Page 19 of Go Luck Yourself (Royals and Romance #2)

“Loch, I’ve seen your studio before. I don’t know why the blindfold is necessary for—”

“Would you hush?” He positions me in the center of the room. “Christ, you’re the son of Santy, you should be better at taking gifts than—”

I snort.

He pauses in front of me, adjusting where I’m facing. “Eh?”

“I forgot that’s what you call him here. And, technically, Coal is not my dad.”

Loch’s quiet a moment.

Then he rips my hands around to press them firmly against the small of my back and oh. Oh.

“I might’ve misread what was happening here.” Despite how many times we’ve made each other fall apart since his coronation last night, I immediately rub against his body.

He chuckles. “Nah, boyo, this is nothing sexual, but if you keep tryna distract me, I won’t use this blindfold for all the plans I had for it later. ”

I whine. “Later?”

He growls. “Keep it in your pants.”

“Oh, yeah, who woke who up this morning under the blankets with a—”

“That’s hardly my fault.” A rush of heat topples down the side of my throat from his exhale. “You looked too goddamn tempting laid out naked in my bed.”

I stumble, but he’s holding me, arms restrained, the suit I wore yesterday stretching between us.

I don’t even remember why we’re down here.

He nips at my jaw. “We are na gonna be late for that treaty signing of yours. You’re gonna be good and proper about accepting this gift I have for you, then—shite, ya pervert, behave.”

I’d been rubbing my hard-on against him. I stop with an eye roll he can’t see.

“Good boy.” He pecks my mouth and I fight down another whine. “Now, I was saying—you’ll accept this gift and then we’ll go to Christmas all composed and respectful, because I will na have your brother hating me for much longer.”

“We can be late for the treaty signing. Coal would appreciate us making a dramatic entrance.”

“All your brother associates me with is dramatics. I’m aiming to be downright dull for the foreseeable future.”

“Being dull is not how you’ll get Coal to like you.”

“If it means proving I can be a steady force for you, I’ll take my chances. Now, hold on. Do na move.”

He steps away and I sigh in feigned exasperation. But I’m grinning too much, I don’t think I’ve stopped since the library.

“He’ll see how happy you make me,” I say to the air in front of me. “He’ll only torture you a little bit. Most of it will likely be payback for how I— oh my god. ”

“What?” Loch’s over by the far wall, but I hear him take a worried step closer to me.

An evil smile curls across my face. “The way I’ve bonded with Coal’s boyfriend is by torturing each other. Or, to be fair, he tortures me, and I figured out a way to get back at him that I spaced on until this moment.”

Something drags across the floor. A tarp falls.

“I’m afraid I’m na following,” Loch says.

“You want my brother to like you.”

“Yeah?”

“Do you think you could paint realistic-looking gore?”

Loch lets out a small, “The fuck?”

“Coal’s boyfriend is, apparently, squeamish. So if you could paint my neck to look like it’s been slashed, he’d hopefully freak out. Help me torment Hex, and Coal will see that that’s the way to get along with you too.” Okay, I’m starting to see the holes in my plan. “This is foolproof, I assure you.”

Loch walks closer, the drop cloth crinkling under the dress boots I know he’s wearing, and he lays a kiss on my cheek. “Despite how enticing you’re making this sound, I think I might pass on this plan. But I promise, boyo, the moment I’ve earned back you and your brother’s trust, my painting skills are yours to torture whoever you’d like.” He pauses. “Keep Hex first in line, though. All that rubbish he was going on about, giving credit for Irish Halloween to England. Fucking England. Bloody dope.”

I squint. It’s lost under the blindfold. “We met because you went to a university in England.”

Loch is quiet for a beat again. “No one’s perfect, boyo.”

He moves behind me, but I grab his arm, tilting my head towards him.

“I do trust you,” I whisper.

It’s hard not seeing him, but easier in some ways too. With one sense dulled, I hear the warble in my voice like a clanging bell, and I wonder if Loch hears it, too.

I think I trust him about as much as I trust myself, both connections tentative and so newborn.

He kisses my cheek again, but leaves his lips there, holding, breathing me in until I lean against him. “It’s all right, Kris,” he murmurs. “You will. Word by word, eh?”

I smile, rubbing the side of my face against his beard. “You’re going to throw my own words back at me a lot, aren’t you?”

He laughs. It sounds… nervous? “You have no idea.”

He pulls off the blindfold.

My eyes blink open, adjusting quickly to the light of his studio.

There’s a canvas leaning against the wall. It’s just over his height, an explosion of red and gold with touches of emerald and neon green.

I take a single step forward, guided to it in an unconscious draw, all the banter going loose in my chest.

It’s us. In that style of his, abstract swaths of color that braid together into an optical illusion of cohesion. He’s kissing my neck and my head is thrown back and it isn’t anything overtly sexual, but it rips through me in a typhoon, sensuality hanging in each bent stroke, in every drip of gold.

Loch comes around me as I step again, hypnotized.

“I, uh—see the spaces around you, eh?”

His voice shakes. He is nervous.

I bend closer and the breath evaporates right out of my lungs.

He didn’t just use paint strokes to create me. He used words, lines from—oh my god, lines from the books I gave him, and lines from that letter to my mom I showed him.

