Her Royal Husband Read Free Page B

in history would you like to do our project on? I thought maybe Stalin.”
    “Genghis Khan,” he said, knowing she wanted to walk all over him, and if he let her, he would never be allowed to explore the deeper mystery of her calm eyes.
    “Wow. Are you actually planning on contributing to this? You’re not just going to let me do all the work while you go down to the beach and ogle girls in their bikinis?”
    “As tempting as that sounds, I’m actually here to learn something.”
    She looked at him with reluctant respect, and then smiled. Really smiled, no barriers. It won him completely. Not that he let her know that for a good long time. At least a day and a half.
    And so it began. Huddled over tables at study hall, grabbing quick hamburgers, throwing ideas back and forth, reworking sentences, drawing time lines.
    That’s how he’d come to love the way she thought—her wry humor, her quick intelligence, the way she danced with words, how much fun it was to spar with her mind.
    That’s how he had started to notice the smell of her hair, the light that danced in her eyes, the breathtaking figure she hid under all those layers of clothes she was so fond of.
    And he found, just as the first time, he told her over and over who he really was. In ways he had never told another living soul.
    That was her gift to him. She allowed him to be normal. To explore normal dreams and ambitions, to be a normal eighteen-year-old guy.
    Jokingly, they had called each other Blond Boy andBlond Girl. She teased him unmercifully when his natural dark brown, nearly black hair began to grow out, giving him roots.
    How quickly he had come to see her inner beauty, her sharp mind, her wonderful sense of humor, her huge capacity to be kind.
    They had become the best of friends almost instantly. It was a relationship based, originally, on mutual respect for each other’s intelligence.
    He knew he had to make it stay that way. He knew he could not allow himself to love her. But he sensed he had begun the fall that even the most powerful of men seemed powerless to stop.
    Unless he was mistaken Owen Michael Penwyck, aka Ben Prince, was falling in love with Jordan Ashbury.
    Without the press looking on, without a royal council vetting his choice, without her lineage being subjected to scathing scrutiny.
    He was just a normal guy with a normal girl who had been given the gift of an extraordinary summer.
    Respect deepened to admiration, words deepened to silence, eyes locking deepened to hands holding, liking deepened to love. Just like that.
    Now, lying in a cell, contemplating the possibility his life was over, and thinking with a clarity that seemed illuminated from the heavens, Owen acknowledged his regret. His one mistake.
    Unable to leave her at first, he had begged for and been given an extension on his stay. Two more weeks of exploring remote beaches, and remote places of the heart. Two more weeks of her hand in his, her lips on his eyelids, his hands allowed to go where no man’s had gone before his. But when that was gone, he had phoned home and begged again. This time he had been refused,so he had done what any eighteen-year-old boy in the throes of first passion would have done. He had refused to go home, and moved into Jordan’s tiny basement suite off campus.
    He remembered the last night, when he could feel it coming to an end, knew his days were numbered.
    “Tell me one thing about you that no one else in the world knows,” he had begged. “Your deepest secret.” Something of her that he could hold onto forever.
    They had been in her tiny bed. Was there anything more wonderful than two people in a single bed? With her naked skin against him, and her hair, soft and fine as a baby’s spread over his chest, with her fingers tangled in his, she told him.
    “I’m a closet romance nut.”
    “What?”
    “I know. Under all that sarcasm and biting intelligence that scares the boys away, I was dying to be loved, Ben Prince. Dying.