Royal Guard Lion: BBW Lion Shifter Paranormal Romance Read online

  Royal Guard Lion

  by

  Zoe Chant

  Copyright Zoe Chant 2016

  All Rights Reserved

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 - Signy

  Chapter 2 - Kai

  Chapter 3 - Signy

  Chapter 4 - Kai

  Chapter 5 - Signy

  Chapter 6 - Kai

  Chapter 7 - Signy

  Chapter 8 - Kai

  Chapter 9 - Signy

  Chapter 10 - Kai

  Chapter 11 - Signy

  Chapter 12 - Signy

  A note from Zoe Chant

  More Paranormal Romance by Zoe Chant

  If you love Zoe Chant, you’ll also love these books

  An excerpt from The Billionaire Dragon Shifter’s Mate

  Chapter 1 - Signy

  Signy Zlotsky was not going to cry on the bus.

  She shoved the stupid plastic nametag from her first day working at a grocery store pharmacy into her pocket. She wasn’t going to stare at the CINDY printed there, or keep dwelling on her boss’s little chuckle as she casually renamed Signy, saying, “What good’s a nametag no one can read?”

  Signy hadn’t argued. She already knew that it didn’t help when she said her name was pronounced exactly the way it looked: Sig-nee. Her name looked strange, and strangers rarely even bothered to try pronouncing it. People who did—who said Sign-ee or Sing-y or her personal favorite, a vaguely French Sin-yee—at least saw her and her weird foreign name and took a shot. Her own family mostly called her Siggy, which she felt weird offering to others as a nickname; it sounded either babyish or a little too David Bowie for a grown woman who was far too curvaceous to pull off a Ziggy Stardust look.

  Strangers mostly didn’t want to be bothered, though, so they said Sandy or Cindy. And Signy let them, especially when it was her first day at a new job, and the person casually renaming her was her boss.

  She wasn’t going to think about that, though. She wasn’t going to cry on the bus, and she wasn’t going to think about how easily she could be fired and replaced with some other pharmacy tech with barely any experience.

  I just want someone to care enough to say my name right, Signy thought, leaning her forehead against the glass. I just want someone to care whether I’m there at all.

  The bus stopped and people got on; Signy looked up automatically to scan the people boarding. She stood up from her seat to make room for a harried looking woman with two young children.

  The woman didn’t seem to even see her, just herding the children toward the suddenly empty seat. Signy planted her feet in the aisle and pulled her phone out of her pocket, checking again for any messages or emails.

  The last text in her conversation with her little sister, Poppy, was still her own, from two days ago. Happy birthday, Pops!

  It was no surprise that Poppy, who took after their mother in her slim build and brilliant red hair as well as her constant searching for something new somewhere else, hadn’t replied. Signy knew Poppy was fine She had posted a picture on Instagram that Signy had seen on her lunch break, showing a glorious multicolored sunset over a vast ocean.

  Signy, sitting in a fluorescent-lit break room, alone except for a grim gray-haired cashier intently watching Judge Judy, had had to Google where in the world the sun was setting at that hour. She had concluded that it was probably the Indian Ocean, or maybe the Mediterranean. Poppy’s “year off” from college was looking like a lifestyle at this point—a constant whirl of new places, new faces, new adventures. Poppy’s adventures were like all the travels of their childhood on constant fast forward.

  All Signy wanted was to have a home she could call her own, and someone there with her at the end of the day. Someone who could make her forget that no one else in the world seemed to know her name. Someone who would make a home with her in one place, not feeling bored or tied down but safe and secure.

  Someone who might even make dinner when she worked the late shift, and maybe after dinner...

  Signy shook her head, smiling to herself. Fantasizing about some imaginary boyfriend on the bus was better than crying on the bus, but not by much. She imagined telling her mom, or Poppy, what she wanted.

  She knew what either of them would say: It’s too long since you went on a date! Go out! Live a little!

