by Pippa Grant
I shuffle to his bathroom and grimace to myself.
Of course they’re not traveling with him to his games. A king and his queen can’t be hockey groupies.
I make eye contact with myself in the massive mirror above the marble sink.
But I could.
I could go to Florida. Get tickets to the games. Surprise him at the hotel—wait.
Do the guys share rooms? Oh, even if they don’t, Viktor will be—
Wait again.
Who am I?
I’m not a hockey groupie, and Manning’s betrothal is still very much a real thing until he confirms it’s off.
He will. But I know we should be as quiet as possible about our relationship until he’s formally a free man.
I finger-comb my hair, grin at the idea of our relationship, sigh wistfully over the idea of a long soak in that huge tub, and go in search of my clothes.
I don’t have to look far, because Manning has once again put everything in its place, and he’s found a place for what doesn’t belong on a fancy upholstered chair with carved wood trim. He even folded my clothes neatly before placing them on the chair.
Right down to my dirty, torn underwear.
For some reason, I can’t stop smiling all over again at the thought of Manning folding my dirty underwear. It’s wrong, but it’s so…right.
The apartment is quiet when I carefully open the bedroom door, so I dash down the stairs, intent on making it to my bedroom quickly to grab clean clothes.
But the living room isn’t empty.
“Miss Diamonte. I wondered when you would arise.”
I nearly trip on the last step. “Oh. Um, hi, Your Majesty.” Am I supposed to curtsy like Elin did yesterday?
Oh, fuck it. I don’t know, and I don’t care. I’m a clueless American. And I’m very adept at playing dumb.
He’s in a charcoal suit, sitting on the couch with his ankle crossed over his knee as he sets aside the paper he’s apparently been reading. For a king, he’s pretty casual except for the way every bit of him right down to his shiny black shoes reeks of power and importance.
He nods to me. “Come. Join me.”
Fucking feet. They’re obeying even though my brain is spiraling into panic attack territory. This man is intimidating and infuriating all at the same time, and here I go, walking over to join him even though he didn’t even say please.
Also, my belly’s starting to grumble again.
I need to eat soon.
“Good morning,” I say, stopping at the edge of where the couches are arranged.
Manning said he had a meeting with his father. But he hasn’t texted to tell me how it went.
Or if he’s still alive.
“Sit,” the king says. “I believe we’re overdue for a discussion.”
I pinch my lips together and remain standing.
“Come, now, Miss Diamonte. I don’t bite.” He smiles, his eyes twinkle just like Manning’s—though his are considerably more creased in the corners, and I have far less trust of his father’s eye twinkle than I do of his—and I let myself sit stiffly on the edge of the other sofa.
I need a shower—I smell like a sweaty fish in dirty gym socks, and now I’m thinking about showering with Manning, or soaking in that jet tub with him upstairs, or bad Gracie, concentrate.
Right.
The king. Manning’s father. My baby’s grandfather.
Oh, boy. I think that was a hot flash. Or possibly embarrassment. Or flat-out fear.
I tell myself Joey wouldn’t flinch before the king of any country, so I won’t either.
“I understand we have a situation in need of solving,” King Tor says.
“Do we?”
“You’re carrying my son’s child.”
“No, I’m not.”
The words fall out on their own. I’m not the worst liar in the world, but I’m not the best either, and I know he doesn’t believe me.
And not only because his eyebrows are rising at the same time his chin tilts down and he folds his arms across his wide chest.
But I can’t confess to having Manning’s baby yet.
Or possibly ever.
Not while he’s still betrothed to someone else, which is on until he tells me it’s officially off.
“Why would anyone in their right mind want to have a royal baby when you do horrific things like pick their spouses for them before they’re old enough to walk?” I blurt before he can call me on the lie. “And you can go ahead and look down your nose at me all you want for the cookies I decorate, but do you know what? I make my own way in this world. I support myself just fine, and I’ll continue to support myself just fine, surrounded by people who care about each other and don’t give two shits about appearances and stupid rules and money and power. What you’re doing to Manning is wrong. People shouldn’t be bought and sold. And I don’t care what you think of me, because I think so very, very little of you that I don’t even know why I’m standing here having this conversation.”
Oh, dog. Oh dog oh dog oh dog. I just said all that.
And I don’t actually want to take it back.
Because he has put Manning in a terrible position, and someone needs to call him on it.
“You’re sitting, Miss Diamonte.”
Dammit. “I’m standing on principle. It’s a figure of speech.”
He drops his foot to the floor and leans forward, hands dangling between his knees. “I can hardly fault you for wishing my son free to court you, but there are—”
“Court me? Look, we both know I’m not princess material. That’s fine. I get it. Princesses don’t say fuck and decorate cookies with penises. Understood. No hard feelings. But I will always consider Manning to be a friend—” so much more than a friend “—and if there’s one thing that makes me madder than a hornet in a mud wrestling pit, it’s seeing my friends hurt for no reason. And if you make him marry Elin, you’ll be hurting him. You’re his father. Don’t you want something better for him?”
