own country. Willow’s fiancé has been traveling to Asia, quite plainly making it clear his connections also travel a great deal and have little time to interview a woman for a prospective position of wife, and none of them have near the fortunes necessary to compensate for a lack of title.
Even Zeus Berger himself texted that his billionaire best friend doesn’t socialize much in billionaire circles, so don’t hold my breath, but if he hears of anyone, he’ll let me know.
Ares immediately followed Zeus’s text with a gif of two words flashing over the screen, all bright pink and sparkly. You’re fucked.
You know it’s bad when Ares sends gifs using complete sentences and proper spelling.
Which is why I’ve decided to host a Halloween party in two days’ time on a day off between home games.
With my teammates, rock stars, football and baseball players, Hollywood actors, and even an underwear model.
All of whom are single.
None of whom I want meeting Gracie Diamonte.
Elin, yes. Gracie, no.
“I don’t know anything about living far from home,” Gracie says to me, quickly overcoming the wobble in her voice though her gaze keeps drifting to places that make my cock leap, “but I know that when a man’s been working hard and traveling and missing his family, and when he wants a fresh, homemade chocolate chip cookie like his brother bakes, that man deserves a fresh, homemade chocolate chip cookie. So unless you’re planning on kicking both me and your teammate out onto the street, I’m fixin’ to get to work and bake us up some chocolate chip cookies.”
Fixin’ to?
The woman is up to something.
Also, my cock pulses harder every time the woman says cookie.
I’d like to explore her cookies.
Her eyes drift down my chest. I muffle myself before I can curse out loud. She’s twenty feet from me, yet I can feel her gaze on my skin as though it were her fingers and they were shooting sparks across my flesh.
“Elin is right,” I grit out. “You cannot stay here. We’re out of beds. There’s no room for you to sleep.”
“No worries.” She removes a package of butter and a carton of eggs from my built-in subzero fridge. “I’m sleeping with Ares.”
I see red.
I see red so very red my vision is swimming in blood.
“The bloody fuck you will.”
Ares hooks a thumb at himself. “Don’t snore,” he says proudly.
“High five.” She smiles broadly and holds a hand up to him. “I don’t either.”
They do a complicated high five involving more hand gestures than I thought Ares capable of using off the ice, and I’m once more on the verge of insane jealousy that Ares Berger has a secret handshake with Gracie.
I swallow hard and remind myself that Gracie Diamonte is off-limits, and I’d do best to convince myself the child she’s carrying isn’t mine.
If I’m to have no role in his life, then he isn’t my child. Regardless of his genealogy. The most precious gift I can offer the lad is his freedom.
Elin’s hands are fisted on her hips. She’s done up in a hairstyle that’s probably touched up weekly to a cost of half o
f Gracie’s weekly wages, her face set in a severe frown that remarkably causes no wrinkles, and sporting a button-up silk shirt that probably cost as much as all of Gracie’s meager luggage, which is still sitting on the marble floor in the foyer—a green backpack with glittery straps, her bright floral shoulder bag, and one tattered black suitcase with a handle taped in pink, the cloth fraying near the zipper.
My stomach tumbles as though it’s attempting to polish boulders.
Elin has been bred to be a royal wife. She makes no apologies, demands what she wants without hesitation, and has no use for love in a marriage.
She has no use for being made a fool either, and I’d be a fool myself if I didn’t suspect she knows what’s going on.
“Viktor, remove both of them,” Elin orders.
“The king wishes for both to stay, my lady,” Viktor replies.
“What?” she screeches.
“What?” I echo dumbly.
“Mr. Berger has been an asset to His Majesty’s royal guard, both in and out of the hockey rink. His Majesty wishes Mr. Berger’s happiness, unconventional though his request may appear.”
“And does His Majesty know what the whore did to my luggage?”
My eyeball twitches. Not merely my eyelid. My entire eyeball. Elin has yet to discover anything wrong with her luggage—and yes, she did find the Hermes scarf that she claimed missing, which I saw her wearing before we left town—but she keeps looking.
