She took his hand. “I’m sorry. I was so focused on my life changing I forgot yours is changing too. I should have first asked how you were feeling about all this.”
He lifted their joined hands and kissed the back of hers. “Not at all. Trust me, you recovered much more quickly than I did to the news.”
“I knew this day would come, but it’s different now that it’s actually going to happen.”
“My father said you’d feel that way. He was right. As usual.”
She pressed a hand to his cheek and he nuzzled it. “Your father isn’t always right. I know you’re worried about stepping into his place, about people comparing you to him and not favorably, and about a million other things right now, even if I don’t know what they all are.”
“Psychic are you?”
“No,” she said softly. “I simply know you, and I’m incredibly in love with you, which means I see things about you that you don’t.”
He tugged her onto his lap, wrapped his arms around her, andrested his forehead against hers. “I feel the same about you, darling. And I know you’re anxious about becoming queen, maybe even more than I am about becoming king.”
“Maybe. Probably.” A pause. “Okay, definitely.”
He chuckled. “You’ll be brilliant.”
“I’ll probably make mistakes.”
“So will I. We’re only human, darling.”
“I wasn’t raised to be a queen. I wouldn’t want to embarrass?—”
He kissed the rest of her sentence from her lips. “None of that. You’d never embarrass me. Ever.”
She bit her lip for a moment, then nodded.
“None of this defeatist self-talk for either of us; I know I’m just as liable to say similar things too.”
She nodded again and took a deep breath. “Okay.” Another deep breath. “Okay. Who else knows?”
“Only my parents. We should tell yours next, then Mara and Tavin. My parents will take care of telling my siblings, though maybe they’ll wait until dinner tonight and announce it then. We won’t announce anything to the public until well after the funeral.”
“Coronations can take a year or more to plan.”
“Other countries may need a year, but I doubt we’ll do it the same as them. We don’t need to be spending so much money on the ceremony with the economy how it is, so it will be much less grand than my father’s. I’d like it done by year end, if possible. I don’t want Papa to wait or to be overly stressed. He needs rest.”
She smiled. “You’re already thinking like a king.”
Fuck. He was, wasn’t he?
He pulled her closer and nuzzled her neck for a moment, inhaling her lavender scent. “I can’t wait to see you on a throne beside me.” He kissed down her neck to her shoulder. “I can’t wait to fuck you when you’re finally Queen Rebecca.”
She tilted her head back and sighed. “Does that mean you don’t want Princess Rebecca anymore?”
He smiled against her skin, then dropped a kiss to the top of hercleavage. “Hardly. I plan to fuck my princess a lot before she becomes queen. Any problems with that?”
She shook her head, her long chestnut hair shifting with her. “Never, though you can’t start now. I’ve got a meeting. Probably ten meetings once I tell Mara what’s going on.”
His hands had shifted to her legs and under the hem of her dress. She wasn’t wearing stockings today and, while he loved her in them with garters, he loved her just as much out of them.
As he slid his fingers higher on her thigh, she shivered. “Alex…”
“You’ll be late for your meeting. They’ll understand when you tell them why.”
“I’m not telling them you tried to get sex after dropping bombshell news.”
