Capturing the Crown: The Heart of a Ruler

But then, she’d never been in this position before. Never suffered through a night-before-she-was-to-meet-with-the-man-who-was-going-to-take-her-to-the-rest-of-her-life before. Because that was what it was. Carrington was coming to take her to her destiny. A destiny she neither remotely liked nor wanted.

Sitting up, Amelia unconsciously doubled her hands into fists. If she had any courage at all, she’d just turn her back on everything and run away. Go to America and avail herself of all the wondrous opportunities that existed there. America, where no one was a princess.

Except perhaps in the eyes of the man who loved her.

Something else she was never going to find out about, she thought glumly. What it felt like to be loved. Because Reginald certainly didn’t love her. And she didn’t love him, either. Never had. Never would.

Amelia sighed, dragging her hand through the blond hair that came cascading down about her face and pushing it back. No, running away would be the coward’s way out. Cowards turned their backs on responsibilities and did what they wanted to, what was easier, what was more appealing. And above everything else, she had been raised not to be a coward. Meeting her destiny, that was what took courage. And she was going to have to dig deep to find hers.

Frowning, Amelia kicked off the covers, slid her slippers on and got off the wide, king-size bed. Because the nights in Gastonia were still cool, even though this was April, she slipped on her dressing gown, covering the very short nightgown that she favored. Tying it securely at her waist, she decided that she desperately needed to get some air.

More than that, she needed to walk around her garden, even though she’d just been there hours earlier. The time for walks in her beloved garden would soon be behind her, but right now, she was still the Princess of Gastonia, not yet the Queen of Silvershire. And this was still her home.

No, Amelia corrected herself as she slipped quietly down the back stairs, holding to the shadows and taking care not to run into anyone, this would always be her home. Nothing would ever change that.

Of the two countries, Silvershire was the bigger, more powerful, more impressive one. But it was Gastonia that was the more charming of the two. And it was decidedly not as backward as she knew Prince Reginald undoubtedly thought it was.

The strides the kingdom had taken were all due to her father. Oh, the country still had its charming seaside shops and internationally famous restaurants, as well as its grand hotels and the casinos that always drew in tourists by the droves. But Gastonia had also become an important industrial country producing, among other things, the very expensive, very alluring and highly reliable Gaston, an automobile reminiscent of yesterday’s romantic vehicles, with cutting-edge technology beneath the hood that had been perfected by one of their own engineers.

Her father was indirectly responsible for the Gaston as well as for the country’s modernization. It was he who had raised the caliber of education within Gastonia, funding programs, bringing in men of letters and science to teach at Roman University, the institution that bore his name. Students no longer left the country in pursuit of higher degrees, they attained them here, in Gastonia. And then went on to give back what they had learned.

Amelia wondered if Gastonia’s advancements were an allure for Reginald. Heaven knew the prince wasn’t the type of man to be herded into an arranged marriage without feeling he was getting something out of the bargain. He probably saw his personal bank account swelling if and when he thought of the marriage at all.

The Gaston was currently all the rage in Europe. Granted, her father did not believe in the government owning the companies within its borders and to his credit, neither did Silvershire’s King Weston, but she had an uneasy feeling that her future husband was not nearly so noble. He might want to change that, might want to put the money from the car company’s coffers into his own pockets.

Bypassing the main hallway, Amelia pressed her lips together. It was going to be up to her to make sure that Reginald became noble. Or, at the very least, it would be up to her to ameliorate whatever black thoughts the prince might have about raping her countrymen and helping himself to the profits that were being made. Her heart felt heavy in her chest.

Opening the terrace doors, she slipped outside and hurried down the steps. Only when she reached the garden with its tall shrubs standing like silent, dark green sentries did she slow down.

She still felt as if she were running from something, because, in effect, she was, although she knew that in reality, there was no running away from what had to be.

As she began to walk the grounds, she waited for a sense of peace to embrace her. She waited in vain. Peace continued to elude her.