His jaw’s ticking, as though I’ve stopped amusing him and now I’m pissing him off.
Good.
“There are certain duties and obligations that come with—”
“Oh, horse shit.” I should shut up. I really should. “How good of a ruler can you be when duties and responsibilities make you miserable?”
“Young lady—”
“And why Manning? He’s third in line? No, fourth. Because your grandson comes before Manning, doesn’t he? Did you sell him already too?”
“I do not sell my sons and grandsons.”
Huh. Pretty sure that vein throbbing in his neck isn’t a good sign for his blood pressure. “Then why?”
He blows a long breath out his nose, the vein stops throbbing, and a man ten years older suddenly sits before me. “The agreement was reached before I had any say in the matter.”
“Why?”
“Miss Diamonte—”
I know that tone. It’s the you wouldn’t understand tone. The you’re too simple and stupid tone.
I’m fucking tired of being stupid.
I rise. “You know what? You have a pretty good opportunity here to ask for help from someone who’s not going to kiss your ass and fall all over herself, and someone who might just see your problems from a different enough viewpoint to help you find a solution, but if you’re too damn tied up in believing that I couldn’t possibly understand the terrible, horrible struggles of your privileged life, then I’ll just have to solve this problem myself another way.”
My knees are quaking as I turn and stalk toward the hall, grabbing the entire platter of leftover cookies as I go, because I don’t do well with telling off anyone even after two cups of coffee, a shower, and a few hours with my ovens, much less telling off the ruler of an entire nation before breakfast.
But I won’t apologize.
I might not be right.
But neither is he.
I don’t even care that he wasn’t responsible for the
original betrothal agreement. Because any father worth his salt would find a way to break it.
My father would’ve found a way to get me out, no matter the cost, and he died near-penniless after a lifetime of barely making ends meet by scrounging up work around Goat’s Tit.
I’m about to slam my bedroom door when I realize something’s off.
Elin’s door is open.
And her bedroom is empty.
I don’t just mean she’s not there either. I mean her decorations are gone, her magazines and clothes are gone, and even her brain is gone.
The model brain, I mean. Sorry. That came out wrong.
Loki lopes into the room with one of my socks on his head.
Why is her monkey still here if she’s gone?
Did she abandon him?
Or did he refuse to go with her?
I hand him a chocolate chip cookie. He crumbles it and throws the pieces toward the bed.
“Is she gone?” I whisper to him.
He nods.
Which might mean she’s gone, or it might not, because I have no idea if he truly understood the question and knows how to answer.
I barely graduated high school, which was almost a decade ago. I don’t know anything about monkeys.
I go back to my room, shut the door, shove a snickerdoodle in my mouth, and rummage about for some clean clothes.
Manning’s gone. At least for the next several days. I don’t want to stay here. I want to go home.
36
Manning
I’m about to board the bus from Mink Arena to the airport when my phone rings. My father’s face appears on the screen, so I step out of line and answer. “Yes, sir?”
“I had the distinct pleasure a bit ago of being thoroughly chastised by an American woman completely unimpressed with any bit of me.”
Holding in a grin is impossible. My father fell for Sylvie when she chewed his arse out over his lack of manners in a New York restaurant, and the rest is history. Though I would’ve hoped he’d learn to not give her reason to chastise him so much by now. “I thought you’d become accustomed to that.”
“Far more charming when my wife does it.”
Murphy distracts me, walking past to climb onto the bus with an irritated scowl on his face. He’s staring at his phone and muttering something about killing someone.
So I shan’t be the only one up to his ears in frustrations on this trip.
“I’m about to board the bus,” I tell my father. “If I need to stay—”
“Go,” he tells me. “Isaakson and I will work out a plan for handling Austling. You’ve done enough. This was never your fault, though it’s good to see you take charge for once.”
Perhaps it wasn’t my fault, but he’s correct. I haven’t handled myself in the best manner to solve the issue directly, and I should have done much sooner.
On the ice, I never leave a problem untackled. But it took a spitfire from Alabama determined to rescue me from myself to show me how to step up outside the arena.
I wish my father safe travels home and climb aboard the bus, Viktor a constant presence as always. Because it’s still bloody fun to be an annoying fucker, I plop into the seat beside Murphy.
He scowls at me.
I smile and type a quick message to Gracie.
You’re bloody perfect. Miss you already.
The message spins and spins and comes up with a delivery failure notification.
I frown and try again.
The bus sweeps into motion while Murphy and I both scowl at our phones.
When the second message to Gracie won’t go through, I text Kristofer instead. Is Gracie about?
While I wait for his reply, I glance at Ares.
He’s watching me back, clearly amused.
“Yes?” I say.
He shakes his head and looks down at his own phone. Mine dings.
Text message from Ares. A gif of an explosion, followed immediately by a gif of a twitterpated cartoon rabbit with its heart bounding from its chest and more hearts dancing in its eyes.
