Page 54 of Tall, Royal and Grumpy

“You know exactly what I mean, Esmeralda.”

“Do I?” she purred and grazed her nails down the back of my neck, causing me to shiver.

I pressed my forehead against hers and closed my eyes. I took a slow, deep breath and clung onto her hips with a vice-like grip that probably left marks. She didn’t seem to mind, and I couldn’t bring myself to let go. “We’re supposed to be behaving,” I whispered.

She brushed her nose across mine. “You’re the only one who wants to behave. I just want you.”

My cock and heart throbbed in sync, but I shook my head. “Not here. Not like this. And not yet.”

“So damn stubborn,” she muttered and slumped against me, relenting.

I lifted my head and pressed my lips to her forehead. “I am, but it’s for you.”

“I know.”

I kissed her forehead again. “We should go back.”

She hummed, looking up at me contently. “One more kiss.”

I cupped her cheeks in my hands and obliged her demand, giving her an extra one just in case. “There.” I brushed my thumb across her plump bottom lip. “Are you satisfied, Babble?”

She blinked, but I didn’t realise what I had said until her eyes went wide and her cheeks screamed with colour. “Babble?” she stuttered.

One side of my mouth pulled up. “It suits you.”

She knocked me in the chest in an adorable outburst. “No, it doesn’t. How many times do I have to tell you, I don’t babble.”

I let her shove me back and chuckled as she stormed away before pushing my hands into my suit trouser pockets and following her.

I liked it. Babble.

It suited her perfectly.

For the rest of the soiree, every time our eyes met, her cheeks went bright red, and she glared at me. It was a challenge and a half not to burst out laughing in adoration every time she did.

Chapter Seventeen

ESMERALDA

“I wish your father would trim his beard. He looks awful, he does.”

If I clenched my teeth any harder, I was going to shatter them all. But I couldn’t laugh. I was sitting in Kareem’s direct eyeline and if he caught me acting any less than a perfectly decorous crown princess, he would destroy me for it after. And I had been doing so well to keep him off my back since arriving in Touma.

But the older woman sitting among her family in the lower pew in front of me was killing me.

On her right, Fay snickered into his fist while the adorable Adam remained engrossed in his parent’s speech. But on her left, Kai shifted awkwardly, and Prince Arsh sighed again.

“Gigi, please,” Kai grumbled for the twelfth time in fifteen minutes. I’d been counting.

“Mother,” Prince Arsh murmured from the other side of Kai. “Could you perhaps listen to your eldest son talk for five minutes without commenting?”

“What? You know I’m right. It’s Formation Day for Neves’s sake and he looks like an ogre.”

I tried to bite back my laugh, but it fluttered from my grinning mouth anyway.

Gisselle Rumina Touma—the happily divorced, retired Queen of Touma, and King Rami and Prince Arsh’s mother—with cropped white hair that put her diamond tiara to shame and an attitude to match, hadn't stopped nit-picking at her children since the ceremony had started two hours ago.

She’d snuck into residence at Chaukham Palace while we had all been at the Business Initiative soiree last night in Pavilion City Hall. Like the badass dowager queen she was, she casually made herself known at breakfast, shocking her family with her early appearance.

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