by Tara Pammi
Only then did Nikandros realize what it must have cost her to come to him tonight. “You will nuzzle into me in sleep. You’ll cling to me in a nightmare. You will slap me because you’re terrified I’ll kill myself. And Christos, you’ll face the ruthless tyrant that is Andreas on my behalf.” A sharp ache twisted deep in his belly at the reminder of what Eleni had told him today. At all the efforts Mia had been making to fit into her new life. Mia was no longer in limbo, his sister had said, no longer resistant to her role in Drakon. “And yet, you can’t admit that you want this...between us.”
“I’ve been yours for the taking since that night. God, Nik, what else do you want from me?”
“I need to hear you say it. Not just the sex but this relationship. What is it about us that scares you so much?”
“I don’t know how to handle small things like attraction and men and you...you’re not even normal.”
He pulled her to him, their breaths choppy in the silence. “What?”
“You’re gorgeous, charming, a bloody prince, for God’s sake. I’m way out of my depth.”
“You were a world-class champion. I idolized you on the soccer field and obsessed about you when you were off it,” he said easily. “How much more power could you want over me?”
“Intimacy is hard for me. I spent my teenage years training long hours. What little time I had, I spent studying. The only man I ever truly loved was my father, and he broke my heart over and over until I... Opening myself to you, letting myself care about this...it terrifies me, Nik.”
“Then let me understand. Let me help you as you’ve helped me.”
She slowly relaxed in his hold, her hands sitting on top of his. “My father was the American Dream come true. When they were mere kids, he and my mother immigrated from Mexico City and started this small café that eventually grew to three restaurants.” Pride resonated in her voice. “But as long as I can remember, he had a gambling habit. That high when he won would be glorious and when he lost...”
The pain in her tone had Nik tightening his arms around her. “Did he hurt you? Or your mother?”
“No, God, never.” She shook her head violently, spraying him with water. “He was a good man, Nik. A wonderful husband, a loving father to me and Emmanuela. Used to call us his little champions.
“But see, it wasn’t enough, not when he was in the grip of that urge, not when he was chasing that high.
“Each year, he got progressively worse until he started gambling away every little thing we owned. In those last few years, he rarely even came home from the club. Stopped taking me to soccer practice.
“He was the one who got me into it—my biggest supporter and my fan.
“With heavy gambling losses of course came drinking. My mother would drive to the club every evening to bring him home. I always went along because I missed him terribly.
“The groundskeeper at the club—he was a man my dad had helped out long ago. One day, he asked me if I wanted to swim while I waited.
“I had already started playing soccer at the local club and I needed all the exercise I could get. I think, for almost three years, we went to that club every night and I swam while my mother tried to convince him to finish for the night.
“Slowly we lost everything.
“High school came and went. When a scout asked me if I was interested in playing on the junior team at Miami, I left and never looked back.”
“Never looked back?”
She flinched, as if it was the one thing she didn’t want to talk about. “My mother begged me to not leave then. She said it would crush my dad to see me walk away. To see me give up on him.
“But what about all the hopes I’d built around him? What about all the thousands of times he’d promised me he’d give it up only to crush them again and again?
“I had a huge argument with her. I said horrible things. That soccer was more important to me than a gambling addict. That she should leave him too. God, I was so horrible to my own parents. So angry and scared...”
“You were sixteen, Mia. All of us have been there.”
“After I found some success, I sent money through my sister. But I don’t think Mom ever forgave me for speaking like that about him. For walking away.
“But, I couldn’t stay anymore, Nik. I couldn’t bear to watch him like that.”
Words are so easy, she’d said that night. Actions speak louder. And then Brian had gone the same way.
He understood her fear now.
She thought Nik would break all the promises he made, too. That if she trusted him, he would only crush her. Such a fragile heart she hid under that resilience.
Was it any wonder she refused to trust him, to open herself up? The smallest of wounds from childhood left deep scars. He should know. He couldn’t blame her for guarding her heart.
