Chapter 1

Tonight wasn’t about doing everything perfectly. Tonight was about letting go.

Flipping the tsipouro glass over with a flourish and smacking it down onto the table, Lauren Grant smiled with the first surge of honest pleasure she’d felt in weeks. After a whirlwind tour of Europe, she and her friends had returned to O?ros today, reuniting with the last of their group—who was also the soon-to-be newest member of the O?ros royal family.

Lauren loved Emmaline like a sister, but she’d only been trapped behind the palace walls for a few hours before she’d started getting antsy, too jittery in her own skin. She’d had to work way too hard to find this dive bar in the seaside paradise of Timiménos, and harder still to ditch her friends and the persistent tagalongs from the palace security. But it was worth it.

She’d spent most of her life under the careful watch of others, and that hadn’t kept her safe. For safety, she’d had to rely on herself. Same for having fun.

Two men and one woman were left facing her across the table. The woman listed to the side, supported by her husband, who kept shaking his head and grinning. The pile of cash in the center of the table was barely enough to buy a pair of shoes, but cash was never the goal anyway. It was simply a way to keep score.

The goal was to be the last woman standing.

“Another!” Lauren called out, and a cheer went up from the crowd circling the tiny table, along with laughter and catcalls, the usual fare of late-night drinking contests. The waitress moved forward, a new round of tsipouro at the ready, but the husband waved her off as his wife slumped fully against him.

That left two.

Lauren smiled saucily at the duo. She was almost certain they were brothers, which didn’t bode well for her. They were big men, swarthy, their Greek heritage not a distant echo but evident in every line of their sun-worn faces and thick, dark hair. These were the true backbone of the Mediterranean, not the people living in the vaunted castle on the hill, where her dear friend Emmaline was being courted by an actual prince. Hell, not even courted. She was going to marry the guy. And that was cause for celebration.

“Yamas!” She raised her glass with the word to another round of applause. Close enough to the O?rois equivalent of “cheers,” her lapse into Greek made her competitors eye each other smugly. The three of them tilted the tsipouro back, and the potent grape liquor washed down Lauren’s throat in a fiery line of absolution. The distilled spirits might have been made of the dregs of the wine-making process, but it definitely packed a punch.

As she crashed her glass down on the table and more money changed hands, she saw him.

It didn’t take much. A shift of the crowd in exactly the right way, the right-dodging face that should have dodged left. She didn’t squint into the gloom surrounding their table to make sure, because she didn’t have to. The man was Dimitri Korba, ranking captain of the O?ros National Security Force. Kind of a high-rent shadow, but that didn’t improve her mood.

Dimitri Korba was everything Lauren didn’t need right now, here in this tiny little bar in the seaside capital city of O?ros on the one occasion in days she’d been able to escape her carefully cultivated world.

Granted, the man was mouthwateringly gorgeous in a big, iron-fisted kind of way. Six foot four if he was an inch, he wasn’t built like the guys she knew back at home, their lean muscles and sinewy bodies honed with miles on the bike and the treadmill. Dimitri Korba was a giant. Heavily muscled legs, powerful arms, granite-set jaw beneath his dark, flashing eyes. Everything about him angled dark, from his richly tanned skin to his black hair to his obstinate scowl. He was the quintessential bull, determined to tromp into any china shop in his way if it blocked him from his goal.

But in the end, he was simply another babysitter.

And Lauren knew how to handle those.

Swiveling around, she waved for the waitress, not missing the fact that the arc of her swing was a little too wide, a little too sloppy. Finally, the drink was taking effect. Finally, for at least a little while, the game was changing. She wouldn’t have to think for a while, wouldn’t have to think about anything but the next hour or how she was going to get herself home. Tomorrow, there would be consequences. There would always be consequences. But in this moment, she didn’t need to worry about?—

“Miss Grant.” Strong hands caught her as she canted dangerously to the right. The right? Hadn’t she been moving to the left? She blinked up into the impossibly hard planes and harsh, dark-eyed stare of the man looming over her. Because that was what Dimitri Korba did best. He loomed.

“I thought that was you back there,” she said archly. She could always do “arch,” even drunk off her ass. She’d be able to do “arch” when she was ten years dead, she suspected. “Stand aside. I have a wager with these men.” She turned around, but her drinking mates were gone from the table, standing at a distance. They looked at her reproachfully, their gaze ricocheting in a triangle between her, Dimitri, and the small pile of euros between them. She could tell immediately that the game had soured, and anger blossomed within her, thick and hot. “Oh, great. Look what you’ve done.”