“Without sufficient evidence of tampering, His Majesty has come to the conclusion that there has been no crime committed worth alerting the American authorities,” Viktor says.
He’s said as much to Elin several times since her arrival, though never in front of Gracie.
Who’s grinning as though she just sharked a shark in poker.
I suddenly have not a single doubt that the only thing Gracie did to Elin’s luggage was to imply she’d done something to it in order to put Elin in a tizzy. Gracie one, Elin zero.
“Lots of chocolate chips, or just a few?” she asks Ares.
“Door.”
“Lots it is.”
He grunts and offers the monkey a stick of butter. Loki ignores it, leaps to the counter, grabs an egg, and flings it across the room at Elin.
She dashes for the hallway as egg splats on my Turkish rug. “You’re ruining my monkey!” Red splotches rise on her neck, and it strikes me that she’s as unhappy with this arrangement as I am.
But even if she begs off, there’s nothing to be done with Gracie.
Until the kingdom is financially secure, nothing is off-limits. Including putting my child in the very same position in which I find myself.
“Enjoy your cookies,” I say crisply to Ares. If I can’t remove Gracie, I need to remove myself, though it takes Herculean effort to walk away, because even knowing it’s best for Gracie if we’re completely unattached, breathing is infinitely easier when I have her within my sight.
Ares looks at me, and while he’s not calling me a dumbass, I’m not entirely certain I appreciate what his look might mean either.
Because I’d swear he’s telling me I’m welcome.
17
Gracie
I collapse onto the king-size bed in Ares’s massive bedroom. “Thank you,” I tell him for the seventy-gazillionth time.
He nods and peers at me.
After two hours of baking cookies with him—including gingerbread, which Viktor finally confessed to liking—I think I’m beginning to understand some of his silent communication, and I’m pretty sure he’s asking if I’m okay.
Understanding him is a relief. Joey told me he was a big ol’ teddy bear, but committing to living in his room for a week to get here to help Manning was a terrifying thought.
“I’m good,” I say. “Just a little tired. It’s normal.”
He nods, pats me with surprising gentleness on the head, and takes the monkey with him when he leaves me for a nap.
When I wake up to voices down the hall, the sun is setting behind the mountains. Holy dog, the pinks and purples over the blue haze that the Blue Ridge range is known for takes my breath away. When I was in Copper Valley for that golf tournament a couple months back, I got out to walk in the mountains but I didn’t get a chance to appreciate the beauty of a mountain sunset.
Conversation continues down the hall, and curiosity gets the best of me. I step into the bathroom attached to the bedroom to freshen up and freeze in the doorway, because holy crap amazeballs again.
There’s a huge clawfoot tub that might actually be big enough to hold Ares, along with a tiled-in shower stall the size of my bedroom that has ten—no, twelve nozzles in the wall, two overhead rain shower fixtures, and a sprayer on a flexible hose as well. I take two more steps into the room, and the toilet seat lifts automatically.
I start to thank it before I process that of course it won’t thank me back. Because it’s a toilet.
“Oh, boy…we’re not in Alabama anymore,” I whisper. I snap a picture. “Honey badger, text Joey. Holy fuck, I could live in this bathroom.”
Honey badger reads me the texts that have come in from Nancy and Tammy, telling me all is fine with the bakery and Mister Beans, my cat back home, and from Peach, asking if I’m going to keep walking or if I’m giving up on ever beating her again with our fitness tracker challenges.
I ignore her message—I’ve been a little tired to keep going at my previous pace—and gape at the rest of the bathroom. The double sink is made of granite, the faucet and knobs fancy brass like I’ve only ever seen on the Home and Garden Channel, and I stop in my tracks when I realize the large rectangular glass-and-metal thing on the wall beside the shower is a towel warmer.
A towel warmer.
I might actually whore myself out if it would get me a towel warmer. Can you imagine? I’ve listened to books where the hero pulls a fresh warm towel right out of the dryer for the heroine, but I’ve never used a warm towel myself.
