19. Kale

I was fallingin love with a prince.

Cursing myself the entire time I cleaned Christian up from the encounter over the top of my desk, I added some new personal insults for good measure while I watched him get dressed after a shower. He looked at home in my bedroom, and I found myself fighting back the unfairness of the whole thing. Christian wasn't the kind of man I should be developing feelings for. He was a goddamn prince of a foreign country and there was no life in that for us. I couldn't walk away from my friends and my family, and he couldn't escape the obligations of his title and his name.

"Do I look presentable?" he asked, undoing the top button of the short-sleeved button-up he'd just put on.

"More than," I assured him. "They've already met you anyway. You've made your first impression."

"I can't imagine it was a good one."

"I like you, so they'll like you."

I held out my hand to him and he walked easily into my waiting arms. Wrapping him up, I buried my nose in the dark tuft of his hair, breathing in the way my shampoo mixed with the residual of his styling product and committing it to memory. Christian rested his cheek against the front of my shoulder, and for a moment, everything was perfect. It was easy to pretend we were different people and there wasn't a deadline on our relationship.

He chuckled, giving his shoulders a little shrug until I let him free. "I don't know why it matters, to be honest."

"Why do you say that?"

"I'm leaving in a couple of days."

I rubbed at an itch on the side of my nostrils, knowing what he said was true, but hating it just the same.

"Are you ready?" I asked him instead of responding to the statement.

"As I'll ever be." Christian rolled his neck, giving it a crack before a soft mask of friendliness settled on his face. "My mind is going a mile a minute and my throat feels like…well…I don't know how to describe what's happening in my throat."

"The word you're looking for is well-fucked," I murmured, smoothing a hand down the front of my shirt to check for wrinkles.

"Right, well I don't think that's something I can say to your friends when they ask if I always sound this raspy." He cleared his throat and winked, inclining his head toward the door.

I knew we had to leave. We had this commitment with my friends, which was poor planning on my part. My time with Christian was beyond limited and I was far more inclined to tie him to my bed for the next two days and only let him up for food and water.

"It's the exact kind of thing you can say to my friends," I promised. "For better or worse, we're very open with each other."

He gave me a deadpan look. "You don't say."

I shoved him out of the door and he made a quick turn down the stairs to the main level of the house. I watched his ass bounce as he moved through my house like he'd been there for years, not hours.

"Idiot," I muttered under my breath.

Christian threw a look over his shoulder at me, brows knit. "What?"

"Nothing."

I grabbed my wallet, phone, and keys from the table beside the door and then made sure everything was situated in my pockets.

"Do you have a scarf in your bag?" I asked, pulling my coat off the hook.

"I didn't quite pack for myself," he reminded me. "Or for America."

I pulled another of my coats off the hook and passed it to him, then one of the many cashmere scarfs sent by my parents. My coat was a little large around the shoulders on him, but something about seeing Christian in my clothes, even if it was only outerwear, sent a flare of ownership straight up my spine. If he hadn't been studying me with such an intense watchfulness, I would have smashed my face into the wall to clear my head of the intrusive thoughts.

"Is this more to your liking, Mr. Sheffield?" Christian smirked, tying a loose knot with the scarf at the base of his throat.

"Don't patronize me or you'll find out just how much my friends and I like to share," I warned.

The comment should have been out of line, so far out of bounds and beyond anything he and I had ever talked about before. But when I snapped my mouth closed, Christian's nostrils flared and his cheeks flushed. My hand was still against the fringe of the borrowed scarf and I wound it around my fist, pulling him against my chest.

"Did you like the idea of that?" I asked, dropping a kiss against the corner of his mouth.

"It's daunting."

"But?"

"You've shown me so many things already," Christian said quietly, almost shy. "I wouldn't be surprised to find out it's exactly the kind of thing I liked."

"I'm not going to share you with them." I kissed my way up the angle of his jaw until his ear was against my mouth. I nipped his earlobe and he moaned, arching into me like our bodies were made to be pressed together in that exact way. "But I'm not against telling them how pretty you look when you come."

"I'm about to come again," he whimpered, shoving me away from him and sucking in the largest breath I'd ever seen. "Please open the front door so I can get some air or I might combust on the spot."

"How are you so perfect?"

"Years of thoughtful breeding," he said, reaching past me and twisting the doorknob when I didn't do as he'd asked.

A cool gust of fall air blew into the entry, and Christian was out in the front garden before I could blink. The fresh air helped enough to clear my head, as well. To remind me that the only thing to come from keeping him sexed up and tied down in my bedroom for his whole stay would be broken hearts for both of us.

"Oh, lovely," a familiar voice said from my front gate.

I looked past Christian to find Ford and Brooks together on the sidewalk.

"What are you doing here?" I asked, locking the door and coming to stand beside Christian. He reached for my hand, and I happily threaded our fingers together. Ford's stare flickered down to our joined hands, but besides a twitch at the corner of his left eye, he didn't say a word.

"We figured—" Ford started, only to be interrupted.

"He figured."

"I figured," Ford corrected, "that it was going to take the jaws of life to pry your cock out of your new favorite foreign dignitary and I wasn't interested in missing our dinner reservations."

