Raye Morgan - The Lost Princes - Darius, Cassius and Monte

www.millsandboon.co.uk

RAYE MORGANhas been a nursery school teacher, a travel agent, a clerk and a business editor, but her best job ever has been writing romances—and fostering romance in her own family at the same time. Current score: two boys married, two more to go. Raye has published over seventy romances, and claims to have many more waiting in the wings. She lives in Southern California, with her husband and whichever son happens to be staying at home at that moment.

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This book is dedicated to Ineke and all my Dutch cousins

PRINCE DARIUS MARTEN CONSTANTIJN of the Royal House of Ambria, presently deposed and clandestinely living under the name of David Dykstra, was not a heavy sleeper. Ordinarily the slightest unusual sound would have sent him slipping silently through his luxury penthouse apartment with a lethal weapon in hand, ready to defend his privacy—and his life.

The sense that his life might be under threat was not outrageous. Since he was a member of an overthrown monarchy, his very existence was a constant challenge to the thuglike regime that now controlled his country. And as such, he had to consider himself in constant jeopardy.

But tonight the instinct to defend his territory had been muted a bit. He’d hosted a cocktail party for fifteen rowdy London socialites and they’d all stayed much too long. That had a consequence he didn’t suffer from often anymore, but its effects were not unfamiliar to him. He’d had too much to drink.

So when he heard the baby cry, he thought at first that he must be hallucinating.

“Babies,” he muttered to himself, waiting to make sure the room had stopped spinning before he risked opening his eyes. “Why can’t they keep their problems to themselves?”

The crying stopped abruptly, but by now he was fully awake. He listened, hard. It had to have been be a dream. There was no baby here. There couldn’t be. This was an adult building. He was sure of it.

“No babies allowed,” he murmured, closing his eyes and starting to drift back to sleep. “Verboten.”

But his eyes shot open as he heard the little rule breaker again. This time it was just a whimper, but it was for real. No dream.

Still, in his groggy state, it took time to put all the pieces of this mystery together. And it still didn’t make sense. There was no way a baby could be in his apartment. If one of his evening guests had brought one along, surely he would have noticed. And if this same ill-mannered person had left that baby behind in the coat room, wouldn’t they have come back for it by now?

He tried to shrug the whole thing off and return to peaceful slumber, but by now, that was impossible. His mind was just awake enough to go into worry mode. He’d never go back to sleep until he was sure he was in a baby-free abode.

He groaned, then rolled out of bed, pulled on a pair of jeans he found in a pile on his chair and began to stalk quietly through his set of rooms, checking one after another and wondering grumpily why he’d leased a place with so many rooms, anyway. The living room was littered with cocktail napkins and empty crystal wine goblets. He’d sent the catering crew home at midnight—a mistake, he now realized. But who knew his party guests would stay until almost 3:00 a.m? Never mind, the cleaning lady would arrive in just a few hours and make everything clean and sparkling again.

“No more parties,” he promised himself as he turned back to his search, kicking a long feather boa someone had left behind out of the way. “I’ll just go to shindigs at other people’s homes. I can still maintain my information sources and let others deal with the hassle.”

But for now he had an apartment to search before he could get back to bed. He trudged on.

And then he found the baby.

It was asleep when he first saw it. He opened the door to his seldom-used media room and there it was, tucked into a drawer that was serving as a makeshift crib. The little mouth was open, the little round cheeks puffing a bit with each breath. It looked like a cute kid, but he’d never seen it before in his life.

As he watched, it gave an involuntary jump, its chubby little arms lurching upward, then falling slowly back again. But it didn’t wake. Dressed in a pink stretch jumper that looked a little rumpled and a lot spit up on, the child seemed comfortable enough for now. Sleeping babies weren’t so bad. But he knew very well what happened when they woke up and he shuddered to think of it.

It was pretty annoying, finding an uninvited baby in your home and it was pretty obvious who was to blame—the long, leggy blonde draped rather gracelessly across his cantilevered couch. He’d never seen her before, either.

“What in blazes is going on here?” he said softly.

Neither of them stirred, but he hadn’t meant to wake them yet. He needed another moment or two to take in this situation, analyze it and make some clear-headed decisions. All his instincts for survival were coming alert. He was fairly certain that this was no ordinary sleepover he’d been saddled with. This must have something to do with his royal past with its messy rebellion history and his precariously uncertain future.

Worse, he had a pretty strong feeling it was going to turn out to be a threat—maybe even the threat he’d been expecting for most of his life.

He was fully awake now. He had to think fast and make sound judgments. His gaze slid over the blonde, and despite his suspicions about her, his immediate reaction was a light frisson of attraction. Though her legs were sprawled awkwardly, reminding him of a young colt who hadn’t got its bearings right just yet, they were shapely legs, and her short skirt had hitched up enticingly as she slept, showing the aforementioned legs off in a very charming way. Despite everything, he approved.

Most of her face was hidden by a mass of wiry curls, though one tiny, shell-like ear peeked through, and she’d wrapped her torso up tightly in a thick brown sweater. She wasn’t really all that young, but her casual pose made her seem that way and something about her was endearing at first glance. There was an appeal to the woman that might have made him smile under other circumstances.

But he frowned instead and his gaze snapped back to stare at that gorgeous little ear. It was decorated with a penny-sized earring that seemed familiar. As he looked more closely, he could see it was molded in the form of the old Ambrian coat of arms—the coat of arms of the deposed royal family he belonged to.

As adrenaline shot through his system, his heart began to thump in his chest and he wished he’d picked up the weapon he usually carried at night. Only a very select set of people in the world knew about his connection to Ambria, and his life depended on it being kept a secret.