The Prince's Captive Virgin

by Maisey Yates

  “You aren’t thinking clearly. Obviously he’s done something to you during the time you spent with him.”

  She had nearly laughed at that. “Yes. He stole my heart.”

  Her father hadn’t found that to be a satisfactory answer. What was it with men always trying to tell her what she felt? Always trying to tell her that her feelings were wrong or irrational. She was getting tired of it.

  She took a deep breath of the salt air, trying her best to wash herself clean, to let in a little bit of this freshness so that she didn’t feel quite so claustrophobic. It was strange what a broken heart did to you. Made everything feel heavier. Even the air.

  She looked down at her left hand, at that ring she should have taken off but hadn’t yet. She touched it, twisted it around idly as she continued to gaze out at the sea.

  Adam. Oh, Adam.

  “Belle.”

  The sound of her father’s thin voice carrying toward her on the breeze caused her to turn. And there he was, standing there, leaning against the rail on the deck. And beside him, bathed in the sunlight, stood a taller, more imposing figure.

  She looked down at the ring, half-suspicious it had called him here. Or, more likely that this was a hallucination brought about by her desperation.

  “I was going to throw him out,” her father said, “but I don’t have the strength to handle someone his size on a good day.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” she said, feeling dizzy and breathless.

  Adam walked past her father without saying a word, heading down the stairs and onto the beach. He paused, kicking off his shoes next to hers. Her father shook his head and walked back into the house, leaving her alone on the beach with Adam.

  “You came,” she said, her voice trembling. “You really did.”

  “There is nowhere else on earth for me to go,” he said simply, making his way toward her. “There is a place I could stay. I can continue on living in the darkness as I have been. But...it isn’t what I want. Not now.” His hands were in his pockets, his gaze focused on the ocean behind her.

  “What did you come here to tell me, Adam? Did you come here to let me know all the other ways I don’t measure up to your wife? Did you come here to tell me that you want to take me prisoner again even though you don’t have feelings for me?”

  He looked at her then, his gaze fierce. “No. Of course not.”

  “Then I could do with a less dramatic buildup, thanks. Can’t you see that I’m here breaking apart? Trying my very best to keep myself together, to keep on breathing, and then you show up. You show up like some...vision out of a dream, that I can hardly believe I’m standing in front of, and you haven’t even managed to get to the point of why you’re here. It should be the first thing you say. The reason you are here. That should be—”

  He cut her off, pulling her into his arms and pressing his mouth to hers. His kiss was urgent, savage, and she reveled in it. Because it called out the savagery in her. Called to that dark, messy place inside her that only Adam had ever reached.

  “I love you,” he said. “Is that direct enough?”

  “Yes,” she said, feeling dizzy and breathless. “But you said—”

  “Everything you thought about me is the truth. I lied. I lied to us both. I said horrible things, hurtful things, so that you would leave me because I am a coward. Because I thought it best to break my own heart in a way that I could control. When I decided to do it. Not in ten years. Or ten months—depending on how long you could possibly put up with me. Depending on how long it would take for you to finally realize that I’m not a man you love. I’m just a beast that took you captive.”

  She shook her head. “You’re not bad. You’re not a beast to...you’re...you’re everything to me.”

  “I don’t deserve that,” he said, his voice rough. “I had sunk so far into my own darkness and I didn’t even want to be reached. But you reached out to me when I gave you no reason to, and you started to love me when nothing in me was lovable. I don’t understand it, Belle. Because I couldn’t understand it, I feared it. And at least buried in the castle by myself I know exactly what’s going to happen. If I love nothing, then nothing can be taken from me. And if I blame myself for my wife’s death, then it’s so much easier to justify that. To call it recompense instead of cowardice. But I was hiding. From the world. And then from you. From my feelings for you. It isn’t that I don’t think I can love—it’s that I was enraged because my heart hadn’t learned. Because I can love, deeper and more profoundly than I ever could because I know how much it costs. I love you in ways I cannot describe, in ways that I wasn’t capable of loving before I lost my wife. And all of that seems unfair, it seems terrifying and it seems like something I would rather run from than run to, but I can’t exist inside of myself knowing that you’re out there and I am there in the darkness. While my light is here...” He dragged his thumbs across her cheekbones. “I can’t stay away from you, even if I should. I know that I should. For your safety, for your sake. But I want you too much to do that.” He shook his head. “It could be argued that I perhaps don’t love you enough, because that would mean letting you go, but I can’t do that.”

  “Why do people do that?” she said, thinking back to what he had said about her earlier, about respect. “Why do they think if they love someone they need to let them go? Maybe, the truth is that if you really love someone, you need to fight through the hard parts, through the fear.”

  She leaned into him, resting her head on his shoulder. “Maybe you have to love someone enough to accept the fact that it sometimes means pain. That it might mean loss, that it might mean a struggle. That it might mean changing what you’re doing and who you are. Sometimes those aren’t bad things. Because I know for certain that before I loved you I wasn’t whole.”

