Elin has finally quit hollering, and my penthouse has lapsed into a peaceful, if suspicious, silence. I peek a head out of my quarters and find Viktor sitting at the top of my steps, eyes alert on the level below. “She appears to have retired for the evening, Your Highness.”
“Somewhere else, I hope?”
“She’s in the second guest chamber, Your Highness.”
“Hope springs eternal.”
Viktor gives me a look that suggests hope is futile and finding a new head of my royal guard for this year in the States will be necessary rather soon.
“Good man.” I clap him on the shoulder on my way down the stairs. “Apologies for my father.”
I’ve barely collapsed on my couch with a bottle of medicinal mead when Ares strolls out of his room, Elin’s monkey still sitting on his shoulder.
Though strolls is perhaps a misnomer. For a big dude, he has surprisingly light steps. Floats is more like it. And for a quiet dude, he’s saying a metric fuck-ton with his hooded eyeballs.
He drops onto the other end of the couch, and I wonder if I’ll need to have its springs checked. “Girls are hard,” he says.
“Understatement of the millennium.”
“Some smell nice.”
Six words.
That’s more than he’s uttered combined in the month since he moved in. I’m beginning to suspect I’ll never be rid of him.
I also suspect I won’t much mind. Though this was supposed to be a temporary arrangement while he looked for an apartment once he was traded here, I’ve become not only accustomed to him, but also appreciative of his quiet company. Wonder if he’s interested in the personal security industry when he’s done playing hockey? He’d make a terrific wall between me and my father.
Who will most likely want my head on a platter—for several reasons—by this time tomorrow.
Not that my father is one of the bad guys—far from it. He’s simply trapped between his goat-headed son and a business arrangement made on my behalf by his lout of a father.
I wouldn’t mind being the kind of father my father has been. But I’ll toss myself off a cliff before I’ll be the kind of father I understand my grandfather to have been.
“Need to woo her,” Ares says.
Woo her? For sheep’s sake. “Wooing her would merely give her more of the upper hand she already holds.”
He pins me with his signature you’re a dumbass look.
The monkey mimics it.
And I realize he was telling me to woo Gracie.
“Rather difficult under the circumstances,” I mutter.
I take a hit off the mead and offer him the bottle.
He shakes his head and tips a bakery bag into his mouth. I wait, wondering if he’s going to eat the bag too, or just the cookies inside it.
He stops and chews, no bag, just so many cookies he can’t entirely close his mouth.
Just like being at home.
He chomps through the cookies, but even with his giant cave of a mouth, it’s clearly going to take a minute.
They call him the Force on the ice. He gives one-word non sequitur answers during press calls—Ares, how did you think the second quarter went? they ask. Song, he answers—turns profanity into poetry, and he’s currently sporting a shirt telling people to “Mink Drilk.”
The man lives on his own plane of existence.
At the moment, I wouldn’t mind living on his plane of existence as well. Because mine’s muddled and messy and suddenly completely different from the world it was when we hit the ice for practice this morning, whereas I suspect he’s some sort of Buddhist monk with all of life’s answers in his own realm.
Crumbs dribble out of his mouth, and Loki leaps to gather them.
“Love solves all,” Ares says.
I take another hit of mead. Love is a fanciful notion in royal marriages. My father claims to have found it, but he had the luxury of being a widower in no need of producing more heirs when he met Sylvie. I don’t wish to discuss my eldest brother’s brief marriage, but suffice it to say, it was not his choice either.
Duty figures into my life.
Love does not.
Though I dearly wish it could.
I check my phone again.
Still no answer to my voicemail and three text messages to Gracie. Pure optimism is the only thing stopping me from the terror of suspecting she’s aimlessly wandering Copper Valley, lost, alone, and afraid. Gracie has pluck. She may not have much experience in the world, but she has pluck.
And Kristofer downstairs informed me she slipped into a cab after implying she’d done something heinous to Elin’s luggage.
