Peach

As soon as I’m dressed—even if I still stink and have plaster stuck in my hair and parts of my ego and pride permanently splattered all over that ugly heart chair in the sitting room—I go on a Papaya hunt.

I keep my head down as I stalk through the private wing of the palace, searching and pretending I’m not embarrassed, disappointed, and appalled with myself.

And still a little horny.

Which isn’t good, because I can’t sleep with Viktor.

If this year in Europe doesn’t work to help Papaya figure out that she can be anything she wants to be, so long as she stays out of trouble, then I don’t know what I’m going to do with her, but I know I can’t stay here forever.

I miss Joey. I miss Weightless. It’s weird to be on a summer vacation, without a set schedule, without people asking me questions, without budgeting and hiring and contract issues to handle, and even when Papaya starts school, that won’t change.

We’ve already hired people—at a significant salary cost—to take over most of my tasks.

Which means even when this year is over, I don’t know what kind of job I’ll be going back to.

Weightless was my dream. Running a successful company with my best friend. I didn’t care what we did, but I knew Joey would go for anything where she could fly and give the middle finger to anyone who ever said she’d never make it as a pilot.

And taking people weightless is fucking cool.

But I’m not queen material.

Even if this castle, with its rotting walls and crooked chandeliers missing pendants and overgrown gardens, is the only kind of castle I’d ever want to live in.

It’s still a castle.

And it has too many hiding spots for Papaya.

She’s not in her room. She’s not in Meemaw’s room. She’s not in the kitchen, or the family room, or pestering Alexander and Samuel in the solarium—see again, I don’t live in castles, because what the fuck is a solarium?—or sniffing cleaners in the maid’s closet, though the door lock has been jimmied and now I need to search her room for Thor only knows what.

By the time I’ve gone through both of the main floors, my pulse is hammering and worst-case scenarios are fluttering through my head. She’s run away with a sixteen-year-old. She’s riding Fred deep into the Alps. She’s switching all the meat in the palace’s kitchens for tofu.

I shudder.

And I refuse to let the darker possibilities filter through my mind.

At least, I try to.

I turn out of the private staircase at the far end of the wing, intent on heading to the kitchen, and run head-first into Viktor.

Who’s now dressed again in suit pants and a gray button-down, and once again totally impassive in his expression.

For half a second, anyway.

“What’s happened?” he asks, his eyes narrowing and his body tensing into tiger mode.

I open my mouth to lie to him, and the truth comes spilling out. “I can’t find Papaya.”

Because really, is there anyone better than Viktor to hunt down a danger to society?

I’m such a two-faced asshole.

He doesn’t physically move, but I can feel him calculating where he’ll start. “You’ve checked everywhere?”

“Everywhere—wait. Except the tower.”

With only a word to Jeeves—“Jeeves, text the palace guards. Be on the lookout for Papaya.”—he turns and strides toward the entrance to King Roland’s Den of Love.

I jog along behind him around the spiral steps that hug the stone wall, barely ignoring the way his ass fills out his pants despite the numerous reasons I need to not be looking at his ass.

Like Papaya.

I can’t make excuses for her—yesterday, she hid every last pair of Meemaw’s underwear, and this morning I caught her packing coffee grounds into small bits of paper, like she was trying to stockpile caffeinated spit wads before school starts.

She’s also told me six times she’s not going to a snooty Amorian school, that I’ve ruined her entire life by bringing her here, and that I owe her three more alpacas because Fred will die if he doesn’t have a companion.

And then there were the polecats.

I don’t know when or how Papaya could’ve ordered a circus of polecats to interrupt today, but I know better than to put it past her.

Pretty sure I’m nailing this parenting thing. Just need her to dye her hair blue, get a tattoo with a boy’s name spelled wrong, and join a grunge polka band to complete my mastery.

She’s not in the first floor whatever this is room, which is a relief, because the mannequins all creep me out, to be honest.

Viktor actually snorts as we ascend to the next level.

“What…are those?” I ask.

“There were once portraits of my ancestors all over the castle. ‘Tis my understanding Roland had them all removed in favor of commissioning statues of his maternal ancestors to commemorate the change in ruling families.”

“That’s…weird.” And also sad. In so many ways. I don’t have many pictures of any of my ancestors, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to know where I came from.

Viktor had pictures, but another man replaced them with a false history.

“You’ve seen the man’s bedroom, yet the statues are what bother you?”

He’s crisp and formal, like we didn’t have our tongues down each other’s throats and crash naked through a wall together barely an hour ago.

“The hearts don’t have eyes.”

