by Lili Valente
I turn to see a tiny boy with enormous brown eyes racing down the carpeted hallway in a saggy diaper. A moment later, a woman wrapped in a robe darts out of the door behind him, calling in an American accent, “Conrad, get back here! Right now!”
“No, no, no!” the boy squeals. “No bath.”
“Yes, bath,” his mother maintains. “You’ve been dirty for days.”
And then, everything happens at once—the elevator opens in front of Jeffrey, the mother trips over her robe and goes down hard, and the door to the emergency staircase swings open before the diaper-clad runaway.
A man wearing shorts and a T-shirt too skimpy for winter in Switzerland runs out, panting, and the little boy darts through the doorway behind him.
Before I realize I’m moving, I’m off, primal instinct roaring that a baby in a diaper can’t be left alone, even for a moment, on steep, concrete stairs.
I reach the closing door before the mother has made it back to her feet, pulling it open to see the little boy climbing the railing at the top of the stairwell. If he makes it over, he’ll fall four stories through the center of the circular staircase.
He’ll die. Horribly.
I can already see it in my head, a scene so terrible I don’t hesitate. I lunge for the baby, wrapping my hands around his waist and pulling him away from danger. He squirms free almost immediately, falling safely to the landing while I slip in my high heels.
One leg flies out from under me. My arms flail, my hands groping for something to hold on to, but there’s nothing but air—air I whoosh through far too quickly as my body tumbles toward the long, hard, concrete steps.
I have a split second to think—No! Not the stairs on my birthday!—and then strong hands close around my arms, wrenching me back to safety.
I fall against Jeffrey, clinging to his sweater as he bands an arm around my waist and hauls me into the hall, saying in a soft rumble, “On second thought, why don’t we go to bed early? Lock the door and stay far away from stairs until after midnight?”
Heart slamming in my chest, I nod. “Sounds good. Just in case.”
“Just in case,” he agrees, wrapping me up in a strong, safe hug.
“Thank you so much,” the robed mother says breathlessly, her bath-averse youngster now clinging to her shoulders with his face tucked into her neck. “I don’t know how he got out of the room. I only turned my back for a second.”
“It’s okay,” I say, the blood still rushing in my ears. “I’m just glad he’s safe.”
“Me, too,” she says, before adding in a shy voice, “I love you two, by the way. Just so you know. You’re my favorite royal couple of all time. You’re just so romantic together.” She glances at Jeffrey before turning back to me. “And the way he looks at you. Girl, you are the luckiest woman on earth. I have never seen anyone so shamelessly adored.”
I smile up at Jeffrey, my cheeks warm. “Yeah, I think I’ll keep him.”
The woman laughs, and we say our goodbyes, returning to our room to find our siblings getting into swimsuits to hit the hot tub on our balcony. We refuse the invitation to join them and, instead, do exactly what Jeffrey suggested. We head to bed, where we snuggle together and whisper in the near-darkness, watching the clock until it hits midnight.
“To another twenty-six years times three,” Jeffrey says with a relieved sigh.
“That’s…” I trail off, biting my tongue as I do the math. “Seventy-eight years and seventy-eight plus twenty-six is…” I huff and shake my head. “One hundred and four? No, thank you. I’ll take ninety-two. That feels like a nice number. Lots of life, but not too much, you know?”
“There’s no such thing as too much life. Not as long as I get to share it with you.”
“Aw,” I say, kissing his bare chest. “If Zan heard you say that, she’d make gagging noises.”
“I don’t care. Do you?” He shifts until he’s on his side, facing me on the crisp cotton sheets.
“Not even a little bit,” I say, sighing as his hand slips down the back of my satin sleep shorts, the ones I designed to flutter around my thighs like flower petals in the wind when I walk.
Ever since I gave myself permission to be the heroine of my own romantic story, I’ve been even more obsessed with designing. I have an entirely new collection almost ready for submission, six months ahead of time.
