Gracie

Telling myself I’m not running away isn’t working.

Not when my self-pep talk is accompanied with worried glances from Joey every forty-two seconds during the entire flight home. Also, not even sitting in the cockpit of the small private jet her company recently bought is helping with the queasiness.

“You realize it’s taking everything I have to not offer to go pound his face into sand,” Joey says as she slows the engines for the descent into Huntsville.

Impressive.

I would’ve thought she’d mention pounding his face into sand the minute she picked me up, but it’s been well over two hours, and this is the first she’s even hinted at anything to do with Manning.

“It’s not him,” I say. “It’s the stupid royal horseshit.”

We’re talking through the headphones, and I’m pretending that looking like a badass pilot makes me a badass pilot, even though all the numbers on all the panels across the dashboard make my eyes cross. She’s let me take the controls of a plane before and told me what to do, which is even more of a thrill than riding in her other plane when she makes everyone go weightless—and yes, I’ve done that several times, and I have my face printed on a cookie to prove it—but she was still doing all the thinking.

“He asked me for advice,” she tells me.

“What?”

“He’s got balls, I’ll give him that.”

“Advice about what?”

“Looking at his problem from another angle to find a solution.”

I gape at her, because that’s almost exactly what I yelled at the king this morning. “What did you tell him?”

“To quit going around the problem and face it head-on.”

Of course she had.

Because that’s Joey.

“He told me he was going to tell his father he wouldn’t marry Elin.”

“He’s not nearly as happy as he seems, is he?”

“He’s not nearly as happy as he could be.” And I can’t help wondering—does he want me because I’m out of reach, or does he want me because he actually wants me?

Joey reaches over and squeezes my hand.

Like she knows what I’m thinking.

And she knows I don’t want her opinion on the subject.

“Neither are you at the moment,” she says anyway.

I sigh. “I’m not princess material.”

“That’s the most fucking ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

I glare at her.

She doesn’t bother dignifying my glare with a return glare.

“I should just be his mistress,” I declare, if only to watch her shoulders bunch. “What? I should. We’re perfect when we’re alone. But we’re a disaster when we’re with anybody else.”

Which isn’t entirely true.

We’ve never really done anything as a couple with anyone else.

Joey still doesn’t answer.

“I want to learn to read better,” I say into the silence.

This time I get a half-an-eyeball glance. “Go for it.”

Just like that. Go for it. I don’t know if she’s talking about reading, or if she’s talking about all of it. Dating Manning. Being his mistress. Being his princess.

Who knows if he even wants me to be his princess?

His father almost certainly doesn’t.

But look what his father was going to let him marry.

Once we land in Huntsville, I turn my phone back on and pull up my email. Three voicemail notifications ring out, but my inbox for my Etsy store has a number in one of the first messages that even I can read clearly.

I shove my phone at Joey when she has the plane parked. “Read that.”

She blinks once. Then twice. “Four thousand cookies? With—well, that’s embarrassing.”

I snatch the phone back. I hadn’t looked at—oh, dog. She’s right.

That is embarrassing.

“Why would someone want four thousand cookies printed with that?”

I’ve seen enough dick picks to be able to say with authority that that dick is less sausage and more cocktail wienie. I force myself to look away, because the hair-to-dick ratio is seriously disturbing. And when I look away from the picture, I see the yellow highlight on the top of the order.

Rush order.

For four thousand Dickookies.

I whimper.

Don’t get me wrong—I charge three bucks a pop on these things, and twelve grand in my bank account is going to go a long way toward getting baby a crib, even before the rush order charge, but ohmydog. The ingredients. Flour and sugar and butter and—

The frosting paper I need to print.

Fuck, I don’t have enough ink.

Can I even bake four thousand cookies in the next forty-eight hours before the shipment is due to go out? And—

Oh, triple fuck with a side of fuck frosting.

“That’s Nick Murphy’s dick.”

Joey shoves a barf bag at me as the hiccups hit hard and fast. “Breathe, Gracie. What do you need?”

First, to have not ever known Nick Murphy has mutantly small, overly-hairy genitals.

Second, probably another frosting printer. Or seven.

Third, about six people on staff to help me with nothing but Dickookies for the next two days.

I click over to my bank app, and—

Yeah.

The money’s already there. Holy shit, that’s a lot of money.

“I need to get busy.” I wince, because now I’m thinking about getting busy, and Nick Murphy, and how he plays for the Thrusters, which is really ironic somehow, and how I’ll have to shut down the entire bakery, and—boxes.

I need boxes too.

“And I need help,” I whisper.

Joey just nods. “Let’s get going then.”