Fuck, he hadn’t been this hard from looking since he’d been a teenager. He shook his head and forced himself to turn away. There was too much at stake to get lost between a pair of smooth legs, even if the stems in question didn’t belong to the woman destined to rule his country.
He turned off the engine and exited the vehicle. No one appeared, but they’d been ordered to keep their distance and only approach if necessary. Spooking the princess any more than she probably already had been was not on the agenda. He rounded the car and opened the passenger door; she didn’t move, and her breathing didn’t change. Doubt tickled the back of his neck. He’d doused the handkerchief himself; the chloroform should be working its way out of her system by now. If she wasn’t awake in the next half hour, he’d have to call in the medic on staff to help.
Scooping her up, he tried to ignore the way her head fit perfectly against his shoulder and how even in sleep she curled an arm across his chest as he strode across toward the château’s front door. The slight hitch in her breath was his only warning. She snagged the nine-millimeter from his shoulder holster and pushed out of his arms in one fluid move before planting her feet shoulder width apart, holding the Glock in a comfortable grip that spoke of a woman who knew her firearms, and then aiming at his head.
“Put the keys in the ignition and then drop to the ground, face pressed to the driveway.” A strand of reddish-blond hair flopped down onto her forehead, dipping down toward one brown eye. Without taking her steady gaze off him, she let out a hard huff of air and blew it out of the way. “Don’t move after that and I won’t have to kill you.”
He brushed his fingertips across his tie, activating the comm unit. “Stand down and stay back.” Then he took one step closer, putting the gun within reach of his long arms. “No offense, Your Highness, but that’s not how things will be going down.”
If she was surprised at him using her title, it didn’t show.
She pushed the Glock’s safety down with a smooth stroke of her thumb and slid back the top of the barrel to load a bullet in the chamber. “So you know who I am.”
“I know everything about you.” Right down to the fact that she slept in a ratty Fashion Institute of Harbor City T-shirt and wool socks pulled up to her knees.
One side of her mouth kicked up, curling her pouty pink lips into a smirk. “I doubt that.”
He lunged for her right as she pulled the trigger.
Chapter Three
Elle knew guns like she knew the contents of her shoe closet. When it came to survival, she didn’t mess around, but she hadn’t planned for Dom. How could she? For such a big guy, he moved fast. In the half a heartbeat between tugging the trigger tight and the bullet clearing the chamber, he grabbed her wrist, wrapping his strong fingers around her tightly. Despite the adrenaline giving her an extra boost of strength, he managed to shove her arm up. The shot went wild.
He spun her around, slung his free arm around her waist, and yanked her to him. Her ass hit his iron-hard thighs. Fuck, those things were tree trunks in suit pants. The side of her head slammed against the unrelenting muscular slab of his chest. He kept her gun pointing at the cloudless sky.
Every nerve in her body was on high alert and tuned in to him—the steady thump-thump of his heartbeat against her cheek, the confidence in his stance as he wrapped himself around her as if he was protecting her instead of kidnapping her, the warmth of his body despite the fast-dropping temperature as the winter sun set early. He was bigger, stronger, and had already gotten the drop on her twice.
Third time’s the charm. Get ready.
“I’m not the enemy.” His hold loose but tight at the same time, Dom exerted only enough strength to keep her anchored to him and the gun pointed away from them both.
Dammit, she didn’t want to believe him, but her survival instinct honed by ten years of hiding
in plain sight told her she could. If he was with the people who had decimated her family, he could have killed her a thousand times over. He might not be the enemy, but that didn’t mean she trusted him. She’d learned two important lessons when her father was murdered in that bloody coup: one, never trust anyone, and two, running was the key to survival.
“I’m with the Resistance.” He curled his pointer finger and thumb together and straightened his middle, ring, and pinkie fingers in the Elskov royal guard’s secret signal. “I’m here to help.”
The Resistance. Made up of a mix of Elskovians and others, they’d sworn to never stop fighting to restore the monarchy and were rumored to have unlimited funds. Well, if a billionaire like Dom was behind them, that would explain their lack of money problems. Still, the instinct to run was stronger than her loyalty to a country that had killed her father. She twisted and squirmed against him, which accomplished nothing other than rubbing her sensitive breasts across his sinewy forearm. “Help who?”
“You.”
The strain in his voice could have been from her escape attempts, but she doubted it. The bastard wasn’t even breathing hard. Time to switch tactics. Instead of sinking her nails into the steel band he disguised as an arm, she inhaled a deep breath. As her lungs expanded, her boobs pressed against his forearm. He went perfectly still. Interesting. Now this was something she could work with. He could overpower her in a heartbeat, so she had to use whatever tools were at her disposal to distract, disarm, and defend. If Mr. Hard Body got a hard-on, that could very well be her ticket to freedom.
She lifted her chin, letting her left cheek rub against his hard pec as she tilted her face upward, and tugged at her bottom lip with her teeth as if she was a little slow and trying to work out all of the confusing details when in reality she was already ten moves ahead. “So while the world thinks of you as a real-life Bruce Wayne with hundreds of millions in the bank and models draped across your arm, you’re really Batman, aligned with the Resistance, and you kidnapped me for my own good?”
“Exactly,” he said.
“Isn’t that what an assassin would say in such circumstances?” She batted her eyelashes.
He narrowed his gaze, but his lips twitched as if he were fighting off a smile. Shit. That might have been a step too far. Sometimes dialing down the drama proved harder than expected, but it was too late to pivot from her course now. She needed a second or two to break free—after that she’d figure it out.
“If you were on my hit list,” he said, his voice low and soft, “you’d have been dead before you even got to ask me my inseam.”
Thirty-four. The number popped in her head faster than an appropriate response.
“And if by ‘such circumstances’ you mean totally under my control…” His fingers brushed her hip as he dipped his head lower so his lips almost brushed her ear. “If that was the case, then I can’t say I’d really be looking for talk.”
His words tickled her sensitive skin, heated her flesh, and made her mouth go dry. Then he shifted his stance and something hard, long, and thick brushed against her ass before moving away. She dropped her gaze and bit her lip for real this time. It was either that or moan in protest. The man had a smart mouth, a hard body, and questionable motives. In short, he was exactly what made her panties melt.