What were the chances that all this was merely a bad dream? That she’d wake up an ordinary person who’d just experienced an epic nightmare? Or, at the very least, that Reginald had changed his mind about marrying her, or, better still, had gotten lost forever while on some safari deep in the heart of the African jungle?

Amelia’s generous mouth curved in a mocking smile. She was really beginning to sound like a desperate loon. Her fate was sealed, she might as well accept it.

She glanced back toward the palace. How had she managed to get this far from the terrace so quickly? Maybe it was time to—

Amelia stopped.

She could have sworn she’d heard something. A noise. Footsteps. Holding very still, her breath lodged in her chest, she cocked her head and listened intently.

And heard the noise again.

There was someone out here.

Her father had left that evening on business, so it wasn’t him that she heard. The king had told her that he wouldn’t be back until morning. When her father had left, he’d assured her that he would return well before Lord Carrington was scheduled to arrive at Gastonia’s only airport.

It was a little after midnight and she felt it safe to assume that everyone who worked in the palace had retired to their own lives for the remainder of the night. Who did that leave?

She stiffened. There it was again. Rustling. Someone brushing against the shrubs that were directly on the other side of the ones she was facing. She was sure of it.

Since there was no sound of soft laughter or lowered voices exchanging endearments, Amelia knew that whoever she heard couldn’t be any of the palace’s younger employees sneaking a moment to share the grounds with someone special.

It had to be an intruder.

A chill ran down her back. How had he gotten past the palace security?

Her heart began to hammer quickly. Her father would have ordered her to hurry back to the palace before whoever had managed to get on the grounds saw her.

But her father had also been the one to see to it that she had extensive training in self-defense, telling her that in the end, all one had was oneself to rely on. She wasn’t going to turn tail and run. This was her home, damn it, and no one was going to make her fearful while she was here.

With a rush of adrenaline, Amelia charged around the shrubs, uttering something akin to a war cry that had been designed by her trainer to help empower her and increase her adrenaline while intimidating whoever was on the receiving end.

The man who turned around to see her coming at him a second before she tackled him was tall. His muscular frame was clothed entirely in black. Like a burglar.

She’d meant to knock him down, to, at the very least, knock the wind out of him. And she succeeded.

Partially.

What she hadn’t counted on was that at the last moment, the man in black would grab her wrist. When he went down, he took her with him.

The air drained out of her lungs as she was yanked down. Her head made contact with his chin. She wasn’t sure who got the worst of it.

Within moments of her hastily devised attack, Amelia found herself sprawled out on top of the intruder, stars swirling through her head, her face a mere three inches away from his. If that.

If the intruder was surprised or dazed, it was for less than a heartbeat. And since hers was beating in a tempo that made “The Flight of the Bumblebee” sound like a tune being played in slow motion, the registry of the intruder’s emotion came and went in something less than could be calibrated by any earthly means.

And then she heard the laugh. Deep, rich, full and completely all-encompassing. A laugh that drenched whoever heard it with liquid waves of warmth. A laugh out of her past.

Amelia blinked. She stared down at the face of the man beneath her. A man who might or might not be an intruder but who definitely was having a reaction, not to what had just transpired, but to what was happening this very moment. The very intimate contact of their bodies.

The ends of her robe were spread out on either side like the giant wings of a bird and the scrap of silk beneath seemed not to be there at all. Every inch of his rocklike body was imprinted against hers. And she was achingly aware of it.

Gastonia’s cool night breeze faded instantly, all but fried in the face of the heat that was traveling up and down her body like white lightning, desperately searching for a target.

“Russell.” Her voice sounded hoarse to her ears.

The smile that slipped along his lips was positively wicked. He made no effort to move or rectify the situation. “At your service, princess.”

As if somewhere someone had magically snapped their fingers, Amelia scrambled to her feet, vainly trying to regain her composure. Not an easy feat when her entire body felt as if it were vibrating like a tuning fork struck against a goblet filled to the brim with subtly aged red wine.

