Courted: Gowns & Crowns, Book 1

by Jennifer Chance

  She checked the date stamp as a caption flared at the bottom of the image, and even that seemed impossible. It was only a few months ago! How had he changed so much in such a short time? And who was the real Kristos?

  Em curled up on the couch with the images still flashing in front of her. She muted the sound, then traded the remote for a pen and the first piece of stationery. One thing was certain, she wasn’t going to sleep tonight anytime soon.

  He was never going to get to sleep.

  Kristos stared bleary-eyed as his father slid another stack of papers in front of him. “Tomorrow you will be expected to read these and sign them, Kristos,” Jasen said sternly. “Ari never took the time to look through them either, and you need to know what it is you’re agreeing to.”

  “What am I not agreeing to?” Kristos shoved the papers away. “We’ve been through three hours of this, and it is everything I expected, which is that my entire life will be now dedicated to the state of Garronia, end of story. So why don’t we cut to the chase and discuss what that doesn’t actually include? Once I become crown prince—and king, though if you die anytime soon, I will hunt you down in the afterlife and kill you again myself—in what areas of my life specifically will I still have control?”

  Jasen looked as though he were about to snap back at him, then settled back in his chair, contemplative. “I’ve never considered the matter from that perspective,” he said, sounding surprised. “I came to the throne at about your age. But I too had a younger brother, though in that case, no one was hoping he would take the throne.”

  “Like father, like son.” Kristos grimaced, thinking of Frederick. He’d met Frederick’s father, of course, and Jasen was right. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Frederick was only twenty, so they needed to cut him a break, but a more rebellious soldier he’d never met. And a rebellious soldier usually ended up getting other soldiers killed.

  Jasen nodded. “It was a shock to my system as well, though I’d been groomed for it since my teen years. All the paperwork, the travel, the endless sessions of the Council. And, of course, the social duties of the role.”

  “Of course.” Kristos twisted his lips. “We can’t forget that.”

  Jasen watched him. “I was fortunate in that I had already met your mother at several events prior to the Accession Ball. It was something of a foregone conclusion that we would marry, though my own mother did her level best to put other women out there in front of me—the best and brightest of Garronia, Greece, and half a dozen other countries as well.”

  “Half a dozen!” Kristos looked at him, aghast. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I wasn’t. She was.” Jasen shrugged. “She had a conviction that we needed a new perspective in the royal halls. New blood. To ease her acceptance of my choice in brides, my father created an external counselor role with access to the king and queen, a role that became the EU counselor in the midnineties.” He shrugged, looking weary but satisfied. “There is always more than one solution to a problem.”

  “So you already knew you were going to choose Mother. What if you hadn’t? What will happen on Friday if I don’t make some sort of formal declaration—which is the stupidest, most insane thing I’ve ever heard of, by the way. Are we going to sacrifice a bull on the steps of the palace as well?”

  His father ignored his sharp tone. “If you don’t make a declaration, then the media and a good portion of the population of Garronia will set up a Wedding Watch, not dissimilar, I’m sorry to say, to Rome’s convocation of cardinals as they prepare to announce a new pope.”

  “Please tell me you’re joking.”

  “Only slightly. You’ll not be barricaded behind closed doors, and the nation won’t hold its collective breath until white smoke wafts above the palace, but everywhere you go, everything you do, it will be the very first question. And not just for you but for the women who have been singled out as your primary candidates.”

  Kristos rolled his eyes. “Do the English princes go through this? I don’t seem to recall this level of frenzy.”

  “The blood of the English does not run as hot as that of the Garronois. And their king—or queen—does not rule the country directly. Your succession plan is arguably a bit more of interest here.”

  Kristos wanted to argue that point but couldn’t. Instead, he poked at the pages in front of him. None of this made any sense. He simply shouldn’t be here.

  “You never answered the question. Out of all my personal rights that I’m signing away tomorrow, what do I keep? I’ve already had to bar the guards from stationing themselves outside the bathroom for fear I’ll fall into the tub and drown.”