  Signy glanced around the bus, wondering if one of the men around her would turn out to be perfect for her if she just struck up a conversation. Somehow she doubted it. She hadn’t been with anyone in over a year, and she didn’t want yet another awkward first date. She could hardly imagine a one night stand, hooking up at a bar or a party the way other people seemed to think was perfectly normal. She just wanted someone to go home to, someone who would stay with her.

  Too bad you can’t skip all the getting-to-know-you and go straight to happily married, Signy thought, looking up just in time to see that her stop was next. She pocketed her phone again and maneuvered toward the door. I wish I could just pick someone. I wonder if matchmakers are still a thing, somewhere?

  But that still might not work, of course—Signy had tried with a couple of boyfriends in the past. She had told herself she was sure and this was it, but it never was.

  She stepped off the bus into the muggy heat of a September that thought it was still August, and thought again about moving somewhere cooler. She’d settled herself in Wisconsin partly because she was born here, and partly because she thought it had to be cooler there, but the humid Midwestern summer in a barely air-conditioned upstairs flat had cured her of that idea.

  She turned the corner onto her block, a long row of cookie cutter houses and duplexes built in the fifties, a corner of the city with all the personality of the suburbs. Her downstairs neighbors were nice enough, but they were busy with their jobs and with each other, plus a baby due in the winter. She had barely met anyone else on the street, just waving and smiling when someone happened to be outside as she was walking to or from the bus stop.

  Signy stopped short when she realized that there was a sleek black car parked in front of her duplex. Did her neighbors have company? She didn’t know if she could bear to hear them laughing and chatting with friends. It would only make Signy more aware of how far she was from a life like that—married and looking forward to a baby, with everything all worked out.

  She was still standing there, debating turning around and getting back on the bus, or at least going to a coffee shop for a few hours, when a man in a suit stepped out of the car. He stood there on the grass at the edge of the street and looked right at her.

  He had gray hair and gray eyes in a pale, weathered face, wearing a suit that looked somehow both expensive and not-from-around-here. He had a little gold pin in his tie, and two rings on his right hand, none on his left.

  “Signy Zlotsky?”

  Signy’s jaw dropped a little at the thought that he was here for her as much as the fact that he said her name—both of them!—perfectly correctly.

  He took a half step forward while she was still standing there trying to gather her wits. He repeated impatiently, “You are Signy Zlotsky?”

  He had a slight accent, she realized, and it sounded faintly, strangely familiar. But she’d also had quite enough of people getting impatient with her before she’d had half a second to think. She wasn’t getting paid to take anybody’s bad attitude with a smile now.

  Signy folded her arms over her work-issued green polo shirt and set her feet firmly on the sidewalk. “Who’s asking?”

  “My name is Otto Sparre af Varg,” he said haughtily. “I am an advisor to your grandfather—your true father’s father. He
has sent me to speak with you.”

  Signy felt her face set into a scowl, squaring her shoulders, even though she also felt terribly curious.

  Her father, her mother’s first husband and the guy responsible for saddling her with a first name no one in America could pronounce on sight, had died when she was just two years old. Her mom had married Frank Zlotsky before Signy turned four, and Poppy had been born a year later. She didn’t remember any dad but Frank, and she didn’t like people telling her who her true father was.

  But no one had ever told her she had a grandfather.

  “I will ask again.” Otto took another step forward. “You are Signy Zlotsky, are you not? Born Signy Bjornsson, the daughter of Nikolas and Mary Bjornsson?”

  His accent sounded like her father’s, she was suddenly certain. But that didn’t make any sense. She didn’t remember her father at all. She’d made up stories about him when she was little, but she had been too young to really remember anything. The stories had been just childish fantasies.

  Hadn’t they?

  “Yes,” Signy said, unfolding her arms, glancing toward the gleaming car. “Yes, I’m Signy Zlotsky. That’s my name.”

  “Your name, as your father gave it to you,” Otto said, “is Signy

  Marija Victoria Aspenas af Bjorn. And as I said, I come with an important message from your grandfather; shall we shout his private business in the street, or will you invite me in?”

