Innocent Surrender: The Virgin's Proposition / The Virgin and His Majesty / Untouched Until Marriage

Demetrios was accustomed to beautiful women. He’d worked with them, he’d directed them. He’d been married to one.

Flawless skin, good bones, perfect teeth all mattered. But facial features were only a part of real beauty. The superficial part. And Anny had them.

But more than that, she had a look of pure honest joy that lit her face from within. It was an uncommon beauty. She was an uncommon beauty.

She was also a princess who had just made a serious, life-changing decision if she decided it was the right one to make. She didn’t know her own mind.

Demetrios knew his. However beautiful, sexy and appealing she was, he wasn’t getting involved with her.

But he was already beginning to realize that unless Anny decided to share his bed it was going to be a very long two weeks.

Anny was exultant, loving every minute, beaming as the sun touched her face and the breeze whipped through her hair.

She felt free—blessedly unburdened by duty and responsibility for the moment at least. She had also forgotten how much she loved to get out on the water and really sail.

Her most recent experiences on boats had all been parties like the one on Gerard’s yacht last night. They were so elegant and controlled that they might as well have been in hotel dining rooms. If she hadn’t had to take the launch to get to the yacht and back, she would have forgotten she was even on a boat.

It certainly hadn’t been going anywhere.

Now she was moving. The boat, once Demetrios had the mainsail and jib raised, was cutting through the water at a rate of knots, and Anny gripped the wheel, exhilarated. It was glorious.

When he dropped into the cockpit beside her she relinquished the wheel, but couldn’t act as if it was no big deal.

“I feel alive!” she said over the wind in her ears. “Reborn!” And she arched her back, opened her arms wide and spun around and around, drinking in the experience. “Thank you! Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

He gave her a sceptical, wary look—one that reminded her of the way he’d looked at her the night she’d asked him to make love to her, that said he was seriously concerned that she’d lost her mind.

“Don’t worry about me!” she said, beaming. “Truly!”

Demetrios still looked sceptical, but he didn’t reply, just moved his gaze from the GPS to the horizon, then made adjustments as required.

Anny stood watching, drinking in the sight of him as eagerly as she did the whole experience. She’d seen him in a number of roles in films over the years. He’d done slick and sophisticated, hard-edged and dangerous, sexy and imbued with deadly charm. She’d seen him in a lot of places—big cities, high deserts, dense jungles, and bedrooms galore—but she’d never seen him at sea before.

It was a perfect fit. He looked competent in whatever role he played. But he wasn’t playing a role now, and he seemed perfectly suited to the task.

“I didn’t realize you were such a sailor,” she said.

He shrugged, keeping his eyes on the horizon “Grew up sailing. We always have. It’s bred in the bone, I guess.” There was a slight defensive edge to his tone that surprised her.

She smiled. “I can see that,” she said. “Lucky you.”

Now he slanted a glance her way, his brows raised as if her comment surprised him. “It doesn’t appeal to everyone. Some people find it boring.”

It was her turn to be surprised at that. “I can’t imagine,” she said sincerely. “It seems liberating to me. Maybe it’s because, being…who I am—” she could never bring herself to say “being a princess” “—when I was home as a child, I always felt hemmed in. But when my parents and I went sailing—even on one of the lakes—it was like we suddenly could be ourselves.”

“Getting away from it all.” He nodded.

“Yes. Exactly.”

“I didn’t think of it that way until I’d been ‘famous’—” his mouth twisted on that word the way hers would have if she’d said “princess” “—for a while. But I know what you mean. I thought getting out and sailing was a way of getting back to who I was…” His voice rose slightly at the end of the statement as if he were going to say more. But he didn’t. He just lifted his shoulders and looked away again.

“Did you have time to sail much?”

He shook his head. “Not often. Once.” Something closed up in his expression. His jaw tightened. Then he fixed her with his green gaze. “Did you get everything sorted out below? Unpacked? Settled in? It’s not a palace.”

The change of subject was abrupt, as was the sudden rough edge to his tone. Anny wondered what caused it, and knew better than to ask.

“It’s better than a palace,” she told him sincerely. “I love it.”

He grunted, not looking completely convinced.