  “And they listened to you, which is an important distinction. You have the right to mandate your own level of personal security within the castle. You do not have the right to mandate it outside of it, and you will not be allowed to put yourself at unnecessary risk.”

  “Like Ari and his plane.”

  His father nodded once. “Had he already acceded to the crown, that plane would never have left the ground. You are allowed to choose your wife, as long as she’s approved by the ministers, which is generally a formality.”

  “How reassuring.”

  “You’re allowed to raise your children as you see fit, and in the event that you do not have a son, your firstborn daughter will be elevated to crown princess when the time comes. Should you have no children, the line reverts to any siblings, offspring of those siblings, then—”

  He trailed off, and Kristos finished for him. “Frederick.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Kristos rubbed a hand over his face. “Anything else?”

  “The money of the royal household is yours to spend as you wish, once you become king, but your royal holdings are immediately your own to manage. You can pursue any line of work or hobby you wish outside of your royal duties, provided it does not run counter to those duties. So, no—you cannot rejoin the military, Kristos. Not and run the country as well. Your patriotism is lauded, but the country could not weather another death in the family.” He sighed. “Neither could your mother, I suspect.”

  But the military is where I belong.

  Kristos stared down at the stacks of paperwork, not trusting himself to speak for a moment. His entire life, his parents had worked hard not to judge him by the decisions, abilities, or actions of his brother. Where Ari had excelled in school, Kristos had gone after every sport with unstinting gusto. Where Ari had been fascinated with tinkering with technology, Kristos had only been interested in what that technology allowed him to do. He didn’t need to build the plane, he’d often told his brother. He simply needed to fly it.

  But now it seemed Kristos’s entire world was being circumscribed by one fatal act of a man who wasn’t around to explain it. And the most preposterous things being asked of him were clearly the ones of greatest importance to his family and to his people. It was ridiculous—but perhaps no more ridiculous than the idea of a ruling monarchy in the twenty-first century. You had to take the good with the bad, he supposed.

  And yet.

  It was almost dawn by the time he finally made it to his rooms. His bed was turned down but empty. He couldn’t see Emmaline, couldn’t hear her laughter. When the sun came up, she would be awakened to rejoin her friends, and the wheels of their respective lives would churn on, taking them ever farther apart from each other. Even though he would see her in a few short days at the Accession Ball, she would be surrounded by her friends, her world, her life. Gone from him.

  He didn’t want to let her go, though. Not that quickly. Not quite yet.

  He moved to the door of his room. He’d dismissed his guards, but that didn’t mean the palace wouldn’t be crawling with the men and women assigned to protect the royal family. Still, his father’s words had been clear. Within this very, very narrow scope, Kristos had ultimate freedom.

  He planned on exercising that freedom one last time. Tonight.

  He opened the door,
and a familiar figure lounged across the hallway, leaning against the wall.

  “I so knew this was going to happen.” Dimitri grinned.

  Chapter 15

  Em rolled over in her opulent bed, unable to sleep, though she desperately wanted to let the smothering tide of darkness take her away. She’d recorded on palace stationery everything she could remember of the events of the past two days—from her first—literal—run-in with Kristos, to his arms around her on the beach, the flight to the chateau, and the beautiful Estral Falls. She’d absolutely omitted any mention of being in his bedroom and what had happened at the falls and in the showers here at the castle, of course. With her luck, she’d leave those pages behind, and they’d end up on the front page of whatever passed for Garronia’s Star Magazine.

  She turned again, then lifted her head, peering into the gloom. Had she heard her door open? She was ragged with lack of sleep, and there had been two guards outside her door when the queen had left her. She’d heard her giving them instructions in Garronois, but she still didn’t know enough to interpret any of the words. Hopefully Catherine hadn’t ordered them to come in and kill her, because honestly, she was too tired to care at this point.