She spoke in O?rois as a matter of course, though the desire to slip into a flow of utterly American curses was almost impossible to beat down. She shoved Dimitri away, and he stepped back easily, fluidly, with the movements of a born fighter. Then she stood, proud that she didn’t falter, and held herself precisely in check to ensure her center of gravity was stable. She inclined her head with all the grace born of twenty-three years of Grant family training and control. Lifting her chin again, she smiled at the two men and gestured to the cash.

“I default by cause of this ox beside me,” she said, her words ringing out loudly in the now preternaturally quiet bar. She had a feeling Dimitri did that a lot, intimidated others merely by standing near them. “The money is yours, with my thanks. And here.” She reached for her purse, startled when Dimitri’s large, bronzed hand shot out to cover hers.

For a moment, she stared at it. His hand looked overlarge, almost cartoonish against hers. She was no simpering pale flower, but her light golden tan couldn’t compare to his skin tone, weathered almost to burnt sienna with the work he must do in the sun all the time. The sun, the wind, the rain, the?—

Focus. She was losing control here, the tsipouro hitting her too hard after barely seeming to affect her for the past hour. It had been that way last time, but she’d been building up a tolerance since then, she’d thought. The same way she’d been building up a tolerance to Dimitri Korba.

Neither of those was working out too well right now.

“Let go of me,” she said curtly.

He smirked but obligingly dropped her hand. “Your wish is my command, princess.”

“Remember that.” She flipped her purse open, dipping in for the money clip she’d always intended to go for at the end of this night. It wasn’t a lot of cash, merely a fraction of the amount on the table. But it was a gesture, and gestures mattered to proud people.

“My thanks for a good evening, and for your company.” Lauren flipped the clip on the table to the cheer of the drunken O?rois around her, then scowled again at Dimitri. “Get out of my way.”

He continued to fall back, but not nearly fast enough or far enough, and another flare of anger bit through her, clearing away some of the alcohol-induced fog. She knew she was being unreasonable. She knew she was probably being borderline stupid. Somewhere in the sane part of her brain, she realized that Dimitri Korba hadn’t been sent here by King Jasen or Queen Catherine, her hosts at the palace of O?ros.

No, he’d most likely been sent by her friends—probably Emmaline, who worried constantly about everyone, or maybe by Fran or Nicki. They’d all known her since college and understood her moods. She’d been cooped up too long, first in a series of hotels across Europe, and now back here in royal confinement, since Emmaline’s engagement to Prince Kristos…

Even thinking those words seemed absolutely ridiculous. Nevertheless, that was exactly what had happened a few short weeks ago. They’d landed in an honest-to-God Greek myth of a fairytale kingdom, and damned if Emmaline hadn’t caught the eye of her own Prince Charming.

Which Emmaline should. She deserved it.

While Lauren deserved to be babysat by Megatron behind her.

Stifling a giggle, Lauren pushed her way through the crowd, knowing Dimitri would be on her heels. The hulking bodyguard would ordinarily be someone she appreciated, at least for eye candy. She’d never seen him naked, but she’d seen enough of his muscles to turn her own tennis and Pilates-strengthened body completely weak. She got the feeling he didn’t build all those cuts and curves on a pink mat somewhere.

Stop thinking about him.

She pressed out through the bar until she finally burst forth like a buoy clearing the surface of the ocean, gasping at the sudden fresh air. It was June and another cloudless night in O?ros, and the sky was an excessively beautiful canopy of stars. The capital city of this idyllic nation had no appreciation for light pollution, and Lauren almost felt oppressed by the stars shining down over her. They were so close. So amazingly, stunningly close?—

“You are drunk. And foolish.”

Dimitri’s rebuke pulled her back with the viciousness of a slap. “Don’t talk to me. Don’t even come near me,” she said, turning sharply around.

Well, perhaps not so sharply as that. Her arms went out a little too far to steady herself, and she knew exactly what she looked like. But she’d practiced this. She’d practiced everything. She knew what she needed to do. Slowly, carefully, Lauren straightened, locking down her core and keeping her weight evenly balanced on her toes. She needed to get away from Dimitri Korba. Far away.

Suddenly, it seemed the smartest way to accomplish that was through him.

“You’re not allowed to order me around, you know. You barely know me,” she snapped, though she knew she sounded fourteen and not twenty-three. She pointed her elegantly manicured finger into the rough cotton shirt stretched tight across Dimitri’s exceptionally broad pecs. Without realizing it, she flattened her hand on that chest, feeling the powerful muscles contract, the heart beneath thud against her palm. She scowled up into the man’s angry, uncompromising face as the wave of his disdain crashed over her.

Disdain and...something else. Something that was more familiar, that thrilled through her like a siren song. This she understood, this she could work with. This was a barrier she could throw up to protect her from everything else.

But first, she had to be sure...

She knotted her hand in Dimitri’s shirt and sagged forward.