One Year and Seven Months Later
ALERIC
“I’m going to die. I mean it. I hope you have a good life insurance policy on me because I’m fading into nothing.”
“You’re being dramatic.” Camillo’s voice was soft and commanding and so fucking welcome. I was home—because wherever he was, that was home. Which happened to be in a little suburb near LA on a private beach.
I’d been away for twelve impossible weeks finishing up the last stint of me playing him—which was weirder now that I had a ring on my finger. We weren’t married yet, but we had plans. He’d proposed on our anniversary, and so far, the press hadn’t gotten a hold of it, but they would.
I just wanted to be done with all the mess back home so I no longer had to kiss him goodbye and go back to the place that had threatened to destroy us.
Too much had happened in the last year and a half anyway. As predicted, Hugo had come forward and had started in with press interviews. It lasted until Camillo went to his parents and told them what happened the night Hugo had him in his apartment.
They recommended keeping quiet, but Carlo had not agreed. At all. He’d done a full press tour, and while no one had any evidence on either side, trial by public opinion favored Camillo. He was a good man, and Hugo was a nobody, grasping at the last chance he had to be relevant.
He went quietly after that.
Neither of us figured out whether or not Christoph had known him, but when I refused to sign the contract for season three, he didn’t put up a fight. I didn’t care what was happening to the show after I left. It wasn’t my business. Camillo and I agreed not to watch it when it aired, and I kept my promotional tours small.
It never did reach much popularity outside the borders of Caverna. It meant I didn’t make it big, but I was okay with that. I had work. I had a steady paycheck and the love of my life, and I was happy.
That was the most wild part of it all: being happy.
“Come here,” Camillo said. He pushed away from the table where he’d been sitting at his laptop. His wheels made a soft squeaking sound against the wood flooring—something he’d chosen specifically so he could roll around without trouble but also wouldn’t kill my knees the way tile did.
Because kneeling was still a thing.
I obeyed. I dropped my bag and closed the five steps between us. Our gazes met, and I ignored the soft popping noises in my joints as I went down. He used his hand to spread his knees so I could fit between them, and I leaned in.
He pinched my chin just the way I liked and drew me close, nearly kissing but not quite. “You are not going to die. You’re home now. With me.”
I was. Closing my eyes, I breathed in deeply—the scent of him, of our house, of our life. It was cinnamon and vanilla. It was earth and rain. He ran his fingers through my hair, then down the back of my neck before massaging my tense muscles.
“It was a long flight, I know,” he murmured.
“Mm.” My forehead hit his shoulder, and I braced myself on his thighs.
“And going back there is never easy.”
I shook my head. Going back there meant talking to the press and avoiding questions about Camillo that should have never been asked. Like if his dick worked, like how we had sex, if he topped, if he bottomed, if I was doing it just because he was a prince.
Too many times, I had to restrain my temper and remind myself they were miserable little fucks who would never understand the way this felt. They would never experience this contentment. This joy.
“I love you,” I told him.
He laughed softly and urged me back so he could look at me. “Did you see Carlo?”
Rolling my eyes, I groaned and collapsed into him, and his arms came around me, holding me tight. “He’s such a shit.”
Camillo laughed again. “I tried to warn you. But he likes you.”
His whole family did. Well, his parents were indifferent, but that was as close to like as I was ever going to get from them. It was hard to wrap my mind around it, but it was what it was. They were rarely ever present.
They hadn’t even come to see Camillo off when he was done packing his apartment. His mother had called to wish him a safe flight, and she’d sent one of her aides to say goodbye to him at the airport.
I knew it gutted him. I knew he’d wanted a relationship with his parents that he would never get. But his brother was better—or, well, he was getting better. He’d visited a few times now, calling it a royal tour, but he spent most of the time with us.
His wife and daughters tagged along, and we managed to secure a private bit of beach where the girls could play in the ocean and Camillo and I could lounge in the sun. He had a beach chair with huge wheels that allowed me to push him in the ocean, and the girls thought it was the most amazing thing they’d ever seen.
It was maybe the best summer of my life. It had started healing me in ways I didn’t think I could be healed.
Camillo’s wandering hands brought me back to earth, and I looked up at him, smiling, unable to help myself.
“How was Christoph on the last day of filming?”
I shuddered. “His usual bullshit. He made me piss for him again. I think he was hoping to finally catch me out and sue me for breach of contract.”
Camillo grimaced. “I could always have Cillian?—”
“No,” I said. Cillian had been reassigned to Carlo’s girls, and although I never did get to know him well, he looked happier than I’d ever seen him. There was a light in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. But he was still loyal to Camillo. He would have burnt down a country if Camillo asked. “It’s over now, and after talking with Jared”—he was the director of the show I was now working on—“I found out he’s got one of the worst reputations in the business. He tried to make it in Hollywood a few years ago and became a laughingstock.”
