by Penny Jordan
Nik was right. The state of his life currently—utter chaos with the Crown Council breathing down his neck for the announcement of his choice for the next Queen of Drakon, the questions the media was raising about his mental health, his frequent disappearances from Drakon in the last year, sometimes even his sexuality—would have usually had the effect of fire ants crawling all over his skin.
But he didn’t have any mental energy left beyond the hunt he’d been on for two years now. He was getting close, he knew it in his blood.
He settled down next to Mia. The smell of baby powder drifting from her was strangely calming. “How are you, Mia?”
Mia took his hands in hers. He tried not to flinch. Physical contact made him twitchy and now Mia knew it. But somewhere in the last few months, his sister-in-law and he had become strangely close.
“You didn’t come to see the twins, Andreas. After all the hullabaloo you raised about heirs for Drakon, I’m feeling neglected.”
He smiled. “I have just this hour returned to Drakon.”
“Which nicely segues to why we are all here. Andreas, what is going on?”
“You let her leave Tia and Alexio’s side to ask me this question?” Nik glared at him in response. Dark shadows bruised Mia’s eyes. “You look awful.”
“Stop posturing, Nik. You know he’s just trying to get a rise out of you.” She smiled and her eyes lit up with that same incandescent joy he’d seen in Nik’s of late. “I have two very good reasons for my ghoulish look, Your Highness,” she said, her gaze tracing the angles of his face. “You however do not.
“You look like hell,” she said with that forthrightness he’d come to expect from her, “and whether Nik and Gabriel will agree to put it like that or not, we’re all…very worried about you.”
He frowned, looked up and, with a strange knot in his gut, realized it was true. “It’s not necessary.”
“There’s talk from the Crown Council about asking you to step down. Your popularity level is at its lowest,” Nik said in a deceptively calm voice. “Some political pundits have dared say Father’s madness has already begun to manifest in you. You leave Drakon for days, not one of your aides knows your schedule, you refuse to see even Ellie and me…”
“That’s why you’re all worried?” Andreas asked with a laugh. “That Theos gave me his madness in addition to everything else?”
Eleni spoke up. “Of course not. But we do think you’ve been acting strange. Andreas, the House of Tharius is waiting for your word to release news of your engagement. The coronation is in two months and you—”
His phone pinged and every nerve in him went on high alert. He knew even before he switched on his phone’s screen what the news was going to be. His fingers shook when he swiped the screen.
Found the target. Sending location specs now.
His breath balled up in his chest, and he had to force himself to exhale.
Anticipation bubbled in his blood, coupled with savage satisfaction. “Let the House of Tharius know it’s off.”
The shock that spread through the huge room made the hairs on his neck rise. Nik and Eleni looked at him with such concern in their eyes that for the first time in months Andreas felt a little guilt. “I apologize for leaving you both in the lurch these past few months. I needed—”
“Thee mou, Andreas!” Nik burst out. “We don’t care that for the first time in thirty-six years, you took a few months for yourself.”
“Not the first time,” he said automatically. “I took a free year just when your health improved. Almost ten years ago.”
Nikandros frowned. “When Theos tried to make me his leashed dog?”
“A few months before that happened, yes.” When Andreas had, in a fit of madness, threatened Theo that he would walk out on Drakon if he didn’t give him some time off.
“Andreas.” Eleni reached him, her voice wavering. “You can’t be crowned King without a wife. That’s one of the oldest Drakonite laws. No member of the Crown Council will let you defy it. Are you…are you giving up the crown?”
Nikandros cursed so filthily that he had to laugh.
Andreas patted his sister’s hand awkwardly. “I’m not doing any such thing, Eleni. I will be crowned as scheduled.”
“You need a wife for that.” Nik again. Only Gabriel stood silent, staring at him from those steel-grey eyes. Gabriel, his brother-in-law, who had figured out the truth.
