Virgin Princess's Marriage Debt / Demanding His Desert Queen. Annie West

      It had been years since Sofia had seen the palace’s ballroom draped in such finery and filled with so many people. Her father’s deterioration had consigned much of her small family’s lives to brief external visits, rarely allowing for the opening of the palace, for outward glances to turn inward upon them. Sofia thought that the last time the ballroom had looked like this might have been her fifteenth birthday, before she’d been sent to boarding school and met the man that had brought this down upon her.

      This evening was costing the country money it barely had, but lord knew, everyone loved a royal wedding. It was an investment—for the future of her country. She had to see it as such or she’d curl into a ball in her room and never come out.

      She resisted the urge to soothe her brow where the beginnings of a tension headache the size of the San Andreas fault line was gathering. She hated the fact that Theo had blackmailed her, hated that there was no confidant, no friend that she could turn to. Her entire life since leaving that school had been about training, learning the tools that she would need to put the country first. She’d had no time for friends, for people her own age. The last friend she’d thought she had was… Theo. With him, she’d been utterly herself.

      It could have been so different, she thought. She’d once dreamed of it being different. The same man, yes. But this? No.

      However, part of the future she was securing for her country required children. That thought sent sparks of fire and ice across her skin and down her spine. They hadn’t yet discussed that. But she’d made sure to put it into the prenuptial agreement. She could be just as sneaky as he. She’d thought with some small pleasure at how shocked he might be to read the clause that required his contribution to IVF treatment. She had absolutely no intention of sharing her bed with him. And even as she’d had that thought, her inner voice cried liar. It brought to mind memories of their kiss…the way her body had sung, had clung to him as desire moved like wildfire through her veins, as her body and soul had yearned for more.

      The sudden and shocking thoughts raised a painful blush to her overly heated cheeks, and, cutting off her thoughts, she glanced again at the clock, placing the practised smile on her features to satisfy the eager curiosity of various visiting dignitaries. Where the hell was Theo? Perhaps he had seen the clause in the agreement and had decided to punish her temerity.

      But that thought was completely overridden by the sense of unease beginning to build. Her father was set to make a royal appearance for only a short allotted time. It was needed for publicity, to soothe potentially ruffled feathers on the Iondorran council for the inappropriateness of her chosen fiancé. Theo didn’t need to know that at least two whole weeks had been spent in tense negotiations as she’d lied and cajoled her father’s old cronies into accepting Theo. She had extolled his virtues, instead of parading his vices, argued the strength of a true love match, even as the lies had caught in her throat. Unconsciously she had repeated the same pleas she had once made to her father, ten years before as he had tried to extricate her from the boarding school.

      She’d been surprised how readily they came to her lips, how easily the same fidelity, emotion, desperation had come to her aid. And the privy council had believed it in a way that her father never had.

      And now, when she needed Theo by her side, he was keeping her waiting, keeping her father waiting. His medication was working for the moment, but she knew better than most how quickly that could change. Once again, she absentmindedly rubbed her forearm, feeling the phantom ache where the accident—as she thought of it now—had fractured the bone there and bruised the ribs beneath. From across the room her mother had caught the unconscious action, and she sent her a reassuring look.

      When she finally saw Theo at the top of the grand sixteenth-century staircase, her breath caught in her throat. In the back of her mind she was a little jealous—surely this was the princess’s moment, to stand atop the staircase and be admired? But this was no fantasy, and Theo was certainly no prince. Yet admired? Yes. He was.

      He stood in between Sebastian Rohan de Luen and a young woman so like him that she must have been his sister. Sofia caught the exiled duke’s eye, his gaze held just the fraction of a moment, and she saw something more than speculation towards the woman who was to marry his friend…something foreboding.

      Theo’s powerful frame unfolded down the stairs into a jog, an actual jog, towards her. Sofia’s head almost whipped around to search for the long-ago voice calling in her mind—No running in the Grand Room, Sofia!

      He came towards her so fast, she had no time to react, the expression of joy across his features so shocking to her that she didn’t prevent the hands that came to her cheeks and took her face in a warm caress as he placed his lips gently against hers. Instantly he enveloped her senses, the soft, earthy smell of him, the traces of electricity that sparkled beneath the pads of his fingertips against her skin, the heat of his lips and the way her body unconsciously rose to meet him…all gone as suddenly as it came.

      ‘Kardiá mou, my tardiness in unforgivable,’ he said against her mouth, loudly enough for all about her to hear. Sighs rose up about her from the women and indulgent smiles painted the faces of Iondorra’s staunchest male dignitaries.

      For a moment, the space of a heartbeat, Sofia had been fooled, had been transported back to a time when his kisses seemed to be her whole world. The way she wanted to sink into the pleasure, the comfort, the… Before her mind could finish the thought, she remembered. Remembered it all. The blackmail, the darkness behind his actions, the belief he held that she had set him up…and in a rash and defiant act, she nipped at his bottom lip with her teeth, quick and hard. He pulled back his head in surprise.

      ‘Let me be the first to draw blood, then, Theo,’ she hissed in a voice audible only to him.

      ‘No, Sofia. You did that years ago,’ he said darkly, his deft tongue sweeping at the thin trace of crimson on his lip, before a mask descended over his features and he turned to the gathering in the ballroom with a broad smile.

      As Iondorra’s leading figures lined up to pass on their congratulations to the happy couple Sofia and Theo continued their quiet lines of attack in under-the-breath sentences.

      ‘I thought I was supposed to be the one who was fashionably late,’ she whispered.

      ‘Fashion doesn’t have to be gender specific.’

      ‘Your ego is impossible.’ Sofia broke off to welcome the Minister of Trade and Industry. ‘Eugene, lovely to see you.’

      ‘Your Highness, felicitations.’ She nodded her acceptance. As her father’s trusted advisor trailed off and they waited for the next, Theo took up their conversation.

      ‘It has serviced me well over the years.’

      ‘It’s not the only thing that serviced you,’ she bit out darkly.

      ‘Come, now, Sofia, jealousy doesn’t suit you.’ Before she could respond, he pressed on. ‘You look ravishing as always,’ he said, turning to take her in fully.

      ‘That’s what happens when the dress you wear to your engagement party is picked by the privy council after three rounds of rigorous polling.’

      ‘You would have chosen something different?’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘I’d like to know what façade I’m going to get. At least if you had chosen your own it would allow me to draw some conclusion about you.’

      ‘Why do you want to draw a conclusion about me? Surely I’m only here to increase your wine sales,’ she hissed as she turned to meet the next guest. ‘Lord Chancellor,’ Sofia said as she extended a hand to meet the last and final man in the greeting line.

      Introductions