Peach

I met Joey Diamonte one day in my early twenties when I walked into a bar just off James Robert University’s campus near Gellings Air Force Base in southwest Georgia and found her drinking sixteen of her fellow military flight trainees under the table. She had this air about her that said badass. We became fast friends when we both tried to shark each other at the pool table after discovering we’d grown up twenty minutes away from each other, though she was two years older than me and already in the military, while I was shuffling through college on a poor kid scholarship.

Women like us need to stick together, I told her that night.

She’d grunted, scratched herself, and reluctantly gave me her phone number.

Joey Diamonte has been my best friend in the entire world ever since then.

And she’s currently standing wide-legged in Gracie’s butterfly-themed salon, dark hair tied back so tight that her bun is giving her face a natural lift, steam rising from her ears as she glares at me like I just set fire to Weightless headquarters.

Being glared at by Joey isn’t unusual.

Needing to squirm while she’s doing the glaring is.

Because I fucked up. And I know it. And she knows it. And I’m sure she spent all day dealing with the publicity fall-out from my balloon misadventure this morning, and she’ll probably spend all next week fielding phone calls about…well, about what she’s glaring at me for.

My wedding.

Which was just a five-minute ceremony at the courthouse where neither Viktor nor I threw up while we both promised a bunch of crap we didn’t actually mean and I realized that his dark eyes are actually several layers of increasingly dark brown from his pupils out to the edges of his irises, he has subtle laugh lines at both his eyes and his mouth, and that he has the lightest dusting of freckles over his long nose.

We managed to get through the ceremony with a chaste closed-lip kiss, rather than whatever the fuck that was in his apartment that left me hornier than a dolphin at a seafood buffet. I’m still a little rattled just having the man standing next to me. He’s not talking, not moving, possibly not even breathing, and I can still sense him there.

“You got married?” Joey spits.

And I thought it was hot and humid outside. Joey opens her mouth, and suddenly the air conditioned antebellum home rivals the pits of some kind of ocean hell.

“Hear her out, schnookums,” Zeus Berger, Joey’s massive ogre of a fiancé, says. He’s the size of a cow—if cows walked on two legs and were almost seven feet tall—and has the vocabulary and maturity of a twelve-year-old caveman.

He also happens to be my favorite person in the world for the moment, since Joey turns her glare from me to him.

No one calls her schnookums.

And he knows it.

Okay, yes, Zeus is often my favorite person in the world, because he’s funny and a total goofball and he insists he’s hanging up his hockey skates so he doesn’t have to be away from Joey so much, and he makes her happy.

Which is really how relationships should be.

“You’re hot when you’re mad,” he tells her, backing up until he hits the butterfly wallpaper between the fancy couch and the doorway to the foyer. “I could go home and wait in bed for whenever you’re ready to work that out.”

He winks at me. She rolls her dark eyes at him, not quite holding onto all of her badass attitude. “Sit,” she orders him.

Zeus sits. Right there on top of an air conditioning vent. His brows shoot up, and he grins. “Hoo. Like being back home in winter.”

He’s adorable for being such a massive ball of testosterone.

“Talk,” Joey orders me.

Viktor shifts beside me, as though our awful lawful union suddenly makes him responsible for deflecting any threat of bodily harm from me now too. A shiver trickles down my spine at his nearness.

“You want the long version or the short version?” I ask Joey.

“I want the true version.”

Well, fucklesticks. “You know how me and Viktor kinda…hate each other?”

Joey crosses her arms. Which is basically her version of yeah, duh, go on.

“It turns out we actually…like each other. A lot. Like…that. And then today happened, and some more happened, and when I realized he was fixin’ to leave the country without me, I—”

“Couldn’t bear the idea of living life without me, so she poisoned me, tied me in the bed of her truck, and forced me to take vows of marriage,” Viktor finishes for me.

I’m going to snip holes in the toes of every last pair of that man’s socks.

My lone consolation is that his announcement makes Joey unload twenty rounds of fireballs out her eye sockets, all of them aimed at him. We’re probably lucky the glare doesn’t reflect in the mirror over the mantle and set fire to the whole building. She’d unload a few more rounds out the tips of her dark hair if it wasn’t tied back.

“I told you they liked each other,” Gracie whispers loudly to Manning from their perch in the window seat, where she’s burping Sophie, who really does only eat, sleep, and poop.

Gracie’s the only one smiling in the room.

If you don’t count Viktor and his smirk.

Which I don’t.

And it irritates the shit out of me that his telling the story that way adds weight to the believability factor.

“I don’t believe you,” Joey tells him flatly.

I almost smirk, but I stop myself.

The more people who know all the details of our arrangement, the more likely it is someone will leak it. And until I have Judge Liverspot’s signature on Papaya’s adoption paperwork, I am not risking anything.

Not that Joey can’t keep a secret.

It’s that I don’t want to saddle her with that on top of cleaning up the rest of my mess.

So I hook an arm around Viktor’s waist and attempt to not throw up in my mouth.

Or try to dry-hump him again, which my baser instincts beg for as soon as I get a whiff of that royal bodyguard cologne he always wears. It’s a mix of the scent of muscles, wool, and bad ideas.

