Home game days have a set routine. Morning skate, personal trainer or physical therapy time, team meeting, lunch, home for naps, back to the arena for mental preparation, taping sticks, and suiting up for the whistle.
A hearty breakfast and a steady stream of energy drinks have kept the lingering fatigue from last night’s party at bay. My skating is clean, my stick work top-notch, and I can’t stop smiling.
Not because I have to smile, or because the world expects it.
But because I’m soon to be on the ice, chasing a puck before a sold-out home game, with the most charming creature on earth tucked safely back in my penthouse as she grows my child.
I hope she’s enjoying herself at the zoo. I can imagine her squealing over the baby sloths, feeding the giraffes, eating one of those fried dough pastries coated in icing sugar and leaving some on her nose, which I would happily lick off her.
And now I’ve gone hard as steel again.
Knowing Elin also has motivation to get out of our betrothal has given me additional hope. Without the deadline of our nuptials hanging over my head, and with the success thus far of all my media appearances promoting Stöllandic tourism and mead, I could convince my father to allow me to stay in the States beyond the original year he agreed.
I very nearly feel as though I could be merely a common man. With a career. A life. And a future with the most darling woman ever to walk this earth.
It’s the last thing I expected to want when I arrived on American soil a few months back, but by the gods, is the idea of a simple life with Gracie and a true hockey career ever enticing.
Ares, Viktor, and I arrive back at my building shortly after one. I’m in the midst of running plays through my head, and I miss the clues that something is amiss until the lift opens into the foyer and the voices ring out.
Willow.
Sylvie.
And—bloody hell, is that Colden? Laughing?
“Yep,” Gracie’s saying, but her voice is higher-pitched than normal, her words coming faster together. “Llamas running all over the beauty shop. Georgia kept yelling for someone to give her the shears, and Maud—that’s the lead llama over at the Winchester place—was trying to eat all the foil wrappers off Misty Worley’s head. Oh, hey, guys. How was practice?”
She hiccups—just as she did through her entire story—and gives me a tight smile from the other side of the kitchen island, where she’s flinging uneven cookie dough lumps onto a tray. Her hair is piled topsy-turvy atop her crown, the barest hint of pink tinting her lips, eyes mildly panicked. I sniff nothing but lemon cleaner, which suggests the cleaning crew is finished post-party, and she’s just begun her baking.
My father’s three senior staffers and extra guards are scattered about the living room, on laptops and phones, quietly blending in while making the penthouse feel more crowded than fifty guests did last night.
I’ve forgotten how much freedom I’ve become accustomed to here.
“Cookies.” Ares gives Gracie a double thumbs-up and a grin, which she answers with another hiccup and a wink that seems to scream save me.
Sylvie and Willow turn from their stools across the island from Gracie, identical aside from the effects of the twenty-five or so years the mother has on the daughter. Also, Sylvie’s smile is wide and uninhibited, whereas Willow seems to be warning me with her eyeballs that my death is imminent.
Though whether that death will be at Gracie’s hands for unintentionally leaving her to entertain my family, or at my father’s hand if he knows she’s carrying my child, is currently the question.
How the bloody hell did they pull off this surprise?
“Manning,” Sylvie says. “I do miss seeing that smile.”
My stepmother pulls me into a hug—she’s quite the hugger, which has inspired more hugs in the palace in the last five years than in all the time in which I was growing up combined—then leans back to inspect me as though making sure I’m still in one piece. “Have you grown? You seem taller.”
“Not bloody likely,” Colden offers. He, too, rises from watching Gracie parse out cookie dough. I greet my brother—the normally stodgy, cranky, snarling brother who’s actually appearing quite pleasant today—with a man-hug.
Because Sylvie has been a good influence on all of us. And it turns out, I appreciate the affection.
“Storing the sheep in the parking garage?” I ask him. “I know you can’t travel without at least one.”
“Sod off, you little wanker,” he replies, though I have him beat by three inches and twenty pounds.
I introduce them all to Ares, who releases Willow from a giant bear hug, and Loki, who is attempting to be a statue until he thinks no one is looking so he might attempt to swipe cookie dough. Or so I assume, because it’s what I would be thinking of doing if I were a monkey pretending to be a statue.
I don’t see my father.
Or Elin.
But I can feel the tension pulling at me from somewhere within the walls of the penthouse. They’re both here, I’m certain.
The tight lines at the corners of Gracie’s eyes confirm as much.
She hiccups again and spins to put the tray into the oven, giving me a delectable view of her backside when she bends, smile ever in place as though she, too, knows how to fake her way through tight situations.
Were it up to me, she’d never have reason to fake a smile. But then, I suspect I’m the very reason she’s being forced into it now.
Her eyes meet mine after she closes the oven door.
I can’t decide if I missed you or want to pluck your nose hairs out for not warning me, they say.
Bloody fucking adorable. She makes my bollocks ache only barely more than my arms itch to hold her, which is a rather unfamiliar sensation.
Generally, my bollocks are all I’m concerned with.
I fucking missed you, and you will be mine, I telegraph back.
Her eyes widen, her pupils dilate, she gives a mighty hiccup and fumbles with shooing Loki and grabbing her cookie scoop to fling more dough. She’s in that Goat’s Tit High T-shirt again, with black sweatpants beneath, and I dearly hope leaning over the counter would give me a glimpse of her painted toenails, but turn my eyes back to my family instead.
