by Avery Flynn
The air was hot and sticky inside the double-paned, bulletproof glass walls, and he slipped off his suit jacket as he crossed the clay-colored Spanish tile floor with its embedded sensors that detected changes in pressure—one of his little additions that added to the hidden appeal of the château. Emerging into the sitting room on the south end of the main building, he checked for the discreet surveillance hidden in the mounted taxidermy so cleverly—one of the stag’s black eyes was a camera. It was the same with the heat-sensitive motion detectors in the oak-lined hallway, the weight-activated alarms on the stairs, and the concealed visual spying devices throughout the château. If he relaxed his guard here in the mountains, it was because it was the one place in the world he could.
He paused for a moment outside the library door to give himself enough time to suck in a deep breath and then entered the room.
“I was wondering where you’d run off to.” She flicked on one of the Tiffany table lamps. The soft light created a dim halo around her body, outlining every delectable curve. “For a large house, there sure aren’t a lot of people around.” She paused and arched an eyebrow. “Or are there?”
So that’s how they were going to play this, huh? The challenge in her voice did something to him. Made him want to push her right back, see how she reacted, and find out if he could get her to lose some of that cool control on display. Let the games begin.
“You know there are.” He shut the door behind him and leaned against it, another nonverbal reminder that she might be royalty, but here in this château he was the one in charge.
“How many?” she asked, her tone light, but he wasn’t fooled.
“Enough.” No one knew all the specifics of security except for him, not even Major Bendtsen, who acted as his second in command. Some would call it paranoia. He preferred to think of it as the ultimate safety measure.
She sauntered over to the bookshelves and let her slim fingers slide across the books’ spines as she made her way to the hidden door that led to her bedroom. Stopping at just the right spot, she pulled out a first edition of Huck Finn. The shelf swung open on silent hinges, revealing her room.
“And the Scooby-Doo haunted house doors?” she asked.
He would not look at the king-size bed visible through the opening. Imagining her naked on that bed was the last thing his big or little head needed at the moment. “They came with the house, Your Royal—”
She held up a hand. “Elle.” Her voice was hard, imperial. “That’s who I am now.”
So stubborn.
“As you command…Elle.” The name tasted sweet on his tongue, like a secret dipped in honey.
“What happens if I walk out the front door?”
As if he’d let that happen. “The Fjende will find you and, eventually, kill you.”
Pondering this bit of information, she twisted a long strand of silky reddish hair around her finger as she stared at him. It was as if she could see something inside him that he didn’t know was there. The idea was touchy-feely, weird, and completely unshakable. He didn’t like it one bit.
Elle crossed over to him, stopping well out of arm’s reach before walking a half circle around him and putting him on the spot. She inspected him from top to bottom, her gaze lingering for a couple of beats on his pants, where his cock lay against his thigh. Blood rushed to it in response, but he refused to move or adjust his stance. She knew what she did to him. She’d felt it as he’d slid against her firm, high ass outside, a moment of blissful agony he’d no doubt jerk off to soon. But he knew the score. She was trying to exert control over the situation by making him hard with just a look. Well, she wasn’t going to get it. Control was his. Always.
With deliberate care, she scraped her teeth across her plump bottom lip, sending a shot of hunger through him that took his breath away. “What happens if I stay?”
“I’ll keep you safe.” He would. No matter the cost.
“Why?” she asked, a huskiness invading her tone.
“It’s what I do.” It’s how he’d get his revenge. Finally.
She stepped closer, her breath warm against his ear. “Who are you?”
“Dominick Rasmussen.” The lie came out smooth and soft, despite the way his body had hardened because of her nearness and the line of questioning.
“Bullshit.” Her laugh teased his skin, and then she was gone, striding across the library to her phone lying on the seat of an oversize leather chair. She bent over, giving him a heart attack–inducing view of her ass encased in that tight green skirt of hers, and picked up her phone. Turning, she scrolled through whatever was on the tiny screen. “I still get cell coverage up here in the snowy boonies of these mountains. Eight years ago you appeared out of nowhere, one of the wealthiest men in the Western Hemisphere, with a mysterious past and a never-ending supply of cash.”
“Everyone comes from somewhere.” For him it was a place he’d never see again because it no longer existed, not the way he remembered. Pain pinched his lungs as the memories flooded. The blood. The severed limbs. The blank stares of the dead.
She flung her cell back onto the chair. “Tell me.”
This needed to stop—the questioning, the wanting, the hunger that nearly dropped him to his knees. Stalking across the sixteenth-century Turkish rug, he trapped her between himself and the chair. “It has no bearing on today or what we’re going to accomplish in the days ahead.”
He let his frustration boil close enough to the top that she should have wilted in the heat. She didn’t. He was beginning to realize that she burned just as hot as he did. Underneath the expensive clothes and their arctic Elskovian exteriors, a blue flame flickered in them both. If he wasn’t careful, that heat might end up turning a decades-long dream to ash.
