Peach

By the time Papaya and I leave Amoria for Joey’s wedding six days after the infamous shower wall incident—and yes, I’d rather remember that day for the near shower sex than for everything else that happened—the country is split over whether it’s wonderful that Viktor and I have such violent sex that we’re breaking the castle, or that it’s terrible that we have so little respect for the castle that we’re breaking it by having violent acrobatic sex.

The wall is almost patched.

Papaya has been doing her time in the kitchens, though she hasn’t been allowed to help prepare the food yet, only wash dishes, which means half my plan with her punishment is still failing, but I have hope Papaya will get a promotion so the palace food will be more edible soon.

And ridiculous faith in Papaya to not intentionally screw it up, but the girl eats like she has three hollow legs. She has to want to eat decent food again sometime.

And Viktor has been—

Well, he’s been Viktor.

Straight-laced. Refusing to mention my complete and total meltdown. Occasionally teasing me, but only when other people are around. He’s in bed asleep before I’m done catching up on Weightless paperwork—and I might’ve been spending extra time doing the fewer and fewer tasks left for me every day just so I’m not tempted to jump his bones if he says something snarky like Lovely frogs on your pajama pants, Peach—and I pretend to be asleep still every morning when he gets up to go take his daily runs.

Getting out of Amoria should be good for getting my priorities set straight again. For remembering that this is just a year to hit the reset button with Papaya and to pass stupid Judge Liverspot’s demands for signing the adoption paperwork and to let Viktor get settled as king.

But when we’re finally ferried to the private island in paradise where Joey’s double wedding is taking place—Zeus’s twin brother, Ares, is also marrying his girlfriend this weekend—I feel weirdly out of my element being back with Joey and Gracie.

Probably because I’m still lying to them.

Once Papaya, Meemaw, and I are settled in our room at the lodge, we change into swimsuits and head to the beach, were we find our friends hanging out in cabanas and watching a bunch of men pool jousting on unicorn floaties in a giant swimming pool complete with a rock waterfall at one end and a water slide at the other. Meemaw abandons us for the parents’ cabana right up at the ocean’s edge, far away from the antics going on in the pool.

“Oh my dog, Peach! You’re here!” Gracie leaps off her chair beneath the curtain-draped pergola, drops her fruity drink in the sand, and tackles me in a hug that could probably knock over one of the Berger twins, who each weigh something like 350 pounds.

And I hug her back with everything I have, because Thor, I’ve missed her.

“Forget the king,” Papaya says as she looks around the island. “I’m marrying a freaking billionaire when I grow up.”

“Fuck that,” Joey says. “Be the billionaire. Don’t wait for a man to buy an island for you.”

“Much better plan,” I agree.

I disentangle myself from Gracie and grab Joey, who tolerates my hug with a tight squeeze back.

As far as I know, she hasn’t done any wedding planning beyond asking Chase, our silent partner and Zeus’s best friend, if he knew anyone with a private island that could accommodate a casual wedding with two hundred guests.

And because Chase is a billionaire, of course he did.

And because billionaires are billionaires, they have people who do the planning for you.

Joey probably would’ve preferred a courthouse wedding, but she knew Zeus would want a party. And so a party is what they’re getting.

“You don’t look like you’re getting laid,” Joey says.

“I can hear you,” Papaya whines.

“Oh, how’s Viktor?” Gracie asks while she gestures me to sit in one of the loungers overlooking the pool. The ocean waves roll in with a soothing crescendo, sun sparkling off the endless water. “I miss him.”

“He’s good,” I say.

“Just good?” she asks with a brow wiggle.

“I can still hear you,” Papaya whines again.

“They fell through a shower wall. I think they’re great, Gracie,” Joey says.

“He was sorry he couldn’t make it,” I tell them both, though I really have no idea if he is or isn’t, but I’d rather not think about the entire world knowing about the shower wall. Damn palace gossips. Stupid country of love. Also, he hasn’t said as much, because Viktor rarely says anything personal, but I’ve heard enough stories to assume he would’ve gotten to know many of the Thrusters. And now I’m wondering if he has friends, or if he’s lonely, or if he misses Manning’s other guards, and fuck, I’m a terrible wife. “He has his hands full right now.”

Joey snorts, and I assume that’s because she’s most likely made a point to study Amoria and now knows everything from the political battles being fought to the state of the palace. “Over full, by the sounds of it.”

“Where’s Sophie?” I ask Gracie, because I want to enjoy every minute of this week with my friends.

And get some perspective back. And ignore the weird sensation that I forgot to bring something, when I suspect that something might be Viktor.