“I took the back cabin—the aft cabin,” she corrected herself. “It’s a bit bigger, though, so if you want it, I’ll be happy to switch. I just thought the forward cabin seemed more like it should be the captain’s. Is that okay?”

“Fine. Whichever.” He gave her a look that Anny couldn’t interpret at all. Then he stared back at the horizon again, seeming lost in thoughts that had nothing to do with the situation at hand. Was he regretting having insisted she come along?

“I’ll just go below for a while,” she said. “If you need me again, shout.”

Demetrios gave her a quick vague smile, but his mind still seemed far away. So she headed back down the companionway steps.

She had put her suitcase and laptop backpack in the aft cabin, but she hadn’t unpacked them yet. Now she did, taking her time, settling in, discovering all the nooks and crannies that made living on board a boat so intriguing.

It was a gorgeous boat. Nothing like as opulent and huge as either the royal yacht of her country or of Gerard’s, but it had a clean, compact elegance that made it appealing—and manageable. A good boat for a couple—or a young family like that of Demetrios’s brother, Theo.

She felt a pang of envy not just for Theo’s boat, but for his family. Some of her fondest early childhood memories were the afternoons spent sailing on the alpine lakes of Mont Chamion with her parents.

Now she found herself hoping that someday she and her own husband and children would do the same. Her mind, perversely but not unexpectedly, immediately cast Demetrios in the husband role. And there was wishful thinking for you, she thought.

She tried to ignore it, but her imagination was vivid and determined and would not be denied. So finally, she let it play on while she put things away.

Since she’d packed hastily in the middle of the night and had planned to escape Cannes by rail, she hadn’t brought any of the right clothes. She’d assumed she would be losing herself in a big city like Paris or Barcelona or Madrid. So most of the things she’d brought were casual but sophisticated and dressy—linen and silk trousers, shell tops, jackets and skirts. Not your average everyday sailing attire.

The jeans and T-shirt she was wearing had been chosen so she could leave town looking like a student and not draw attention to herself. Unfortunately they were the only halfway suitable things she’d brought along, and in the heat of the Mediterranean summer she was nearly sweltering in them. She would need to go shopping soon.

She just hoped no one would recognize her when she did.

In the meantime she would cope. But somehow, for a woman who had spent her life learning what to do in every conceivable social situation, she had no very clear idea how to go on in this one.

Madame Lavoisier, one of her Swiss finishing school instructors, tapping her toe impatiently and repeating what she always called “Madame’s rules of engagement.”

“You are a guest,” Madame would say. “So you must be all that is charming and polite. You may be helpful, but not intrusive. You must know how to put yourself forward when it is time to entertain, but step back—fade into the woodwork, if you will—when your hosts have other obligations. And you must never presume.”

Those were the basics, anyway. You applied them to whatever situation presented itself.

And Anny could see the wisdom of it. But still it felt lacking now—because she didn’t want to be a guest. She wanted to belong.

And how foolish was that?

Demetrios had told her clearly and emphatically that he wasn’t interested in a relationship. He could not have made it plainer.

If she let herself get involved with him now, it would not be some fairy-tale night with a silver-screen hero. Nor would it be the adolescent fantasy of an idealistic teenager. It wouldn’t have anything to do with duty and responsibility.

It would be a lifetime commitment of love to a real live flesh-and-blood man—a man who didn’t want anything of the sort.

“So just have a nice two-week holiday and get on with your life,” she told herself firmly.

She vowed she would. All she had to do was convince her heart.

About noon Anny brought him a sandwich and a beer.

“I figured you’d be getting hungry.” She set the plate on the bench seat near where Demetrios stood, then went back down to return moments later with a sandwich of her own.

“I’ve been through the provisions,” she told him. “Made a list of possible menus, and another of some things we should probably get when we go ashore.”

He stared at her.

She finished chewing a bite of sandwich, then noticed the way he was looking at her, and said, “What? Did I overstep my bounds?”

He shook his head. “I’m just…surprised.”

Anny didn’t see why. “Maybe it was presumptuous,” she went on after she’d swallowed, “but I’m a better cook than a sailor. And if I’m going to be here two weeks, I need to do my share. So I thought I’d do the meals.”

