The Prince's Nine-Month Scandal

“I was reading about you on the plane back from London today,” she told him, surprising him all over again.

“And here I thought we were maintaining the polite fiction that you did not sully your royal eyes with the squalid tabloids.”

“Ordinarily I would not, of course,” she replied, and then her mouth curved. Rodolfo was captivated. And somewhat horrified at that fact. But still captivated, all the same. “It is beneath me, obviously.”

He sketched a bow that would have made his grandfather proud. “Obviously.”

“I am a princess, not a desperate shopgirl who wants nothing more than to escape her dreary life, and must imagine herself into fantastical stories and half-truths presented as gospel.”

“Quite so.”

“But I must ask you a question.” And on that she smiled again, that same serene curve of her lips that had about put him to sleep before. That was not the effect it had on him today. By a long shot.

“You can ask me anything, princess,” Rodolfo heard himself say.

In a lazy, smoky sort of tone he’d never used in her presence before. Because this was the princess he was going to marry, not one of the enterprising women who flung themselves at him everywhere he went, looking for a taste of Europe’s favorite daredevil prince.

There was no denying it. Suddenly, out of nowhere, he wanted his future wife.

Desperately.

As if she could tell—as if she’d somehow become the sort of woman who could read a man’s desire and use it against him, when he’d have sworn she was anything but—Valentina’s smile deepened.

She tilted her head to one side. “It’s about your shocking double standard,” she said sweetly. “If you can cat your way through all of Europe, why can’t I?”

Something black and wild and wholly unfamiliar surged in him then, making Rodolfo’s hands curl into fists and his entire body go tense, taut.

Then he really shocked the hell out of himself.

“Because you can’t,” he all but snarled, and there was no pretending that wasn’t exactly what he was doing. Snarling. No matter how unlikely. “Like it or not, princess, you are mine.”