Peach

Because of course my day can get worse, when I get to Gracie’s, I have a voicemail.

For once, I’m grateful for that my phone automatically sends calls to voicemail when I’m driving, because otherwise, I’d probably be heading to jail for murder right about now.

This is Bitsy Jacobson. Brantley’s mother. That little hoodlum sister of yours has been corrupting my baby boy, and I want you to know right now that if you don’t keep her away from him, we’re going to be pressing charges for trespassing and harassment and anything else our lawyer can come up with. If she wants to be some teenage trash with two babies on her hips before she’s eighteen, that’s her business. But I’m not going to have my boy’s life ruined by some—

I stop the voicemail with shaky fingers before she can finish. My chest is collapsing in on itself, and I suddenly feel about fifteen myself again.

Something has to give. To change.

Papaya’s so fucking smart. I don’t care what her report card says, any kid who can sneak out of class undetected, get all the way to the school kitchens, and ruin macaroni and glue day with a rainbow volcano science experiment erupting simultaneously out of every cafeteria pot could go places if she just had the right guidance.

She could be the doctor who cures cancer. She could negotiate world peace. She could invent untangle-able power cords and universal adapters that will automatically morph whenever all these gadget manufacturers change up their plugs.

But she’s on a path of self-destruction that’s so familiar, I can’t breathe.

There has to be a way to save her from herself before it’s too late.

The front door of the manor—yes, the manor, because house is too tame of a word for the big ol’ grand antebellum home Manning bought Gracie for their summers in Goat’s Tit—opens and the prince himself steps out in a collared short-sleeve shirt and cargo shorts.

He’s smiling—fucker’s always smiling—and he pauses with one hand on the door, as though he’s ready to dart back inside if I start launching projectiles at him.

We have a love-hate relationship. We both love Gracie, and we both hate to admit we might actually be growing on each other.

When a rich, attractive, hockey-playing foreign prince knocks up your best friend’s lower-middle-class small-town baby sister, you tend to go overboard with making sure he’s good enough for her, since money and fame don’t buy class or morals.

At least, you do when you’re me.

I push down all my worries about Papaya so I can breathe again, and I step out of my truck. “No lapdogs waiting to pat me down this time?” I say dryly.

Because that’s what happens every time I come over here.

One moment, Ms. Maloney, we need to inspect your handbag before you may enter the prince’s home.

Pardon me, Ms. Maloney, we need to search your vehicle for weapons.

Ms. Maloney, it’s come to our attention that you were once incarcerated for threatening a public official. You should be aware that any perceived threats to His Highness shall be neutralized immediately. However, as a friend to Miss Gracie, I shall give you the privilege of expressing your preference now—shall it be a taser or physical restraints?

Fucking Viktor.

It’s like he enjoys lording it over me that Manning’s a prince and I’m still trailer trash at heart.

“Security is all tied up with your sister.” Manning’s grin increases by a factor of I love being a shithead. “Gracie asked me to inform you that she’ll return to the carriage house after feeding Sophie.”

I squeeze my eyes shut. “Thank you.”

“Always a pleasure to have you in my debt.”

“One day you’re going to wake up with fire ants in your drawers.”

He laughs, because we both know if he deserved fire ants in his drawers, Joey would’ve already put them there. “’Twould be my pleasure to accompany you to the carriage house, but I’ve a guest I must return to. Please don’t torture poor Viktor again—he’s had a rough day.”

“Heaven forbid,” I reply.

He winks at me. “Chin up, Peach. This too shall pass.”

The fact that Manning is borderline consoling me is enough to remind me just how precarious everything is. Because when Manning Frey passes up an opportunity to get his digs in, you know it’s bad.

And now I’m headed to enemy territory.

Also known as Viktor’s place.

I can’t entirely explain why he rubs me wrong—other than the fact he’s always trying to get my goat, and he’s always insisting on making me jump through more hoops than Joey whenever we come visit Gracie. And I wasn’t the one who blatantly threatened his life—multiple times—when we found out Gracie was pregnant with Manning’s baby.

But Joey gets a pass, whereas I get the criminal treatment.

But that’s still not what bothers me the most about Viktor.

