The Prince's Nine-Month Scandal. Caitlin Crews

which he’d have a hell of a time explaining to her father, the humorless King Geoffrey of Murin.

      But Valentina only smiled and a gleam he’d never seen before kindled in her eyes, which he supposed must always have been that remarkable shade of green. How had he never noticed them before?

      “Well, it really depends on the kind of dental surgery, don’t you think?” she asked.

      Rodolfo couldn’t have been more surprised if the quietly officious creature had tossed off her clothes and started dancing on the table—well, there was no need to exaggerate. He’d have summoned the palace doctors if the princess had done anything of the kind. After appreciating the show for a moment or two, of course, because he was a man, not a statue. But the fact she appeared to be teasing him was astounding, nonetheless.

      “A root canal, at the very least,” he offered.

      “With or without anesthesia?”

      “If it was with anesthesia you’d sleep right through it,” Rodolfo pointed out. “Hardly any suffering at all.”

      “Everyone knows there’s no point doing one’s duty unless one can brag forever about the amount of suffering required to survive the task,” the princess said, moving farther into the room. She stopped and rested her hand on the high, brocaded back of a chair that had likely cradled the posteriors of kings dating back to the ninth century, and all Rodolfo could think was that he wanted her to keep going. To keep walking toward him. To put herself within reach so he could—

      Calm down, he ordered himself. Now. So sternly he sounded like his father in his own head.

      “You are describing martyrdom,” he pointed out.

      Valentina shot him a smile. “Is there a difference?”

      Rodolfo stood still because he didn’t quite know what he might do if he moved. He watched this woman he’d written off months ago as if he’d never seen her before. There was something in the way she walked this afternoon that tugged at him. There was a new roll to her hips, perhaps. Something he’d almost call a swagger, assuming a princess of her spotless background and perfect genes was capable of anything so basic and enticing. Still, he couldn’t look away as she rounded the settee he’d abandoned and settled herself in its center with a certain delicacy that was at odds with the way she’d moved through the old, spectacularly royal room. Almost as if she was more uncertain than she looked...but that made as little sense as the rest.

      “I was reading about you on the plane back from London today,” she told him, surprising him all over again.

      “And here I thought we were maintaining the polite fiction that you did not sully your royal eyes with the squalid tabloids.”

      “Ordinarily I would not, of course,” she replied, and then her mouth curved. Rodolfo was captivated. And somewhat horrified at that fact. But still captivated, all the same. “It is beneath me, obviously.”

      He sketched a bow that would have made his grandfather proud. “Obviously.”

      “I am a princess, not a desperate shopgirl who wants nothing more than to escape her dreary life, and must imagine herself into fantastical stories and half-truths presented as gospel.”

      “Quite so.”

      “But I must ask you a question.” And on that she smiled again, that same serene curve of her lips that had about put him to sleep before. That was not the effect it had on him today. By a long shot.

      “You can ask me anything, princess,” Rodolfo heard himself say.

      In a lazy, smoky sort of tone he’d never used in her presence before. Because this was the princess he was going to marry, not one of the enterprising women who flung themselves at him everywhere he went, looking for a taste of Europe’s favorite daredevil prince.

      There was no denying it. Suddenly, out of nowhere, he wanted his future wife.

      Desperately.

      As if she could tell—as if she’d somehow become the sort of woman who could read a man’s desire and use it against him, when he’d have sworn she was anything but—Valentina’s smile deepened.

      She tilted her head to one side. “It’s about your shocking double standard,” she said sweetly. “If you can cat your way through all of Europe, why can’t I?”

      Something black and wild and wholly unfamiliar surged in him then, making Rodolfo’s hands curl into fists and his entire body go tense, taut.

      Then he really shocked the hell out of himself.

      “Because you can’t,” he all but snarled, and there was no pretending that wasn’t exactly what he was doing. Snarling. No matter how unlikely. “Like it or not, princess, you are mine.”