Stay.
But Lucy doesn’t stay. Dashing away her tears, ducking her head into her chest, she click-clack, click-clacks away and I… I don’t follow her.
I stand there, alone by the fountain, watching the water drip while fighting every urge I have to chase her down.
I’ll give her tonight. I won’t let her get away from me that easily, but if she’s convinced herself that she needs to end things formysake… well, I’ll just have to do everything in my power to convince her that she’s mine, and nothing can come between us?—
—nothing, except for Jack fucking Collins.
ONE
HEATHER MOORE
NOW
DALLAS
Heather Moore used to be blonde.
Her roots are growing out. I can see the pale line as it darkens into brown. It catches the sunlight from the large window behind my back, behind that massive desk that Jack once treated like a throne on a dais. He wanted all of Harmony Heights at his mercy, with a view that let him see too much of it, and I’m regretting not hanging black-out curtains before this early morning meeting.
As it is, I did everything I could to avoid it after the first time I was forced to sit through it. Canceled this second meet once, rescheduled it twice after that, and I’m only here because Adrian let himself into the penthouse apartment an hour ago, dragging my ass out of bed where I was sleeping off a well-earned night at the Court, and forced me to gargle with enough mouthwash to drown out the stink of booze on my breath before pushing me the floor below to my office.
Myoffice. It’s been a little over a year since I became King, and I can’t help but sense my old man lurking in the corner, judging every word I say, every decision I make, bitching about how Adrian didn’t even bother to spring for a decent bottle of whiskey to poison him…
Shaking my head, I lean into the King’s chair, still staring at Heather’s hair. I know what’s going on here. Once the new guard—my ‘advisers’ in the Order, both led and handpicked by my cousin because, if it were up to me, I’d run the secret society into the dirt—decided which Offering would be my bride, Adrian would’ve realized that throwing a leggy blonde at me just wouldn’t work.
But take a natural blonde and make it so that she’s a brunette with big blue eyes instead of stormy grey ones, and maybe Dallas might be fooled into forgetting the one who got away long enough to say ‘I do’ and sign a wedding license.
As if. It’s been five years since Lucy left me…well, four years, ten months, and eight days, but who the fuck is counting? She ended what we had, rejecting my panicked proposal, then agreed to marry an Owed in another of the Order’s arranged weddings before disappearing from Harmony Heights—and my life—forever. Almost five years that she’s been gone, and if she walked through the door, told me she made a mistake in choosing Julian, I’d take her back in a heartbeat.
Only she didn’t choose Julian. Like too many women controlled by the Order—and terrorized by Jack before his too-fucking-timely end—she wasforcedinto marrying an Order member a decade older than she was. Jack gave the order, and she did it, and I’ve spent every day since my father gloatingly confessed that he got Lucy as far away from me as possible wondering why she couldn’t have given me a chance to protect her before she threw her life away.
She didn’t love Julian Fairchild. She lovedme, but she’s his wife—and now, because Jack is dead and I’m King, I have to do the one thing I spent thirty years rebelling against: I have to take a bride.
No surprise. The head of the Order choosing a woman to lie beneath him and rule at his side is a big fucking deal. I never thought that I’d be considered a catch—that would’ve been Bas before he fell for the Bait he met at the Court earlier this year—but I underestimated how much absolute power can be an aphrodisiac.
They want to wed the King, to help him rule the Order, and that alone should’ve been enough to disqualify them. In the end, Adrian insists that Heather’s the best he could find. An Offering from birth, half a decade my junior, and a pretty virgin who keeps smiling nervously at me because she has no idea that I’m fixating on how she was willing to change her hair color right from the start, but by the time I couldn’t prevent this meeting any longer, it’s already growing out enough for the blonde to be noticeable.
Will she dye her hair forever, I wonder. What about her pubes? I’m assuming she’ll wax her pussy for our inevitable consummation so I don’t see yellow curls and get a limp dick. Yeah. Learned that one the hard way when I tried to fuck the memory of Lucy out of my head and discovered that blondes… I can’t do blondes. These days, I can’t do anyone, but the old guard made themselves super clear. I won’t fulfill my duty as King until I marry, then bang an Offering. After that, I can fuck whoever the hell I want, and the whole damn Order will turn a blind eye just the way they did when Jack paraded woman after woman after woman in and out of the penthouse apartment he used to share with Mom and me.
It’s all mine now. At least, until I go through with this sham and?—
“Dallas? What do you think?”
Someone’s talking to me. From the annoyed edge to his tone, it’s Adrian, and he’s been trying to get my attention for a while.
I’m an old pro at ignoring the throbbing at the base of my skull, the lingering consequence of another late night when I want nothing more than to forget. From the outside, I probably have a blank expression, maybe a slight scowl, as I turn toward my cousin.
While I have on yesterday’s jeans and a black t-shirt I took out of the pile of laundry in the bathroom, Adrian Heller is wearing another one of the thousand-dollar suits he prefers when he’s at the office. The early morning sunlight winks off of the pair of small golden hoops in his left ear, a hint of amusement in his soft green eyes—Collins eyes, just like mine, a gift from his mother—as he lets me know thatheknows that I’ve been zoning out for most of this meeting.
What do I think?
I clear my throat, still sounding gruff as I ask, “About what?”
Adrian looks like he’s wondering if it might be worth it to see if Hunter Reed is willing to take on another hit on his dime. Ha. Joke’s on my cousin. If he assassinates me next, with my mom and dad dead, he’s my next of kin. The Order’s rules of succession make it clear. With no other family or kids of my own, Adrian would be next in line to lead the society.
He’d rather gargle with razor blades than willingly step out from behind the throne and take his place on it. Ever since we were kids, my cousin has thrived as the man with the plan, the self-proclaimed ‘kingmaker’. If it wasn’t for him having my back, I would’ve flipped off the old guard and refused to follow in Jack’s footsteps. Only knowing that Adrian would refuse and that I’d be putting Bas in a shitty situation—since, as a Reynolds, his bloodline ruled all the way back to when Samuel Reynolds formed the Order… until my dad knocked Guy Reynolds out ofthe line of succession before knocking his old man off next—kept me from doing the same.