A burst of laughter draws my attention away from drooling over the bathroom, and curiosity gets the better of me. I finish quickly—only squealing a little when I find the toilet seat warm, like someone’s been sitting on it already, before I catch on that there’s a toilet control panel on the wall. The toilet has a control panel. And there’s not only a heated seat function, but also a bidet function.
I am such a simple country bumpkin. But you’re damn right I’m going to try that bidet before Manning or Elin finds a way to kick me out.
I try to act cool walking down the hallway when I realize the framed prints aren’t prints at all, but original paintings.
Last time I was here, I didn’t notice much more than the marble and slate. Now I’m seeing all the other signs of opulence, and despite that dollar figure on the payoff paperwork Manning sent me, it’s beginning to sink in just how much money a king has.
I don’t recognize the paintings, but I have a feeling they’re at least worth my monthly mortgage payment.
Probably more.
At the end of the hall, I find a small party going on around the polished dining room table. Because I’m completely and totally lame and have given up Dancing with the Stars and America’s Got Talent for Thrusters hockey games, I recognize Duncan Lavoie and Nick Murphy—whom I belatedly realize were the two goons here the night I came to tell Manning I was pregnant—though I don’t know who the strawberry-blond woman sitting between them is. Elin is sniffing at the cartons of food scattered about the table. Ares is using a fancy silver serving spoon to feed himself some kind of noodles in sauce. Manning is expertly wielding chopsticks, but he freezes when I appear in the doorway.
His gaze sweeps over me as though he’s verifying I’m still in one piece, then sweeps over me again a second time as though he’s enjoying the view and imagining himself pushing up my shirt to feast on my breasts. While my nipples tighten, he visibly swallows, his bright blue eyes go smoky hot, and a muscle ticks in his jaw despite his strained smile.
He looks down at hi
s food as though he hasn’t seen me, smile still in place, and it strikes me that his smile might be perpetual, but it doesn’t mean he’s happy.
Duncan Lavoie notices me next. “Hello, love.” He wiggles his brows and pats the seat beside him. “Come. Sit. Eat. Let me tell you all the things I’d love to do to you if your poutine is half as good as your cookies.”
“Back, small dick,” Ares growls.
“I hate when he fucking pulls that card,” Duncan says to Manning.
Whose dick is nothing to sneeze at, but considering I’ve seen—never mind.
Again, not going there.
Point is, I suspect none of these men have dick problems, but I imagine it is hard—oh, dog, now I’m going to giggle—to compete with Ares.
Ares trades places with Duncan, by which I mean he rises, points, and gives Duncan a growly-eyed glare that makes Duncan sigh and rise with a few grumbled curses that make me glad my baby can’t hear yet.
“The whore’s not eating with us,” Elin declares.
“Of course she’s not, because she’s not here,” I reply. I take the seat Ares points me into between him and the woman I don’t know.
“So, you’re not a whore?” Nick asks. “Damn.”
The woman extends a hand to me. “Hi. Felicity Murphy. Apologies for my dumbass brother. He has a permanent case of hornball-itis.”
“That usually means they’re compensating,” I tell her. And then I hiccup.
She cracks up. “Fuck the handshake. You get a hug.”
We bond over a mutual lack of appreciation of hornballs while Ares produces a plate from somewhere and piles it with fried rice, noodle something, random meats in sauce, and tops it all with a fortune cookie still in a wrapper.
He also gives me a spoon, a fork, chopsticks, and tongs.
I’m not sure what the tongs are for, but I thank him anyway with a peck to the cheek that makes him blush.
I hope Joey marries Zeus just so we can have Ares for a brother-in-law.
And I’ll have to find more excuses to kiss Ares on the cheek, because Manning is positively fuming now.
Oh, he’s still smiling. But his eyeballs suggest he’s mentally stabbing Ares everywhere it’s possible to stab a man without killing him.