  The bedchamber the queen had granted her was extraordinary in every way—other than it was a fully interior room, which meant no windows. She supposed that was typical of a lot of the rooms in a building this big. There was only so much real estate you could mete out, but nevertheless, it gave the entire room the feeling of being a strange sort of cocoon. She wouldn’t want to stay here for long. Then again, perhaps that was why it was used for visiting dignitaries. Anything to hasten tedious guests along their way.

  She let her eyes drift shut again, sleep finally starting to pull her under with its tempting touch. It seemed to stroll up to her on cat’s paws, soft, stealthy, and so, so sweet—

  “Emmaline.”

  Em’s gasping scream was cut short by a warm, heavy hand pressed over her mouth, and her eyes snapped open only to have her vision filled with Kristos’s face. “Please don’t scream,” he whispered, trying for stern and failing miserably. “You’ll ruin my reputation.”

  He lifted his hand away, and Em scooted up against the headboard with its overflow of pillows, staring at him, unsure whether to laugh or cry or throw herself at him. “What are you doing here?” she hissed, looking from him to the door. She had heard someone enter. “Weren’t there guards outside?”

  “Apparently, being a prince has its privileges.” Still, Kristos hesitated, looking impossibly gorgeous as he stood at her bedside, with his white shirt open at the neck, his fine trousers creased and rumpled. Her wide-eyed perusal of him brought a frown to his face. “I’ve startled you too much. I’ll go. I’m sorry.”

  “Please don’t.” Em felt her cheeks flame, but she pushed the blankets down and shifted farther over in the bed, her invitation for Kristos to join her clear. “Can you stay long?”

  “Not long,” he said. But he was already shucking his shirt, throwing it to the chair beside the bed. His pants and briefs followed immediately after, the action so swift it had Em blinking. Her own nightgown was barely there—a fine white cotton tank-top-style sheath embroidered at the neck and sleeves that she’d found folded neatly on the bed with a note about how it was handcrafted in Garronia. Now it seemed scarcely any barrier at all to the man climbing into her bed, his body making the mattress dip, his hands reaching for her.

  “I thought I wouldn’t see you again—like this,” Em said, surprised at how her voice wobbled.

  “I know.” Kristos pulled her close to him, brushing his lips against hers. “I decided I couldn’t stand the idea of that, and technically, tomorrow is not yet here.” He tightened his hold briefly. “Besides, there is still one nagging concern that I cannot put aside.”

  “A concern.” Em managed to keep her hold on semicoherency as Kristos’s head dipped into the curve of her neck. He followed the trail of her pulse down to where it throbbed at the base of her throat, then lingered there, breathing her in as his hands slid beneath her shift and along her body until they closed over her breasts. She sucked in a deep breath as she arched beneath him, and he growled in response before dropping to nuzzle her breasts through the thin fabric with his mouth, his tongue. The touch of him with the barrier between them seemed almost more erotic than if she’d been naked, and heat flooded through her, the ache in her core almost a living thing. “Kristos,” she gasped.

  He shifted down to place a kiss on her belly, and his fingers curled around the edge of her panties. Em groaned as his touch trailed down to cup her intimately, his fingers exploring the soft dampness.

  “That is becoming my favorite sound,” he said, and his breath against her sensitive skin mesmerized her as he leaned down to kiss the base of her belly, the inside of her thigh. “There is nothing about you I do not wish to know, Emmaline, nothing I do not wish to taste or touch. My concern is over everything I may have missed.”