Her gaze grew hooded, and a pink flush ate its way up her ample cleavage, but her questioning continued. “You live in London, but you don’t have an English accent. Instead, you have the slightest hint of Brooklyn and something that”—she narrowed her eyes—“sounds a lot like home.”
“I thought you were a woman without a country.”
“I am,” she whispered.
The loneliness in her voice tore a hole through him. The Resistance had watched, but always from a distance. What kind of life had that been for her? He’d spent the last ten years surrounded by fighters readying for battle. She’d lived those years alone; it was all there in her file on his hard drive.
She lifted her small hand to his chest, setting it over his fast-beating heart and sending shock waves through him. With the barest pressure, she pushed him back as far as her arm would go. He allowed it even though every instinct in him was screaming for him to wrap her up and tell her she would never be alone again.
“What will it take to convince you you’re wrong, that you have a country, a home?”
The lost look in her brown eyes gave way to a wary determination. “A good place to start would be the truth.”
Now, that way lay trouble. “About what?”
“You.” She brushed past him, putting half of the rug between them, as if that would minimize the awareness he had for her. “According to the internet, you’re a total player with the Midas touch when it comes to business deals. According to you, your only mission in life is to get my ass on the Elskov throne. So which is it?”
They stared at each other as the silence stretched between them, holding them in place. Talking about his past had been forbidden for so long, he wasn’t sure he could speak the words out loud. He took a deep breath, the smell of tear gas and the echoes of horrified screams escaping from some dark place in his memory. She didn’t know. How could she? The Fjende had covered their tracks too well. The international community had accepted the state-sanctioned stories of the king’s sudden heart attack and a grieving nation temporarily broken apart by rival factions as an explanation for the riots, the murders, and the chaos following the coup.
Telling her everything wasn’t an option. Success depended on her never findin
g out the truth about her father, but the rest? That he could give her.
“Do you remember what the week leading up to the coup was like?” He shoved his fingers through his hair as if he could wipe the memory from his brain. “I was twenty-two and home on holiday from university. I thought I was about to take over the world—then everything crumbled.”
The reports in the beginning had been sporadic rumors, but they could only be contained for so long. Elskov was a small country, and on their island word traveled fast.
The heated pink in Elle’s cheeks drained until only a ashy pallor was left. She clutched her hands together in front of her. “My father tried to hide it from me as long as possible, but everything was so tense there really wasn’t any way. There were paid protestors outside the castle gate. Someone had to taste my food before I could eat it. In the last few days, I wasn’t allowed to leave the castle, even in the armored SUV.”
In those last few days, the country was obsessed with sightings of royalty, false or not. “The Fjende claimed your lack of visibility was proof your family had abandoned the country.”
“My father would never have done that.” She shook with indignation as disgust wound its way into words. “He bled for Elskov, for all the good it did. The coup won anyway.”
Her words slapped him in the face, and he nearly flinched. “The war isn’t over yet.”
“What war?” She spun around to face him, her eyes blazing with fury. “No one in the international community cares about Elskov. They gladly eat up the bullshit that I’m alive and sorta well, that no coup ever took place, and that my father died of a heart attack and everything is business as usual.”
“We can change that.” The frustration of being so close to what he’d worked so hard for and discovering there was yet another hurdle to climb ripped a hole into him. Moving forward could be done without her cooperation. He’d committed to doing what needed to be done, no matter the cost. “You can change that.”
She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Instead, she let out a deep sigh, closed her eyes, and the fight went out of her. For a moment she stood there, her shoulders slumped, before opening her eyes and hitting him with a question he’d skated around answering for years. “You don’t need this. Why do you want it so fucking badly?”
“You’re wrong. I do need this. I’ve been waiting for ten years to make it happen.” The words came out before he could stop them, even if he’d wanted to. “You’re right on the accent. I had the best language and dialect tutors, but they weren’t good enough for someone with your ears. I grew up in Elskov as a registered foreigner. My family was wealthy but still waiting to become official citizens. Despite that, my parents were loyal royalists. They were not quiet about their support of your father and pledged to do whatever it took to help him. The wrong people heard about this and decided to make an example of them.” He fisted his hands, pushing past the agony the words brought to the forefront. “The night your father was shot and you fled for America, they were murdered. Their mutilated bodies were displayed in the square near Elskov Castle to serve as a warning to other loyalists. It worked.”
He didn’t know when she’d walked over to him, but suddenly she was there standing in front of him and taking his large hands into her own small ones. “I’m so sorry.”
Stopping the story there was the smart thing. It allowed him to hold a little bit of the pain back, but he needed to tell her. He had to let her know that although she might have been alone, she hadn’t been abandoned.
“Their names were Sabine and Rasmus Vinter,” he said, his parents’ names so long unspoken that they seemed foreign on his tongue.
She gasped and released him as if he’d burned her.
