Masked Prince (Fated Royals Book 2) Read online

  Masked Prince

  Nikolai Andrew

  Dani Wyatt

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  Copyright © 2020

  by Dani Wyatt & Nikolai Andrew

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places,

  events and incidents are either the products

  of the author’s imagination

  or used in a fictitious manner.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  is purely coincidental.

  Cover Credit Pop Kitty

  Editing Nicci Haydon

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Stalkers welcome

  Chapter 1

  Randal

  Chapter 2

  Iris

  Chapter 3

  Randal

  Chapter 4

  Iris

  Chapter 5

  Iris

  Chapter 6

  Randal

  Chapter 7

  Randal

  Chapter 8

  Iris

  Chapter 9

  Randal

  Chapter 10

  Iris

  Chapter 11

  Randal

  Chapter 12

  Randal

  Chapter 13

  Iris

  Chapter 14

  Randal

  Chapter 15

  Randal

  Chapter 16

  Iris

  Chapter 17

  Randal

  Chapter 18

  Iris

  Chapter 19

  Randal

  Chapter 20

  Iris

  Chapter 21

  Randal

  Epilogue

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  About Dani

  About Nikolai

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  Dedicated to

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  Chapter 1

  Randal

  I don’t remember the exact year I realized I was a bastard, or what that meant.

  One thing I knew at thirty-four years old…

  I didn’t give a shit.

  It barely crossed my mind anymore. I knew it crossed the mind of the queen—my father’s wife, which I guess made her my stepmother. Even the thought of that word would make bile rise into my throat, as I knew my presence did for her every time she looked at me, but I’d come to enjoy making her suffer in some passive way.

  It seemed a bit of divine justice.

  Cloaked but unmasked, I pounded back my cider outside the village tavern before heading for the market square. It was the first decent day of spring. People were everywhere. It had been a long, shitty winter—the worst of my father’s reign, without a doubt.

  As I moved among the townspeople, nobody paid me any attention. As far as they knew, I was a journeyman carpenter who made a habit of passing through Aramoor and its surrounding lands. True, I stood three heads taller than all of them, and my shoulders were at least twice as wide, but nobody gave me more than a glance anymore. The feeling of being nobody important was fucking priceless.

  Inside the castle, my life was an endless goddamned battle. Out here, it was easy. Nobody expected a thing from me; nobody knew me well enough to love me or hate me. They’d just seen me around so much that my appearance didn’t shock them anymore. And they were smart enough to get the fuck out of my way when they saw me coming.

  Even my scars were of no interest. Though I always covered myself with my cloak, nobody commented on my face. My appearance was as familiar as the leather smith’s limp or the apothecary’s lazy eye. Nobody looked at me like a monster, which is what I fucking knew I was. The people of Aramoor were like the inhabitants of any castle city—they were all damaged, all fucked up in one way or another. I fit right in.

  Way above the village loomed the massive stone walls of Ironhaven Castle. From each window, the washer women hung new royal standards, showing my father’s crest, a crescent moon with three stars, representing the three children born to the stolen princess a few generations ago, who went on to found kingdoms of their own.

  I’d been forced by my tutor to learn the story as a child, though I believed little of the old tale. As I watched one of the standards flap in the breeze, I reminded myself yet again that it was also my crest. But no matter how many fucking times I saw the image, it never felt like mine.

  Through the streets I went, past the grain seller with his barrels of wheat, past the butcher with his rows of hogs’ heads. The closer I got to the dairy stall, the faster I walked. If I was lucky, there was a chance I might catch one glimpse, one fucking glimpse of…

  A man’s scream busted up my fantasy. I was the kind of guy that went toward trouble, so I took off running. Down a nearby alley, a pair of muggers had pinned an old man up against a wall. One of them held a small knife at his throat, drawing a trickle of blood that darkened his collar. The other patted him down, and a jingle of coins echoed around the alleyway.

  Not a fucking chance was I going to let that happen.

  With a few long strides I was on them, moving fast but quietly up behind the muggers’ backs. I might be big, but I knew how to be stealthy. I grabbed the one with the knife by the back of his neck, the way wolves grab their pups. The mugger let out a pathetically girly squeal as I seized him.

  “What the fuck!?” He howled.

  “Exactly,” I said, gripping him hard. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “Let go of me. You’re going to snap my neck!”

  Unlikely, but possible.

