I grasp the metal handrail and brace myself as Elin tumbles into me. Her nails slice into my upper arm and her bare shoulder connects with my skin.
I want to recoil, but I keep that damned smile plastered to my face as I settle us both.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” she grits out between a forced smile of her own.
Gracie Diamonte is what’s wrong with me.
Her stomach has ballooned in the last several hours, and I’m now watching another man—a man currently sharing her bed—paw the woman carrying my child.
“Knee locked up,” I force myself to say. Pleasantly. “Hockey players do not age gracefully, darling.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“As you wish.”
“Don’t say that either.”
She wrenches free. I let her pass on the narrow stairwell while I attempt to survey the room, but my gaze snags on Gracie and will not let go.
There could be an entire zoo of exotic animals, a football game, and fire dancers wreaking havoc on my home, and I wouldn’t notice.
Because there’s Gracie. Attacking Sokolov’s soiled shirt with a napkin and hopping about picking cocktail wienies from between her toes.
She’s sporting ripped jeans, that low-cut tank top beneath an open red plaid button-up, beer-can curlers in her thick dark hair, with a missing tooth, painted-on freckles, and a baby in her plump belly.
Logically, I know she’s merely costumed.
But there’s not a single cell in my body that gives a fuck.
That’s my child.
My life.
Mine.
I scrub my hand over my eyes and attempt to blink away the hazes.
The red haze demanding Ares Berger remove his fucking hand from Gracie’s shoulder.
The violet haze demanding I extract myself from my royal duties and denounce my family.
The rainbow haze demanding that I punch a hole in my wall of windows, launch Elin’s luggage down the forty stories to the ground, and surrender to my desperate desire to be there to watch that baby grow within Gracie’s womb, to stroke her back, rub her swollen feet, suggest increasingly ridiculous baby names over pie until we’re both laughing so hard we’re unable to breathe.
To kiss her lips, her ears, her shoulders, her fingers and toes.
Her inner thigh.
The swell of her breasts.
Her very center.
I swallow against the increasingly pressing need to taste every inch of Gracie.
“Your Highness?” Viktor says from the bottom of the stairs.
“I require a word with Miss Diamonte.”
“She appears otherwise engaged.” Viktor-speak for that’s a terrible idea.
We compete in a stare-down that ends when Lavoie spots me. “Yo, Frey! Brought you some cookies.”
Cookies.
Heaven above, if he’s brought cookies with his genitalia printed on them, I’ll have to hope Elin’s impressed.
Lavoie is, after all, one of the highest-paid professional hockey players in America. Despite his personality shortcomings.
“I’ll get a knife,” I tell him as I deliberately force myself to walk past Gracie without looking at her. “I suspect your cookies need some slicing.”
“Fuck, man.” Lavoie shifts in his space cowboy costume and covers his family jewels. “What’s wrong with you?”
Murphy chortles. “He’s a bloody Viking, old chap,” he says in a terrible impersonation of a native Stöllander.
“Is that Liv Daniels? In the Catwoman suit?” Lavoie wants to know.
“Quite likely,” I tell him.
I’ve no idea. I haven’t taken tally of the guests, and I have no wish to. Every bloody king in the world might be standing in my living room, and I’d be tongue-tied. Brain-tied.
Because I can feel Gracie behind me. Her gaze. Her presence.
I can hear muted fragments of her conversations. And I swear I can detect her sweet vanilla and peaches scent.
The woman is a drug.
I text Viktor a repeat of my request to have Miss Diamonte escorted to my private quarters for a brief conversation while Lavoie and Murphy trip over themselves to go meet Catwoman.
Elin is struggling to pull off her role as a charming hostess. Were we back in Stölland, both her father and mine would have blown their tempers over her skimpy silk toga. Most of her abdomen is exposed. Nearly her entire left leg as well, with the gold clasp holding her costume together strategically placed to draw the eye.
When she knocked on the door to my quarters to insist that she arrive at the party with me—as though we had bloody far to go—I couldn’t decide if she were trying to bait me into seeing her as a sexual being, or to flout what I’ll never be allowed to touch.
As though I might actually want to touch her, which I do not.
I’d told myself it was my duty to see her as the mother of my future children.
And then I’d immediately imagined myself making an entire bloody hockey team’s worth of babies with Gracie, her beneath me, above me, beside me.
Writhing in pleasure as I devoured her sweet pussy.
Lathering her perfectly proportioned breasts in the shower.
Waking every morning to the grind of her sweet bottom against my cock.
Whether Elin had seen the swelling of my shaft or if I’d given some other sign, she’d grimaced as though she found me as distasteful as I found her, and then brushed past me to barricade herself in the bathroom for a full forty minutes.