“Another one bites the dust, eh?” I say to Ares.
He doesn’t answer, but his smirk says it clearly. You got it, smarty-pants.
Yes, I’m a twitterpated fool.
And I’m quite all right with that.
Until Kristofer’s message lands on my phone.
She departed with her luggage an hour ago, Your Highness.
Heat flashes up my neck. Airport?
I’m going to the airport. If she’s there—
Traveling privately with her sister, I believe. And there’s this business with the monkey, Your Highness…
“Fuck,” I mutter.
She’s already gone.
Not a surprise—she does have her bakery to run. I assumed she’d wish to return home while we were away, given that Elin has also departed. I hope she didn’t misunderstand my message.
The part where she hasn’t texted or called is worrisome.
And—bloody hell.
She chewed out my father. That’s what he meant. Fuck fuck fuck.
I can’t even begin to imagine what might be going through her brain. I hit the button to call her, unsurprised when her phone rings straight through to voicemail. “Gracie, love, I’m boarding to Florida soon. Call me when you get this. Please.”
Murphy slides a look at me. “Trouble in paradise, you bloody cheerful goat?”
Fuck the smile. “Never. You?”
“I’m going to beat the fucking pulp out of Felicity’s ex-boyfriend.”
“Need a hand?” I don’t want to beat anything right now. I want to hear Gracie’s voice and be able to tell her I’m a free man.
But until then, help is what I have to offer my teammates.
Murphy’s nostrils flare. “Probably could use eighteen or twenty hands if I’m going to stay out of jail.”
Across the aisle, Ares grunts and holds up ten fingers.
“We’ve four hands right there,” I say, as though my insides aren’t turning to jelly.
Gracie’s left because she has responsibilities of her own at home.
Not because I’m never going to see her again.
This is going to be one long bloody flight to Florida.
37
Gracie
Telling myself I’m not running away isn’t working.
Not when my self-pep talk is accompanied with worried glances from Joey every forty-two seconds during the entire flight home. Also, not even sitting in the cockpit of the small private jet her company recently bought is helping with the queasiness.
“You realize it’s taking everything I have to not offer to go pound his face into sand,” Joey says as she slows the engines for the descent into Huntsville.
Impressive.
I would’ve thought she’d mention pounding his face into sand the minute she picked me up, but it’s been well over two hours, and this is the first she’s even hinted at anything to do with Manning.
“It’s not him,” I say. “It’s the stupid royal horseshit.”
We’re talking through the headphones, and I’m pretending that looking like a badass pilot makes me a badass pilot, even though all the numbers on all the panels across the dashboard make my eyes cross. She’s let me take the controls of a plane before and told me what to do, which is even more of a thrill than riding in her other plane when she makes everyone go weightless—and yes, I’ve done that several times, and I have my face printed on a cookie to prove it—but she was still doing all the thinking.
“He asked me for advice,” she tells me.
“What?”
“He’s got balls, I’ll give him that.”
“Advice about what?”
“Looking at his problem from another angle to find a solution.”
I gape at her, because that’s almost exactly what I yelled at the king this morning. “What did you tell him?”
“To quit going around the problem and face it head-on.”
> Of course she had.
Because that’s Joey.
“He told me he was going to tell his father he wouldn’t marry Elin.”
“He’s not nearly as happy as he seems, is he?”
“He’s not nearly as happy as he could be.” And I can’t help wondering—does he want me because I’m out of reach, or does he want me because he actually wants me?
Joey reaches over and squeezes my hand.
Like she knows what I’m thinking.
And she knows I don’t want her opinion on the subject.
“Neither are you at the moment,” she says anyway.
I sigh. “I’m not princess material.”
“That’s the most fucking ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
I glare at her.
She doesn’t bother dignifying my glare with a return glare.
“I should just be his mistress,” I declare, if only to watch her shoulders bunch. “What? I should. We’re perfect when we’re alone. But we’re a disaster when we’re with anybody else.”
Which isn’t entirely true.
We’ve never really done anything as a couple with anyone else.
Joey still doesn’t answer.
“I want to learn to read better,” I say into the silence.
This time I get a half-an-eyeball glance. “Go for it.”
Just like that. Go for it. I don’t know if she’s talking about reading, or if she’s talking about all of it. Dating Manning. Being his mistress. Being his princess.
Who knows if he even wants me to be his princess?
His father almost certainly doesn’t.
But look what his father was going to let him marry.
Once we land in Huntsville, I turn my phone back on and pull up my email. Three voicemail notifications ring out, but my inbox for my Etsy store has a number in one of the first messages that even I can read clearly.
I shove my phone at Joey when she has the plane parked. “Read that.”
She blinks once. Then twice. “Four thousand cookies? With—well, that’s embarrassing.”
I snatch the phone back. I hadn’t looked at—oh, dog. She’s right.
That is embarrassing.