Excerpt Crowned

The roaring speedboat smashed headlong through the white-capped waves of the Aegean, apparently deciding today was the day it would pick a fight with the open sea. Fran Simmons knew exactly how it felt.

"Isn't this great?" Beside her, Nicki Clark gripped the side of the boat, her bright red life jacket more a formality for her than any sort of needed protection. Nicki lived for any ocean-adjacent adventure—the more outrageous, the better. "The island is even more gorgeous—you'll see!"

"Great!" Fran echoed, glad the gale-force wind meant she didn't have to carry on a conversation with Nicki. She needed the time to think, to plan. To figure out how she was going to unravel this newest vacation tangle that had wrapped up her and her three best friends.

A vacation! That's how this trip had been described to her originally. She wouldn't have agreed to it otherwise. A few weeks traveling through Europe, ending in Paris and starting with the tiny seaside country of O?ros, nestled between Greece and Turkey. The aquatically challenged Fran hadn't even minded the idea of them all vacationing next to the ocean—as long as next to never ever meant being in.

The trip had offered the perfect chance to reconnect with the three women who'd become Fran's rock. Six years ago they'd all helped Fran become the person she was today in more ways than they'd ever know. She'd lost a bit of that person over the past year. Her grad thesis work with traumatized soldiers had shown her exactly how much she could help others, but it had also revealed some cracks in her own hard-won self-concept. She needed to re-establish her base before she could launch herself into her next challenge: life after grad school.

But the relaxing girls' trip through all the tourist meccas of Europe had gotten derailed almost immediately once they'd set foot in the idyllic seaside kingdom of O?ros. Within what had seemed like thirty seconds, Emmaline had fallen in love with the newly minted crown prince of O?ros. Then Lauren had taken out her whack-job ex-boyfriend with the help of a gorgeous captain of the O?ros National Security Force. After that? Nicki had set out on a grand rescue adventure with the royal family's icy cool ambassador. The fact that one of these men was royalty and the other two were straight-outta-Greek-mythology demigods was just icing on the crazy cake. Their entire adventure now felt like a wild delusion brought on by too much tsipouro and too little sleep, except every morning Fran kept waking up to the same delusion.

Now it apparently was her turn to get roped into the chaos, and she had to play it smart. The royal family wanted her help for a very legitimate reason—and she would give that help. But only on her terms. She couldn't afford to make any mistakes.

"Oh my god, Frani, look! Dolphins!"

Terror seized Fran's heart, and she gripped the side of the boat so hard she thought the rail might break in her hands. "Wow!" she shouted back, fixing her gaze on a point far beyond where the pair of shark-like mammals leapt out of the sea.

She could not—would not—betray her abject fear of freaking dolphins, of all things. Dolphins! Possibly one of the most beloved sea animals on the planet, and they made Fran's legs practically shake to pieces whenever she so much as thought of the creatures. Her baseless horror of dolphins was so absolutely, unforgivably ridiculous, she'd never breathed a word of it. Today didn't seem like a great time to start.

The engine throttled back abruptly. Fran flinched back as a spray of water splashed over the deck of the speedboat.

"Man! We were flying." Nicki beamed at her. "Hey, don't be nervous. I'm telling you, there's nothing serious you have to do here, other than, you know, help."

"I can't truly add value here, I told you that already." Fran tried to take the sharpness out of her tone, but this wasn't a lie, at least. "I'm not anywhere close to being licensed to work with anyone, and from everything you've said, Prince Aristotle—or Ryker or whoever he thinks he is—needs the care of a medical doctor. He's the king and queen's oldest son! Surely they can afford the best medical care in Europe."

"He has plenty of doctors. And neurologists and shrink people too," Nicki said, her grin not dimming a fraction. "But they're all a hundred years old. The queen thought, you know, maybe having someone his own age who at least had some background in PTSD would be good. Someone who wasn't a doctor. Or about to die."

Fran quirked a glance at her. The idea sounded no less lame than when she'd first heard it. "So she wants me to be his playmate."

"His companion," Nicki corrected. "And come on! You'll be great at this. Ari has been through hell this past year, and you've worked with tons of guys like that. With this job, you're not seriously working. More like, you know, hanging out. How hard can it be?"

Fran grimaced. A hundred distinct faces slid through her mind…haunted faces, worn and weary and forlorn. Soldiers with expressions that seemed to have been taken carefully out of a box and worn like a mask until at last, these men and women could hide again from the real world, returning to the place inside that both soothed and tormented them.