Camillo smiled, the expression sharp and spiteful, and I loved him a little more for it. “Good.”
I sighed and turned my face in to nuzzle against his neck. “This is horribly uncomfortable. Can we move to the couch?”
Not just a couch. The couch. It was the perfectly designed piece of furniture from Camillo’s little safe house above the café back home. It was the one thing we’d shipped over besides his medical equipment and our suitcases.
That last little bit of what was, now connecting us both to what would be.
He gave me a little shove, and I stood up, cracking my back before passing the living room. “I’m going to change. Get comfy.”
“Don’t wear too much. I want to feel your skin against mine,” Camillo called after me.
That was an easy ask. It was warmer out here, and with the windows open, there was nothing better than lounging on his chest with the ocean breeze floating across my skin. I could waste away for an entire afternoon doing nothing more than that.
Peeling away my shirt, I popped in the bathroom for a piss, then put on a pair of gym shorts, aired out my disgusting feet for a few, then headed back to where my love was waiting for me. He was stretched out in the L corner just the way I liked, his legs parted enough to fit my body.
I grinned, then wormed my way up his body until I was wrapped around him like an octopus, and I breathed out old, stale air I’d been holding in, thanks to all the tension in my body. Every muscle began to relax in little fits and bursts.
Camillo’s fingers danced across my back like he was searching for all the knotted places, and every so often, he’d stop to rub a sore spot. “So. This is it, isn’t it?”
I looked up at him, propping my chin up on his chest. “What?”
“This. Us. This is home.”
“For now.”
He tilted his head to the side. “You don’t want to go back there, do you?”
“I don’t know. You’re still the prince.”
He rolled his eyes. “I’m barely a prince. My nieces are already ordering me around.”
I laughed. “That’s because they’re children. They do that. But seriously, you’re more than just a title. There are ways for you to do good things once my schedule is free.”
I didn’t want to count on successes after all this. I had already seen how quickly and how rapidly it could all fall apart. I’d been irrelevant once—and that could happen again far too easily. But this time, I was okay with it. This time, I wouldn’t be alone.
He sighed and shrugged. “I’ll always go back. If my parents abdicate and my brother takes over, I want to be there for the coronation—though I think he’d fight them on that.”
I didn’t think Camillo was wrong. Every time he brought up Carlo being king, the crown prince went green in the face and looked like he was going to throw up all over his shoes.
“I should go back for my parents’ anniversary, and I’d like to be there for the girls’ birthdays.”
“I bet those are fun,” I told him with a grin.
He smiled down at me. “Bouncy castles and pony rides.”
“Fuck yes.”
He laughed, shaking his head. “But those are visits. I want something that’s ours. It doesn’t have to be here. I don’t much care where it is as long as you’re with me.”
“But?” I pressed. I could always tell when he was holding back.
He sighed. “But I don’t want it to be in Caverna. It was home, but that felt so against my will. Nothing in Caverna ever brought me joy except meeting you, and even then, we had to escape to find peace.”
It had been hard once we went public. All of Camillo’s fears had come true. I woke up to paparazzi outside my car when I was heading off for work, and every interview I did was either about him and his disability or about me and my past. And no one wanted to listen to the truth.
No one was willing to believe us.
So I understood. There was nothing back there waiting for us. Nothing that would make what we had better or stronger.
“Marbella,” I said.
He laughed. “Too much sun.”
“Capri?”
“Not the most accessible for me.”
“I mean, if we live on a yacht and don’t bother with land and all those ridiculous hills and stairs?—”
He cupped my cheek, cutting me off. “Kiss me.”
I did. It was so easy to give in to him, to press our bodies together and let him show me in little ways that he owned me in all the ways I wanted to be owned. He’d show me with his mouth and hands later too—drawing me to the edge and back until I felt like I was losing my mind.
But for now, there was this. The softness I needed. The steady ballast of his beating heart resting in his chest. Some days, I felt bitter and angry that I’d spent so many years without him. I felt cheated out of having firsts with him that belonged to people who didn’t deserve them.
But it was hard to dwell when I was like this.
“We’ll figure it out,” he eventually said. “I’ve been living in the past for too long and fantasizing about the future. I finally have a chance to enjoy right now.”
“With me?”
He met my gaze and smiled, then drew me in for a last kiss. “Always with you. And nothing will ever change that.”
I was still a pessimistic man who would always wait for the other shoe to drop, but when Camillo had me in his arms, I knew that even if it fell, he would protect me from the pain. And that was all I could ever ask.