ROYAL ROCK(4)

However, those rules could be a huge problem. If a king didn’t have a male heir to pass the crown down to, succession could get tricky. In the case of my brother, I was the clear successor since he didn’t have a son. But if I were to get killed, the country would be in anarchy.

And so Lynette had found the Koch family. They happened to solve both of my problems in one neat, sexy little package named Bryce.

Five hundred years ago or something like that, Bryce’s family had ruled Starkland. When the King died without a clear male heir, there was some major political battle for who would take over the throne. Eventually my family won out and Bryce’s family was tossed out of the country.

They had been popular, though, and there was still a positive, lingering sentimental feeling about Bryce’s ancient royal forebears.

And, of course, Bryce was a woman. She was capable of having children.

Lynette’s plan was simple. We invite the Kochs out here and then we offer them a deal. If Bryce agreed to marry me, we’d set them up for life. They’d never have to worry about a thing ever again. We’d bring them into the aristocracy and all of their wants would be taken care of.

A pretty damn good deal, if you asked me. All Bryce needed to do was marry me, and then I could get the benefits of her ancient family lineage plus the potential to put a male heir in her stomach.

It all seemed so simple when we first talked about it. I wasn’t much interested in marrying a strange girl, but my control of the country needed a boost, and I couldn’t deny that a male heir would help a whole ton. I was willing to give it a shot, at least.

It seemed easy, right up until Bryce slapped me across the face.

I looked out the window at the city rolling by. It was my city, my favorite place in the world. I used to live in an apartment right downtown, and I could walk around the place just like anyone else. As it turned out, being the younger brother of the true heir meant nobody really cared much about me, which was just what I wanted.

But now I was stuck in the castle, away from the city and the people I loved. Ruling was boring, but it was important. I wished I could go back to my old ways, but the country needed me. They needed me to step up and rule them as well as I possibly could.

I didn’t need a distraction. In fact, my advisors had been working very hard to get rid of distractions.

But as soon as that girl hit me in the face, I knew she was going to take a lot of my attention. I was already hard just thinking about all the attention I wanted to give her.

I was King Christophe Werner von Brunhild the Third, Prince of the Lowlands, King of Starkland, and I was going to marry that fiery American Bryce Koch and get her pregnant if it was the last thing I did.





BRYCE





I’d never been in a castle before. Americans didn’t have castles. There wasn’t the kind of history in America that there was in Europe. There just wasn’t anything that old.

But this Starklandian castle was gorgeous. It looked like something out of an internet search for “perfect euro castles.” It was all high stone walls and tall spires jutting up into the air. The city had clearly grown up around the castle, sprawling out away from it. Modernity met the ancient right in the heart of the city.

As far as I could tell from the car, that was the best description of Starkland possible. The modern world and the ancient world pressed up against each other everywhere I looked, from old-looking fountains to a high-speed rail line. Electricity and cable lines twisted through the air right next to two-hundred-year-old, Victorian-era streetlamps. The buildings were a mix of old and new construction with seemingly nothing to separate it.

Stehen was a city of juxtapositions and mixtures. It was a hybrid city, where the old met the new and created something absolutely beautiful.

I was already enamored with Starkland when we finally pulled up inside the castle’s courtyard, but nothing could have prepared me for what I saw next.

I thought I understood what a castle would be like. I’d seen movies and TV shows, and I figured I had a good idea. But as we walked into the main building, I realized I was absolutely wrong.

Just like the city, Stehen’s castle was a hodgepodge of the modern and the ancient. Our guide, a man named Maximilian Josef who had a bushy white mustache and looked like he was two hundred years old himself, pointed out some of the history as we moved. Next to a computer terminal was a painting over three hundred years old. The stones were all original, but the lavish rugs and tapestries were all additions over the years. I almost jumped into the air when he told us that the rug we were walking on was over a hundred years old.

As we walked along, I couldn’t help but stare at the sheer amount of wealth lining the walls. I’d never seen such opulence and modernity before in my whole life. Everything was electronically controlled on touch screens, and the little control panels were all over the place. They were well hidden, though, behind million-dollar statues and mirrors with golden frames. It seemed as though everything we passed had some historical importance.