The Royals of Monterra: Royal Delivery (Kindle Worlds) Read online

  Toys needed to be disinfected before they were put away. I made a note to get Clorox wipes from the housekeeping staff. And while we were disinfecting the toys, it would probably be a good idea to wipe down the crib.

  Actually, the crib was looking a little off.

  I picked myself up off of the floor and went in search of Giacomo, who, sure enough, was keeping my staff in line. “Giacomo,” I said as I approached, nodding absently at the scattered bobs and bows from various people, “do you have a screwdriver?”

  He looked like I’d just spit in his ice cream. “A… screwdriver?” he repeated slowly.

  “Yep. You know, little handy tool that turns screws this way and that? I need one. Phillips head.”

  He blinked his eyes twice, and I could swear I was going to hear a very Tim Gunn “Make it work” in just a second. But then he nodded and said, “Yes, Your Majesty. I will find you one.”

  And off he went, presumably to find the elusive tool.

  Fifteen minutes later, I had taken apart the entire crib and was putting it back together.

  “Kat…”

  I looked up at the door and Nico was standing there, despite being in a hoard of meetings today, and looking around as if a tornado had hit the palace.

  I glanced around and saw that it sort of had. But I knew exactly where everything was and as soon as I finished reassembling the crib, I would get back to getting all of that cleaned up. “What?”

  He gestured faintly at the crib. “Is something wrong with the crib?”

  “Not anymore.” I grinned and went back to reattaching the leg in my hand.

  “What was wrong with it?” Nico asked, coming over to squat beside me.

  “It just looked off,” I told him, setting the pieces aside and picking up another. “I just want to make sure it’s ready, okay?”

  “Okay. Why don’t you let me finish the crib and you can put the toys back on the shelves?”

  That sounded very patronizing. I turned to glare at him, and he didn’t even notice. He was looking at the crib, analyzing it, and picking up the remaining pieces, nodding a little.

  Hmm. Maybe he was with me on this.

  I could deal with that.

  The smell of the crib was starting to make me sneeze anyway, and sneezing was not a pleasant experience.

  I shrugged and handed over the pieces. “Fine. But I have to disinfect the toys before they go back into the shelves.”

  “Of course,” Nico said, taking the screwdriver from my hand.

  He sat down on the floor and got to work, and I moved over to the toys and my Clorox wipes. After a few minutes of working in silence, I looked over at him, still suspicious. “I thought you were in meetings all day.”

  “I am,” he replied nonchalantly.

  “So why are you up here reassembling a crib with me?”

  He gave me a look. “Giacomo said you needed some help, and the current meeting doesn’t require my presence.”

  Giacomo was fired.

  I huffed a little and scrubbed the current rubber ducky harder. “I do not need help,” I muttered. “I’m pregnant, not handicapped.”

  “I know that, but I’m going to help anyway.”

  “Hrmph,” I grunted, tossing the wipe aside and putting the toys carefully back into their baskets. “You should be down in the meetings. They’re here to meet with you, not your advisors.”

  Nico laughed a little and focused on screwing in side rails. “It’s fine. We got through the important parts, then I said I wanted to check on you, if they were all right with it, and they were.”

  I pushed up to my knees and put my hands on my hips. “Are you babying me, Nico Fiorelli?”

  He gave me one of those innocent “who, me?” looks, and then grinned. “Just loving you, bella. If I have to put together a crib to spend time with you, that is fine with me.”

  Wind, you may now leave the sails.

  I frowned, despite feeling fluttery, and awkwardly stood up. “Fine. I’m taking these down to laundry and putting them in the wash.”

  Nico looked surprised. “The housekeeping staff can do that.”

  “I can do that,” I informed him.

  He held up his hands in surrender, one still holding the screwdriver. “Okay. Yes, Your Majesty. Of course.”

  I kicked him in the butt on the way out of the room for being a smarty-pants.

  Nico had no idea what sort of crazy I was feeling. I washed all of those things three times that day. Then folded them, organized them, and put them away. Twice.

  The nursery was all done, it was perfect and all set. Baby could come and move right into the nursery without any concerns from me.

  But what were we going to do about my maternity clothes? They were getting tighter on me, and I would need more before the craziness was over. I tried on every single article of maternity clothes I owned, and if it didn’t fit, it went into a pile for packing away. I braved my apprehensions about going out in public in a non-official capacity, and Lemon and I went clothes shopping, much to her delight. She decked me out with more fashionable stuff, and the media accused us of cheating on Battle of the Babies by working together.

  Whatever.

  I made a list of everything I would need in the days following giving birth, and set everything out. I packed my hospital bag three times, never mind that I was months away from delivering. It was ready.

  My closet was organized and color coordinated. Nico’s was organized and color coordinated. The baby’s extensive clothing collection was organized by size and season, and color coordinated.

  Productivity was at an all-time high for me, and it was addicting.

  So I unleashed my new powers on the palace.

  After a few days, Nico came into the bathroom where I was, on my hands and knees, gloved up, scrubbing the grout on the tile floor. With a toothbrush.

  “Bella,” he said, leaning against the doorframe, “what are you doing?”

