Bride By Royal Decree. Caitlin Crews

of his soften at all. And yet there was that silver gleam in his gaze that kicked at her anyway and was worse, somehow, than the gloating of a lesser man. Or it hit her harder, anyway.

      He merely inclined his head. Then he named the fanciest resort within a hundred-mile radius, waiting until she nodded.

      “Yes,” she bit out, letting her sharpness take over her tone because it was much, much better than what she was afraid hid beneath it. “I know where it is.”

      “I will expect you in one hour,” he told her.

      Expect away, idiot, she thought darkly.

      But she made herself smile. “Sure thing.”

      “And if you do not appear,” Reza said quietly, because apparently he really could read her like a very simple book, “I will come and find you. I know where you live. I know where you work. I know the car you drive, if, indeed, that deathtrap can rightly be called a car at all. I have an entire security force at my beck and call, and as the sovereign of another nation, even one who is flying under the radar as I am here, I am granted vast diplomatic immunity to do as I please. I would suggest you consider these things carefully before you imagine you can plot your way out of this.”

      And he turned on his heel before she could come up with a response to that. Which was good, because she didn’t have one. His men leapt to serve him, flanking him and opening the door for him, then swept him back out into the night.

      The cold air rushed in again. The door slapped shut behind him, the echo of the bell still in the air.

      Maggy was breathing too hard. Too loud. And she couldn’t seem to operate her limbs.

      So she made herself move. She sank back down to her knees and she scrubbed that damned sticky area like her life depended on it. And only when she was finished, only when she’d mopped the rest of the floor and dealt with her bucket in the utility room in the back, did she pull out her own phone again.

      She looked at it for a long moment. Maybe too long.

      Then she pretended she was doing something, anything else as she opened up her browser and typed in king of the Constantines...

      And there he was. Splashed all over the internet. On the covers of reputed newspapers and all over their inside pages. In image after image. She saw articles about his childhood. His education at Cambridge. His coronation following his father’s sudden heart attack and the war he’d wrenched his country back from in the months that followed. That same harsh face. That same arrogant brow. That same imperial hand waving here, there, everywhere as he gave orders and addresses and spoke of this law and that moral imperative and the role of the monarchy in the modern world.

      It was him. Reza was exactly who he’d said he was.

      Which meant that there was a very high probability that she was, too.

      And this time, when Maggy went back down on her knees on the floor, it wasn’t because she was in a hurry to get back to cleaning it.

      It was because for the first time in her entire life, when she’d learned how to be tougher than tough no matter what, her knees failed to hold her.