Because it’s my fucking royal duty.
“Lovely surprise,” I say to my family. “What brings you all to town?”
You’re a dead man, Willow mouths behind her mother’s back.
“Dragged along against my will to witness you tripping in your skates tonight,” Colden says.
Sylvie hushes him. “It’s good for you to get outside the palace and meadows from time to time.”
“Not bloody likely,” he replies with his characteristic grumpitude, all amusement over Gracie’s stories gone.
Sylvie smiles indulgently and turns to me. “Your father misses seeing you play. He’ll be out soon. He’s speaking with Elin.” Her brow furrows as though she wants to say more, but she glances toward the non-family members—Gracie and Ares—in the room and shakes her head instead.
“Welcome to the royal family, madam,” I murmur.
“Women should rule the world,” she replies tartly.
“Indeed.”
Gracie hiccups.
“That’s it,” Willow says. “You’re trying peanut butter.”
“They really don’t bother me,” Gracie lies, but Willow won’t be deterred, and now I’ve two women overtaking my kitchen, though the shorter one—swiping an errant strand of hair off her cheek with the back of her hand and scooping more cookie dough onto another tray—is more than welcome to take over any part of my home as far as I’m concerned.
If anyone in my family has said anything untoward to her, I’ll have their heads.
“You had the day off?” I ask Willow as she shoves a spoonful of peanut butter at Gracie.
“I haven’t seen Mom in three months,” she answers.
“We’re going dress shopping when we get back to New York,” Sylvie adds.
“Lovely,” I say, because I assume it is, though I’m not looking at either of them.
I’m watching Gracie, who peers at me over the spoon in her mouth as though there’s something vitally important I need to know about dress shopping.
“Willow’s to be married in the palace this spring,” I tell her without wincing, which is a monumental task. Bloody hell, I hardly approve of her tool of a fiancé, but I’m not in a position to talk. Martin what’s-his-name will cause the palace far less grief than I will.
Gracie blinks.
Willow watches her. So does Sylvie. And Colden.
“It worked,” she announces as she studies the peanut butter jar. “Hiccups all gone.”
We all wait another moment, but there are no more hiccups forthcoming, apparently.
Willow smiles. “Magic.”
Footsteps clip down the hallway from the guest chambers, and my father emerges in a suit and tie, his hair more speckled with gray than the last time I saw him, his shoulders seeming to sit lower and less broad.
He’s alone.
I smile.
I can’t help myself. My father is a good man with his hands tied where my future is concerned.
And he smiles back at me as though he’s proud of the man I’ve grown into, despite the fall-out from my dalliance with the prime minister’s daughter, the headache of my protests of my betrothal, and all the other ways in which I’ve caused him grief over the years.
No doubt I’ll wipe that smile off soon enough.
Because I will not marry Elin.
If I have to sacrifice the remainder of my hockey season, return home, and appeal to Parliament myself over what my grandfather promised, I will.
“Still in one piece, son?”
“For now. We’ll see what Boston does to me tonight.”
He claps me on the back and pulls me in for a manly squeeze that smells of spiced cologne and centuries of heritage. “Good to see you,” he says gruffly.
“Quite the pleasant surprise.” I wish they’d all leave so I could drag Gracie up to my quarters, apologize for leaving her here alone, and demonstrate for her what my shower is capable of.
And, of course, what I’m capable of as well.
We make small talk about Copper Valley, mead, and tourism—and not Elin, who has yet to appear from her room—while the aroma of melting sugar and chocolate wafts through the air. Colden, the grumpy bastard, flirts with Gracie, who nearly charms the trousers right off him despite her voice still being too high and her shoulders strung too tight. She flings dough at him accidentally, leans over to wipe it off, and ends up shoving her finger up his nose.
“Ohmydog, I’m so sorry,” she gasps.
He squeezes his nose and wrinkles it at the same time. “Quite all right, madam. Yours is by far the most attractive finger I’ve ever had the pleasure of having up my nose.”
What the bloody hell? I’m about to knock my brother—who flirts with no one, ever—from his stool when Ares interrupts with a pointed look. “Nap time.”
Gracie stretches, her shirt lifts, revealing a strip of smooth skin and that emerald stud, sheer relief crossing her features. “Oh, that’s an awesome idea.”
My cock is quite done with behaving.
As though it hadn’t been making its desires known from the moment I heard her voice.
“I think I’ll join you in a minute here when I’m done with the cookies,” she tells Ares before I can find a way to sneak her up to my chambers.
I grit my teeth.
Willow glares at me. Colden sighs and shakes his head. And my father frowns at me.
Bloody hell. If they don’t all know, they suspect, which is just as bad.
Hopefully I can at least keep Gracie’s condition from them for the duration of their visit.
I rise from the couch. “Nap time,” I agree. “Have to get our beauty rest before the game. Are you free for breakfast? We’re traveling to Florida early afternoon, but we’ve some flexibility in the schedule before noon.”
My father holds my gaze for a heavy moment before he nods. “Breakfast,” he agrees. “It’s been too long since we’ve had a meal to ourselves.”
To ourselves.
Bloody hell.
I have a horrible suspicion I’m on the way to the worst breakfast of my life.