“I didn’t want to put his job with Prince Happypants in danger,” I tell Joey, “so we kept us a secret.”

Viktor wraps an arm around me and subtly pinches the back of my arm. It’s a silent shut up, though he’d probably say it more like, it would please me greatly, my lady, if you would stick a sock in your piehole and keep it there for an indeterminate amount of time.

“So very thoughtful of you to concern yourself with the pleasure of my pants,” Manning says in his fancy Stöllandic accent.

Gracie hushes him even as she giggles. “Peach, you know Manning wouldn’t fire Viktor for dating you.”

“He might, if he knew what Viktor liked to—”

“I apologize, Your Highness, for not tendering my resignation weeks ago,” Viktor interrupts.

“No need to apologize on my behalf, Your Majesty,” Manning replies.

Viktor flinches.

It’s a subtle flinch, and I don’t think I would’ve noticed if his muscles hadn’t tensed around me.

And I decide Manning really is growing on me. I could actually like him.

Not that anyone would believe me.

It’s entirely possible I’m a difficult person. But my reasons were pure, I swear. When Manning got Gracie knocked up, he was betrothed to some hag from his country, and there was no way I was letting the man get away with thinking Gracie would be his mistress.

My family gets better than that.

I should probably be a little more grateful to Viktor. Not that he’s a saint, but he’s definitely getting the shorter end of this family stick. The man has to learn to be a king while he’s saddled with me, Papaya, and Meemaw.

Assuming Meemaw wants to give up her cushy apartment across the street from the closest thing Casper County has to a strip club and move to Europe.

Oh, fuck.

That’s not glass shards in my eyeballs. It’s tears. Fuck.

I’m not supposed to let myself have this breakdown until after we move, because if I have it before, I might chicken out and not go.

I’m not a stranger to being impulsive, and I know the massive change and the opportunity to see a new part of the world will be good for Papaya, but Thor’s ass, I got married.

“You’re not quitting,” Joey informs Viktor. “I refuse to let Peach be married to a bum without a job, and—why did Manning just call you Your Majesty?”

“I’ve unexpectedly inherited a small kingdom in Europe,” Viktor says.

She looks between Viktor and me, then Viktor and Manning. Her eyes bug out of her head. There’s a fault line opening in the top of her skull, and any minute now, lava’s going to shoot out and incinerate us all.

Zeus leaps to his feet and puts an arm around her, because for all his doofusness, he’s pretty smart where Joey’s concerned. “Whoa, hey. Hear them out.”

“She just married the man she likes to complain about having the smirkiest smirk this side of Smirksville, after stealing a hot air balloon this morning, and you want me to hear them out?”

To be fair, Joey doesn’t raise her voice.

But that tone does peel some of the paper off the walls.

There’s more banging on the front door—thank god, because I’m about to cave and tell her about the judge and Papaya—and Meemaw bursts in with a blast.

She’s five-foot-three with two more inches added by her poofy silver hair, in rhinestone flip-flops, hot pink cotton shorts, and a T-shirt with a picture of Burt Reynolds captioned with My Boyfriend Can Kick Your Boyfriend’s Balls. While she’s not a day over sixty-three, she could easily pass for seventy-five, and she’s rocking a new hip, since brittle bones come in the Meemaw gene package. I’m hoping sunscreen and eating my vegetables help counteract those genes. That, and not mistaking pop for milk for a few decades.

“Peach Berry Maloney, why did Ginny Jo Rasmussen just call me up and tell me my grandbaby got the courthouse opened special tonight just so she could get hitched?”

“Sshh!” I hiss. “Don’t wake the baby.” What I really mean, of course, is don’t let Papaya overhear you.

I don’t want her finding out we’re moving to Europe by eavesdropping. Or figuring out what’s happening before my emergency court date with Judge Liverspot tomorrow, because Papaya does know the truth.

I just have to keep her quiet until we get to Europe.

Fuck.

We’re moving to Europe.

Where we’ll know no one but Viktor.

I stick my chin in the air so I don’t lose my nerve. It’s possible I over-impulsivated this time around.

Yes, over-impulsivated. Don’t bother looking it up. Just trust me when I say the last time I leapt this far without thinking first, I woke up in a barn in South Carolina dressed like a mermaid, and it took me three days to get home.

“Everyone needs to chill out about this,” I announce. “Since when is a wedding the end of the world?”

“You’re leaving, aren’t you?” Joey says.

The silence that settles in the room is thicker than the July humidity and heavier than Zeus and his twin brother put together.

And that’s before you add in the utter betrayal she can’t blink fast enough to hide.

Joey talks tough, but she’s a marshmallow on the inside. And there’s nothing that can break her faster than feeling abandoned, which I figured out about three days after I met her.

“We’ll talk every single day,” I whisper.

She sucks in a breath. Zeus grabs her in a hug and glares at me. Gracie hands the baby to Manning and scoots to her sister’s side too.

“With the balloon—the FAA probably getting involved—the orchard—I’m a liability at Weightless right now,” I continue, unable to keep the cracks from my voice.

