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Bride By Royal Decree
CAITLIN CREWS
His lost princess bride!King Reza abandoned the search for his childhood betrothed, Princess Magdalena, years ago. Until the shocking appearance of a photograph of the elusive princess reignites the legend that gripped his nation. Now Reza must return to the hunt and claim his Queen!Waitress Maggy’s family history is a mystery, and even though she often dreamed of Prince Charming, he was never as devastatingly handsome as Reza! Fiercely independent, she won’t accept her birthright on any terms but her own, so if Reza can’t use legal bindings, he’ll use sensual ones that Maggy will be helpless to resist!Conveniently wedded, passionately bedded!
His lost princess bride!
King Reza abandoned the search for his childhood betrothed, Princess Magdalena, years ago. Until the shocking appearance of a photograph of the elusive princess reignites the legend that gripped his nation. Now Reza must return to the hunt and claim his queen!
Waitress Maggy’s family history is a mystery, and even though she often dreamed of Prince Charming, he was never as devastatingly handsome as Reza! Fiercely independent, she won’t accept her birthright on any terms but her own, so if Reza can’t use legal bindings, he’ll use sensual ones that Maggy will be helpless to resist!
“I’ll return to my original question,” Maggy said. Not politely. “Who the hell are you, and why do you care if some barista in a photograph looks like an old, dead queen?”
Reza drew himself up to his full height. He looked down at her with all the authority and consequence that had been pounded into every inch of him all his life—even when his own father had failed to live up to the crown he now wore himself.
“I am Leopoldo Maximillian Otto, King of the Constantines,” he informed her. “But you may call me by my private family nickname, Reza.”
She let out a sharp, hard sound that was not quite a laugh and thrust his mobile back at him. “I don’t want to call you anything.”
“That will be awkward, then.”
Reza took possession of his mobile, studying the way she deliberately kept her fingers from so much as brushing his, as if he was poisonous. He was a king, not a snake. The way this creature dared to treat him—him—with such disrespect baffled him, but did nothing to assuage that damnable need that still worked inside him. She confounded him, and he didn’t like it.
But that didn’t change the facts. Much less what would be gained by presenting his people with the lost Santa Domini princess as his bride.
He met her gaze then. And held it. “Because one way or another, you are to be my wife.”
Wedlocked! (#ulink_f6100f61-6c89-538c-a050-c96212f62eae)
Conveniently wedded, passionately bedded!
Whether there’s a debt to be paid, a will to be obeyed or a business to be saved... she’s got no choice but to say, “I do!”
But these billionaire bridegrooms have got another think coming if they think marriage will be that easy...
Soon their convenient brides become the object of an inconvenient desire!
Find out what happens after the vows in
The Billionaire’s Defiant Acquisition
by Sharon Kendrick
One Night to Wedding Vows
by Kim Lawrence
Wedded, Bedded, Betrayed
by Michelle Smart
Expecting a Royal Scandal
by Caitlin Crews
Trapped by Vialli’s Vows
by Chantelle Shaw
Baby of His Revenge
by Jennie Lucas
A Diamond for Del Rio’s Housekeeper
by Susan Stephens
Bound by His Desert Diamond
by Andie Brock
Look out for more Wedlocked! stories coming soon!
Bride by Royal Decree
Caitlin Crews
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–nominated author CAITLIN CREWS loves writing romance. She teaches her favorite romance novels in creative writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Program, where she finally gets to utilise the MA and PhD in English Literature she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in California, with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com (http://caitlincrews.com).
Books by Caitlin Crews
Mills & Boon Modern Romance
Castelli’s Virgin Widow
At the Count’s Bidding
Undone by the Sultan’s Touch
Not Just the Boss’s Plaything
One Night With Consequences
The Guardian’s Virgin Ward
The Billionaire’s Legacy
The Return of the Di Sione Wife
Wedlocked!
Expecting a Royal Scandal
Secret Heirs of Billionaires
Unwrapping the Castelli Secret
Scandalous Sheikh Brides
Protecting the Desert Heir
Traded to the Desert Sheikh
Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com (http://www.Harlequin.com/) for more titles.
To anyone, like me, who dreamed they were really a princess...
Contents
Cover (#u55bdc413-d87d-50af-bff1-3d88a36ee605)
Back Cover Text (#u50562ebb-93b8-5d9f-abef-125a3d80d3d6)
Introduction (#u46ee63cf-d45c-5e46-ad9a-35d9522a35a0)
Wedlocked (#ulink_c272b9c7-d855-563f-8b75-005ed60bbcc6)
Title Page (#ub938cda1-8b9e-52f7-a57a-ec4a18405f63)
About the Author (#ueafd0fbb-cad9-57e9-a9b0-eecf7227b484)
Dedication (#ua0b05568-8fa5-5251-975a-4e72bb42722a)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_537b64cf-6623-5072-86e4-2d1b443309d7)
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_07ed7672-ec34-5e0f-ace1-010421f0bee5)
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_d0a5950a-5269-5fb5-abab-36025f003c0c)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_987a7616-9219-5985-9dd7-593bfbcc3d24)
THERE WERE FEW things Maggy Strafford liked less than scrubbing the coffee shop floor—or really any floor, for that matter. Dental surgery. The stomach flu. Any and all memories of her unfortunate childhood in foster care. Still, there she was on her hands and knees, dutifully attacking an unidentifiable sticky patch on the hardwood floors of The Coffee Queen in the tiny, tourist-rich hamlet of Deanville, Vermont, just down the road from one of the state’s most famous resorts. Because it was her job as the most recently hired barista on this, the first night the owners had trusted her enough to close up shop.
