Highness.” She stopped in front of him with that ra-ra-hurra look that hardly left her face whenever she dealt with him. She seemed to think that if she smiled wide enough and pretended that what she was doing to him was normal—wonderful, even—somehow he could be tricked into agreeing with her.
“I don’t know how you got here. Never mind that.” He reconsidered and cut to the point. “You should leave,” he told her firmly. “I’m not playing your games today. I’ve made other plans.”
Since the top of her head only came up to his shoulders, she usually rose to the tips of her toes when she wanted to browbeat him into yet another one of her crazy plans. She was stretching up so hard at the moment that she looked like a ballet dancer. The wind whipped her long, reddish-brown hair around her slim face. Her eyes, the exact dusky blue of his first race car, narrowed as she dropped the smile, recognizing smartly that it wasn’t going to work today.
“You should face your responsibilities, Your Highness. Don’t you think all this endless evasion is childish?”
She had his gander up in thirty seconds flat. A new record. She knew she was annoying him, but she didn’t care. She had the Queen’s protection. She’d been given free reign, God help him.
“I’m childish?” He drew up an eyebrow slowly, regally, and regarded her with a chilly expression he’d learned early on in life from his mother. “You torture me for money. What does that make you?”
She dropped back on her heels and stuck her chin out, her eyes and lips narrowing. “To be honest, I’d torture you for free. If that makes you feel better.”
He was taken aback for a moment. He was used to more respect as a prince. Although not from her, admittedly.
“You know what I think?” she asked with a smirk, losing the last of her polite veneer.
He allowed a subtle sneer. “A better question is, mademoiselle, do I care?”
“I think you’re afraid that you couldn’t hold an intelligent woman’s attention over the long term. That’s why you engage only in nightlong, scandalous affairs with those twits.” Her tone turned to lecturing. “Your conduct is embarrassing the monarchy and the Queen. You were caught on tape in a compromising situation, for love’s sake.” She rolled her dusky blue eyes in a way that told him exactly what she thought of that.
Not that until now he’d been forced to guess. She had expressed her opinion a number of times since the unfortunate incident.
He tried to put this latest scandal out of his mind. No chance of that with her around. She was going to lecture him on his duties as a prince? His blood pressure inched up. He drew a long, slow breath.
“You know what I think?” he asked, and kept going, without giving her a chance to pipe up. “I think American kamikaze nuptial consultants should stay in their own country.”
He was pleased with himself for resisting the urge to raise his voice. He was not going to lose control because of her. He was a prince. He was certainly up to the challenge of ignoring a troublesome matchmaker. “Where are my brothers?”
He was supposed to be on the island with them, and only them, on a day hike. Miklos’s idea. Since the failed rebel attacks of the past two years, the six royal brothers hardly got to spend time together anymore. If he didn’t like Miklos’s and Benedek’s wives so much, he would have blamed it on them, but Princess Judi and Princess Rayne were too lovely to fault for anything. He couldn’t truly blame his brothers for not wanting to leave home, even if he never understood what had possessed them to rush into marriage.
Single life suited him just fine. Being a prince, he already had more expectations and regulations, more rules governing his every move than he cared to think about. Marriage would have been just another prison.
Which Milda refused to understand.
“Your brothers aren’t coming.” Her slim fingers worried the colorful bead bracelet on her left wrist.
Why couldn’t they just call, instead of sending a message with her, of all people, when—Lazlo froze, a terrible premonition holding him speechless for a moment before he could ask, “This is another one of your traps, isn’t it?”
So help him God—
“You’ll be going hiking with the Lady Lidia, the Lady Szilvia and the Lady Adel.” Her “this will be fun, you’ll see” smile returned.
He swore in a way that should have been beneath him as a prince. “My brothers helped you set me up?” A new low. Incomprehensible, really. The sense of betrayal was overwhelming.
And her guilty look confirmed everything.
His brothers probably thought it was a grand joke. “I’m going to murder them,” he muttered.
History was full of princes who killed their own brothers to get closer to the throne. He didn’t care about the throne. But he might be driven to murder by Milda Milas yet. Except, then centuries from now historians would speculate that maybe he’d been secretly in love with her, and the act had been motivated by jealousy or some such nonsense. That would be intolerable. She was already messing up his life; he wasn’t going to let her sully his legacy.
“How dare you?” He stepped toward her, ready to take her to task, but caught sight of a sizable pile of duffel bags farther up the beach. He’d thought them a pile of rocks earlier, with the sun in his eyes, but now that a small cloud blocked some of the brilliant rays, he could see that he’d been mistaken. “What is that?”
They couldn’t have needed all that equipment for one day. His own guards were in the process of unloading his speedboat, removing the two boxes that contained the food and drink he and his brothers would have needed until they returned to the palace this evening.
“A two-week hike?” she squeaked, cleared her throat, went back up on her tiptoes then said again, in a deeper tone of self-confidence she must have practiced in the mirror, “A two-week hike with the ladies.” Her damned smile was in full bloom.
He glanced around but didn’t see any desperate women ready to drag him to the altar. Excellent. He had plenty of time to run for the boat. “Have you lost your mind?”
She drew her slim shoulders up, looking like some sort of exotic bird taking up defensive position. Or getting ready to attack. He had the uncomfortable feeling that he was about to be pecked to death.
“The ladies went to see the Painted Rocks. They should be back shortly. You need to spend time with intelligent, self-sufficient women, and stay away from your empty-headed beauties for a few days,” she stated.
So she admitted that the three ladies in question weren’t beauties. Not that he could bring that up without proving himself to be shallow—of which she accused him endlessly.
The impatient growl that escaped him didn’t seem to alarm her in the least. “Once you calm down, Your Highness, you’ll see this was a good idea.” She didn’t back away. She never backed down from him, one of her many annoying qualities. “By tonight, I promise you’ll feel a lot better about all this.”
The only thing that would have made him feel better would have been tossing her into the sea. Sadly, being a prince, he’d been raised better than to threaten bodily harm to a woman. Not even a woman who was dead set on ruining his life.
She wasn’t going to quit until she saw him married. She was the type to see that the job got done. No matter what. In anyone else, he could have appreciated the drive. He could appreciate little in her. They’d been doing battle for months now.
A wave of weariness hit him. “Why are you doing this to me?”
Her gaze never wavered. “For one, as you pointed out, I get paid for it.”
“I could pay you more to go away.”
“I would never