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“Proud of yourself?” he asked in a sleep-roughened voice. “Maybe I’m just cold.”
“Mm-hm. That’s probably it.” I continued pressing gentle kisses along his shoulder to his neck and into the back of his hair. “Everything okay back home?”
He harrumphed and shifted to set the phone back on the bedside table. In the process, his ass pressed back into my groin, and I couldn’t help but grab his hip and return the gesture.
“Fuck,” I groaned. My cock was already wide-awake from waking up nestled against Felix’s bare ass, but feeling him press against it made me even harder. Felix turned to face me with a grin of mischief.
“Before we do any of that again, you need to feed me.”
His face was creased on one side where he’d slept on a fold of his pillow. Warm brown eyes peered at me expectantly from under bed-rumpled hair, and I had a moment’s clarity that I was really quite gay. I’d spent much of my time since puberty self-identifying as bisexual, but in that moment, I couldn’t imagine a single woman on earth who could ever come close to being as attractive and enticing to me as the man in front of me.
But then again, there couldn’t be another man that beautiful either. Perhaps I was Felix-sexual.
A furrow formed between his eyebrows. “Why are you staring at me? Aren’t you hungry too?”
I nodded. “Yes, yes, of course. Late breakfast is just the thing. Surely Mari left something out for us.” Without lingering further, I turned to exit the bed and find my clothes.
It wasn’t until much later in the day, after a big Christmas meal Mari and my sister insisted on serving to the rest of us in the castle, that I found myself alone with Felix again. I’d invited him into the hidden treasury room, and we were kicking back in front of the fireplace with full bellies and Irish coffee.
Felix’s shoes were off, and he stretched out his legs toward the fire. He wore red-and-green-striped socks which, for some reason, made me think he was even more adorable than I already knew him to be. What the hell was wrong with me? I’d never been so attracted to another person in my life.
Was this some kind of last-minute panic? Like a manifestation of my unwillingness to give up my life for the crown? Maybe I was clinging on to a man in hopes of not having to face my real life. As long as I was seeing a guy, I couldn’t take the throne.
I was so much in my head that I didn’t hear what Felix asked me until he nudged my leg with his toes.
“You okay, Lio? You’ve been super quiet all afternoon. I think Hen is worried about you.”
There had been at least twelve of us for the meal, including three to four royal guards. I’d noticed Henriette talking Felix’s ears off from her spot between him and Jon. She’d told him about growing up in the palace with nannies and tutors until we were old enough to go off to boarding school and have a somewhat more “normal” childhood. Not that it was ever normal by any stretch of the imagination. Arthur had piped in several times and left Felix in stitches telling “teenage Lio” stories.
My eyes moved from the golden glow of the fire to Felix’s worried gaze. I’d intended to give him a smile of reassurance, but he continued speaking before I had a chance.
“Is it me? It’s okay. I should probably give you some space anyway. I feel like I’ve been monopolizing—”
“No,” I blurted. “Stay. Please, Felix. That’s not the problem. You’re not the problem at all.”
I ran a hand through my hair and looked back at the fire. Felix shifted, standing up quietly from his chair and stepping over to mine. I looked up at him and saw his sweet face in the light of the fire. Without even thinking about it, I reached out my hand to him and pulled him onto my lap until he was straddling me with his knees on either side of my hips.
“I’m sorry,” I said softly. “Just have a lot on my mind. It’s not you at all.”
Felix’s hands smoothed up my chest to my neck. “Do you want to talk about it? I mean, you don’t have to, of course, but if it would help…”
The divot between his eyebrows had returned, and I reached up to rub it with my thumb.
“Soon it’s going to be my turn on the throne,” I said quietly, as if anyone could hear us from our hidden space inside a semideserted castle on a sparsely populated island in the middle of the North Sea.
In winter.
I moved my hand to cup his jaw before continuing. “And I don’t want it, Felix.”
There, I’d said it. I’d confessed my deepest secret thought to a practical stranger.
