Reign: A Royal Military Romance (31 page)

The girls raise their eyebrows.

“Not like
that
,” he says. “Like normal.”

The rest of the party is starting to die down, and people are meandering through the living room, leaving.

“We should go before you sleep on this couch,” I tell Kostya. “I can’t carry you.”

“I should buy a royal golf cart to drive through the halls,” he says.

“Fuck, I would love that,” Courtney says.

“We could race,” Kostya says.

I push him off me, stand, wobble, and hold my hand out. He takes it, and I brace myself to pull him up.

“Night, guys,” I say as handsy, drunk Kostya stands behind me and puts his arms around me. “See you tomorrow. Kostya,
stop
it. Come on.”

“Byeeeeeeee,” Courtney says. The other two just wave.

* * *

W
hen we get
to our apartment, as soon as we close the door Kostya grabs me and pulls me in, and then just holds me tight for a long, long time.

“You okay?” I finally ask.

He kisses the top of my head.

“I was gonna do this tomorrow but I think I’m braver right now,” he says.

“The hell do you need to be brave about?” I ask.

“Stay there,” he says.

I sit on the couch and listen to him pawing through something. I’m drunkish, but mostly sleepy, and I know I have to be up early tomorrow for a full day of ceremony and regalia.

Kostya comes back. There’s something in one hand, and he just looks at me for a moment. He swallows, like he’s nervous. I pull my legs up and sit cross-legged on the couch, getting a little nervous myself.

Then he sits down on the couch and turns toward me, still holding whatever it is in his hand.

“I still get nervous about you,” he says.

“Don’t,” I say.

He looks at his hand and thinks for a moment, while I lean against his shoulder and he puts his arm around me.

“I found this when I was kid,” he starts, his voice going quiet. “I kept this box of these little treasures I found, and even after everything got better and I grew up, I kept them and I never told anyone. And sometimes I take them out, still, when I feel like I’m getting too comfortable. Because I want to remind myself that it wasn’t always this way.”

I take his hand in mine and lace our fingers together.

“I’m not explaining this well at all,” he says.

“You’re fine,” I say.

He exhales hard, looking at the wall opposite us.

“That’s not what I’m trying to say,” he says. “I’m trying to say that all that, the secret box, the being afraid that this will all fall part again, it’s all part of me that I never told anyone until I met you. And I think it’s easy to love a king with a palace and harder to love a dirty, scared kid who hoards trinkets because he always thinks everything might fall apart.”

I squeeze his hand and he takes a deep breath.

“And tomorrow is all king stuff, but I wanted to give you this first, alone, from a dirty scared kid who has nothing, but he loves you and would do
anything
for you.”

I’m crying, and I bite my lip hard, a tear running down my face. Kostya opens his hand and there’s a dull, dark gray ring inside. He turns it over in his fingers.

“It’s an iron wedding — don’t cry,” he says.

“It’s good crying,” I whisper.

“You sure?”

“Yes,” I say, rubbing the tears off my face. “Tell me about the ring.”

“It’s an iron wedding band that I found in the chapel when I was five or six,” he says. “I think it’s a couple hundred years old, and it’s pretty ugly, and you don’t have to wear it, but I wanted to give you something with no pomp and circumstance. I wanted to give you something that’s
mine
, not the king’s.”

He’s flipping the ring around in his fingers, rubbing the outside along his thumb.

“I always thought that all that would be a weird, secret part of me forever, and I’d never share it with anyone. But then you came along, and I
wanted
to share it with you, and you love me anyway and I don’t know why but I’m glad you do,” he says.

I hold out my hand. He takes it and kisses it, then looks at me.

“Put the ring on me,” I whisper.

“Oh,” he says.

It doesn’t fit on the ring finger of my right hand, but it fits on my middle finger, already warm from his hand. He wipes tears off my face with one thumb.

“I didn’t mean to make you cry,” he says.

“It’s okay,” I say, and swallow. “I’m glad you love me even if I’m a fuckup who fucks up a lot. I didn’t get you anything. I’m sorry.”

“You moved across the world,” he says. “You volunteered to get married in a language you don’t know

I just burrow my head against his neck and look at the iron ring on my finger.

“I love you,” I say. “And I love you better because you were a scared dirty kid once, not despite that.”

“I love you better because you met my family wearing spandex,” he whispers.

“I really thought you hated me,” I say.

“Not at all,” he says, leaning his head against mine. “You made me feel funny and I didn’t know what to do.”

He strokes my shoulder, and I take his other hand in mine.

“We should go to bed so we can get married tomorrow,” I say.

“This is nice, though,” he says.

“It is,” I say. “This won’t change, right?”

“Not at all,” he whispers. “I’m yours forever.”