“You—” Joey sucks in a breath and stops.

Because I’m right and she knows it. I checked my email while we were waiting at the courthouse, and already, three summer camps have canceled my visits to talk about women in flight-related fields. Weightless has been dropped from the sponsors’ lists for four different charity events. I’ve been uninvited from a flight symposium at my alma mater, even though there’s a firecracker of a physics professor who swears she’s still going to fight for me to be there.

All events I spent weeks and months cultivating relationships for.

And it’s barely been twelve hours.

Government contracting officers and college researchers won’t want to deal with me either while I’m under investigation for crimes against aircraft.

“I can still pull my weight through paperwork, and I can do that from anywhere in the world, but I can’t network for us right now. I can’t be a public face. I have to disappear for Weightless to survive.”

“Peach—”

“And I’ll still be at your wedding, and we’re coming home for Christmas, and by then I can probably do some networking so we can expand in Europe—”

“But do you love him?”

I freeze. Viktor goes so tense beside me, I wonder if he’s finally petrified himself.

Joey’s blinking fast, her eyes shiny, and oh holy shitbuckets, that’s not good.

Joey never cries. It’s a rule. The sun rises in the east, thunderstorms come in every summer afternoon in the South, and Joey never cries.

Especially not for me.

And especially not because she’s afraid I’m married to a man I don’t love.

I make myself think of baby goats and that time Papaya and I made my phone tell us jokes until we were crying with laughter and that little sliver of time when Viktor’s tongue was in my mouth and his fingers were digging in my ass and his erection was throbbing against my belly and making me want to rip his clothes off and ride him until that hot, wet ache deep in my pussy was satisfied, and then I can answer Joey’s question.

Do you love him?

“Yes,” I whisper, because it’s easier to lie in a whisper.

Viktor goes impossibly tenser.

Joey studies me from the Joey sandwich Zeus and Gracie are making her into. Her gaze is hard. Demanding. Searching.

She switches her focus to Viktor, and she goes rigid as stone while she tries to peel all his secrets out of him with nothing more than her ninja mind powers and her take-no-bullshit gaze.

Which she’s pulling off in spades despite being sandwiched by a six-foot-nine hockey player and a pipsqueak of a sweetheart.

“She shall be in good hands, my lady,” Viktor tells her gravely.

“Your hands,” Joey says.

“I’m quite the glutton for punishment.”

Gracie giggles softly, and Joey sags. “Okay,” she whispers.

I almost sag in relief too. I hate lying to Joey—she’s been a sister to me longer than I’ve known Papaya existed—and having her support adds some I can do this to my own mental state.

I can do this.

Moving will be good for Papaya. It’ll be good for me.

And as soon as Viktor figures out how to get his damn laws changed—hopefully sooner than a year, so Papaya has more time to adjust to even more changes—we’ll be back. Hopefully both of us stronger and wiser.

But even if Papaya needs to stay away longer than a year, I’ll still be back.

Eventually.

Meemaw claps. “Well, hot damn. Let’s go fry us up some biscuits and have a party.”

My stomach cramps at the idea of eating anything, but I smile at her anyway like a happy bride should. “Sounds delicious.”

“I can’t wait to get to know my new grandson-in-law.” She looks him up and down and winks. “I think you got the best of the lot of these royals that are invading Alabama. Shewee, he’s a hot one.”

Viktor cuts a look at me that suggests he would’ve had more stipulations if he’d met Meemaw before our hasty wedding.

“I’ll go grab some cookies,” Gracie says.

Everyone breaks into motion, and soon I’m trailing my own party out the door.

Just me and Manning bringing up the rear.

He turns a cool stare on me. There was a time—not all that long ago—that I was judging him. Measuring him. Making him prove he was good enough for Gracie.

Now, the tables have turned. “Don’t make his life difficult,” he says shortly.

No threats.

No promises.

No smile either, though, which makes his words every bit a threat and a promise.

If I make Viktor’s life difficult, someone will make sure mine is as well.

And he knows why we got married, even if the Amorian palace envoy that Viktor sent packing once we’d signed all the paperwork at the courthouse believes we’re in love.

There’s a yelp and a crash above.

Manning’s omnipresent smile is gone as he looks toward the ceiling. “He’s a far braver man than me,” he murmurs.

I’ll deny this if you ever repeat it, but I think Viktor’s a far braver person than me too.

He returns to the room as another thump sounds. He points Manning toward a trick door hidden in the seams of the wallpaper that I’m not supposed to know about, and he races up the stairs, two at a time.

Manning shakes his head with a sigh, though his smile is coming back. “He’ll need to learn to stop doing that,” he says thoughtfully.

“Do you really think he can?”

“Not likely.”

“Me neither.”

And if it means Papaya’s safe from herself while we find a more constructive use of her brains and her energy, then I guess I’ll just have to deal with playing the part of a doting wife in the meantime.

So long as I don’t get attached for real.

Because hot as that kiss was, my life is here. In Alabama.

And Papaya and I will be back, and we’ll be back better than ever.

We will.

If I repeat it enough, maybe I’ll believe it.