royalty! || jj maybank

two!

(  lucky )

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          "MORNING, BABY."

Rafe rolled over next to her. Lucy, though she'd tried, hadn't slept once since leaving Sarah's room. His voice was gravelly as he spoke to her, deeper than usual, and coarser too. He had no idea she'd left his room at all.

          "Morning." She smiled at him, and he returned it with the slightest tilt upwards of his lip.

He grabbed her hip with his hand, holding it tight in his grip and pulling her towards him. His fingers dug into her skin beneath the sheets, a sort of cruel intimacy. Her blue eyes met his for the briefest of instants. She had always loved his eyes.

Rafe closed the gap between them, pressing a kiss to her lips with enough force behind it to bruise. It wouldn't, though. Lucy knew which wounds bruised.

Every move he made towards her was a reminder that he owned her. More specifically, his family owned hers. Those lines between family and individual had blurred long ago.

She didn't return the kiss, but he barely noticed as he rolled out of bed, pulled on a shirt and walked to the door. Rafe Cameron was out of the room without a second glance.

Her part to play for this morning was over. The curtain called, the act complete. For everyone else, they pretended. For themselves, they could act however they wanted. That wordless agreement had always suited Rafe better than her. He had never bothered with the profuse apologies for the things he said or did, because both of them knew he wasn't sorry.

Lucy lay back on the bed, surrounded by too-cold pillows, blankets that she had barely touched in the brief time she'd been by Rafe's side.

When they had been younger, she'd had a crush on Rafe for years. That was before she was shipped off to boarding school, before they started dating, before everything went to shit.

She would follow him around like some lost little puppy, and Sarah had teased her endlessly, but Lucy had never been able to look away from the boy with blonde hair and blue eyes that looked just right in the summer sunlight. Sometimes, Lucy looked at him and tried to see that same little boy, the one who had played with her and laughed with her and taught her how to do all sorts of things, like how to drive a dinghy. The boy who had celebrated with her and Sarah when she had caught her first ever fish.

The little boy who had always been the only one to give her a second glance, to think she was more than her family name just like he had always wanted to be more than his.

Now, that boy would return home at three in the morning, reeking of alcohol and god knows what else. It had never crossed her mind that she could grow to fear him.

The day he had asked her out was the happiest of her life.

Sarah had gotten her first boyfriend the month before, and though Lucy had been thrilled for her, she had been jealous beyond belief. The order was all wrong, Lucy was three months older, it should have been her getting to be the older one, the wiser one, the experienced one.

She and Rafe had been walking on the beach together, and he had looked at her with those same eyes that she loved so dearly, and he had asked her to be his girlfriend.

Lucy had been over the moon, had practically sprinted back to Tannyhill as fast as her legs could carry her, and had unceremoniously kicked Sarah's new boyfriend — soon-to-be ex — out of her room to tell her everything.

Of course, she had found out later that he had never actually wanted her. That the only reason he had asked was because his family had made him do it. That, and that alone, was the one thing that hurt more than the bruises.

If a piece of shit like Rafe Cameron didn't want her, Lucy doubted that said much about her future prospects.

She could hear the wind picking up outside as she stirred from their bed, the telltale sign that Agatha was on her way. The storm had been all the news networks could talk about for months. The generators at her own home and Tannyhill had been serviced just days ago.

God forbid the royal families of the Outer Banks went without air conditioning for more than a day.

Lucy made her way to the bathroom, an ensuite. In Figure Eight, if you didn't have an ensuite bathroom, you didn't really deserve to call yourself a Kook. Luckily for Lucy, both her own family and the Camerons had several.

The mirror was spotless, courtesy of the cleaners who drifted in and out of the house so quickly they ought to have been invisible. Lucy met her own gaze, nearly balking at the bags beneath her eyes. People always said she had her mother's eyes. Her father's nose and bone structure, her mother's mouth and hair.

Lucy was lucky once more. As her eyes scanned her face, she found that she had nothing to hide. Her wrists were clear, her stomach bare, the slope of her shoulders ran uninterrupted. Swathes of pale skin calling out for a summer tan, the likes of which only the Outer Banks could bring. She laughed as she looked at herself.

Lucky indeed.

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