“
Ya lyublyu tebya
,” I say. “A lot.”

“I love you more,” he says.

“It’s not a contest,” I whisper.

“I’d win if it were,” he says.

I laugh, and he kisses me.

“No way,” I say.

Kostya stands, still drunk, and pulls me up after him. He slides his arms around me and squeezes my ass.

“You’ve got one night left as a commoner,” he says, pressing me against him. “Let’s make it count.”

“Are you saying that once I’m Queen all the fun stops?” I ask, teasing him.

He pulls my skirt up and then slides a hand under it, up my thigh.

“Hell no,” he says, his voice getting lower. “I’m saying I’m drunk, I love you, you’re the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen and I want you to ride my cock on this couch right now, and I love you.”

“Dirty,” I tease.

I kiss him and slide my hand along his cock. He growls into my mouth.

“Just honest,” Kostya says, and kisses me back.

J
ackson Cody
nearly ruined my life.

I was dumb, drunk, and eighteen. He was a rodeo star with a smile that could melt steel, and I was
this
close to giving him everything.

I learned my lesson, grew up, and moved on. Now I’ve got my first
huge
assignment as a photographer, and if I play it right, this rodeo shoot could make my whole career.

There’s just one problem, and it’s got spurs, boots, and hazel eyes.

Get it now on Amazon, or free with Kindle Unlimited!

T
hey call
me The Scorpion because I’m fast, lethal, and I pack plenty of heat.

The only thing more dangerous than doing my job is
not
doing my job. But for her?

Sign me the
fuck
up.

O
r
, for the complete North Star Shifters, just turn the page!

I
love writing sexy
, alpha men and the headstrong women they fall for.

My weaknesses include: beards, whiskey, nice abs with treasure trails, sarcasm, cats, prowess in the kitchen, prowess in the bedroom, forearm tattoos, and gummi bears.

I live in California with my very own sexy, bearded, whiskey-loving husband and two hell-raising cats.

• roxienoir
  

D
elilah drove carefully
down Main Street. On the passenger seat of her little Toyota was a street map of Fjords, Alaska, and her grocery list. She’d bought the map the day before, when she’d gotten into town after nearly fifty hours of driving, but she hadn’t needed it yet — it turned out that almost nothing had changed in the town since she’d moved away nearly eight years ago.

Even the Carrs grocery store was standing exactly where it had been while she was in high school, the biggest store in a shopping center that also had a 7-11 and a Payless Shoe Source. The stores around it had changed, but she was surprised that no new roads had been built, no new bridges from their peninsula to the Alaska mainland. When she had left for college in California, there had even been talk of building a regional airport in Fjords, but that had never happened.

Sitting at a red light, looking at a Thai restaurant, Delilah heard the crash without seeing it. Her head whipped around and, in shock, she saw a mass of steaming, crumpled metal. For one second, there was an eerie silence as everyone stopped and stared.

Then
she realized that the mass was two cars, right in the middle of the intersection. Some kind of big SUV had t-boned a tiny car, practically driving right over it, leaving it crumpled right in the middle of the intersection in front of her.

Delilah gaped for a few seconds — the SUV had obviously run the red light, was the driver drunk? In the middle of the day like this? — but then her training kicked in and she ran toward the wreck.

Already, two other people were standing there, staring at the two cars now smashed almost completely together, moving their hands around uselessly as though that would help.

“I’m a doctor!” Delilah shouted as she jogged the last few feet, approaching the two cars. The word still sounded weird coming from her mouth, but it was finally true. She
was
a doctor.

Either steam or smoke poured forth from one of the cars, and for half a second, she wondered whether the cars would explode, like in the movies.

All at once, her head cleared, and she knew she had to take control of the situation.

She pointed at an older woman with dyed-red hair who was simply standing there, gawking. “You,” she said. The woman looked up, aimlessly. “What’s your name?”

“Karen.”

“Karen, I need you to go find a pay phone and call 911. Can you do that?”

“But—” said Karen, waving her hands at the wreckage.

“These people need an ambulance,” Delilah said firmly, far more firmly than she felt. “Go call 911.”

Karen nodded and then ran off to the row of shops along the street, entering one and jabbering loudly to the guy behind the desk.

Breathing deeply, Delilah approached the two intertwined cars. An instinct told her that exploding was just a myth, and she needed to see whether the drivers were still alive.

First she approached the SUV. Inside was a thirty-something man, blood running down his face from the broken windshield, pawing at the door handle ineffectively.

“Oh shit,” he was saying, over and over again, tonelessly.

“Sir,” Delilah said, rushing toward him. “Sir, please just stay where you are. An ambulance is on its way.”

