Page 42 of Dirty Crown
I stretchedand felt the warmth of the sun on my skin as a light breeze crossed over my body. I was tanning next to our pool at the Fincross house and I was almost falling asleep.
The sound of a distant lawn mower was hypnotic and the chirps of birds in nearby trees was the lazy soundtrack to my perfect life.
I was at the end of my third year of school, which meant I had one more to go for my Bachelor’s degree.
Everything was working out for me, and even though there was the constant fear that I’d lose it all somehow in the back of my head, I finally learned to appreciate my life.
Even the craziness with Seymour from last year had faded into distant memories. She’d come back to class and found me one day to apologize. I didn’t hold anything against her, she had been paid an enormous amount of money to take a vacation, there was no way she could have known what would happen to me after she left.
Ilya had recently died of a heart attack, at least that was the official story. When I asked Ivan about it, he had twitched his mouth into a smirk and tried to look sad about it but had failed.
I suspected he got his revenge, but since we were trying to relate to each other on positive, happy levels now, we hadn’t brought it up again. Maksim, predictably, was blowing through his father’s estate at such a rapid pace I didn’t think he’d be rich for more than another year or two.
Penny and Mark had gotten engaged recently and she’d finished all her final exams which is why she was here with me now. She was snoozing on the comfortable lounge chaise next to me and I could add her light snoring to the soundtrack of my perfect life.
My Kings were off playing a friendly game of football with Mark and some other guys from college so we were taking advantage of the opportunity to have our down time.
Ivan and Amara were bringing Nat tomorrow, and we had plans to travel as a group to do two weeks in Europe, just for fun this time. I wanted to be a tourist during this trip, not a captive, and I wanted to discover different cultures with the people I loved.
I couldn’t wait to do a private tour of the Louvre with Nat, or visit an opera house in Vienna with Penny.
Or get naked and busy with my Kings in every city, to reclaim all of Europe for our pleasure and strip away any lingering feelings of fear.
It would be good for us all.
I began to doze off myself when I heard them return. It wasn’t so much that my Kings were noisy, they were, but it was a shift in energy in the house when they were there.
I could feel them coming before I heard them, like a tsunami of love hormones and desire for me, it washed over me and left me breathless.
They clattered out onto the pool deck, talking and laughing all at once and dragging the lazy energy off me.
I laughed and let them kiss me, one by one. They pulled chairs over to sit near me while Mark shared the chaise with Penny.
And they destroyed the silence of the afternoon with spirited descriptions of their game and arguments over who really had won.
I smiled and listened, exclaimed where appropriate, and overall, loved hearing it.
As much as I loved the quiet peace of my life when they were gone, I much preferred the busy whirlwind when they returned.
My life was better with them in it, and I wouldn’t change it for anything in the world.
I smiled and nodded at their excitement, and fell in love all over again with each one of them. I would be their queen, their dirty queen wearing my dirty crown as long as they were my Kings.
My loves, my life.
THE END OF SERIES