“Yes, the same Sabine and Rasmus who were supposed to meet you in Harbor City and keep you safe after you’d escaped,” he said. “It took me a year and you don’t want to know how many bribes to track you down. You’d hidden yourself well.”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
“But you do now.” He took her hands in his. They disappeared in his grasp, reminding him that behind the larger-than-life image of her he’d created, she was in many ways the lonely stylist working a nine to five, surrounded by luxurious trappings that probably only reminded her of how her former life had ended in tragedy. “You said yourself that you always have a choice. I’m asking you to make the right one.”
…
Elle looked down at their hands. She was trapped. Not by him, but by his expectations and his agenda. If she said yes, that would be her life until she ended up alone, like her father, her blood soaking the ground of the country he’d loved that had betrayed him, because that’s how it would end. The Fjende wouldn’t give up power without a fight, and she was no one’s idea of a warrior queen. She was just Elle. She’d fail, and what would that do to her father’s legacy?
Hating that it was so hard to do, she pulled her hands from his. “No.”
Dom snapped to attention, an icy contempt freezing out the emotion she’d seen in the blue depths of his eyes only moments before. “What do you mean, no?”
“I’m Elle Olsen.” She wiped her palms against her pencil skirt, trying to numb the electric tingling touching him created. “I’m a stylist. I live in a tiny one-bedroom, rent-controlled apartment in Harbor City. Find another way. I can’t be your queen.”
“That’s bullshit.” Anger roughened the low timbre of his voice until it was like sandpaper against her last thin string of control. “It’s time to stop hiding who you really are.”
“Fine advice coming from you.” And there it went. The string tethering her to a place of calmness snapped in half, and her temper erupted, heating up her insides and melting the bone-chilling, furious fear holding her in place. “You haven’t been hiding at all, have you, with your fake last name and all-too-convenient information blackout on all things related to your Elskov history?”
“This isn’t about me,” he said through gritted teeth. “This is about you taking your rightful place as queen. It’s time you accepted your duty. You’re being selfish.”
“Selfish?” The smug bastard. As if she wouldn’t be giving up her life—her freedom—as soon as she put on that crown, but she should just accept it like a good little girl. She hadn’t been a good little girl since the night her father died. She couldn’t bring him back, but she damn sure wouldn’t help the country that destroyed him. “Elskov took everyone I loved and abandoned me in a foreign land.”
“You were never alone,” he said.
The statement was so demonstrably false that she laughed, laughed, right at that big, broad chest of his, but there was nothing joyous in her voice. Instead there was the hurt and fear and despair of a seventeen-year-old girl who, within a twenty-four-hour time span, had seen her father murdered, left the only home she’d ever known, and found herself alone on a bench outside the Harbor City International Airport, totally ill prepared to function in the real world outside the castle walls.
“Now who’s full of shit? Were you there when I spent a month holed up in a cheap hotel because I was petrified that if I left someone would kill me?” She jabbed a finger hard into his unrelenting chest, the frisson of attraction mixing with the emotions swirling around inside her like a tornado no one could control. “Were you there when I realized no one was coming for me and that I had to create a new life for myself? Were you there when I was turned down for every job I applied for because the only thing I knew how to do was wave, smile, and put together a killer outfit?” She fought to get the words out through her tightened throat. “Were you there when I pawned my mother’s gold locket, the last tie I had to her, so I could buy forged identification papers and actually create a new life for myself?” Biting the inside of her cheek to head off the tears threatening to spill, she straightened up to her full height. “No, you weren’t. No one was.”
Raw emotion squeezed her lungs as she stared at him. Large and imposing, he loomed over her, the cold fury of his
anger and their potent sexual chemistry sucking up all the oxygen in the room. The air sizzled around them, sparking with too many wants denied. His icy-blue gaze dipped down to her mouth, and her stomach dropped down to her knees. He stepped closer, eliminating the space between them and sending her heart rate through the roof. He didn’t touch her. He didn’t have to for her to feel him. Something hot and angry sparked between them. He looked as if he couldn’t decide whether to fight her or fuck her. She knew the feeling.
“You owe it to your country,” he said, but his words burned with a different kind of heat than before, one that stoked an answering blaze within her.
“And it owes me my father back.” The agony of those words had her running for an escape, the kind where she ended up naked, sweaty, and too satisfied to do anything but breathe, because thinking…remembering…feeling was killing her right now. “Is he going to magically rise from the dead when I put that crown on my head? He died for them, for Elskov.”
“Do you really think he would have had it any other way?” Dom asked. “Do you really think he would have saved his own life if it meant sacrificing his country?”
No, he wouldn’t, and that was the broken shard of glass that cut against her heart every time she thought of him. Her father had loved her. She’d never doubt that, but Elskov, his duty, the crown—they all came first. And in the end, the truth of it was that she and his beloved country had both abandoned him as he lay dying. The guilt surrounding that moment never went away, but sometimes she could outrun it by shutting off her brain and letting her body take over. That’s exactly what she needed right now.
The tension between her and Dom had been winding her up since he’d walked out of the elevator and on to the Dylan’s showroom floor. She needed release. He could give it to her. Giving in, she reached up with both hands and grabbed fistfuls of his button-up shirt as she raised herself to her tiptoes, bringing her mouth in line with his.