The King’s Innocent Bride

Beautiful pink rose bushes line the stone driveway up to the font. I can’t pull my eyes away from how perfect it looks. It almost doesn’t look real. When the van door opens, I step out without being asked. I want to take a close look. Guards stand along the stairs that lead up to two enormous doors that have to be over thirty feet tall. They are standing wide open, and like an invisible thread is pulling me, I start to walk up the stairs. One of the guards follows in step beside me. When I get to the doors, I pause for a moment when my feet hit white marble swirled with gold traces. My feet move again, the thread pulling me close to something.

I raise my head a little and still when my eyes alight on a throne in front of me. A man is sitting it in, his imposing frame dominating the room. There is really a king. I’d heard people talk about him before, but for some reason like the castle, it hadn’t felt real. I don’t come from a land of kings and queens. The closest I’d ever gotten was pretending to be a princess when I was a little girl.

Even from this far away, I can tell he’s big. Even bigger than the guards. It’s almost comical, guarding a man who is so much larger than them.

“Move,” the guard barks, pushing me forward. This time I’m not so lucky. My feet tangle in the long hood I have on and I fall forward. I feel the guard’s hand lock around my arm, pulling me back to my feet in one quick movement. I scream out in pain at the hard jerk. My hood falls back and my hair comes undone, falling all around me as I get to my feet. The guard quickly releases me.

“It’s a girl?” He says it like a question.

The room falls silent.

Chapter Two

James

“Why are we here?” John, my main guard and best friend since I could walk, asks me. He looks as bored as I feel right now. I shrug. “Liar,” he throws back at me, cocking a smile.

We both know why I’m here. It’s an excuse to get out of breakfast with my mom—a breakfast that I knew would once again involve her pushing me to find a bride. For last breakfast she invited me to, she’d also invited thee woman in hopes that I would fall madly in love on the spot. Now it seems like every time I see her she had some single woman with her, and avoiding my mom has now become a game of chess.

Falling in love on the spot is the fucking stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of, but I keep that thought to myself. I don’t want to hurt my mom’s feelings.

I love my mom and tried to smile though breakfast, keeping my manners in check as best I could, but things got heated when the woman realized my mom had invited them each with the hopes that I would fall in love with one of them. Some men might get off on three women fighting over them. It just gave me a fucking headache.

I hadn’t cared for any of them. I’d later made the mistake of telling my mom I was thinking of asking someone out already. That’s why I ended up leaving so abruptly. It was a lie, but I was hoping it would get her off my back for a little. I was dead wrong. Now she calls me every day trying to find out who this mystery woman was. My plan is biting me in my own ass. She’s even been trying to get it out of John, asking him who the object of my “secret crush” is. He has no idea. Because there isn’t anyone.

This morning I’d jumped all over canceling breakfast with her when I’d gotten word that someone had been trespassing near the castle’s south wall. Normally I would have let someone else handle it, but I used the excuse to get out of breakfast.

Now here we are waiting for the man and young boy who committed the crime. I’ve already been told it was nothing major. The man was only chasing after his son, who was trying to run away. Still it had piqued my interest a little and now I want to know why the boy had been running away to begin with.

“Can’t you pick a bride already?” John sighs, almost too dramatically. He’s just as annoyed about the whole thing as I am. He got married a few months back and his wife has been pestering him about it, too. Something about double dates and so on, another thing I have no interest in. I have a country to run. Seeing some of the changes in John over the past few months after finding his wife, however, has made me long for something more than work every day. I know they’re trying for a baby. I’ve never given much thought to having children before.