Awakened on her royal we.., p.1
Awakened on Her Royal Wedding Night, page 1
“Rather than put Nazarine through countless pointless battles of succession, I must marry immediately and do my best to procreate before my brother does.”
Felipe looked straight at her. Into her. She had the sensation that her heart was falling down a flight of stairs and he was watching it happen.
“I don’t understand,” she said carefully.
“Of course you do. You know exactly where I’m headed because you’re very smart, Claudine. It’s one of the things that attracts me to you.”
“No. It— I— No.” Her ears were ringing. “You can’t be serious, Felipe. No.”
“I am very serious, Claudine. I want you to marry me.”
Canadian Dani Collins knew in high school that she wanted to write romance for a living. Twenty-five years later, after marrying her high school sweetheart, having two kids with him, working at several generic office jobs and submitting countless manuscripts, she got The Call. Her first Harlequin novel won the Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best First in Series from RT Book Reviews. She now works in her own office, writing romance.
Books by Dani Collins
Harlequin Presents
One Snowbound New Year’s Night
Innocent in Her Enemy’s Bed
Four Weddings and a Baby
Cinderella’s Secret Baby
Wedding Night with the Wrong Billionaire
A Convenient Ring to Claim Her
A Baby to Make Her His Bride
Jet-Set Billionaires
Cinderella for the Miami Playboy
The Secret Sisters
Married for One Reason Only
Manhattan’s Most Scandalous Reunion
Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles.
Dani Collins
Awakened on Her Royal Wedding Night
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
EPILOGUE
EXCERPT FROM UNVEILED AS THE ITALIAN’S BRIDE BY CATHY WILLIAMS
CHAPTER ONE
“YOU’LL DIE OUT THERE!” the Prince shouted from his speedboat. “I’m not coming after you!”
Good, Claudine Bergqvist thought, even though the sea was cold enough that her muscles were already cramping. The water was dark and pulled at the maxi-dress she wore. The jersey silk tangled against her legs as she tried to frog-kick. Waves dipped and rolled, making it hard to catch her breath without taking in a mouthful of water.
She was swimming a breaststroke so she could keep her vision fixated on the island ahead of her, but even though she was a strong swimmer, that black rise of land with only a few twinkling lights upon it was still terrifyingly far away. Barbed hooks of panic were trying to take hold in her while her imagination ran away with her. What else lurked in these waters besides her and that horrible man who had lured her onto his boat?
She heard the engine start up and stopped to tread water, swiveling to see if he was coming after her.
No. The running lights turned away from her. The aerodynamic speedboat shot away in a burst of its engine, spewing froth behind it.
She couldn’t see the yacht that had birthed it, or the super yacht where she had started her evening. This whole night had been a nesting doll of ever more perilous situations, not that she had seen it at the time.
“Come to a big party on a big boat. Why don’t some of you come to a smaller party on my smaller yacht? Actually, let’s take my runabout for a spin, just you and me.”
Now it was just him, the Prince, heading back to Stella Vista, the biggest island in the chain that made up the Kingdom of Nazarine. And her, Claudine. Alone in the sea.
Her heart thumped erratically. Her abdomen tightened with so much anxiety her lungs could barely draw a breath. The wake from the departing speedboat rippled toward her, picking her up and dropping her into the trough so she lost sight of the boat.
When she spun in the water, the small island she’d seen a moment ago was gone.
She turned and turned.
Do not panic.
There it was. She kept her gaze pinned to it while she fought the clinging material of her dress. She pulled her arms from its straps before she pushed the sheath off her waist and hips, freeing herself of the encumbrance.
I can do this.
She had done many things that were difficult, including becoming the Swedish contestant in the Miss Pangea pageant despite living in America for the last fifteen years.
She had also once won a bronze medal for her breaststroke. She’d been eleven and it had been a medley relay. Her portion had only been one hundred meters, but her team had made it to the podium.
Mom needs me alive, she reminded herself as she resumed her kick, stroke, breathe.
The thought of her mother only made her more anxious, though. Ann-Marie Bergqvist hadn’t wanted Claudine to do this pageant. Not any pageant. They were archaic and sexist, she’d insisted.
They were, Claudine agreed, but she’d stumbled into the first one on a lark with friends, then kept winning. At first, she had competed for a scholarship and some trendy clothes. Then luggage and a vacation in the Caribbean. She had been flattered by the modest fame and the interviews with TV personalities, but when her mother’s well-managed multiple sclerosis suddenly took a sharp turn into more serious symptoms, Claudine had sold the car she’d won along with the appliances.
The cash had bought her mother some time off work and a number of specialist appointments, but her disease was not one that could be cured, only managed. Each time Claudine leveled up and won a bigger pageant, she was able to afford better care for her mother.