I’m jogging now to keep up with his pace up the stairs. I’m not in bad shape, but I’m also apparently not in keep up with Viktor’s thighs of glory shape. I round the last bend in the stairwell and crash into him in the study beneath the bedroom.

It feels different.

Like something’s missing, but I can’t put my finger on it.

Still, there’s no Papaya, so after Viktor peeks under the desk and I take a quick glance out the windows over the back gardens to make sure I don’t see her blond head—or a purple, pink, blue, orange, or any other color head—we take the stairs to the bedroom on the top floor.

Where the chairs and nightstands have all been rearranged into a circle—no, wait, that’s a heart—around a trio of heart-shaped candles.

And right there in the center are two pictures.

One is me.

From high school.

The other is a formal shot of Viktor in some kind of uniform that reminds me of the one time I saw Manning all dressed up. So probably his official formal Stölland royal guard uniform.

He blows out the candles, then turns to me with lifted brows.

“I didn’t—”

“Of course not.”

“She was probably—”

“Naturally.”

“Don’t even—” I start.

“I wouldn’t dream of evening, my lady.”

Oh, fuck, I think I’m blushing. Because he somehow made evening sound dirty. “That thing in the—in the—broken wall—that was just…stress. I get…horny…when I’m stressed. That’s all.”

“So it shall be a very trying year for you, should your collection of aids disappear?”

I gasp.

His lips quirk.

And I realize Viktor isn’t taunting me.

He’s flirting with me.

Holy Thor on a cupcake, Viktor is flirting with me.

He’s pulling my fucking pigtails.

“You wouldn’t think it was so funny if someone chopped your hands off.”

He’s stifling another smile as he crosses to the window and peers out, looking for Papaya, just like I’m looking for her out the window overlooking the courtyard, and dammit, this protective side of him is hot.

There’s something wrong with me.

Very, very wrong with me.

“You’ve not tracked her with GPS this time?” he asks.

Thank god. Because it’s a distraction from thinking about Viktor jerking off. “She didn’t take her iPod with her. It’s in her room.”

“Then she can’t have gone far.”

I’d pretend to be annoyed at his sarcasm, except he’s right.

Papaya going anywhere without her iPod is like me going anywhere without my head.

“She’s probably out in the stables with Fred. I’ll go—”

His phone dings, and Jeeves reports that there’s an incoming text saying Papaya is not, in fact, in the stables with Fred.

“The kitchens,” I say, because I need to get away from Viktor and his see-everything eyes and his talented lips and his hard body and his complete lack of judgment about me losing Papaya. “I’ll check the kitchens. She put an entire box of cornstarch in the baked beans in the school kitchens last year and all the kids had to eat bean turd mountains. It trended on Instagram for a few hours. And the health department added a code to their inspections for keeps kitchen locked when unattended.”

Viktor’s are you quite mad? expression reminds me that yes, yes, I did infiltrate his kingdom with a teenager more likely to cause a coup from inside the palace walls than that asshole duke this morning is likely to succeed from the outside.

“So I’ll go check the kitchens,” I say again, because I’m apparently at the babbling level of panic, and I don’t know if I’m panicked that Papaya is missing, or that Viktor might actually have been flirting with me ever since I met him. “The palace doesn’t have an armory, does it?”

He sighs and strides toward the stairway to the bathroom, which I refuse to follow him into, because first of all, we’ve had enough shared bathroom time today, and second of all, the heart-shaped tub and toilet are just weird. “I shall check it next,” he tells me.

“I can do it. You have…kingly things to do.”

“I shall be quite more adept at my kingly things so long as I’m assured the palace isn’t about to collapse about my feet due to your sister’s ingenuity and desire for attention.”

The statement startles me so much I almost trip on the edge of the heart rug.

“My lady?” he inquires.

I open my mouth.

Then I shut it.

Because I realize I’ve been an asshole.

I’ll never be convinced that men deserve thrones just because their fathers had it before them, but maybe I was too quick to judge the value in having a king’s family safe.

In having Manning, a hockey-playing flirt running away from his family responsibilities, taken care of so that his father, the king of Stölland, had some peace of mind in knowing that the people he cared about most in the world were safe despite being public figures.

When they never asked for that notoriety.

Viktor’s watching me. He’s been a king less than a month, but already he seems older.

And he didn’t have to take this job.

He chose to.

In the worst way possible—by marrying me and taking on Papaya and Meemaw to boot.

“Thank you,” I whisper.

And before I can say anything more—and also because my sister really is a danger to society, or at least palaces—I duck out of the room and race for the kitchens.