Goddammit, how he wished he didn’t really mean it. Or if he did, how it could’ve been just some frolicking dungeon play before he carried her off to a fucking bench and buried himself, body and soul, inside her fiery heat. Or hell, even into a vanilla bedroom, where they could wrap themselves around each other for hours.
How he wished he was carrying her anywhere but back to a reality of harsh truths—and away from a cave of harsher ones.
A cave that was now overflowing with haunted house echoes.
Echoes that crawled, grisly and graphic, to surround them in the tunnel.
Male screams, begging for mercy.
Steel bolts, exploding one after another after another.
Hoarse rasps, of a human fighting for their last air—and their soul’s mercy.
The sounds of anyone’s death, even those of an asshole who’d bred chaos and fear for so long, weren’t easy to forget.
Unless there was a worse sound to drown it all out.
Like the mewls of a princess being overtaken by her own memories of the occasion.
“N-N-No. No. Please!”
And the wild thrashes of her bed sheets as she fought her way back to consciousness.
“D-D-Don’t,” Jayd mumbled into her pillow. At least that was what Brick assumed before pushing up from the floor next to her bed. Sure enough, his sights breached the mattress as his pixie rolled over, smashing her face deeper into the down cushion. “Trystan. N-N-Nooo. Stop it! Please! Stop it, or she will have to…”
“Jayd.”
“She will have to…but she cannot! She—she—”
“Jayd.” He raised up on his knees and gently nudged at her hunched shoulder—the same way he’d rocked her every night for the last week. “Sweet girl, wake up.”
When she only rolled onto her back, still thrashing at the covers and fighting at the dream, he leaned over and picked up one of her hands. As soon as he pressed a kiss over her knuckles, she started rousing.
“Brickham…”
“Right here.”
He pushed up until he sat next to her. This wasn’t exactly obeying her brothers’ rules about keeping his hands to himself from the air mattress on the floor, but it wasn’t snapping them clean either. It was middle ground—the perfect assignation for how everything had been for the last seven days.
The French troops had gone home, since all of them could account for their whereabouts during the estimated time of Trystan Carris’s mysterious murder. Zeke and Ethan were gone too, back to Mykonos after receiving glowing character endorsements from all three of the Arcadian princes.
But Brick’s clearance had been held up, for all the obvious reasons. Arcadia and France had an expedition treaty, so there was that. After the French authorities cleared him, there were all the questions from the island’s high council about how he knew where to find their princess so fast during the terrifying hours of Carris’s incursion. Though technically, by the time everything was over, she was no longer Princess Jayd. She was just Jayd Cimarron, newly de-crowned but very much alive. A true survivor.
Since then, questions had been flying at both of them on the daily. How much had Jayd known—or not—about her true lineage? How much did either of them know about what the Pura were going to do with that intel? How much did either of them know about Carris’s ultimate and astonishing plot twists?
Somehow, in a variety of miraculous ways, they managed to weather the storm. By day, they answered all the questions and attended all the hearings. By night, they laid low in Jayd’s suite and thanked her all-seeing Creator for the extra time they’d been gifted yet again.
So yeah…middle ground.
A holding pattern they were determined to savor, second by precious second.
Even these kinds of moments. The uncertain limbos in which his pixie hovered between the ordeal of her nightmares and the pain of her reality.
The seconds in which a gob of strange fears filled Brick as well. Shit that almost brought on the next-level crap. The lungs that refused to work. The mind that switched off. The attack from his own damn nervous system…
But then she opened her eyes, refocused her gaze, and really saw him. And smiled because of it.
And the world was right again.
“Well, hello there, Sir.”
He lifted her hand to his lips again. “Hello there yourself, beautiful.”
Her smile sobered when she glanced to the window, observing the moon and stars reflected by the calm ocean waters. “Damn it,” she whispered. “I did it again?”
Brick bent over, this time to tenderly take her lips. “You’re only one week post trauma, Pixie, with two significantly bruised ribs on top of it. It’ll take time for things to heal.”
A labored breath escaped her lips. It was just as much effort for her to swallow, as he saw when she rolled her head to the side. “But we are running out of time. You know it as well as I do. This is borrowed time, Maximillian. A wonderful dream for us…but a dream nonetheless.”
Brick scowled. He was beyond tempted to add a snarl, ordering her back from the fascinated fixation with the star-covered sky and the moonlight-drenched ocean. But damn it, he was as mesmerized by his view now. Or maybe that was a lame-ass excuse for his actual truth. For the straight-up he knew she’d just spoken, in so many words.
Still, he dipped over her a bit more and whispered, “What are you talking about, sweet girl?”
She flung her head back to center, which caused her thick black spikes to spread against the pillow. From his perspective, in the dim light of the room, the points looked like the tines of an elegant black crown.
They looked absolutely perfect.
She was the queen of the shadows.
Of his shadows.
She lifted a strangely quixotic smile. “Have you ever heard the story about the secret prince of France?”
Huh?
That one was easy enough to stow away before he replied, “Ermmm…no.” Not so easy to quell was the urge to stretch out next to her and then tuck in for some cozy spoonage as she relayed her royal tale.
“I thought perhaps you might have, since his name was also Maximillian,” she began. “He was born in the middle of the eighteenth century, supposably a bastard of King Louis the Fifteenth. But all of that was kept a secret from him at the order of Louis the Sixteenth, until the breakout of the Revolution in seventeen eighty-nine.”
“When the mob seized the records and went after him with the axes?”
His pathetic attempt at levity changed nothing about her faraway gaze. “Well, that was just the thing…”
“What? The mob or the axes?”
“Both,” she supplied. “But neither.”
He arched a brow. “Am I going to need a Schmoop study page for this?”
Again, she went on as if his jibe didn’t exist. “The peasants found his parents and brother with no problems. There are clear records of their executions.”
Well, there was a cue to sober things the hell up. “And the secret prince himself?” he asked quietly. “Where is he in all the records?”
“He…is not.”
She coupled that declaration by raising her gaze back to his. While Brick was eager to accept her offering, he felt like an alcoholic given an empty wine bottle. Her gaze was just as bleak, a shadow queen with no court, her aquas subdued to the shade of turquoise in the rain.