She tugged the ends of her robe together. Her insides were still trembling, but she noticed thankfully that her hands were steady enough.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

Russell rose to his feet in a fluid motion she envied. “Apparently being knocked off my feet by a blazing ball of fire.” He casually brushed himself off. Humor never left his lips. And his eyes never left hers.

The trembling had stopped. But she couldn’t get her body to stop tingling. This was like old times, she thought. Except that instead of a water balloon, she’d been hit by Russell. Sort of.

She was a woman now, not a child. Forming coherent words should not be an insurmountable effort for her.

Taking a breath, Amelia managed to restore a measure of dignity to the moment. “I mean, you weren’t due until tomorrow.”

How had he managed to sneak into the country? Just how lax was security at the airport? She made a mental note to speak to her father.

Her father.

Her eyes widened as she remembered. “My father had a ceremony all in place to greet you at the airport.”

If the information was meant to evoke remorse from the tall man before her, it failed. He gave her his trademark lopsided smile. The same one that had made her adolescent heart secretly flutter.

“Which is why,” he told her, “I came in early this evening.”

She knew what Reginald thought of Gastonia and the crown. Did his chief political advisor and cohort share that view? Her eyes narrowed as a wave of protectiveness passed over her. “To humiliate my father?”

He made no effort at denial. He thought her intelligent enough to know that none was needed. “To avoid attention.”

Still smarting from Reginald’s high-handed snub, she looked for the insult in Russell’s actions. “Why? Are you ashamed to have to come to bring me back to your prince, Lord Carrington?”

She was being formal. Somehow, he hadn’t expected her to be. He’d expected her, he supposed, to be exactly the way she’d been the last time he’d seen her. Sweet. Unassuming. And open.

But nothing in life, Russell reminded himself, stayed the same. Things changed, they evolved or they died. There didn’t seem to be any other choice.

He saw the way her mouth curved, saw the displeasure when she uttered Reginald’s title. It was obvious that the princess was no happier about the union than Reginald was. And in her case, Russell couldn’t blame her. At least Reginald was getting a beautiful woman. All Amelia was getting, beyond a treaty, was an egotistical, self-indulgent, power-hungry, spoiled brat of a man who seemed too besotted with his womanizing way of life to appreciate even marginally what he was being handed on a silver platter.

“No,” he answered her question quietly, “I’m not ashamed to be the one to bring you back to Silvershire. I just don’t care for any kind of unnecessary fanfare. Unlike the prince, I never really liked being in the spotlight, however briefly.”

The moon was full tonight and its silvery light was caressing the man standing before her. Amelia realized that she’d stopped breathing only when her lungs began to ache. As subtly as she could, she drew in a long breath.

“Then perhaps political advisor shouldn’t have been your first choice of a career, Carrington.”

“It wasn’t. But my father couldn’t see his way clear to his only son being a beachcomber. And I liked it better when you called me Russell. No fanfare,” he reminded her.

“No fanfare,” she repeated with a nod, then forced her mind back on the conversation and not on the fact that somehow, during the years since she had last seen him, Russell had come into the possession of a very muscular-looking body. “Beachcomber,” she echoed. “Do they still have that sort of thing?”

He laughed. The moonlight wove through her hair, turning it the color of pale wheat. He caught himself just before he began to raise his hand to touch it. He’d been sent to bring her back, not to familiarize himself with the packaging. “If I had anything to say about it, they would.”

God help her, she could see him, lying on the beach, wearing the briefest of bathing suits, the tide bringing the waves just up to his toes, gently lapping his tanned skin.

She had to swallow twice to counteract the dryness in her mouth. It was a credit to her breeding and training that she could continue without dropping the thread of the conversation.

“Seriously, if you don’t like the attention, Russell,” she emphasized his name and he nodded with a smile in response, sending her pulse up another notch, “there had to be something else that you could have become.”

He shook his head. He knew better. “Not with my lineage. Besides, someone needs to be there to temper the prince.”