Gracie waves toward the pool. “Manning’s spreading the baby cooties. They’re contagious, you know.”

“No, they’re not,” Joey says.

Gracie merely smiles.

At the edge of the pool away from the unicorn jousting, Ares Berger is cradling a tiny bundle in a baby swimsuit. Even from a distance, I can tell her dark hair is thicker than it was when I left Goat’s Tit a few weeks ago, and if anyone but Ares—or Zeus—were holding her, she’d probably look twice as big too.

Ares’s fiancée is next to him, leaning her head on his arm—he’s too tall for her head to reach his shoulder—and smiling at the baby. They both have their feet in the pool, and I’m pretty sure they’re both ignoring whatever Manning is saying, which is most likely how many dirty diapers she has a day and which books are her favorites.

“He’s made every last one of his teammates hold her,” Gracie says. “He keeps telling them it’s for their own good, so they remember why condoms are important, but I think he’s secretly hoping she’ll get a few playmates.”

“He’s horrible,” Joey says.

“He’s perfect,” Gracie replies. “And he let me sleep in every day the last two weeks.”

“Maybe he’s only half horrible.”

“Are there any teenagers here?” Papaya asks.

“Zeus has a few cousins.” Joey points toward three massive boys pounding each other into the ground at the sand volleyball court. “He’s threatened all three with dismemberment if they look at you wrong.”

Papaya grunts.

“Yo, P!” Zeus himself yells from a unicorn floatie. “Get over here and knock Murphy off his unicorn, and I’ll give you fifty bucks.”

“Keep your filthy money,” I yell back.

“I was talking to the little P,” he replies.

“Best offer you’re gonna get,” Gracie tells Papaya.

“Are they all hockey players?” I ask.

“All but Chase and Knox and Dax,” she replies.

“Oh my god, is that Dax Gallagher?” Papaya shrieks.

The tatted rock god on a blue unicorn floatie lifts an arm and waves at her, and Zeus knocks him off and into the pool.

A dark-haired woman I recognize as Manning’s stepsister throws a bucket of ice at Zeus, and he falls off his floatie too.

“Don’t splash the ba—” Ares’s fiancée cuts herself off mid-sentence, covers her mouth, leaps to her feet, dashes to a trash can, and pukes.

“Like I said,” Gracie says smugly. “They’re contagious.”

“It’s food poisoning.”

“Believe the lies all you want. Time will prove me right.”

Papaya’s still staring at the pool.

“Go on,” I tell her. She’s in a black bikini top with boy shorts, which was our compromise when she picked out a white thong bikini. I’m pretty sure I got played, but I don’t care what she wears, so long as she’s not indecent. She still has slender teenager legs, but her boobs have ballooned, and I realize I should’ve gotten her a bigger top.

I eyeball the three Berger cousins again. Pretty sure I could take them. But only if I had to.

“They won’t touch her,” Joey tells me while Papaya shyly approaches the pool.

“They won’t,” Gracie agrees. “Zeus and Ares are their heroes. And Joey scares the shit out of them. Plus, Felicity—you’ve met Ares’s fiancée, right?—anyway, she’s a ventriloquist, and that freaks them out too. Papaya’s safe here.”

My body sags in a relief I didn’t know I needed.

“What about them?” I ask with a finger flick toward the hockey players and rock god in the pool.

“Taken, taken, taken, and the rest of them know she’s jailbait.”

I didn’t know I could get more relaxed. “Why is there a pool on an island?”

“Because billionaires have to spend their money on something.”

“So,” Joey says, stretching her thin, muscular frame on her lounger and tucking her hands behind her head, “how much alcohol are we going to need before you confess you really married Viktor because that asshole judge made you get a husband?”

I tense up so fast I go lightheaded. “That’s not—I didn’t—we—”

Joey pulls down her aviators and hits me with the don’t give me bullshit on my wedding weekend glare.

“That’s not fair,” I hiss.

“You told me you loved him. You lied.”

“I don’t not love him,” I sputter, which might not be a total lie now, but definitely would’ve been a few weeks ago.

“Joey. Knock it off. She did it for your own good,” Gracie tells her sister.

I turn a glare on her, but she holds her hands up. “I didn’t tell her anything. And I do think you’re an adorable couple. The only time I ever saw Viktor smile was when he was eating my cookies or tormenting you.”

“I did it for Papaya,” I whisper, ignoring that weird squishy warm feeling in my chest at the idea that I have some superpower to make Viktor smile.

Gracie leans over to shoulder-hug me. “Joey would’ve done the same for me.”