“You cook?” That seemed to surprise him, too.

She flashed him a grin. “Cordon Bleu,” she told him, causing his brows to hike clear into the fringe of hair that had fallen across his forehead. “All part of my royal education. But don’t expect that standard under these circumstances,” she warned him.

He shook his head. “No fear. I’m happy with sandwiches. I wasn’t planning on cooking.”

“I noticed,” she said drily. Besides bread, cheese and fruit, there was little in the pantry besides granola bars and protein bars and beer.

“I wasn’t expecting company.” His tone was gruff. The wind was ruffling his hair, making him look dangerous and piratical and very very appealing.

“I realize that. And I’m grateful. I—” she hesitated “—appreciate your offer to bring me along. Your insistence, actually,” she corrected. “It is a better alternative than wandering around Europe trying to stay a step ahead of Papa.”

He nodded, then looked at her expectantly because the note on which she ended made it clear she had something else to say.

Which she did. She just couldn’t seem to find the right way to say it. Finally she simply blurted it out. “But even so, I don’t think we should make love together again.”

Yet another look of surprise crossed his face, this one more obvious than the earlier two. His green eyes met hers. “You don’t?”

Anny gave a quick shake of her head. “No.”

Demetrios tilted his head to regard her curiously. “You didn’t like it?”

Anny felt her cheeks begin to burn. “You know that’s not true,” she protested. “You know I liked it. Very much.”

He scratched his head. “And yet you don’t want to do it again.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t want to do it again. I said I didn’t think we should.”

He stared at her. “Your logic eludes me.”

“It would mean something if we did,” she explained.

He blinked. “I thought it did mean something last time. All that stuff about your idealistic youthful self…”

“Yes, of course it meant something,” she agreed. “But it would be different if we did it again. That time it was…like…making love with a fantasy.” Now her cheeks really did burn. She felt like an idiot, didn’t want to meet his eyes. But she could feel his on her, so finally she lifted her gaze. “When we did it then, I was with the you I—I had dreamed about. The ‘fantasy’ you. The one I imagined. If we did it again, it wouldn’t be the same. You wouldn’t be the same. You’d be—you!”

“Me? As opposed to…me?” He looked totally confused now.

Anny didn’t blame him. She didn’t want to spell it out, but obviously she was going to have to. “You’d be a real live flesh-and-blood man.”

“I was before,” he told her. “Last time.”

“Not the same way. Not to me,” she added after a moment.

He still looked baffled. “And you don’t want a ‘real live flesh-and-blood man’?”

What she wanted was to jump overboard and never come up. “It’s dangerous,” she said.

“No, it’s not. Don’t worry. I won’t get you pregnant. I promise. I can take care of that.”

“Not that kind of dangerous. Emotionally dangerous.”

He looked blank. Of course he did. He was a man.

“I could fall in love with you,” she said bluntly.

“Oh.” He looked appalled. “No. You don’t want to do that.” He was shaking his head rapidly.

No, she didn’t. Not if he wasn’t going to fall in love with her in return, at least. And he’d made it clear that he had no intention of doing so. She supposed there was always the chance that she could change his mind, but from the look on his face, it didn’t seem likely.

“Like I said, dangerous,” Anny repeated. “For me.” She shrugged when he just continued to stare at her. “You said it was up to me,” she reminded him.

His mouth twisted. “So I did.” He rubbed a hand through his hair. “That’ll teach me,” he muttered.

“I’m sorry.”

He made a sound that was a half laugh and half something Anny couldn’t have put a name to. “Me, too, princess,” he told her. Then he gave her a wry smile. “Let me know if you change your mind.”

“Sure,” Anny said.

But it wasn’t going to happen—she hoped.

She was the most baffling woman he’d ever met.

When she didn’t know him, she wanted to make love with him. When she knew him, she didn’t want to—but only because she might fall in love with him.

Where the hell was the logic in that?

Well, perversely, Demetrios supposed, squinting at the Italian shoreline as if it might provide some answers, there was some. But it wasn’t doing his peace of mind much good.