She looked at him for a long moment. There was more to the man than just practical jokes and devastating good looks. Or was he ultimately cut out of the same cloth as Reginald and just bragging?

“And you can do that?”

Russell heard the skepticism in her voice. Not that he blamed her. He had no reputation by choice. Reginald’s was international.

“I have a modest success rate, but in comparison, it’s still better than anyone else’s.” He didn’t want to talk about Reginald. Not tonight. There was more than enough time for that later. He looked at her, thinking about what she had just done. “You thought I was an intruder.”

“Yes, obviously.” As she moved her shoulder, the robe began to slip off. She tugged it back into place, aware that he had looked at the exposed area. That he was still looking. She felt naked. And unashamed at the same time.

“Why didn’t you get someone from security?” Russell asked.

Pride had her lifting her chin defiantly. She wasn’t a helpless little girl anymore. “Because I could handle it myself.”

She hadn’t struck him as being reckless, but tackling him like that hadn’t been the act of a intelligent person. “You’re the princess,” he pointed out. “It doesn’t behoove you to take chances.”

Amelia rolled her eyes. Was he like all the rest of them? Why wouldn’t he be? she challenged silently. He was part of Reginald’s inner circle. “Oh, please, no lectures.” And then she sighed. It was a losing battle. “Or if you feel you simply must, take a number. There are a few people ahead of you.”

“Such as?”

She saw his lips curving. Was he laughing at her? Having fun at her expense? Try as she might to take offense, she couldn’t. There was something about his smile … But then, there always had been.

“Such as my father. His advisors. It seems these days, everyone feels they have to tell me what my duty is.”

“I won’t,” he promised, dropping the subject for now. And then he looked at her, compassion filling his eyes. “You’re not having an easy time of it, are you, princess?”

She thought of denying it, of saying everything was fine and that she had no idea what he was talking about. But everything wasn’t fine and, very possibly, never would be again. Not once she left for Silvershire and married Reginald.

With a feeling of longing wrapped in futility, she thought of the past. “Things were a lot simpler when all I had to worry about was ducking out of the way of water balloons and checking my bed half a dozen times to make sure I didn’t find any surprises in it before I got in.”

He laughed. He’d been a hellion back then, all right. The thing was, he couldn’t really say he regretted it. Teasing Amelia was the one way he had of making her notice him. He had no crown in his arsenal, but he had been clever and he’d used his wiles to his advantage. He remembered how wide those violet eyes could get.

“These days, I’m sure the surprises in your bed are far more pleasant,” he told her. “And come with less legs.”

The moment the words were out, he waited for the anger to gather in her eyes, the indignation to appear on her face. Without meaning to, he’d crossed a line. But he’d always had a habit of being too frank and with Amelia, he’d felt instantly too comfortable to censor himself.

She surprised him by exhibiting no annoyance at his assumption. “The only thing my bed contains, besides sheets and blankets, is me.”

The moment was recovered nicely. “The prince will be very happy to hear that.”

As if she cared what made that thoughtless ape happy, Amelia thought darkly. “Speaking of the prince, why didn’t he come himself?”

He’d expected her to ask and shrugged vaguely. “He had business to attend to.” If it were him, he added silently, nothing on heaven or earth would have kept him from coming for her.

Amelia laughed shortly. “What is her name? Or doesn’t he know?”

Russell looked at his prince’s intended bride for a long moment. For all his wealth and fame, he’d never envied Reginald. Until this moment. “You’re a lot more worldly than I remember.”

“You remember a thirteen-year-old girl who was afraid of her own shadow.” Her eyes held his. “I’m not afraid of my shadow anymore.”

He rubbed his jaw where her head had hit against it just before recognition had set in for her. For him, it had been immediate, because he’d followed the stories about her that appeared in the newspapers. Stories that were as different from the ones about Reginald as a robin was from the slug it occasionally ate. While stories about Reginald went on about his various less than tasteful escapades, hers told of her humanitarian efforts.

“I noticed,” he replied with an appreciative, warm laugh.

