Chapter 8

“Ithought I was done with this,” growled Dimitri as he and Kristos stepped onto the veranda.

When the new crown prince had summoned him from his training rounds this morning, he’d responded with military efficiency, wondering if he’d finally get his orders to go to the border, where his help could do some good. He should have known that those kinds of orders would only come from Cyril. Kristos was so ensnared in his accession duties, he didn’t have time to take a breath, let alone focus on the work he so loved.

“Another party?” he continued. “For what?”

“It’ll get worse before it gets better.” Kristos didn’t look amused either, hanging back as his mother and his fiancée swept forward, clearly bursting with news. “Emmaline’s so relieved that my mother seems happy, she’ll agree to do anything for the few short days she’s here. And Mother is so happy to be planning a royal wedding, she’s impossible to be around.”

“And you?” Dimitri didn’t ask the question lightly. It’d been only a few weeks since Kristos had proposed to Emmaline on open network TV...or pseudo proposed, anyway. He’d given her one of his military pins, not a ring, but the effect was the same: mass media hysteria.

“The wedding, I couldn’t care less about,” Kristos said, shaking his head. “That’s going to be a state event so tortured with tradition that Emmaline will probably fall asleep in the middle of it. But as for her?” He shifted his glance forward and focused on Emmaline.

Despite himself, Dimitri felt a rush of emotion at the change in Kristos’s face. Though Kristos was only a few years younger than his older brother, Ari, Dimitri had spent most of his time with the original crown prince. Still, the boy had matured dramatically since Dimitri had first returned to the palace and taken on the role of captain of the guard again.

Over these past eight years, he’d seen Kristos bored out of his mind with school, excited with his physical training when he’d first joined the military, drunk and celebratory, devastated with the loss of his men in combat...and completely destroyed when his brother had crashed his stupid, fucking plane into the Aegean. Dimitri had even seen Kristos distracted by, and half in love with, whatever woman had crossed his path on any given day.

But he’d never seen him like this.

Kristos grinned broadly, his entire face transformed as he stared at Emmaline like a boy of sixteen and not the future king of O?ros. “Emmaline is everything I wanted, and a lot I didn’t know I wanted. She’s beautiful, giving, sweet?—”

“Pull it together, Pyramus,” Dimitri reached out, punching Kristos in the arm to refocus his attention. “The queen.”

He and Kristos moved forward to watch the announcement, but he’d heard the important part already. As King Jasen’s closest relatives in O?ros, the Raptis family insisted on hosting an engagement party that very night for Kristos and Emmaline, and of course her friends must also attend now that they were back, blah, blah, blah. Emmaline’s gaze swept toward them, and Kristos took another step to enter into the explosion of female planning, while Dimitri stayed back. He didn’t care about another ridiculous party. He didn’t care about these women.

Well, not all of them, anyway.

Lauren Grant stood between her two friends, the fitness freak and the shrink, holding on to her chair with a little too much grace. He frowned, shifting forward slightly. As if she caught his movement, her gaze drifted to his, then held it for a second. Every ounce of withering contempt that she could infuse into that gaze, she did, then she glanced away.

If the eyes were the window to the soul, this woman offered him nothing but hoarfrost.

Only he knew better than that. It was all he could do to keep from grinning.

“Of course, Dimitri will be on hand to provide security for the event.” He blinked at the sound of his name, lashing down his irritation at getting pulled into the conversation.

“Security?” Emmaline asked, her slender body going instantly tense. “Why security? Is anything wrong?”

“Standard procedure,” Dimitri said, overriding the queen’s voice. The queen looked at him, surprised at his intervention, and he nodded with deference. “Ma’am.”

Queen Catherine smoothed her expression. “Exactly so,” she said. She didn’t look at Lauren, who didn’t look at him, and Dimitri kept his gaze on the room in general. Nicki’s and Francesca’s faces were blank, but genuinely so, not in the calm-fa?ade way of Lauren’s. That fa?ade masked about a million untold truths, he suspected. Not the least of which was last night’s little scare. Interesting.

Predictably, Lauren recovered first. “I’m sure there’s no need for more security than whatever you would normally have.” Her gaze swiveled to his, and he was struck again with its cool dismissal. “It’s an engagement party, right? It should be safe enough without involving Dimitri. He’s done quite enough.” Her lips curled with disdain around his name, and he found that he wanted to hear it from her again—and again. Not in her haughty, refined accent, either.

He held her stare, glaring back at her, matching her ice with fire until finally she faltered, her eyes going wide as he put the full force of what he wanted to do to and with her in his gaze. That’s right, princess. Chew on that.

“Oh, but of course he’ll be there,” the queen said firmly, though Dimitri didn’t miss her glance between them. He quickly shuttered his expression, but he couldn’t do the same to his body. In the blink of an eye, even thinking about holding Lauren Grant in his arms, both of them naked and slick with sweat and heat, was enough to make his body completely forget its hard-core training. The woman was a drug, and he suspected his next hit would be deadly. He needed to get out, get away, get some air. And some control.