The global Miss Pangea pageant was one of the most lucrative. It had brought her to Nazarine, near the ankle of Italy’s boot, and if she was chosen to appear in their notoriously sexy swimsuit calendar, she would receive a very generous compensation. If she made the cover, she would earn even more. In fact, she was the favorite to win the whole contest.
If she made it to shore.
Was that why the Prince had targeted her? Because she was odds on to win?
She tried not to think of it. She was already tired. The exertion of swimming was not the problem. The force of the sea was taking a toll. This was no placid pool where she could skim along. She was being shoved from all angles, catching waves up the nose and swallowing salt water.
What if she didn’t survive? What if she didn’t make the photo shoot tomorrow? What if she didn’t win any prize money and her mother had to let her disease run its course?
What if she drowned and never saw her mother again?
Don’t think of it.
Kick, stroke, breathe. Kick, stroke, breathe.
* * *
“Intruder, Your Highness.” Prince Felipe’s guard brought him a tablet as Felipe was sitting down to a late dinner.
Francois.
His mind always leaped to his twin when something unpredictable and less than desirable happened. Cold hatred threatened to engulf him, but Felipe habitually banked those grim, unhelpful emotions. He focused on exactly what was happening in the moment.
“How many?” He took the tablet.
“Just the one, sir.” The guard tapped to show the security footage in both night vision and infrared. A swimmer was approaching the western side of the island.
Situated furthest from the rest of the islands in the Nazarine archipelago, Sentinella had been named hundreds of years ago for the protective armies that had been stationed here. Its lofty cliffs allowed unimpeded surveillance of the surrounding waters and its lack of low, sandy beaches made it difficult to infiltrate.
In fact, any craft attempting to enter that particular lagoon took a beating through a toilet bowl of currents that punched every which way. Once inside, the shallow cove was littered with sharp rocks that lurked below the surface. They shipwrecked vessels and were guaranteed to shred a knee if you didn’t know where they were. There was no reward once you reached the beach at the base of the cliffs. It was mostly rocks and coarse sand.
Like its occupant, Sentinella was formidable and inhospitable to strangers.
Felipe tried to expand the image, but it was too grainy to provide many clues as to the swimmer’s identity.
“How did they get here? Is there a vessel nearby?”
“The Queen’s Favorite held a sunset dinner for the pageant contestants this evening. Tenders were buzzing around it, bringing people back and forth from Stella Vista and taking side trips to the smaller islands. That’s normal for these things. There was a seven-meter speedboat stalled about a mile out an hour ago. That’s the closest any came to us.”
The guard’s lips were tight. He knew the hostility that existed between the Princes and hated to even mention Francois.
Felipe wasn’t ambushed by the news that his brother was nearby. Francois spent most of his life chasing skirt and parties around the globe, but he always came home at this time of year, bringing his sordid little beauty co
He didn’t usually send trespassers boldly up to Felipe’s front door, though. Not when he had his image and his own personal interests to protect. What was he up to this time?
“Let’s greet our visitor.” Felipe rose without having tasted the braised duck before him.
“Sir, he might be armed.”
He? Felipe looked again at the screen. The swimmer had found a rock to clasp. As their arm came out of the water, the strap of a bikini top was revealed.
“Unless she intends to spit a cyanide capsule at me, I don’t think she’s carrying a weapon.” He strode out the door to the inner grounds of the castle fortress, then across to the gate in the wall.
Two guards followed him, radioing low communications to the rest of the team. Another two fell into place next to Felipe as he stepped beyond the wall of the castle and made for the second gate, the one that blocked access to the stairs down the cliff face.
The narrow steps had been chipped from the stone wall by long-ago soldiers. A weathered rope was mounted through eyelets pounded into the rock, providing a tenuous handhold if a foot happened to slip.
Felipe hadn’t been down these steps in years, never at night, but he waved away the guard who tried to illuminate the path with a handheld spotlight. He wanted to approach more stealthily.
The quarter moon made it a treacherous descent. When they came to the bottom of the stairs, cypress trees briefly blocked his view of the water. He could hear the waves fighting one another outside the lagoon, but also heard a feminine cough and some ragged breathing near the shore.
He brushed past the guard who held out an arm, trying to hold Felipe back from advancing the short distance to the water’s edge.
In the pale moonlight, a woman—a mermaid? a siren?—was crawling from the glittering, black water. She paused, rearing up so she knelt in the shallows. Water lapped around the tops of her thighs. Her hair was pewter in the moonlight and stuck in vine-like curls against her shoulders and chest. Silver droplets fell off her chin and sat like diamonds against the swells of her breasts before slithering down her abdomen. Her chest heaved and every breath held a sob of effort.
That wasn’t a bikini. It was a bra and underwear, a lacy set in an indeterminate color that sat as a charcoal streak against skin that might have been tanned golden or naturally tawny, but in the cool light of the moon, turned her into a timeless black-and-white photo of a castaway survivor. Of Venus, rising from the deep.
