there was only one thing that was going to work.
One image.
He could only hope he wouldn’t be haunted by it for the rest of his miserable life.
He tightened his grip and let himself feel her breath on his cheek. The rush of it as she exhaled her surprise—and pleasure—as he whispered dirty nothings in her ear.
He let himself see her. Flushed and emboldened by her own power. Her Royal Highness Marie Joséphine Annagret Elena, Princess of Eldovia, making herself come as she ground all over his leg.
He muffled his shout by turning his head into that ridiculously fluffy pillow.
“You could at least try to be nice,” Marie said quietly to her father after bidding the Riccis good night.
He whipped his head up from where he’d been refilling his wineglass—they’d kept up her mother’s tradition of dining without servants hovering over them.
He was shocked. Marie had learned not to speak to him like this. After he’d sent her back to school and made clear that there would be no shared father-daughter grief, no strengthened emotional bond as the silver lining of her mother’s death, there didn’t seem to be any point in trying to say anything real to him. So she never corrected him or suggested that his behavior was anything less than impeccable or that his whims were anything less than gospel. It was easier to go along with what he wanted. It was almost never worth starting a row.
But that was before he started being cruel to her friends.
It hurt her, to see him like this. She’d told Leo that her mother had always tempered her father. Softened him. She was realizing now how much she had always believed that eventually, he would thaw. That things would get better between them. That beneath her father’s gruff exterior, there was still a good man.
Like Leo.
But what if that wasn’t true?
What if, without her mother, her father was just a big bully?
What if she never got him back?
“You’ll tell the UN you’re honored but you have to decline their offer.”
She blinked at the change of subject. But, fine. They might as well have it out now. “No.”
The king physically recoiled a little. Because if she never scolded him, she certainly never outright defied him. She wasn’t sure what made her so bold tonight.
“You won’t have time. We have to focus all our efforts on shoring up Morneau.”
“Father.” She sighed. “About that. I think it might be time to—”
“Mr. Benz reports that Marx is—”
“No.” There it was again. How astonishing. “Mr. Benz does not report. I report.” She had made a full report to her father and his cabinet this morning. “I’m the one who saw Marx.”
“Yes, well, between him and Gregory, we need to focus all our energies internally for the foreseeable future.”
“I can do both.”
“So what I hear you saying is you want to throw open our borders to hordes of people who have no skills and—”
“That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying Europe has a refugee crisis. The world has a refugee crisis. It’s not going to go away, and we—I—want to help.”
He glared at her.
She glared back.
It’s what Maman would have done.
She was being uncharacteristically bold tonight, but Marie didn’t quite have the guts to say that out loud.
She wondered if he heard her anyway.
Chapter Thirteen
“I can’t see the phone when you hold it like that.” Leo sounded peevish. He tried not to, but honestly, how was he supposed to copy Hair & There’s tutorial if he couldn’t see the damn phone?
Try to copy.
Leo was really bad at braids.
It shouldn’t be this hard, with his years of construction experience. What were braids but building with hair? But he’d never gotten the hang of it.
Gabby heaved an extremely put-upon-sounding sigh.
He held his hands up like he was being robbed. “Okay, let’s try again.”
“Forget it,” she snarked, letting his phone clatter to the dressing table she was seated at.
He closed his eyes. Started counting to ten in his head. He tried not to get into arguments with Gabby. She needed the stability of someone who supported her unconditionally. But sometimes she drove him batty. So, yeah, he was bad at even the most basic of French braids, forget the more elaborate creations she coveted. Dani sometimes reminded him that they were still siblings. Still family. “And what is family,” she said, “if not a bunch of people who annoy the hell out of you a large proportion of the time?”
He tried to comfort himself with Dani’s words, but really, the