The Reluctant Royal by Eleanor Harkstead

Author:Eleanor Harkstead [Harkstead, Catherine Curzon & Eleanor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LGBT Romance Fiction
Publisher: Totally Entwined Group
Published: 2020-12-19T16:00:00+00:00

* * * *

The sound of a cry woke Joe from his half-slumber. He knew instinctively that it had come from inside the house. It had come from Alejandro’s room.

Joe didn’t hesitate. He threw back his duvet and was out of his room in seconds. Without a pause, he barrelled through the door to Alejandro’s room. Zak, his face even redder than before, stood in the middle of the room, his eyes bulging and his breaths deep and aggressive, like a bull about to charge. He was fully dressed but dishevelled, as if he’d been in a fight.

“Get out of here, Copper! Fuck right off!”

Joe scanned the room for Alejandro, and saw him cowering in his bed. The brightly woven cover was drawn up to his naked chest, clutched by one white-knuckled hand. The other hand was pressed to his shoulder and between Alejandro’s fingers Joe could see a slick of bright red blood. Alejandro stared wide-eyed at Joe, tears coursing down his cheeks and in the lamplight, there on his jaw Joe saw the telltale sign of an open-handed slap.

Joe strode up to Zak and grabbed him by his shirt, lifting him an inch from the floor. “You did that, did you? Assaulted Mr Fuente?”

“Fuck off!” Zak repeated, but his voice was now rather small. “He started it!”

Joe glanced at Alejandro. “Is that why you insisted on coming in, to assault your boyfriend? Is that it?”

“Let me go, you mad bastard!”

But Joe only tightened his grip. Fury ripped through him, and Joe tried to remind himself that this was partly why relationships weren’t allowed with principals. He was verging on the unreasonable.

He overshot reasonable by some way as he dragged Zak across the room, flung up one of the sash windows with one hand, then slapped Zak onto the windowsill, so that his upper body was leaning out above the patio below. A freezing blast of wintry air hit Joe and it was only then that he realised he hadn’t got dressed. He was dangling Zak out of the window while wearing only his shorts.

“I’ve had enough of you, Mr Smythe-Unwin! I’m going to politely ask you to leave of your own accord, and if you don’t, you’ll leave either via a back-up team of police officers who I’ll call here to arrest you, or you’ll be leaving via the window!”

Zak was terrified, struggling, scraping his feet across the carpet to gain purchase. “You—you mad bastard!”

“What’s it going to be, Mr Smythe-Unwin? How are you vacating the premises this evening?”

A tear ran down Zak’s face. “I-I’ll go quietly. I promise.”

Joe pulled Zak back to his feet and shut the window. “That’s just what I wanted to hear, Mr Smythe-Unwin.”

“Just go, Zak,” Alejandro told him through his tears. “Go somewhere and sleep it off.”

“I’ll be back,” Zak promised, but his bottom lip was wobbling.

Joe marched Zak downstairs. He unsecured the door, but before letting Zak outside, Joe told him, “I really don’t like bullies, Mr Smythe-Unwin. Bear that in mind, eh?”

Zak shot outside faster than he’d come in.

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