Amelia felt the laugh traveling straight to the center of her abdomen, before it seemed to spread to regions beyond, like a sunbeam landing on a rock, then widening as the sun’s intensity increased.

She cleared her throat and looked back toward the palace. It was obvious that he had to have come through there to wind up here. “How did you get into the palace?”

She watched as a smile entered his eyes, shadowing a memory. “Remember that old underground passage you once showed me?”

Amelia’s eyes widened. He was referring to something that was forever burned into her memory. She’d slipped away from her nanny, leaving the poor woman to deal with Reginald, while she took it upon herself to share her secret discovery with Russell. It was the one bold incident she remembered from her childhood.

Remembered it, too, because the episode had ended in a kiss. A soft, swift, chaste kiss that Russell had stolen from her.

A kiss, Amelia thought, that she still remembered above all the others that had subsequently come in its wake.

She was glad for the moonlight, fervently hoping that it offered sufficient cover for the blush that she felt creeping up her neck and onto her cheeks.

Chapter 3

“So that’s how you got in,” Amelia finally said, finding her tongue.

Strangely enough, the air was not uncomfortable, but it had grown far too still between them. And she found herself feeling things. Things that, at any other time, she would have welcomed, would have enjoyed exploring, things she had never felt before, had only thought about. But feelings like this, if allowed to flourish, to unfold, would only get in the way of her obligations.

She suddenly felt a great deal older than her twenty-six years.

“That’s how I got in,” the tall, handsome man at her side confirmed needlessly.

They had begun to walk back to the palace, to the world where their lives were, for the most part, completely laid out for them. Where obligations constricted freedom and feelings were forced by the wayside. All that mattered were boundaries.

“I had to do a lot of stooping,” Russell continued. His mouth curved as he spared her a glance. “The passageway beneath the garden to the palace is a great deal smaller than I remembered.”

Amelia paused for a moment, reluctant to leave the shelter of the garden. Here, for a fleeting amount of time, she could pretend to be anyone she wanted to be.

Banking down her thoughts, Amelia began to walk again as she smiled at Russell. “You’re a lot bigger than you were then.” And you’ve filled out, she added silently.

“I suppose,” he allowed with a self-deprecating laugh she found endearing as well as stirring. “Funny how you never really think of yourself as changing.”

Moving to one side, he held the terrace door open for her. Amelia looked up into his face as she entered the palace. “Is that a warning?”

His eyebrows drew together over a nose that could only be described as perfect. Entering behind her, he closed the French doors. “I don’t follow.”

Amelia led the way to the rear staircase. As before, she kept her path to the shadows that pooled along the floor. The palace seemed empty, but that was just an illusion. There were more than a hundred people on the premises.

Though she sincerely doubted that Russell didn’t understand her meaning, she played along. “Should I be looking over my shoulder for water balloons?”

Cupping her elbow, he escorted her up the stairs. Perfectly capable of climbing them on her own, she still enjoyed the unconscious show of chivalry, not to mention the contact. It was hard to believe that this was the same mischievous, dark-eyed youth who’d simultaneously tortured her and filled her daydreams.

“The water balloons were never over your shoulder,” Russell pointed out as they came to the landing. “They were always dropped from overhead.” His mouth curved a little more on the right than on the left. “I’m sorry about that.”

Amelia tilted her head and looked into his eyes. They were the color of warm chocolate. How strange that she could pick up the thread so easily, as if no time had gone by at all since his last visit. As if more than twelve years had merely melted away into the mists that sometimes surrounded the island kingdom and they were children again.

“No, you’re not.”

She was rewarded with the rich sound of his laugh as it echoed down the long, winding hallway lined with portraits of her ancestors. They seemed to approve of him, she thought.

“All right, maybe I wasn’t,” Russell admitted. “Then,” he quickly qualified. “But I am now.” He saw her raise her delicate eyebrows in a silent query. And just for the tiniest of moments, he had an overwhelming urge to trace the arches with the tip of his finger. He squelched it. “I frightened you.”