Which should give Jeffrey and I plenty of time to honeymoon this spring.
“Elizabeth,” he says in a scandalized voice. “You aren’t wearing panties.”
I gasp in mock horror. “Oh, no! Did I forget again?”
“You did,” he says. “And you know what that means…”
“You’ll have to ravage me again?” I grin up at him as he hooks his fingers in the top of my shorts.
“Indeed. If there were another layer to take off, maybe not, but when you make it so easy…” He drags the satin down my hips to my thighs. “How am I supposed to resist?”
“You’re not,” I whisper, and then I remind him why.
Nearly an hour later, I nod off, still smiling, drunk on love and sex and all the endless possibilities waiting to be explored.
With this man, the prince of my panties and my soul and my heart, from now until the very end.
Ready for more royal romance?
Alexandra and Nick’s story, UNDERCOVER WITH THE PRINCE is clickable now! Keep reading for a sneak peek.
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CHAPTER ONE
Alexandra Gertrude Renee Rochat:
A woman on the verge of (justifiable?) homicide.
Ugh. Princes.
They really are the worst.
And Nickolas Von Bergen is a special kind of awful. Smug. Entitled. The type of royal who believes the rest of us were put on this earth for his amusement. I’ve known him since we were children and can confirm he’s been insufferable since the age of four, at least.
This isn’t the first time I’ve wanted to kill him, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.
He’s just so…murderable.
Sliding open the glass door of our Swiss hotel suite, I watch him with my lip curled.
Lounging in the hot tub on the balcony as the snow falls on his perfectly curled dark hair, bragging to my sister and his brother about how fast he zipped down the double black diamond slope this afternoon—he’s practically begging for a knife to the gut.
Or, at the very least, an elbow in the eye.
Both eyes, maybe…
He’d be a lot less pretty with his sparkly green eyes swollen shut.
And he wouldn’t be able to see.
And if he couldn’t see, the powers that be might decide it’s time to remove him from the field. Send him back to work on the Gallantian tourist website. Chain him to a computer somewhere in Baden-Bergen where I’ll never see or hear from him again—except at family gatherings, of course.
Because Nickolas Von Bergen isn’t just my work nemesis. Soon, he’ll be my double brother-in-law.
My sister Sabrina is married to his eldest brother, Andrew, the King of Gallantia, and my sister Lizzy is engaged to his next oldest brother, Jeffrey.
Andrew is an amiable goofball, and Jeffrey a brooding behemoth with a bossiness disorder, but both are far less irritating than Nick. Andrew’s clownish side makes Sabrina happy, and Jeffrey would clearly lay down his life for Lizzy in a heartbeat. He’s actually very sweet with my shy, scatterbrained sister, and probably, if I’m being honest, a decent human being.
But I don’t like being wrong.
No…that isn’t accurate. I don’t have much experience with being wrong. From the time I was a tiny girl, I’ve been able to read people. Give me ten minutes and I’ll guess where you’re from, which parent left you with a childhood wound, what you had for breakfast, and who you’re planning to cheat, swind
le, or kill today.
The fact I was wrong about Jeffrey is…strange.
Uncomfortable.
And it is downright infuriating that, until our run-in this past summer, I’d been so utterly off base about Nickolas’s capacity for subterfuge.
Against my will, my thoughts go back to that cool night in May…
Seven months earlier…
I’m going to kill Nickolas Von Bergen.
Kill him dead.
Knock him out with a bat, drag him into the Romanian woods, and bury his body in a shallow grave.
It’s the least he deserves for putting my family in danger.
“That’s incredible, mate,” Nick slurs from several meters away, where he’s doing a drunken dance by a firepit next to one of the most dangerous drug dealers/human traffickers/generally evil men in Europe. “I’d love to see your helicopter. We have one for the royal family, but it’s so…blue. You know? I hate blue, don’t you?”
“Blue is all right,” the man with the eerily gorgeous profile responds.
