woman beside him had mellowed somewhat. She wasn’t as bad as he’d insisted she was when he’d talked to Jordan, but she certainly had turned out to be very different from what he’d first expected.
But what had he expected exactly? Ever since he’d made the alliance with King Mandrake and agreed to marry his daughter, people had been whispering warnings in his ear. Or shouting them at full volume. He almost grinned, thinking of his mother-in-law, Lady Judith, who had been explicit.
“You can’t marry that woman. She’s a floozy.”
The mother of his beloved wife Lorraine, Judith was still a major factor in his life as well as the main caretaker of his two young children. Her opinion mattered. Still, he was a man who believed in keeping his word. Breaking the promise he’d made to King Mandrake would threaten the stability of his newly freed country. His own personal happiness wasn’t as important as the well-being of his country.
For just a moment a picture flashed into his mind. A small, slender pixie of a woman was dancing before him, her dark eyes warm with laughter, her short-cropped gamin hair hugging her head. “Catch me if you can, Mister Crown Prince,” she teased him as she darted away, and his heart twisted with love for her.
His wife, Lorraine, had died almost two years before and the pain sometimes swept through him in a wave that choked and weakened. He pushed her memory away. He wasn’t going to think of her. He couldn’t allow himself the self-indulgence of it. He had to live in the here and now. He had a country to run. And he had to prepare to take a new wife, no matter how much that thought repelled him.
He’d forgotten the princess sat beside him until she said something and he turned toward her with a start, then realized she was asking for a drink of water. Nodding, he pulled an ice-cold bottle out of the little refrigerator and handed it to her, studying her quietly as he did so.
Iliana looked nothing like Lorraine. That was good. It was going to be difficult enough to avoid making comparisons as it was. He had to treat this as a whole new experience. Lorraine was a love match. This was…something else. The capacity for romantic love had died in him the day Lorraine was killed.
At the same time, he couldn’t help but feel Judith was wrong. This woman was no floozy.
“Dallas is beautiful,” he said, looking out at the sparkling lights set in the blackness of the night as the limousine cruised down the highway.
“Yes,” she responded. “And it’s even better when you can actually see it.”
He almost smiled and he had to admit, that was progress. Her quips were beginning to seem more amusing than annoying. “Why did you pick Dallas, Iliana?” he asked.
“Why did I pick Dallas?” she echoed blankly, ready to bristle.
“What made you move here?”
“Oh.” She avoided his gaze. What was the reason again? Greta had filled her in. Oh yes. “My father bought the ranch for me.” She looked at him sideways. “He was hoping to interest me in settling down in a nice town where there was an established Alovitian community he would have ties to.”
“And away from the bright lights of the big bad coastal cities?”
“Exactly.”
“And did his ploy work?”
“Well….” She frowned. This weaving in and out of what she could actually say was getting tiring fast. “I have to say I do love Dallas,” she said quickly instead of answering. “I’ve been very happy here.”
She looked into his eyes, noting the intelligence that shone from them, but also the moody restlessness that seemed to lurk in the dark shadows. As she was calming down and taking this conversation as the currently necessary evil that it was, she was losing some of her animosity toward him. He was still high-handed and arrogant—but hey, he was a crown prince. That was part of his role in life, she supposed. She just had to remember that she was a princess and therefore didn’t need to give way to him entirely.
She tried to put herself in his position. Here he was, talking to the woman he had arranged to marry, trying to find out…what? What could she tell him that would put his mind at ease and make him stop asking her questions she could never hope to answer? In his next statement, he told her.
“What I really want to do is to get to know you better.”
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