“Your father, how is he now?”
Her tears fell on his wrists. “He passed away three years after I left. I didn’t even make it to the funeral because I was on the championship tour. I’ve never been able to sleep before midnight, so I swim.”
“Come here, matia mou,” he whispered, folding his arms around her trembling body. Nuzzling into his chest, she came to him without a word. The rush of tenderness Nik felt disarmed him.
He wished he could do something, anything to fix this for her. He held her like that for how long he didn’t know but the dark night stilled around them.
Hardening his heart, he pressed a kiss to her temple. “I understand now how hard it is for you to—”
She wrapped her hands around his neck, pushing herself onto her toes. “I do trust you, Nikandros. I want to put everything I have into making this work. But opening myself up to you will take—”
Nikandros didn’t let her finish. He shifted down and nuzzled at her top lip. When she gasped, he pressed ahead, a faint drumming in his ears. He only meant to seal her promise with a kiss but in mere seconds, the kiss took on a life of its own.
Her soft breath hit his jaw like a caress, her breasts plastered to his chest sending deep shivers of need through him.
This was right too, some primal instinct reared inside him. Mia and he were right. The sound of a throat clearing, again and again, filtered through the lust soaking his mind. Mia hid her face in his chest, her body trembling in his arms.
“Your Highness?”
Nikandros had to swallow a couple of times to find his voice. Of all the times—damn it all to hell. If it was Andreas summoning him, he would commit fratricide.
An aide materialized at the pool’s side, a dark shadow in the moonlight. His face landed somewhere near Nik’s head. “The Crown Prince has summoned you, Your Highness. Your father... I was told to inform you that King Theos is slipping away. And he asks for you incessantly.”
* * *
It was almost as if King Theos knew that his sons were forging a bond with each other.
Mia had no idea what was said between him and his sons. But the worse the news about his deteriorating health, the edgier Nikandros seemed to get. And Andreas too. It was as if that placid calm was beginning to fray at the edges.
Nikandros worked with Gabriel’s team at nothing short of an inhuman pace, with no time for anyone. Andreas’s warning began to beat a tattoo inside her head.
Mia had been so worried about both of them that she’d mentioned the idea of a friendly game of soccer pitting the brothers against each other to Eleni. Andreas and Nikandros were hard-core fans of the game.
The simple idea spiraled into a national event.
Once she’d got both brothers to join, Mia soon found herself visiting the soccer clubs in the city, looking for players. She’d even called on a couple of her old colleagues. Soon, the two teams were filled with an assortment of players ranging from minor soccer celebrities to players from inner-city clubs.
That the Princes were playing a soccer game against each other became the social event of the summer. In over her head, but suddenly teeming with ideas, Mi
a had enlisted Eleni’s help. Now the event was sold out at exorbitant prices and Mia’s unofficial career was launched.
“This could be your thing, you know, your platform so to speak. Every princess needs one,” Eleni had chirped, supreme satisfaction in her face.
“What’s yours?”
She’d shrugged. And for the hundredth time, Mia had wondered if Eleni truly didn’t mind her limbo status, being thought less than her brothers by the conventionalists in Drakon. For all her tireless endeavors, there was a steel wall around the Drakos sister. She butted into everyone’s affairs and yet was fiercely private when it came to her own life. “I’m not officially a princess, Mia. More of a wizard behind the curtains type.”
Mia had burst out laughing.
“Princess Mia, Patroness of Sports Charities,” she’d said with relish. “It’s something that fits your background, your image and it has a nice ring for the future wife of the Daredevil Prince. If I was the romantic sort, I would say Nik and you were made for each other.”
Mia’s gut bottomed out at Eleni’s statement.
Nik and she, made for each other? Dare she believe it?
“Why do you look so shocked,” Eleni had said, holding up two different jerseys she’d had designed for the two teams.