“Whatever you’re considering—” Eleni was close to tears now “—please tell us. Nik and I would never judge you for what—”
“I can’t marry Maria Tharius because I already have a wife. For two years, I’ve been trying to locate her.”
You are like me, Andreas, in every way. The same taste for power and control runs in your blood. Why do you think your little wife ran?
Those words had haunted him for two years now. But he didn’t give a damn.
He would willingly be a monster if that meant she was back in his life.
“You’re married? To whom? When? Why didn’t you ever…” Eleni faintly shook with the force of her questions, until Gabriel put his hands on her shoulders and absorbed her petite form into his.
“She was Father’s ward. I married her during that sabbatical year in a secret civil ceremony.”
“Father had a ward?” Another curse from Nikandros, for he knew that meant another life his father would have played games with.
“Your pity is wasted on her, Nik,” Andreas said stonily. “Turns out Father and she understood each other perfectly well.”
“Ariana Sakis.” Eleni pronounced the name that had become so much a part of his own makeup that Andreas couldn’t remember a day before her life tangled with his. “She was shy of eighteen by a few months.”
Utter shock was etched on their faces now.
He’d been twenty-six and he’d married a barely legal eighteen-year-old in a secret ceremony… He could have grown two horns and a tail and it would have been less shocking.
“Her parents…died in a car accident. There were rumors that they’d been arguing, that her mother had driven it into the tree on purpose,” Eleni explained to Nik. “Her father…was a military general, a close friend of Father.
“There was a lot of talk about what an abusive husband he was and Father immediately severed the connection between the House of Drakos and him.
“Only a handful of people knew he had her custody and he sent her off to…no one knew where. I don’t think she even set foot in the palace.”
“To a fishing village off the coast,” Andreas finished. “Having met Father a couple of times, she’d been more than willing to go.”
“That’s where you met her?” asked Nikandros.
Andreas nodded. “I…I demanded Father give me a year to do as I wanted, to research a book I wanted to write. He agreed, after a lot of ranting.
“Little did he know that I would end up at the same little village that summer.”
Crisp mountain air, blue ponds surrounded by lush woods, a remote cabin, a single coffee shop…and a girl with copper-colored hair and a wide, impish smile.
Andreas swayed as the past reached into him with a clawed hand. Those months in that village with Ariana had been the most glorious of his life.
Too good to last, he realized now with a bitterness that choked him.
“If you married her, how come none of us met her? We didn’t even know.”
“Father and I decided to wait for a more opportune time to announce that I had wed. For the three months of our marriage, she stayed in an apartment ten miles from the palace.”
“You’ve been looking for her…since Father’s decline began.” Eleni jerked her chin up. All the pieces were beginning to fall into place. “Where was she all these years, Andreas?”
“Father told me she died in a boating accident after I returned from that oil summit in the Middle East that year.”
“Instead?” Nik asked the question, tension filling his shoulders.
> “Instead, she took the ten million he offered, faked her death and disappeared under a new identity.”
“That’s…horrible.” Eleni, always loyal to her brothers, had formed her opinion. “How could she make you think she was dead?”
Mia frowned. “You’ve found this woman now, haven’t you?” Something almost like fear glittered in her tired gaze. “Andreas, what is it that you intend to do? Clearly, the woman has made her choice. All of Drakon’s eyes will be on her.”
It was an edict he’d heard since before he’d even hit puberty. All of the media’s eyes would be on him and the woman he chose, Theos had whispered continuously.
She must bring either incomparable wealth—Gabriel’s sister had met the first condition—or good breeding in her own blood—Maria Tharius had met both—or be a woman with powerful connections who would agree to become the perfectly ornamental Queen.
Ariana had been none of the above.
“You could divorce her.” Gabriel spoke for the first time.
“Drakonite law mandates the couple wait for eighteen months after they file for divorce,” Eleni supplied, frowning. “With the coronation in two months, he can’t file for a divorce now.”