“It’s what I started on the night you came down, after Belfast,” he says. “And I kept on it. Hoping I’d get to show it to you.”

I stand up straight, throat thickening.

“I used that letter you showed me”—he’s stammering now—“and you left it in the guest room, and I—”

“Oh.” Blood rushes to my face. I left all of my writing in that guest room. Including the flowery, indulgent stuff I wrote about him.

Loch holds up his hands. “I did na read any but the letter you showed me already. Not for lack of wanting, mind. But I only used that letter.” He waves at the painting. “It’s meant to be all of you, because that’s what I want. All of you, even the messy bits. And if, one day, you want me to read the rest of what you wrote, or show me that story of yours”—I told him last night, one of the breaks between touching and kissing and devouring—“I’ll add words from that, too. We can build on this. Together.”

Every muscle in my body is gilded and heavy. I look back up at the painting, can’t get myself to break out of this incandescent spell.

“Kris,” Loch whispers. “Say something.”

I smile at him.

The strain in his eyes alleviates and he breathes out a sigh, and I realize he was afraid I’d be upset. Or afraid I wouldn’t like it. Or this painting is a piece of his soul now, and he’s showing it to me, and I’m part of that soul.

Every reason is at once equally unbelievable. I’m stuck in a dream state, suspended between him and this painting and this is somehow real, that he would see me, in all these pieces, and find a way to make those broken pieces beautiful.

I kiss him, throwing my arms around his neck, his body immediately fitting to mine in a way that feels like locking in place.

“We’re going to be late,” I inform him. “Like, really late.”

“No, we are not. ” Loch manages to push me off of him. “I’ll win Coal over, you’ll see. And it will na involve torturing him with gory paint.”

“Of course it won’t. Coal’s not the squeamish one.” I wriggle past his grip and kiss his jaw. “But you should’ve thought of that before you showed me this painting. You cannot expect me to go to some treaty signing now. To sit in a ballroom and pretend I’m not slowly dying with wanting your cock in me.”

I’m not playing fair. He’s an expert at dirty talk, but it turns out he likes it just as much, maybe even more, when I talk dirty too.

Proven by the way I can feel his body temperature increase, his hands clenching tighter on my hips.

I suck at a spot below his ear. “And fuck, Loch,” I moan licentiously. “I want it so bad. Need to feel you plunging into me again. Owning me. Need you to make me scream.”

Loch grunts, choked. “Kris— shite —no, no, we’re leaving. Now. ”

I whimper overdramatically, but he gets me to walk for the door.

“Devil man,” he mutters, one hand wrapped around my forearm, steering me ahead of him while he adjusts himself.

I laugh. Bright and happy.

“The question is”—I glance back at that painting—“where are we going to hang that?”

Out in the hall, the chill air has me leaning into him.

Loch threads our hands together. “Oh, the foyer,” he says matter-of-factly.

“Yeah, sure, us making out is a totally respectable thing for any visitor to see when they first enter your castle. No way. That painting’s for me. ”

Loch’s cheeks go red, highlighting his freckles. “You like it, then?”

I stop. He faces me, and I can see the residual tremors of him worrying what I’d think.

“I love it,” I whisper. “Really, Loch. I—” My chest constricts. “You see me,” is all I can think to put words to.

He grins, a deep, reverberant sort of pleased, and kisses my forehead. “I was na sure how you’d feel about the words I chose. I told you once—there is no greater measure of value than what you give to a piece of art. And I’ve come to mean that in a bit of a different way. There is no value greater than what you have for me.”

I weigh the ramifications that’ll come if I miss the signing of the winter Holidays treaty. Like yes, it would be a huge snub—but god, what am I supposed to do when he says and does stuff like this? How can I not want to shirk every other goddamn responsibility and lose myself in him?

For the first time in my life, I don’t feel any guilt about wanting to give in to those thoughts. It wouldn’t destroy my worth, or my purpose, or who I am. I’d still be all the parts of me that Loch painted in his studio, words and mess and color and chaos and, most important, loved.

It’s a work in progress. But all the best things are.

He takes a step away from me, lips pursed in amusement.

“But,” he starts, “I mostly was na sure what you would think of that line on the bottom.”

“The line on the—” I look back at the studio. What was on the bottom?

“The first line of poetry you spoke to me. You do na remember?”

He takes another step backwards, his smirk cunning.

“I don’t—”

“It was about ‘ breaching the agreed upon social constructs of the Spacefinder app. ’” He puts air quotes around it. “Pure poetry. I fell in love with you on the spot.”

My eyes slowly widen. “You did not put that shit on our painting!”

Loch shrugs, but he’s smiling so wide I know he very well fucking did.

“You asshole!” I dive after him, and he races up the hall, laugh ing, but he shuts up once I catch him in the stairwell and kiss the hell right out of him.

But I’m laughing, too. I’m laughing and he presses me against the cold stone wall of his castle. It should be such a mundane thing now, kissing him, but I know, god do I know, that it’ll never stop feeling new and thrilling and vital.

That’s the real happy ending I always wrote about—no big, sweeping orchestral situations, no constant churn of drama and emotion.

Just this.

Lips and tongues and his hips against mine.

Just him, over and over, unfolding into a meandering, uncertain path that ripples far off into the distance.

A happy ever after that we make together.