It made all those glimpses of Anny he kept catching out of the corner of his eye all too distracting, though he supposed she intended nothing of the sort at all.

She wasn’t coy and flirtatious the way Lissa had been, eager and enthusiastic one minute, pouting and moody the next. With Lissa he’d never known where he stood or what she wanted.

With Anny, she flat-out told him.

When she wanted to make love, she’d said so. Now she didn’t, and she’d said that. No, he’d never met a woman even close to her.

After their discussion, she had finished her lunch, then taken both their plates below. He’d expected she would stay there to avoid him and his “dangerous” appeal. But she came back to put her feet up on one of the cockpit benches and leaned back to lift her face. She still wore Theo’s visor, but for the moment her face was lit by the sun and the wind tangled her hair.

“Isn’t this glorious?” she said, turning a smile in his direction. And there really was nothing flirtatious about the smile at all. Just pure enjoyment of the moment.

“Yeah,” Demetrios agreed, because it was.

But also because it was pretty damned glorious to stand there and simply watch her take pleasure in the moment. For the longest time she didn’t move a muscle, didn’t say a word, just sat there silently, absorbing, savoring the experience.

She didn’t glance at him to see if he was noticing. Lissa had always been aware of her audience.

He remembered when she’d badgered him to take her sailing. He had been in Paris at the time and she back in L.A., having just finished a film. And every time they talked on the phone she’d chattered about how wonderful it had been going sailing with a couple of big A-list stars.

“We could go sailing,” she’d said to him.

It was the first time she’d shown the least interest in any such thing. When he’d taken her to his parents’ place on Long Island right after they were married, she hadn’t set foot on the family boat. She’d had little to do with anyone, and she’d been eager to leave almost as soon as they’d arrived.

He’d thought at the time it was because she’d wanted to spend some more time with him alone. Only later he began to realize a family vacation on Long Island wasn’t fast-lane enough for her.

But when she’d made the remark about sailing, he’d taken her suggestion at face value and offered to charter a sailboat so they could go to Cabo San Lucas as soon as he got back home.

Lissa had been delighted.

“Ooh, fun,” she’d squealed on the phone when he’d tossed out the idea to her.

They hadn’t seen each other for more than two days at a time in the past two months. It seemed like a great way to spend some time alone with her. And he’d been delighted she was as eager for some uninterrupted time together.

“It will be wonderful!” Lissa had crowed. And he knew that tone of voice—it was the one that went with the impossibly sparkly blue eyes. She’d let out a sigh of ecstasy. “The wind. The water. The two of us. Oh, yes. Let’s. I always feel as if I’m in communion with nature.”

So two days after he got home, he’d chartered a boat, and they’d set sail to Cabo from Marina del Rey.

For the first five minutes Lissa had looked exactly as content as Anny did now. But an hour later the contentment had vanished.

The wind was too cold. The boat tilted too much. The ocean spray wasn’t good for her complexion. She was afraid of sunburn.

Demetrios had tried to be sympathetic. Then he’d tried to joke her out of it. But Lissa didn’t take teasing at all. She pouted. She wept. She slammed around and threw things when she was upset. They weren’t two hours out of Marina del Rey and she had become seriously upset.

Demetrios did his best to placate her. “I’ve missed you, Lis. I’ve been waiting for this.”

She looked at him, appalled and flung her arms in despair. “This? This? There’s nothing here!”

“We’re here. The two of us. Alone,” he reminded her. “No press. No fans. No one at all. Just us. Relax and enjoy it.”

But Lissa hadn’t relaxed and she hadn’t enjoyed it. She’d gone below, she’d come up to the cockpit. She’d flipped through a magazine, tried to read a possible script. There was no one to talk to. She was bored.

He’d offered to let her take the wheel. She’d declined. “I wouldn’t know what to do.”

“I’ll teach you,” he’d offered.

She hadn’t wanted that, either.

As the hours passed, she’d become more agitated. She hadn’t been able to sit still.

“When do we get there?” she’d begun asking when they’d barely left Catalina behind. She had looked around hopefully, as if their destination might materialize on the horizon. “It’s only a couple of hours to Cabo.”