And for once in the bumpy carnival ride that had been her life since she’d been found by the side of the road as a feral child with no memory of where she’d come from, Maggy was determined to keep her job. Even if it involved scrubbing unidentified sticky things off the floor of a coffee shop in almost the middle of nowhere, Vermont.
She scowled when the bell on the door rang, announcing the arrival of one more coffee-obsessed tourist who couldn’t, apparently, read the closed sign she’d flipped over on the glass. Or spare a glance inside to see all the chairs flipped up on the tables, clearly indicating the shop was closed for business. Or notice Maggy herself, there on her hands and knees on the floor, obviously not manning the espresso machine.
“We’re closed,” she called out as a blast of chilly winter air rushed in, swirling around her and making her wish she hadn’t stripped off her thick sweater to do the end of day wipe down. She did not say, which you can see right there on the door, assuming you can read, because that kind of knee-jerk, snotty response was the Old Maggy. New Maggy was kinder and gentler. And had thus been steadily and gainfully employed for the past five months.
With that in mind, she summoned a smile as she tossed her sponge back into her bucket with enough force to make the brown water slosh alarmingly. She hated smiling on command. She wasn’t exactly made for customer service and never had been, as her spotty employment record attested. But New Maggy knew better than to share her real feelings with anyone, especially not the customers, and who cared how rich and correspondingly annoying they were. Her real and inevitably prickly feelings were her personal business and best kept hidden away if she wanted to keep her current, surprisingly okay, situation. Which she did. So she aimed all her teeth at the door when she looked up.
And her half-assed smile toppled straight off her face.
Two heavily muscled and stern-faced men in dark suits that strained over their physiques strode inside, muttering into earpieces in a language that was definitely not English. They paid Maggy no mind whatsoever as she gaped up at them, moving swiftly past her where she knelt on the floor with a certain brisk efficiency that made her stomach flip over. In warning and a little bit of panic. She knew she needed to jump up and deal with them somehow, which her ingrained fight-or-flight monitor suggested meant running the hell away rather than confronting either one of them.
She braced herself to do just that.
But then another man walked in, flanked by two more muscle-bound goons with earpieces and cold, grim eyes. And giant, ugly handguns on their hips. Guns. The obvious security detail peeled off, each one taking a position at one of the front windows, all dark suits, hard gazes, and grim, bulging arms.
The man in the center took another step or two inside the coffee shop and then simply stood there, gazing down at Maggy as if he’d anointed himself the new messiah.
Maggy was no particular fan of arrogant men. Or men at all, if she was honest, given the less than stellar examples she’d encountered over the years, particularly in the foster care system. But she found her usual defense mechanisms—those being her smart mouth and her willingness to wield it first and ask questions later—seemed to have fled her completely.
Because the man standing there above her as if there was a sound track playing the “Hallelujah Chorus” as he did so was...something else.
He stood as if it was commonplace for him to find all sorts of people on their knees before him. As if, in fact, he was faintly bored that there was one more person at his feet. She should have loathed him on sight.
Instead, Maggy’s heart slammed against her ribs—and didn’t stop. She told herself he was nothing special. Just another man, and an evidently pompous one at that. Obviously, ridiculously, eye-rollingly wealthy like so many of the people who descended on this little après ski town in the winters. They were a dime a dozen here, leaping in and out of their gleaming four-wheel-drive monstrosities and blinding people with their lazy, too-white smiles. They draped themselves over all the best tables in the town’s restaurants, jacked up the prices in all the village’s boutiques with their willingness to purchase T-shirts for upwards of a hundred dollars, and cluttered up the coffee shops with their paragraph-long orders of joyless fake drinks.
This guy is nothing special at all, Maggy assured herself, still gazing up at him as if this was a church and she’d taken to her knees to do a few decades of a very specific sort of rich man rosary on a dark winter evening. This guy is interchangeable with all the rest out there.
But that was a lie.
He was extraordinary.
Something seemed to hum from him, some intense power or perhaps that sheer certainty that seemed stamped into his very bones. It was more than simple arrogance. It was more than the tanned faces, white teeth, and high-end vehicles idling by the curb that the others in this town assumed made them demigods. It made it hard to look away from him, as if he claimed all the light in the shop—in the town, in the whole of New England—for himself. And he wasn’t exactly hard to look at, she was forced to concede. He wore dark trousers and boots that Maggy could tell at a glance cost more than the fancy SUVs the usual tony ski bums drove. He wore one of those expensively flattering winter coats that exuded upper-class elegance and deep masculinity at once. He was tall, and not just because she was still kneeling. He had wide shoulders and the kind of rangy, offhandedly athletic physique that suggested he spent a lot of very hard, very physical time catering to his own strength and agility—a notion that made her stomach flip again, and this time, definitely not in warning.
But it was his face that was the real problem.
He was not a blandly attractive, run of the mill rich guy, like all the rest packed into Deanville at this time of year in their designer ski togs and indistinguishable store-bought tans. Not this man. His face was too relentlessly and uncompromisingly masculine. Too harshly male. He had a nose like an old coin and a hard, stern, unsmiling mouth that made a shocking, impossible heat uncurl, low and insistent, deep in Maggy’s belly. If she was honest, lower than that. His gaze was the color of a hard rain and much too shrewd besides. It seemed to kick up some kind of electricity as he aimed it at her, as arrogant and aloof as it was ruthless.
