A deal. Part of one, anyway. For several million dollars and her as his bride, the king of Tharsalonia would not interfere in her uncle’s brutal expansionist plans for Qaram.
Annie groaned and leaned back against the wall.
Every part of her ached. From the cold. From struggling with her captors and—Be honest, Annie—from fear.
Was death to be her fate as well?
What had awaited her—marriage to the king of Tharsalonia—would have been a kind of living death anyway.
Tears stung her eyes. She blinked them back. She wasn’t going to give in to defeat. The trick was to keep her mind occupied. To think about good things, not bad.
This place—the shack—was ugly. It stunk of goats and chickens and of her captors, but she knew that the Copper Mountains themselves smelled of green growing things. Of flowers. Of sunshine. As a little girl, she’d spent summers in the foothills of these mountains with her parents.
Her throat constricted.
Oh, how she’d loved them. Her beautiful mother, who’d given up the charmed life of an American debutante to become the wife of a handsome king determined to lead his people forward. Her loving father, who’d defied tradition by raising his daughter to be strong and independent.
“I am so proud of you, Anoushka,” he’d said when she graduated from Oxford University, and he’d beamed with happiness when she’d enrolled in graduate courses at the University of California. He’d understood and supported her decision to do it under the name Anne Stanton—a combination of her mother’s middle and maiden names—because she’d wanted to avoid the kind of publicity she’d run into at Oxford.
Annie’s mouth trembled.
Sh
e remembered, too, the call a year later from her father’s senior advisor, telling her of the plane crash that had taken her father’s life as well as her mother’s.
“I’ll be on the next flight home,” she’d said, sobbing.
“No!” the senior advisor had said, and then he’d told her that she could not return, not even for the funeral.
Her uncle Cyrus-—her father’s younger brother—had immediately seized control of the governing council.
“He is intent on undoing all the good work of your father, Princess. If you return home, he will imprison you. You must stay away until we are powerful enough to oust him. He does not know the name and identity you have been using, and he must not learn it. Do you understand?”
Annie had understood all too well.
She had been raised in a royal court filled with the intrigue that accompanied two differing factions, one determined to keep the kingdom mired in the past, the other determined to bring it into the twenty-first century.
And so she’d stayed in America, alone and lonely, and devastated by grief…
Until, by chance, she took a walk along a windy stretch of beach and met a man. An amazing man.
“Declan,” she whispered.
No. This wasn’t the time to think about him. How she had hurt him, wounded him…
Tears spilled down her cheeks.
Declan. Her beautiful, proud lover.
Except, they’d never made love. Not really.
She had slept in his arms. Kissed him. Oh, those kisses! Gentle at first. Then more demanding. More exciting. Her mouth had opened to his. Tasted his heat. His passion.
And that one time, that one incredible time, his hands and mouth on her breasts.
“I need to touch you,” he’d whispered, and she’d needed him to do it, to taste her nipples, lick them, suck them into the heat of his mouth.
But she’d pulled back. She knew it had almost killed him, but he had let her do it.