Bride By Royal Decree. Caitlin Crews

don’t want to look at that,” she told him. Because he was overwhelming and he didn’t make sense and he was too much. And she was being smart not to let him reel her into anything, the way she’d always had to be smart, because it was that or be a victim. But that didn’t explain the sudden, hollow sensation deep inside her. “I want you to go. Now.”

      “Look at the picture, please.”

      He didn’t sound as if he was really asking. He didn’t sound as if he ever asked, come to that. And she noticed he didn’t promise that he would leave her alone if she looked as ordered, either.

      So Maggy had no idea why she reached out and took the damned smartphone from him, making absolutely certain not to touch him. Or why the faint glint of approval in his stern gray gaze...did something to her. She swallowed hard and looked down at the smartphone in her hand, still warm from its close contact with his skin. Which should absolutely not have made her fight back a shudder.

      Maggy focused on the screen in her hand. And then froze.

      It was a picture of a woman.

      She was standing somewhere beautiful, all gleaming lights and old stone, and she was looking back over one bared shoulder with a wide smile. Her dark chestnut hair was swept back into some kind of complicated bun and she was wearing the sort of dress real people never wore, long and sleek and seemingly threaded through with diamonds to match the bright strands draped around her neck.

      If Maggy didn’t know better, she’d have said it was a picture of her.

      “What is this?” she whispered, aware as she did that her heart was pounding at her. That her stomach knotted so hard it hurt. That her head ached, hard and strange at her temples. “Who is this?”

      The man before her didn’t move a muscle. He didn’t lift one of his powerful fingers. He didn’t do anything, and yet there was something about the way he watched her then that took over the whole world.

      “That is Serena Santa Domini.” His voice was cool, and yet she was sure there was something like satisfaction in his voice, threaded in deep, like stone. “Better known as Her Majesty, the queen of Santa Domini, who died twenty years ago in a car crash in Montenegro.” His gray eyes flashed with something Maggy didn’t understand, dark and sure, but it hit her like a wallop all the same. “I believe she was your mother.”

      * * *

      Reza Argos, more widely known and always publicly addressed as His Royal Majesty, King and Supreme Ruler of the Constantines, was not a sentimental man.

      That had been his father’s downfall. It would not be his.

      But either way, there was no doubt that he was a king. That meant there was no room for the maudlin trap of sentiment, especially in a country like the Constantines that prided itself on its correctness with, it was true, a certain intensity that suggested a number of unpleasant undercurrents. Like all the whispers about his father’s longtime mistress, for example, that no one dared mention directly—especially not after the way his father had died. Not that anyone said suicide, either. It was too messy. It hinted too strongly at the darkness beneath the Constantines, and no one wanted that.

      It was all unpleasant history. Reza focused on the present. His trains ran on time. His people paid their taxes and his military zealously maintained his borders. He and his government operated transparently, without unnecessary drama, and in the greatest interests of his people to the best of his ability. He did not succumb to the blackmail of a calculating mistress and he certainly did not risk the whole country because of it. He was nothing like his father. More than that, the Constantines were nothing like their closest neighbor, the besieged Santa Domini, with its civil and economic crises these last thirty years.

      Unsentimental attention to detail on the part of its rulers was how such a small country had maintained its prosperity, independence, and neutrality for hundreds upon hundreds of years. Europe might rage and fall and rise again around them, but the Constantines stood, a firm guard against encroaching darkness and Santa Dominian refugee crises alike, and no matter how grim and worrying it had all been these last three decades.

      His father’s descent into cringe-inducing protestations of what the heart demanded—followed by what might well have become a constitutional crisis had it not been stopped before the blackmail had truly ripped apart the kingdom—did not count. Since very few people knew how bad it had all gotten outside the royal family and the most highly ranked ministers.

      Reza had held his tiny alpine country together since his ascension to the throne at the tender age of twenty-three following what had been widely reported as his father’s sudden heart attack, as the latest in a long line of monarchs from the House of Argos. The Constantines was a small country made up of two pristine valleys high in the European Alps. The valleys were connected by a vast, crystal blue lake, bristled with picturesque villages and plump, comfortable banking concerns, and were bordered on all sides by crisp snowcapped mountains and luxury ski resorts.

      The Constantinian people liked the kingdom as it was. Untouched. A legacy of a bygone era, yet with all the comforts of the present day. That their longtime ally and closest neighbor, Santa Domini, had suffered a violent military coup when Reza was a child, had lost its exiled king and most of its royal family when he was eighteen, and had strewn out refugees seeking escape from the harsh military government all this time made Constantinians...upset.

      Reza did not particularly care for the fact that his reign was often characterized as “rocky,” purely because he’d had to spend so much of it handling his neighbor’s messes and making up for his father’s adulterous yearnings, the blackmail that had nearly brought the kingdom to war, and the suicide he’d had no choice but to conceal from the public lest all the rest of it come out, too. He’d handled that necessary lie. He’d handled his furious, spiteful mother. He’d even handled his father’s awful mistress. It was unfortunate that no one outside his inner circle knew how much he’d handled. But things were looking up. Next door in Santa Domini, the usurper, General Estes, was dead. The rightful Santa Dominian king’s restoration to the throne had changed his country and calmed the whole region.

      If this woman in front of him was the lost, long presumed dead Princess Magdalena as he suspected she was, that changed everything else.

      Because Reza had been betrothed to the Santa Domini princess since the day of her birth. And while he prided himself on his ability to live without the mawkish sentiment that had brought down his father and led him straight into an unscrupulous woman’s hands, he suspected that what his people truly wanted was a convenient royal fairy tale with all the trappings. A grand royal wedding to remind them of their happy fantasies about what life in the Constantines was meant to be was just the ticket. It would generate revenue and interest. It would furthermore lead to the high approval ratings and general satisfaction Reza’s grandfather had enjoyed throughout his long reign. Contented subjects, after all, rarely plotted out revolutions.

      He opted not to share the happy news with his prospective bride just then.

      The woman before him shook slightly as she stared at the picture on his mobile. He’d expected joyful noises, at the very least, as he’d imagined anyone standing in a second-rate resort town undertaking menial labor might make upon learning she was, in all likelihood, meant for greater things than her current dire straits. Or a celebration of some kind, particularly given the circumstances under which he’d found her. On her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor like the lowest servant. Her hair like brittle straw around her bony shoulders, making her look even more pale and skinny than she already was. Wearing the sort of fabrics that looked as if they might set themselves alight if they rubbed together.

      Her mouth as foul and crude as the rest of her.

      This, then, was his long-lost queen. The fairy-tale creature he would use to beguile his people and secure his throne, all rough, red hands and that sulky, impertinent mouth. He supposed he would have to make the best of it.

      And if there was some part of him that was pleased that he could not possibly be in any danger from this creature—that she was about as likely to beguile him as