A dragon spewing fire with a soccer ball, or football as everyone seemed to correct her a thousand times a day, under its monstrous jaw was the common emblem on the teams’ apparel.
Mia had rolled her eyes and bit into her lip, hard, to stop from laughing when Eleni had unveiled the logo for the first time at dinner with the aplomb of a queen—really, Drakonites and their obsession with dragons was hilarious.
She’d seen the same glimmer of humor in Nik’s twinkling eyes and twitching mouth, but Eleni would skewer them if they so much as made a peep. Andreas, as usual, had just stared at the logo unblinkingly for a while, then returned his attention to his dinner.
“Once you marry and the baby comes, you’re going to have your hands full. That is, if you and Nik are able to set aside this fierce competitive thing you’ve got going on.
“Did you know that there’s a pool among the palace staff about whether you and Nik will come through this whole...opposing team debacle? Of all things, I can’t believe people are getting this worked up over football.” Apparently, it was informal but widespread knowledge that Nik and Mia were together.
Mia had somehow been roped into coaching Andreas’s team as they were supposed to be the underdogs, against Nik’s team which was full of athletes.
To Mia’s everlasting shock, Nikandros seemed to have taken this as a personal insult. “If that’s accusation I hear in your voice because I’m coaching Andreas and—”
“It just seems like a trick to provoke Nikandros—coaching the opposition’s team. There’s such a thing called masculine ego, Mia.”
“Damn it, you’re being just as irrational as Nik now. It’s not as if I chose Andreas over him, Eleni.”
“You know how competitive Nik can get.”
Even dinners with the four of them had become a riot, Nik and Eleni ganging up against Mia and Andreas. With whom she’d been forced to form a reluctant alliance.
She still didn’t trust the Crown Prince but she didn’t think he was the diabolical control freak she’d thought him the first day.
When Nik’s team was on the field at the same time as theirs for practice, she followed him across it greedily taking in every word he said, every motion of that sleekly honed body, every gesture, every smile.
Andreas had to wave his hands in front of her once to get her attention. Even the mortification and the knowing smiles that she’d been caught gawking at Nik like one of those royal groupies that seemed to follow him around—one had even sneaked into the his private office once from the visitor tour—didn’t stop her.
It morphed into this desperate ache inside her to be by his side, to share that intimacy with him again.
With the amount of media exposure the game was getting, her stupid moniker began to be bandied about by the press again—Soccer Widow In Action Again in Drakon, Soccer Widow’s Ties to the Royal Family.
It felt really good to be doing something that she loved, so Mia ignored the nonsensical headlines. But she’d cursed the game as much as she enjoyed it, for suddenly it seemed to create a chasm between Nik and her again.
* * *
The day of the soccer match dawned sunny and crisp, a perfect Drakonite summer day, filling the stadium with people. Little Drakon flags abounded everywhere Mia looked, a festive atmosphere permeating the palace and staff alike.
Dressed in shorts and a loose Team T that hid her small belly, Mia went to the stadium with Eleni in a tinted limo surrounded by a fleet of security vehicles.
The game turned out to be the most talked-about social event of the season. The entire nation tuned in to watch their beloved Princes going head-to-head against each other.
Pregnancy hormones or not, even Mia had to fan herself quite a few times at the sight of those broad chests and muscular calves. She would never play again, but God, if it wasn’t thrilling even to be on the sidelines.
Nikandros’s team won in the end, but Andreas had been a revelation. He’d been feral on the field, as if something had come undone inside of him.
Nik’s jersey had come off by the end of the game, to a loud applause from the crowd. That lean, rippling chest, the defined slab of muscle narrowing around his low-slung shorts—every woman had her eyes on him.
And of course, the charmer performed for them, waving, blowing kisses and throwing that megawatt smile.
The urge to march into the middle of that small field and plant her mouth on his chest, declare that he belonged to her, was so wild, so overwhelming that Mia had to empty out a chilled bottle of water over her head to cool down.