“You’re having sex,” Joey says.

I wince.

“You’re not?” Gracie whispers in a shriek so loud, six people—including Manning—turn and look at us.

“The shower wall caved in first,” I mumble.

“So you want to,” Joey clarifies.

“I’m confused, okay?” I hiss. “He was always giving me extra pat-downs and being all I have to make sure His Royal Happypants isn’t endangered by you, when seriously, how important is Manning—no offense, Gracie—in the grand scheme of the world?”

“Yeah, I get that,” Joey says with a nod. “But you still married him.”

Gracie rolls her eyes. “Fate.”

“I’ll be back at Weightless,” I tell Joey. “I’m coming back. Me and Viktor have a deal. He has a year total to get his laws changed so he can stay king and I can come back home. Papaya’s had…some moments…but she’s getting it out of her system. And she starts school next week, so that’ll be good too. Once I’m sure she’s not going to end up pregnant and uneducated and—”

“A drain on society?” Joey suggests dryly, and I wince, because Gracie barely graduated high school, thanks to undiagnosed dyslexia, and ended up pregnant with the baby of a man betrothed to someone else, but she would not have been a drain on society. She was a successful business owner despite her struggles.

But Papaya doesn’t have a learning disability. She has a lack of motivation. And that’s worse.

“She’s so freaking talented. She just needs the opportunity to realize it.” I fuss with my ponytail, because sitting here getting grilled isn’t helping my stress levels, but they’re my best friends, and I probably do owe them the truth.

Even if I would’ve preferred to save it for another eleven months or so.

“How’s Viktor with her?”

I tell them an abbreviated version of the suit of armor incident—and I swear, that’ll be the last time I talk about it, because just imagining those guards pointing guns at Papaya is enough to give me another heart attack—and about the meeting with the duke.

And about how Viktor let me take the lead both times.

And didn’t question my decisions or requests.

Gracie’s grinning when I finish.

Joey isn’t.

“What?” I ask her.

“What happens if Papaya likes Amoria?”

In other worse, what happens if you decide to stay longer than a year?

“We’ll figure that out when the time comes,” I reply. “But one way or another, I will be back.”

Gracie and Joey suddenly split, dodging in opposite directions off their loungers. Before I can utter a word, I get a face full of water.

I leap up, sputtering, and poke Zeus in the breastbone over his ridiculous hockey abs, because that’s about nose-level for me. “What the fuck was that?”

He tucks his bucket under his arm. “You made Joey frown. Against the rules. Do it again, and you’re going in the time-out chair.”

He stalks off after kissing the stuffing out of her.

“Does Viktor kiss you like that?” Gracie whispers.

“No. He’s way shorter than Zeus.”

She giggles with glee. “So he does kiss you.” She flashes a thumbs-up at Manning, who winks at her.

“Oh, stop. Even if we do it, it’ll just be to work off steam because we can’t sleep with anyone else.”

Joey saunters back over to us, but she’s walking a little uneven, like she’s drunk on Zeus’s kiss. “Easier to let me kidnap you both and drop you in a country without an extradition treaty.”

“Those charges were dropped,” I grumble. “And would you please smile so Zeus doesn’t wake me up at 3 AM with another bucket of water to the head? Although I probably deserve it for making him become a peach farmer.”

She smiles.

It’s a terrifying look on Joey, as it always is.

“Or you could just come home,” she says.

“Papaya adopted a llama and she’s been out riding horses three times.”

“Fuck,” she mutters. “Gracie would’ve killed for a llama when she was that age.”

“I would’ve,” Gracie agrees.

Their mama took off when Gracie was a baby, so Joey raised her up even more than I’m raising Papaya now. She gets it.

“How’s the bid going for the university research project?” I ask.

Joey frowns.

I poke her. “Smile,” I hiss.

She fake smiles again. I double check that Zeus is distracted, and find everyone running for cover as he cannonballs into the pool.

“Signed and submitted,” Joey reports. “Now we wait. Bookings are up for the tourist rides though. We’re sold out on three planes for the next month.”

“Whoa.”

She points at a dark-haired guy in the pool. “Our friend Knox is a librarian. Loves romance novels. He and Zeus worked up that story about why you’re gone.”

“What does that have to do with bookings?”

Joey and Gracie share a look. “Nothing,” Gracie says quickly.

I’m suddenly regretting my decision to selectively filter my news since we got to Amoria. “Joey…”

“It was just a cute story about how much Viktor realized he loved you when you tried to save a baby from a runaway balloon,” Gracie tells me.

“There’s more to this story, isn’t there?”

