Chapter 21

Flora

Just when I think everything is about to get better, it all gets worse.

Mother and Father refuse to give Torben and Hailey their blessing and instead try to push the lovely but extremely uptight beer heiress on him.

Torben and Hailey secretly marry with the help of Callum, my brothers, and me.

If that’s not enough, Torben abdicates. Which means all eyes are on Etienne to marry poor Kala, who he hates with the fire of a thousand suns.

Which makes me third in the line of succession instead of fourth.

What’s worse, Sigurd has now disappeared.

Everyone is jumpy. My mother recruits Callum to find Sigurd, his best friend.

“The two of you are two peas in a pod. If anyone knows where to find my son, it’s you,” the queen says at breakfast one morning.

The table is set for a family of six, but it’s only the queen, me, and Callum. Torben and Hailey are on their honeymoon. Etienne is locked in his chambers with a fully stocked bar. The king is off somewhere, probably sulking alone in the library, still smarting from the spectacle of Torben’s unexpected abdication.

“Callum, sit,” I tell him. “Have breakfast with us.”

Surely, Mother will not want all this food to go to waste. And it’s a test to see how highly the queen esteems him. Maybe if she gets to know him as a person and not a staff member, she’ll accept him as a son-in-law someday.

Mother casts a withering glance at me, then turns back to Callum. “She’s a sweet girl with excellent manners, but between the search for Sigurd and all your other responsibilities, I’m sure there’s no time for dawdling with us.”

Callum nods politely and offers me a tight grin before bowing to us both and exiting the breakfast room.

That’s my answer. Callum and I are never going to be accepted as a couple.

Sigurd phones me one afternoon while I’m on my morning run with Uther.

This time, I’m not planning to ditch the oversized bodyguard. There’s no point, since Callum is who knows where, busy tracking down Sigurd, which has taken some of the pressure off of Uther. “Where are you?!”

“If I tell you, I’d have to kill you,” Sigurd jokes.

My brother is hilarious. “Haha. Seriously.”

“Keeping a low profile until all this wedding bullshit blows over.”

I promise not to tell anyone, but he doesn’t budge. I try to ply him with a guilt trip over the fact that everyone’s eyes are on me now that Torben has abdicated, Etienne is still a fuck up and nobody can find brother number three.

But he sounds like a man ready to give up everything if a woman is willing to do the job.

“Do you want to be queen?”

I love my brother, but this is not the response I need right now.

“Sig, I’ve never given it a single thought.”

“Kind of hard to fly under the radar with you being the most photogenic of the entire family,” he says. Oh great, now he’s trying flattery.

I tell him he’s being extremely unhelpful and he gives me a half-assed offer to return home.

He doesn’t want to come back.

“I know you and Etienne don’t get along, but maybe it would help if you would come to the wedding.”

“Flora.”

“You fucking officiated Torben’s wedding,” I remind him.

He informs me of what I already know: Etienne’s wedding to Kala is a sham. I remind him that almost all royal marriages are low-key arranged in our little kingdom.

This seems like a good time to tell him about Callum and me. It would be the perfect reason for him to come home, either for good reasons or bad. Maybe he’ll be upset with Callum, or perhaps he won’t.

“We’d better hang up the phone before the palace figures out where I am,” he says.

Interesting. That would bring Sigurd home and free Callum of some responsibilities.

“How would they figure that out?”

“Depending on how bad things get, security could find the tower my phone is pinging to.”

Wow. Thanks for telling me exactly how to get you home, big brother.

I hang up the phone and consider flagging down Uther, who keeps his pace about thirty meters behind me while I’m on the phone.

Or maybe I’ll wait it out.

Maybe Etienne will surprise everyone. And I can buy Callum and me some more time.