Nevertheless, Fran could help Aristotle Andris, she suspected. If she'd learned nothing else from her year-long study of traumatized soldiers, it was that sometimes merely sitting with a survivor in comfortable silence, letting him know he or she wasn't alone, was the best gift you could possibly give.

She could do silence, right? Anyone could do silence.

Especially someone with so much to hide.

Fran stared at the private island they were puttering toward and went over her story again. She was a grad student…true. She had a year of working with military personnel enduring Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder under her belt, as part of a psychology thesis program for which she'd earned a scholarship…true.

She'd met Lauren, Nicki and Emmaline during her undergrad years and they'd all struck up a friendship that had profoundly strengthened over the years…also true.

Then came the rest of her bio. Her name was Francesca Simmons. She'd spent an idyllic childhood in suburbia. She had a cozy middle-class blended family back in Michigan with her father, his wife and Fran's two step-brothers, basic cable, hot dogs on the deck every summer weekend, and absolutely no run-ins with the law.

False, false, and false again.

"You said Prince Ari had been held prisoner?" she asked finally. She turned back to Nicki who bounced on her toes, her satisfaction at winning obvious.

"Yup!" Nicki said, glancing to the dock as the boat cruised in. When she spoke again, her words were lower, more hurried. "He took off from the municipal airstrip in O?ros one night last June and crashed his plane in a storm somewhere off the coast of Turkey. He washed ashore, delirious. Then he got caught in some kind of vagrant round-up and put into a work camp. He still has no idea he's the heir to the kingdom of O?ros. He thinks he's some pilot. But according to the doctors, his prognosis is good. There's nothing physically wrong with him. He's simply sort of…forgotten who he was."

Fran couldn't help her half-choked laugh. "Sometimes that isn't so bad," she said wryly. "Though maybe not when you're a prince."

"Hey!" Nicki waved furiously at a new target, and Fran pivoted as well, shielding her eyes from the brilliant Aegean sun to take in the rapidly approaching dock, and the two men standing on it. She recognized the O?rois ambassador Stefan Mihal, of course. He and Nicki had been charged with traveling to find the errant prince.

Fran didn't much like Stefan, but it wasn't because of anything he'd done to her. The man—demigod—was simply too smart. He'd run dossiers on all of them when Emmaline had been in the middle of her whirlwind courtship with Prince Kristos, Ari's younger brother. Fran hadn't been able to breathe for a few days until everything on her had checked out. She'd covered every base imaginable to create her new life, and it appeared that hard work was paying off.

She knew more than most, however, that it could all be yanked away in a heartbeat. The faster she got out of O?ros and back into the rhythm of her own anonymous life, the better.

Stefan caught one of the tie ropes at the prow of the boat, while the second man grabbed the edge and stabilized it. With a delighted "thanks!" Nicki accepted the second man's outstretched hand and mounted the step halfway up the side of the speedboat. Then she leapt out of the boat, clearing the short distance to the dock like she'd been born to the sea.

Fran, on the other hand, widened her stance as the boat rocked, then clutched the back of the passenger seat to steady herself, rigidly not focusing on the water surrounding their craft. Breathe in…breathe out. She just had to step out of the boat and on to the dock. If she fell into the water where dolphins lived, she was going to drown. She knew she was going to panic and drown, there were no two ways about it. So she couldn't fall into the water. She could only step off the fucking boat and on to the deck, without falling, without drowning. There was no other option, so that's what she'd do.

The unfamiliar man turned toward her and she steeled her nerves, unable to look at anything but the dock.

"Easy there, it's a short step," he said with a thick Mediterranean accent. The boat tipped precariously again and Fran's balance shifted. She flashed a grateful smile in the man's general direction, focusing on the step in front of her as she lunged for his hand.

The moment the man's rough palm closed around her fingers, a zip of awareness rushed through Fran, sharp enough to make her forget her fear for a split second. She glanced up and found herself staring into the face of quite possibly the most gorgeous human she'd ever seen—which was saying something, since O?ros was chock-full of beautiful humans. But this one was tall, broad-shouldered and intense, his dark hair streaked by the sun. He had a deep tan, dark chocolate eyes and high, sculpted cheekbones above a neatly trimmed beard. His face broke into a broad grin as she stared.

"You good, miss?" The impossibly gorgeous man asked as another wave rocked the boat.

She blinked, recalling herself. "I'm good, I'm just a little?—"

Before she could finish her words, he tugged her up out of the boat…and into his arms.