The bed was made of gold. The canopy was comprised of layers of fabric, a glittering and a gauzy layer, with heavy brocade beneath. The covers were velvet, rich purple and gold.
It made the clean, modern lines of her all-white apartment stark in her memory.
She wasn’t going to waste time pondering the room, though. What she needed to do was figure out how to talk the King out of this ridiculous idea that they needed to get married. First, she needed to figure out what his motives were. Obviously if he were crazed by lust where she was concerned, there wasn’t much she could offer him. At least, nothing much that she was willing to offer.
Violet knew that no one would believe it if she told them, but she had no physical experience with men. She had never been carried away on a tide of passion, and she fully intended to be carried away on a tide of passion when she allowed a man to... Do any of that.
The problem was, she had met so many kinds of men in her life. Hazard of being well connected and well traveled. She had met rich men. Talented men. Actors, chefs, rock stars. CEOs.
Javier is the first prince you ever met...
Well. That didn’t matter. The point was, she’d been exposed to a variety of powerful men early on, and inevitably she found them to be... Disappointments.
They either revealed themselves to be arrogant jerks with overinflated opinions of themselves, secret perverts who had only been pretending to listen to her while they contemplated making a move on her, or aggressive nightmares with more hands than a centipede and less sense.
And she had just always thought there could be more than that. More than shrugging and giving in to a wet kiss that she hadn’t wanted anyway.
The richer she had become, the more men had seemed to find her a challenge. Whether she was actually issuing one or not.
And that had made her even more disenchanted with them.
And she hadn’t held out for passion for all this time to just...
To just be taken by some king that she didn’t even know.
She could Google him if she had any devices. But there was no damned internet in this place.
The first active business would be to find out what he wanted. Because she had a lot. She was a billionaire, after all. And, she was well connected. He could break off a chun
k of this castle, and it would probably equal her net worth, so there was that. But there had to be something. There had to be. Otherwise, it wouldn’t matter if it was her.
Which brought her back to sexually obsessed. Which really creeped her out.
There was a knock on the chamber door, and she jumped. “Come in.”
She expected it to be the same woman who had led her to her room, but it wasn’t. It was Javier. And when he came in he brought with him all of the tension that she’d felt in her chest the entire time they were together on the plane ride over.
“I wasn’t expecting you,” she said.
“What were you expecting exactly?”
She realized there was no point in being difficult. Because Javier might be the key to this. “Where is your brother?”
“Eager to see him?”
“No,” she said, and she found that was honest. Better the devil she knew, after all. Even if said devil was as unyielding as a rock face. “Did he tell you why he wants to marry me?”
She needed to know. Because she needed to formulate a plan. She needed to get some power back. Or, rather than getting it back, needed to get some of it in the first place.
“Yes,” Javier said.
He just stood there. Broad, tall and imposing.
“Would you care to share with the class?”
“I don’t think it matters.”
“You don’t get that it matters to me why this stranger wants to marry me? I would like to know if it has to do with him harboring some sort of obsession for my body.”