I think it’s that he chose this life. Manning didn’t have any say in falling out of a royal vagina at birth, but Viktor had a say in choosing to get paid to protect someone who’s only important because he was born in the right family. And Manning is so far down the line to inherit that his father lets him play professional hockey in the States instead of keeping him back home in Stölland to do real work for his country.

So Viktor’s life work is guarding a man who will never be asked to negotiate peace treaties with other countries, or tasked with solving hunger in a country, or leading a charge for equal rights in the workplace. No, Manning’s greatest contribution to society is skating around chasing a puck.

That’s what Viktor guards.

Plus, he’s so by-the-book, my aging free spirit gags every time he’s around.

I knock on the door, and a moment later, Kristofer opens it. I breathe a small sigh of relief, because while Kristofer is equally tall, thick, and darkly brooding as Viktor, he’s also boring as a split end.

Kristofer never smirks.

He never even talks if he doesn’t have to.

Case in point?

He merely opens the door wider, scans me with his eyeballs as though he could detect hidden weapons on me with his x-ray vision—whereas Viktor would probably insist on running a background check again—and allows me entry.

I take two steps into the devil’s lair and stop dead in my tracks.

Papaya is handcuffed to a chair at a table between the living room and a small galley kitchen.

She’s also bent over a paper, lower lip caught between her teeth in intense concentration, slowly tracing something with a pencil that’s had its eraser chewed off.

Viktor’s in the chair opposite her, legs spread wide, arms crossed over his barrel chest, stretching the fabric of his crisp white button-down. He’s focused on her with an unwavering intensity, as though he knows as well as I do how easily she could slip out of those cuffs and disappear out the door.

There are welts on her cheek and neck, and my pulse freezes.

Bees.

She got herself into a nest of bees.

If she was allergic, she’d be dead.

She suddenly snaps straight and throws the pencil on the table. “It’s impossible,” she announces.

“It is if you give up,” Viktor replies.

No smirk, no gotcha, no smart-ass to be seen. If it had been me, he probably would’ve said something like only for the weak.

Of course, I wouldn’t have ever admitted to Viktor that anything was impossible.

The paper Papaya was bent over has nine dots in a three-by-three square on it. Actually, there are several iterations of the nine dot pattern, all of them with lines drawn connecting the dots in some fashion or another.

None of them with all the dots connected.

I know this puzzle.

Papaya apparently doesn’t.

“It’s simple math,” she says to Viktor. “You can’t connect nine dots with four lines.”

“You can if you wish to have a cookie,” he replies.

My hands clench before I can stop them. Fucking Viktor would make a better parent than I would.

She looks to me. “Peach, tell him he’s full of shit.”

“It’s time to go.” Not that we should go. The last time she spent the night at my house, she snuck out her window, climbed down a tree, and dashed over to the Winchester farm, where she shaved alien symbols into all of the goats.

There were Martian investigators all over Goat’s Tit for weeks.

The time before that was the lawn mower incident, but since I caught her before the high school principal could see that she’d mowed penises into his yard, I was able to convince him that she was doing a good deed preemptively in mowing his whole yard to make up for what she’ll undoubtedly do wrong next year.

It’s only a matter of time before those midnight trips turn into drinking and sleeping with boys.

According to fucking Bitsy Jacobson, she might have already started.

Swear to Thor, I just sprouted three dozen gray hairs.

Papaya tugs on her handcuffs. “Can’t go. I’m stuck.”

“Can I keep those?” I ask Viktor.

“I rather doubt you’d find them effective,” he replies as he moves to unhook her. He’s well over six feet tall—taller than the prince, though not as tall as Joey’s hulking mass of a fiancé—and solid as a dark-haired, square-jawed, serious-eyed mule.

He’s also unfortunately not wrong. She needs handcuffs and someone constantly watching to make sure she hasn’t figured out how to pick the lock. “That wasn’t the question.”

“Merely pointing out the truth, my lady. And while I’m observing truths, military boarding school may be an option you should consider.”

And again, he’s not wrong.

And it irritates the snot out of me that he thinks he gets to have an opinion. Gracie told me once that he grew up solidly middle-class with two awesome parents and two successful siblings and that he would’ve joined the army if Stölland had had anything more than a ceremonial military.

