for the disarmament issue, it’s the sanitized, gilded, photo-op version of philanthropy the palace directs.” She shook her head. “You know I’ve always felt I have a higher calling. The ability to effect widespread change because of who I am, the power I have. And yet every time I’ve tried to spread my wings, I’ve been reined in. Athamos and Nik have taken precedence. I was the one left to toe the line.”
Jessie was silent. “I hear what you’re saying,” she said finally. “But this is big, Stella. Irreversible. If you marry him, you’re going to be queen. You will be taking on a nation. You’re going to be walking into a very delicate situation with no real control.”
But weren’t those the kind of challenges that made her feel alive, despite the inherent risk involved? Wasn’t this what she’d been craving all her life, a chance to make her mark?
She and Jessie talked late into the night. When her friend finally pleaded exhaustion and drifted off to bed, Stella stayed on the terrace, tucked in a chair, the fat half crescent of a moon, tossed in a sea of stars, her silent companion.
She didn’t question her ability to do what Kostas was asking of her. She’d walked through war zones to promote peace in countries where young people were the innocent victims of conflict. She’d met and challenged tribal leaders to find a better way than destroying each other. What she was afraid of was Kostas. What he could do to her in a political marriage with her as his pawn.
Tonight had proved, a decade later, she was far from immune to him. In fact, it had illustrated the opposite; revealed the origins of her stunningly bad mistake with Aristos Nicolades last year.
She had worked her way through a series of men whom she’d discarded one after another without allowing any of them to get close. When that had proved unsatisfactory, she’d fixed her sights on Aristos to prove she could win a man every bit as unattainable as Kostas; as elusive and undeniably fascinating. She’d sought to exorcise the ghost of her most painful rejection, to prove she was worth more than that. Instead, Aristos had broken her heart and, worse, fallen head over heels in love with her sister and married her.
She wrapped her arms around her knees and hugged them to her chest, the pang that went through her only a faint echo of what it once had been, because she’d anesthetized it, marked it as mindless self-pity.
She was destined to be alone. Had accepted that love was unattainable to her. That she’d been too badly scarred too many times to view the concept as anything but a destructive force. Which would almost make the suggestion of a political match bearable. Practical. If it was with anyone but Kostas.
Tying her fate to a man who could destroy her, if the forces threatening to splinter Carnelia apart didn’t do it first, seemed like another bad decision in a long list of many. Unless she neutralized his effect on her.
If she was to do this—marry Kostas—and survive, she would need to bury her feelings for him in a deep, untouchable place where he couldn’t use them against her.
The question was...could she?
* * *
“The princess is here to see you, Your Highness.”
Kostas looked up from the intelligence briefing he was reviewing, his heart climbing into his throat. It had been two days since he’d thrown all his cards at Stella, hoping she’d see the light. Two days with no response. Due to return to Carnelia tomorrow for a regional summit of leaders, he’d started to think his penchant for risk taking had been his downfall. That he had overrated his negotiating skills when it came to a princess who harbored a very personal anger toward him.
He betrayed not one ounce of the relief flooding through him as he nodded to his aide, Takis. “I’ll go up.”
Taking the steps to the upper deck of his old friend Panos Michelakos’s yacht, anchored in Carlisle Bay while its owner took care of business in the West Indies, he found Stella standing at the railing of the impressive seventy-foot boat, looking out at the ocean.
She was silhouetted against the dying rays of the sun, her hair, the color of rich honey, hanging loose down her back. Her slim body was encased in a white skirt and caramel-colored tank top. She looked every inch the cool, sophisticated golden girl she was reputed to be, except he knew from experience Stella was anything but cold. She brought passion to everything she did.
He was fairly sure the image of her in bloodred lingerie, curled up in his bed at the Akathinian palace, would forever be imprinted on his brain. Stored there to torture him with the memory of the one woman he had never allowed himself to have; the one who had never left his head.
A slow curl of heat unraveled inside of him as the erotic image painted itself across his brain. It had been late, the early morning, when he’d climbed the stairs to his room after a palace party, head hazy from too many shots of tsipouro. He’d let himself into his suite unaware anyone else was there, stripped off his clothes, left them in a pile on the floor and collapsed onto the king-size bed.
It was only when his splayed arm had touched silky soft female skin that he’d become aware he wasn’t alone. He’d thought maybe he had drunk too much and dreamed up the lingerie-covered Stella until she’d started talking, telling him he was the most exciting man she’d ever met, that their kiss earlier in the library had been incredible and she wanted him to be her first.
His twenty-three-year-old brain had nearly exploded. She was every red-blooded male’s fantasy come true with her high, perfect breasts and mile-long legs. His body had definitely not been in tune with his head. She’d been too innocent, too pure, too full of her ambitions to change the world for a man caught in a struggle to define himself as different from his autocrat of a father to ever pursue. A man unsure he could ever live up to the lofty ideals she’d built around him.
Somewhere in his liquor-soaked brain, he’d summoned up the sanity to scoop her up, carry her to the door and deposit her on the other side, telling her to go kick sand in her own playground. He’d been sure someday the shattered look on her face would be worth it when she realized he’d spared her a broken heart. That women, for him, were fleeting pleasures meant to be enjoyed, then discarded in the must-win, must-conquer existence that had characterized his life.
But after that night, he sensed his callousness had dug far deeper than he’d believed in a tough, resilient Stella. That his need to underscore he was not the man for her, not the man for any woman in their right mind, had hurt her deeply.
* * *
She sensed his presence before he revealed himself. Turning, hands curling around the rail, a charge rocketed through her. Her soon-to-be fiancé was studying her with an intense curiosity in his hawk-like gaze that seemed to strip the layers from her skin, deconstructing every one of the protective barriers she’d come armed with.
Her chin dipped as he moved toward her. “Planning your next move, Kostas?”
“Admiring you. You still have the power to stop me in my tracks.”
Her stomach folded in on itself, a renegade wave of heat spreading through her in places that needed to remain ice-cold. “No need for flattery,” she said, injecting some of that much-needed, cool composure into her tone. “You know why I’m here.”
“Honesty,” he countered as he came to a halt in front of her, “is something you will always get from me, Stella. Whether you like what I have to say or not.”
Another veiled reference to his humiliating rejection of her? A current