Andreas smiled, uncaring what they all saw in his face. “Father, in his Machiavellian masterminding, assumed that her being officially dead was enough to terminate our marriage. But she’s alive. So, even if I wanted, I could not marry Maria Tharius now.
“Ariana will be the next Queen of Drakon.” The declaration fell from his mouth, resonated in the very air that filled the King’s Palace.
He found he liked the sound of it. An additional bonus was that his father would be rolling in his grave.
* * *
Ariana stared at the white stone building of the small, beautiful church in downtown Fort Collins and shivered from head to toe. The frigid October wind that stole through her flimsy wedding dress had nothing to do with it.
The past would not leave her alone today. Didn’t matter that it was over ten years since she had married Andreas Drakos, the Crown Prince of Drakon, in a little forgotten church in a backwater fishing village near the mountains.
Didn’t matter that in a few hours she was to marry Magnus.
A vein of utter misery ran through her day and night.
She was Anna to her friends, to her colleagues at the legal aid agency where she worked, and to the little community she belonged to amidst the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.
Anna was not an impulsive, reckless woman that self-destructed in the name of love. Anna was not a woman who gave in to the dangerous passion for a man who didn’t know how to love.
Instead Anna was supposed to be married this evening to a nice, understanding man. Her friends must be thinking she’d lost her mind. But she had needed to get away from the madness of it all. She’d barely eaten a morsel of food yesterday and nothing at the dinner their friends had arranged for her and Magnus.
Against every better instinct, she pulled her phone out of her coat jacket and compulsively opened a browser. The page was still open to the same article she’d been reading for the last month.
She perused it greedily, as if reading it for the hundredth time would somehow change the gist of it.
Crown Prince Andreas Drakos of Drakon was to announce his choice for his Queen, before his coronation as the King of Drakon, a tiny principality in the Mediterranean again making its mark in the financial world.
A woman who was regal and educated, a doyenne of charities, born to wealth and perfect bloodlines. A woman who would be soft and womanly, a perfect complement to his brooding, controlling masculinity.
She had known that Andreas would one day take another woman, a woman far more suitable than her, to be his wife, to be the Queen of Drakon. That he had waited this long at all, when she knew of his devotion to Drakon, was a shock in itself.
And yet, from the moment she’d seen the little article, her world had tilted on its axis.
Was Anna really any better than the impulsive hothead she had been then? Was there any other reason except that her heart had broken a little again when she’d seen news of Andreas’s coronation and it had prompted her to accept Magnus’s proposal?
Thee mou, was she willing to destroy Magnus’s life, too?
Whatever sun had been shining this morning had receded under dark clouds, the weather resonating her own dark thoughts. She had to break it off. Before she hurt Magnus, before…
The smooth swish of a finely tuned engine broke her focus.
She looked up and froze, wishing with every cell inside of her that she could truly freeze, become invisible, blend into the gray, leaf-bare trees around her. Could become one of the statues that littered the lovely town.
The pounding of her heart in her ears said she was far too alive.
For she recognized the little black-and-gold flag fluttering in the harsh wind on the hood of the European luxury car idling not two steps away. She knew the symbol of the golden dragon with fires spewing out of its wide jaws. She knew the man inside and his body and he knew hers, better than she did her own.
Legs quaking under her, she stumbled away from the curving stone wall that led to the steps of the church. Wrapped her arm around a tall tree for support.
Every primal instinct she possessed screamed at her to run, to flee. And yet not a single cell obeyed. Not a single muscle moved even as she heard the click of the car door, even as she saw polished black shoes step out of the car, even as the tall angular form straightened.
He’d found her.
Dear God, after ten years, he’d caught up to her. Just as she had always known he would, in the deep dark of the night when she couldn’t hold the memories at bay.
Crown Prince Andreas Drakos, soon to be King of Drakon, was here.