If I were free to court Gracie, to do the bloody right thing by her and my child, I would solve every last one of her concerns and issues. She could bake cookies in Stölland as easily as she bakes cookies here. Her sister owns a bloody flight adventure company and could come visit any day of the week. Plus, there’s comfort in knowing Joey would have to take an airplane if she happened to want to drop in for a visit. Air traffic control in Stölland would see her coming a few hundred miles away, and with orders to notify the palace anytime her plane approached, I’d have plenty of time to don an athletic cup and pads.
A wail erupts from one of the bedrooms down the hall. Ares and I share a look. Loki rubs his little monkey hand over his face, leaps down, steals a bakery bag, and dashes away.
“Poor monkey,” Ares says.
“Are you speaking of me or the primate?”
He grunts and nods.
I easily translate grunt, because I come from a long line of men. Literally every woman in my ancestral line has married into the family. Grandmothers. Aunts. Cousins-in-law. Frey men only sire male heirs. There hasn’t been a female born in the palace in over two hundred years.
And Ares’s grunt has just told me that I’m well and truly fucked.
“I’ll fix this,” I tell him.
Seeing as his brother is dating Gracie’s sister, they may as well be family.
He lifts a gallon of chocolate milk.
“No, not with chocolate.”
He pops the top off the milk and downs half the gallon in two gulps.
“You gonna be a dad?” he asks.
I swipe a hand over my mouth to keep the smile from bursting through, but I find I can’t suppress it.
I am. I’m going to be a father. Have a little dark-haired, dark-eyed brute of my own to teach to skate, scale castle walls, and hide amongst the sheep to scare the shit out of stodgy old Uncle Colden.
If I can disentangle myself from my betrothal to Elin.
The smile grows and grows, until the idea of another uncle strikes me once again. “Your brother’s going to bloody kill me next time we see him.”
He grins and grabs another bag. Instead of tipping it back, he chomps through the bottom of the sack. He has the appetite of a billy goat and apparently the stomach as well. Cinnamon and powdered sugar and cookie crumbs tumble out the hole and all over my sofa.
“You’ll be cleaning that, of course,” I say.
There’s that eyebrow twitch of you’re a dumbass again.
Possibly because I’d have to hit him with a tranquilizer to have any hopes of besting him in anything, ever, and even then, the tranq’s no guarantee he’d go down.
Plus, he’s the type to cross the bloody interstate to save a chicken. Or a pet monkey.
I’d be a heartless bastard to tranquilize him over crumbs in the sofa.
Regardless of how annoying they might be.
“She’ll be okay.” Ares grabs the last two bakery bags and leaves me alone in the living room.
It’s freakishly scary that he’s right.
She doesn’t need me.
Nor does she want me.
I’m quite accustomed to being superfluous. It’s why I’m here, after all. A Stöllandic prince, playing hockey full-time?
Only possible because my father and brothers have the running of the country easily in hand. Even the dukedom that will be mine is for purely traditional purposes. Northern Stöllanders have no true worry about what the king thinks of them. They’re a hardy lot, well used to surviving on their own, and I dare say they’ll be more offended at the idea that we’re keeping an eye on them than they’ll be grateful to have more direct access to the palace.
Which means my country has no use for my special areas of expertise.
Which, if we’re being honest, thus far consist of partying, winning a silver medal as part of Stölland’s national hockey team, and generally causing a ruckus in the media over my own forms of personal entertainment as I’ve been sowing my wild oats before settling down with Elin. So if my father authorizes me to play hockey in the European leagues and then here in America, he’s sacrificing very little for the potential for significant gains.
Because American women love princes.
Even when we’re ugly.
A prince playing professional American hockey, with a hint of scandal in his past?
The gossip rags love me, whether I’m misbehaving or not.
Tourism in Stölland is already growing by leaps and bounds.
My father and the prime minister are once again sniping at each other over differences of opinion about economic and social factors, rather than over one more scandal caused by a prince. Until Elin showed up on my doorstep, I’d gotten not a word of worry that her father had concerns about me fulfilling my duties to them as well.
I need to find Gracie.
And I need to find Elin a more suitable husband.
For everyone’s sake.