She was the most fiercely beautiful thing Felipe had ever seen. She made his guts twist in a mix of awe and lust, the desire to possess and an instant certainty that she could not be captured or contained.
In a surge of uncharacteristic jealousy, he wanted to physically knock his guards’ gazes away from her. She was his.
With a fresh moan of effort, she crawled further out of the water and collapsed onto her side, chest heaving, legs still in the lapping surf.
As Felipe strode toward her, he dragged his gaze from her long thighs and trembling abdomen, past the quiver of her breasts to the way her eyes popped open beneath the anguished knot of her brows.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded in the Nazarinian dialect of Italian, crouching beside her.
The noise she made was one of pure suffering. Her arm moved in a sudden arc. A fistful of gravel peppered his face.
* * *
How was he here?
It didn’t make sense, but Claudine didn’t think, only reacted, trying to get away from the devil himself. She closed her hand on whatever bits of shells and rocks were on this godforsaken excuse for a beach and threw it at him.
While he swore roundly, she tried to roll away from him and get her arms and legs under her, but her muscles were utterly exhausted. She was shaking and weak, disoriented.
In the same moment, there were shouts and a scuffle of noise. A harsh male voice barked something in Italian. A heavy, rough weight pressed onto the back of her shoulder, squashing her onto her own feeble arms.
She should have let the sea take her because she was going to die tonight regardless of her fight to live. She let her face droop onto the pebbled beach beneath her.
I’m sorry, Mom. You were right. I’m so sorry.
There was a potent moment of silence, one that made her realize she had spoken aloud.
A burst of authoritative Italian came out of the Prince. There was the sound of a dull slap that transmitted a vibration into her shoulder before the punishing weight lifted off her back. It had been a foot, she realized, one with a roughly treaded sole. That’s all she could see when she lifted her head. Boots and more boots.
“Don’t attack me again,” the Prince warned in his accented English. “My guards don’t like it.”
If only she had guards, she thought with brief hysteria. Instead, she had been one woman defending herself against his attack.
She tried to push herself into sitting up and facing him, but her arms were overcooked pasta, completely ineffectual. Every part of her hurt. She didn’t even have the strength to cry.
“How did you get here?” he asked.
That seemed too obvious to bother answering. She searched for a path of escape, but only saw boots, boots, rocks and more boots. Then feet in what had to be bespoke Italian shoes. Not deck shoes like the Prince had been wearing earlier. Laced leather shoes with fancy detailing.
She could still hear the swish and churn of the water at the mouth of the lagoon. Soft waves were caressing her calves. Dare she try that route again? Swimming had been her only escape the first time, but she hadn’t managed to escape him, had she?
With a sob of utter despair, she dropped her head onto her wrist.
“Why are you here?” he prodded.
Seriously?
“I was aiming for Sicily. Is this not it?” she asked in a rasp.
There was a smirk from one of the hovering guards. The aggressive one who’d stood on her earlier nudged her hip with the toe of his boot.
“Don’t be smart. You’re under arrest. Answer the Prince’s questions.”
The Prince, whom she heartily consigned to the hottest corner of hell, said something in quiet, lethal Italian that had all of his guards shuffling back a few steps.
“Now,” the Prince continued in English, “if you want to lie here waiting for all your cuts to grow septic, we can do that. Or you can come up to the castle for medical attention and give me a full explanation for your presence here. Can you stand?”
He started to take hold of her arm, but a fresh surge of pure adrenaline, the kind with its roots in an atavistic desire to survive, knocked his hand away. She scrabbled for a fresh handful of sand to throw at him.
“No.” His knee went into the bed of pebbles in front of her eyes while his firm hand pinned her wrist to the ground. The other immobilized her bent arm against her chest, pressing her onto her back. “We’ve talked about that.”
She was dimly aware of a noise that she had only heard in movies. It was the sound of guns being cocked and readied for firing. She had never been so petrified in her life. Her heart ought to have exploded.
She refused to look at him, though. She stared at the crease that went down the front of his trousers, from his knee to his shoe. Out of her well of pure hatred, she said, “Don’t. Touch. Me.”
“Open your hand,” he commanded.
“Go to hell.”
“We’re staying here, then?”
She hated him. Really truly hated him.
But when his hold on her wrist didn’t relent, she reluctantly allowed her fingers to splay. Her only weapon sifted out of her grasp.
His hold on her lifted away. “Can you stand on your own?”
She could not, but she refused to admit it. “I’m not going anywhere with you ever again,” she choked. “I’d rather drown.”
There was such a profound silence at that statement she opened her eyes and glanced around, half expecting the guards to have somehow evaporated.
“You were on the Queen’s Favorite?” the Prince demanded.
“You know I was.” She was really at the end of her rope. The salt on her cuts was killing her and her stomach was no longer tolerating all the seawater she’d swallowed.