  “Belle...”

  “I needed to change to have you,” she continued as though he hadn’t spoken. “And I don’t think you’re whole without me. So maybe we can dispense with this nonsense that superior love somehow means perfect happiness. I think it should mean passion. I think it should mean struggle, sacrifice, beauty and pain. I think it should mean that I have to open myself up and risk myself for you, and you have to be willing to be heard again for me. You keep telling me that you’re darkness. And that I’m your light, but you never once thought that you might be mine?”

  “How could that be?” he asked, his voice broken. “It makes no sense.”

  “I lived a passionless existence. I dated a man for eight months that I didn’t even want. I probably would have married him, Adam, secure and happy in the fact that he didn’t make me hurt. That he didn’t make me ache or want. That I didn’t have to risk anything to have him. But you showed me that I could have more—you made me want more. And then you gave it to me. You haven’t taken anything from me. You have given me so much more than I could have ever hoped for. The only darkness I’ve experienced has been those moments without you.”

  He pulled her into his arms then, kissing her, over and over, deep, fierce and drugging kisses that left her in no doubt of his passion for her.

  “You were never my captive,” he said, sliding his thumb across her lower lip. “I was only ever yours. From that very first moment I saw you.”

  “Maybe you’re the one with Stockholm syndrome.”

  He laughed. “Or maybe we just love each other.”

  She smiled, feeling like light was flooding her soul. “Yes,” she said, “I think you’re right.”

  When she had seen him that first day, that day he had told her she would be his prisoner, she had thought him a monster. But it had turned out Prince Adam Katsaros was the man she had always needed.

  “I want you to be my wife,” he said. “I don’t think I have ever said that before. At least not in quite that way. I want you to marry me, be my princess, sleep with me always, give me children. I want it more than I want my next breath.”

  “I want that too,” she said.

  “You
are my future,” he said, drawing his knuckles across her cheek. “You are my heart.”

  She lifted her hands, tracing the deep lines of his scars that spoke of his pain, that spoke of his strength. Those scars that made him the man she loved.

  “And you are mine.”

  * * *

  And they lived happily ever after...

  * * * * *

  EXCLUSIVE EXTRACT

  Ariston Kavakos makes impoverished Keeley Turner a proposition: a month’s employment on his island, at his command. Soon her resistance to their sizzling chemistry weakens! But when there’s a consequence, Ariston makes one thing clear: Keeley will become his bride…

  Read on for a sneak preview of

  THE PREGNANT KAVAKOS BRIDE

  ‘You’re offering to buy my baby? Are you out of your mind?’

  ‘I’m giving you the opportunity to make a fresh start.’

  ‘Without my baby?’

  ‘A baby will tie you down. I can give this child everything it needs,’ Ariston said, deliberately allowing his gaze to drift around the dingy little room. ‘You cannot.’

  ‘Oh, but that’s where you’re wrong, Ariston,’ Keeley said, her hands clenching. ‘You might have all the houses and yachts and servants in the world, but you have a great big hole where your heart should be—and therefore you’re incapable of giving this child the thing it needs more than anything else!’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Love!’

  Ariston felt his body stiffen. He loved his brother and once he’d loved his mother, but he was aware of his limitations. No, he didn’t do the big showy emotion he suspected she was talking about and why should he, when he knew the brutal heartache it could cause? Yet something told him that trying to defend his own position was pointless. She would fight for this child, he realised. She would fight with all the strength she possessed, and that was going to complicate things. Did she imagine he was going to accept what she’d just told him and play no part in it? Politely dole out payments and have sporadic weekend meetings with his own flesh and blood? Or worse, no meetings at all. He met the green blaze of her eyes.

  ‘So you won’t give this baby up and neither will I,’ he said softly. ‘Which means that the only solution is for me to marry you.’

  He saw the shock and horror on her face.

  ‘But I don’t want to marry you! It wouldn’t work, Ariston—on so many levels. You must realise that. Me, as the wife of an autocratic control freak who doesn’t even like me? I don’t think so.’

  ‘It wasn’t a question,’ he said silkily. ‘It was a statement. It’s not a case of if you will marry me, Keeley—just when.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ she breathed.

  He shook his head. ‘Just determined to get what is rightfully mine. So why not consider what I’ve said, and sleep on it and I’ll return tomorrow at noon for your answer—when you’ve calmed down. But I’m warning you now, Keeley—that if you are wilful enough to try to refuse me, or if you make some foolish attempt to run away and escape…’ he paused and looked straight into her eyes ‘…I will find you and drag you through every court in the land to get what is rightfully mine.’

  Don’t miss

  THE PREGNANT KAVAKOS BRIDE

  by Sharon Kendrick

  Available July 2017

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  Copyright © 2017 Harlequin Books S.A.

  ISBN: 978-1-474-05250-4

  THE PRINCE’S CAPTIVE VIRGIN

  © 2017 Maisey Yates

  Published in Great Britain 2017

  by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

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