  “Let’s give it a fucking try,” I said, lifting him up higher so that his feet dangled off the cobblestones. As soon as I raised him as high as I could, his partner hit me with a punch to the sternum. It was a horseshit dirty move, and it pissed me the fuck off. Worse still, it made me lose my grip on the girly squealer’s neck. The two muggers set off running, with coins jangling as they ran. Though I wanted to go after them to beat the living shit out of them, I checked on the old man first. Priorities. “You good?”

  He nodded. He was rattled, but seemed alright. But I realized that in the scuffle, I’d lost my hood. Before I could yank it back up again, the man got a good look at my face. To his credit, he didn’t gasp when he saw me.

  “Aren’t you the carpenter that helped out old Flannery when his cart got stuck in the muck?” He asked me.

  Here we go with this bullshit again. The roads around Aramoor were calf-high with mud most of the year. One stuck cart was exactly like the next.

  “Probably.”

  “And the man who helped divert the ditches during the floods? Carried those big stones down from the forest for the job?”
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  “Nobody else was going to move them.”

  “And the man who single-handedly raised the barn out at the freehold near the rye fields? And the same man who…”

  Come on. This list of “good deeds” wasn’t going to catch the motherfuckers that assaulted him, now was it?

  “Listen, man. You’re sure you’re good?”

  “Indeed, I am, lad!” Said the old man, with a friendly slap of my shoulder. Reminded me of a child patting a bear.

  “Good. Watch yourself in the future. Market day brings out all the assholes,” I said, and then booked it down the alley toward where the muggers had gone, pulling my hood up as I ran.

  I rounded the corner and tore off down a towpath that ran parallel to one of the canals. The spring grass was still damp from the morning showers, and it was easy enough to track them. As muggers, they were pretty shitty. As escape artists, though, they had my respect. I chased them for miles, all the way out of town and into the sprawling countryside that surrounded Aramoor. In my rage, I’d not been paying attention to how far I’d run until I saw the old mill up ahead and realized where I was—out by the old dairy and stables.

  Holy fuck. I was at her farm.

  Like a vision, she appeared in the field up ahead of me. She stood in the farmyard, wearing heavy boots, with her skirt drawn up away from the ground, allowing me a tantalizing glimpse of her bare calf. The wind caught the hem of her skirt and smoothed the fabric around the curves and valleys of her hips. I pressed my clenched fist to my mouth and growled.

  I wanted that body, I wanted that pussy, I wanted her to be mine forever and fucking ever.

  As soon as I saw her, I forgot all about the damned muggers. She was all that mattered. I’d been fucking obsessed with her for over a year. But she had no idea I even existed.

  Iris.

  The first time I laid eyes on her was at the harvest festival two winters prior. She seemed hardly more than a girl, just on that cusp of change, but I knew she was too young for a brute like me. Legitimately forbidden fruit. But, even then, she took hold of something deep inside me and never let go. Over the year between, as she turned from a girl into a young woman, things changed.

  An obsession turned rabid. I fought it, but lost at every turn. I wanted to love her, fuck her, take her and keep her. She was the single most beautiful thing in the entire goddamned world.

  She wore a dark green dress that first day I saw her, and the same at the next year’s harvest festival. Green suited her, it brought out the dark of her eyes. I remember the way she blossomed as womanhood took hold. The way the fabric pulled taut against her hips, her breasts, her ass… Incredible the changes a year could bring.

  Where she had worn her blonde hair loose the year before, the next festival she kept it in a long braid, down over one shoulder, and in one hand, she held a bright red apple. Like Eve. A honeypot to sinners. She bit into it and wiped the juice away from her pink lips with the sleeve of her dress.

  So many women were so fucking polite—never ate in public, even. But she didn’t give a shit about that. She ate that apple with pleasure and I fucking loved watching her. Especially her throat as she swallowed. The way she ate that apple was a small thing, but it showed me so goddamned much.

  Around her were other young women from the village. To me, they looked like nothing but maids waiting on a goddess. When she smiled and laughed, I felt bone-deep desire to own her, body and soul. From that day to this, she was the first thing I thought of when I woke up, and the last thing I thought of when I went to sleep…usually with my hand on my cock, thinking about her cunt. Without ever showing her my face or letting her hear my voice, I swore my loyalty to her forever. I was hers and she was fucking mine.

  Simple as that.

  But part of me also knew it was impossible.

  Goddesses and monsters? That shit is for myths.

  And my life was not a fucking myth.

  So, I settled for being able to see her, watch her, obsess over her. Men a hell of a lot wiser than me say that the thing we want most is whatever we can’t have. For me, that was Iris. Fucking always.

