Valerie Parv - The Prince and The Marriage Pact

Fiendishly clever, Annegret thought. According to history, the merchant had known that the prince was madly in love with a commoner, and had assumed the crown was within his grasp. But the prince had outwitted the merchant by sacrificing his love for the good of the crown. Annegret gathered that princes of Taures had been doing much the same thing ever since.

She had long been fascinated by the Champagne Pact itself, as well as the famous painting. Knowing that at least one branch of royalty was doomed to be unlucky in love gave her enormous satisfaction.

Recognizing her own bias in this particular area, Annegret felt a twinge of conscience. While working in the Australian diplomatic service, her mother had fallen in love with an equerry to Prince Frederick of Ehrenberg, then his country’s ambassador to Australia. After promising to marry her mother and take her home to his country, the equerry had instead left Debra West alone and pregnant with his child.

Annegret lifted her shoulders in a shrug. So she wasn’t a fan of royalty. It was hardly surprising, given that she was the child the man had turned his back on. The only correspondence her mother had received from the man was a letter soon after Annegret was born, telling her that she wouldn’t be hearing from him again.

Ehrenberg’s borders had been closed to foreigners for most of Annegret’s life, so she and her mother couldn’t seek out the man to demand an explanation. Not that Annegret wanted to. She told herself that he had done her mother a favor, leaving his child to be raised in Australia. Had he taken her mother home to Ehrenberg with him, Annegret would be there still, confined within the mountain kingdom, cut off from the rest of the world. If it wasn’t for the unhappiness her father had caused her mother, Annegret would have no regrets at all.

Dismissing the thought, she studied the painting. If she hadn’t known it was so old, she would have been confused by the strong resemblance of that prince to the present-day prince of Taures, Maxim de Marigny. He had put in an appearance at the wedding to wish the couple well.

He was amazingly good-looking, a fact that hadn’t escaped her notice at the ceremony. As dark in coloring as his ancestor in the painting, Prince Maxim had the most amazing cobalt-blue eyes. As the guests left the chapel, the prince’s gaze had fixed on her for a few seconds, sending a shiver of response down her spine. Although tempted, she hadn’t looked away, and had caught a glimmer of amusement in his expression, as if he had expected her to lower her lashes, and was pleased when she met his gaze unflinchingly.

Pure fantasy, she told herself. The product of working too hard to wrap up her most recent series before leaving Australia. Still, she couldn’t deny that he had noticed her. She had certainly noticed him.

He possessed a worldly look she found herself wondering about. He hadn’t appeared overly pampered, yet his job as administrator of the Merrisand charitable trust had to be a sinecure. With a thousand years of royal tradition behind him, he obviously didn’t need to work for a living.

He hadn’t looked as inbred as she’d expected, either. His wide, strong mouth was far from effete, and his athletic build suggested he took as much care of himself as Annegret herself did. She liked that, having little patience with people who took no pride in their appearance. She didn’t care whether they were tall or short, heavy or slender, as long as they made the best of what they had.

There was no denying that Prince Maxim did so, she thought. What he had amounted to a devastatingly masculine package. Her mental assessment had included long limbs and a lithe body encased in a dark suit that was a monument to tailoring excellence.

But there was something more—a commanding quality that owed nothing to breeding or tailoring. Had he been the lowliest commoner, Maxim would still have been an impressive man, she conceded. He couldn’t have helped it.

Annoyed with her train of thought, she turned away from the painting. Having seen it, she knew she should return to the reception. But her footsteps dragged. It was so peaceful here, away from the festivities. She was in no hurry to return.

Noticing an intriguing plant in an alcove, she went to inspect it. Annegret was no gardener, but guessed it was some kind of lily. The dazzling cream flower was the size of a trumpet, and the jade-green dinner-plate-size leaves glistened as if painted. It looked too perfect to be real. She stretched out a hand.

“Don’t touch that.”

The order startled her so much that her hand closed reflexively around the plant’s fleshy stem, and she gave a cry of shock as her palm was stung by what felt like hundreds of needles. She pulled away, feeling as if she had thrust her hand into a naked flame.

She looked up into a twin of the cobalt gaze she had been contemplating in the painting only a moment before. Except this time the eyes raking her belonged to Prince Maxim himself, and fierce glints sparked in their depths.

“I only wanted to see if the plant was real, Your Highness” she said, wishing she didn’t feel like a child caught with her hand in the cookie jar. Assuming there were cookies that could make her hand feel as if it was on fire.

“The Janus lily is real, unfortunately,” he said in a clipped tone that barely disguised a voice as deep and rich as hot chocolate. “When it’s in flower, it’s particularly dangerous. I’d ordered it moved from the alcove, but evidently the staff hadn’t gotten around to it yet.” His grim tone said someone would pay for the oversight.

“It’s all right, really,” she insisted, cradling her hand against her chest. As soon as the pain subsided, she would be fine. Less easy to deal with was the way her heart had started thundering with his approach.

Only shock, she assured herself, not sure how accurately. Up close, the prince was even more prepossessing than when she’d seen him outside the chapel. He was a few inches taller than Annegret herself, and she stood five-ten without heels. His hair was as dark and glossy as a night sky, and the hand he reached out to her looked strong and capable.

She had always had a thing for men’s hands. The prince’s might not appear work-worn, but neither did they look soft. His nails were clipped to a businesslike length and he wore a beaten-silver ring on the third finger of his right hand. Nothing on his left hand, but she already knew he was unmarried. Not that she cared.

“Let me take a look.”

Before she could argue, he took her hand in his, uncurling her clenched fingers to reveal two red slashes across her palm where she had touched the plant stem. Each livid slash was impregnated with hundreds of hairlike filaments.

In as much pain as she was, she couldn’t help noticing that his grasp was gentle, for all the anger in his expression. Her swift and very physical response caught her by surprise. She told herself it was because he was holding her hand and standing close enough for her to inhale a faint trace of his aftershave lotion—a blend of citrus and herbal scents that teased her nostrils.

“The Janus lily?” she queried, very much aware of needing the distraction. And not wholly because of the pain. “Wasn’t Janus the Roman god of doorways and entrances?”

The prince nodded. “He was usually depicted wearing two faces.”

She looked at the plant with renewed respect. “Like the lily, one beautiful, one dangerous.”

“It’s a Carramer native, one of the few that isn’t benign,” he explained. “They’re only dangerous when in flower, and then only when touched.”

“If you hadn’t startled me, I wouldn’t have touched it,” she snapped, pain getting the better of her.

“If you hadn’t been wandering where you shouldn’t, I wouldn’t have startled you,” he countered mildly, but she heard a definite undercurrent of steel in his tone. Prince Maxim didn’t take kindly to being crossed, she gathered.