Prince of Secrets

“You’re acting freaked. Slamming back vodka and driving around like a teenager with his first car.”

“I assure you, I did not peel rubber at any stoplights.”

“Do teens still do that?”

“Some.” He never had.

It would have not been fitting for a prince.

“I said yes, Demyan.” She laid her hands on his chest, her eyes soft with emotion.

His arms automatically went around her, locking her into his embrace. “Why?”

Her agreement should have been enough, but he needed to know.

“My mom came by to talk. She told me not to give up on something this powerful just because it scares me.”

“Your mother?” he asked, finding that one hard to take in.

“Yes. She wants to try again, on our relationship.”

“She does realize you are twenty-nine, not nineteen?”

Chanel smiled, sadness and hope both lurking in the storm-cloud depths of her eyes. “We both do. It’s not happy families all of a sudden, but I’m willing to meet her partway.”

“You’re a more forgiving person than I am.”

“I’m not so sure about that, but one thing I do know. Holding bitterness and anger inside hurts me more than anyone who has ever hurt me.”

A cold wind blew across his soul. Demyan hoped she remembered that if she ever found out the truth about her great-great-grandfather’s will.

She frowned up at him. “You were driving without your glasses?”

“I don’t need them to drive.” He didn’t need them at all but wasn’t sure when he was going to break that news to her.

“You always wear them, except in bed.”

“They’re not that corrective.” Were in fact just clear plastic.

“They’re a crutch for you,” she said with that analytical look she got sometimes.

“You could say that.”

“Do you need them at all?”

He didn’t even consider lying in answer to the direct question. “No.”

He expected anger, or at least the question, why did he wear them? But instead he got a measured glance that implied understanding, which confused him. “If I can step off the precipice and agree to marry you, you can stop wearing the glasses.”

The tumblers clicked into place. She saw the glasses as the crutch she’d named them for him. Being who she was, it never occurred to her that they were more a prop.

“Fine.” More than. Remembering them was a pain.

She grinned up at him and he found himself returning the expression with interest, a strange, tight but not unpleasant feeling in his chest.

“Want to celebrate getting engaged?” she asked with an exaggerated flutter of her eyelashes.

The urge to tease came out of nowhere, but he went with it. “You want a shot of my vodka?”

He liked the man he became in this woman’s presence.

“I was thinking something more mind-blowing and less about imbibing and more about experiencing.” She drew out the last word as she ran her fingertip across his lips, down his face and neck and on downward over his chest, until she stopped with it hovering right over his nipple.

He tugged her closer, his body reacting as it always did to her nearness. “I’m all about the experience.”

“Are you?” she asked.

He sighed and admitted, “Not usually, no. My position consumes my life.”

“Not anymore.”

“No, not anymore.” He hadn’t planned it this way, but marrying Chanel Tanner was going to change everything.

He could feel it with the same sense of inevitability he’d had the first time he’d seen her picture in his uncle’s study. Only now he knew marrying her wasn’t going to be a temporary action to effect a permanent fix for his country.

And he was glad. The sex was mind-blowing, but that didn’t shock him as much as it did her. What he hadn’t anticipated was that her company would be just as satisfying to him, even when it came without the cataclysm of climax.

Right now, though? He planned to have both.

* * *

Chanel adjusted her seat belt, the physical restraint doing nothing to dispel the sense of unreality infusing her being.

Once she’d agreed to marry Demyan, he’d lost no time setting the date, a mere six weeks from the night of their engagement. He’d told her that his aunt wanted to plan the wedding.

Chanel, who was one of the few little girls in her class at school who had not spent her childhood dreaming of the perfect wedding, was eminently happy to have someone else liaise and plan with her mother. Beatrice was determined to turn the rushed wedding into a major social event.

And the less Chanel had to participate in that, the better. If she could have convinced Demyan to elope, she would have, but he had this weird idea that she deserved a real wedding.