Player's Princess (A Royal Sports Romance)(163)
He doesn’t ask me to return the favor. He washes himself down then swaddles me in a robe and towels and lays me in the bed before drying himself off.
He gives me a glass of water first and I chug it lustily, gripping the big glass in both hands. Then we each take a glass of fruity wine that starts getting me drunk after a few sips.
“You have never been so beautiful as you are now.”
“Oh, stop it,” I say.
He doesn’t, not ever.
That becomes one of his favorite things to say to me.
The spring air pours in through the open window, rustling the papers on my desk. In the seventh month of my pregnancy, even moving to adjust myself in my padded chair can be a chore. This isn’t my first rodeo but it’s the heaviest burden I’ve ever borne.
My youngest, little Elsa, is absolutely fascinated by Mommy’s belly. Unlike her brothers and sister, she’s never experienced a pregnancy before, and at six years old understands just enough to comprehend that there are three little babies in Mommy’s belly, but not much more. She pads quietly into my study on bare, grubby feet, mud flecked from running in the woods with her brothers, and sets her tiny hands on my stomach.
“Hello, babies,” she says, before saying, “Hi, Mommy.”
I pat her head. “Go clean up, sweetie. You’re tracking mud all over the house.”
She rubs her cheek on my stomach and runs back out of the room, shedding more mud on the way out than she did as she came in. My instruction to clean up is apparently forgotten as she runs back outside, whooping, and hurls herself at her eldest brother.
John is fourteen years old and nearly as tall as his father, a slender, strapping youth who has the eye of all the village girls. I can’t help but grin when he gets awkward around one girl he has a little crush on, a slender redhead named Elaine. She’s out there now, sitting beside him along the stream as he studiously ignores the fishing pole he’s propped up.
His father stands farther down the riverbank, my second youngest, David, standing beside him. Nine years old, he swings his fishing rod with the kind of serious intensity only a child imitating his father can muster. I lean on the windowsill and watch, smiling when I catch Kristoff’s eye. He smiles back, only to be startled when our son bellows,
“I got one! I got one!”
The little perch he heroically struggles to drag out of the stream isn’t much of a catch, and Kristoff doesn’t bother whacking its head on a rock and tossing it in the creel. Now that his son has finally caught a fish, they can stop for the day. He carries the big basket himself, lugging it into the kitchen where he’ll clean his catch.
I’ve never taken much to a life of servants and pomp and circumstance, but when it comes to gutting and cleaning fish, I turn up my nose and inform my husband, very curtly, that I am, after all, a princess, and such things are beneath me.
Elsa gloms on to her sister Emma, who at eight years old is still running around in short pants along with her sister. I shout at them not to go too far as they run into the woods, and John of course volunteers to take his friend with him into the woods to make sure the girls don’t run afoul of a bear or break a leg.
I give him a look of warning, my stomach churning up as I spot him grabbing her hand when he thinks I’m not looking anymore.
With a deep sigh I turn back to my work. I push my computer aside and read over the latest letter from Melissa. After her parents came to Kosztyla (and attended the wedding, of course, though it was too much for Melissa to handle) they took her home to Wisconsin, where she originally hailed from.
Enclosed in her letter is a picture of her with her husband, a tall, grinning man who bears a strong resemblance to their two children. He’s a minister and they run a mission together, though it’s to feed their local hungry; Melissa no longer travels outside the country. I tuck the picture into one of my books, meaning to show it to John soon. He keeps asking me how it came to be that I married his father, and there are some details I haven’t shared with him yet. Some I won’t.
Melissa herself is the head of a rape crisis center and moonlights as a volunteer coordinator for a battered women’s shelter.
Danielle survived her gunshot wounds, barely. She suffered damage to her spine, a collapsed lung, and several broken bones, but the bullets miraculously missed her heart, and she lives to this day with her boyfriend, a fellow former journalist. She can walk on crutches and they have an active life together, most recently forming a foundation to raise awareness of the danger faced by reporters in hostile countries.
My mother and father both eventually remarried (to other people) and he moved to Ohio with his company while my mom went back to school and eventually became an artist-in-residence, traveling to various kindergarten classes to play the guitar and teach music.
After Cassandra’s death, the resistance, which was never much of one at all, collapsed. Kristoff never participated in any more military operations and after the reforms I championed, he doesn’t need to.
One year to the day after our wedding, while I was still carrying baby John in my arms, my prince demolished the assembly line under the mountain and destroyed the remaining armor suits, along with the schematics and all his father’s and grandfather’s and great grandfather’s research and notes. No one will ever build one of those things again.
He saved the battery technology, however. Last year, with international investment and partnership, Kosztyla opened a factory building all-electric cars using the battery technology that powered the suits, and a team of scientists is working with my husband to find peaceful medical, environmental, and commercial uses for the dozens of technological advances that made the armor suits possible in the first place.