Royal Bastard (Instantly Royal 1)

“Good, because I like you, Nick Vane, but I love my sister.”

And there it was, the thing he couldn’t give Brooke, not now, not ever—that sense of permanence. He didn’t know jack shit about forever except that it was a lie. Everyone leaves, so why bother trying to pretend otherwise? Brooke believed that following the rules meant success, she believed right triumphed over wrong, she believed that forever wasn’t a fairy tale—even if she wouldn’t admit it to herself, let alone him. If she didn’t, she never would have been making all this effort to bring Bowhaven back to what it had been and push it toward what it could be. And he would be nothing but a sometimes visitor to that world. It was all he knew—that was all he could ever be—because he knew better than anyone else that forever was nothing but a cruel promise that wasn’t any more real than Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella.

The shrill squeak of feedback over a loudspeaker made him flinch before he could respond to Daisy’s threat.

“All zombies report to the great hall,” a woman in a baseball cap armed with a bullhorn said as she walked through the crowd of the undead.

Riley tapped Daisy’s shoulder and she stopped giving Nick the I-will-fuck-your-world glare to turn an adoring gaze onto her new boyfriend.

“We’ve got to go,” he said, once she was turned to him and could read his lips.

She nodded, and a huge smile broke out on her face. “Let’s go eat some brains.”

Riley laughed and they walked off together until they were a part of the undead horde streaming into Dallinger Park.

That left Nick alone to watch the controlled chaos that was a film shoot. It was a lot like baseball. Hours of boredom broken up by a flurry of activity, screams, and cursing. He scanned the area for Brooke, but she wasn’t with the skinny guy anymore. Not by the entrance to the big house. Not on his side of the do-not-cross line. After a few minutes, he finally spotted her deep in discussion with Mace. Her hand was on his forearm and their heads close together as they looked at a monitor showing what was going on inside the great hall.

He’d known Mace for his entire adult life and a good number of years before that. In all that time, he’d never wanted to strangle him. Of course, that was before he saw his oldest friend give Brooke the smile that usually led to a game of: Panties? What panties?

Every muscle in his body was strung tight as he watched them, willing himself not to give in to the urge to pound his friend into the ground. Then Mace turned his head toward Nick and shot him a nothing-going-on-between-you-huh? grin behind Brooke’s back. The asshole. He must have seen Nick approaching and decided to poke the bear. Nick flipped his friend off. Mace just shrugged and turned back toward the monitor Brooke was engrossed with, but this time letting some sunshine—if this country actually had some—between their bodies.

Shit. He needed to dial back this…whatever the fuck it was. He wasn’t the guy. He wasn’t just the one everyone left. He took off, too. He’d walked away from every girlfriend he’d ever had since he’d kissed Jenna Hoffman in sixth grade at the middle school dance. Staying wasn’t in his DNA. And he was leaving soon for Virginia anyway, to get his life in order for the six-month split between there and here.

Of course, that didn’t make him want to

touch her any less, and that was the part that had him walking a thin line. He was the wrong man for her and he still wanted her anyway. Badly. More than he should.

“There you are,” Brooke said, a huge smile on her face as she crossed under the rope cordoning off the no-go zone and over to him. “I was wondering where you’d run off to.”

Standing close enough that the hum of electricity between them practically buzzed in his ears, she reached up and picked off invisible lint from his shirt as if she couldn’t help but touch him. Without thinking, he took her hand in his, the rightness of her fingers being intertwined with his setting off sparks of awareness and a lightning bolt of realization. He didn’t just want her. He was falling for her. And as she looked up at him, desire burning in her blue eyes as she parted her lips expectantly, he knew the last thing she needed in her life—even temporarily—was a man with his kind of baggage.

A better man would have walked away right then. Nick wasn’t a better man. Instead, he gave in to the urge to make Brooke his, dipped his head lower, and claimed her mouth in a kiss that promised everything he couldn’t deliver. He put everything he had into it, all the yearning and bittersweet wanting and tomorrows they couldn’t have. It wasn’t gentle or nice or teasing. It was delicious agony, and he never wanted it to end.

He never heard the other man approaching. It wasn’t until the flash went off and the man hollered “oi” that Nick realized the rest of the world still existed. Drugged on this kiss and denial, Nick broke away from Brooke enough to figure out what was going on. His gut sank.

The man was in a T-shirt and jeans, a press badge clipped to his shirt. “Never thought I’d catch Reggie’s uptight ex like this,” the man said. “Who’s the chap, Brooke? Is this to get back at Reggie? Still holding out hope he’ll come back now that he broke it off with the prime minister’s daughter?”

He took another couple of shots as Nick’s brain tried to catch up. As soon as it did, he leaped back from Brooke and reached for the photographer, but the other man slipped away, disappearing into a second wave of zombies milling around waiting for their time on camera.

“Oh no,” Brooke said, seeming to shrink into herself as he watched. “Please not again.”

…

Whoever was answering pleas that week wasn’t taking calls, though. The first photos had appeared online on soccer gossip sites that night and rehashed Brooke’s experience with that dickhead Reggie as if she hadn’t been hot enough to hold on to what they called a footballer. Nick had never read something so ridiculous in his entire life.

“They’re jerks,” he said, snapping closed her laptop that sat on the kitchen table in the stable house the next morning.

She took a drink of tea from her mug, then let out a long, weary sigh. “Why did this have to happen just when everyone was starting to look at me as if I had something to offer Bowhaven, as if I could be taken seriously?”

“I take you seriously.”

She snorted in a very un-Lady-Lemons-like way. “You just want to get in my knickers.”

“True.” He grinned. “But don’t worry, this will blow over and it’ll only be a blip compared to all you bring to this place. The people in Bowhaven know that.”

If only that had been the case. By the time Mace and the last movie people were packing up two days later, there were scummy little reporters and photographers everywhere in Bowhaven. Someone on the crew—Mace didn’t know who—had let it slip exactly who Brooke had been caught kissing. And that’s all it had taken for the photos and the speculation to move from the obscure soccer gossip sites to national news. Everyone wanted to get a piece of the American who was a rich inventor and would be the Earl of Englefield. The one he’d given to Mr. Darcy to shred in his doggie way had the headline “From American Love Child to English Earl.”

“Oh, not this twat again,” Riley muttered when a blowhard appeared on the TV in the fish and chip shop where the two were having lunch.