Stefano DeLuca is objectively even more handsome than Nickolas—with his sun-kissed skin, broad shoulders, sculpted muscles, and Greek statue-esque features—but looking at him gives me chills.
And not the good kind.
Even if I didn’t know he was responsible for the deaths of three journalists and dozens of rival mafia members, or that he’d kidnapped and sold hundreds of innocent women into slavery, some of them not much more than girls, he would still make my blood run cold.
It’s his eyes.
Flat. Empty.
I’ve met snakes with more warmth than Stefano.
There’s something missing in the man; some absent quality of humanity that sets off all my “danger, predator in the vicinity” instincts.
Just standing behind him in line for beer at the festival’s refreshment tent earlier was enough to lift the hairs at the back of my neck, making me grateful for my baggy T-shirt, cutoffs, and combat boots. In grungy clothes, with my hair pulled into a ponytail and an oversized sock cap pulled low on my forehead, I couldn’t be less Stefano’s type. He goes for leggy models with wasp-thin waists, pouty lips, huge boobs, and vacant expressions—not teenaged goth girls.
Without makeup, I look closer to fifteen than twenty-five, a hazard of being barely five feet tall and cursed with a babyface. But I don’t mind either as much as I once did. In fact, my appearance is one of the most powerful weapons in my arsenal.
Go ahead, bad guys.
Underestimate me. Overlook me.
Assume that runty blonde with the scrawny wrists couldn’t possibly be here to take you into custody for Union Ten, Europe’s most elite organization of undercover law enforcement agents.
I’ve been training to be a spy since I was accepted into Union Ten’s boarding school for future agents when I was thirteen. I’m more than capable of taking down a man twice my size and outsmarting your typical criminal mastermind, but I won’t complain when the bad guys make my job easier for me.
Tonight, however, was never going to be easy.
Putting a tracking device on Stefano’s cell without him realizing he’s been pick-pocketed (and then reverse pick-pocketed) was always going to be tricky. The man is perpetually on guard, no matter how many beers he’s had or how much cocaine he snorts up that patrician nose of his.
And even if he were to get a little soft around the edges, his bodyguards don’t drink while they’re on duty.
He has eyes—and guns—on him at all times.
My best bet is to wait for him to join the dancing in front of the stage and arrange to bump up against him, liberating his phone from his suit pants in the process. So far, he’s spent most of the night by the firepits at the edge of the woods, far from where a Romanian punk band has been rocking out for nearly two hours, leaving the thinning crowd thrashing in the grass, sweaty and breathless.
Time is running out—the festival’s programming ends at midnight—and Stefano shows no sign of leaving Nick’s side.
And until he does, I can’t risk approaching either of them.
There’s a chance Nick will recognize me and blow my cover. We haven’t spent much time in each other’s company since I nearly drowned him when we were children, but he’s seen pictures of me with my sisters.
And no—I hadn’t been trying to drown him, just to win a game of Lake Monster Wrestling. He was four, and I was five.
He was a rather adorable four-year-old, I confess. Mischievous and brave without being stupid.
Now…he’s stupid. Nick grew up to become an insipid party boy with a gambling problem, who’s in debt to the mob and kissing up to a murderer in order to maintain his high-rolling lifestyle. He’s getting in deeper with Stefano with every passing day, putting his entire family—and by extension, my family—at risk.
Stefano has a history of settling debts by demanding payment in illegal and usually dangerous favors. If the person refuses to play along, retribution is swift and cruel. One of their loved ones might have acid thrown in their face, as just one horrid example.
If Stefano’s goons throw acid on Andrew or Jeffrey, my sisters could be caught in the crossfire. And I swear, if either of my sisters’ beautiful, innocent faces is scarred for life because Nickolas Von Bergen refuses to grow up and get help for his various addictions, I’ll be tempted to do something drastic.