“I gotta get out,” he said in that same strange, toneless voice. Delilah knew it was shock — she’d met plenty of people like this during her emergency rotation. “It’s — there’s an accident — I gotta get out.”

“You need to stay right where you are,” she said. “You could have serious injuries and you shouldn’t move.”

Delilah went up to the car and looked inside, down at him. He was at least wearing a seatbelt. She inhaled deeply, smelling hard for alcohol on his breath, her extra-sharp senses kicking in.

There it was. Bud light, it smelled like, or maybe Coors — some cheap beer. Delilah ground her teeth together and did her best not to get angry. The police would test his blood alcohol level, and he’d get what he deserved.

For his part, he just looked at her, blankly.

“Stay there,” she said, hands up, trying to sound soothing.

Since the guy in the SUV was talking and moving, she wasn’t too concerned about him. Besides — and she knew this was un-doctorly — he’d been drinking, and whatever he got, he deserved.

As she was checking over the guy in the SUV, there were alarmed shouts from the little Hyundai, and Delilah looked up.

“Stay there!” she shouted to the guy in the SUV, pointing at him, and running around the little silver car that he’d smashed into.

From the other side, it was worse than it had looked at first: the nose of the SUV had come almost completely through the passenger side of the car, and now the woman who’d been driving — who had been completely, utterly in the right of way — was trapped underneath.

Worse, she was unconscious and covered in blood.

The onlookers scattered when Delilah approached, and she heard mutters of
doctor
, not that she paid too much attention. Right away she could see that the blood was from a huge gash in her right leg, where a piece of metal had gouged her, but that wasn’t even her worst problem: the worse problem was that the SUV was practically on top of her, crushing her.

The woman wasn’t breathing.

Fuck fuck fuck shit fuck damn
, thought Delilah, her thoughts little more than a stream of curse words.

She took a deep breath.

“Someone needs to lift the SUV off of the car,” she called through the broken windshield. “It’s crushing her.”

There was no way the woman would make it until the ambulances got there. The three men that had gathered around jogged to the front of the SUV and started a count:
one, two, three, lift!

The SUV didn’t budge. Delilah cursed.

“Try it again,” she said. She tried to tamp down the panic that was rising in her chest. The men counted down again, but again the other vehicle didn’t move, not even a little. Desperately, Delilah tried to think — if only they could get this woman free, she could staunch the bleeding from her femoral artery, and there was a decent chance she’d make it out of this alive.

If not, though. The woman had another minute, maybe. Delilah didn’t even hear the sirens yet.

“Come on!” she shouted at the men. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she thought
hasn’t the adrenaline kicked in yet?

“Hold up!” she heard a voice shout.

She
knew
that voice. She couldn’t think about it now, though.

“Scoot over and let me get the bumper,” the voice said. The men reshuffled themselves, the new guy at the very front, and Delilah heard them start counting again.

Please
, she thought.
Please, please, please
.

Then, on three, the SUV started lifting, moving backward away from the tiny Hyundai. Relief flooded through Delilah, and as soon as she could, she pressed her jacket to the wound in the woman’s leg.

Take a breath,
she thought, leaning as hard as she could against the bleeding wound, praying to stop it, just a little.
Come on, breathe, breathe
.

There was a crunching sound and a jolt as the men lowered the SUV back onto the pavement.

Delilah looked up for just a moment, making sure that everything outside of the Hyundai was still all right, that the drunk guy was still in his seat where she’d told him to stay.

Peering in through the broken passenger side window was a very, very familiar face.

For a split second, Delilah forgot to breathe.

The woman in the Hyundai suddenly gasped for air, taking in a long ragged breath and then coughing so hard Delilah was afraid she’d rupture something. Delilah tried to keep her as still as she could — the woman was out cold — while keeping pressure on her gaping leg wound.

“You need anything else, doc?” asked
that
voice, and Delilah looked up into Miles’s face. She’d known he was there from the first word he said. There was no mistaking that low, lazy, gravelly sound.

“I need that ambulance to hurry up,” she said, still watching the woman’s chest rise and fall. “Go make sure that other driver doesn’t go anywhere. I’m afraid he’s too drunk to know that he’s hurt.”

“The boys have got an eye on Larry,” Miles said.

Of course they know who he is
, thought Delilah.
Everyone knows everyone in this town.

Then, at last, in the distance: sirens.

Delilah and Miles stayed there, Delilah in the Hyundai and Miles right behind, in silence until the sirens were right next to them. Miles met the paramedics as they jumped out, told them that the woman in the little car needed them the most, that the drunk guy in the SUV was fine.

Someone came and relieved Delilah, taking over the job of keeping pressure on her wound. The paramedics gently got her out of the car and onto a stretcher just as she woke up, her eyes flying open in her bruised face, immediately contorting with pain.