Isn’t he special?

He helps Papaya to her feet, and the four welts on his neck almost make me wince.

Almost. “How about I let you know when I need your opinion?”

He turns, but I catch the smirk.

He knows I know he’s right, and he knows I’ll never admit it.

I gesture to Papaya. “Come on. Let’s go see the baby before we head home.” Where I need to have a long heart-to-heart with her about stealing balloons and not being able to hang out with Brantley anymore and hormones and condoms and life decisions you can’t take back.

And a judge wants me to add a husband to this mess?

I can’t even control the kid who isn’t mine yet, much less keep a husband in line too.

We step out into the heat, and I hold Papaya’s arm while I march her toward the big house.

“For a guy who could be a king, Viktor’s really strong,” she says.

What in the blazes is she making up now? “Keep talkin’, young lady. It’s not getting you out of dishwashing duty from now until the cows come home. What in the world possessed you to attempt to steal a hot air balloon?”

“I wasn’t stealing it. I was trying to keep it from going too high while Brantley distracted its owner.”

I stifle a howl of rage, because I’ve seen this game before. Poor girl and spoiled rich boy hang out together, poor girl takes the blame for everything.

It’s how the fucking world works.

“Papaya—”

“So, you and Viktor like each other, right? Because from what I heard, he needs a wife to claim his kingdom or whatever, and do you know how cool it would be to walk into high school and be able to tell people I’m royalty? I mean, related to royalty, but still. That beats Caroline Abernathy and her my great-granddaddy was a general in the War of Northern Aggression baloney. Just because I can’t trace my kinfolk back that far doesn’t mean we didn’t suffer at the hand of the Yankees either.”

“You keep spray-painting cows and shaving the mayor’s poodle, you’ll be bragging about being related to royalty while you’re in juvie lock-up, and I don’t think that’s gonna score you any points.”

She rolls her eyes. “Like you weren’t a holy terror when you were my age.”

I was, but I don’t need to give her ideas. Especially when she has easier access to the internet than I did.

The internet is full of bad ideas.

“Papaya. What in the hell would you have done if that balloon had taken off with you inside? You could’ve been halfway to Canada by now, with no food, no phone, and probably not warm enough clothes once you got north of Tennessee and high enough in altitude. And when you ran out of fuel—”

“Although, you really shouldn’t marry Viktor, because he’s such a hard-ass, neither of us would ever have fun again,” she muses.

I shush her and knock on the front door, and Gracie herself ushers us in. Her dark hair looks like it hasn’t been brushed in days, there’s baby spit-up on her pink T-shirt, and despite the worry in her brown eyes, she’s glowing the way only a happy woman in love with her little family can.

She grabs me in a huge hug. “Oh my dog, Peach. Are you okay?”

A lump lands in my throat. I don’t answer, but I squeeze her back.

Hard.

“Do y’all want to stay here tonight?” Gracie asks. “The guest rooms are all finished, and the windows are all armed to go off anytime anyone opens them. Plus we can turn on the electric fence tonight.”

“We wouldn’t want to intrude,” Papaya says sweetly.

She looks so freaking innocent when she smiles.

“Yes,” I blurt before I can stop myself.

Because I do want to stay somewhere with a security system and armed guards, and at the moment, I don’t care that one of those guards is Viktor and that it’s total overkill to have four guards making sure the occasional random paparazzi doesn’t snap any unauthorized photos of His Royal Happypants.

Much as Viktor annoys me, I need help. And as much as my pride tastes like shit when I’m swallowing it with all the worries clogging my sinuses right now, I need an easy button.

I might hate myself tomorrow for hiding behind Gracie’s rich, titled boyfriend and his cadre of unnecessary guards, but the judge is right.

I can’t do this by myself.

“Great!” Gracie says. “Since the weather won’t let us head out to the Grits Festival tonight, I’m making fried chicken. And you two are going to sit down at dinner, and you’re going to like it.”

“You know what I love about chicken legs? The shape reminds me of—”

I put a hand over Papaya’s mouth before she can finish that sentence.

Sometimes I forget she knows what Gracie used to do for a living.

And that I used to be in the videos she’d use to advertise her dirty cookies all over social media.