  Otto flicked a hand at the duplex, and Signy glanced toward it. If you weren’t familiar with the way houses were divided into flats, it wouldn’t be obvious that there were two apartments in it.

  She tried to imagine taking Otto up the stairs to her second-story apartment. It would be nice to watch him sweat in that suit, but Signy knew she would feel like a bad hostess to her uninvited guest rather than enjoying his discomfort.

  And there was something about him, all lean and silver, watching her with that impatient expression. He was being polite, barely, but he obviously expected her to just do whatever he wanted her to because he said so.

  Signy shook her head. “I don’t invite strange men into my home, even if they claim to know some grandfather I’ve never heard of who hasn’t sent me a birthday card in twenty-five years.”

  Otto huffed but turned toward the car. “In here, then. Allow me to extend an invitation, and I shall present my credentials.”

  Signy took a few cautious steps after him. It wasn’t a good idea to get in strangers’ cars, either, no matter what cheerful stories Poppy told her about her adventures in hitchhiking. On the other hand, who would go to this much trouble to get Signy alone? Otto’s story was weird, but it made more sense than any other reason for this to be happening.

  The car was parked facing away, and all the rear windows were tinted; Signy was nearly level with the door before she spotted the suited shoulder of a man sitting in the front seat and stopped again. Otto had already opened the back door, and was gesturing her in; she could feel the seductive coolness of the air conditioning running on full blast. The seats were black leather, and there was a briefcase on the nearest seat.

  Signy bent over to peer through the front window, getting a glimpse of the two big men, much younger than Otto, sitting in the driver and passenger seats up front. Both of them were wearing suits and sunglasses. The driver had tan skin and tawny blond hair, and the man riding shotgun had brown skin and black curly hair. Both of them stared straight ahead.

  Signy backed up a step. “If I’m going to sit in a car with a stranger, I’m taking the driver’s seat. I’m not letting your armed guards just drive off with me whenever you decide.”

  Otto made an irritated noise, but he reached into the car and knocked on a little divider, like in a cab, between the back and front seats. Both men opened their doors, and Signy backed up a couple more steps as they got out, trying to watch both of them at once and wondering if anyone would come outside if she screamed.

  “Keep watch out here,” Otto said to them, reaching into the car and grabbing the briefcase. “The lady has requested privacy.”

  Both men nodded, and Signy caught the gleam of sunlight on sweat trickling down the blond one’s neck. She felt bad for a moment, banishing them to stand outside in the heat in their black suits—but she wasn’t about to get herself kidnapped just because it was gorgeous and slightly sweaty men in suits looking to do it. The guards moved back to the sidewalk, and Signy slid into the driver’s seat.

  It was still warm from the big blond man’s body heat, a startling contrast to the chilly air of the car. It felt strangely intimate, as though she were sitting in his lap, and Signy glanced out through the windshield after him. He had turned away, and was walking up the driveway while the black-haired man stood perfectly still on the sidewalk.

  Otto slid into the passenger seat beside her. Signy shut her door, focusing again on him.

  He popped open the briefcase in his lap and fished out a letter and a passport. “As I said, my credentials.”

  The letter was on heavy paper with some kind of logo on top in full color—a gold crown above a red shield with two yellow trees, with white bears to either side of the shield holding it up.

  Aspenas for aspen trees, she heard someone saying, a familiar voice with a familiar slight accent. And ‘af Bjorn’ means of the bear, our clan. Where we come from, polar bears are just the normal kind of bear.

  Signy touched the crest, feeling strangely close to crying, as her eyes skimmed down past some writing in an alphabet she couldn’t read to the start of the letter.

  To our beloved if rarely-seen granddaughter, Signy, Greetings,

  We have sent Count Otto Sparre af Varg as our emissary

  “Count?” Signy asked, her gaze flicking up to the crown over the crest again, and down to the end of the letter. The printed words gave the name of the writer, just one despite all the “we” and “our.”

