Heart of Royals (Royal Ice Dragons #4)

Chapter 1

One

Dare

Hanna stopped me just outside the door to our rooms—and to Kaelan—with a hand on my arm. “Maybe it’s too late in the evening to tell my psychopath of a first husband that I’ve married another man.”

We’d both strode down the hallway ready to tell Kaelan we were married, but we’d slowed as we got closer to the gilded doors.

“I can think of easier ways to die,” I admitted. “Simpler, more pleasant. Dragonfire. Drowning. A medium-speed poison.”

Through the thick wood, I could hear the low rumble of conversation. Kaelan and Thorne were discussing something, their voices too muffled to make out words.

Hanna hesitated. “You knock.”

I frowned at my wife. “You knock. He won’t murder you.”

“He won’t hurt you. He loves you in his own way.”

“And he loves you in a burn-down-the-rest-of-the-kingdom kind of way,” I pointed out.

The door swung open abruptly, and Kaelan faced us both down. “Why are you arguing in the hallway?”

Kaelan’s eyes were icy, and I suddenly regretted the fit of courage from which Hanna and I had both suffered. I needed to claim Hanna as my own to him, but did it have to be tonight?

“You’re so welcoming.” I pushed in past him.

As Kaelan followed me, I felt Hanna’s sigh in my bones.

The apartments Honor had given Kaelan were absurdly lavish, like everything else about the Isle with its profusion of glittering crystal water and green forests and lush gardens.

These rooms were warm, with soaring ceilings and enormous arched windows that overlooked the gardens.

Thorne occupied the window seat, a book open in his lap that he clearly wasn’t reading.

Kaelan’s ice-blue eyes locked onto mine, then flicked to Hanna. One dark eyebrow rose.

“How kind of you to grace us with your presence, wife.” Kaelan’s tone was light. “You’ve been gone so long I thought perhaps you’d forgotten where you belong.”

Ah, fuck. This was not going to go well.

“Don’t be a dramatic princeling,” Hanna said, which was not the direction we’d meant to turn the conversation. Kaelan did not always bring out the best in either of us.

I closed the doors behind us with a solid click that sounded far too much like a cell locking.

“Me? Dramatic?” Kaelan pressed a hand to his chest in mock offense, but his gaze had already sharpened.

He knew. Of course he knew. The man could read me like a book, even though we didn’t share the mental link he had with Thorne.

“You both look as if you’re about to confess to murder. You’re avoiding me.”

“We’re not avoiding you,” Hanna said, but even she sounded unconvinced.

“No?” Kaelan prowled closer with that predatory grace that made him so dangerous. “Then perhaps why you’ve both been exchanging those weighted looks? I cannot believe the two of you are gifted spies because you are more transparent than a sheet of ice.”

Thorne closed his book with a soft snap. “Just tell us, Dare.”

He sounded as if he already knew.

Hanna was over by the table, quietly lifting Kaelan’s two discarded blades from the polished tabletop.

“Tell us what, Dare?” Kaelan’s voice had a mocking note.

Before his gaze could shift to Hanna stealing his weapons—because it was never long before his gaze sought her out, no matter how cool he might act—I cleared my throat, covering the sound as she swept the weapons into hiding. “We had quite the eventful journey. Do you remember Lord Kustav?”

Kaelan gave me a look that suggested he knew I was stalling. “You know I do. Spit it out.”

Hanna stepped closer, leaning up to kiss him as her fingers moved to his hip. To the dagger he kept there, the one he was never without. Kaelan allowed himself to be distracted, bowing his head to hers.

Their lips met in a long kiss, and despite the current life-threatening danger I was in, my cock hardened at the sight of his tongue teasing between her soft red lips, the way he palmed her perfect ass as he pulled her closer.

She slid the blade free with practiced ease. Our little thief.

Kaelan kept kissing her as if he didn’t notice, and even as she hid the knife at her side with one hand, she fisted the material of his tunic with the other. Thorne shot me a look, but it was hard to read his dark expression.

Was he trying to ask me, why are we standing here watching as Kaelan prepares to fuck the girl we both love—without us?

Or—why are we standing here watching when Kaelan prepares to disembowel you?

Kaelan pulled away, his brows arched.

He would’ve killed anyone else who tried to disarm him.

But he’d let Hanna do it. She stepped back, holding the knife loosely in one hand while she studied his face.

He cupped her cheek with one hand, the gesture tender. Then his grip slid to her throat, studying her with narrow eyes. “You two had better explain yourselves before I lose my sense of humor.”

Her hands stayed at her sides, the blade hidden in the soft, silky material of her skirt.

She looked so beautiful, with his calloused knuckles in contrast to her long, pale throat and her chin tilted proudly above it, her eyes steady on his in challenge.

“Now I feel much safer giving you news that might make you throw a tantrum.”

His fingers tightened on her throat, and she smiled faintly even as her lips parted, seeking air she wouldn’t find. She was being deliberately provocative, but when was she not?

“Are you safer?” Kaelan asked mildly.

His grip loosened, and her voice was wispy when she answered, “You tell me, husband.”

