His Drakon Runaway Bride. Tara Pammi

quiet. Am I getting close, Andreas?”

      He smiled then—a jagged mockery that made her chest ache. “You know what I find truly hard to believe in this new, peachy life you’ve made for yourself?”

      “What?” She snarled the question at him.

      “Am I to believe that you have found your true, deep purpose in your scattered life finally? That you truly devote yourself tirelessly to those women and their plight?”

      If there was a moment that Ariana truly wanted to sink her nails into that perfect, arrogant, condescending face and scratch it, it was then. Ten years of striving to make something of herself, to give meaning to what she’d lost, to make a meaningful path for herself, and his careless disdain crushed it all.

      And he knew it. He was all but challenging her to launch herself at him again, to go back to that lowest denominator of herself she’d once thrived on.

      She would attack him and he would subdue her...and it would lead to only one conclusion. The knowledge suffused the very air around them with a dense heat.

      Every time they had fought in those horrible three months of their marriage, they’d ended up in bed. Or against the wall. Or on the chaise longue with the Crown Prince on his knees, with his arrogant head between her thighs.

      The memory shimmered like a bright glitter in his coal-black eyes.

      With the sheer will that had helped her survive through the darkest night of her life, Ari looked away. Air rushed into her lungs, clearing the haze.

      Her biggest defense against Andreas was to show leaving him hadn’t been a whim. That she wasn’t a car crash in the making anymore. That she had come into her own strength these last ten years. That she’d proactively made something of her life.

      “I care about my clients, about their privacy, about not turning everything Magnus and I worked for into a lie. So, yes, you win my silence. But nothing else.”

      “How refreshing that you’re capable of loyalty, even if it’s toward another man, pethi mou. I told him, soon enough you’d have found a reason to run out on him. That your precious freedom would have come calling.

      “Is it not your pattern?”

      Ariana flinched, the softly delivered statement even more painful for she’d been about to do exactly the same thing to Magnus. Not for some kind of femme fatale reason but because she’d realized Magnus deserved much better than her.

      “I didn’t think you of all people would be crass enough to typecast me as some kind of vacant-headed, freewheeling slut. If for no other reason than that it would taint your own pristine image, your own association with me.”

      “What does that mean?”

      “I was eighteen, Andreas. I... I was bowled over by you. I threw myself at you. I was...messed up after my parents’ deaths, and you were a high unlike anything I’d ever known.

      “You were—you are unlike any other man I’ve ever known.

      “Jesus, did you know what your attention, your reluctant interest, meant to me? You...who didn’t show interest in princesses, and models and CEOs.

      “You looked at me. Me—messed-up, frightened, guilty Ariana.

      “You married me knowing who and what I was. So, if we have to call out someone for the...twisted mess that was our marriage, it’s you.”

      “Was that the justification when you let me think you had died in a horrible drowning accident,” he bit out and she flinched. “Maybe I will let you go, Ariana. Maybe one of these days I will find that little bit of decency within myself again. Maybe you can go back to being Anna Harris and the savior of those women in your little town again.”

      And in those statements of his, Ariana saw his shredded control for what it was. Saw his loathing that she was still an obsession with him. He despised himself, and her, because he couldn’t give her up.

      Any hopes she had of convincing him perished in that moment. After all, she did know him better than anyone.

      “So this is about revenge?”

      “Call it whatever the hell you want to.” His gaze tracked her face and her torn clothes. He fisted his hand so tight by his side that the knuckles were white.

      For the first time that day, Ariana realized how tremendous his self-control was.

      “You need food and rest. Do not force me to manhandle you into that, too. We both know whether it will be pleasure or punishment.”

      Ariana fell onto the bed with a soft thud, the recrimination in his eyes burning through her like acid. Her skin still prickling, for the first time since she’d known him, she was grateful for his iron-clad self-control.

      Because, even after all these years, she had none when it came to resisting the Crown Prince of Drakon.

       CHAPTER THREE

      “MRS. DRAKOS? YOUR HIGHNESS?”

      For the second time in a few hours, Ariana jerked upright so suddenly that her neck gave a painful twinge. She looked at the stewardess patiently waiting for her to wake up.

      So the cat was out of the bag.

      Instead of the panic she braced herself for, all she felt was a...quiet resignation. Not the give-up-and-become-his-wife kind. But the guilty-as-hell kind.

      Whatever he had done to her, however much she had despised him at the end of their marriage, it was clear that she had miscalculated the effect of her supposed death on Andreas. On hearing of his swift engagement to a real estate mogul’s sister, her own guilt had been alleviated.

      She didn’t belong in the Crown Prince’s world and that he’d replaced her so fast had been proof enough.

      Of course, that miscalculation had been aided by his father.

      If Andreas had grieved her loss, who knew how Theos had twisted that to his advantage?

      King Theos, she had realized within a week of meeting her guardian as her father-in-law, had possessed an unhealthy hold on his heir. He’d seen her as nothing but a weakness to eliminate from his son’s life.

      What had been painful was from the moment he had presented her to King Theos, even Andreas had begun to see her as that—a weakness to be hidden away.

      The stewardess’s eyes traveled over Ari’s hair, which could rival the Amazon forest for its wildness right now, to the torn dress she had fallen asleep in.

      Ari cringed. She stood up from the bed, and pushed the dress off her shoulders and hips.

      Ill-concealed curiosity scampered across the woman’s face. “I will take care of the dress, Your Highness. Have it mended. I’m sure you’d want to—”

      “No, that’s not necessary,” Ari replied, pulling the slip off her shoulders. Her strapless bra stuck to the underside of her breasts uncomfortably, thanks to her habit of smothering herself under the covers. She stepped out of the slip seconds before the woman took it, almost dislodging Ari off her feet.

      “Have it burned,” a soft voice commanded from the entrance.

      The need to cover herself was instinctive, self-preservation at its primal. Shaking, Ariana covered her midriff with her arms.

      The stewardess had that look again, switching between her and Andreas, as if she could figure out the secret as to how this average-looking, falling-apart-at-the-seams waif had snared the most powerful, gorgeous man in Drakon.

      It was a question the whole world was going to ask this time, not just King Theos, if Andreas had his way.

      His gaze dipped past Ari’s face this time—as if he’d given himself permission to look, to linger—moved to the pulse