Nataliya, Queen of Mirrus, was pregnant again. After her last pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage and her nearly hemorrhaging to death, Jenna had assumed the other woman wouldn’t try to get pregnant again.
Silly her.
Although Nataliya had given birth to both the heir, six-year-old daughter Anna Yelena, and the spare, three-year-old Daniil, it turned out the queen adored being a mother and wanted more children.
Children.As in plural.
Since Nataliya’s miscarriage and subsequent bleeding had been diagnosed as idiopathic, which meant they didn’t know what caused it, there was as much chance it could happen again as not.
So Jenna worried, but she couldn’t help being happy for her friend too. Because Nataliya? Was over the moon.
Jenna would have to plan a trip to Mirrus soon, just to confirm to herself that her friend was doing as well as she claimed.
Her heart sped just a little with the usual fillip of excitement at the thought of seeing another certain member of the royal family. Prince Dimitri: Dima.
The youngest and, in her opinion, sexiest of the three Merikov brothers, the six-and-a-half-foot-tall triathlete had a gorgeous body. With brown hair and gorgeous gray eyes, he was her own personal brand of catnip, but the prince was five years younger than Jenna. He was also the brother-in-law of her best friend. Then there was that pesky prince thing.
He was off limits to Jenna’s libido on so many levels, it would take a skyscraper elevator to reach him.
A trip she was in no way willing to take.
Forcing her thoughts away from the delectable man, Jenna went back to work on the spread for the sustainable fashion article her magazine was featuring that month. The plus-size model, who had opened her own wardrobe for the photo shoot, had a ginormous following that had only grown after she’d caught the notice of a pop icon.
The interview and photo spread had the potential to be one of their most popular to date, and that included the dating and wedding spreads she’d done on Nataliya.
“Hey, Jenna, there’s someone here to see you.”
Jenna looked up, about to ask who it was, only to look into the gray eyes she saw way too often in her dreams.
Dreams that left her feeling hot and breathless.
“Dima!” she exclaimed in shock. “What are you doing here?”
It was as if her thoughts of him had conjured up the one guy she could not let herself go for.
Casually, for him, dressed in a spring-weight designer suit sans tie, he stood in a relaxed pose opposite her desk. “Kon asked me to come visit the boys.”
His security detail must be outside the door, only knowing Dima, he could as easily left them in the lobby, or downstairs. He took more liberties with them than his brothers.
There were benefits to being third in line, she supposed.
“I meant here in my office, not Seattle.” Though Dima didn’t visit the West Coast as often as his family would have liked, the fact he was in the city wasn’t that surprising.
That he was standing in front of her desk startled her usual cool right out of Jenna.
“I had some time on my hands.”
“So you came here?” Why?
He gave her the charming smile that was featured so often in the papers when his picture was taken. Only she’d noticed how it no longer reached his eyes since his deployment. No one else in his royal family seemed to find Dima much changed.
Nataliya did, though.
She wanted to ask him about it, but knew doing so would draw them closer together, something she could not afford with her ridiculous sexual fixation on the man.
“So you came here? When you are in town to see the children?” His sister-in-law, Emma, would be delighted.
Dima was a favorite with his nephews, and Emma liked anything that made her sons happy.