Page 1 of Kings of Sherwood

Prologue

Rob

Igot a bone to pick with happily ever after.

Here’s how the stories usually go. There’s a bunch of back and forth and back and forth until there’s some big showdown, right? The bad guys put up a fight, but the good guys give ‘em a good licking. The good guys win, like they always do.

But then what?

They never tell you.

That’s the thing. They never tell you what happens next, and that’s the whole damn problem. Because it can’t just be that simple. It can’t just behappily ever after‘cause one or two individuals of ‘em got mowed down.

Because the bad guys aren’t just bad guys with evil in them from the jump, right? They’re not just a bunch of dudes with a shitty attitude and an ax to grind. No, they gotmadebad, somehow. Something bigger got them that way, something that doesn’t just go away when the good guys turn them into grease spots, something that’s everywhere and nowhere at once and that doesn’t disappear with the snap of your fingers.

I know because I figure—Iknow—with a few more wrong turns? I could’ve been a bad guy too. I’m not rotten to my core, but that doesn’t matter. That’s not what makes a bad guy bad.

And yes, sure, technically I’m still a criminal—we all are—but it’s not the same thing and you know it.

Now I ain’t going to say I’m any kind of white knight. I don’t want to be one, don’t have a bone in my body that wants to play the hero and get the glory, and I mean it. Say what you will aboutmy ego—and it’s plenty healthy—I don’t do what I do just to get some ticker-tape parade down the streets of Nottingham. I’m just fine operating out in the wild. Doing what I can, for who I can. I don’t have any more designs on life than that.

But I do have a girl I’d kill for—have killed for.

And I’d do it again.

If that’s what it took to give her a happily ever after?

I’d burn this whole place to the ground.

But I sure damn hope it won’t come to that.

Chapter One

Will

Iswear, nothing can ever be peaceful in this damn house.

It’s God knows how early, I’m sleeping alone (to my slight dismay), and I’d literallyjuststaved off insomnia when my bedroom door flies open and slams against the wall with a crack.

I sit up in bed, fire flaring in my veins, the instinct to shift clawing at me.

Down, boy.

Because it’s not an attacker. It’s not a sleepy, beautiful girl here to slip into my sheets after having a nightmare, either—andthatthought stirs a different instinct in me.

Again:down, boy.

No, it’s just some redheaded bastard waking me from my beauty sleep.

“The fuck?” I croak.

Rob grins. “Good morning to you, too.” He flops onto my bed. “Glad you’re awake.”

“I’m not,” I say, as he flops—uninvited—onto my bed. “Oh, by all means, come on in.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” His grin widens, and I feel my heart squeeze—among other things.

Maybe it’s from spending my formative sexual years at all-boys prep schools, or maybe I’m just such a slave to the white-hot lust that seems to come with being part fire-breathing beast that I’ll fuck anyone of any gender, but at this point, it’d behopeless to deny that I don’t look at Rob the way the other guys do.

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