  “What does it look like I’m doing?” I huffed as I scrubbed.

  “Well,” he drawled slowly, “it looks like you are scrubbing the floors. Which the staff cleaned this morning.”

  His attitude was not amusing. “Do they clean it like this?” I asked, scrubbing harder for effect.

  “Nobody cleans like that,” he informed me. “You are going to remove the grout entirely if you don’t stop.”

  “Then we will re-grout the entire bathroom.”

  “No, we won’t.”

  I froze as I heard his very firm, very kingly tone, and cast a slow glance over my shoulder at him, and his expression matched his tone.

  He wasn’t going to budge.

  I huffed and tossed the toothbrush into the bucket of soapy water. “Fine. No more grout scrubbing.” I moved over to the bathtub, where my sponge waited, and started scrubbing there.

  “Katerina, what all have you done in here today?” he said, sounding less amused.

  “Sinks, toilet, mirrors, shower, floor, tub,” I reported. “Cabinets and organizers, garbage, and counters.”

  “How many times?”

  I stopped what I was doing and sat back on my heels. “Oh my gosh…” I said slowly. “I’ve been in here all day.” I turned to look at him in horror. “All day. This is all I’ve done. I’ve cleaned the tub three times.”

  He smiled a little and crouched down to my level. “And you’re doing a marvelous job of it. I can see my reflection in it.”

  I snorted and stripped the gloves off of my hands. “I don’t know what got into me,” I admitted with a shake of my head. “I just… I had to clean. And organize. Everything. I had to get ready for the baby.”

  “Kat, you’ve tried to clean and reorganize the entire palace. People were beginning to talk. The housekeeping staff is terrified they’re all getting fired.”

  I winced and let him pull me to my feet. “I didn’t mean to, I just…” I smiled up at him sheepishly. “Nesting is real.”

  He laughed and kissed my cheek.
“I know, bella. I can see it. But it’s time to stop now before you make us tear down wallpaper and paint the walls.” He steered me out of the room, his arm securely around my waist.

  “Actually,” I quipped, “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that.”

  “No,” he replied immediately. “No, no, and before you ask again, no.”

  I frowned a little. “So what do you think I should do with this energy I have?”

  He sighed and tugged me closer. “Not try to organize Rafe’s closet.”

  “He’s a surprisingly sloppy guy.”

  “Or Chiara’s accessories.”

  “A little order never hurt anyone.”

  “Or the refrigerator.”

  “We really need to talk to the kitchen staff, that was gross.”

  “So,” he said, pretending as though I had never said anything, “why don’t you and Lemon send thank you notes to your baby shower attendees, plan your baby announcements, look up baby names, and try to make a list of children’s books for the library?”

  I stopped him in the hall and took a good look at him before a wild grin took over my face. “You talked to Sue Ellen.”

  He scratched at the back of his head, sheepishly smiling. “Guilty. I didn’t know what else to do, you were acting so crazy.”

  I laughed and kissed him, then wrapped my arm around his waist and started walking again. “You adorable, clueless man. That was smart. And I think I will do just what you said.”

  “Really?”

  I gave him a little smirk. “For now.”

  He groaned in response.

  Shortly after the baby shower, Lemon put herself on bed rest. Her doctor wanted her to be active and said she was at least three weeks from anything happening, but Lemon swore off absolutely everything and only walked the distance from the bed to the bathroom. Maybe the stairs, but only if she really had to.

  “There is no way I am letting this baby mess with my plan,” she told me when I heard what she was doing. “I have to get as close to your due date as possible.”

  I gave her a fairly pitying look. My due date had moved as close as the twenty-first of December, but was now looking more like Christmas, which I was not at all pleased about.

  “Lemon, we’re six weeks apart,” I reminded her. “Even if you could get to forty-two weeks, I couldn’t possibly go at thirty-five. Not without something weird going on.”

  Lemon skewered me with her eyes. “Don’t tell me we can’t figure out how to make you go early, Kat. Google the darn thing, have a Pinterest field day, call my mother, whatever you need to do. I am going late, and you are going early!”

  I didn’t have the heart to argue with her.

  With three weeks to go, Lemon was feeling pretty great, and she looked pretty great, but she was bored out of her mind. She never wavered on her determination though, not even when Dante hinted that she might want to be a little less strict about it.

  “You can deal with my fatness on your own time,” she had snapped at him. “It’s your fault I’m in this mess anyway.”

  He raised a brow at her. “I don’t remember you complaining about it at the time.”

  The glare she leveled would have melted the ice caps, even as her cheeks flushed.

  Since then, Dante had been surprisingly mum about the whole thing.

  I, on the other hand, was freaking out.

  Lemon’s plan was working. She had had less Braxton Hicks contractions lately, although apparently those weren’t actually the precursor to labor everybody assumed, and despite the fact that she was, at last, gaining weight, she only looked more like the perfect pregnancy model for it.

  I was still swelling up somehow. My chest felt as heavy as my belly, my back killed most of the time, and waddling was my new swagger. I could have sworn I would give birth any day, except, according to the experts, I was still carrying high and two months away.