And Nik had seen that. While she stood there with water rippling down her face and neck, her emotions twisted and toppling, his eyes collided with hers, a dare in them.
Seeing a couple of reporters notice her, Mia forced herself to walk away from the field, even as every inch of her wanted to stay there and stake her claim. Back in their suite, she quickly showered and dressed in a light pink collared dress that boasted a straight, stiff bodice but touched her knees in a feminine frill.
Blow-drying her hair, she looked at her reflection and stared. The dress, casually chic and elegant, fit her to perfection. She was twelve weeks along but maybe because she’d been always slim and athletic in build, she wasn’t quite showing yet.
Now that the game was over, the palace staff was in an uproar getting everything ready for tonight’s celebration.
Drakonites and the world had already seen the brothers on the field in a friendly game. Tonight would be a welcome home party for Nikandros, a statement to the world that the Princes of Drakos would work for the progress of Drakon—a powerful statement unlike any the palace had made in the last two decades, according to Eleni.
The door swung open behind her and Nikandros walked in.
Thankfully, his jersey was back on. The lines of his face gleamed with satisfaction, the thrill of a good game won. His dark hair was slicked back with wetness and she realized he’d showered and changed like her. Vitality poured off his sun-kissed skin.
When he closed the heavy door behind him, the corded muscles in his arms had Mia swallowing the desire that seemed to uncurl in every inch of her.
With a slow gait, he strolled in and leaned against the arched wall, cutting off her way to the exit. Then set that blue gaze on her.
It traveled over her with such lingering leisure that all the pulse points in her body seemed to pound into life. Tension weaved thick in the air, winding around them.
“That dress...is it new?’
Breath ballooning in her chest, Mia stared unblinkingly. “Yes, do you like it?” He raised a brow and she babbled on. “It’s from my new wardrobe,” she finally managed, swallowing that teengaer-esque squeal that rose in her
throat.
“You didn’t congratulate me, Mia,” he said in a careless drawl.
Mia smoothed the dress over her hips. All she’d wanted these past weeks was that he look at her, speak to her, and now that he was, all she could do was panic. Until that moment, she’d never realized what a tremendous coward she was.
She shrugged. “You didn’t look like you’d miss it you were so busy performing for the crowd. I’m not a huge fan of pushing my way through throngs of your adoring female fans just to get to you.” Even though it was exactly what she’d been dying to do. “Eleni’s always lecturing me how I’m supposed to act all poised and disapproving of everyone and everything.” She was exaggerating, but by God, she loved the crease he got in his cheek while he tried to intimidate her.
Because that’s what this whole routine was.
But there was such a raw honesty about Nikandros, an edge of freedom to his emotions that it lured her in.
“Still, you’re the opposing team’s coach and it is good sportsmanship to congratulate the winning captain, ne?”
“Fine, congratulations,” she said, slowly melting inside at his possessive look. “One would think I purposefully made the whole palace speculate that—”
He pushed off from the wall with a sinuous grace. Words got lost between her brain and her lips. He circled the room, touching all the small things she’d spread out around their suite, his gaze never leaving her. “One would not be wrong in assuming that you did it only to rile me seeing how chummy Andreas and you were being.”
She colored. “That’s ridiculous, Nik. You’re taking this whole thing to extremes.”
He had reached her now, and the scent of him—sweat and sun and skin—her throat filled up with him, the urge to rub herself against him a wild tattoo under her skin.
“I see,” he said, a knot between his brows. It felt like she was waiting for a predator to strike. “So, Eleni is talking about how this should be an annual event. A soccer game between the Princes and a celebration in the evening.”
Her mouth dry, Mia licked her lips. “That sounds like a good idea. A grand tradition, actually.”
“So you would tell me that say, next year, I can form a team with all my exes and daughters from the highest echelons of Drakonite society and you wouldn’t mind one jot?”