Joey rolls her eyes. “It was disgusting. And I don’t want to know how much Zeus had to pay them to run it. But since the article painted you as the victim of a smear campaign to destroy a woman-owned business who had to flee the country under the protection of a new king, bookings are up, and my last flight was all women who showed up in tiaras and shirts that said Women Should Rule The World, so I don’t care what any of the news articles said.”

“The palace probably will.”

“They’ve already issued a formal statement confirming it.” Gracie smiles with all the cheer of a woman who’s never falsely been accused of being in love.

And I wonder if I shouldn’t be more grateful to Viktor for handling all this, or suspicious about what else I should quit sticking my head in the sand over. “That explains the balloon at that horrible reception that was overrun by polecats. If I have to do many more of these, will you—”

“Send you some cyanide pills so you don’t have to go through with it?” Joey finishes for me. “Always, but I could fly you to some remote African nation and make it look like you fell out of the plane instead of landing safely. With Papaya. Like you both died in some horrific accident so Zeus and I don’t have to adopt her. Not that we wouldn’t. But I’m not sure you’d want Zeus in charge of her.”

We both glance at the pool again. Zeus and Manning are both in it now, spinning Papaya in a circle on her unicorn floatie, making her go so fast she’s probably going to be the second person to puke in five minutes.

“God, I miss you,” I tell Joey.

“Seeing as you’re one of three people in the world who would say that and mean it, I miss you too. I worry about your sanity, but I miss you too.” Her brow wrinkles, and she sighs.

“What?” I ask. “Are you working eighteen hour days again? Quit frowning before Zeus sees.”

“Being the queen of an entire country is kind of a big deal.”

“Psh. I’m still the same old Peach.”

“You have new duties and responsibilities—”

I go rigid as a dead armadillo. “Not this queen.”

“Peach—”

“All this royalty stuff is bullshit, and you think so as much as I do,” I whisper. “Viktor doesn’t need me waving at crowds and kissing babies on the head. Women can have their own jobs and purpose and royal husbands. Look at Gracie.”

“Viktor’s the face of a nation,” Joey says quietly. Which is scary, because Joey doesn’t do quiet. “Manning’s fourth in line to a crown and will never wear it.”

“Just because he was born—”

“This royalty stuff? I’ve been studying Stölland. Manning’s country. And the king does a shit-ton for the people. Stuff that matters. Educational projects. Literacy centers. He put pressure on Parliament to pass a bill giving working mothers paid maternity leave, and another bill to fund research into family-friendly workplaces. If Viktor does half as much for Amoria…”

I swallow hard. “I’m sure he will. He’s just getting his feet wet right now.”

“You could too, Peach.”

“Or I can set an example of a woman succeeding in business despite difficult circumstances.” The words feel hollow.

I’m grasping for an argument, and it’s weak as a sapling in a hurricane.

“You know he’s only king because of who his parents are,” I say in one last desperate bid to make my case.

“And because you married him.”

Dammit, I think I just popped a blush. “You know I did that for Papaya. And I think Europe will be good for her. Llamas and horses, remember?”

“All I’m saying is, sometimes there’s merit to kingdoms. He doesn’t have to make a political party happy with his policies. He’s there to serve the people, and Viktor isn’t the kind of guy to take that responsibility lightly. I doubt the Amorian government would’ve gone looking for him if they had a better option already in the country.” She glances over at Gracie, who’s been scary quiet, and then back to me. “If you think you could love him…you should. We’re not easy women to love. You and me, I mean. Scrooge himself would love Gracie. But if you find someone—”

“Aww, look at you going all soft and lovey.” I hook an arm around her neck and pull her in for another hug so she can’t see my face. “I’m so glad Zeus makes you so happy that you’re seeing love everywhere.”

And that’s Thor’s honest truth.

I am glad my best friend is happy. I’m glad Gracie’s happy.

I’m even glad Zeus is happy.

But I’m still not queen material.

I’m just the temporary fix Viktor needs. And he’s the temporary fix Papaya and I need until that idiotic judge signs the final adoption papers.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

Because we really couldn’t be less.

Except that little voice inside me that won’t quite let me get away with lying to myself is reminding me it was me who took that first step before the shower wall came crashing down.

And that letting Viktor hold me after Papaya nearly got herself killed in that damn suit of armor was way more comforting than it would’ve been if he really was just a means to an end.

It’s not until four days later, when I’m watching my best friend promise to love and cherish her ogre of a goofball boyfriend, and wishing Viktor could be there with us, that I realize I might have a bigger problem than being temporarily married to a king.

I might actually be starting to fall for him.