Page 46 of King of Lies
“Oh really?” someone else asks. “Where were you twenty years ago?”
“Umm … failing at learning to ride a bicycle and developing an addiction to books, I suppose.”
“So books and literacy are important to you?”
“Yes,” I answer, feeling a little more confident. “Very much so.”
“Do you think literacy will become one of your patron causes then?” someone asks.
“If given the opportunity, I’d love to,” I answer. “Books and animals are my favorite things in the world.”
“Do you have any pets then?”
“No, but I’d love a cat then maybe a dog someday.”
“Sounds like I need to find a cat for an engagement present,” Rhys wades in and everyone laughs. “Then maybe a puppy for a wedding present.”
“So a wedding and a coronation in the next year, are you excited, Your Highness?”
“About the wedding? Yes,” he answers. “I’m excited to embark on this new chapter of my life with a woman I have come to care deeply for. But excited for my coronation? No. I cannot be excited for that because it means my beloved father and king will have died. It means that the weight of our nation, and the duty to care for and protect our people, has passed to me. I do not look forward to that in celebration, but I will uphold my duty to our people with everything that I am.”
“Do you plan to take a honeymoon?”
Rhys eyes the reporter who spoke like he’s an idiot. “Look at her and tell me what you think?”
“I think you’d be a fool not to,” the reporter says.
“And I do not claim to be a stupid man,” Rhys replies. “Now, if that is all, thank you for coming today, but I’d like to take some time to enjoy being engaged with my beautiful fiancée.”
And then he expertly loops my arm through his and leads me out of the room.
“Well done!” Maeve cheers in the hall. Rhys just keeps leading me down the hallway.
“We are not to be bothered until dinner,” he orders and then whisks me back to the residential area and into my rooms where all signs of my being dressed and fussed over are long gone.
“I think I’d like to see you wearing nothing but my ring now,” he says, his voice rough with his own arousal. I squirm under his heated gaze and nod.
I spend the rest of the afternoon giving Rhys exactly what he asked for and then some. And I was thoroughly sad when it was time to dress for dinner.
Then again, if the previous night’s dinner was anything to go by, tonight was going to be just as awful. And Rhys’s family does not disappoint.
Chapter 19
You can’t be serious
“Say it isn’t so,” I mutter, exhausted and completely sexed out.
“I’m afraid so, Hen.”
Rhys swings his legs over the side of my bed where I’m lying face down and naked. I might actually be paralyzed. Or dead. He might have killed me. Apparently, he liked the fancy undies the stylist had supplied me with almost as much as he liked me wearing the big green emeralds. And while I thought I was sure to tear the delicate lace and silk, it wasn’t me. Rhys calmly pulled the pins from my hair and then shredded the lace in seconds before taking me to bed.
“What if I said I don’t want to?”
He turns to look at me while sliding his uniform pants up his legs, “I’d say I didn’t think you were a coward.”
“That’s where you’re completely wrong, my friend, I am totally a coward.”
“All right,” he says calmly. “Then I’ll have to remind you that you promised to love me and to try to adjust.”
