Aleksey's Kingdom

  Readers love A Royal Affair

  by JOHN WILTSHIRE

  “A Royal Affair absolutely delivers all that I’m looking for in a story: unique and compelling characters, a vivid, action packed setting, believable romance, all wrapped in a fresh and captivating narrative style.”

  —It’s About The Book

  “There are twists and turns, both in plot and with characters. Brilliantly scrumptious fiction.”

  —Prism Book Alliance

  “…as soon as Doctor Nikolai Hartmann meets Prince Aleksey of Hesse-Davia, I quickly became in engrossed in the book.”

  —MM Good Book Reviews

  “A Royal Affair is beautifully crafted and certainly a journey worth taking… There is no doubt that I will be reading more by John Wiltshire, especially with the poetry he creates through the simplest of words.”

  —Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words

  “A Royal Affair is so far from predictable that it had me catching my breath with all the surprising and intense moments.”

  —The Blogger Girls

  Copyright

  Published by

  DREAMSPINNER PRESS

  5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886 USA

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Aleksey’s Kingdom

  © 2015 John Wiltshire.

  Cover Art

  © 2015 L.C. Chase.

  http://www.lcchase.com

  Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.

  All rights reserved. This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of international copyright law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. Any eBook format cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press, 5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886, USA, or http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/.

  ISBN: 978-1-63216-888-7

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-63216-889-4

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014922530

  First Edition April 2015

  Printed in the United States of America

  This paper meets the requirements of

  ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  Chapter One

  I DID not intend to take up my pen again so soon—if at all.

  I am no longer a man of reflection or one of science as I once purported to be, and do not analyze my life as I once did.

  In this place of towering trees and deep, cold lakes, of mountains and wild coastlines, I have no need to pretend to be what I am not. But the events of the last few weeks have shaken me, I confess. Even now, sitting at my crudely fashioned desk in our cabin, I can feel a slight tremor in my hand as I write. It will pass, as will the nightmares and the drumming in my ears, which sounds like a summons from the dead.

  But I do not pretend this time that alleviation of these small woes is my chief motivation in recording the events I am about to relate.

  I have another motive.

  I say I am no longer a man of science, but that does not mean I have fallen so far in my beliefs to now be… irrational… and yet… what I have witnessed over the last weeks has utterly confounded me. I will set it down. Once more I will record I went here, I did that, and maybe when the path is clear upon the paper, it will become clearer in my mind and fit once more into the laws of nature I have not wholly abandoned.

  For if it does not, what is the alternative?

  The alternative is unthinkable.

  I SUPPOSE the beginning of the tale belongs to Aleksey.

  Did I think our flight from Hesse-Davia to this new world would leave us in a kind of semiparadise? Heaven here on earth? I suppose I did. If put under torture—and trust me when I say from firsthand knowledge I would not want that experience again—then I would retrieve my account of my time in Hesse-Davia and confirm I did use the word heaven—or Aleksey did. I do not think either of us gave thought to how our lives would play out here in the New World.

  If we were man and wife….

  Dammit. He is as difficult to write about as he is to live with.

  Aleksey, Aleksey, Aleksey. Now the trees whisper his name as once the wind cracking the sails did, the seagulls mewling….

  Now I think on it, perhaps they were warning me.

  Aleksey. His Majesty King Christian Aleksey Frederik Mountberg. What can I say about living with Aleksey that would capture one fraction of the ecstasy and fury that are my everyday lot? I brought a king to a wilderness, the general of a victorious army to a place where, if you listen closely, you can hear trees growing. I removed a young man who had lived out his twenty-four years surrounded by court intrigue and gossip to this place where the arrival of winter and the departure of ducks is something to be noted. He had spent his life being amused by people paid to invent novel entertainments: picnics, masques, dances, tournaments, concerts. Now he has me to divert him. You may have gathered from my previous account that I am not the most enthralling companion anyone could choose. I have my moments, but they are usually when I am horizontal—or Aleksey is—and then I can be inventive and amusing enough. But we can only be horizontal (and clearly this is only an expression, as we are as happy to share our bodies standing up pressed to any convenient wall as we are lying down) so much of the day, following on from nights when we exhaust ourselves to pain with the frequency and urgency of our passion.

  As I started to say earlier, if we were man and wife…. If we were, there would most likely be children now: two people becoming three and then four. Then the love and the devotion that brought two people together would spread to encompass all. I assume that is how it works. I have no firsthand experience of this, naturally. But here we are. Just the two of us. Of course, I am not wistfully picturing Aleksey as my spouse surrounded by children. I am content enough. But I just wish….

  Dammit, I wish he had not visited the newest settlement on the coast, and I wish he did not now find it so necessary to his happiness.

  Aleksey has gone a handful of times to a small colony on the seaboard, and I am as a lovesick, jealous girl. There. I have improved my ability to be honest with my feelings.