Demetrios had stared at her. “Flying,” he’d agreed. “Sailing it’ll probably take us about a week.”

“A week?” Lissa’s voice was so loud and so shrill he thought they probably could have heard it in Des Moines.

“Well, depending on the winds, of course, but—”

But she hadn’t let him get any more out than that. She’d lit into him with a fury he’d only seen before on the set when she’d played a drug addict deprived of her source. She’d got an Emmy nomination for the performance.

It turned out she hadn’t been acting. It turned out Lissa had more than a small drug habit. She’d been intending to score some in Mexico, though Demetrios hadn’t known it at the time. There was a whole lot about Lissa he hadn’t known then—things that even now he wished he’d never known.

It would have made it easier to forgive her. To forgive himself.

That disastrous trip had occurred just six months into their marriage. Later he’d thought it was the beginning of the slide downhill. Even that wasn’t true. The slide had begun before she’d even walked up the aisle to become his wife.

He’d been fooled. Conned. Duped into believing he’d found the woman of his dreams.

Because he’d wanted it so much that he’d convinced himself? Or because Lissa had played the role so well?

How much had been intentional misdirection and how much had simply been bad judgment? Demetrios had no idea still.

All he could remember is that she’d looked so perfect on their wedding day. So content. So happy, Anny looked that way now—happy, her eyes closed, her face in repose.

But hers was not like Lissa’s version of “happy.”

Lissa’s “happiness” had always had an effervescence to it. She had bubbled, emoted, reacted. She had acted happy.

Sitting here now basking in the sunshine, eyes shut, wind in her hair, Anny wasn’t acting. She simply was.

There was no bubbliness, no bounce. No reaction. Her emotion was quiet, accepting, serene—and, heaven help him, enticing in its very stillness.

Dangerously enticing.

And Demetrios understood quite clearly now what Anny meant about making love with him being “dangerous” because it would involve her heart.

Indulging these thoughts about Anny—seeing in her the antithesis of Lissa—was dangerous in the extreme. It could undermine his resolve. It could make him vulnerable.

She didn’t have to entice him intentionally. It was worse, in fact, that she wasn’t. It made him want things he had promised himself he would never want again.

“You’re going to get a sunburn if you keep doing that,” he said gruffly.

Anny’s eyes flicked open in surprise. She dipped her head so that Theo’s sun visor shaded her face again and she sat up straight, then smiled up at him. “You’re right,” she said, flexing her shoulders and stretching like a cat in the sun. “But it feels wonderful.”

To his ears, her voice almost sounded like a purr. He didn’t answer. He didn’t know what to say in the face of such inocent happiness.

He found himself wishing she were more like Lissa so she would be easier to resist.

At the same time he couldn’t help being glad she was not.

CHAPTER SEVEN

CINDERELLA ONLY GOT a single evening to indulge her fantasy.

Anny had had her evening with Demetrios. But now, amazingly, it seemed as if she was going to get two whole weeks.

Two weeks to be simply herself—not a princess, not Gerard’s fiancée. Just plain Anny. With no demands, no expectations at all.

Not even sex.

Not that she wouldn’t have liked to enjoy sex with Demetrios. The one night she’d spent with him had been astonishing, revelatory, incomparable.

It had made her want more.

Too much more.

So much more that she had not dared to allow herself to think about it. Limiting it to one night and walking away had been possible. But indulging herself in the joy of spending two weeks of nights in his bed, in his arms, would not work.

She would want more than those two weeks.

She would want a lifetime of them. And not just of making love with Demetrios, but of being loved by him.

She wasn’t there yet. But she would be if she allowed herself to give into the temptation. And so she’d said, “No sex.”

She hadn’t explained it well. She wasn’t sure that she could ever explain it so that it made sense to him. He was a man. Men didn’t think about sex the same way. And he clearly had no problem enjoying sex with her and then walking away without a backward glance.

He’d basically promised to do just that.

Well, more power to him, Anny thought wryly. She knew her own limitations. And she knew they precluded that. So she said she was sorry and she stuck to her guns.

Having made her statement, though, she went below to work on her dissertation for a while. It seemed a good idea to give Demetrios some space to get used to a platonic two weeks.