"Did you bring the fire department?" I asked, pretending to look around for a man in uniform who'd been prepared to separate Christian and me from each other.

"Just some Crisco." Ford patted the pocket of his coat. "Worst case, I would have lubed you up until you slid apart and fell onto the floor."

"Very thoughtful," Christian muttered, giving my hand a squeeze.

"Can we please get going?" Brooks gestured toward the corner. "I'm starving."

Christian and I joined them on the sidewalk, walking behind. Ford chattered on mindlessly about a whole array of things I didn't care enough to ask for clarification on, but as soon as we were divested of our outerwear and seated at the restaurant, he turned his sights onto Christian.

"So, we hear you're a prince."

"Which one of you helped stage the kidnapping?" Christian asked, amusement coloring the cadence of his voice.

"That was definitely me." Ford grinned. "Ford Carlisle, in case you forgot."

"I'm Christian Davenport-Spencer," he said, tilting his head to the side.

"Prince of…?"

"Princess," I corrected. Christian reached under the table and dug his fingernails into my thighs.

Brooks' mouth twitched in the corner. "Cute."

"I very much like that I'm not a prince here," Christian told Ford.

"I wasn't aware it was something you could take off like a coat."

"Don't start," I warned.

"I'm just getting to know your friend," Ford said, throwing a look at me before focusing back on Christian.

"You can't get mad," Brooks said. "This is how you treated Beamer's husband."

I scoffed, the protest already tasting like a lie in the back of my throat. "No it's not."

"It is," Ford agreed, flagging down a waitress and ordering a round of drinks for the four of us.

"I was nowhere near as insulting as you've managed to be."

"He's fine," Christian promised. "I've verbally sparred with men far more competent at the sport than him."

Brooks barked out a laugh, and I reached to my side, taking Christian's face into my hands and kissing him wet and hard against the mouth. He let out a surprised little sound, but quickly melted into me. His lips parted enough for my tongue to sneak past for a taste, and the moan he breathed into my mouth rattled me down to my bones.

"I like him," Brooks said. The waitress brought our drinks and he raised his glass for a toast. "To Kale's smart-mouth princess."

Christian did a royal-looking little swirl with his hand and dipped his head in a sort of bow, then raised his glass and clinked it against Brooks' drink. I joined my glass with theirs, and Ford, finally made the fourth.

"So," Brooks sipped his drink and leaned back in his seat. "Tell me how the two of you met."

"It was a very dramatic kidnapping," Christian started to explain, and I smacked the side of his arm. He laughed and leaned toward me, affection rolling off of him in waves. "I'd just snuck out of the ballet and I ran right into your friend here. He kissed me senseless, took me to a sex club, and then a rather posh hotel for the night."

"The rest is history," I finished.

Christian chuckled and I admired his profile while he fell into an easy conversation with Brooks that didn't involve me in the slightest. He was handsome and animated. He was engaging, and it came as easy as breathing. I didn't know Christian well, but I'd watched him talk to Niko and I'd seen him talk to me. With Brooks, he wasn't pretending. He was being honest and real, and that understanding only served to push me deeper into the realm of feelings that weren't going to do me any favors.

"You're fucked," Ford murmured under his breath.

I inhaled slowly through my teeth, groaning before I angled myself away from Christian so I could talk to Ford without breaking up the conversation at the other end of the table. Christian's hand was still on my thigh, his fingers less tense than before.

"I know."

"Are you going to pack up like Beamer did and leave us too?" Ford arched a brow, the words sounding much more like a taunt than a question.

"I'm not absconding to a foreign nation," I assured him.

"What next, then?"

I swallowed, looking at Christian. He laughed at something Brooks said, and I wished I had an answer.

"I don't know," I admitted. "Nothing good, though."

"Yeah." Ford exhaled heavily. "I hate to say this, but you should call Beamer. This is right up his alley."

"Dalton Fox isn't a prince," I said.

Our missing fifth friend had gotten married in college, then promptly forgot his husband existed. They'd reconnected fifteen years later and apparently there'd been something to the initial pairing worth remembering. Beamer—or Carter Royce IV, as his parents knew him, Ivey as his husband called him—and Dalton had ended up in Los Angeles when all was said and done.

"He's not," Ford agreed. "Still I can't help but think there are similarities here."

"Beamer isn't going to want to talk to me about Dalton."

"Not until you offer up a proper apology to his husband, no." Ford's eyes sparkled as he studied me over the rim of his drink.

"I've apologized."

"You reached a tentative agreement on the counsel of overbearing assholes," he said.

"That's rich, considering how you just talked to Christian."

"Your own medicine and all that," he said, waving me off. "I'm only saying that I think Beamer andhis husband would have some advice you might find useful."

"This isn't anything serious," I grumbled. Much like earlier, the words tasted like poison on my tongue.

Ford's mouth twisted into a frown and he shook his head, attention drifting to Brooks and Christian at the other side of the table, engaged in conversation like they were the longtime friends and we were the newcomers.

"You've never lied to me before, Sheffield," Ford warned. "Don't start now."