  He infuriates me because he finds my jealousy funny. Damn him, he has entirely forgotten how our relationship is supposed to work. He is only twenty-six. I am thirty-eight.

  I should never have called this new home Aleksey’s kingdom and told him he had a devoted subject entirely in his thrall. I think he took me a little too literally.

  I think now, upon reflection, it was a very bad idea to allow His Majesty to read my thoughts on our time in Hesse-Davia at all—recollections he has now read a number of times—some passages extremely well thumbed. It is very hard for me to now present myself as the stern arbitrator of his folly, censorious of his ridiculous whims and enthusiasms, when he knows I am usually thinking entirely different to what I actually say.

  Aleksey, I am very sad to relate, takes liberties with me I should not allow.

  He thinks my body is his to do with as he wishes.

  He thinks my thoughts are constantly upon him. />
  He thinks my heart is unable to beat without the spark his presence lends.

  His folly in all this is quite unsupportable.

  AS I have already said, therefore, Aleksey precipitated these strange events. He returned one day in late autumn from his latest excursion to the colony to tell me some news that was to have more of an impact upon us than I anticipated when I first heard it. As he had been away for two weeks, I was not in the best of moods. I was chopping logs, a task I had taken to with great relish that morning, waking for some reason very out of sorts and needing something extremely physical to revive my spirits. Faelan was the first to sense his return. Now gray muzzled with age, he rose with difficulty from beside the woodpile where we had been comparing our thoughts on Aleksey’s absence and padded stiffly to the edge of the tree line. Aleksey got more of a welcome from his wolf than he did from his lover. I ignored him. I was busy. Wood does not chop itself.

  After regarding me for some time, perhaps waiting for a greeting, Aleksey released Boudica to her paddock and came closer, his hands behind his back. “Do you not want your present?”

  “Am I a girl needing trinkets to sweeten me?” The log split with one of those perfect blows you can only reproduce once in a while. I smiled privately and lined up another.

  Aleksey picked up my shirt, which was draped over the log pile, and sat down, idly running his fingers over the material. Faelan slumped down at his feet with a sigh of pleasure. “He is glad to see me. I do not see why you are not too. It is very hard to have ridden so eagerly to get home and tell you my news—and give you a present—only to be treated so rudely.”

  “One day you will return and find Faelan has died while you have been gone, and then you will be sorry—he is ten, Aleksey. That is a great age for a wolf, and he pines for you when you are not here.”

  “Out loud?”

  “No, in his heart. He is miserable and can settle to nothing.”

  He picked up a long splinter and began to clean his nails, a deep frown upon his perfect features. “Perhaps he should tell me these things sometimes. When I am here.”

  I sunk the axe into the block and went over to him and straddled his thighs, then took up my shirt and wiped the sweat off my face and naked chest. He lifted his eyes from the small task he was employed upon and watched the slow movement over my muscles. I slid my hand around the back of his neck and leaned closer, my mouth mere inches from his. “He is a dumb animal, Aleksey. You need to interpret his mood better—read his body language.”

  He cupped me gently, a rueful pout upon his lips. “I am trying to interpret this. It resembles the axe handle. What could it mean?”

  I lowered him to the ground, pressing it against him to give him a clue. He smiled wickedly and kissed me, a long, loving meeting of mouths. “You could come with me, Niko.”

  “If I came with you, I would not have the pleasure of your absence. The peace and the quiet….” I was too busy kissing and exploring to play the game for much longer. I was close to admitting just how much I had missed him and showing him this very forcibly with my body.

  But he was Aleksey. He suddenly pushed me off and darted one hand back up to the woodpile. “I forgot your present!”

  “Aleksey!”

  “No, wait. It’s a letter from Johan. To you, or I would have opened it—if it had been to me, which I think it should have, as he is my friend, not yours.”

  But I had seized the letter from him and tossed it out of reach. Johan would understand. He was a man.

  Aleksey’s breeches came down very swiftly, revealing the only present I needed. I took it eagerly in my mouth, as if he had brought me some sweet offering of sugar. He tasted better to my mind, despite a day in the saddle. He groaned and stretched upon the dry earth under the hot sun, then stripped off his shirt before spreading his arms and grabbing small handfuls of dust as his pleasure mounted.

  One of the great delights of our enforced exile was that the monarch of this small kingdom could lie in the bright midday sun completely naked and be sucked to completion by another man, and the only stake he faced was one of flesh and blood, which was soon to take him another way.

