Page 5 of Claimed By the Crown Prince
Princess Laia held up a finger, as if just remembering. ‘Ah...’
She opened her bag and scrabbled around for what seemed like long minutes. Dax’s frustration and irritation were growing by the second.
‘Dammit, Princess—’
She held up the phone triumphantly, with a smile. ‘Got it.’
And, as he watched, she flung it out to the side and it landed in the sea with a loudsplosh.
Her eyes went wide. ‘Oops. Butterfingers.’
She picked up a couple of bags full of shopping and started to walk towards the beach and the lush hill beyond.
Dax just stood there, absorbing what had happened, looking at the place where his phone was undoubtedly sinking to the sea bed.
She stopped and looked back. ‘We’re the only ones here, so if you want to eat you’ll need to bring those bags with you. There are a lot of steps up to the villa—you don’t really want to have to make two trips.’
Dax looked at the array of bulging bags at his feet on the pontoon. Then up again. Then out to sea, where the boat that had brought them was disappearing back to the bigger island, not even visible from here.
The other boat was bobbing gently in the sea. Obviously anchored. No sign of the bodyguards. No sign of help.
Dax almost felt like throwing his head back and barking out a laugh. It had been a long time, if ever, since someone had surprised him so effectively. Taken him unawares. Blindsided him. But she’d done it with ruthless and efficient precision.
She’d basically kidnapped him, and all without hitting him over the head or disabling him. He’d followed her every step of the way into this lush and humid paradise.
CHAPTER TWO
PRINCESSLAIADIDN’Tdare look around again to see if he was behind her. Crown Prince Dax de Valle y Montero. One of the most eligible bachelors on the planet. Renowned for his good looks and sybaritic lifestyle. Renowned for lots more. Innuendo and rumours swirled around the man like a mist—not least about his sexual prowess. But she pushed that incendiary thought out of her head.
It was almost a relief to know who had come to find her and have the situation contained. Because she’d known that King Aristedes wouldn’t put up with her avoidance of their arranged marriage for much longer. He’d shown his determination to force her to comply by following her to a famously remote festival in the middle of the desert just a few days ago.
Luckily, she’d managed to evade him again. But only just.
The wedding was due to take place in two weeks. Just before her twenty-fifth birthday. As agreed by her father and the previous King of Santanger. A perfectly acceptable agreement on many levels, as Prince Dax had pointed out.
But from the moment she’d been told she would have to marry a crown prince from another kingdom...a complete stranger...when she’d been just ten years old, something inside her had rebelled against it.
And that feeling had only grown stronger over the years, reinforced the few times she’d met King Aristedes—eight years her senior. He’d always seemed aloof and impossibly serious. Not remotely interested in her...in who she really was. She’d felt no connection.
And then, when her father had been dying, four years ago, he’d taken Laia’s hand and said, ‘My darling, don’t marry for anything less than love, no matter how high the stakes. You need to be supported by someone who adores you. This job is hard and long and you deserve to be happy doing it.’
Laia’s mother had died giving birth to her, and her father had lived his life in love with a ghost, devoted to her memory. He hadn’t ever bowed under the pressure to marry again and have more heirs, telling people, ‘I have my heir. Laia will be a great queen one day...’
And that was what the people believed, and what Laia had believed—until he’d revealed a cataclysmic secret. That he’d had a grief-fuelled affair a year after his wife had died.
Even though Laia had had time to absorb that information—and everything else that had come with it—she’d found it hard to let go of the idealised vision of love that her father had presented for so long, in spite of her knowledge of his affair.
Witnessing his devotion to his deceased wife had instilled within Laia a deep yearning for someone to love her in the same way. Yet with that came a sense of guilt—because Laia had killed her mother. Oh, she knew she hadn’treally,but deep down, in some place where cellular memory was held, she felt guilty. Responsible.
All she had of her mother were inanimate pictures and some video footage of a beautiful, vibrant woman. She’d never been able to look at them without feeling that awful sense of guilt mixed with a hollow feeling of abandonment.
That sense of yearning for a deep and abiding connection had become even more charged as she’d grown up. As if she had a duty and responsibility not to become cynical—even after learning of her father’s affair. But to honour her mother’s sacrifice, and her father’s grief, by aspiring to the ideals they’d set.
And now here she was, hiding out in a tropical paradise avoiding an arranged marriage, because she desperately wanted somethingmorethan just to be a box ticked on King Aristedes’s list of things to do.
Royal wife acquired:tick.
Apart from that desire for a great love and supportive companionship instilled within her by her father, she also had an almost primal instinct to protect Isla’Rosa’s independence. When her father had signed the marriage agreement all those years ago he’d agreed to make sure the marriage would take place before Laia’s birthday, so she would have a husband and King by her side when she was crowned Queen. He’d been worried the pressure of doing it alone would be too much.