“It’s your lucky day,” one of the paramedics told her, and Delilah was impressed with how calm he sounded. “You’re not dead. That nice lady probably saved your life.”

Delilah, standing to the side, didn’t know what to do anymore, so she stood there uselessly, covered in blood that wasn’t hers. The men who’d lifted the car, minus Miles, still stood around the SUV, looking almost like guards.

“This has been coming for a long time for Larry,” said Miles, and Delilah jumped. She hadn’t realized he was right there next to her.

“How so?” she asked. She was hugging herself hard with her arms, doing her best to stop the shaking. Why was she shaking, anyway? She was a doctor, she saw this stuff all the time. She shouldn’t be in shock.

“His drinking’s really gotten to be a problem,” Miles said in his low voice. “Lost his job at the cannery, then his wife left with the kids, so now there’s nowhere to be at eight in the morning except the Rusty Anchor.”

Delilah nodded. It was a familiar story to her — too familiar, really. Growing up she’d through this kind of tragedy was specific to small-town Alaska, but it turned out that it was everywhere she went.

“The Rusty Anchor’s still around?” Delilah asked. The place had looked like a falling-apart fishing shack when she’d left, and she’d assumed that a strong wind had knocked it over at some point.

“Course it’s still around,” Miles said. “There could be a nuclear war and it’d be the only place left standing. The Anchor will outlive us all.”

The paramedics loaded the woman, still in pain and breathing heavily but alive, into the back of the ambulance. They slammed the doors shut and immediately, the sirens started and the ambulance lurched away, moving through the snarled traffic, even driving up on the curb.

“Does Fjords have a hospital?” Delilah asked Miles. She was still hugging herself tightly without really realizing it, and she shivered a little in the cool May air.
Alaska
, she thought.
Where you need a parka year-round
.

I guess I went soft down south.

“We’ve got a little urgent care facility, but that’s it,” Miles said. He looked worried as he watched the ambulance drove off, fast.

“They’ll probably have to patch her up there and then transfer her,” said Delilah.

“She gonna make it?”

Delilah looked at the ground for a second and then nodded. “I think so,” she said. “It won’t be fun, but I think she’ll make it.” She wrapped her arms even more tightly around herself.

“That ain’t gonna be the worst part,” Miles said thoughtfully.

“Her recovery is gonna be pretty bad,” Delilah assured him.

“Just wait until Roy finds out what happened,” Miles said, grimly. “The worst part is gonna be letting the police do their job and keeping him from killing Larry.”

Suddenly, everything clicked into place. Delilah had been far too concerned with the woman’s body and leg to get a good look at her face, but all at once, she realized who it was.

“That was Susan?” she gasped.

“Yup,” Miles confirmed.

That
was
bad. Roy was the alpha of their pack — or at least he had been when she’d left town years ago — and he wasn’t known for his kindly manner or his mercy. No, he ran the Fjords shifters with an iron fist, and woe to anyone who crossed him or broke the rules.

Susan, of course, was his mate.

Next to the SUV, the drunk guy — Larry, apparently — was on a stretcher too, seemingly lucid and talking to the paramedics. The three men who’d helped lift the front of his SUV off of the Hyundai still stood around, back a little, like they were watching over him and making sure he didn’t try anything.

From the corner of her eye, she could sense Miles watching her, like he wanted to say something.

Finally, he put one hand on her shoulder. It was big and warm, and his touch sent a rush of remembrance through her. All those
other
times they’d touched, before she’d left Alaska.

“Jeez, Del,” he said. “You’re shaking.”

He took his hand off of her and started taking his leather jacket off, wearing nothing more than a t-shirt underneath.

Peeking out from beneath one sleeve was a tattoo. She could only see the black lines the grizzly’s feet, but she knew exactly what it was: a thick black line drawing of a grizzly bear, the stars of the constellation Ursa Minor — the little dipper — arranged inside it, the North Star the biggest.

“No, it’s fine, it’s just the shock,” Delilah said.

He called me Del,
she thought. It had been years since she’d heard the nickname.

“Come on, take it,” he said. “The police are gonna want to talk to us, so we’ll be standing outside for a while.”

“Aren’t you cold?”

“Nah,” he said, and smiled the same old smile at her, putting his heavy jacket over her shoulders.

God, he even smelled the same. His hand rubbing her back, trying to warm her up — that felt the same too.

As they watched, the police came, sirens blaring, and started directing traffic around the wreck. Now Larry was in the other ambulance, and it set off in the same direction that the first had, going a little slower, driving a little less urgently. Delilah’s car was still parked right in the intersection, ten feet from the crashed cars, but incredibly it hadn’t been hit, not even by flying glass or car parts. The police directed traffic around it.