  “Oh,” Em breathed out shallowly, her heart pounding, as Kristos pulled her panties down her legs and spread her legs farther to allow him to position himself more completely. She felt exposed, vulnerable, but when he kissed her again on the inside of her knee, she also couldn’t stop her body from arching up, subconsciously trying to guide him to where she most needed him to be. “Oh dear God.” Em jolted as she felt the slow slide of Kristos’s tongue, the sensation at once foreign and somehow taboo and so, so—

  “Good?” Kristos breathed against her, turning her inside out with his mouth, his tongue, seeming to know exactly when she was about to break and deliberately shifting away before she could reach her release, then moving back to torment her before she could regain her breath. Every time he did so, her need surged higher, her climax closer, and she found herself lost in a sea of sensation that she’d always suspected was possible but had never allowed herself to try. When Kristos murmured something in Garronois against her, she cried out, only to bring her fist to her mouth, stifling her own cries.

  “The walls are thick,” he said, or she suspected he said it. She couldn’t think, could barely breathe as he pressed forward again, and this time it was not only his tongue but the sensation of pressure inside her that caught her up short, his fingers dipping into her in such a shockingly intimate intrusion that the combination of sensations seemed to crystallize in one long, impossible moment—then sent her catapulting over the edge again faster and harder than she would ever have thought possible.

  “Kristos!” She hissed as her body fairly vibrated off the bed, and then he was sliding up her body, pausing only long enough to sheathe himself with a condom before his mouth was on her shoulder, her neck, at her ear, whispering more unfamiliar words, the pressure of his shaft inside her sending her into another rat-a-tat-ing stream of mini orgasms as he filled her completely. She breathed in deeply, reveling in the feel of him, and he loomed above her, timing his strokes in perfect counterpoint to her body’s clenching reaction. She moaned, almost dazed, until she was pulled into the steady rhythm of his thrusts, her body moving unconsciously, her hands gripping his forearms, and a heady, bone-deep relaxation swept over her, unlike anything she’d ever felt before.

  The intense look of satisfaction on Emmaline’s face was definitely not helping Kristos to control himself. He stared down at her, cataloging her every change of expression, her slightest reaction, reveling in how changeable her face, her eyes, even her lips were.

  “You’re beautiful,” he said to her in Garronois. Though she couldn’t know the content of the words, she sensed their meaning, and her cheeks flushed with the lightest rush of pink. She stared up at him and shifted her body, lifting her legs to take him inside her more deeply.

  “You feel—really, really amazing,” she said, her lids drifting closed as she concentrated on him. “I think you’ve maybe ruined me for any other man.”

  Good. Though he suspected her comment was somewhat in jest, Kristos’s response was immediate and viscer
al. He was glad he wasn’t holding her, as his hands clenched into fists and twisted in the sheets, but he drove into her with yet more force, causing her to sink back into the pillows, her head thrown back. She was clearly savoring this experience as much as he was.

  “Emmaline,” he murmured and she opened her eyes again. Her gaze found his almost drunkenly, her expression loose and unfocused, more swept up in emotion than any woman he’d ever seen. Was this how she looked when she played music? He wondered suddenly. Transported to some other place?

  “Look at me,” he commanded, and her gaze firmed on him. “I want to watch you while you come again.” Right along with him, he knew, as Emmaline flushed scarlet at his stark demand.

  “I’m not anywhere—oh—” Her eyes widened in surprise as he pressed up and into her, his knowledge of her body becoming more detailed with their every interaction. They moved together in a rhythm that was already familiar and welcome, and he filled her in such a way that her already-triggered nerve endings responded with swift and sudden force. Her mouth tightened as her fingers clamped on his arms more fiercely, her eyes wild as she convulsed against him as he let himself go as well, the thundering tide of their shared release pounding over and through him, sweeping him away into one of Em’s fantasies—if only for a brief, perfect moment.

  He collapsed on top of her and rolled off, ridding himself of the condom as he stood. He strode to the bathroom and discarded the thing, then was back at Emmaline’s side before she’d scrambled to a fully seated position. He knelt upon the bed, not trusting himself to recline again, as exhaustion and the powerful urge to stay with this woman threatened to finally catch up with him.

  She understood immediately, her eyes shifting to the clock. “You have to go,” she said, but there were no tears in her voice at least. That would be more than he could manage at this moment.