  I turned him onto his belly in the dirt after I had swallowed all he had to offer. He deserved to be mounted thus and reminded of his place in the scheme of things. And besides, although I loved to see his face when I took him, I cherished seeing his hard buttocks just as much, to spread my fingers over them as I thrust in, parting them to their extreme, stretching as I plunged to hear his gasp of delight. I relished the moment when he would inevitably push up, rising from his slim waist, twisting around for a kiss. I kissed him willingly, ignoring the slight smirk I sensed hovering around his lips. No doubt he would see this taking very differently: having returned home he’d successfully manipulated me into forgiving him his absence and rewarding him just the way he wanted. I would have pulled out and punished him by teasing my cock over him, promising reentry but withholding that extreme pleasure, but he had been absent two weeks, and that meant many, many such entries had been lost to me. I was not a man who found it easy to deny myself this indulgence. Actually, I cannot recall one instance when I had voluntarily denied myself Aleksey’s backside. Unless when giving him mine, of course.

  We finished most satisfactorily with me coming deep inside him and he frustrated, for he had risen again after the relief my lips had given him but had not now been brought again to fulfillment. I left him in this state, disheveled, naked, hard, sitting alongside me as I retrieved Johan’s letter. I didn’t let him find his own easement either and told him I’d bind his hands behind his back if he tried it. This was something new we were experimenting with—me tying him up occasionally—so he did not take this threat lightly. As a king, this new interest of mine went very much against the grain for him, and it was taking a long time to coax him into playing with me in such a way. He would come around.

  I prayed Johan would forgive me opening his letter in such circumstances, but I was fully intending to rise again very soon and finish my annoying king off properly, so holding one of his hands, preventing him touching himself, laughing and fooling, I tried to read poor Johan’s news. I was hoping it was confirmation they would soon be joining us.

  I had no objection at all to Aleksey having a little more company from an old warrior he thought of as a father and a young wife who adored her husband. It was only soldiers in the colony I had a problem with Aleksey seeing. But then, as I frequently reminded him, he did not have a very good record with the military. He had seduced a senior officer in his own army on the road to war!

  Johan and Anastasia wanted to come and join us. I think my descriptions of the life—the freedom and the complete lack of censure from any form of authority—had seduced a young princess who had dreamt of such a life since she was old enough to realize that etiquette and manners of court were not for her. Although I do not think Johan’s and my experiences of love were similar in most respects, they were perhaps more alike than we had ever suspected they would be. We had both tethered ourselves irrevocably to beautiful whirlwinds and were hanging on for the ride.

  So his letter was full of his plans for the journey to the New World, but also full of the work they were both doing as de facto guardians and counselors of a very young king. Stephen, being only twelve, needed them. It was an ideal arrangement. Johan and Anastasia ruled Hesse-Davia and raised Stephen to be a monarch worthy of the ideal. Our early reforming zeal was in very good hands. They had apparently rescinded once more the death penalty for witchcraft and sodomy.

  There was even a suggestion of Aleksey and I being able to return one day, which is why, I suspect, the canny old soldier had sent the letter to me and not to Aleksey, or both of us as he usually did. He knew Aleksey’s innate good manners would forbid him opening something so directed. He probably understood my extreme reluctance to even contemplate such a return, despite how much Aleksey might see it now—from this great remove—as a good idea. He was still, tec
hnically, King of Hesse-Davia, of course. Only a small handful of people knew of his survival—and mine, come to that. So I read him parts of the letter I wanted him to hear and concealed others. I think he was too distracted by us both being naked and erect to worry much over what the letter said. I dragged out the recital a little to inflame him more.

  Finally he could stand it no longer and suddenly displayed one of those annoying traits I alluded to: he demanded I turn for his convenience. I didn’t object to taking Aleksey into my body—indeed, I craved the feel of him inside me—but I didn’t appreciate being ordered by him to do anything and certainly not in the crude way he put it. Turn over, I want to fuck you was the sort of thing a soldier might say to an eager young man….

  At my very mild enquiry—something along the lines of is that what the soldiers in the colony say to you?—he took umbrage with me for some reason, and the consequent manhandling was quite vicious. I always took the time to prepare him—well, a finger or two if he was lucky and I was feeling generous. His entry into me, however, was painful and sudden. If we hadn’t been laughing so much, I might have actually resented it. But we were too amused with ourselves to worry about my discomfort or his intense delight in conquering me so. He rode me with the same urgency he rode his horse, with the spirit with which he did everything, and as he worked himself deep inside me, he regaled me with tales of what he did with the soldiers, when and how, and was inventive in his wicked lies. Quite where the young prince I first met who had no words to describe most of what we did with our bodies had gone, I had no idea. This challenging man had taken his place. It was a good trade, I thought.

  Aleksey’s news, therefore, did not get related until later that day as we were swimming in the lake. It was incredibly convenient, given our favorite pastime was inevitably so messy, to have this to look forward to afterward. The water was always cool, even in the high summer months, and sometimes, when the light was just right, was entirely clear to the bottom except in the very deepest parts in the middle. Now in late autumn it was very cold and quite delightful to plunge into—once the initial heart-stopping moment was over.