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.