Page 161 of Twisted Royals

I looked down at the carpet again.

"Yes, sir," I whispered.

"Say it," grandfather ordered, his voice hard as stone.

I raised my eyes to meet his, feeling how wild my gaze had just become.

"No…" I begged weakly. "Please, grandfather… please don't…"

"Say it, you little?—"

He cut himself off before he uttered whatever terrible word must have almost emerged from his lips. I swallowed very hard and took two deep breaths through my nose, doing everything I could, inside my head, to get rid of my deep blush, and the shame that went with it.

You decided you wanted to act shamelessly, didn't you? You fucked the servants because you wanted to be exactly this kind of girl — the precise kind whose conservative, old-fashioned grandfather calls her on the carpet and disowns her. The little slut.

I found my defiance, felt it flare from my eyes. My grandfather's head shook, slightly, and the expression on his face changed from raw fury to something even less welcome: profound frustration and disappointment. My rebellion almost ebbed away, but I refused to let him see that his opinion mattered to me at all. Crown Prince or not, I intended to live my own life and make my own choices.

"They call me Princess Goldilocks because I can't find the… the…"

Fuck. My nerve failed at the last moment.

"The what, Susanna?" my grandfather said, in a voice that cut like a knife.

I searched for my own anger, at this attempt to tame me, and I found it. I finished the sentence in a loud, brazen voice — more strident than I intended, but at least not weak-sounding.

"Because I can't find the cock that will fit my pussy."

The Crown Prince of Forthia flinched. That gave me a moment of perverse triumph.

I bit my lip, hard, because the flinch and the wayward pride that followed it, had also brought on a terrible new wave of embarrassment. To my dismay, I couldn't help going over, in my mind's eye, the five penises I had had inside me in the course of my nineteenth year on Earth — just as I did every time I heard that someone else had called me Princess Goldilocks.

The truth was that none of them had felt just right. For one thing — though it felt absolutely mortifying to be thinking about this with my grandfather's icy gaze fixed on me — I had never come with one of them in my pussy. Nor had I had much real interest in touching any of them, let alone doing anything more shameful, of the kind I knew some of my friends claimed actually to enjoy. Oral. Head.

How could I actually be thinking about never having given a blow job in my grandfather's library?

I swallowed again, feeling my forehead crease and the heat in my cheeks grow. My grandfather's eyes seemed to bore into me, as if in search of some sign of contrition. I managed to keep looking at him, rather than at the carpet, as if it represented some titanic act of resistance, but what he said next sent my gaze diving to my shoes.

"I want to make it clear," grandfather said, "that it's not about the sex itself. I'm not thrilled to have to speak in these terms, but if you had decided to sleep with the various men with whom your name has been linked discreetly, we wouldn't be having this problem. Instead, you have flaunted your promiscuity in more ways than it appears even the paparazzi can count."

My cheeks burned. He meant the story in the big American newspaper. The one about how the previously safe haven of Forthian investment appeared to be less safe, just at the moment, because of the unwelcome attention Princess Susanna had begun to receive. Yes, I admitted to myself though it pained me, I could have slept with them without the press knowing. But I had decided I wanted everyone to know, and I had endangered the prosperity of my entire nation.

"In the old days, I would have turned you over to the butler for a sound whipping, Susanna. A good long session over the discipline horse with your drawers down would have cleared matters up considerably for you, I think."

What. The. Actual. Fuck. My face felt like the surface of the sun. Despite myself, I turned it to the carpet, unable to meet my liege lord's eyes.

"We knew how to control young women properly, in my day," grandfather continued.

"You were patriarchal assholes, you mean," I muttered under my breath, wishing I had the courage to say it out loud.

"What's that, girl?" he demanded, his voice sharp. "Look at me. What did you say?"

I raised my eyes, knowing just how red my face had gotten and fighting with the tears that had started to prickle at the corners of my eyes.

"Nothing, grandfather," I tried, though I had to clear my throat to make my voice come out as something more comprehensible than a croak. My whole body seemed to have reacted in the abject shame his horrid comment about the discipline horse.

I had seen it, though I wished I hadn't. In the storage closet of the schoolroom where I had "gone" to grammar school with my cousins before we got to boarding school — the boys in England, the girls just down the road from the palace in the swankiest section of old Forth, the capital of our tiny principality. Our teacher, Madame Grévy, had shown it to us once, when we had behaved terribly. I couldn't even remember what we'd done — a naughty drawing on the chalkboard, or maybe just an attempt at a homework strike.

In any case, she'd marched us to the closet door and opened it with a skeleton key. None of us had any idea what the thing was, with the leather straps.

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