Now, I hear Gracie laugh—a booming, throaty, full laugh of sheer joy—as I watch several of my guests openly ogle Elin, who is passing her drink glass between her hands, the only hint of nerves in her otherwise regal bearing.
“Didn’t expect to see Zeus and Fireball,” a helium-colored voice says beside me.
I extend a hand to Panther-the-mime while I sneak a glance at Gracie’s reflection in the wall of glass windows. She’s stroking her belly with one hand while gesticulating with the other, shifting from foot to foot and charming the utter hell out of Sokolov.
Who’s still wearing some kind of brown sauce from the food mishap but smiling like a giant oaf who’s been promised cupcakes and lemonade and a puppet show.
“Quite convincing, aren’t they?” I manage.
“They’re not playing Zeus and his lady friend,” a seven-foot-tall blow-up penis tells us. He trips over his blow-up bollocks and rights himself. “They’re a shotgun wedding.”
Panther chokes on the helium he’s sucking out of a balloon that matches the black paint around his eyeballs.
My red haze returns. The penis voice is somewhat familiar—one of my teammates, I’m nearly positive, which is confirmed when an inflatable vagina with killer legs, red heels, and a rack undisguised even beneath her costume rubs herself against the penis. “Come on, Bobby, I want to try the mead.”
Bobby Gregor’s bunny of the week. Or fanny of the week, if you rather.
I gesture to the bar, smiling as always despite wanting everyone to get the bloody hell out of my home. “Please. Help yourselves. Stölland does mead so very well.”
The vagina rubs against me as she passes. “Call me, Your Highness. Bobby’s getting bored. And so am I.”
A feminine snort of laughter sounds behind me.
A glance at the windows confirms Gracie’s not even looking at me. No, she’s helping Loki tie on the bandana Ares had been wearing around his head.
I’m so busy watching Gracie’s reflection that I miss Cleopatra’s approach. “My, my, what have we here?” she purrs. “A gladiator for my own personal amusement?”
A year ago—bloody hell, three months ago—I would’ve welcomed the talons trailing down my chest, and probably taken the woman up to my bed.
Tonight, her touch makes my skin recoil, and once again, I find myself searching the windows for Gracie’s reflection.
“So many superheroes to choose from, madam.” I remove her hand from my chest and gesture to Panther, rock god three nights a week, bloody disaster all the rest. I quite like the fellow. Usually. “Have you met my friend, Ninja Mime?”
“Ninja Mime?” Cleopatra’s eyebrows attempt to stretch to the ceiling.
“Terribly sorry. The ninja part was supposed to be a secret.”
Panther mimes something that is either a desperate plea to show him to the nearest privy, or a demonstration of his ninja skills.
“Can’t go wrong with the silent type,” I add. “Please excuse me, I believe I’m required in the kitchen.”
Because Gracie is piling a plate of food with Ares’s help, and if I don’t speak with her, I may very well go mad.
Or challenge Ares to a wrestling match for her honor, which will be quite painful for both of us, because the man outweighs me by well over a hundred pounds, but I have no intention of losing when Gracie’s honor is on the line.
Before I reach the kitchen, another guest intercepts me. And another. And another. Two ask after Elin, including Alberto Jimenez, former star pitcher for Boston who now co-owns a baseball team of his own in addition to a chain of brewpubs across the Northeast.
“Yes, she is lovely,” I tell him. I clap him on the shoulder. “Quite worldly and cultured. Enjoy yourself tonight, old chap.”
He angles toward her as soon as we end our conversation, and I look around for Gracie once more.
Ares is doing leg lifts beneath my dining room table while more and more guests pile on the table to see how many humans his legs can handle before he gives up. The monkey, draped in toilet paper, is cheering him on. Panther and Cleopatra are sharing helium. The penis and vagina are attempting to simulate intercourse in the center of my living area while mead flows freely, giant spiders lower and raise from my ceiling, and spooky techno music drifts through the sound system.
But there’s no Gracie.
Viktor is standing silent in the hallway leading to the bedrooms. I catch his eye, and the man gives nothing away.
Is Gracie down the hall?
Or has he shown her to my bedroom?
A laughing couple is weaving toward the kitchen, sloshing cups in hand. I accidentally-on-purpose step in their path at just the right moment, and oh dear.
For shame.
My gladiator skirt appears to be ruined.
I’ll have to change.
Bloody weak, wimpy excuse, but I wish to find Gracie. Gracie and that plump belly, her generous laughter, her sparkling brown eyes. Her heart of gold.
Her everything that will never be allowed inside the Stölland palace walls.
Because she deserves so much more.