“Fried chicken sounds delicious,” I tell Gracie. “Thank you.”

“Good. Because Joey and Zeus are coming over, and I have about six chickens I’m frying up.”

I wince at Joey’s name.

At best, I’ll be on a short administrative leave while she and Weightless take care of my PR nightmare. At worst—nope.

Not going to think about worst.

Because worst involves being jobless and husbandless and losing any chance of giving Papaya a normal life.

God. It’s like I need to just start over. Go somewhere new. Both of us. Just—just escape from all of this.

“Fried chicken with biscuits?” Papaya asks.

“No, silly, with cheese grits. I make ‘em better than you can get down at the festival anyway.”

That’s the truth. Gracie might be known around town for her baked goods, but there’s little she can’t do in the kitchen.

Thunder rolls behind us, and I look out the window in time to catch two more rapid flashes of lightning in the thick clouds piling in from the southwest. Gracie winces, and a baby wails somewhere in the house.

“Be right back. Make yourselves comfy—in the kitchen. Yes. In the kitchen.” She gives me a look that suggests whoever came to visit Manning is still here in the salon—which we call the salon mostly because it’s hilarious to all of us that Gracie lives in a house fancy enough to have a salon, even if it’s super comfortable and where we usually hang out. So I’m guessing they don’t want Papaya—or possibly me—to get in the way.

I grab the back of Papaya’s Half Cocked Heroes T-shirt and tug her toward the back of the house. “Yep. The kitchen.”

We pass the closed double doors to the salon, but two voices ring out clearly.

One is Manning’s.

The other belongs to what sounds like the world’s most cheerful woman. “Oh, Your Highness knows Amoria! I usually have to explain to people that we’re tucked into the Alps between Italy, Austria, and Switzerland. Original country of love, you know.”

“Hence the reason Viktor needs a wife if he’s to take the throne,” Manning says.

Papaya smirks. “Told you,” she whispers.

My entire left eyeball is twitching. Are eyeballs supposed to twitch? Like all the way back in the back of your eye socket? Because mine’s twitching against my brain. I drag her faster down the hall. “Hush before you get us kicked out.”

“You know, we could have a lot of fun if we joined forces instead of you telling me no all the time.”

I pull her through the kitchen door and turn on her. “Papaya. Do you know what I did today?”

“Flirted with Judge Liverspot?”

“Yes. That’s exactly what I did. I made moon eyes at him and promised to kiss him if he’d sign off on your adoption paperwork.”

She wrinkles her nose. “You love me that much?”

My heart squeezes, because I’m not sure anyone has ever loved this kid. Tried to, maybe. But succeeded? “Yes. I love you that much.”

And I want her to have a chance at growing up and doing something amazing with her life.

I can’t tell her about the charges. About the bad news undoubtedly coming from Joey. About having to get married if I want to have any chance of having the judge sign off on the adoption.

About the threats from Brantley’s mother.

She doesn’t need to know any of that.

She needs to know I’m not going to dump her on someone else just because she’s pushing limits.

It’s what I needed—and got—from Meemaw.

And there’s no way I’m introducing a random man into her life.

But what does that mean? That she’s just going to bounce here and there until she’s eighteen? I don’t know if she’s still on her father’s insurance. I don’t know if she’s enrolled in school for the fall. I don’t know if she needs a physical or if she wants to play sports or if she has any friends other than Brantley or how in the world I’ll keep her away from the bad influences.

Or keep her from being the bad influence.

We both need to start over.

Go somewhere else, and just start—

Oh.

My.

Lordy.

Goodness.

Thunder shakes the foundation, and a gullywasher attacks the windowpanes without warning.

Manning bursts into the kitchen, glancing around as though he’s looking for Gracie and the baby.

Who wakes up screaming every time there’s a thunderstorm.

So, basically, every afternoon.

“Gracie’s already checking her,” I tell him. I snap my fingers. “You keep Papaya. I got something I need to do.”

“I—” he starts.

“Just sit on her,” I call. “And if she gets out, I’ll kill you, even if it means taking my chances on that taser Viktor’s always threatening me with.”

Because this is insane.

It’ll probably give me indigestion on an hourly basis.

But it might be the only thing I have left that can save Papaya.

And that’s what’s important.