A long black coat fluttered around his ankles, wavy hair the color of a raven’s wing carelessly combed away from a high forehead. Power stamped across those high cheekbones, the patrician nose, the thin-lipped mouth. Arrogant entitlement and self-confidence dripped from him with every movement of his body.
Jet-black eyes, hard and flinty like glittering opals, eyes that reflected nothing back, eyes that had sometimes felt as if there was nothing behind them, swept over her shivering body and came to rest on her face. “Kalimera, Ariana.”
Their eyes collided and held, sending a tsunami of emotions racing through her body. God, those eyes…she had drowned in them once. She had reveled in making them glow with humor, in making them darken in passion, in trying to break through that opaque shield.
She pressed her bare hands against the rough bark of the tree, hoping to jerk some kind of self-preservation instinct into life, for some kind of rationality to master the sheer emotional assault she was under.
Hands tucked into the pockets of his trousers, clad in all black, he looked like a dark angel come to serve swift justice. “It does not seem like a good day to be getting married. Does it, pethi mou?”
So he knew.
Ariana licked her dry lips, swallowing away the knowledge that she’d been about to call it off. Her gut instinct had been right. “What…what are you doing here?”
“Here on this side of the pond, in Colorado, in this little wonderful town that you’ve been hiding in?” He didn’t move, nor did a muscle flicker in his face. In that deep, gravelly voice of his, he could have been inquiring after the bitter weather.
They could have been a couple of friends discussing trivialities. No anger or emotion fractured his cool expression. Only a faint thread of sarcasm bled through.
“Or here in front of this beautiful little church on this bleary afternoon where you’re waiting for the man you’re supposed to marry in a few hours? Should I answer the general or the specific?”
Ariana closed her eyes. Didn’t help one bit. His presence was a hum of power in the air, making something in her vibrate in tune. Dragging cold air deep into her lungs, she flicked her eyes open. Feeling was beginning to come bac
k into her muscles. And along with it memories and an unholy amount of panic.
How had she forgotten that the smoother Andreas’s voice got, the hotter his rage? The deeper the fracture in his self-control, the colder and calmer his actions? It was his shut-down mode, where neither reason nor begging would filter through. Fresh wind made her eyes water. It had to be the wind. “I don’t have your magic with words, Andreas.”
He inclined his head in a regal nod. “I am to be King soon. I thought now would be a wise time to take care of the little business between us. After all, you ran out on me without a word, and who knows when you will decide you want to come back to me?”
Shivers raced down her spine. “Go back to your precious Drakon.” She couldn’t help the bitterness in her voice, even as she cautioned herself against it. “You have nothing to worry about with me. You and I—” her voice caught, and still, nothing changed in his expression “—were an episode from a different life. The media will never catch hold of our little story, neither will I claim even an acquaintance.
“Ariana Sakis, for all intents and purposes, is dead.”
She glanced up and her breath seized in her lungs.
Suddenly, he was there in front of her, blocking everything else from her vision. Blocking the entire world from her. Sandalwood, flared by his body’s heat, taunted her nostrils. Filled her with sensations and memories. Such an interestingly warm scent for a man whose blood was decidedly cold. But then his passion had been just as contrasting to the ruthless lack of his heart.
“Ariana Drakos,” he corrected with the faintest trace of warning. “Do not forget you belong to me.”
Nothing so tacky as a raised voice or a teetering temper from the House of Drakos.
“You might be King of your bloody palace, Andreas—” panic rushed reckless words to her mouth “—but not of me. Magnus will be here any minute and I won’t—”
“Your fiancé has been made aware of the situation and is not coming.”
So polite even as he stood there, playing havoc with her life. So infuriatingly calm. Her hands itched to muss up that perfectly placid expression of his. The devil in her burned to unsettle him as he did her. That urge was dangerous. Just being near Andreas was like throwing herself off a cliff—exhilarating and terrifying. And she had stopped doing that to herself a long time ago.