  If Lemon could hold out and go late, the least I could do was go early and stick with the plan, right?

  Two weeks until Lemon’s due date, she started to get antsy.

  She’d sequestered herself in her room and I was free to come and go as I pleased, so long as she could manage me. And manage me she did. I was still dong yoga with Natalia, which was more uncomfortable than before considering I was like a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, but still felt good. We’d managed a photo shoot with Nico and I that I found utterly adorable and the rest of the world had been charmed by. No one really seemed to comment on the fact that Dante and Lemon had snuck out of the limelight, although one commentator suspected that Lemon had already given birth and the royal family was just hiding it.

  No one seemed to believe him though.

  “Kat,” Lemon whined, waving her hand at me. “Can you scratch my ankle?”

  I looked up at her where I was, lounging around on her bed, and grinned. “Which ankle?”

  She made a face. “Both.”

  I sighed and complied, laughing to myself. She really was miserable and I couldn’t blame her. She wasn’t exactly the kind of person that was good at doing nothing.

  “Thank you,” she sighed. Then, abruptly, she hissed and her entire body tensed up.

  I pushed myself up on my elbows. “Lemon?”

  She waved a hand at me, then exhaled slowly, her face clearing. “Contraction.”

  “Lemon!” I shrieked, sitting up all the way, too fast. I winced at the sudden jab of pain in my back.

  “Careful!” she barked.

  I shook my head. “A contraction? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She shrugged. “I’ve had a few over the last few days. Not regularly, and not a lot. I’m trying to relax more and do less, but…”

  “Uh, how can you do less than complete bed rest?” I asked, raising a brow.

  She ignored me and rubbed her belly. “Baby knows he needs to wait for a bit. He’s a Mama’s boy.”

  I smiled a little. “So it’s a boy?”

  “Of course, it’s a boy,” she answered absently, “why wouldn’t…?” She stopped and looked at me with wide eyes. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you that,” she breathed.

  I squealed and leaned over to hug her. “Lemon!”

  “Stop that!” she giggled, shoving me away. “You’ll break your water.”

  I gave her a look. “Wouldn’t that work for you?”

  “It’s too soon, you don’t want a real preemie,” she reminded me, shaking her head.

  I sat back against my mountain of pillows and grinned at her. “What are you naming him?”

  She smiled and rubbed her belly gently. “Probably Marco. We’ll have to see, though. After all of this, he may wind up being Giacomo.”

  We both grinned at that. Giacomo was not only the most efficient man on the planet, but he had also proven to be entirely devoted to us and our world of pregnancy. He always knew when we needed something before we could ask, and when the man appeared with a peanut butter and banana sandwich at two in the afternoon because he knew your husband wasn’t there to get it for you, you owed the man a hug and possibly a namesake.

  If you could bear to use the name Giacomo.

  Lemon wrinkled her nose up. “Maybe I’ll get a puppy and name it Giacomo.”

  I hid a laugh and leaned my head back against the pillows.

  Lemon groaned and shifted beside me. “Why is it that the only times I ever find a comfortable spot are the times when I have to pee like a racehorse?”

  “Ha!” I chortled. “That is the pregnancy paradox. Pretty sure it’s a rule of science somewhere.”

  She groaned and pushed herself up, far more easily than I in my massiveness could have done. “Well, it’s rude, and I don’t…” She broke off with another sharp gasp, one hand flying to her stomach as another gripped the bedpost.

  “Lemon?”

  Lemon was exhaling slowly, eyes closed, fighting for control. “Hang on…”

  “Lemon… that was… ” I glanced over at the clock on th
e end table, then back at her. “That was less than five minutes.”

  She winced and opened her eyes. “I know,” she murmured. She managed a smile. “Maybe it was just luck?”

  I gave her a warning look. “If you have one more…”

  She shook her head. “I won’t. I’ll just go take care of my business and then we can chat some more about what we’ll do when this baby does come.”

  She whirled, as much as an eight and a half month pregnant woman can whirl, for the bathroom before I could respond.

  I watched the clock like a hawk while I waited.

  Two minutes.

  Three minutes.

  Four.

  “Kat?” Lemon called from the bathroom, sounding strained and a bit worried.

  I sat up slowly and swung my legs off of the bed. “Lemon?”

  She appeared in the doorway of the bathroom, her face strained and her knuckles white. “Get Dante,” she ordered tersely. “Get Dante now.”

  I bolted for the door, throwing away my queenly convention and bellowed down the hall. “DANTE!”

  The beautiful thing about palaces is that they echo so loudly and so well.

  I heard a thundering of feet and yelled again, “Dante! Now!”

  Nico, Dante, and Rafe all appeared at once, though I failed to see how Rafe could actually want to take part in the zoo that was about to go down. But then, Dante was his twin, so maybe there was some connection there.

  “Bella, are you all right?” Nico asked at once, coming to me and trying to pull me in.

  I shoved him off. “I called for Dante, babe, not you.”

  Dante’s eyes widened and he looked towards the room. “Lemon?”

  I nodded. “Contractions. About five minutes apart, and the last one was a…”