“Yes, that should do nicely.” Catherine continued, oblivious to his internal struggle. “We’re not expecting any excitement, but it’s always good to have trained experts on hand. There are any number of details to manage when it comes to public appearances.”

“I’ll get working on that right now,” Dimitri said, grabbing for the opportunity to leave. Almost before the queen nodded, he’d turned on his heel and strode out.

He hit the corridor and kept moving, aiming for the closest location for him to take a moment and ratchet down his reactions. He knew the palace like the back of his hand. He’d been here countless times in his long life, most recently becoming a fixture again when Ari, the crown prince, had reached the age of eighteen and joined the military. Dimitri had been assigned to watch over him—if only from a distance—as part of his role as captain of the guard. Instead, they’d become friends, never mind that Ari was the prince of the realm. That was always Ari’s way. Everything was easy, unforced. Everything was meant for its proper place. And Dimitri’s place had been at his side—in battles large and small. Ari had grown into his position quickly, and Dimitri, as Ari was fond of saying, never changed.

It had taken the crown prince awhile to figure out how true his statement was.

Then came that last, fateful day, when Dimitri hadn’t been there to protect the prince.

Now the palace held no more secrets for him, no more mysteries. And it also didn’t hold Ari. Without the man who’d unexpectedly become his best friend, the place seemed little more than a pretty, painted shell.

One short hallway and a turn later, and he stepped inside the quiet portrait gallery. The room was, as usual, shrouded in soft shadows. The family didn’t come here much. They hadn’t before Ari’s death, and now, when the portraits of generations past seemed only to remind them of the future that they’d lost, he doubted they’d darkened its doors in months.

Excellent. He needed the time alone.

As usual, he avoided Ari’s portrait, preferring instead to focus on the much older generations of the royal family. The quiet, staid paintings had the desired effect. His temper cooled, his body unknotted. He could manage the American, if he kept his distance from her. He could manage her even better if she never spoke. His lips twisted. Like that would ever happen.

He’d made it halfway down the long, narrow room when a flurry of movement at the doorway had him turning around.

“Ungh!” Lauren’s momentum took her halfway into the room before she stopped, her graceful arms flexing as she lifted her fists to her eyes. She hissed out a long breath, clearly trying to get control of herself. “This is impossible!”

Dimitri shifted toward her almost unconsciously, picking up every detail, cataloging it, assessing. The blonde thought she was alone, safe. Unwatched. She pressed her hands to her temples, then turned toward the picture at the head of the room and exhaled a long, tortured breath. The image she was looking at was a large portrait of the royal family made after Ari’s death. Without Ari in the frame, the royal family seemed impossibly wrong, but Dimitri could tell Lauren wasn’t actually seeing the painting. She wasn’t seeing anything except the images shuddering through her mind.

He moved closer to her on soft feet, unreasonably pleased that she didn’t notice him. The room was mostly dark, the only light where she was, highlighting the royal family. No windows lined the walls either. Ideal for a portrait gallery, and for hide-and-seek as well. But he was close enough now to see Lauren’s distress, and his words were harsher than he intended. “You lost?”

“Oh!” Lauren whirled, taking a defensive step back, and the play of emotions across her face would have been comical in any other situation. Shock, fear, panic, anger, all in succession, but the only one he wanted there was the anger. It was clean and fierce and didn’t twist up his guts, didn’t make him want to punch through walls he couldn’t see.

“No, I’m not lost,” she snapped. “The queen and Kristos left, and Emmaline was practically bursting with the desire to talk to us, but then an entire host of staff members descended for fittings, she got called away to deal with some need with her family, and I—I just couldn’t deal with it. I split.”

“Uh-huh. Or maybe you just decided to follow me?” He grinned at her, hooking his thumbs into the waistband of his trousers. As he planned, her gaze dropped to track the movement, then shot back up to meet his, her outrage ratcheting up.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” she snapped, her chin firming. “You’re the last person in the world I’d want to follow.” The fire he wanted to see—needed to see—was back in her eyes, and he couldn’t deny the relief that spread through him.

He also couldn’t deny the way his body reacted, being this close to her. Dammit. She might be a stuck-up, spoiled pain in the ass, but she had his number. She radiated with energy no matter where she was in a room, or who she talked with. This close, that energy reached out toward him like a hungry sun, and it was all he could do to stand his ground and not grab it up, gathering in its warmth.

Instead, he went on the offensive, leaning toward her close enough that she stiffened, on guard. She wouldn’t back down, of course. That wasn’t her way.

He liked that about her.

About as much as he liked the soft curve of her lips, parted slightly below his mouth. As he’d thought before, she was a drug. And he was well on his way to getting addicted.

“And yet you’re still standing here,” he murmured. “Something you still want from me, princess?”