  Now as I stood watching, Iris looked worried as she smoothed the flank of the cow beside her. Though I couldn’t hear what she said, it was obvious she was trying to comfort the beast, which was heavy and distressed with trying to birth a calf. I crouched behind a stack of round bales and alfalfa, watching her every move. Whenever I was near her, my cock ached so bad I thought my fucking balls would burst.

  There were times I hated her, just a little, for making me so goddamned needy; there were times I wanted to punish her for being so fucking perfect.

  Iris crouched beside the animal, feeling its belly. As soon as she did, the cow roared in pain, staggered, and went down, all four legs buckling beneath her. Iris screamed before I even realized what had happened. She had gotten pinned beneath the cow, who lay prone on her side, groaning into the mud.

  Fuck. I was up out of my crouch instinctively, already moving to go help her. But I stopped myself. Or my fucking shame did.

  For the first time in my life, I hesitated before going to help someone who was clearly in need. I wanted to help her—I needed to help her. She was mine, after all. But if I showed myself to her, if she saw my face, I fucking knew what I’d see: pity, horror and fear.

  And the idea of seeing any of that from her? Fuck, no.

  So, I scanned the farmyard for anyone else who could help her, any half-useful piece of shit farmhand who could go to her aid. But there wasn’t a goddamned soul anywhere.

  The mental conflict only lasted a few seconds. I knew I would go to her. I knew I would help her.

  Consequences be damned.

  I knew I would save her. Fate was there, pushing me, and deep down I knew it was just what I needed.

  Chapter 2

  Iris

  I lay face-up in the muck, struggling to get free from under my sweetest old heifer, Nellie. Her pregnancy had been difficult from the start, and I’d worried that the calving would be especially hard. I was right.

  When she faltered, and finally lost the struggle to stay upright, she’d pinned me beneath her, and now a zinging bolt of pain shot up from my lower leg. I tried to squirm free, but it would have been impossible even with just her weight—the combined weight of her and the calf inside her were much too heavy for me to budge. I tried to push her off me, summoning every ounce of strength I had. I squirmed in pain as I tried to wiggle my injured leg. But she didn’t even shift.

  “Nellie.” I gritted out through my teeth. “Just. Roll. A. Bit.” I pushed and she bellowed, but I was as stuck as ever. Deeper even. The mud sucked us both lower as I struggled.

  I took a deep breath and looked up at the sky, trying my best to stay calm so as not to make Nellie panic. She shuddered with a contraction and I petted her side softly and patiently, telling her it was all okay and that we’d figure this out, while trying to come up with some sort of plan of how to do that.

  Many people said that cows were the stupidest of all the animals, but I had worked with them all my life and I knew that wasn’t true at all. They were kind, simple creatures, who felt pain and worry just as we did.

  Nellie had begun to thrash in the mud, every movement of her massive body causing my leg to hurt more and more. I feared—even suspected—that my leg was broken. But no matter how much I was hurting, it was no use crying out for help.

  It was market day, and that meant we had even fewer passersby on the road than usual. I could scream and scream until I was hoarse, but nobody would come and I would only frighten Nellie more. The last thing I needed was to create more panic when she was looking to me for calm.

  Of course, my father should have been there, and I should have been in the village selling our wares. But instead of tending to the work that was rightfully his, he’d wandered off two days earlier and was now probably three towns over and three-sheets to the wind. Best to save my energy and keep my focus on getting myself ou
t of this mess.

  I comforted Nellie, hoping she’d roll onto her other side in her own time. Laying there, helpless and nearly crushed, I silently cursed my father for putting me in this situation, then chided myself for blaming him.

  None of what had happened was his fault. And while I might have hoped that he would be better for my sake, I couldn’t really blame him for the hurt he’d been living with these past few years.

  Still, birthing calves wasn’t the sort of thing young women should be doing on their own, but I had done it more times than I could count. The only job I was supposed to do on the farm was milking the heifers, but over the years I had taken on more and more responsibilities as my father had fallen deeper and deeper into his melancholy.

  Nobody else would tend to the livestock, and so it was left to me. In truth, it was all fascinating to me, but I often found myself far outside of my knowledge or experience, unsure what to do or how. I carried the weight of our entire livelihood on my shoulders. As one of the few royal freehold stables and farms, it was of the utmost importance that everything at least appear to be running smoothly and prosperously.

  If the royal council, who oversaw the freeholds, discovered that this whole endeavor came down to a nineteen-year-old milkmaid who was leagues out of her depth, we’d be stripped of our tenancy in an instant. For the royal family, appearances were everything. So long as everything appeared to be in good order, that was all that mattered.