Husband. She wielded the word like a weapon and a caress at once, and Kaelan’s eyes sharpened, the ice-blue deepening to something darker.

“Explain, Dare,” Kaelan said, though his gaze never left hers.

“While we were in the mining village. When we were posing as peasants,” I told him, “Lord Kustav took an interest in Hanna. He thought she was available for his vile tithe. He was…persistent.”

Kaelan’s expression was as disinterested as ever, but the murderous intent in his gaze wasn’t directed at us. “How persistent?”

“He was planning to claim her. We had hours, maybe less. She had to be married, or we would have had to choose between protecting our identities—and the village itself—and protecting Hanna.”

“She was already married,” Kaelan observed, his tone ice. “To me.”

Fuck, fuck, fuck. I had to make him understand. “Yes, and the magic he used would have shown the attachment wasn’t to me. It was to you. He would have known Hanna’s identity and held us hostage for Edric if he could. And if Hanna and I fought our way out, he would have punished the village.”

The look he gave me felt like a dare. One that I had to take.

“So, I married her,” I finished.

Kaelan released Hanna abruptly. A wounded look flashed across her face—as if Kaelan allowing her to breathe freely was a rejection—as he turned his back to us.

I moved to her side, knowing it might provoke him more, but she needed me.

Silence reigned in the room. The kind of silence that came before violence. Before the world rearranged itself into something unrecognizable.

As Kaelan turned to face me, Thorne shifted his weight, ready. I’d never heard him leave the fireplace, but he stood on Hanna’s other side, ready to fight for her if she needed him.

I kept my hands visible, relaxed. I’d thought arriving armed might send the wrong message. That had been idiotic.

“You married my wife.” His voice was flat, hard, but then something shifted in his expression. A crack in the ice. His mouth twitched, and before I could brace myself for the explosion, he laughed.

The sound was sharp and disbelieving, edged with something that might have been genuine amusement or might have been the precursor to murder. With Kaelan, you never quite knew. “No reason to ask me, I suppose. You just went ahead and married my wife.”

“He did ask me,” Hanna pointed out tartly. “I was rather intimately involved in the decision.”

“Our wife,” I corrected, because apparently I had a death wish.

“Our wife.” Kaelan tested the words, rolling them around like he was trying to decide if they would suit him or encourage him to kill. “Tell me, Dare. Was this your idea or hers?”

“Mine,” I said at the same time Hanna said, “Mine.”

Kaelan looked between us, and his smile was sharp. “How romantic.”

In his words was an echo of an accidental deception that I could let stand or set right. Even if he might hurt me for it.

“I didn’t just marry her for our ruse,” I said, and Hanna’s bright gaze leapt to mine. “I married her because I love her. And I would do it a thousand times over.”

I braced. I’d sparred with him thousands of times over the course of our friendship. I knew him well enough to both love him and fear him. But Hanna was looking at me so tenderly, and those words had needed to be said.

He would never hurt Hanna, but if he thought I had betrayed him…

Kaelan threw his head back and laughed again.

Not another bitter, mocking laugh, as I’d expected. A genuine, full-bodied laugh that echoed off the vaulted ceilings.

Hanna and I exchanged a confused look.

“Your faces.” Kaelan scrubbed his hand over his features, but couldn’t stop himself from grinning.

“What the fuck, Kaelan,” I said.

He still looked as satisfied as Finnias with a mouse under his paw. “You should see yourselves. Standing there as if you’re facing execution. Hanna hiding my weapons—which, by the way, was adorable—”

“You could level cities when you’re angry,” she pointed out.

“True.” His expression was hard to read. Not anger. Something else entirely. Pride, maybe. Or satisfaction. “But did you really think I’d be angry that you protected yourself? That Dare kept you safe?”

“Yes,” I said flatly.

Kaelan looked at me then, and his smile softened into something genuine. “Your reaction was priceless. Well done, Dare. I didn’t think you’d stake your claim quite so decisively. Though, I suppose I did set the precedent by marrying her first.”

He seemed pleased with himself. Though to be fair, that was his default.

“Stake his claim!” She rounded on Kaelan. “You arrogant, manipulative, insufferable”—she punctuated each word with a jab to his chest—“calculating, self-satisfied, smug bastard. You knew. You knew, and you let us torture ourselves?”

“I suspected,” Kaelan corrected, catching her hand before she could jab him again. “And I wanted to see you tell me. If Dare was brave enough to prove himself worthy.”

She flipped the blade, caught it by the point, and offered it back to him hilt-first. “You’re being an ass.”

Kaelan took the dagger, his fingers brushing hers. “I’m not being an ass.”

“You absolutely are.”

“You married another man. I think I’m taking it in stride.” He considered, then added, “And planning your punishment.”

She rolled her eyes. “Aren’t you always?”

“You hate to be bored. You’re happiest when you can’t quite sit right, and I am happiest when you are happy.”

Hanna snorted, and the sound shattered the tension in the room.

And no matter what Kaelan might say, he kissed her then as if she were his whole world.