Royal Recruit - Susan Grant Page 0,35

New Zealand with some pretty extreme runs. I board too so I know.”

“Can you get me and my friends down there? No extras,” he added, winking at the model, “just us. There’s eight—eight guys.”

“When?”

“Say, in about three hours. I gotta put in a little more face time at this shindig.” Tabs had put the event’s cost at over eighty million. Million! It was the least he could do.

“I’ll have a helicopter on the roof at 1:00 a.m. It’ll get you to the airport. My personal jet will take you and your friends from there.”

Jared thanked the “anonymous” Oscar-winning donor and hung up. Then he climbed out of the sports car to share the good news.

Forty hours later, Jared sank his aching body deep in a leather recliner in front of a massive rock fireplace and held an ice pack on his knee. He didn’t know whose ski chalet they’d borrowed, but it was damn nice. He brought a beer bottle to his lips. Only the Steinlager label reminded him he was in New Zealand. Everything else reminded him of a typical winter weekend spent boarding.

Days he’d never have again.

Jared tipped more beer into his mouth. Wouldn’t do to get too morbid. Time was fleeting. He’d been fighting that sense for the past two days. Every time he let down his guard or got sober enough, it came back.

Paco pondered him from the couch. He sat hunched forward, his arms propped on his legs, a Steinlager dangling from one hand. “I know leaving your family and everyone here has got you down, but look at the positives.”

“Like?”

Paco searched for something to say. “Like your wife.”

Jared winced. “Careful. We were going to avoid the W word, remember?”

“She’s hot. If nothing else, at least you have that to look forward to.”

Paco had a point. What often got lost in the shock of his impending life change was the fact that he’d be sleeping with a sexy, beautiful woman…and for the rest of his life. Not too bad, that aspect of it all.

“Revrokk sebah,” he murmured. “Loosely translated—hot babe…in her language.” By now he was speaking the Queen’s tongue fluently—accented, but fluently. Soon he’d know her tongue pretty damn intimately too. And every other part of her.

He imagined Keira as she’d appeared the first time he’d seen her, on-screen, whirling on him with that shock, outrage and delight in her eyes. He remembered the high color in her cheeks, her sleek grace, and a surge of sexual anticipation ran through him.

Sleeping with Keira was something he looked forward to—on a basic, raw, male level. It wouldn’t be lovemaking at first. He didn’t know her, nor did he love her, but that was a situation of her design, not his. Sex with her would be based on mutual pleasure, not love. She needn’t worry; he had every intention of giving as good of a time as he got.

“I didn’t think I’d see you smiling after only one beer.” Gilligan limped in to join them, leaving everyone else in the huge hot tub nursing aches and pains from a day on the slopes. They’d never been a bunch to hold anything back. They took the experience full-on, like flying, like everything else.

Gilligan had joked, but the relief in his friend’s eyes at his smile shone bright. Jared shrugged. “Let’s just say that I’m trying to focus on the, ah, more positive personal aspects of this situation.”

Indeed he was. Keira may have forced him into this, but sooner or later, he was going to even up the game.

Chapter Eleven

“Prince Jared, there is no need for you to remain awake at this time. We’re well out of range of your planetary system—nothing more to see—and we still have a full standard day’s journey ahead.”

Standard Coalition days ran about twenty-five percent longer than an Earth day. With the light-years they were traveling, for the trip to be that quick was a miracle.

“We’re about to enter the first of a series of wormholes—shortcuts through space,” the pilot explained. “There will be three in total. The last drops us off a short distance, astronomically speaking, from the holy world of Sakka. The Goddess Keep,” he added with reverence.

The Goddess Keep, huh? Jared hadn’t heard anyone refer to the queen’s planet that way, but this was his first interaction with regular, everyday people of the Coalition. They worshipped Keira as a deity. He hadn’t realized how much so until now.

“That said, Your Highness, this journey will be much more pleasant if you