I would never act on my murder-y thoughts, of course—I’m one of the good guys—but I could arrange for Nick to be forcibly removed to a rehab center in Outer Mongolia. There, he can spend a year far from our families and the mob, getting clean while reading anonymous letters warning him that if he gets into trouble with casinos or dangerous men again, he’ll end up back in a tiny padded room at the edge of the world.
Possibly for keeps.
I make a mental note to talk to my handler, Nadia, about what it would take to make a prince disappear for a while.
When I tune back into the conversation between the two men, Nickolas is still nattering inanely about helicopters. “Have you ever jumped out of a chopper? My brother parachutes out of ours all the time, but seriously…I don’t see the appeal. I get into enough trouble on solid ground, right?” He laughs loudly—drunkenly—and takes another healthy swig of his gin and tonic.
Stefano casts a pointed look at one of the men lurking in the shadows beyond the ring of flickering firelight before saying, “I hear you. But I’m tired of solid ground. Let’s go for a ride. I’ll get you back to your hotel in half the time, and we can talk in private. I have a proposal I’d like to run by you.”
Instantly, I’m on high alert.
In addition to his other methods of debt collection, Stefano occasionally kidnaps people in order to recoup his investments—“Pay up, or Aunt Vicky loses a finger” style.
Nick’s family is obscenely wealthy. His eldest brother is the king of one of the most prosperous countries in Europe, his mother is a pediatric heart surgeon with her own small fortune, and his other brother is secretly making a killing in his spare time with various international investments.
Any one of them could afford a handsome ransom, and that’s not even considering his wealthy aunts, uncles, and cousins.
“All right, I’m game,” Nick says, swaying as he lifts his drink into the air. “Just let me finish. Hate to let a fourteen-euro cocktail go to waste.” He chortles again, his eyes sliding closed just long enough to miss the subtle signal Stefano flashes to his right-hand men, Tony and Thom.
Tony and Thom are stereotypical strong men with too much gel in their dark hair, too much gold jewelry adorning their thick fingers and necks, and baby beer bellies swelling above the waist of their too-tight jeans. But they are strong and ruthless and prepared to do what Stefano orders without hesitation.
And they’re both more than capable of overpowering Nick physically, with or without one of the weapons tucked into the back of their pants.
I have to get Nick out of here. Now.
Protecting a civilian in danger is more important than my mission. Union Ten will have another opportunity to bug Stefano’s phone. This could be the last chance to get Nickolas out of harm’s way before it’s too late.
Adrenaline pumping, I come up with a plan. It’s not a great one, but I glance down at my half-empty cup of ginger ale and decide to consider it half full.
Tony and Thom are on the move, easing up behind Nickolas. I dart in front of them with only seconds to spare.
Tripping over my own feet, I stumble, dumping my ginger ale on Nick’s crotch.
“Oh, fuck, that’s cold,” he hisses through his teeth.
I keep my head down, slurring my words as I cry in Romanian, “Oh no, I’m so sorry.”
“I think my balls just crawled into my lungs,” he says with an uncomfortable laugh as he reaches down to pull the soaked fabric away from his thigh.
“Sorry, I take too many mushrooms,” I continue in heavily accented English, tugging my hat lower on my forehead as I grab a fistful of Nick’s shirt. “Can you take me to medical tent? I can’t find. I am so messed up, man.”
“I’ll get someone to take her,” Stefano says from behind me, making the hair at the back of my neck prickle all over again.
I can’t let him or his people see my face. If he does, I’ll be out of the field for the rest of this case, and I really want a front-row seat when this man goes down. It always feels good to get the bad guys, but arrogant, entitled bad guys who assume they’ll never get caught are a special thrill. There’s nothing better than the stunned, confused, but ultimately haunted look that comes over a suspect’s face when they realize they’re caught and there’s no way out.
I need to see that look in Stefano’s pompous eyeballs.
I need it badly enough to do the unthinkable.
“But I want you to take me,” I mumble, reaching up to twine my arms around Nick’s neck. “You’re so pretty.”