  Einar Magnus Henrik, King of Valtyra

  Signy looked over at him again, her eyes widening.

  “That is my title,” Otto—Count Otto? What was she supposed to call him?—agreed. “And I sit on the King’s Council as his First Minister.”

  “The King,” Signy repeated, looking down at the letter again. Her grandfather, a king. Her father, a prince.

  Signy remembered suddenly, the first time she held Poppy. She had looked up at her mother and asked if Poppy was a princess too.

  “Poppy’s an American citizen, just like you and me,” her mother had said. “We’re proud to be Americans. We don’t need any princes and princesses here, we have a democracy.”

  But Signy was suddenly sure that there was a reason she’d asked that question. She thought she could remember her father’s voice, calling her princess and meaning something different from all the millions of other fathers who called their daughters the same thing.

  “I don’t understand,” Signy said, even though she thought she did understand. She thought that if someone gave her a map she could put her finger on the place Valtyra was, in the middle of the North Sea, even though it never showed up on maps unless she colored it in.

  “Your grandfather is king of Valtyra, and both his sons have now died,” Otto said briskly. “His only remaining heir is you, Signy Marija Victoria Aspenas af Bjorn.”

  He handed another heavy sheet of paper across to her. The top line was the strange alphabet she couldn’t read—runes?—but the next line read REGISTRATION OF BIRTH. It listed her own birthday, and the long version of her name Otto had kept repeating. Not typed, like her familiar ordinary birth certificate, but written in a hand she had seen a few times before, on the backs of photos and the inside covers of a few old books.

  It was her father’s writing.

  He had indicated where Signy was born, and that was the same as her birth certificate: Froedtert Hospital, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

  The next line gave her mother’s full name as Mary Margaret Arnott Bjornsson, and to her surprise she saw her mother’s signature th
ere. That meant her mother had seen this other birth certificate. Whatever this proved, her mother already knew.

  The next line gave her father’s full name in a form Signy had never seen before: Alexander Gustav Frederik Aspenäs af Bjorn, called Bjornsson, Prince of Valtyra.

  Signy’s hands began to shake, making it hard to read the rest of the page, a few lines of writing like nothing on her birth certificate. The first few lines were in runes, but the next were in English—probably a translation.

  I accept from my son this report of the birth of his daughter and heir, and bestow upon her the title Princess Signy of Valtyra, Countess of Nordholm.

  Einar Magnus Henrik, King of Valtyra

  Princess, just like her father had called her when she was very small. Just like her mother had told her she wasn’t anymore.

  This was impossible. It couldn’t be true. And at the same time it answered questions Signy had never really thought to ask, about why she seemed to have no family at all beyond her mother, stepfather, and baby sister.

  Signy looked down at the paper again. It should have seemed like no proof at all—anyone could make up something like this, couldn’t they? But she touched her mother’s signature, familiar from a lifetime of permission slips and checks, and her own real—American—birth certificate. She could feel where the pen had indented the paper.

  “Why was I never told?” Signy asked. “Why...”

  “Your father followed your mother away from his kingdom, because she did not wish to live the life of a princess in Valtyra. He died like—”

  “Don’t you dare,” Signy blurted. One of the few things she did have of her father were the newspaper clippings about his death; he had been struck by a car while trying to help a woman stranded on the side of the road. Otto might think that wasn’t a sufficiently heroic death for a Prince of Valtyra, but Signy wouldn’t let anyone speak badly of her father.

  Otto waved it away like it didn’t matter. “Your mother didn’t wish to bring you to Valtyra either. Your grandfather allowed it because he had another heir, but your uncle died a few weeks ago, childless, and we had no alternative but to seek you out. You are an adult, you can make your own choice now. You are a wealthy woman, Your Highness, regardless of what you may ultimately inherit from the King. You are Countess of Nordholm in your own right; you have holdings attached to that title.”